Authors: Jo Baker
Mr. Moore said nothing for a moment. He inclined his head, and when he spoke, it was quietly, almost too calmly. “You know my position, a joiner on the new hall, and you know I need the work as much as the next man. But every peg I hammer home seems like a coffin nail to me.”
He was still as a rock, the whole of his body, but for his hands; they did not cease moving. He pressed his fingertips together; his fingers slid and meshed and separated. These slight motions seemed to be connected with what he said, as if he felt the distress in his own body and could not be at ease; as if his hands were eager to be at other work. His thumb rested for a moment between his lips, his teeth teasing at the skin beside the nail. I noticed my own hand was at my mouth, my own knuckle resting in the wet between my lips. I dropped my hand and looked away.
“I take the money that could be used to pay his workers decent wages, and you will take it from me, and that is how we must live, and so all our hands are stained with this guilt, however little we intend it. We cannot be free of it.”
I knew what he reminded me of. Years ago, when we were girls, a preacher had come to give witness to the Lord from a tree-stump on the green. Our mams had forbidden us to go, so me
and Agnes sneaked up through the field behind the green, huddled down behind the wall among the buttercups and wild carrot and long grass, and listened to the preacher’s great strong voice, his passionate words. We scared ourselves witless with what we heard about the Elect and Grace and the Second Coming and the End of Days. I felt it again, the same blend of fear and guilt, a sense of the coming apocalypse; and with it a new feeling that I couldn’t name. I was vexed at being laughed at, but there was more to it than that. The kettle began to rattle and boil, and I remembered the tea. I had to go to the stove, right between Mr. Moore and my dad, and bend to get the kettle. They paused in their talk a moment, and I was all too conscious of myself and of the way my cheeks flushed in the heat from the fire.
Ted and John bundled in, red-cheeked and full of buttoned-down laughter. Mam sent me to the larder for preserves, though it was Lent, and there were only a half-dozen stone jars left on the shelves. Then Sally came in, looking prim and pretty. She had been up at the schoolhouse sewing with Mrs. Forster. The younger ones took their supper to their stools and sat to eat, and I kept company with Mam, standing at the table to eat our bread and apple-jelly, while the men sat by the fire and ate theirs. Sally wanted to know about the baby and wanted to tell me about the dress Mrs. Forster was making, but I didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to listen to her, didn’t want to think about the blood and the baby, and all the time she talked I couldn’t hear what Mr. Moore was saying. My mam was now too tired for conversation, she just leaned against the table, and sipped at her tea, and ate her bread and jelly as if it were almost too much of a bother for her to do it. We cleaned up the plates and put them away, and still
Mr. Moore lingered there, listening to my father, who now was talking about the Enclosure. I didn’t like it when Dad got talking about the Enclosure. It seemed so long ago now, and there was nothing to be done about it, and it made him nasty to reflect on it, and I could not imagine what kept Mr. Moore there listening to him, when he could have been off home hours before. He couldn’t have known the trouble he was courting.
I’d go up to my room and read and get myself out of the way. There was a little light left: I could get a few pages read at least before Sally came up and started wittering about bonnet trimmings or the baby. It didn’t cross my mind that I’d be remarked on, either in my going or my being gone. I had my hand on the stair-rail, my foot on the first tread, and my new chapbook about Robinson Crusoe under my arm, when Dad called out after me, asking where I was off to.
I turned and went back to him, bent to give him a kiss on his cheek, and said goodnight. The hem of my skirt brushed against Mr. Moore’s booted feet, and I caught his scent for the first time: the smell of cut wood. There was wood dust in his hair.
“You’re not up there anymore,” Dad said.
I looked at him, not comprehending.
“You’re down here. You and Sally. You’ll be good and warm with the fire.”
“You mean sleeping?” I asked.
“Of course I mean sleeping.”
“But—”
Ted laughed. Only then did it dawn on me what was going on. Mr. Moore was lodging with us. He was to have our room; mine and Sally’s room, and we were to sleep downstairs. There’d been
talk of a lodger for a while, but nothing had been done, and I’d thought the idea had been forgotten. I looked down at the floor, the rag rug, the ash on the hearthstone. I will sleep like Cinderella tonight, I thought, and every night until he’s gone, and I will not have a moment’s peace or solitude until he goes. In the corner of my eye, I could see Mr. Moore looking down at his hands, his right index finger bent and pressed down hard with the thumb of the same hand, so that the fingertip nearly touched his palm. The knuckle cracked, he looked up, and our eyes met. His eyes were brown and clear as peat-water. He looked a little ill at ease.
“Go and get what you need down from your room, and put it in the chest,” Mam said, “and then Mr. Moore can go up when he wants to.”
My eyes left his. I turned away. I went up to our room, and fetched bedding and clothes and brought them down and put them in the chest, and then went back for the books I had up there, and rearranged the crocks on the dresser to make space for them, and moved aside the Bible and the prayer book, and pushed my
Pilgrim’s Progress
and my chapbooks in beside them, and all the while the pair of them were sitting there at the fire, my father smiling and watching me as I made the arrangements. Mr. Moore didn’t look around at me, which was good, because I could not have easily met his eye.
It was pitch dark by the time Sally and I had got the bedding spread out and undressed and laid ourselves down to sleep. The fire was a low smoulder. I was beginning to drift into sleep, thinking that another night, when I was not so tired, I’d stir up the flames a bit, put a few sticks on, and I’d be able to read in the firelight, and it wouldn’t be so bad. It was good just to be lying
down, and I didn’t really feel the hardness of the floor, and my eyes were closing, and I was thinking how Agnes hadn’t seen the new chapbook yet, that I’d take it over and read to her in bed tomorrow evening, and when she was well enough, she’d sit in her kitchen, and I’d do her cleaning or some baking for her.
“Are you never going to get married?”
I opened my eyes. “What?”
“You were nineteen last birthday,” Sally said.
“I know how old I am.”
She took a noisy breath. “I was thinking what with Agnes having the baby now, you would be thinking of it, you could marry Thomas and move out and have babies of your own.”
“You’ll wear yourself out, thinking like that.”
She rolled onto her side, pulling the blankets with her. “You could have your own room then too, though I suppose you’d have to share it with Thomas.”
“Leave off, will you?”
She sniffed indignantly. “It isn’t just me.”
I leaned up on an elbow, looked over at her. “What do you mean?”
“Oh nothing.”
I prodded her. She yelped in protest. I said, “Tell me; you’ll have no rest till you do.”
She rolled back over and looked me in the eye. I remember her eyes, dark and glossy, catching the firelight, and her smooth young skin glowing pale. “Our mam was saying that we’re too crowded here, I heard her say it. And Dad agreed.”
“They should have thought about that before they invited that man in. There’s just him taking up a whole room to himself while
us two have to sleep down here, and that’s just daft, it makes no sense at all.”
Sally shrugged and heaved herself over again; “He could hardly have the boys’ room, it’s too small, and you wouldn’t wish this on our mam at her age.”
Just as I was about to ask whether she knew if he’d be stopping long, she said, her back still turned to me, “I’m to be apprenticed soon, you know, Mrs. Forster is arranging it for me.”
“Who to?”
“Mrs. Forster’s milliner at Settle; one of the girls is leaving to set up for herself, and when she does, I’m to be indentured in her place.”
I rolled onto my back, lay there with the blanket pulled up to my chin. “What did our mam say?”
“It’s clean work, and I’ll be mixing with a better sort of people. She’s glad.”
Time passed in silence, and the church clock chimed ten.
“Good for you,” I said.
Sally muttered something, but her breath was coming softer, and I knew that she was almost asleep. The blanket scratched against my chin. I turned, tugged at the covers, and saw that there was light overhead, sieved by the boards, slipping down between them, hair-thin, golden. He was awake up there, up in our old room. He had a candle burning. He sat in light.
It was barely a
town at all. Just a motorway exit, a railway station, a grimy, busy crossroads with traffic thundering through. Dirty great lorries and 4x4s and car after car after car. No one stopped. I waited at the traffic lights, looking down the curved slope of the high street. A greengrocer’s, an off-licence, a post office, a couple of charity shops, and three estate agents.
I parked outside the train station. It was practically derelict. Dusty windows gave onto dim empty rooms. Rails curved off north and south towards their vanishing points.
I carried a plastic bag of paperbacks, another of coat hangers, and one with her jumpers in it, lifted from the wardrobe, still just ever so faintly scented with her perfume.
I phoned Mark as I walked up the street, all the bags clutched in one hand. The signal was fine. He spoke discreetly, in that at-work kind of way. I asked how Cate was doing; he said that she was fine. His mum was going to pick her up from the childminder, and he’d drop around to get her after work. This was all as we’d agreed. I couldn’t mention the noise in the night, the electric hum, the way it made my skin prickle. Or how little I had managed to do, so far, by way of sorting out the house. Cate was an ache in my throat, a flash of panic at the empty space at my feet. The baghandles cut into my palms, but I had nothing to push, no one to carry, to hold. It made me uneasy.
The conversation didn’t go well. The wind blew my words away; Mark was distracted by his email. After a few minutes, we gave up and said goodbye. I was slipping the phone into a pocket as I passed a shop window: deep in the pale interior, a woman bent her head to paperwork and the phone, a sheet of silk-blonde hair screening her face, a perfect nail skimming a line of text as she read. A shift in focus, and I caught my own reflection on the window: pale, eyes shadowed, that line between the brows that didn’t used to be there.
I pushed into the first charity shop I came to, the bell jangling. It smelt of old clothes, instant coffee and other people’s perfume. I put the bags down on the counter. A woman in her sixties, her face deep-lined with smoke, came out from the back room. She thanked me and went to gather the bags to her. “Just these two,” I found myself saying, keeping hold of the bag with the jumpers in and retreating. They’d absorb the old-clothes and other-people smell. I couldn’t leave them.
There was a bookshop just across the street; an independent
one. I crossed in a gap in the traffic, clutching my bag. The window was dusty, the display sparse. Dead flies desiccated on the window-shelf and local history books bleached and buckled in the spring sun. I was here to shed possessions, not acquire them. But there was no harm in looking.
The place had that breathy, fusty kind of quality that libraries used to have, before they were full of computers. A sandy-haired man sat behind the counter, his head down, reading. I poked around in the local history section for a while, flicking through contents pages, dipping in and out of articles. There were books on local industries, local farming practices, maritime history, educational institutions. I skimmed chapters in the final one and read the index, thinking that I might find something there about the Reading Room, but there was nothing.
At the back of the shop there was a flight of stairs. Sunlight poured down them and the carpet was worn to hessian fibres. A sign had been balanced on the lintel: Second-hand Books. I went up.
The smell of old books: musty, skin-like, of the attic. The room was lined with tight-packed shelves and in the centre a table was heaped with books. A real jumble:
Teach Yourself to Knit
,
Socialism New and Old
,
The Odyssey
. A door stood open into another room. I went through. There were shelves on all four walls, bookcases dividing the space into bays and booths and alleyways.
I wandered through the narrow spaces in an acquisitive daze. I picked up books, examined bindings, checked prices, weighed volumes in my hand. The rooms were dim and soothing and felt private and quiet as a pine wood. The carpets swirled green and
gold and red. I had picked up a craft book and was looking at a very seventies illustration of a woman making a wicker basket, when someone sniffed close by, making me start. In the space between the top of some French paperbacks and the bottom of the shelf above, I saw a fold of denim and a blunt-fingered hand. I’d thought myself alone.
I ducked through the next doorway, into a corridor lined with shelves. It ended on a small room where the floor was almost entirely covered with boxes of sheet music, slitheringly overfull. There was a second, narrower, flight of stairs with books stacked on every tread. I made my way up, was soon half-hypnotized by the repeating labyrinth of corridors and rooms, the same layout as the floor below, but with sloping ceilings and different patterns on the patchwork carpets. I found myself standing in an attic, white sunlight through a low window, a wedge of shelved wall packed solid with books, with a sense that this was something I’d once dreamed. The heavy red book seemed to nudge itself into my grip like a dog pushing its muzzle into a hand; blunt, mute, accepted instinctively. I took it downstairs with me.
The sun was shafting down the stairwell, so that I came down it in a stream of golden dust-motes. At the cash desk, the bookseller grunted and took my stack off me. A shiver of guilty self-consciousness ran through me: this was not what I was supposed to be doing. The bookseller flopped open the cover and checked the pencil-written price, keyed the figures into the till and set the book to one side. I tilted my head to look at the handsome old Everyman edition of Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
, with a design of leaves and an armour-suited pilgrim on the front. When the bookseller lifted the cover to check the price, I read, upside down,
an inscription in browning copperplate:
Prize for Holy Scripture
, but I couldn’t see the name beneath. The next book was a shabby tan-leather
Robinson Crusoe
, the edges rough where they’d been cut, and blotched and dark with age.
A History of the Lune Valley
, its porcelain-blue dust jacket worn white at the edges. The big red book was called
History of the Chartist Movement
. I couldn’t remember why I’d thought it was a good idea.
I was climbing the stairs to the Reading Room, to go and put the books on the bookcase. I held them in my hands, shuffling and reshuffling them as I climbed, so that one was on the top, and now another. I was ignoring my unease, indulging instead the rare pleasure of acquisition, the beauty of the books, tracing the embossing of the leather, lifting an opened volume to inhale the skin-scent of the pages. And then there was a voice.
A young woman’s voice, speaking softly, urgently. I lowered the book and closed it. Not so much words as a suggestion of speech, like the burn a sparkler leaves behind when traced through the air. Then a pause, as if someone were replying, but the voice was too low for me to hear. I must have left the window open; there must be people out in the street. But there hadn’t been anyone on the street when I came in; no one at all. I pushed the door open, my books crushed to my chest. The room was silent. Both windows were shut; they gave a greyish, muted light. I set the books down on a shelf, went to look out of the window. The street was empty.
The moment didn’t linger in my thoughts; when I turned away from the window I caught sight of the books, and they looked so
right on the bookshelf, as if they’d always been there, that I felt an inarticulate urge to do more, to somehow soften the starkness of the place. I took the pewter jug from the box room, brought it downstairs and set it by the kitchen sink. I wandered down the garden, picking daffodils. The grass was long, rank, tangling around my feet. Shrubs sprouted gangling stems. Last summer’s dead heads wizened on the rose bushes.
The daffodils glowed yellow on the windowsill. The air was fresh with their scent. I sat, legs stretched out along the worn blue sofa, and in the back of my mind was the thought that I should be scouring a Yellow Pages, calling charities to see which of them would collect a second-hand sofa, a pair of grotty single beds, and somewhere beneath my breastbone was an ache of Sunday evening homework-guilt: I should be getting on with this. I should be sorting things out. Instead, I was leafing through the local history book for a mention of this place. Not even reading, really: looking at the photographs.
Farm workers, straight out of D. H. Lawrence; all beards and rolled shirtsleeves, squinting in the sun; a flat expanse of field behind them, and a heap of bleaching hay:
Haytiming, Caton, 1911
. Just up the road from here. A massive horse with a floppy fringe, a boy in knee britches and bare feet at its halter, standing next to a moustached man in a stained apron, hands-on-hips; behind them, a dark low lintel and the white flare of a captured flame:
The forge at Bentham, 1908
. The next image was a sketch, not a photograph. In pen-and-ink. A woman sat on a stool by an open hearth. In her lap was a bristling palisade of sticks, like an unfinished bird’s nest.
Basket-making
, the caption read,
Lancashire, 1840
s.
I heard a dog bark. A motorbike burned up a distant road, and was gone. The quiet settled again, and seemed even deeper. I turned back through the chapters to take a glance at the essay on basket-making. After a while, I flicked back to look at the drawing again and came upon a photograph that I hadn’t seen before. An old man, his head as bald as an egg, squinted in the light, the lines radiating from the corners of his eyes. He was sitting on some stone steps, a half-made basket clasped between his knees. He sat on the third step up, and there were six. Handrail to the left, a glimpse of flower-border and the bottom of the door. This house. It certainly looked like it; but there was no mention of it, no evidence in the caption.
George Williams
, the caption read.
Last of the Lune Valley Basket-weavers
.
I gave up on the local history book and picked up the
History of the Chartist Movement
. It was a sour thing: a contemporary account by a member of the organization, full of grievances and the sense of failure. It was a facsimile edition, reproducing the nineteenth-century type, which was cramped and difficult to read. There was mention of a trial at Lancaster, which wasn’t far, it was where I’d left the motorway, but there was no mention of Reading Rooms, and Lancaster wasn’t close enough to seem relevant. I slapped the book shut and set it down.
I felt it. A teetering, pregnant silence as if a breath had been drawn, and someone was about to speak. I looked up, glanced around the room. The daffodils on the windowsill, the grey paths across the floor, the silky ashes in the grate; it was all absolutely ordinary. The view from the window, grey sky and green fields. As I turned my head to look, I felt slow, as if moving through water. The air was thickening; if I lifted up a finger, and ran it
through the air in front of me, it would leave a ripple. But it was too much to move a finger. I couldn’t move a finger. Each breath was a conscious effort.
I must have sat like that for just a minute, maybe less, waiting. Nothing happened. No one spoke. My skin teased itself into goose bumps.
And then I sneezed, and a sheep coughed in the field, a great barking, rasping cough, as if it were taking the piss out of me.
Idiot.
What would Mark say? I swung my legs off the sofa, got up and went over to the window. He’d have me down the road in an instant, have me in the queue to see the peeled man. I looked out at the garden, the intensity of its green, its lushness. I saw what I had seen before, but failed to take account of until that moment. Down at the end of the garden: the electricity substation.
Double idiot.
On the corner of Kirkside Road, our road, there’s an olive-green metal cabinet, pressed up against the low wall, the privet hedge behind swelling up and around it. I don’t know exactly what it is: electric wiring or telephone cables, perhaps. Occasionally I’ve seen a guy there in overalls, he’d have the doors open, the cabinet spilling wires. Sometimes, passing by, I’ve heard the electricity hum inside, like a dozen violins playing the same chord. The substation must have been similar, only bigger, grander, more expansive. An orchestral strings section thrumming out a single chord. Electricity: that’s what the hum was, that was the strangeness in the air. Nothing more than that.
I took myself out for a walk, the way I might have taken Cate out for a walk. I had to organize myself into jumper, jacket, boots, and practically drag myself out of the door. I’d get some fresh air and some exercise, and then I’d get stuck in to the work: unwrap everything, take everything out of the boxes, bags, suitcases, heap it into piles, begin triage. I could get it done in a day or two, once I’d got started.
I stalled at the top step. I felt so obvious, so conspicuous, the street a clean sweep in both directions. To my left, the ground rose, the street ducking out of sight down the other side, towards the church. The road was a cul-de-sac; I knew from the directions. To the right, the street flattened for a while, and then curved and climbed towards the crossroads where it was lost from sight behind the bulk of a converted barn. There was about a quarter of a mile between my cottage and the barn, and in all that space there were only four houses, standing in wide pools of garden. In between, fields reached right up to the edge of the street; sheep grazed and lambs stood around in gangs, like teenagers. There were no pavements, no white or yellow lines, no hard boundaries at all. Grass nibbled and cracked at the edge of the tarmac. Hedges were bony and holed, fence posts had been strung with invisible wire. The only solid lines were the dry-stone walls edging some of the gardens and fields, so ancient that they seemed more like an accident of geology than anything man-made. It made me feel exposed, and somehow porous, as if I were too vulnerable to face the air. At home, I’d head for the park, the canal, the open spaces, but where do you go when everywhere is open space?