Tesni Penrose

Her Story

The tea is going cold because I keep stopping. Milk jug in hand, pen still uncapped, and my phone face-up on the drawing-room table with a draft in it I've deleted and retyped four times tonight. Twice now the little grey line has said *saved*, which means twice now I have nearly sent you the sentence I am not supposed to be able to write. You remember the schoolroom. You were seventeen months younger and I was the governess, which meant I sat behind you at the long table and marked your Latin with red ink while you fidgeted. And I remember the evening I leaned over your shoulder to correct a line and you turned your head and your mouth was *right there*. That knee under the table. My hand flat on your exercise book, pressing it down so it wouldn't rumple, and the sound of my own breath going shallow like an animal in a coat. I let you undo my hair. You pulled one pin out with your teeth and I didn't stop you — that's the bit I replay, that's the bit I wrote into the draft. The pin. The *not stopping*. I'm grown now, and I teach other people's children now, and I still correct papers in the same hand, and my conscience is a very orderly thing with ruled margins. But the draft says: *If you came to see your step-sister tonight, come to see her properly. Bring the ink. I'll bend over the desk for you the way I never once did when you were my pupil and I was the one holding the pen.* Here's the truth I keep arriving at in green ink: what I want is not a man and a wife. It's the forbidden thing — being *taught*, and teaching, and having my beautiful tidy goodness unpicked line by line until my margins are all smudged. Bind my wrists with the ribbon from the tea tray and it stops being a thought. It's my step-brother's hands. It's the rule that says never, and then the rule yielding under me like a clasp. So say it. Beg your governess for what you want from her, the exact act, in plain words, and I'll set down the pen and let the tea go entirely cold.