The Telling

don’t know what you’d like,’ he said. I glanced at him, the underside of his jaw and a trace of the morning’s beard. ‘There’s Fielding, and Richardson,’ he said. ‘Recently acquired, and maybe neither are strictly speaking Sunday reading. There’s Milton, and there’s Dante, which might be more appropriate. Homer; he was a pagan, but the translator is, as far as I know at least, a model Christian, and if your only chance to read is Sunday, then I’d say you should get what you can, while you can, and not worry too much about it.’
    His hand moved back and forth across the shelves as he spoke, lighting on a book here and there, brushing over others.
    ‘So,’ he said. ‘Is that all right?’
    I nodded, swallowed: ‘Yes.’ The word came out strangely.
    ‘I’ll leave you to decide.’
    He returned to the table. I ran a hand along the spines, bumping from one book to the next. I dug my fingertips into a gap and levered out a volume. It was bound in fine maroon leather, embossed with gilt. I had no idea what it was: Fielding or Milton or whatever else he had spoken of. I had been too flustered, too absorbed in my own reflections, too much looking at his hand, to consider where it paused, or what he said.
    The church bell gave its final, dying toll. The service was beginning. I turned from the bookcase, the volume heavy in my hands. He didn’t look up; again, he pushed a chair back from the table with a booted foot; it was his only invitation to sit down. I sat.
    My feet tucked in under my seat, my skirts tucked in around my feet, very conscious of my rough hands, I opened the book cover, smoothed the page flat. As I began to read, my thoughts were edged with the gentle scratch of his quill.
    The book was the Principles of Geology , by Charles Lyell, BA, MA, Oxon., and it seemed almost impossible to me, and yet there was no way under heaven that I would even consider returning it to the shelf unattempted.
    Just inside the cover there was an engraving of a strange and ruinous building. There were pillars at the front, and a shallow-pitched roof on top. I sat looking at the picture for some time, at the worn and pitted stone of the pillars, the slender trees behind the building, the sharp rocks underneath. It was beautiful.
    ‘It’s a temple.’
    I glanced up.
    ‘A pagan temple. Those are water marks on the pillars. It was built on dry land, of course. But the water rose all the way to lap at the pillars, and stayed there long enough to wear away the marble, then shrank back to the foot of those rocks.’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    ‘The book explains.’
    I tried to read; I got some of the words: I couldn’t vouch for the meaning, not the whole of it: I felt as if I were grasping fragments , as if seeing some wide valley from the far side of a thick-laid hedge; glimpsing it through the gaps. I struggled my way into it. My finger followed the lines, my lips formed the letters. Sometimes the sense was clear as a raindrop, making me smile. Difficulties became like stones in mid-stream; I slid around them, flowed over them; they remained, but I did not let them check my progress. There was no time to waste.
    I read about great sores in the land that spewed forth ash and molten rock, devastating the country for miles around. I read about the rock cooling, and hardening, and being worn away by sea and wind and rain and frost. I read about the warm shallow seas alive with creatures, tiny and delicate as lace, that died, and sank down to the seabed, and laid their bones and shells and scales there like snow. I read about the land rising and the seas drying, and the ground covering itself with plants, that flourished and grew, and then died and fell, and fallen, rotted into the earth. I read about the ice that came and pushed across the land, scraping away the earth, revealing the stone beneath. The stone that had once been innumerable drifting creatures at the bottom of a shallow sea, and then was covered with earth and plants, and then with ice, and now is bare as bone, cracked with ancient frost and worn with ancient water, right up on the roof of the world, up on the tops, the moors, the fells.
    He had spoken. I raised my head. He was looking at me, his dark eyes. I had no notion of how long he had been watching me.
    ‘Lyell,’ he said, ‘an interesting choice –’
    There were creases at the corners of his eyes. He was talking. I had to gather my wits and direct them to what he was saying.