The Telling

every day.
    Reverend Wolfenden never asked for me, unless it was to clean again something that I had cleaned already, to do something right that I had done perfectly well just moments before.
    It was around then, after the hay, before the corn, that I began to notice the change in my father. One night, he and Mr Moore were sitting downstairs after supper. Mr Moore was quiet and Dad was talking about the poorness of the season, the late frosts we’d had that spring, the rains he’d expected to ruin the hay, that hadn’t come but when they did the ground would be so dry and hard that there would be floods, no doubt about it, floods to rival Noah’s, and the corn would all rot. The chill in the air now, even though it was but turning August. What was certainly a hard winter to come. The scandalous cheapening of baskets. The scandalous dearness of bread. The Corn Laws that suited the gentry and the Poor Laws that suited the manufacturers, and no laws that suited the likes of us at all. It was like learning a new word; having seen it once, I noticed tokens of the change in him all the time: a new eagerness, a sharp eye for trouble, a looking-forward to disaster, a keenness to apportion blame. Mr Moore would sometimes nod, sometimes speak; his words were like dark spaces in the air. I felt a note of caution in his voice, but did my best not to hear the words.
    The meetings started up again, after the haytiming. My father went along, and so did Thomas, and so did the other men. There began to be noise, and voices raised. I couldn’t make out what was being said, since the words were muffled and obscured by the floorboards and the closed door.
    I wanted to ask Thomas if the Reverend had spoken to him, and what he might have said in reply. Whenever I saw Thomas, he was in the company of other men and I never got the opportunity to ask.
    *
     
    That August, Sundays, rather than being a looked-for rest, became like a storm cloud hanging over the whole week, as the Reverend’s sermons grew more fiery and fierce. I sat in the free-seats, between my mother and the boys, my father wedged glowering at the end of the pew. Hot sun pooled on the flagstones like molten lead. There was no air. The nave was full of shuffling and rustling, of the smell of close-pressed people, of Sunday clothes taken straight from the closet where they’d hung since last week’s wearing. As the sermon began, I bent my head, and kept it lowered all the time that the Reverend spoke. I hoped it looked like piety. My eyes swam; tears fell on to my clasped hands as the Reverend spoke of the torments of Hell, and the sinfulness of the human state. I could not pray. I felt so far from God. My soul would not be soothed.
    One night as Mam and I sat half-sleeping over our work, the door upstairs was flung open with a bang, making us start awake, and Mr Gorst came thumping down, and touched his cap to us sitting by the hearth, and we said good evening, and he left the house.
    ‘Isn’t Jack Gorst still up there?’ I said, meaning his son.
    ‘I think so.’
    Mam and I both craned our heads to listen. The door was standing open upstairs; I heard Mr Moore’s voice clear as though he were standing beside me; it was raised above the clamour of other voices.
    ‘It seems to me that when all is reckoned together,’ he said, ‘the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man should therefore set himself up as an authority over another, simply by virtue of the class into which he was born, and claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he.’
    Recognition made me catch my breath. I could not have said it, in such a way, but I’d felt it, when I was standing in the library while the Reverend had sat rehearsing Martha’s tale. Mr Moore’s words went as the crow flies, straight, and I could feel the justice and the truth of them; but I could not let myself listen to him, could not let myself fall into sympathy or agreement with him: if my feelings matched his words then both were wrong. He walked in darkness; he refused the light of Christ.
    Then the door above was slammed shut, and the words were lost, and all I could hear was the sound of his voice, like an emptiness welling overhead.
    *
     
    I was unhappy. I was desperately, sickly unhappy, all through those long late summer days. I was unhappy at work, I was unhappy at home, and there was nothing else but work and home. Agnes didn’t want me; she was