The Telling

It was about the book, but I’d missed something: I couldn’t make out what he was asking me. I shook my head.
    ‘Just, that it seems to have caught you.’ He leaned back in his chair, his face softening with that smile. ‘Go on, tell me. What do you think?’
    My thoughts were formless, but in that moment his expression made him seem almost young, almost an equal, and I began to feel as if I knew him. I spoke, and as I spoke the thoughts came together, like butter out of churning milk.
    ‘There are two kinds of stone around here. There’s limestone, which can be burned, and the ashes spread on the fields to help the crops, and unburned it’s used on the roads, which is what makes the roads so white; you get that from the tops, from the fells and crags. There’s also sandstone; it’s golden; the houses are built out of that – it’s a lowland stone, a valley stone. I read here, the white stone, limestone, is made out of the bodies and bones of ancient sea creatures, and that sandstone is compounded sand, and that the sand itself was once solid rock, but was worn down by an ancient sea, which must have been just here, right here where we sit now. And it just seems extraordinary to me, that there should be so much time, that a fish can turn into a stone, and rock can turn into sand and then turn back into rock, and that we all march the roads every day, and spread lime on the fields, and sit in our homes, and we never think beyond our brief lives, and don’t consider the nature of things, but just the use we can put them to.’
    The creases deepened at the corners of his eyes.
    I took a breath. ‘I mean, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I think of it. I’m sorry.’ I pushed back my chair and was on my feet to go. ‘I’ll leave you in peace, I should be –’
    ‘No.’ He put a hand on my arm, and I looked down at it, resting there on the holland sleeve, and felt the warmth and heaviness of it. ‘Stay.’
    My heart, I think, must have held itself still. I sank back down on to my chair.
    ‘Go on,’ he said.
    But his hand was still on my arm. I wouldn’t look at it again, the dark skin, the creases around his knuckles like knots in wood. I couldn’t speak sense: there was no sense in me to speak. He lifted his hand away, but the touch, the sense of weight lingered, as if flesh has a memory of its own, independent from the mind.
    ‘I don’t know that I can,’ I said, ‘It’s just. I’d never thought like this before. I’d never thought about what lay beneath, about the bones of the earth; I’d never seen time like this, beyond the turn of the seasons and day and night and the chiming of the church clock. All I ever knew about land was that some of it was good and some of it was less good, and some of it was bad, and that we all had a share of it, good and bad, before the Enclosure, you know my father after a drink, he’s told you all about that.’
    He dipped his head slightly. ‘Enclosure is widespread, and well known.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘It happened all over the country; it’s still happening, it’ll happen everywhere.’
    ‘I remember the barley,’ I said. ‘There was nothing quite so beautiful as that field in early summer.’
    ‘I think we forget, you know, that this world is not young; that it can’t drink up our filth and poison for ever, and still be beautiful.’
    ‘What do you mean?’ I was leaning forward, the book set aside, my eyes fixed on him.
    He pulled a face, as if in discomfort. ‘You don’t know the cities. The manufacturing towns. You haven’t seen. A child there might grow up and grow old and die without ever seeing clearly the blue sky, or the stars, the moon; the sun is reduced to a bloody glare. The smoke and dust are such that the trees die, the flowers die; there are no birds.’
    ‘That’s terrible,’ I said. ‘It sounds like Hell.’
    ‘And no sin required to enter,’ he said, ‘unless you count poverty a sin.’
    ‘I saw your shoes,’ I said. ‘The way they’re mended: I thought, you must have been halfway around the world to wear your boots into holes like that.’
    There was a silence; I’d said something wrong, but I didn’t know how to retreat from it.
    ‘I’ve been to London,’ he said eventually, and then, ‘you’d like London.’
    The words seemed to gather, swell, like a drop of water on a leaf, suspended for a moment before falling. He’d thought of me. He’d thought of what I might like.
    ‘Other places, too. I’ve