The Telling

yet.
    *
     
    I spent the morning wiping dead flies from windowsills and fingerprints from doors. I dragged the old upright vacuum out of the kitchen broom-cupboard and did all the carpets. I found a rusting cylinder of Vim under the sink and scoured the baked-on meat juices from the inside of the cooker. I cleaned the bathroom. I opened all the windows. The house smelt clean; of vacuuming and Vim and wet spring air. It needed doing, it all needed doing. I wasn’t wasting time.
    There was no means of making coffee in the house. No cafetière, no percolator, not even one of those filter efforts you balance on top of a jug. So I made coffee in the teapot and brought it, with a cup and a tea-strainer, back upstairs. I was going to go into the box room. I was going to go in with my cup of coffee and start sorting through the stuff, unfurling packages, assessing their contents, putting them in one of three piles, destined for home, Oxfam, or the bin. But instead, I found myself standing at the Reading Room window, looking out at the garden, at the nodding daffodils, the bare branches of a tree trembling in the wind. At the end of the garden stood an electricity substation; it was surrounded with green chain-link fence. On its pebbledashed wall was a sign showing, in silhouette, a man falling over backwards, a lightning bolt embedded in his chest. Beyond it was a farm, though it didn’t look as if it was still in use; there was no sign of animals. The outbuildings were all painted pastel blue.
    All I could think was: this is an ending. The beginning was lost; the first peeling of the helix from its twin, the first bulge and split of cells: there is no way back to that from here.

 
     
     
     
    THE DAFFODILS WERE BRIGHT YELLOW AND THE DAMSON tree was in milky blossom. It was a fresh spring day and the sky was tumbling with clouds. I’d sat at the window in my Sunday dress, staring out across at Agnes’s house, nothing moving, till it seemed like everything – flowers, tree, Agnes’s four windows and brown front door – were all painted on the glass, and not real at all. It was like looking at the windows in the church, of St Hilda and St John, too deeply coloured, too neat, too calm to be anything like real.
    My work lay beside me on the flags, a book was neglected in my lap. I had my shawl wrapped tightly around me; it was cold away from the fire. No one came, and no one left, and I shivered in the draught, and Mam scolded me for mooning about and wasting the day. The light began to fade.
    She left for the evening milking, and the boys were playing out somewhere, and Sally was at the Forsters’ for her tea, and the house was empty.
    I had wanted to stay with Agnes, but they wouldn’t let me. I’d asked her mam to let me know when it was over, and she had said she would send me word the first chance that she got. What good did I think I’d do anyway, my mam wanted to know. Hanging about, getting in the way? I’d only scare myself, and be put off ever marrying, and end up an old maid. But it seemed to me that it would be better to be with her, to know how things went with her, however badly they were going, than remain in ignorance for so long.
    Dad would be back soon. Once he was back, and given his tea, I would just slip across the street and gently knock, and if someone answered I’d ask after Agnes, and if no one answered then I would just come home, and no one need know I’d been, and I’d be no worse off than I was now.
    I had the kettle hot on the stove, the teapot standing with the tea spooned in, the canister with its picture of a Chinaman and a lion put back on the dresser. The bread and the cheese were cut, and a clean cloth laid over them. There was nothing more to do. I leaned against the table, chewed a fingernail. Of my mam’s confinements that I could remember, none had taken as long as this.
    My father’s cap came bobbing slowly along the far side of the garden wall. I poked up the fire, got the kettle steaming. He scraped his way up the steps, and came in. His cheeks were flushed: he brought a pool of cool spring air with him, and the smell of his work, of horse and tobacco and beer. He was in one of those slow, philosophical moods that he gets into when he’s had a drink or two. He saw the steaming kettle and the tea things set out on the table, and shook his head, as if it were some fancy of mine to make him his tea, but he was prepared to humour me and play along with it. Then he saw