The Telling

the image.
    ‘Got it?’
    ‘Yep. I think so.’ I smiled up at her. Her skin was creamy, soft and clear. I felt grubby, grey and really tired.
    ‘Any problems, I’ll be over at the enquiries desk, okay?’
    ‘Okay. Thank you for your help.’
    I watched her go. The neat shape of her pencil skirt, the neat hem of her cardigan. A grey-haired gentleman straightened up and turned to catch her eye. She stopped, studied the records he was viewing, and they dropped into muted conversation.
    I slipped the slide around in its orbit, murky images rearing up on to the screen. I focused the lens with a twist. It still didn’t seem quite real.
    The handwriting was fine and regular and careful. The first record for the village was that outlying farm beyond Storrs. The name of the house was not given; it was just listed as number one. Living there was the patriarch (farmer, fifty-five, widowed); a son (farmer, thirty-six, married), daughter-in-law (thirty-five); a grandson (farm worker, fifteen), and a granddaughter (scholar, eleven). I wondered if the official had been brought in and given tea. I wondered if the girl was doing well at school. If they were, more or less, happy.
    I shifted the slide across, counting out the house numbers, noting landmarks: Storrs Hall, Public House, School House. I shunted the slide on: for a moment the screen was just swirling white space, dust-motes the size of cherry-blossom petals, trapped fibres big as millipedes. I glanced down to the mechanism and lined up a dark rectangle beneath the lens. Then I looked back up, at the screen.
    It was number 14.
    In 1851, the head of the household, the individual who accounted for all the occupants of the house was a man called Thomas Williams; the man whose name appeared on that grave. He lived there with his wife, Elizabeth, whose name had crumbled half away beneath the moss. They lived in that house. To read it here made my throat constrict with unaccountable tears. She was twenty-seven at the time of this census. And then I saw it.
    Their son, James. Eight years old. A scholar.
    I hadn’t considered the possibility of him.
    *
     
    Outwardly, it all seemed so normal, so everyday. Afternoon light streamed in through the window, making the hanging strips of the blinds glow and casting a wedge of brightness across the top of the wooden Parish Records cabinet. It seemed to me that there was something wonderful about this human conspiracy of order, that everything should be catalogued and housed and copied and filed, just to serve the possibility of future significance, the idea that this might matter, at some time, to someone.
    There was just one envelope: the best part of a hundred years of baptisms, marriages and deaths all recorded on one slip of film. The parish must have been so small, the population so scant. I drew the transparency out of the envelope and tried to slide it into place between the sheets of glass, but my hands were clumsy, and it juddered and crumpled. I took a breath, straightened it, smoothed it and tried again. It slotted into place.
    An image reared up on to the screen; a copy of the Parish Register cover. Flaking leather, heavy gothic type, and a crest of a lion and a unicorn. I pushed the slide away, careening through decades of blessed release, better places gone to, patters of tiny feet and doesn’t she look beautifuls, to get to the end of the century. The records were in negative. The dark grey pages were traced across in white ink, like the writing in an old photograph album. It was difficult to read. I hunched forwards, squinting to pick out the names, the dates.
    Burial
 
 
 
1881
John Ireby
Febry 5th
Jn. o Tatham
 
aged
 
          Vicar
 
71 yrs
 
 
     
    I shunted the slide sideways, the records flicking past.
    Burial
 
 
 
1887
Catharine Barns
Febry 6th
Jn. o Tatham
 
Infant
 
          Vicar
     
    Deaths clustered at the beginning of the year, as if there were a season for death, as there is for making hay, or buying swimwear. Infants, children, women, men. I shifted the slide again, down a row. A trapped hair slipped across the viewing screen, monstrous, wormlike. And there she was.
    Burial
 
 
 
1897
Elizabeth Williams
September 14th
Jn. o Tatham
 
Aged 73
 
          Vicar
     
    She was seventy-three. She was buried in September, out of season. Her coffin – if she’d have had a coffin – her shrouded body, wrapped in a wedding sheet perhaps, was let down into the