CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Choice #3
“There isn’t a last part. That’s what I’m telling you.
There’s no doom on it, madam. You’d live a long while.
You’d be respected, which you’d loathe. You’d see that man of yours as often as the coming up and down allowed, which is more than people think and less than you’d like.
” He put the oars in the water at last. “And in forty years you’d look at him and find you loved him a great deal, and that Ilmarren was still the first thing in your head of a morning.
Nothing wrong. Nothing to fix. No villain in it anywhere. I did tell you it wasn’t grand.”
? ? ?
None of that decided it.
There’s a version of this story where I chose in a boat, with a man explaining the cost, or on the harbour wall with the weed on the stones, or at the kitchen table over the tide tables. A version with something noble in it somewhere.
What really happened is that I went up to Mara’s on the eighth of March to say goodbye.
We had a perfectly civil hour. She was careful with me and I was careful with her and neither of us mentioned the promise, and it was dreadful.
She spilled the tea twice and didn’t swear either time, and that frightened me more than anything.
At the door, as I was going, she said: “Your mother came back once.”
I stopped with my hand on the latch.
“What?”
“After you were born. About a year after.” Mara was standing in the middle of her own kitchen with her arms hanging at her sides, like she’d forgotten what they were for.
“She came up this hill in the summer with you on her hip, and she stood exactly where you’re standing, and she said, Mara, I have worked out that I can simply not send her. Those were the words.”
“And?”
“And I said, what happens then. And she said she didn’t know.
And I said, what happens to her. And she didn’t know that either.
And she stood there.” Mara’s voice was completely flat.
“Long enough that you fell asleep on her. Then she said: She’ll find out on her own.
She’ll find out at thirty or thirty-five and she’ll have to decide it with nobody to ask.
And I said yes. And she said, that’s better than me deciding it for her now, isn’t it.
And I said yes. And she went back down the hill. ”
I couldn’t speak.
“She didn’t know what she’d done to you. She knew she’d done something and she couldn’t see the shape of it. She went back down that hill and some months later she was dead, and the last thing I ever said to her was yes.”
? ? ?
I walked down through the Hallowwood and out onto the lane, and I didn’t go home.
I went down to the harbour and past it and out along the north jetty to the very end, where the stone’s broken and there isn’t any rail, and I sat on the edge with my legs hanging over and the water forty feet below me going slack and green against the piles.
She’d come back.
I couldn’t get round it. Everybody in this story had done a terrible thing out of love and kept on doing it, and every one of them had done it in advance, in a room, before the person it was about could open her mouth.
And she’d come back a year on with me on her hip and asked the one question none of the rest of them had thought to ask. What if I let her decide.
And the answer had been yes.
So there it was. The whole apparatus, thirty-four years of a life arranged to specification, and the last thing my mother did about any of it was leave the decision lying about where I’d trip over it.
Badly. At enormous cost. Without telling me, without getting me ready, without so much as a note on the table.
She left me hungry and ignorant and sat on a jetty at thirty-four with nobody to ask, exactly the way she’d said I’d be.
She’d failed at nearly everything she tried. The gate, the bargain, staying alive. Telling me one single true thing.
But not that. Whatever else, she hadn’t failed at that one.
I sat on the end of the jetty till my hands stopped working and it was properly dark, and somebody up on the harbour wall shouted down to ask was I all right. I shouted back that I was. And the odd thing is that I was.
? ? ?
I went home.
Elias was in the yard splitting wood we didn’t need. He saw my face and put the axe down and came across the yard, and before he could get to me I said:
“I’m going to do it.”
He stopped four feet off. He does that.
“Right. Tell me why.”
“Because nobody’s making me.”
“That’s not a reason.”
“It’s the only reason there’s ever been. You told me so on a wall in December, and I’ve spent three months finding out you were right, which I resent.”
? ? ?
He didn’t argue. He didn’t cry, and he didn’t tell me he was proud of me, which would have finished me off.
He crossed the last four feet and took hold of the front of my coat in both fists, high up by the collar, and hauled me in against him so hard I lost my footing and had to grab at him.
He held on like that. It was more a grip than an embrace, both hands knotted in the wool at my chest and my face pushed into the side of his neck, the way a man hangs on to a mooring line with the weather getting up.
“Say it once more. So I’ve got it.”
“Nobody’s making me.”
His hands tightened. I felt the whole of him give, just for a second, and come back.
“All right,” said Elias. “Then we’ve got twelve days, and I’m not wasting any of them being noble at you. I want that understood now.”
“Understood.”
“I’ll be perfectly horrible on at least three of them.”
“I’d be insulted if you weren’t.”
He let go of my coat and smoothed it down flat with both hands, slowly, over and over, and didn’t quite manage to make a joke of it. Then he went back and picked up the axe and split wood we didn’t need for another hour, and I leaned in the doorway and watched him do it.
? ? ?
Kael came on the sixteenth, like he’d promised, and was every bit the nuisance he’d promised too.
He turned up at the front door in the middle of the afternoon with his hair wet and the smell of low tide on him, and before anything else he said to Elias: “Vale. Sit down. This is about your family, and I’d rather you were sitting.”
Then he told us who’d lit the second seal.
“It was your grandmother, Vale. Go back four or five greats. Her name was Ceria.”
? ? ?
Neither of us took it in at first. It came into the room and sat there and nobody could pick it up.
“Say that again,” said Elias.
“Ceria Vale. Born seventeen ninety, died eighteen seventy-one, buried in the churchyard at Rellhaven under a stone that gives her as a fisherman’s wife.” Kael hadn’t sat down himself. “I’ve spent five months not telling you this, and I’d like it on the record that I was instructed.”
“By whom?”
“Her.” He let that sit a moment. “She gave the instruction in eighteen forty-four, and it’s been handed down the way things like that get handed down among people like me. I had it at nineteen from a man who had it from a woman who had it from her.”
“She’s been dead a long lifetime,” I said. “Kael. Threnn told me. The seal goes dull when the maker dies, whichever is sooner. She was very precise about it.”
“Threnn is precise about everything she’s read, and everything she’s read about seals was written by people who never once made one.”
? ? ?
He sat down at last, on the arm of the settle, which isn’t a place for sitting, and wrinkled his nose at the fire like it had said something rude to him.
“Here’s what I know. It isn’t much, and I’ve checked it as far as it’ll go.
In eighteen forty-four a woman from a Keeper family on this coast went down.
Not as a guest. Nobody knows how. She was in the city for something under a year, and whatever she did there is in the fifty-one years of Ilmarren that aren’t in any rack.
At the end of it she made a seal and put her name on a slate next to a promise, and she came back up, and she lived another twenty-seven years in a cottage outside Rellhaven, a fisherman’s wife with four grown children, and never said one word about any of it to a living soul. ”
Elias had gone grey.
“Her seal’s still lit.”
“Her seal’s still lit.”
“Which means the promise still holds.”
“Which means,” said Kael, “whatever she put into it wasn’t measured against what was left of her life, because she spent what was left of her life on four children and a bad marriage in Rellhaven. And that seal’s been burning for close on two hundred years, and there’s no woman left to burn it.”
The fire cracked. Nobody moved.
“Then what’s burning?” said Elias.
Kael looked at him, and for once didn’t bother to look bored.
“You are. All of you. It’s in the blood, Vale. She put the family in.”