Читать книгу To Hold: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him - Joanna Briscoe - Страница 7
ОглавлениеREADER, I MARRIED HIM because I had to.
You see, we did in those days. There was no glimmer of a choice.
My hand in marriage was requested by the boy with the triangular Adam’s apple and a shuffling thirst for a girl. He was the lad who worked for his parents’ motor garage on a yard beyond the village, and I hadn’t expected his offer after a lifetime of nods, three conversations, one dance and no kiss with him. But he knocked on our door and asked my father, who postponed his answer, crimson-necked. Using half an excuse, he told Dougie Spreckley to wait.
As my parents’ only child – no further births; no boy to help with the rough work; no man’s wages to soften old age; only one womb available for the grandchildren they already treasured – I was aware that all hope lay with me, though they never said it, and the knowledge made me swallow a rise of nausea. They were good parents.
It was Mr Tay-Mosby with his Mosby Hall who was the bright dream on the other side of Gibbeswick.
The Hall lay along the Oxenhope road, behind park walls, vegetable garden abutting the moors. He had shown the Hall and gardens to me when I was a girl, just as he had taken me once to the fells and Tarey Carr beyond, where the bogs slumped and beige fogs sickened when the winds weren’t screaming.
The espaliered walls, the choke of cabbages, ended in a gate that led straight through to where the gorse was webbed with nests and the merlins soared to Gibbeswick Fell. Tay-Mosby hiked daily through the tussocks accompanied by his dog, Ranger Boy, surmounted the head of the waterfall as he chopped at thorns with his stick, walked by the beck to where the quarry was, the Pennine Way, the views further west to witch country.
He contemplated me as I grew. I was only aware of his appraisal as a blush inside me, because he wouldn’t look at me with his eyes. He turned away with a statue’s indifference if he ever spoke to me, yet he watched me too; my skin knew it.
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.
