The Telling

based the book on his travails. May I?’
    He took the chapbook from my hand. He examined the cover, the woodcut of Robinson with his goatskin umbrella.
    ‘So it’s not true,’ I said. ‘None of it was true?’
    ‘It’s fiction. So is your Pilgrim’s Progress . Did you really think there was a city called Destruction?’ His tone was kind. I didn’t mind it.
    ‘For all I know,’ I said, ‘there might be half a dozen.’
    He smiled; there was something very pleasant about his face when he smiled; his brows seemed to clear, his eyes to soften, and I found myself wondering about the young man that he had been; if at nineteen, at twenty, his brow would have been always unfurrowed , his gaze as open and clear as that. He handed the chapbook to me and went back to his seat. He touched the book that he had been reading, gentling the page flat.
    I hesitated, watching him, then went over to the table, and stood there, not knowing what to say. The chair beside him scraped back from the table; he had pushed it out with a foot. He glanced up at me, the candle burning clear and warm, the open pages of his book creamy gold between us. He nodded towards the seat.
    ‘I only know what I learned at school,’ I said.
    ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’
    I slid on to the chair.
    ‘What did they teach you?’ he asked.
    ‘To read the Gospels. I’ve always read everything the way I was taught, as if it were gospel truth. I never knew that books could lie.’
    For a moment he did not reply, and the words seemed to hang in the air like a bell-chime, unanswered, and I thought of what Reverend Wolfenden had said, about Mr Moore being neither of the church or of the chapel, and being a Chartist and an agitator and a viper.
    I leaned forwards. ‘Will you tell me, please, will you explain? I mean, tell me the nature of what I have read. What is truth, and what is lies, and what pretence?’
    In the candlelight his eyes were dark and wet and peaty, and his skin lined and tired and weather-worn. He looked at me, leaning back. Then he grinned, shook his head.
    ‘That’s a good question,’ he said.
    ‘Is it?’
    ‘It’s practically unanswerable.’
    ‘How can it be?’
    ‘Well truth and lies and pretence; it’s a question about how we can understand the world. And there are so many ways of understanding the world. There’s natural science and that’s an attempt to describe the physical world as it is, ever since Aristotle and the crab; but how can you describe the world as is when you only have your partial and imperfect senses to guide you, and an imprecise and mutable language to express what you have seen, and a mind that may not, after all, be adequate to the task? And then there’s history and that has all the attendant problems of science but with the complicating coda that it describes the world as it was not as it is , and there’s politics, which is describing the world as it could or ought to be or ought not to be, and is driven by faction more than anything else. And then there’s philosophy, which some would say is the only way we can understand anything, but leads, I have found, more to an understanding that nothing can be perfectly known in this imperfect world, which is how I feel about science, if you remember. But you’ve been reading fiction, which, it seems to me, when run through as it is in both books with a strong vein of religion, is an attempt to pretend that it can.’
    I shook my head to clear it. ‘What can what?’
    ‘Sorry. That something can indeed be perfectly understood in this imperfect world.’
    I was dazed with it. I felt as though I had walked into a haberdasher’s shop, like the one that I had once seen into when I was a girl, and we were taken to Lancaster for a fair. But instead of just peering in the window and admiring the ribbons, I was stepping through the door, passing the drawers of buttons and hooks, the rails of laces and braids; going further in, moving between bolts of glowing velvet and swathes of brocade, bemused and almost gawping with delight.
    ‘What do you do here, when you have the meetings? Do you talk to them like this?’
    ‘You don’t know what the meetings are for?’
    ‘No one told me.’
    He raised his eyebrows.
    ‘Really,’ I said. ‘I didn’t even know the room was to be let until the evening you arrived.’
    There was a moment’s silence. His expression was muted somehow, but when he spoke, he spoke briskly.
    ‘I’m setting up a