Free The Telling by Jo Baker

sure sign of her full return to health.
    *
     
    It was maybe a fortnight after the christening. It was a beautiful May evening; the sky was deepening blue and there was birdsong from the garden. Agnes had the baby lying in the curve of her arm as she sat, his head turned into her bodice and his nose pressed against the cloth. He was starting to be pretty. The room smelt of his milkiness. I read the story to Agnes, keeping my voice low so as not to disturb the child, and Agnes smiled as I read, but the baby stirred, and mewed, and she lifted him and set him against her shoulder, rocking back and forth, back and forth, crooning to him, and he just went on crying. I stopped reading.
    ‘Is there anything I can do?’
    She shook her head, and laid him down in her lap. She unbuttoned her dress, and her breast inside was hard-looking, streaked with blue, and the nipple was welling drops of pale bluish milk. I looked down at my hands. She tucked the baby inside her clothes, and he began to suck. She arranged her shawl over herself and the child. I looked up again at her and smiled, but she was smiling down at her son.
    ‘Shall I read on?’ I asked.
    She shook her head, and did not look up. I thought I should say something about little William Stephen, but could think of nothing to say that I hadn’t said already, and so we just sat there in silence, the only sound being that of the baby’s sucking and swallowing and the fire crumbling into coals. She looked up at me, her face pinched.
    ‘Does it hurt?’ I asked.
    She shook her head. ‘Sometimes. A little.’
    I nodded.
    When I bent to kiss her goodbye, she thanked me for my company, and the way she spoke, thin and breathy, mouthing the words at me rather than saying them, seemed to me to be the meaning of it all, and how everything would be from now, nothing left for me in her but the husk, the weightless chaff of words.
    The evening was full of birdsong and May blossom. I walked down the coffin lane, the mud hard and dry underfoot. I came to the salmon pool and sat down underneath the hornbeam tree. A heron stood at the far bank, staring down into the water for the flicker of fish. I heard the church clock strike the quarter-hour. An otter slipped out of the water at my feet, saw me sitting there, looked at me with its wet eyes, and turned in one smooth movement to slip back into the water, as soundlessly as if it were formed entirely of that element.
    I got back around the three-quarter bell, expecting to be scolded for my lateness, but the house was quiet, and the kitchen was cool and dim. Dad was asleep in his chair, with his head thrown back and his mouth open, the fire crumbling into ashes at his feet. I put some sticks on the fire and lit a rush-light. I drew a chair over to the windowsill and set the candlestick on the chair arm to have the best of both lights. I got down my Pilgrim’s Progress.
    Dad started to snore. The smell of old mutton fat from the rush-light was strong and unpleasant; I could have taken a dipped candle but it would have caused more trouble than it was worth. I turned a page. My eyes followed the lines of print. I shook the cobwebs from my head and tried to pay attention, but it wasn’t working; I couldn’t get through the words and into the world beyond. I was stuck there, in the darkening kitchen, with my father sleeping drunkenly in the chair; I was not walking the close-clipped grass at Christian’s side, setting out with him on his journey from Destruction to the Eternal City. All I could think was, Agnes is gone from me. It was right, and proper, and it made me feel that I would choke.
    I let the book fall closed, and held it at the flyleaf. I looked at my name written there in Mr Forster’s hand, my name, my prize for Scripture, the date of my leaving school. I’d been an idiot all this time. Since I first heard that there was going to be a baby, I’d thought somehow that it would be just like a doll that we could play with when we