Reader, I Married Him. Tracy Chevalier

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