The Telling

her.
    ‘You’re going wrong there,’ she said.
    I looked back down. I had. I retreated with the scissors, then set them down. ‘Only a snip.’
    ‘So, you and Thomas are finally courting.’
    ‘We’re not courting.’ There was a faint darkness under her eyes, I noticed, as if she were fatigued, or somehow troubled, but her manner gave nothing away.
    ‘He’s been pining after you long enough,’ she said.
    ‘We are not courting.’
    ‘What do you think this is, then?’ She nodded at the fabric. The pattern was laid and pinned out, and I had already begun to cut the cloth that he had given me. There was, after all, no disputing what she said.
    *
     
    The Reverend leaned on the pulpit’s edge, his hands gripped around the rim, his knuckles white. He was speaking, his voice level, setting out the argument of his sermon as if he were laying paving stones. I was watching the whiteness of his knuckles, the way the veins stood out on the back of his hands.
    I sat between Thomas and my mam. My dad was sat on the far side of her, at the end of the tight-packed pew. All the free-seats were full, the air heavy with the press of warm bodies, the smell of clothes, goose fat and lavender water and bad teeth; a whiff of drink here and there, including off my dad. Michaelmas daisies and marigolds were brilliant on the windowsills; their faint scent was the scent of funerals and did little to sweeten the air. I kept my eyes on the pulpit.
    The Reverend’s surplice was spotless as the Lamb; spotless as all the linen that we laundered for him. It hung in folds, as if carved out of wood and whitewashed. I watched as his face filled with blood; noticed that his voice was getting shrill, and there was spittle at the corner of his mouth. The words were coming from his lips like ash-flakes lifting from the fire. It was as though I didn’t so much hear them, as watch them rise.
    To presume too much, seeking to rise above the station allotted, tempted by Satan to presumption, it is folly, folly, folly of the most abject kind, to look to the things of this life, and so lose the Life to come.
     
    I could hear Thomas breathing, too close. I felt my mam’s shoulder press against my own, too close. I could smell the breakfast egg on her breath.

    The wise man seeks rather an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, that fadeth not away. A Crown of Glory, Life Everlasting, garments that shine like the sun. The Righteous Man will heed the word of God, and not the word of Man, or the word of the Devil from man’s lips. The Righteous Man knows that to do otherwise is to fall into sin and folly; he knows that there is no wisdom greater than that of the Pure Heart and the Innocent Mind, that there is no worldly consolation for the troubled soul.
     
    I could see the back of Sally’s head, the bare nape of her neck underneath her fancy feathered bonnet. She was sitting between Mr and Mrs Forster in their pew. And as Reverend Wolfenden said A Crown of Glory she reached up, and touched the curl that had escaped on the nape of her neck, and I loved her for it. Dad said something. I didn’t quite hear it; he spoke under his breath, and was at the far end of the pew. I saw Mam shushing him; he shook his head, and fell silent.
    For the Lord has ordered our estate, and set every man in his situation, from the highest in the land, to the most wretched pauper at his door –
     
    Dad rose from his seat, making me gasp, sending off rustles of movement across the church as people turned to stare. He was standing now, one hand clutching the back of the pew in front, the other clenched in a fist at his side.
    ‘Damn fine luck for some,’ he said.
    Silence filled the whole of the chancel; it was as if the nave, from flags to roof-beams, had been turned into one solid block of ice. Mam scrabbled at his arm, but he pushed her hand away. He stepped out into the aisle, and I lunged across Mam, trying to grab his coat-tails.
    ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘please Dad, don’t –’ but it was too late, I couldn’t catch hold of him, and I doubt it would have done much good if I had.
    ‘Isaiah,’ he said, far too loud, his voice ringing around the chancel roof like the Reverend’s. ‘The prophet Isaiah. He said you were damned if you took more land than you needed to feed yourself and your family, that you were damned if you added property to property and left nowhere for ordinary men to live. Isaiah said that was devilry, and you’d be damned for it. What