CHAPTER ONE What the Water Left #2
I sat. There was a cup in front of me before I’d properly settled, which she’s done ten thousand times, and I looked at it and had a small private collapse, and then I drank.
“You’ve gone thin.”
“I have not.”
“You’ve gone thin and you’ve gone quiet, and I don’t like either, and the two together I like even less.” She had her forearms on the bar. Copper hair half down, as ever, and a new scorch on the apron. “Three weeks. You’ve been in twice, and both times you drank half and buggered off home.”
“I’ve been.”
“If the next word’s busy, love, I’m watering your ale for a month.”
I laughed. It came out wrong, too loud, and went on a beat after it should have stopped. Her eyes changed. She let it go on and didn’t say a thing about it.
“They’re talking,” I said. “In the market.”
“They are.”
That pulled me up short. “You’re not going to tell me I’m imagining it.”
“Why the hell would I?” She said it like I’d asked if she was planning to serve me a boot.
“You’re not imagining anything. Marta Pell asked me Monday whether you’d been unwell, in that voice she does.
Unwell. And Hallam’s wife said something to the Fenn sisters about a light, and the Fenn sisters told everybody with ears.
There’s one going round where you walked up out of the sea at dawn on the first of the month.
” One shoulder went up. “In fairness to them. Did you?”
“It was nearer nine.”
“There you go. Town’s got the hour wrong. Town always gets the hour wrong.”
Then she was away up the other end because the fishermen were bellowing, and I sat with both hands round the cup and let the hot pressure behind my eyes go down on its own, without doing anything about it in public.
? ? ?
She came back once the room had thinned out.
“Right. Now the honest bit, and then I’ll leave you be.”
“Wren.”
“Two minutes. You’ve had nineteen days, and so’ve I, and mine were longer, because at least you know what happened to you.
” She’d stopped wiping the bar. That was how I knew it was serious.
“That man of yours came in the second day. Didn’t want ale.
Sat there,” she tipped her head at the end stool, “for an hour and asked me what you were like at fifteen.”
I hadn’t known that. I sat with not having known it.
“What did you tell him?”
“Told him you were the most frightened child I ever met and you’d have bitten his hand off for saying so.
” The cloth started up again, round and round, and the squeak of it filled the space where I should have been answering.
“Then he thanked me like I’d pulled him out of the harbour, and off he went, and he’s not been back.
Didn’t finish his water. Water, Rose. In my pub. ”
“He’s been reading.”
“Mm.” A long pause. “Look. I’m not clever about the rest of it. Mara’s the one for whatever’s under your skin, I’ll not pretend she isn’t, and I’ve never once wanted to know what she knows.”
“But.”
“But I’ve watched you come through that door nineteen years being somebody’s idea of something the whole way through. Their idea. Never yours.” She put the cloth down. “So I’ll ask you like I’d ask anybody. Are you all right?”
Nobody had asked me that. Not one person in nineteen days. Elias had asked me a hundred other things, what I’d felt, what it had said, was I frightened, did the fire still come when I called it, and every one of them circled the thing and never landed.
I opened my mouth to say yes.
“I don’t know,” is what came out instead.
Wren nodded slowly, as if I’d confirmed a suspicion about the weather. Then she crouched down out of sight, and a crate scraped, and a cork squeaked, and she came back up with a squat green bottle, no label, about two inches gone.
She didn’t ask me. She took my cup, tipped the dregs of the ale into the slop bucket without any ceremony, wiped the inside out with her apron and poured. A short measure, nothing generous about it, her eye on the level like it was rationed.
Then she set it down, put two fingers against the base and pushed it the last inch across the wood to me. Nineteen years, and she’d never done that.
“Right,” she said. “Then we’ll start there.”
? ? ?
He brought them down on the nineteenth night. I took it to mean he’d finished. Later I learned it meant only that he’d run out of things he was willing to check a second time.
Six books, and no two of them the same size, which struck me as wrong straight off.
I’d pictured a shelf’s worth, some solemn matched set in leather with the years stamped down the spines, like the ledgers at the shipping office.
These looked like exactly what they were, a household’s paper.
A fat one in cracked calf. A thin one in green board with a water stain creeping up one corner.
One that was frankly just a stack of sheets sewn through the fold with sail thread, by somebody in a hurry.
He laid them out on my table in the order he wanted and then took a step back from the table. I noticed that.
“Before you open any of it I need to say something, and I’m going to say it badly, so let me get to the end.”
“What a lovely start.”
“I know.” His hands found the back of a chair.
“What’s in these isn’t some secret history of the world.
I want to take that idea away from you now, because you’ll be disappointed in about four minutes and I’d rather you were disappointed on purpose.
It’s a family’s records. Weather, mostly.
Births. What the tide did. Four generations of men who were told they were guarding a boundary and who mainly wrote down the price of rope. ”
“Elias.”
“There are eleven pages in the whole lot that matter.” Flat as a board. “I’ve spent nineteen days finding out there are eleven pages. That’s what I’ve been doing in your front room.”
“I thought you’d been avoiding my bed with great dedication.”
“That too,” he said. “It’s a big room.”
? ? ?
He was right, which was worse than if he’d been wrong.
I read for two hours. What I read was a man in 1783 complaining about his brother-in-law.
A recipe for something to put on a burn.
Four inches of one column recording, in a beautiful copperplate that must have cost an hour a page, the daily height of the water at the harbour mouth for eleven years without a break.
At the end of the eleven years the hand stops in the middle of a month, and another hand writes Father died the 9th, and then carries on with the water heights the following Tuesday.
I sat back and rubbed my eyes.
“You said eleven pages.”
“I did.”
“So show me.”
“No.” He pulled a chair round and sat on it backwards, forearms along the top rail, which is what he does instead of pacing. “Read the ordinary stuff until it’s ordinary. Then I’ll show you, and you’ll see the difference yourself, and you won’t be able to tell me afterwards I put it in your head.”
I looked at him for a while. “You’ve planned this.”
“I’ve planned very little else.”
“You’d make a terrible lover, you know. All that preparation.”
“Read,” he said, and looked at the wall, and the back of his neck went a shade darker.
? ? ?
In the end it was the handwriting, and it took most of a third hour.
Four generations, five or six hands, every one of them the hand of a practical man writing the way practical men write. Fast and ugly, abbreviating everything, blotting and pressing on. Nobody writing down the price of rope cares about the price of rope.
And then three times in a hundred and forty years the hand goes careful.