My mother was flustered by him, and mentioned him repeatedly; my father merely nodded his approval. I was fifteen when I understood their hope that I might one day have a chance with John Tay-Mosby, though he was as old as a father, and the shock of the realisation was so much worse than the terror of the blood when it first came out of me, worse than the killing of baby birds by Dougie and his friends, worse than seeing my father bang his head against the door because the beet crop’s roots grew cysts.
You’re so pretty, they said, pretty as a picture, bonny as the day, smooth down your frock, stockings at sixteen. I was the picture; my parents were the frame. Mr Tay-Mosby looked at me by not looking at me.
“Will she have me?” Dougie said to my father, to silence. “Please. Sir?”
“Will you – will you – shall we be married?” Dougie stumbled to me, his neck bulge so close it blotted out the clouds behind him.
In my surprise, I couldn’t answer. I was nearly nineteen by then; I was taking my teaching certificate, and they were scrimping and dressing me, and it was for Mr Tay-Mosby’s benefit as I was nudged towards him. All points led towards the Oxenhope road. By prettifying me, they wound me in shrouds that went over my mouth, but not my eyes.
My mind shot along that road. The garden. The tussocks beyond.
“Yes. I will, then. Thank you,” I said to Dougie, and wanted to hurt myself, but beyond the Adam’s apple was not the sky, only the stick of Tay-Mosby.
The rumour of my engagement to Dougie Spreckley was put about the village, and my parents waited for Mr Tay-Mosby to emerge from the Hall with his own offer, but John Tay-Mosby wouldn’t marry me, though I could see him considering it, fighting with himself then resisting, as my parents rose and fell with the currents from the Hall. He would take aristocracy, or something close to it. I knew this. He did.
My wedding night, it was like a wound that was scab-crusted and could only be broken with battering, Dougie pounding and belabouring, all concentration tight in a face like sinew, his eyes closed, and though I cried out and so nearly begged him to stop, so nearly, I knew that if I didn’t let him through that night, he would never get there. I would be unable to face the hunger in his stranger’s eyes again, his trembling hips, the jolting spine on top of me. I would cry out, or be sick, or tear in two. So I let him ram through the scar, scab, skin, and he got there and all was warmth and blood and death and soreness, then the searing pain subsided.
We had to live with my parents at first, because there was no money, though I hoped to escape that village with its frost-shattered houses like kennels straggling along the Keighley road, its sinking farms and cottages. The babies came, and when they were old enough, I went to Hessenton to teach in the mornings, and there she was.
Mary Lewthorne. It was as though I recognised her the first time I saw her, her face a heart on a stem in a grey teaching dress, her very being so serene, yet complicated, and complete. She would have been my dear friend if we had been at school together as children, instead of working there as adults, but the friendship was as sudden and as fast as those forged by girls.
The babies were dears, and naughty good children, and they became my companions. We talked when we didn’t play, and I snuffled up their scenty skin, and I loved them like little otters. Dougie looked after us well enough, but we barely knew each other better over the years, and I wasn’t sure how much there was to discover. I married a man who never read a book, and he married a woman who never watched a game. I sank my face into the washing of my little ones to breathe them in, but I touched his smalls with the ends of my fingers. He tried, and then he didn’t try. I pretended, straining to feel the love for him, but I didn’t, and it was my private sin, my sorrow. I could hardly look at him or taste him, with his bobbing neck, his few words. He tired me; he bored me. He was not a bad man. I could almost like him.
We moved into our own place outside the village later: a little cottage with a midden, so beaten by the winds, so sleet-cracked, the rains came in and the drains croaked when the storms poured down from Gibbeswick Fell. John Tay-Mosby tightened when he saw me, and pretended he hadn’t.
I taught at the school just a few hours a week, and there, there and on the fells, I felt most alive.
“There’s a world outside here,” Mary Lewthorne said when we sat in Hessenton, and she showed me. She had lost her husband young, had a room in an older widow’s house, and worked every day to make her living, using her big, twisting mind. We found each other where we could, along the ginnel that led to the paths that led to the fells, and chattered like the fastest starlings.
My poor husband Dougie Spreckley went to work one day, as he always did, but that morning he was run over by an apprentice backing towards the mechanic’s shed in his father’s garage, and they mended his legs while his lungs bubbled, but it was infections that later killed him in the hospital, and left my three without a father. I said my sorries to him when we buried him, and wept for what wasn’t, and couldn’t be.
John Tay-Mosby began courting me with improper haste, seeing no reason to wait. He was between wives, the first having produced the heir and back-up, a Scottish landowner’s daughter rumoured to be her successor. This time, he visited. My parents knew nothing of it. He offered me his company, dining and protection, and I resisted. He gazed at me this time, his eyes like the mud puddles on Tarey Carr. He stood as upright as his stick in his rain-coloured shooting coat, his taste for moorland game shining pink on his lower lip, and I said no, and thank you, and no. No.
Reader, I married him because I liked him.
I did not desire him. Robert Briley, serious and considerate, was a teacher at the school in Hessenton along with Mary Lewthorne, and he visited me to offer his help after Dougie died, and when we were married, we moved into the town. We needed more money than I could ever make, but I didn’t want John Tay-Mosby’s riches; my children needed a father, and they found a good and an interesting man in Robert Briley, my husband. We were safe again. Wives in Gibbeswick had eyed me askance when I was widowed, though I had the stains of three children on my dress and their tugs on my hair and was shabbier by the week. Robert was my friend and theirs.
Mary and I stole conversations between lessons, between days and nights, every moment with her treasured, even the times when we clashed and tangled and cried, then tried so hard to start afresh. But how could you love a woman as I loved her? She lined my existence because she lived inside me, and at night as Robert slept, there were the colours of her, the fragrance, the smooth shell of skin behind her ear. When we could escape town, no one else on the moors on wet days, she walked with me in all the winds, which had names, and by the stream sources, among the curlews, the peregrine nests. She showed me the sandstone and the thorns and waterfalls: all the pretty places where the toadstools grew in dark secret; the drowning ponds, sphagnum, fairy-tale growth in tree shadows.
She touched my temple first. After that, her hand was on my face all night, every night until I saw her again, and all my body desired was her fingertips on me once more.
We could talk, Robert and I, read books together, and guard those children as they grew to be tall, healthy things, the joy of their grandparents before they died. We closed the curtains on the dark after the evening’s supper and chatted, and when he slept, I dreamed of hiding in a bower, a nest, with my three young, and her.
It was as the children grew older and there was a slackening to the days’ bustling routine that he began, from time to time, to look at me differently. He had a deep understanding of me as I did of him, and he saw, more clearly, the screen that lay between us, but he was too much of a gentleman to fight me.
I tensed at night. My body no longer wanted children; it never wanted him inside, and his clean smell made me stiffen when he was near me, though I tried.
“I saw you today,” he said finally.
“What?” I said, and all the