Bitterhall by Helen McClory (story books to read .txt) 📕

not saying. It hung around us. You want to grasp and to know the thing, get it named. To have it and to that way disarm. As if a named bomb won’t go off in your hand. But even speaking of the thing obliquely, as we were doing, is itself sometimes impossibly hard.

‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do,’ Daniel said.

‘Keep an eye on him,’ I said, ‘make sure he gets enough sleep. Rests and relaxes enough.’

I looked at the window. There we sat in the reflection, in the glass all hollow. Stillness. Daniel, in his reflection, took off his glasses and put them on the table. He looked very different, less pinched. But then much the same, unmovingly agitated, like a pool of water into which some current is pouring, churning. But likely this was my projection onto him, and he was still to his depths, calm in a way I would never be. I felt the cold and damp of the old room then, even with a jumper. I wished we had a fire, something to gather ourselves around.

‘I didn’t realise you wore glasses,’ I said.

‘Yeah, only if I’m reading,’ he said. ‘I have – I have a really bad feeling,’ he said, ‘like I’m sitting in a fog. And something is coming through it, towards us. Sorry. Probably sounds—’

I had no idea what he was talking about. I sat for a moment. ‘Oh, fog. You really do have trouble seeing then. The glasses make sense now,’ I paused. ‘No, I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘It’s like there is something coming through the fog, through Tom.’

Lennoxlove

I read: I am a young man in love with someone beneath my station but also so far beyond it that such strictures cannot be placed on us, only rank disgust. My eyes glazed over. Oh a scandal of love, huh. I flipped through a few pages more. More hunting, more talk of society, a trip to the city. Vain, rich boy who goes where he wants and gossips and has the occasional epiphany about something everyone knows. Here he orders the beech wood cut down and new farmland ploughed. Here he orders a black jacket and considers his brother’s coolness towards him as evidence of their parallel and untouching lives. Here he admires a woman at a party, only to be told that she is some kind of upperclass hussy of no repute. I rub my eyes and do not care. What does Tom find to care about? I flip backwards, forwards. A scattering of words catch my eye, make me itch. Then I notice it: the dates. Under each entry James Lennoxlove writes a date (without year), but they don’t make sense. He writes about the love in June, but describes falling leaves. The party with the socially-disparaged woman appears to be for the new year, as he mentions resolutions and forward-looking games, but the party is placed before his birthday – which he previously says is in November, so must either be a year on from, or in reference to the party he ran out of, where the murder happened. Winter appears after summer, autumn is whenever, the leaves constantly drifting in the woods that are never cut down. The diary is out of order, or the order he has imposed on it is not true. In this light the gossip reads as carrying a sly red line through it, untruthfulness. I read again. There, something too polished, too playful in the way he says, in the forestry entry, ‘like all good men must I improve my lot.’ And belying this, a handwriting that just feels slightly off – slants a little too rough, or too hasty. I can’t speak on the matter, since it’s not my century, my area of study. I sat back from the book and there it sat, all edges and disquiet.

‘What did you like about this text?’ I asked Daniel.

‘Oh, I think it’s his attention to scenic detail. He makes a lot of beautiful observations about the natural world.’

‘Not much to go on for an obsession,’ I said.

‘Tom probably saw other things in it that he liked. The secret love, the sense of isolation – the, ah, historic details?’

‘See, I don’t think that meshes with him, who he is. Unlike us, he doesn’t have an academic interest in minutia and proof.’

‘How much do you really know of him?’ Daniel asked.

‘I know that much,’ I said. ‘He’s a man who likes the real, the now. He likes beer, working out. Women. He’s not a stupid or a shallow person, but I think that he wouldn’t or shouldn’t get interested in something as mundane as this record of a life.’

‘You don’t know that,’ said Daniel, peevish.

‘But,’ I said, holding up a hand, ‘did you notice this?’ I pointed out what I had noticed.

‘It’s not right,’ I said. ‘There’s something almost forced in it.’

‘Ehh,’ he said, ‘can’t say I saw any of this. On the other hand, if Tom’s the way you think he is he wouldn’t have noticed either. Would he?’

‘And what would it mean to him if he did?’

‘Obsession?’

I ran my finger around the lower edge of the book. It was scuffed and my nail caught on something. I picked it up and examined it. You find hidden latches that open the world that way. But there was just a wrinkle in the fabric. I let the book fall to the table, sinner that I am. And clapped my hands.

Morning

Tom wouldn’t remember, of course he wouldn’t. He’d slept the whole night, felt well rested. He got up and hugged me when he came into the kitchen.

‘You’re up early, for the weekend,’ he said. Raspy, seductive voice.

‘Mm,’ I said. Daniel put on some tea and opened the back door. The air outside rushed in violet grey light and I took some slow deep breaths of the dry air and potting mulch smells and listened to the birdsong.

‘We should have a barbeque sometime, if the