The Telling

my book lying on the windowsill, saw the work half done and lying on the floor, and his mood turned sharply.
    ‘If you’re going to waste your time reading that old nonsense again,’ he said, his breath sweet with malt.
    ‘It’s Sunday, and it’s Pilgrim’s Progress , which is a fine book for Sunday,’ I said quickly. ‘And it’s better than many ways of spending the Lord’s Day.’
    He gave me a look, sat down in his chair, and kept himself bolt upright in a poor imitation of sobriety. I made the tea and I gave him his bread and cheese. I left him to pour his own cup and slipped out to stand on our top step, and look over to Agnes’s house. No candles lit there, as yet.
    It was a lovely soft evening, a little way off dark. The sheep were calling up in the back field, and someone was chopping logs up at Goss House. A curlew flew overhead, giving its shrill repeating cry. I went down the front steps, crossed the road, the loose stones crunching loud underfoot. I peered through the front window, but couldn’t see anyone. I rested my ear to the front door. I heard nothing but the beat of my own heart. I thought that she had died. That she lay cold and dead upstairs. That they could not bring themselves to tell me. I lifted the latch; the door creaked open, and I stepped inside, on to Agnes’s clean-sanded kitchen floor.
    The room was stuffy; I could smell something sweet and rich and spiced. There were figures slumped at the kitchen table. I moved closer in the gloom and saw that it was Mrs Skelton and Agnes’s mam, and that they were sleeping, their heads resting on folded arms. In the middle of the table was a half-eaten batch-cake, the crumbs scattered like grain, whole raisins lying plump on the scrubbed deal tabletop; the scent sweetened the air. Agnes had made the cake for eating after the baby came, moving slowly, bending red-faced at the stove, with her belly vast and in the way. Between then and now was last night, and the walking up her garden, as far as the apple tree, and back. She had paused when the pains came, her eyes screwing tight, and her mouth opening. She whispered to me, so that the women wouldn’t hear, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do this,’ and I hissed back to her, ‘Yes you can, of course you can, it will be all right,’ because I was thinking, everybody that walks the earth is born, it happens every day. Then her breathing changed, and her eyes went distant and glossy, as if she were looking inward; she did not look like Agnes any more, and the women had brought her upstairs and sent me home, and I began to be afraid for her. But it was over now, because there were cake crumbs and tea-stained cups. This was not a scene of mourning, these women sleeping with their heads on their arms, the smell of spice, the huff and whistle of their breath: she had lived through it. They had been too tired, too exhausted by their labours, to think of telling me.
    I slipped past them and went up to Agnes’s room; the room she has had since she was married. Agnes was lying in the bed, sleeping, the covers pulled tight over her. Her face had the same pulled-tight quality as the sheets. Her hair lay in a thick dark braid over her shoulder and down over the quilt. The room smelt of blood, but there was no blood to be seen. She looked so completely done-in, so pale and wan. I came closer and saw the baby; it was tucked in the crook of her arm. It was red, dry-looking, its eyes pinched shut. Its head was a strange shape, bulged and squashed. It didn’t look like her.
    I wanted to touch her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
    I heard the stairs creak and lifted my sleeve to my face to blot away the wet. Her mam appeared and came over to me, moving quietly in stockinged feet. She stood beside me. Her face was a maze of wrinkles; she smelt of tobacco and bad teeth.
    ‘A boy,’ she said. ‘We’re calling him William Stephen, same as his father.’
    The words whistled through the gaps in her teeth. She went on talking, the sound hissing and wet, and there was a constriction in my throat, and my nose felt raw inside.
    ‘I said to her last night, it’s taking that long it’s bound to be a boy,’ she said. ‘Girls are that much easier, God grant her a girl next time.’
    ‘I’d best go.’
    I turned to shift past her, and she was in front of me a moment, her hair combed into a dry white parting, her shawl greasy and threadbare, her skin creasing happily. She’d seen it all before,