The Telling

unlocked.
    ‘Mrs Hutton?’ I asked. The woman nodded carefully. I threaded through the chairs towards her.
    She was a tiny person, frail as wood ash. Age had bent her; she was hunched forwards protectively around herself, her chest hollow underneath the patterned polyester of her dress. The other women resumed their conversations, their voices soft as crumbled cake. I sat down in the upright wood-framed armchair on Mrs Hutton’s left and the seat sank deeply on its springs.
    ‘Is that you?’ she asked.
    Her skin hung in swags beneath her eyes and at her jaw, in shades of translucent purple and manila. I felt myself choke up. Stupid, that this would make me miss my mum; she never got to be this old.
    ‘No,’ I said, and then didn’t know what to say, how to frame the question.
    Mrs Hutton studied my face. Her eyes were smudged with age, the whites marked with yellow and fine webs of pink, the irises watery blue. She shook her head. ‘I thought you were her.’
    I felt my cheeks redden with guilt. She thought I was a friend or relative; a daughter-in-law, a granddaughter, a niece.
    ‘No. Sorry.’
    Her attention slipped to my hand curled on my lap; the pink swell at the base of my thumb, the plaster stuck inadequately across the infected cut.
    ‘Been in the wars,’ she said.
    ‘A bit.’
    ‘You have to watch yourself,’ she said.
    I smiled awkwardly. ‘A friend of yours sent me to see you. Your old neighbour from across the street. Mrs Davies.’
    Mrs Hutton’s face cracked with pleasure. ‘Ah. Jean.’
    ‘Yes, Jean.’ I seized the name. ‘She sends her love.’
    ‘That’s nice.’
    ‘She said I should ask you about the house.’
    ‘The house?’
    ‘She said that you were the one to talk to.’
    Margaret looked at me a moment, nonplussed. She raised a hand, the knuckles swollen like tree roots. She gestured to the room, frowned deeply. ‘This place? The Home?’
    ‘No, I mean your cottage. My mum and dad bought it. I’m –’
    ‘No,’ she said, and frowned deeper still. ‘No.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘I told Jack.’
    ‘I’m sorry?’
    ‘I told Jack, I said he mustn’t.’ Her voice was raised in irritation . Other conversations fell away; attention was drawn to us.
    I spoke low: ‘He mustn’t what?’
    She looked at me sidelong, appraisingly. She seemed extremely lucid, needle-sharp.
    ‘I was sure you were her,’ she said.
    ‘I’m not, honestly. We’ve never met. Your neighbour. Jean. She said that I should –’
    ‘You look like her.’
    I felt a prickling at the nape of my neck. ‘Who do you mean?’
    Mrs Hutton’s hand fixed itself around my wrist. Her touch was cold and dry.
    ‘I got so cross with her,’ she said. ‘Getting me up at all hours. Those tricks of sunshine and voices. The kind of smells that get you right here.’ She tapped her concave chest with a thick fingernail ; a shiver of electricity shot through my skin. ‘The smell of wet linen, and wood shavings, and wood smoke, and liquorice. There’d be someone talking downstairs, and I’d think Charlie was there, and I’d think the boys were home, and I’d think it was all back as it used to be, and I was young again, and if I could just find Charlie –’
    Mrs Hutton drew a ragged breath. Her eyes were brimming. She raised a loose-skinned finger to a lower lid.
    ‘I couldn’t bear it any more.’
    She fumbled in a skirt pocket, raised a bunched tissue to blot at her eyes.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said clumsily.
    She shook her head. ‘Oh, I like it here, I like it here. It’s a good place; it’s good to have the company – it’s just –’ she squeezed my wrist, shook her head ‘– cruel,’ she said. As she looked at me, her expression softened; her face seemed somehow to slacken. She shook her head again, gently.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, my voice thick, colluding with her tears.
    ‘It’s never that, he didn’t mean –’
    ‘He?’
    She said something else; I couldn’t make it out.
    ‘Mrs Hutton?’
    She didn’t seem to have heard me. Her eyes had clouded; she mumbled something about rain, and something that had to be brought, as if she were trying to convince herself, to set it straight in her own head.
    ‘Are you okay?’ I leaned closer. ‘Do you need anything? Shall I call someone?’
    She shook her head, her eyelids sinking.
    ‘Margaret?’
    She didn’t respond. I lifted her hand from mine and laid it in her lap. Her fingers, with their loose skin, their swollen