The Telling

it moved in its pattern of tiny shiverings, forward shifts.
    ‘Isn’t it driving you out of your wits?’ I said.
    He looked up. His brow was creased into a headache frown.
    ‘I mean, not having enough light to see what you’re about.’
    ‘My eyes aren’t what they were.’
    ‘You’d be better here.’
    I dropped my tools into the half-made basket, gathering it to me as I rose. He shook his head and gestured with an inky hand for me to sit back down.
    ‘I don’t need the light,’ I said. ‘If someone but thought to put the tools into my hands, I’d be making baskets in my sleep.’
    I didn’t know what devil had got into me. I lifted the basket; I remember particularly the green sappy smell of willow, and the cool smooth feel of the exposed split surface of the withies, the bulk and slight weight of the basket in my arms. I went over to him, waited for him to rise.
    He stood up. He lifted the writing set with him. The pen was clutched against the board, the ledger and letter and loose papers sliding against each other.
    ‘It’s very kind of you,’ he said.
    He carried his things over to the windowsill, and took my seat, and said nothing more. The evening light brought out the blue of the stone floor, the iron sheen of his dark hair. It had only been a tone, an inflection to the voice, but it filled me with indignation. He was mocking me, I knew it. There was a sufficiency of irritations and vexations in my life, without him mocking me.
    I sat down where he’d been sitting, my feet on the rag rug where his had been. The wooden rungs of the high-back chair were smooth; they held me upright, supporting me, so that I could lean back and feel some relief from my stays. I felt somehow taller, sitting there in my mam’s chair; less of a child.
    He was setting his writing slope to rights. He wiped and dipped his pen, touching the nib against the rounded rim of the ink pot.
    ‘You’re a joiner, on the new house up at Storrs,’ I said.
    He looked up, nodded. It was only afterwards that I learned that he was Master Carpenter, and was in charge of seven men, and saw the grandness of the house that was built, and the staircase that flowed like a stream, like birdsong, and realized the meanness of Reverend Wolfenden’s mind in calling him a joiner. The ledger lay open on the windowsill while he arranged his writing things. I could see that the left-hand page was half-full, covered with densely written words; not dotted with numbers, dashes, single words, the rows and columns of income and expense, as one would expect. His eye caught the direction of my sight. He slid the ledger off the windowsill, drew it on to his writing slope, so that it was inclined towards him, away from me, and I could no longer see it.
    ‘You’re a domestic, I believe,’ he said.
    ‘At the vicarage.’
    Could I say that I had been cleaning in his room, that Robinson Crusoe had fallen open when I was dusting; I had not meant to pry, there had been no intention at all, just accident? But then why would I need to dust the contents of a newly delivered box?
    ‘There are books about the house. Whose are they?’ He glanced across towards the dresser: Fox’s Martyrs, Pilgrim’s Progress, Saints’ Rest, the family Bible.
    ‘I like to read.’
    ‘Of course you do.’
    He smiled, but the smile did not reach his eyes. He closed the ledger and set it down upon the floor. He wiped the last drops of ink from his pen, stoppered the ink pot and closed the writing set. He put it down on top of the ledger.
    ‘So the abridged Robinson Crusoe, that’s yours, and the ballad sheet, and the tale of Jack the Giant Killer? They belong to you?’
    My chapbooks. His air was calm, but I knew he must hold them in contempt. A man with books like that, with so many; of course he must hold my few slight things in contempt.
    ‘There are others,’ I said, ‘but they’re lent out, and the Pilgrim’s Progress was my school prize, Fox’s Martyrs and Saints’ Rest were my grandfather’s, but he’s dead.’
    Mr Moore nodded, but didn’t comment.
    ‘No doubt you think them foolish,’ I said.
    ‘Of course not, no.’
    ‘Then why are you smiling?’
    It was a faint flicker of a smile; it plucked the flesh up at one corner of his lips. It irritated me.
    ‘It’s strong meat, all those martyrs and saints and pilgrims, that’s all. And the chapbooks; well, you may as well eat sugar straight from the bowl.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Just that I