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The Telling

The Telling

Titel: The Telling Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Jo Baker
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away, and there was wood dust on my fingertips. It made my skin prickle.
    ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, as I turned around to where he was.
    He was sitting at a table on the far side of the room; the door had screened him as I came in. The table and chairs were new to the household; he must have brought them in that evening. A wax candle was dripping in one of our pewter candlesticks. A book lay open in front of him. The room smelt of oak and beeswax, and was warm with the glow of candlelight. His dark eyes caught a gleam.
    ‘You made this,’ I said.
    He didn’t speak, he just looked back at me.
    ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said again.
    He cleared his throat. ‘Thank you.’
    He stood up, pushing his chair back from the table and came over to me, his leather soles quiet on the wooden floor.
    I said it again, and shook my head; ‘But you made this.’
    ‘Yes. But you make things all the time; you never stop.’
    ‘It’s not the same. I make the tea and make baskets and I make things clean and neat, but none of it lasts, not beyond the use of it; it gets eaten, it gets dirty, if it’s a basket it gets sold and I start all over again.’ I shook my head again. ‘But this, this is different. There used to be nothing there, and now there’s something. And it looks as though it could stand here for ever.’
    He smiled, but I turned to watch my fingertip slip across the smoothness of the wood. It was a strange feeling, the softness of the surface, the iron hardness beneath. I heard his breath as he drew it.
    ‘There’s no such thing as for ever,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’
    I was suddenly aware of myself, standing there, uninvited, with wood dust on my fingers. If ever there were cause for him to mock me, this was it, but his expression was serious and sober. He gestured to the chapbook tucked under my arm, my Pilgrim’s Progress.
    ‘Have you brought something for me to see?’
    His voice was barely above a breath. Someone could come home at any moment, and find me alone with him, at night, in his room; I had not considered this. It made me feel more nervous to realize that he had.
    ‘I wanted to ask you,’ I said, and it all came pouring out, without pause for reflection. ‘I wanted to know. My chapbook of Robinson Crusoe, and your book about the same man. I don’t understand at all. They’re the same thing, but not quite, and the book is so much bigger, has so much more of the island in it, more words, more thinking. I looked at my Pilgrim’s Progress again –’ I felt my voice thicken with the beginning of ridiculous, foolish tears. ‘I looked at it again; I thought I knew it back-to-front, but I read the title properly, I read the Apology properly for the first time ever. It seems, it seems that both books, the Progress and the Crusoe book: I don’t think they’re true.’
    He reached out, and for a moment I thought he was going to touch me, to just rest a hand on my waist, but instead he took hold of the Progress , which I was holding pressed with the chapbook between my arm and my side. I loosened my grip, let the book slip away and took the chapbook in my own hand. His practised fingers opened the book’s cover and leafed through the pages.
    ‘“Read my fancies,”’ I said, craning my head to look at the words. ‘It says fancies . And similitude; I think that means a pretence, a deceit, doesn’t it?’
    He pressed his lips together, tilted his head. ‘Also counterpart, where one thing seems an echo of another; as in music, where a melody returns again in the same piece, and is familiar, but not the same, is perhaps rendered in different instruments, in a different key.’
    He set the book down on an empty shelf, reached up and took down his Robinson Crusoe . He handed it to me. ‘Would you read the title page for me, Elizabeth?’
    My name on his lips. It startled me, made me glance at him. He nodded to the book, waiting for me to read, so I opened it, turned the leaves, found the title page, and I read it to myself.
    ‘So who’s Mr Defoe?’ I asked. ‘What’s he got to do with it?’
    ‘Mr Defoe,’ Mr Moore said, ‘wrote the book.’
    ‘He isn’t mentioned in the chapbook,’ I said, lifting it up. ‘Why does it say that Robinson wrote it?’
    ‘It’s a device,’ Mr Moore said, ‘a convention. There was no Mr Crusoe, at least, not in the way you might have imagined. There was a sailor, one Alexander Selkirk, who was shipwrecked in the South Seas. Defoe

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