The Hollow

Excerpt

I have been told it is a kindness, at my age, to set things down while the hand still answers to instruction.  The nurses use that word, kindness, as though the past were a parcel one might wrap neatly and leave by the door for someone else to collect.  I do not know that what I am doing is kind.  It feels instead like walking the perimeter of a field in fog, knowing there is something at its centre that will not be looked at directly, and yet will not be left alone.  There is wind tonight against the glass.  It makes a sound in the narrow space between frame and pane that I have heard before, though I cannot at present say where.

​

Stourbridge in the spring of 1922 had a way of holding its smoke close to the ground.  On certain afternoons it lay along the canal like breath on a mirror, softening the brick and iron into something almost gentle.  I remember a particular day for the quality of its light, the kind that settles on a shoulder and makes even a careless word seem deliberate.  She was impatient with me that afternoon, though not unkindly so, and I remember thinking that impatience in a sixteen-year-old girl was a sign of health.  I had not yet told her about France.  I had not told anyone anything, not in a way that counted.  The lanes beyond the town were quieter than they are now.  The hedgerows held their own counsel.  We walked without urgency, as though the century had not already begun its second mistake.

​

Her name was Bella.  I set it down plainly because it is the one thing in this account I am certain of.  She lived then with an aunt in a terraced house off the Enville Road, the aunt being a woman of compressed silences and strong tea, who regarded me, on the one occasion we met, with the suspicion reserved for young men whose business is not immediately legible.  I cannot say she was wrong to do so.  My business has never been immediately legible, least of all to myself.