MRS. LOVE TURNS A HEEL

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    When it started to rai our hoods up and made our way hurriedly to the shelter of the church. In the porch we did a little jig to drive the raindrops off our coats, and the inside.

    We sat in a pew he altar and I stared up at the pale, vaulted ceiling until I made myself dizzy.

    ‘Tell me about when you were found,“ I said<mark>９９lｉｂ?</mark>. ”What do you know about it?“

    ‘I know what Mrs. Love told me,“ he answered. ”I  tell you that. And of course there’s always my iance.“

    ‘You have an iance?“

    ‘Yes. It’s nothing muot eople usually meahey talk about an iance, but all the same… In fact, I could show it to you later.“

    ‘That would be nice.“

    ‘Yes… Because I was thinking, nine is a bit too adjat to breakfast for cake, isn’t it?“ It was said with a relut grimace that turned into a gleam with his  words: ”So I thought, Invite Margaret back for elevenses. Cake and coffee, how does that sound? You could do with feeding up. And I’ll show you my ia the same time. What little there is to see.“

    I accepted the invitation.

    Aurelius took his glasses from his pocket and began to polish them absently wit<tt>藏书网</tt>h a handkerchief.

    ‘Well now.“ Slowly he took a deep breath. Slowly he exhaled. ”As it was told to me. Mrs. Love, aory.“

    His face settled into passive rality, a sign that, in the way of all storytellers, he was disappearing to make way for the voice of the story itself. And then he recited, and from his very first words, at the heart of his voice, it was Mrs. Love I heard, jured from the grave by the memory of her story.

    Her story, and Aurelius’s, and also, perhaps, Emmeline’s.

    There itch-black sky that night, and a storm was brewing in it. Ireetops the wind was whistling, and it was raining fit to break the windows. I was knitting in this chair by the fire, a gray sock it was, the sed one, and I was just turning the heel. Well, I felt a shiver. Not that I was cold, mind you. I’d a  of firewood piled up in the log basket that I’d brought in from the shed that afternoon, and I’d only just put an on. So I wasn’t cold, not at all, but I thought to myself, What a night, I’m glad I’m not some poor soul caught outdoors away from home on a night like this, and it was thinking of that poor soul as made me shiver.

    Everything was quiet indoors, only the crack of the fire every so often, and the click-click of the knitting needles, and my sighs. My sighs, you say? Well, yes, my sighs. Because I wasn’t happy. I’d fallen into remembering, and that’s a bad habit for a woman of fifty. I’d got a warm fire, a roof over my head and a cooked dinner inside me, but was I tent? Not I. So there I sat sighing over my gray sock, while the rai ing. After a time I got up to fetch a slice of plum cake from the pantry, nid mature, fed with brandy. Cheered me up no end. But when I came bad picked up my knitting, my heart quite turned over. Do you know why? I’d turhe heel of that sock twice!

    Now that bothered me. It really bothered me, because I’m a careful knitter, not slapdash like my sister Kitty used to be, nor half blind like my poor old mother whe he end. I’d only made that mistake twi my life.

    The first time I turned a heel too often was when I was a young thing. A sunny afternoon. I was sitting by an open window, enjoying the smell of everything blooming in the garden. It was a blue sock then. For… well, for a young man. My young man. I won’t tell you his here’s no need. Well, I’d been daydreaming. Silly. White dresses and white cakes and a lot of nonsense like that. And all of a sudden I looked down and saw that I’d turhe heel twice. There it lain as day. A ribbed leg part, a heel, more ribbing for the foot and then— another heel. I laughed out loud. It didn’t matter. Easy enough to undo it and put it right.

    I’d already drawn the needles out when Kitty came running up the garden path. What’s up with her? I thought, all of a hurry. I saw her face was greenish white, and theopped dead the minute she saw me through the window. That’s when I k wasn’t a trouble for her but for me. She opened her mouth but she couldn’t even say my name. She was g. And then out she came with it.

    There’d been an act. He’d been out with his brother, my young man. After some grouse. Where they didn’t ought to have been. Someone saw them and they toht. Ran off. Dahe brother, he got to the stile first and hopped over. My young man, he was too hasty. His gun got caught iile. He should have slowed down, taken his time. He heard footsteps ing after them and panicked, ya the gun. I don’t o spell it out, do I? You  guess what happened.

    I undid my knitting. All those little knots that you make oer mother, row by row, to knit a sock, I undid them. It’s easy. Take the needles out, a little tug and they just fall apart. Oer another, row by row. I undid the extra heel and then I just kept going. The foot, the first heel, the ribbing of the leg. All those loops unraveling themselves as you pull the wool. Then there was nothio unravel, only a pile of kled blue wool in my lap.

    It doesn’t take long to knit a sod it takes a lot less to undo it.

    I expect I wound the blue wool into a ball to make something else. But I don’t remember that.

    The sed time I turned a heel twice, I was beginning to get old. Kitty and me were sitting by the fireside here, together. It was a year since her husband had died, nearly a year since she’d e to live with me. She was getting so much better, I thought. She’d been smiling more. Taking an i in things. She could hear his hout welling up. We sat here and I was knitting—a nice pair of bed socks it was, for Kitty, softest lambs’ wool, pink to go with her dressing gown— and she had a book in her lap. She ’t have been looking at it, though, because she said, “Joan, you’ve turhat heel twice.”

    I held up my work and she was right. “Well, I’m blowed,” I said.

    She said if it had been her knitting, she wouldn’t be surprised. She was always turning heels twice, or else fetting to turn at all. More than once she’d knitted a sock for her man with no heel, just a leg and a toe. We laughed. But she was surprised at me, she said. It wasn’t like me to be so absentminded.

    ‘Well,“ I said, ”I have made this mistake before. Only the once.“ And I reminded her of what I’ve just told you. All about my young man. And while I was reminisg aloud, I carefully undid the sed heel and got started to put it right. Takes a bit of tration, and the light was going. Well, I finished my story, and she didn’t say anything, and I thought she was thinking about her husband. You know, me talking about my loss all those years ago, and hers so ret by parison.

    It was too dark to finish the toe properly, so I put it aside and looked up. “Kitty?” I said. “Kitty?” There was no answer. I did for a moment think she might be asleep. But she wasn’t<samp>９９lｉｂ?</samp>.

    She looked so peaceful there. She had a smile on her face. As if she was happy to be back with him. Back with her husband. Iime I’d been peering at that bed so the dark, chattering away with my old story, she’d goo him.

    So it bothered me, that night of the pitch-black sky, to find that I’d knitted a sed heel. Once I’d do and lost my young man. Twid I’d lost my sister. Now a third time. I had no oo lose. There was only me now.

    I looked at the sock. Gray wool. A plain thing. It was meant for me.

    Perhaps it didn’t matter, I told myself. Who was there to miss me? No one would suffer from my going. That was a blessing. After all, at least I’d had a life, not like my young man. And also I remembered the look on Kitty’s face, that happy, peaceful look. ’t be so bad, I thought.

    I set to unraveling the extra heel. What was the point of that, you might wonder. Well, I didn’t want to be found with it. “Silly old woman,” I imagihem saying. “They found her with her knitting in her lap, and guess what? She’d turned her heel twice.” I didn’t want them saying that. So I undid it. And as I work<var>..</var>ed I was readying myself to go, in my mind.

    I don’t know how long I sat there like that. But eventually a noise found its way into my ear. From out-of-doors. A cry, like some lost animal. I was away in my thoughts, not expeg anything to e now between me and my end, so at first I paid no notice. But I heard it again. It seemed to be calling me. For who else was going to hear it, stuck out here in the middle of nowhere? I thought perhaps it was a cat, lost its mother or something. And although I reparing to meet my maker, the image of this little cat, with its wet fur, kept distrag me. And I thought, Just because I’m dying, that’s no reason to deny one of God’s creatures a bit of warmth and something to eat. And I might as well tell you, I didn’t mind the thought of having some living creature by me right at that moment. So I went to the door.

    And what did I find there?

    Tucked in the porch, out of the rain, a baby! Swaddled in vas, mewling like a kitten. Poor little mite. Cold a and hungry, you were. I could hardly believe my eyes. I bent doicked you up, and the minute you saw me you stopped g.

    I didn’t linger outdoors. You wanted feeding and some dry things. So no, I didn’t stop long in the porch. Just a quick look. Nothing there. Nobody at all. Just the wind rustling the trees at the edge of the wood, and—odd this—smoke rising into the sky off toward Angelfield?

    I clutched you to me, came inside and closed the door.

    Twice before I had kwo heels into a sock, ah had e close to me. The third time, and it was life that came to the door. That taught me not to go reading too muto ces. I had no time to be thinking about death after that, anyway.

    I had you to think about.

    And we lived happily ever after.

    Aurelius swallowed. His voice had grown hoarse and broken. The words had e out of him like an intation; words that he had heard a thousand times as a boy, repeated inside himself for decades as a man.

    Wheory was finished, we sat in silence, plating the altar. Outside the rain tio fall, unhurried. Aurelius was still as a statue by my side, yet his thoughts, I suspected, were anythi<bdo>..</bdo>ng but quiet.

    There were lots of things I might have said, but I said nothing. I just waited for him to return to the present in his own time. When he did, he spoke to me.

    ‘The thing is, it’s not my story, is it? I mean, I’m in it, that’s obvious, but it’s not my story. It belongs to Mrs. Love. The man she wao marry; her sister Kitty; her knitting. Her baking. All that is her story. And then just whehinks it’s all ing to an end, I arrive and give the story a art.

    ‘But that doesn’t make it my story, does it? Because before she opehe door… before she heard the sound in the night… before—“

    He halted, breathless, made a gesture to cut off his sentend start again:

    ‘Because for someoo find a baby like that, just find him, all alone like that in the rain, it means that before then, in order for it to happen, of y—“

    Another frantic erasiure of the hands, eyes ranging wildly around the church ceiling as though somewhere he would spot the verb he hat would allow him finally to anchor what it was he wao say:

    ‘Because if Mrs. Love fou  only mean that before that happened, someone else, some other person, some mother must have—“

    There it was. That verb.

    His face froze into despair. His hands, halfway through an agitated gesture, were arrested in an attitude that suggested a plea or a prayer.

    There are times when the human fad body  express the ‘earning of the heart so accurately that you , as they say, read them like a book. I read Aurelius.

    Do not abandon me.

    touched my hand to his, and the statue returo life.

    ‘There’s no point waiting for the rain to stop,“ I whispered. ”It’s set for the day. My photos  wait. We may as well go.“

    ‘Yes,“ he said, with a gruff edge in his throat. ”We may as well.“

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