The Telling

the local record office at Preston. They house census records too, so you’d be best off heading down there. Get it done in a day. And you’ve got the archivists on hand if you run into difficulties.’
    She pushed herself out of the chair, crossed over to the sideboard , opened a drawer, took out a spiral-bound notepad and a steel biro, and the phone book. She flicked through, running her finger down the columns. She opened another drawer, lifted out a train timetable and studied it a moment. She spoke over her shoulder.
    ‘You’re better off taking the train,’ she said. ‘Parking’s a nightmare .’
    There were precise creases across the backs of her knees. I picked a scrap of loose skin by a thumbnail. My cheeks still burned.
    She brought the notepad over to me and I rose from the chair. Her fingers were swollen and distorted with rheumatism. I thought of the violins, their dark clipped-shut cases.
    She said, ‘Direct train from Carnforth. The next one’s half past twelve. If you hurry you might just make it. Funny, you asking about Reading Room Cottage.’
    ‘Why’s that?’ I asked; it came out too abruptly. She didn’t seem to register.
    ‘When I first came to the village, thirty odd years ago, I had this theory, that with the name surviving like that, the reading room itself must have been recent, that there would have been memories, oral history.’
    ‘And there wasn’t?’
    ‘Not a thing.’
    ‘Can you think,’ I said carefully, ‘why would that be? Why there would be no stories?’
    She shook her head. ‘It must have been short-lived. That kind of thing was often set up in a spirit of self-help, to give people a wider education than the church offered. It was sometimes done by groups, sometimes by an individual with strong political motivation . But these institutions, they’re relying on subscriptions from working people, so if wages take a slump, then people are faced with a stark choice… and if you’re a political radical, and there’s a crackdown… It makes you realize how vulnerable that kind of thing is, how those lives, working-class lives, they’re just so –’
    ‘Perishable,’ I said.
    Her eyes were bright, hazel, acute. I was conscious that my own were dry and sore, my cheeks were burning and my hand throbbing hot. I was not managing to do normal, not remotely, not at all.
    ‘And yet the name survives,’ I added.
    ‘Indeed.’
    ‘So it must have mattered to someone.’
    She looked at me a moment too long. It was a moment of assessment. She ripped off the sheet of notepaper and handed it to me.
    ‘I hope it works out for you,’ she said.
    *
     
    A spider had made its web between the window-seal and the wing-mirror. It was poised there like a hand on piano keys. I cupped it in my fingers and set it down on the garden wall, beside the tiny creeping thyme plant. It picked its way across the stone and slipped into a gap. I slid into the car.
    It was as though I were moving through the pre-programmed environment of a computer game, shifting gear, depressing the clutch and accelerator in response to changing constellations of pixels. The road swooped me up the hill, and through the woods, past Storrs Hall, out into open fields. Solitary wind-twisted trees, and sheep clustering with lambs, and cows just standing as if in a trance, and then the farm, and a tractor lazily grinding across a field.
    The road brought me down into the blustery, blackened little town. I coasted through and pulled to a halt in the station car park. There was no queue in the ticket office. Seconds later, ticket bought, I was loping down the ramp to the underpass, my stride stretched by the slope, passing beneath the silent railway lines before climbing back into daylight.
    Above me, the ceiling was a glass-and-iron canopy. A clock, massive, weighty, was tethered with cables to the cast-iron ribs. Five minutes to wait till my train. I sat down on the edge of a bench. The light gleamed off the rails. There were railway lines in front of me and railway lines behind. A single tick; the minute hand clunked forward. I watched the clock’s steady, authoritative care of minutes; seconds were left to shift for themselves. The railways had relied upon time. They’d whisked time from village to village, dragging it along in their slipstream like dandelion down or the fluff of old-man’s-beard. Before railways, communication was confined to the speed of a galloping horse. To walking pace. The church