Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

In the compilation and introductory material © Tracy Chevalier 2016

My Mother’s Wedding © Tessa Hadley 2016

Luxury Hour © Sarah Hall 2016

Grace Poole Her Testimony © Helen Dunmore 2016

Dangerous Dog © Kirsty Gunn 2016

To Hold © Joanna Briscoe 2016

It’s a Man’s Life, Ladies © Jane Gardam 2016

Since First I Saw Your Face © Emma Donoghue 2016

Reader, I Married Him © Susan Hill 2016

The Mirror © Francine Prose 2016

A Migrating Bird © Elif Șafak 2016

Behind the Mountain © Evie Wyld 2016

The China from Buenos Aires © Patricia Park 2016

Reader, She Married Me © Salley Vickers 2016

Dorset Gap © Tracy Chevalier 2016

Party Girl © Nadifa Mohamed 2016

Transference © Esther Freud 2016

The Mash-Up © Linda Grant 2016

The Self-Seeding Sycamore © Lionel Shriver 2016

The Orphan Exchange © Audrey Niffenegger 2016

Double Men © Namwali Serpell 2016

Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark © Elizabeth McCracken 2016

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Cover design by Heike Schüssler © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photograph © Dan Saelinger/Trunk Archive

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008150600

Ebook Edition © November 2016 ISBN: 9780008150594

Version: 2016-12-14

Dedication

For Charlotte, of course

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword by Tracy Chevalier

My Mother’s Wedding – Tessa Hadley

Luxury Hour – Sarah Hall

Grace Poole Her Testimony – Helen Dunmore

Dangerous Dog – Kirsty Gunn

To Hold – Joanna Briscoe

It’s a Man’s Life, Ladies – Jane Gardam

Since First I Saw Your Face – Emma Donoghue

Reader, I Married Him – Susan Hill

The Mirror – Francine Prose

A Migrating Bird – Elif Shafak

Behind the Mountain – Evie Wyld

The China from Buenos Aires – Patricia Park

Reader, She Married Me – Salley Vickers

Dorset Gap – Tracy Chevalier

Party Girl – Nadifa Mohamed

Transference – Esther Freud

The Mash-Up – Linda Grant

The Self-Seeding Sycamore – Lionel Shriver

The Orphan Exchange – Audrey Niffenegger

Double Men – Namwali Serpell

Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark – Elizabeth McCracken

Notes on the Contributors

A Note on Charlotte Brontë

About the Publisher

FOREWORD BY TRACY CHEVALIER

Why is “Reader, I married him” one of the most famous lines in literature? Why do we remember it and quote it so much? Why have twenty-one writers jumped at the opportunity to take that line and run with it, folding its powerful resonance and sheer chutzpah into their own stories? Is it because of who says it and how she says it, or who has written it, or how we read it – or all of those things?

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the story of a nineteenth-century orphan who becomes a governess and finds her place in the world, is most memorable for the character of Jane herself. “Poor, obscure, plain, and little”, with no family and no prospects, nothing to cushion her from a life of poverty and loneliness except her wits and her self-belief, Jane is the embodiment of the underdog who ultimately triumphs. And who doesn’t support the underdog? No matter what our circumstances, most of us see ourselves as underdogs; we can relate to her, and cheer her on.

Despite a childhood of physical abuse (near-starvation at her boarding school) and psychological torment (locked in the “red room” by her cruel aunt), Jane grows up with her self-esteem intact, and throughout the novel proves to be tough, resilient and morally grounded. She catches the eye of her employer, Mr Rochester, a man assumed to be way out of her league. She is as witty and as clever as he, eventually winning his love when she isn’t even trying to. She stands up to him too, declaring, in probably the second most quoted line from the book: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.” Who can resist a character like Jane Eyre?

“Reader, I married him” is Jane’s defiant conclusion to her rollercoaster story. It is not, “Reader, he married me” – as you would expect in a Victorian society where women were supposed to be passive; or even, “Reader, we married.” Instead Jane asserts herself; she is the driving force of her narrative, and it is she who chooses to be with Rochester. (Interestingly, Jane also inherits a fortune from an absent uncle, but no one ever remembers that detail; it is a deus ex machina out of her control and so it means less to us.) Her self-determination is not only very appealing; it also serves to undercut the potential over-sweetness of a classic happy ending where the heroine gets her man. The mouse roars, and we pump our fist with her.

It is also flattering – and memorable – to be addressed directly. How many novels acknowledge their readers? Jane addresses us the Reader throughout, and by doing so brings us on her side. Not only that: the line resonates because of the silent clauses that surround it. What it really says is: “You may be surprised to learn that, Reader, I married him” or, “Reader, I married him, though perhaps I shouldn’t have” or even, “Reader, I married him and then we went to bed.” We readers fill in those blanks, and doing so involves us in Jane’s decision as much as her speaking directly to us does. Her story becomes entwined with us, so that it feels as if we are telling it alongside Jane and her creator. No wonder we remember the line: we seem to have written it ourselves.

The woman who created that line is also a significant factor in its power. Though most readers may not know a lot about Charlotte Brontë, many will be struck by even the briefest outline of her remarkable life: remarkable not for being full of incident, but because it wasn’t. Or it was, but it was drama played out within an intimate domestic space rather than on a wider stage. Charlotte was one of a trio of sisters who grew up in a parsonage in a remote Yorkshire village on the edge of the moors, who all published novels around the same time, with strong characters and storylines, before dying young. If you visit the atmospheric Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, where I first had the idea to create this collection of stories, you will be struck by what a strange, intense family the Brontës were: a hothouse of creativity springing from unpromising surroundings. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë often sat together in the severe dining room, all writing and talking about what they wrote.

Women just didn’t do that back in the nineteenth century. Most writers then were men; middle-class women were expected to be decorative rather than active. They were not meant to write novels about obsessive love on the moors (Emily’s Wuthering Heights), or wives escaping their drunken, abusive husbands (Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), or a headstrong governess who declares that she will marry. That they published at all – at first under the peculiar male names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell – is miraculous. Jane Eyre went on to become a publishing sensation; it was well reviewed, sold well, and Charlotte was fêted by other writers such as William Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell (one of the few other popular women writers at the time).

The fact that from such an unlikely background she became a famous, bestselling writer is heartening news for all would-be writers, for all women – and indeed, for all women writers. That is why I have asked women to contribute to this collection – we have even more reason to be grateful to Charlotte for her ambition and imagination, which paved the way for more women to write and be published. “Reader, I married him” reveals not just Jane Eyre’s determination, but Charlotte Brontë’s too, and it inspires our own.

Twenty-one writers, then, have taken up the line and written what it has urged them to write. I liken “Reader, I married him” to a stone thrown into a pond, with its resulting ripples. Some of the writers have written close to where the stone has entered the water, taking the Jane Eyre story itself and writing it from a different angle: Helen Dunmore from Grace Poole’s point of view; Salley Vickers from Mr Rochester’s eyes. Audrey Niffenegger places Jane in a contemporary war-torn country in “The Orphan Exchange”. Other stories are ripples a little further from the source, including elements from the novel such as the moors setting, or specific incidents, or imagery such as mirrors or animals, or even certain lines. (Look out for “small and plain”, Rochester’s famous description of Jane.) You do not need to know Jane Eyre to enjoy these stories, but if you do, those resonances will make you smile.

Other stories may move still further away from Jane, yet almost all of them address marriage (or today’s equivalent of it) in some way, exploring when marriage might happen, or should happen, or shouldn’t, or when it ends, or is with the wrong person, or seems to be with the right person but goes wrong. There are at least two proposals in the collection – though we will have to guess at the replies!

For some weddings themselves provide the drama, courtesy of a painful shard of glass in Linda Grant’s “The Mash-Up”, or a sudden cast change in “My Mother’s Wedding” by Tessa Hadley, or a secret liaison during a Zambian bonding ceremony in Namwali Serpell’s “Double Men”, or a muddy Gothic encounter on the moors in “To Hold” by Joanna Briscoe.

For others, a wedding is only the start of a relationship, the stories moving beyond the traditional happy ending to find out what happens within marriage. Evie Wyld explores a woman’s feelings about her husband, set against an austere Canadian landscape peopled with bears, while Susan Hill dissects the fall-out from a famous Anglo-American marriage, and Francine Prose looks at what happens to Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester after they wed. In “The Self-Seeding Sycamore” Lionel Shriver reminds us of what can grow after a marriage has ended.

Always, always in these stories there is love – whether it is the first spark or the last dying embers – in its many heart-breaking, life-affirming forms.

All of these stories have their own memorable lines, their own truths, their own happy or wry or devastating endings, but each is one of the ripples that finds its centre in Jane and Charlotte’s decisive clarion call: Reader, I married him.

MY MOTHER’S WEDDING

TESSA HADLEY

IT WAS NEVER GOING to be an ordinary kind of wedding. My mother didn’t do anything ordinary. She would marry Patrick at the summer solstice; it would all take place on the smallholding where we lived, in Pembrokeshire. My parents had bought the place in the seventies from an old couple, Welsh-speaking and chapel-going. Family and friends were coming from all over; all our Pembrokeshire friends would be there, and those of our neighbours who were still our friends: some of them didn’t like the way we lived. My mother had dreamed up a wedding ceremony with plenty of drama. She and Patrick would drink Fen’s home-made mead from a special cup, then smash it; the clinching moment would come when they got to take off all their clothes at sunset and immerse themselves in the pond while everyone sang – Fen would wave myrtle branches over them and pronounce them man and wife. Mum had spent hours puzzling over her notebook, trying to devise the right form of words for her vow. She could whisper to horses (she really could, that wasn’t just hokum, I’ve seen her quieting a berserk half-broken young gelding when grown men wouldn’t go near it), but she struggled sometimes to find the right words for things.

Patrick wasn’t my father, needless to say. My father was long gone: from the smallholding and from west Wales and from the lifestyle. Dad had short hair now; he worked for an insurance company and voted for Mrs Thatcher. From time to time I went to stay with him and my stepmother, and I thought of those weeks in High Barnet as a tranquil escape, the way other people enjoyed a holiday in the country: with their central heating, and their kitchen with its food processor and waste-disposal unit, and the long empty days while they were both out at work, when I tried on all her trim little dresses and her make-up. I never mentioned Mrs Thatcher when I got back to Wales. I didn’t like her politics any more than the others did, but I loved my dad. I didn’t want to encourage the way everyone gloated, pretending to be shocked and disappointed by how he’d gone over to the dark side.

Patrick wasn’t the father of my two half-siblings, Eithne and Rowan, either. Their dad was Lawrence, and he was still very much in our lives, lived a mile down the road – only he’d left Mum around the time Rowan was starting school, went off with Nancy Withers. And on the rebound Mum had had a fling with Fen, who was her best friend’s husband. But that was all over now and Patrick was the love of her life and someone new from outside our set; all those people from her past – Lawrence and Nancy and Fen and Sue and all the others, though not my dad or my stepmother – would be at her wedding because that was the kind of party they all liked best, where everyone had a history with everyone else, and anything might happen, and there was opportunity for plenty of pouring out their hearts to one another and dancing and pairing up in the wrong pairs, while the dope and the drink and the mushroom-brew kept everything lubricated and crazy. Meanwhile, the ragged gang of their kids would be running wild around the place in the dark, wilder even than their parents dreamed, stealing Fen’s disgusting mead and spying on what they never should have seen – and one of them would almost inevitably break an arm, or set fire to a tent, or nearly drown. (Once, at a different party, one of the children really did drown, but that’s another story.)

And I wouldn’t know what to do with myself, because at seventeen I was too old to run with the kids, yet I was still holding back – too wary and angry and sceptical – from joining in with the adults. I was pretty much angry about everything, around that time. My mother came draping herself over my shoulders where I was trying to learn about photosynthesis out of the textbook for my Biology A level. “Janey, precious-heart, help me with this wretched vow thing, I can’t get it right. You’re the one who’s clever with words. What should I say? I’ve put ‘I promise to worship the loving man in you,’ but then I have this picture of Patrick flinging it back at me if ever anything went wrong. Because of course I know what can happen, I know about men, I’m not going into this with my eyes closed.”

“Mum, get off,” I said, trying to ease myself out from under her. “I can’t possibly make up your wedding vows. It’s inappropriate.”

“You’re such an old stick-in-the-mud,” she said fondly, squeezing my shoulders tightly and kissing the top of my head, her auburn hair flopping down on to the page. Her hair is like Elizabeth Siddal’s in Rossetti’s paintings and she wears it either loose or in a kind of rope wrapped around her head, and actually her looks are like Elizabeth Siddal’s too, and she wears the same drapey kind of clothes. But I was the one who knew who Elizabeth Siddal was, and that Rossetti buried her with a book of his poems and then dug her up again to get them back; I knew all about the Pre-Raphaelites and Rossetti and Burne-Jones and the rest, and I didn’t even like them all that much. That was the way life was divided up between me and my mother. I knew about things, and she was beautiful.

I couldn’t imagine Patrick flinging anything back at anyone. Patrick had the sweetest temperament. He was much younger than Mum, only twenty-six, closer to my age than hers, and he was loose-limbed with messy pale hair, and sleepy grey eyes as though everything in his life had been a dream until he woke up and saw my mother – in the wholefood cooperative in the village, as it happened, when they both reached out for a paper sack of muesli base at the same moment. He’d come out to west Wales to stay for free in a friend’s family’s holiday home for a couple of months, to finish his PhD thesis on the theology of Julian of Norwich (I knew who she was too). He’d run out of grant money and told us he’d been living for weeks on end on nothing much but apples and muesli base. “It’s very filling,” he said cheerfully. Mum thought he was otherworldly like the Celtic saints, but I knew he was just an intellectual. All his experience had been in books and he’d never properly come up against life in its full force before: he fell for the first real thing he laid his eyes on, like an innocent in a Shakespeare play. There was a girlfriend back in Oxford – another theologian – but she didn’t stand a chance against that rope of auburn hair. He’d abandoned the thesis, too.

We loved Patrick, Eithne and Rowan and me. Eithne and Rowan loved rambling with him around our land, finding out how he’d never done anything before: never swung out on a rope over the river or ridden a pony bareback (or ridden any way at all), never seen anything like the dead crows strung up along the fence wire of the neighbouring farmer who hated us. I loved talking with someone who knew things instead of being experienced. Experience was etched into the leathery, tanned faces of all the other adults in my life; experience was like a calculating light in their eyes when they looked at me. Patrick and I sank deep in the sagging old sofa which stank of the dogs, while my mother cooked vats of curry for the freezer, and he told me about Julian of Norwich, and I was happy. This doesn’t mean I was keen on his marrying my mother.

I kept saying it would rain on the wedding party because it’s always raining in Wales (that’s another nice thing about High Barnet). We ought to make plans for the rain, I said, but my mother just smiled and said she knew it was going to be fine, and then it was: the day dawned cloudless and pure, yellow haze gleaming in the meadows, hills in the distance delicately drawn in blue. I had to hold on very firmly, sometimes, to my conviction that everything could be explained in the light of reason; it really did seem as though Mum had witch powers. She could smell if rain was coming, her dreams seemed to foretell the future, and her hands could find the place where a horse was hurt, or a child. People said her touch was healing – only I didn’t want her touching me, not any more.

She and I worked together all that morning, defrosting the curries and loaves of wholemeal bread and the dishes of crumble we’d cooked with our own apples and quinces, mixing jugs of home-made lemonade. Fen drove over with plastic buckets of mead and crates of bottles in the back of his flatbed, along with a suspect carrier bag: he was in charge of the stronger stuff. Sue had sent the wedding cake, soaked in brandy and decorated with hearts and flowers cut out in coloured marzipan. “You don’t think it’s poisoned?” I said. “After what you did to her?”

My mother only laughed. “We’ve forgiven each other everything. Anyway, Sue started it – when she slept with your dad, while I was still breastfeeding you.” I pretended I knew about this, just to prevent her telling me more.

Then I sorted out sleeping bags and blankets for all the guests who were going to stay over. Patrick helped me haul the old mattresses up into the hayloft in our barn, built of ancient grey stone, older and more spacious than the farmhouse. When we stood at the open loft window with the sweet air blowing around us – it was tall as the loft itself, gracious as a church window, only without any glass – we could see ten miles, all the way to the glinting fine line of the sea.

“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” I said daringly. “I know Mum’s overwhelming.”

I expected him to reply with the same dazed absentmindedness I was used to, as if he were under her spell – and was surprised when he looked at me sharply. “I suppose you think she’s too old for me,” he said.

I made some joke about cradle-snatching.

“She looks great though, doesn’t she?” Patrick went on uneasily. “For her age.”

So he wasn’t so otherworldly after all! I didn’t know whether to be triumphant, or disappointed in him.

Our guests began to arrive in the afternoon. The party grew around the outdoor fireplace Lawrence had built in the meadow years ago, when he still lived with us. Lawrence was handsome, big and ruddy-faced with thick black hair and sideburns and moustache; he made his living as a builder though he’d been to one of the famous public schools. He was in charge of barbecuing as usual, and we brought out all the rest of the food from the kitchen, to keep warm beside his fire. Fen – not handsome in the least but wickedly funny, tall and stooped with a shaved head and huge crooked nose – started doling out the drink. I wouldn’t drink, and they all thought it was because I was a puritan, controlled and disapproving; actually the reason was rather different. A year ago at another party, when no one was looking I’d helped myself to too much mushroom liquor from the bottom of one of Fen’s brews, and since then I’d been accompanied everywhere by a minor hallucination: hearing my own feet scraping on the floor like little trotting hooves. Nothing disastrous, but enough to scare me.

Patrick had scythed along the top of the meadow that morning and smells of fresh-cut grass and roasting meat mingled together. Swallows came darting and mewing among the clouds of insects in the slanting yellow light. When the Irish band turned up, Mum and Patrick danced the first dance alone, then everyone else joined in; the warmth seemed to thicken as the sun sank lower. The kids had found our old punt in the long grass and taken it out on the pond; it leaked and they had to bail it frantically. The sounds of their distant shouting and laughter and splashing, and the dogs barking at them, all came scudding back to us across the water. I thought that my sister Eithne must be down at the pond with the others, until I caught sight of her at the heart of the dancing – and she looked as if she’d been drinking, too. There was always trouble at our parties (my little hooves didn’t begin to count, in the scale of things), and this time the trouble began with Eithne.

She was fourteen, and her face was expressive enough when she was sober, with her big twisted mouth and bright auburn hair, and the funny cast in one of her hazel eyes like a black inkblot; she was wearing her pale old stretch-towelling pyjamas to dance in, and had her hair done in several plaits that bounced around her head like snakes. Eithne had all sorts of mystery illnesses; I used to get mad because I thought Mum kept her home from school on the least excuse, or if she just thought the teacher wasn’t being spiritual enough. So Eithne could hardly read or write; she didn’t know basic things like fractions or the date of the French Revolution – probably didn’t know the French Revolution had even happened. But she’d always been able to dance like a dream, the same graceful easy way that she could ride and swim.

While Mum and Patrick were drinking out of the wedding cup, which Nancy Withers had made specially, Eithne came snuggling up next to me. I felt her shivering. “Have you been at Fen’s mead?” I asked her. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

“I don’t care if I die,” she said.

“You won’t die. You’ll just be throwing up all night.”

Mum promised to love the holy wanderer in Patrick, and Patrick promised, because he could quote poetry, to love the pilgrim soul in Mum. They lifted the wedding cup between them and smashed it down against the stones of Lawrence’s fireplace, then kissed passionately. Eithne said it was disgusting, and that she was going to bed.

“I told you you’d make yourself sick,” I said.

Then when she’d gone, Mum and Patrick were smooching together for a while to the sound of the band, until Mum suddenly had one of her intuitions. She pushed Patrick away and went running up towards the house with her skirts pulled up around her knees so she could go faster. And somehow I must have half-shared in the intuition because I went running up after her, and as we left the meadow behind and came round the side of the farmhouse we could see Eithne standing framed against the last of the light, in her pyjamas, in the barn’s hayloft window – which wasn’t really a window at all, just an opening into the air, fifteen feet above the ground.

“Ethie, take care!” Mum called out. “Step back from the window, my darling.”

“I love Patrick,” Eithne said. “I don’t want you to marry him.”

And then she stepped forward out of the window into nothingness, flopping down like a doll and landing with a thud on a heap of rubble overgrown with nettles. Mum ran forward with an awful cry and picked her up, and I really thought my sister must be dead – but by some miracle she wasn’t hurt. (Mum said afterwards it was because she’d fallen with her limbs so floppy and relaxed.) Cradling Eithne in her arms, she told me to go and tell Patrick to wait for her. “I’ve got to deal with this,” she said. And she carried Eithne into the house and lay on the bed upstairs with her, soothing her, making everything all right. This is the kind of thing that happens at our parties.

Everyone including the band had drifted down the meadow to stand beside the pond. The kids had pulled the punt out into the grass and now everyone was waiting for the finale, when Mum and Patrick took off their clothes and walked into the water. Patrick stood at the edge by himself, looking doubtful. The sun was going down behind the row of beech trees that marked the edge of our smallholding, and its light made a shining path across the water’s surface, motionless as glass. I don’t know what made me do the mad thing I did next; perhaps it was the last kick of my year-long mushroom hallucination. Instead of giving Mum’s message to Patrick, I put my arms around his neck and kissed him. “Mum’s not coming,” I said. “Marry me.”

“Janey says Patrick ought to marry her instead,” Fen announced to everyone, booming, waving his myrtle branch.

“Marry me,” I said, louder.

“Where is she, anyway?” Patrick looked around him helplessly.

“Marry her, marry Janey instead,” they all called encouragingly, maliciously: Lawrence and Fen, Nancy and Sue, and all the rest.

The fiddle player started up the “Wedding March”.

And I pulled my dress over my head and stepped out of my knickers and unhooked my bra, not looking at anyone though I knew they were all looking at me, and I waded naked into the pond water along the shining path, up to my knees and then up to my thighs, feeling the silt oozing between my toes, not caring about the sinister, slippery things that touched me. It was such a risk; it would have been so humiliating if Patrick hadn’t come in after me. I waited, not looking back at him, looking ahead at the sunset glowing like a fire between the beeches, while he stood hesitating on the brink. I heard them all singing and I felt the first drops of rain on my skin, like a sign.

LUXURY HOUR

SARAH HALL

IT WAS THE LAST week of the season and the lido was nearly deserted. She arrived at the usual time, changed into her suit, left her clothes in a locker and walked out across the chlorine-scented vault. The concrete paving had traces of frost in the corners and was almost painful on the soles of her feet. Light rustled under the blue rectangular surface. She climbed down the metal ladder and moved away from the edge without pausing. In October, entering the unheated pool was an act of bravery; the trick was to remain thoughtless. The water was coldly radiant. Her limbs felt stiff as she kicked and her chin burned. At the halfway mark she looked up at the guard, who was sinking into the fur hood of his parka. Nothing in his demeanour gave the impression of a man ready to intervene, should it be necessary. She took a breath, put her head underwater, surfacing a few strokes later. She was awake now, her heart jabbing. She turned on to her back, rotated her arms. The clouds above were grey and fast. Rain later, perhaps.

She swam twenty lengths, by which time she was warm and the idea of autumn seemed acceptable, then rested her head on the coping and caught her breath. The pool slopped gently against her chest. Light filaments flashed and extinguished in the rocking fluid. In summer it was hard to swim, hard to find the space; the pool was choppy, kids bombed in at the deep end, and the water washed out over the edges, soaking towels and bags. Barely an inch between sunbathers. Not many came after early September. But the old couple with rubber caps she always saw on quieter mornings were in the next lane, swimming side by side: her chin tipped high, his submerged. She followed in their wake. They nodded hello when she reached the end, and she smiled. She climbed out. Her breasts and thighs were blotched red with the chill and exertion.

In the changing room she tried not to look at her midriff in the mirrors, the crêping and the sag. She showered and dressed, and went into the poolside café. It was busy as usual. There were prams parked between tables, people working on laptops and reading books. The debris of muesli, pastries and napkins was strewn about. On the walls were photographs from the thirties, pictures of young women diving from the high board, now dismantled, or posing with their hands on their hips. The grace, the vivacity of another era: dark mouths, straight teeth, a kind of ebullient confidence. The scenes looked pre-industrial – open sky, birds in vee formations overhead. The five-storey civic building opposite the park hadn’t been built. London had not yet arrived.

The man behind the counter leaned away from the growling espresso machine and predicted her order.

Latte?

Yes, please.

There was an immaculate row of silver rings in his bottom lip.

Bring it over.

She took a seat by the window, in the corner, and watched the old couple emerge from the lido. Their stamina was far greater than hers – an hour’s swimming at least. They stood dripping and chatting for a moment as if unaffected by the smart breeze. The woman’s legs were thin, but strung with muscle. Her belly was a tiny mound under the swimming costume. The man had a buckled torso, a white beard. There was a vast laparotomy scar up his abdomen. They were the same height and seemed perfectly suited. She wondered if they’d evolved towards their symmetry over the years. The couple parted and went towards separate changing rooms. He walked awkwardly, favouring one hip. In the pool he swam well. Occasionally she’d seen his sedate, companionable breaststroke morph into an energetic butterfly.

There was no one left in the lido. The guard rested his head on his hand, eyes closed, the whistle attached to his wrist hanging in the air. The surface of the pool stilled to a beautiful chemical blue.

Her coffee arrived. She opened a packet of sugar and poured it. She shouldn’t be taking sugar – the baby weight was still not coming off – but hadn’t ever been able to drink coffee without. She sipped slowly. The pool was hypnotic; something about the water was calming, rapturous almost. Time here, after swimming, always felt inadmissible to her day. She would linger, ignore her phone. Often she had to race round the shops to be back in time for the sitter. “Luxury hour”, Daniel called it, as if she were indulging herself, but it was the only time she had without the baby.

After a while she went to the counter, paid and left. She began to walk through the park. The breeze was strengthening, the leaves of the trees moving briskly. There were some kids playing cycle polo on one of the hard courts, wheeling about and whacking the puck against the metal cage. Dogs bounded across the grass. She passed the glass merchant’s mansion and the old glassworks, both hidden under flapping plastic drapes and renovation scaffolding. She’d hated the city when she and Daniel had first arrived. She’d missed the Devon countryside, the fragrance of peat and gorse, horses with torn manes, the lack of people. But it was what one did – for the jobs, for the culture; London’s sacrificial gravity was too strong and it had taken them. Discovering the park had changed everything, and the nearby property was just about affordable.

She passed through the rank of dark-trunked sycamores. Beyond was the meadow. Its pale brindle stirred in the wind, belts of grass lightening and darkening. The field had been resown after a local campaign by the Friends of the Park. For a century it had been a wasteland – the horses used for pulling the carts of quartz sand to the glassworks had overgrazed it. Dust, cullet and oil from the annealing ovens had polluted the soil. Now it was lush again; there were bees and mice, even city kestrels – she’d seen them tremoring above the burrows, stooping with astonishing speed. There was a dry, chaff-like smell to the meadow after the summer; the grasses clicked and hushed. The enormous, elaborate spider webs of the previous month had broken apart and were drifting free.

A man was walking down the scythed path towards her. She stepped aside to let him pass but he stopped and held out his hand.

Alex.

She looked up. For a second she didn’t recognise him. He had on a tie and a suit jacket. The planes of his face came into focus. The heavy bones, the irises, with their concentration of colour, no divisions or rings. He was a little older, his hair darker than she remembered, but it was him.

Oh, God, she said. Hi.

He moved to kiss her cheek. She put a hand on his arm, turned her face too much and he kissed her ear, awkwardly.

Hi. Do you still live around here?

Yes, I’m over on Hillworth. Near the station.

Nice area.

Yes.

The wind was throwing her hair around her face, tangling it. She hadn’t properly washed or brushed it in the changing room. She moved a damp strand from her forehead. It felt sticky with chlorine. He was looking at her, his expression unreadable.

I’ve been swimming.

At the lido?

She nodded.

Wow! It’s still open? I must go there. Is it cold?

It’s OK. Bracing.

Had he forgotten? The cold water never used to bother him. She ran a hand through her hair again, tried to think what to say. Her mind felt white, soft. The shock of the real. Even though he’d said he was going, she’d expected to run into him and had, for a time, avoided the park. After a few months the expectation had lessened, and the hope, and she had reclaimed the space. Then the baby had come, and life had altered drastically. She’d assumed he’d moved away for good. His face was becoming increasingly familiar as she looked. The shape of his mouth, too full, voluptuous for a man, the fine white scar in the upper lip.

So, where are you these days? she asked.

Brighton.

Brighton!

I know!

He smiled. His teeth. One of the front ones was a fraction squarer, mostly porcelain – the accident on his bike. She had liked tapping it, then the tooth next to it, to hear the difference. Heat bloomed up her neck. These days she could not remember things – where her purse was, which breast she had last fed the baby on, the name of the artist from her university dissertation. But she could remember his mouth, and lying so close to his face that the details began to blur. She felt as if she might reach out now and touch the hard wet surface of his tooth. She put her hands in her coat pockets. Around them the grass was swaying and hissing. The silk webs floated. A bird darted up out of the field, flew a few feet and then disappeared between stalks.

He was studying her too. Probably she looked tired, leached, aged, the classic new mother, not like the woman who had come up to him in a low-cut swimsuit and asked to borrow change for the locker.

I’ll pay you back tomorrow.

I might not be here tomorrow.

Yes, you will.

So confident, then.

She hadn’t applied make-up, there was no point most days really, and her mouth was dry and bitter from the coffee. At least the long coat hid her figure.

Did you go to Burma? she asked.

Myanmar, he said, quietly. I did. For eighteen months. Well, officially to Thailand for eighteen months, but we went across the border most days into the training camps.

I thought you would.

Now it’s not such a problem getting in. Tourism.

She nodded. She was not up to speed on such things any more; she’d lost interest.

Was it difficult?

She was not sure what she meant by this question, only that she imagined privation, forfeit, that he had made the wrong decision.

Sometimes. We had a decent team. A lot of them were more missionaries than medics really, but on the whole the quality was good. I don’t know whether we helped really. The students qualify, then get arrested for practising.

He shrugged. He glanced towards the north end of the park.

So it’s still open?

Yes. Last week before winter closing. You should go before it shuts.

For old times’ sake. She did not say it. Nor, why have you come back?

He glanced at his watch.

I have a conference. I’m presenting the first paper, actually. I have to get to Barts.

Oh, great. Congratulations.

Hence the suit, the tidy version of his former self. He shrugged again. Humility; the duty was clearly very important. There was a pause. She could barely look at him; the past was restoring itself too viscerally. Since the baby she had felt nothing, no desire, not even sorrow that this part of her life had vanished, perhaps for good. Daniel had been understanding, patient. She couldn’t explain it: breastfeeding, different priorities, the wrong smell. Now, that familiar low ache. She wanted to step forward, reach out. Compatible immune systems, he had once said, to explain their impulses, that’s what it really is. For something to do she took her bag off her shoulder and rummaged around inside. It was a pointless act, spurred by panic; she was looking for nothing in particular. But then, in the inside pocket, she found the season ticket. She held it out.

Here. It still has a couple of swims. They won’t check the name when they stamp it, they never do.

He took the pass.

You should go, since you’re here.

That’s so thoughtful of you. God, I do miss it!

He was grinning now, and she could see in him the uninhibited man who’d never cared about the cold, who’d plunged into the pool without hesitation and swum almost a length under the surface. She could see his damp body on the bed in his flat, those stolen moments, the chaos of sheets, his expression, agonised, abandoned, as if in a seizure dream. She could see herself, holding the railings of the bed, fighting for control of the space they were using. Walking quickly home, ashamed, electrified, and holding her swimsuit under the kitchen tap, so that it would look used. Luxury hour.

She still swam, in October. Perhaps he was impressed because his interest suddenly seemed piqued.

So, Alexandra. What’s your life like now? Are you still at the gallery?

No. I’m married.

Ah.

She looked at him, then away.

To Daniel?

Yes, to Daniel.

Any children?

There was nothing to his tone other than polite conversation, the logical assumption of one thing following another. Or perhaps a slight wistfulness, some emotion, it was always hard to tell. The wind moved across the meadow. The grass rippled, like dry water.

No. No children.

He nodded, neither surprised nor sympathetic. She looked at the meadow. As if it could be as it was before. It was suddenly harder to breathe, though there were acres of air above. The lie was so great there would surely be a penalty. She would go home and the house would be silent, her son’s room empty. Or the baby would be screaming in the cot, and he would turn to ash when she lifted him up. The baby would be motionless in the shallow water of the bath while the minder sat on a stool, waiting.

He was speaking, saying something about his engagement to a woman from Thailand; her name was Sook, his family liked her, they had no children yet either. He was holding the season pass. He looked contented, established, a man in a tie about to give an important paper. Everything had moved on, except that he was here, and this was not the way to Barts. She reached out and touched his arm. He was real, of course he was.

You should swim, she said. Will you swim?

He looked at his watch again.

Yeah. Why not. I reckon there’s time, if I’m quick. What shall I wear? Will I get away with boxers?

I have to go, she said.

Oh. OK.

It was too abrupt, she knew, a breach in the otherwise civil conversation between old lovers that should have wound up more carefully. But already she had turned and was walking away up the path. His voice, calling behind her:

Bye, Alex. Lovely seeing you.

She kept walking. She did not turn round. At the edge of the meadow she stepped off the track, put her bag down, and crouched in the grass. He would not follow her, she knew, but she stayed there a long time, hidden. From her bag came the faint sound of ringing. She was late for the sitter again. She stayed crouched until her legs felt stiff. Embedded in the earth, between stalks, were tiny pieces of brown glass from the old works. The wind had lessened, the rain still holding off. She stood. If she ran back to the lido maybe she could catch him. She could apologise, and explain, tell him that she’d been afraid, she’d been angry and hurt that he was leaving; she’d had to choose, as he’d had to choose. The baby was a complication, but she could tell him what the child’s name was, at least. They could exchange numbers. They could meet, somewhere between Brighton and here. Or she could just watch him swimming from the café window, from the corner table, behind the blind pane, his body a long shadow under the surface.

GRACE POOLE HER TESTIMONY

HELEN DUNMORE

READER, I MARRIED HIM. Those are her words for sure. She would have him at the time and place she chose, with every dish on the table to her appetite.

She came in meek and mild but I knew her at first glance. There she sat in her low chair at a decent distance from the fire, buttering up Mrs Fairfax as if the old lady were a plate of parsnips. She didn’t see me but I saw her. You don’t live the life I’ve lived without learning to move so quiet that there is never a stir to frighten anyone.

Jane Eyre. You couldn’t touch her. Nothing could bring a flush of colour to that pale cheek. What kind of pallor was it, you ask? A snowdrop pushing its way out of the bare earth, as green as it was white: that would be a comparison she’d like. But I would say: sheets. Blank sheets. Paper, or else a bed that no one had ever lain in or ever would.

I am a coarse creature. No one has ever married me and I have not much taste for marrying. I like my porter, and there’s no harm in that. I am quick with the laudanum too. My lady takes it flavoured with cinnamon, and I keep the bottle under lock and key because sometimes she likes it too much. This little pale one won’t touch a drop of anything. Won’t let it sully her lips. Doesn’t want to be babbling out her secrets in that French she’s so proud of, as if anyone cared to listen. The little girl speaks French as pure as a bird.

I sweat and my stays creak when I move. I have good employment and I am respected by everyone in the household, not least Mr R. He’s a sly one, a fox if ever there was, and my poor lady was no vixen. All she ever had, and I will swear my Bible oath to it, was a weakness.

Violent? Not she. Not my lady. Mr R brought Dr Gallion here to measure her skull. She was tied firm to a ladder-back chair and she did not resist although her eyes rolled. The doctor undertook the palpation of my lady’s skull prominences. Here, he said, this is the bump of Amativeness. A propensity to Combativeness, do you see here, sir? His hands roved over her head and everything he discovered was to her detriment. He went beyond prodding at her bones to observe the way her hair grew low on her forehead, which he said showed an animal disposition. It vexed me. It was because she would not speak that he called her animal, but she could talk when she liked. She spoke in her dreams, when only I was there to hear her. If she preferred to be called mute I did not blame her. Downstairs, the pale one, chatter chatter in French with the little girl, scribble scribble on whatever piece of paper she could get, as if words were all anybody needed.

What I hated most was the way she made herself milk and water, a dish of whey for anyone to drink at, sip sop sip sop, when what she truly wanted was to be a blade through the heart of us. I knew it but the rest were dumb and blind. The old lady loved the sip sop. As for the little girl, she was taken by her, like a baby taken for a changeling.

My poor lady’s skull showed an enlarged Organ of Destructiveness. Dr Gallion passed his fingers over the place and repeated the words. He nodded and Mr R nodded with him, the two gentlemen solemn together now while my lady bent her head and her hair slid over her shoulders. The doctor had loosened it from the knots and coils she wore, the better to get at her.

In such a case as this, the doctor said, it would be wise to shave the head entire, the more clearly to see how the organs display themselves.

I rubbed oil into the bristle that sprouted from my lady’s scalp, so that it would grow more quickly. She was bewildered at the loss of her hair. She would raise her hand as if to touch the knot that sat at her nape, and find it gone, and then her hand would waver. I would give her a little laudanum and she would rock herself and seem to find comfort in it.

The pale one thinks she has the measure of us all. Up and down the garden she goes in the shadows of evening. She ticks us off in her steps. The old lady. Mr R. The little girl. The guests who come and go. She would tick me off too but she only knows my name. She asked it and they told her: Grace Poole.

I am a strong creature with a pot of porter. I receive excellent wages. I am so turned and turned about that if I saw a snowdrop push its way out of the earth I would stamp on it.

She was brought here to dig the frippery out of the little girl, so that the child might take her proper station in life.

Less noise there, Grace.

I can make a noise if I want. They know that. I have not yet lost my voice. If I spoke out I’d tell the pale one a story she wouldn’t soon forget.

Long ago he married my lady and they were Mr and Mrs R. Amativeness is what the doctor called it. This was long before the snowdrop raised its head, but the creature with the porter was already here. Me. Fifteen was I? As old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth. I was a lovely flashing bit of a girl then. I could stop men of thirty dead in their tracks as they ploughed. I made the air so thick around me they seemed to wade or drown in it. I was Grace Poole.

I stopped him dead in his tracks. I did not care for my lady then or know her. She did not come downstairs. They said she was nervous. To me she was a foreign land where I never wished to go.

Grace Poole, he said to me, and I saw him tremble. Is that your name?

I tilted the water I was carrying so that the jug rested on my hip. I said nothing. Let him look, I thought, and I shall look back at him.

I had an attic then. A slip of a room all white with sunlight and almost bare, but there was a bed in it. He was older than me but not by so much. He had married young and they said he was unhappy. I thought of nothing then except having him.

I dare say he had never lain down on such a bed in his life. We had to put our hands over each other’s mouths so as not to cry out.

Grace Poole, he said when I released him. Grace Poole. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard: my own name. No one heard and no one came.

No man likes a big belly. I carried mine to a place he procured for me. He told me that he would provide for the child and give it a station in life, and I would come back to Thornfield. It was more than I expected. He was a fox because it was his nature, but he kept his word about the child. I did not resist when it was born and taken by a wet nurse, to go far away to a better place.

I took a fever when it was gone and the room stank so that even the nurse who tended me held up a handkerchief over her face, but I did not die. I pitted and spotted and what got up from the bed was no longer the old Grace Poole but the beginning of the creature you see presently. I grew as strong as you like. I came back to Thornfield and took a taste for nursing, as perhaps he had foreseen.

I did not want anyone to look at me. And there she is, the pale one, bursting with it, every inch of her chill little flesh shouting: Look at me.

She will never stand before him as I did and look back at him, and make him come to her. She hunts in another fashion.

So I came to nurse my lady here. She would not eat so I fed her from a spoon. She would not speak so I learned her gestures and what they meant. I brushed her hair, which was thick and soft and long enough to touch the ground when she sat. It took an hour sometimes to brush her hair, to plait it and coil it into the knot she liked. When it was finished she would put up her hands to touch it and she would be satisfied. She liked her laudanum flavoured with cinnamon and not with saffron, which was what they gave her at first. Another thing she liked was a bit of red satin ribbon which she would wrap around her fingers and rub against her cheek as she rocked herself, and at those times although she never spoke she would hum and I would think: Perhaps she is content.

Each morning: porridge with cream and syrup, so that even a little of it will fatten her. Sometimes she will take a dish of tea; other times she will dash it from my hand. But no matter how fiercely she smashes china, she never touches me. There has been long discussion over whether or not she should take meat. It is heating. It inflames the passions. She is allowed only a very little beef. I make broth for her myself, out of bones she likes to crack with her teeth when they are cooked so that the marrow is ready to drip out of them. She will eat toast sometimes, as long as it is cut so fine it splinters to pieces if the butter is hard. On the days when she puts her lips together and will not swallow, I know better now than to persuade her. I take out my two packs of cards and make them flicker down into heaps over and over. It soothes her.

But now here we are: the old lady, the snowdrop, the little girl, Mr R, my lady and the creature with the porter. Me. The little girl has come back from France and she does not know me. She peeps and cheeps about the house with her high French voice and her dancing slippers. In the kitchen they say that she is the child of a French opera dancer that Mr R has kept in France. Some say that the opera dancer is dead, others that he has tired of her. They are used to me going in and out without partaking of the conversation, as I fetch and carry my lady’s food and drink. They call me Mrs Poole and none of them will cross me. Richard the footman visited London when he was a boy and he says he would rather have charge of the entire menagerie at Exeter ’Change than be left alone with Mrs R as I am. All I will ever own is that my lady has her ways.

If the pale one had not come to this house we should all have kept on safe. The little girl did not know me. I was content with that. I liked to see her flutter about the house in her lace and silk, and dance in front of the mirror. I was no more the Grace Poole who laid herself down on the narrow bed in the sunlit attic than I was Mr R himself. I rose up from childbed another woman and I am that woman now. I have no child but I have Mrs R. Let the little girl skip where she wants and peep out her French phrases and grow up to a suitable station. But this pale one has come here, loitering in our lanes and uncannily stealing what does not belong to her. And now here is my lady disturbed night after night, murmuring and rocking. No one knows what senses she has. Sometimes I see thoughts whisk in her eyes that I would never dare to see the bottom of, and I know that Mr R will not come here again and face her.

Mr R knows that I will never leave her. We should have been safe, if that one had never come here. Of course she wants my lady gone. She spins out words in her head like a spider. She will have us all wrapped tight. I see him walking in the garden, and her walking after him, so sly and small and neat that you would never think twice of it. She calls my lady a madwoman and a danger, and he listens. She says these words and he listens, in spite of all the years I have kept my lady safe and she has never troubled him. She wants my lady gone.

She may marry Mr R. She may take him for all that there is left in him. She will never stop him dead and make him tremble all over, as I did, before he ever touched me. She can do no harm to the little girl. With her bright black eyes and her dancing feet the child will go where she chooses, and by the time she is fifteen she will turn the air around her thick with longing. We will all be what we are again.

But you could put your hand through Miss Eyre and never grasp her. I know what she is. There she sits in the window seat, folded into the shadows, watching us. She has come here hunting. I have seen how she devours red meat when she thinks herself alone. She wants my lady gone. She will have my lady put away like a madwoman. Her hair cut again, her ribbon taken and nothing to comfort her. The doctors will measure her skull with callipers.

The pale one may hunt but she must not touch my lady. I read in my Bible with my good candles burning late. St Paul says that it is better to marry than to burn, but there is marriage and there is marriage. Sometimes it may be better to burn.

I will make my lady a custard, which I can do better than any cook in England. I will sit on my stool beside her and hold the spoon to her lips. Sometimes I chirrup as if she were a bird, to make her open her lips. She holds her red ribbon in her lap and her eyes meet mine and then she does open, she does take the spoon of custard into her mouth and she does swallow.

DANGEROUS DOG

KIRSTY GUNN

IN A WAY, I could start this short story with a dream I had last night in which I was attacked by two rogue Labradors who’d seemed sweet at first but then turned mean. This was at the gates of the park where I normally go running, and the Labradors went for me right there, one biting my hand, holding on and not letting go, the other mauling my clothing. I could start with that, I suppose, because the same park features heavily in the story I want to write and it works as a nice “gateway to narrative” – a phrase Reed has taught me and the kind of thing I come out with now as casually as terms like “core muscles” or “aerobic as opposed to muscular fitness”, which have been a natural part of my professional vocabulary as a fitness trainer and personal body-development coach.

So yes, I could start with that dream, with me reaching down to a pair of dogs who were sitting just outside the gates to the park, just reaching down to pat their soft black heads – and wham! Just like that they were on to me, one with my hand in its mouth, the other grabbing on tight to the hem of my jacket. “Hang on a minute, you two,” I heard myself say, “this isn’t what you’re supposed to do. You’re Labradors, for goodness’ sake.” At which point, hearing myself speak, I woke up.

Of course everyone knows about dreams like this, about Jung and Freud, those dream counsellors with their unconscious-world this and their myths-and-meanings that. And sure, we all know about the biting-dog dream: that it’s about either sexual repression or confidence. Or fear of sex. Or too much, or not enough. Whatever. So I suppose it could be that the dream itself might be a little short story if I wanted. It’s starting the writing classes that got me thinking this way. You, whoever you are, are reading now because you like reading, you’re used to it – even something like this, a short story from a writing class – and you’re used to thinking of life in a fictional sort of way; you probably write short stories yourself. But for me, finding meanings in the day-to-day, using them to create a written piece of work … It’s weird and it’s exciting. Now I think back on so many things that have happened to me and find shapes in those things, patterns … Like how come I went through most of my adult life in and out of relationships when I know I’ve got my own ways of going about things, always have had, so why should I be surprised they didn’t work out? Of course it comes of being a professional athlete, my mother used to say, as well as having my own business and telling people all the time: You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that.

And here I am, still doing those things – giving the aerobics and weights lessons, signing up new clients for training, etc. etc. – but also taking writing classes, and everything changed for me because of that. And maybe it’s what the dream was telling me – reminding me of that connection between life and art. Who knows. All I can tell you is that when I started this particular exercise – the title we were given: “Something that really happened that has far-reaching consequences” – I just thought, first off: Hey, get the biting dogs in, Kitty. Start with that.

The class I go to isn’t strictly short story writing. It’s “Life Writing” with various approaches to prose. We, to quote the course leaflet, “draw from material that has occurred in the student’s life and from that fashion stories and non-fiction articles – ‘prose artworks’ – that both transform the original and stay true to its shape and turn of events”. Amazing, right? That a class could deliver that kind of result with a bunch of men and women in their thirties to sixties, taking two hours of night school per week to “hone their writing skills”? Well, that’s Reed Garner for you, that one man. He developed the course and teaches the whole thirty-two weeks’ worth of it, and he knows what he’s doing because he is an American short story writer who himself writes from life, creates those “prose artworks”, and though no one here has heard of him he’s quite a big name in the States, with stuff in the New Yorker and collections of short fiction and has won big prizes over there too – all this information I have at my fingertips, now, you see, and can write about with such authority and ease. I also know that he has taught at Princeton and Yale and is Visiting Professor of Short Fiction at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, which is where my mother used to go. So, hey. I guess I was bound to feel a connection. Because my mother was a big presence in my life, I must tell you, massive, and my dad, too, and I miss them both more than I can say.

Still, even with all these credentials running from him like water, he’s a teacher who doesn’t make a big deal of that. From the outset he said, “Guys, we’re all in this together. Just because you’re starter-writers and I’ve been doing it longer doesn’t make me your professor any more than it makes any of you a student. You’ll be teaching me easily as much, if not more, than I’ll ever be able to show you.” And then he did this thing with his hair – he has super-long hair that’s white as white because of being part Native American and he has to keep flipping it back to get it out of his way – flipping it back and then with one hand gathering it up and twisting it into a pretty little rough ponytail or bun, talking all the while. “So teach me,” he was saying. “I’ll be paying attention to you all.”

For my part, I couldn’t listen hard enough, pay attention close enough … “Reed Garner. Just say his name out loud, Kitty,” I used to murmur to myself as I was walking home, those first few classes. Not even thinking about going for a run or working out. Just going over ideas about fiction and prose and Reed Garner, saying his name. One day he cycled past me as I was in this kind of daydream and when I lunged out of my thoughts to shout “Hi!” he nearly fell off his bike, took a sort of tumble to avoid hitting me, but then went on his way.

Already that feels like a long time ago, when we sort of crashed into each other like that on the street … But I know it’s got nothing to do with my “gateway” and “Something that really happened that has far-reaching consequences”, so I’d better get on with all that now.

Well, I was running, as I do every morning, through the park, coming back around seven, getting to the front gates, and there up ahead I saw, seven o’clock in the morning, remember, a gang of kids, teenagers I thought at first but more like in their early twenties, and they were laughing at something, a shouting and jeering that sounded like a crowd – though I saw when I got closer that there were only four of them. The thing they were all looking down at was a dog, a pit bull terrier, with a black, flat expression in its eyes. Its ears were back, and its head down, its tail level, and it was pretty unhappy, twitching and twisting on a chain because those kids were tormenting it. One was bent over and jeering at the dog and poking him with a stick to make him mad and he was spinning around and snapping at it. Another was yanking on the chain. “Nah, Rocky!” one of the kids sneered at him, and tickled his balls when the chain was pulled back so tight I could see the little dog was nearly choking. “Yah, pussy!” the kid said, and made to kick him when his friend released his grip.

Now I may be a personal trainer and strong, but actually I’m quite small. And I may be super-fit, I am, but I wouldn’t describe myself as brawny. Still I hate to see a dog being taunted – any animal, but dogs especially. Perhaps that’s because I’d always had dogs as a kid and my parents, when they were still alive, used to take in strays and mutts, “orphan anything”, my mother used to say – I was an orphan myself, you see, and my mother and father took me in – and I’d always thought I’d have a dog one day, when I quit the personal training … Anyhow, when I saw those kids, well, young men really, they weren’t kids at all, when I saw them taunting that little dog so that he was snapping and growling and starting to look as if any minute he was going to slip his chain and make a lunge and then there’d be trouble … Well, I saw red.

Professor Garner – just joking: I mean, Reed – says we must never use clichés in a story. “Do anything to avoid ’em, kids,” he says, in his American way. Yet sometimes, like just then, it seems there is no way around them. Because I did … see red. We’d been reading Jane Eyre in class, as part of a study of “the intersection between Life Writing and Fiction”, and looking at how that novel by Charlotte Brontë seems for all the world to be just the story of a particular woman’s life, a study of Jane, and not the usual kind of fiction with a plot that has been figured out in advance to make it seem exciting. The red room in that book – it’s there towards the beginning when Jane is being punished by her terrible aunt – and the idea that it might surround a person, that colour, might make her see things in a particular way … well, that detail stayed with me. All that opening section, actually, because I related to it, maybe, with being an orphan too and my parents only adopting me when I was four so I can remember that other part of my life, not in detail, maybe, the orphanage or “home”, as people always called it, but I can remember my mother and father walking towards me that day they came to collect me, and my mother getting down on her knees in front of me and opening her arms and I ran towards her … And I can remember, too, exactly how I felt, being held in her arms that first time … So yes, the early section of Jane Eyre, it stayed with me, how it must have been for Jane to have that terrible aunt and not someone like my mother and what it must have been like, growing up so alone … And “seeing red”, well, altogether it seems a likely expression for me to use – cliché or not – when that book had been so clearly in my mind.

I saw red with what those kids were doing. So instead of walking on, I went straight up to those boys, young men, whatever, and said, “What on earth are you doing?”

Let me tell you, that was a moment. A moment, right then, of silence. Then one of the men said, “Fuck off, bitch,” and the one beside him, “Yeah. Fuck off,” and then someone else said, in a low and dangerous voice, “Get her, Rocky. Get her,” and the dog turned.

Now again, as I say, I’m not tall and what do I know? And I’m not brawny in any way and I’m not confrontational with strangers, but neither do I believe anyone is inherently mean, human or animal, boy or dog … I just don’t believe it. It’s like bodies. You can be overweight or your tone can be shot to hell or you’ve got no endurance, no core strength … but I can work with you on that. Take my classes and you’ll see, straight away, how together we can improve things. I’m saying all this as a kind of metaphor, I guess, as a way of showing that I wasn’t about to walk away from that situation, even though the boy who held the dog lengthened the chain and the dog lit out at me and someone said, “Get her, Rocky,” again, but then the boy with the chain pulled it back just in time, so that nothing happened, even though the little guy’s teeth were bared and his eyes like a shark because he was ready to get me all right, he’d been commanded.

“You’re being very cruel to that dog,” I said then. “How old are you all, anyway? Twenty? Thirty? You should know better. Here …” and at that point I got down on my knees, just like my mother got down on her knees that day at the orphanage, and the little dog looked at me, and his expression changed. His ears went up. He put his head to one side.

“Look at him,” I said to the boys, for now I could see that they were just boys, I’d kind of made that up about them being twenty or thirty, just to flatter them, because they wanted to be very, very tough. “Look,” I said again, from down there, though one of them was lashing some other chain he had, and another was muttering over and over in a dark low voice, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” just like that, and another turned to spit.

“Look,” I said again, for the third time. And then I put out my balled fist and the dog stretched his head towards me. Then he stood up, took a step or two, his head still tilted to one side, while all the time I kept my fist in front of him, quite steady. Then he let out a little whimper and sat down again. He had a lovely face. His eyes, which had been black and scary-flat like a killer fish, were now full of thoughts and interest. He gave a little bark, like a puppy. He was really just a puppy. He put out his head towards my hand and smelled my hand all over and then he licked it. And I opened my hand then to let him sniff my palm and then, when he’d done that, too, I gave him a little scratch around his ears and fondled his muzzle.

“There,” I said to him, and sort of to the boys as well. “There, you see? Everything’s all right.”

The boys kind of shuffled, reassembled slightly. The one with the chain just let the chain hang.

“You see,” I said, “you think you’ve got a mean dog here, boys. But” – I wasn’t looking at them as I spoke. I was just looking at the dog – “he’s not mean at all.”

“He should be fucking mean,” said one of them, the one who had been swinging a length of chain attached to his jeans, though he wasn’t swinging it now. “He should fucking be.”

“But he’s not, Steve,” said the guy holding the actual dog chain. “Look at him. He’s a pussy. He’s a mummy’s dog.”

“My old mum wouldn’t be seen dead with a dog like that,” the third boy said. “She wouldn’t be seen dead.”

“His name’s not even Rocky,” I said then. “It’s Mr Rochester. Little Roc, for short, because look, he’s only a puppy …” By now the boys could see that the little dog was wriggling with pleasure, tail wagging, only wanting to play. Not the kind of dog they’d thought he was at all. “He’s named after a guy I’ve been reading about in this book about someone’s life,” I said. “That guy is a bit like this little dog of yours. He may seem all tough and mean but really …” And I gave Little Roc a lovely rub all over his haunches and down his back. “Really,” I said, “this little guy wants – like all of us want – like you boys yourself want” – and by now I had the puppy snuggled up right by me, his eyes closed with pleasure – “someone to give him attention and to love him and to love them back.”

“Hah!” they all went then, the four kids, and snorted like young ponies.

“You be some crazy bitch,” one of them said, the third one again.

“Well, this book I’ve been reading, that I was telling you about, Jane Eyre … She seems crazy too, I suppose, but her story is not so different from Mr Rochester here, this little guy, not so different from all of you, too, I reckon. Listen …” I said then, and I stood up – and I still can’t believe I did all this, spoke that way to total strangers, acted so cool and so assured, because all the time, let me tell you, my heart was beating, it was going like bam, bam, bam as though those boys could hear it because, remember, this was seven something in the morning, inner London but in a park, there was no one else around – and I started speaking then, like it was all prepared. I told them about my life and about Jane Eyre and the writing classes and about my mother and father and how I missed them – and really, this is the heart of the short story, the reason Reed said I should write it in the first place, because I had a central “incident” or “pulse moment”, as he calls it, the unexpected bit coming – bang – just like in Jane Eyre, you might say, a certain thing happening that’s like – whew! – this doesn’t seem like real life, but it is. And I said then, “Listen, boys. Why don’t you let me have this dog? I can see he’s not yours. And you don’t know what to do with him.”

“That’s the truth,” one of them said.

“We didn’t even want the fucking dog,” said another, right away, but looking at me as he spoke, and then saying, “It wasn’t my idea, you know.”

And then someone else said, “Yeah, Keith. She’s right. You didn’t know what you were going to do with him. None of us did.”

And so the conversation went on. And Keith, for he was the one who’d taken on Mr Rochester in the first place, told me he’d promised to look after the dog for someone who didn’t want him but might be able to sell him on, but that if Keith took him off his hands, he could have the money, if there was any. They’d only got him the night before at the pub and someone there had said that the guy who had been interested wasn’t even around. They had the choke chain, a bit of food in a bag, but no bowl, nothing to feed him in … All this came out, bit by bit, as the boys started telling me their story, why, that same morning, after being up all night, roaming around with a dog they never really intended to have, it was a good thing I’d come upon them, walking out of the park from my morning run … And, as for me, well, seeing some young men with a little dog, and leaving, after the conversation I had with them, with a pit bull terrier on a chain – one of the most dangerous dogs in Britain, all the papers say, with the most attacks on babies and toddlers, getting mauled in dog fights, all of it, you name it – it just shows how interesting life is, in stories and out of them. Because not only did I leave that morning with Mr Rochester on his little chain, but by the time I left I’d told his previous “owners” pretty much the full plot of Jane Eyre, and though all four of them thought it sounded “pretty fucking lame”, they agreed that the scene in the red room had its merits. “Yeah,” Steve said, quietly, as though to himself, after I’d finished telling that bit, “my gran used to put me in a room like that.”

Anyhow, I’ve gone on and on, and Reed gave me, he gave all of us, a word limit and I need to start counting words now. But the reason I wanted to get it down as a story for class is because it was due to the events I’ve described that my life went into a change position when I came upon Mr Rochester that day. That was the “incident”, the “pulse moment”, you see – Reed said that straight away when I told him after class about what had happened to me in the park that morning. “This is all a story, Katherine, a great story with a pulse moment that kicks the whole thing into life. I think you should write it all down sometime,” and then we arranged to meet the next day and have a dog walk together because it turns out he was a pit bull man himself, he used to have one when he was a boy. “Let’s go for it,” he said, referring to the dog walk idea and doing that thing with his hair that I like so much, twisting it back with one hand so that he looks diffident and shy.

And change, yes, change. Because now the story is done and I’m still training, of course I’m still doing all that, but I’m writing more, too, and reading, and Mr Rochester is a total peach and we take him to the park, twice every day, Reed and I, and we sometimes run into the guys there – Steve and Keith and Dave and Kevin – and they take a look at Mr Rochester then and I might tell them a bit more about his namesake because they occasionally ask after “Jane” and what else went on in that book and apparently, it’s written all over me, Reed says, I “could bring fiction to troubled kids in a new way”.

And Reed? You’ve probably guessed. I married him. We decided that pretty soon after he said “Let’s go for it” about the dog walk but also meaning the idea of the two of us together. He said the whole thing lit up for him, as it did for me, the second I told him about my meeting with a so-called “dangerous dog” and the boys who gave him to me and what we talked about that morning, the boys and I, and what happened then, and what happened next. After that, as he said, it was just a case of writing it down.

TO HOLD

JOANNA BRISCOE

READER, 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.

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 colour in my body seemed to leach at once. Mary and I had grown more careless over time, taken to meeting in the alleys behind school when the sleet was too vicious and the hail was running flat over the moors.

He raised one eyebrow, and walked out of the room. And then he kept watching me, his sadness a stain on the house.

He and I scarcely spoke of it again, but he divorced me in the end, when the children were off and happy. I protested and tried a little, but in my most hidden thoughts I understood what it was about me that had driven him away. I wanted to die of the shame, though I was older, and the disgrace did not hurt as terribly as it would have done in previous years.

So Mary and I had our dangerous walks at night where no townspeople could catch us, along the old quarry tracks, the pony beatings, the tunnels between the gorse; or the other way, over the scarred fell tops where the wind might tip you into the air, but the race to her was faster.

Reader I married, married, married him.

John Tay-Mosby asked me outright to become his wife soon after my divorce, no preparatory courtship, no hawk gaze on the horizons. I said yes, I would. Yes, I will marry you. He was old by then, half-sprightly, half-bowed, with a cluster of cooks, nurses, day-help to serve him, and oh he was the merry gentleman with a twinkle in his eye, the naughty-boy lord of the manor to be flirted with and pampered and wiped down.

We were married in the chapel on his land, no parents left to witness the event they had frocked me for, and later in the evening, I turned to him, and said, smiling at my feet, “Our real marriage must be on the moor. Where we were all those years ago, Tarey Carr where you took me.”

He laughed. “I have a bed that the scurrilous eighth Edward is rumoured to have owned,” he said in the game-fed tenor that seemed to emerge through his nose. “Although I suspect that is apocryphal. But it’s a fine bed with a superlative mattress.”

“I want Tarey Carr, the heather flowers and the skies. It’s a warm evening.”

He laughed. The guests had gone; the staff had retired to leave us to our pleasure. I began to walk that way, through the garden gate past the vegetables, out past Gibbeswick Fell, and he had to follow.

“This is madness.”

“It’s what I want.”

I turned my back on him, and only looked once to see he was following me, stumbling with that stick, the modern version, Ranger Boy and Ranger Son long dead. I brought him round the fell towards the marshes of Tarey Carr, where he had shot golden plover.

“You’re beautiful,” he said the one time I looked at him, and he followed me.

‘Even now?’ I murmured, but I didn’t turn.

I thought of Mary as I walked. The way she traced her finger over me for lingering minutes, how I kissed her curves; her beauty, her contradictions, her gentleness. My legs softened as I thought of her, even after so many years. Oh, that I could live with her in the bracken: me, her, my children, who were grown, always visiting. I loved her as you shouldn’t. We both knew. We knew what was to be and what was not.

I saw two girls once in town, much much younger than me – decades, an age – holding hands. Quite openly on the causey, just like that. I never forgot them. They were young ladies, not the foreign young women you sometimes saw arm in arm, but young women in love, and they made me want to cry.

I lay down on our marriage bed.

“This is insanity, my dear,” he said, but I pulled him down on the sheet of sweet asphodel covering the rocking watery ground of Tarey Carr beside me, and stroked him, and he moaned a little and closed his eyes.

He became excited, at once, soft and hard, but not hurting, not that scream that the marsh had swallowed so many many years before, and I curved over him, a cat, in the evening-scented breeze, to perform our marriage rite, our vows, and he was grunting like a small animal, a calf whose vocal cords were not formed as I pressed into him.

“Do it,” I said, arching further, and all the delightful little mud fountains sprang up around him, like points of a crown, springs of a bed, and I cat-lay all over him, a puma, moor beast, stretching over his length. “Do it, then,” I said, pressing against him, into him.

Do it as you did when all I had was a young body.

“Marriage is one flesh, you said it then.”

I ground into him, and the calf vibrations deepened, and all our bed’s mud swelled over us, like the breaking of a membrane, the tear before the gush, but it was cool, and I pressed myself into him, his face, his body, covering his fowl-eating lips that were blackening with marsh, my hair falling over him as my hair had fallen on him so long before, when I was a girl, but in long strands and hooks then, curled by my mother, mud-knitted. I stretched and rubbed myself against him, splashed by swamp-scented Tarey Carr, almost covered as I lay over him with my weight. “Happy, my dear?” I said, his own long-ago words slipping on the air as it chilled. Sheep’s breath was loud beside us. His voice was a dying bittern in the mud. The sky darkened, his skin the colour of where he lay beneath me.