The Telling

myself contract, like a touched snail: I couldn’t face it. At the same moment the back of my hand brushed against a light-cord. I caught it, and tugged. The light came on. I saw the bookcase. I went towards it.
    I was opening my mouth, and drawing a breath to tell Mark, when the phone bleeped, and went dead. I glanced at it; connection failed. I slipped it into the back pocket of my jeans.
    The bookcase was massive. Maybe eight feet tall and five feet wide. It was completely empty. It stood in the middle of the gable wall, the ceiling sloping away to either side; it was the only point in the room high enough to accommodate its size. It must have been built to fit. In all her talk of this place, she hadn’t once mentioned the bookcase. She’d been keen to discuss her growing list of books for retirement-reading, the books she hadn’t had time for in her thirty years of teaching; the books she’d worn to shreds in rehearsing them for A levels. Living here, she’d binge-read, she’d gorge on these books; that was why the place had seemed so fitting, with its unusual name. She’d talked about all that, and their plans for renovation and refurbishment, but she never once mentioned the bookcase. The wood was dark and old, and there was something about its crafting, the way its parts were shaped and finished and fitted together that gave it an almost archaeological feel. No lines were ruler-straight, no edges precision-angled: it was as though the wood had been split along its fault-lines, smoothed and considered and pieced together in the only way the grain would naturally allow. I laid my hand on a shelf. It was silky, ridged with veins, and my own pulse beat back at me.
    Behind the bookcase, I could see the gable wall was bare unplastered stone. Underneath, the floor was uncarpeted. It must have stood where it had been built. The whole house had morphed and changed around it, covered itself in woodchip and magnolia and varnish, but this had remained here, darkening with the years. A kind of gentle heaviness descended on me, like thick fog. It was as if I had been waiting to feel like this, as if I had just been holding it off till I reached this moment, this room. I thought, I can stay here, if I just stay here it will be all right.
    I noticed the rest of the room bit by bit, in a tired way: the bare worn wood of the boards, the last blue evening light spilling in through the window beside me, onto the varnished surface of a dressing table. Over to the left, in the back wall of the house, a door stood open: the bathroom, on the top floor of the extension, directly above the kitchen. The light was soft through the window that overlooked the street; it caught on the dark blue satin quilt on the bed underneath, silvering the bulge of each pocket of down. The wardrobe door stood open: clothes hung darkly inside. I walked over to it and pushed the door shut; empty coat hangers chimed against each other.
    *
     
    I lit the fire and emptied out the bags of food that I’d brought with me. I ate straight from the packets; breadsticks, hummus. I swigged wine from half-remembered petrol-station tumblers. I checked my phone. There was a signal, so I phoned Mark.
    ‘It just went completely dead,’ he said.
    ‘Yeah, the signal went.’
    ‘You didn’t call me back.’
    ‘He-llo? Calling you back now?’
    ‘It’s been ages. I thought you’d fallen through the floorboards.’
    ‘You would have heard the crash.’
    There was a smile in his voice. ‘You over your wobbles, then? You okay?’
    ‘I’m fine. I’m tired, like you said; it’s a hell of a drive. And I miss you both.’
    The smell of woodsmoke, the taint of garlic and wine, and a feeling that was like nostalgia, but not quite: it was all somehow unexpectedly familiar.
    ‘We’ll be up to see you at the weekend, take back the first load. Don’t kill yourself over it, Rachel, you’ve got plenty of time.’
    ‘A fortnight. There’s not that much to do, really.’
    ‘You can always come home early. But take your time. Don’t overdo it.’
    ‘How’s Cate?’ I asked.
    ‘She’s brilliant. She keeps telling me “Mummy back soon,” like she’s trying to reassure me. Mum bought her a new toy lion; she keeps shaking it and pretending to growl and you have to be scared.’
    ‘That’s great,’ I said, my throat thick. ‘That’s really great.’
    ‘Yep,’ he said, ‘Don’t you worry. Just you get the stuff sorted, and take care of yourself.