CHAPTER NINE Neither Wholly
CHAPTER NINE
Neither Wholly
I told him everything in one sitting, and it took till two in the morning.
We did it in the front room, because the kitchen felt wrong for it.
He had the fire going before I’d got my coat off and a cup of tea in my hands before I’d sat down, and then, since I only held mine, he made a second for himself and didn’t drink that either.
I sat on the settle with a blanket round me and my hair still wet and talked until my voice went.
Elias sat with his forearms on his knees and didn’t interrupt me once.
Every so often he got up and fed the fire a log and sat back down again, and never broke into my sentence doing it.
The city. The light coming up instead of down. The bowl of the Court and the nine hundred in it, and the question from the rim nobody answered. The room with the bed turned back. The long walk over the silt with my own prints going off behind me. Six syllables on a stair.
I didn’t tell him about the apple book. It was in my bag, four feet from his chair, and I kept my mouth shut about it, and I still couldn’t tell you why. It was nearly a month before I did.
When I got to the gates, he went completely still.
I’d been waiting for that since the cove.
I’d rehearsed it on the cliff steps and again while the kettle boiled, and I’d got it wrong every time, because in all my rehearsals I told him and he was shocked.
What he actually did was lean over and set his untouched cup on the table, very exactly, and put both hands flat on either side of it, and say:
“Say the word again.”
“Ilmarren.”
“That’s it. That’s the one from the books.” His voice had gone quiet and level, which in Elias isn’t calm at all. It’s the opposite of calm with its coat buttoned up. “Twice, either side of a cut. Rose. I said it to you at two in the morning and told you I didn’t know if it was a man or a boat.”
“I know. I didn’t think about it for eleven days.”
“I thought about it for eleven days.” He laughed, once, with nothing in it. “Standing on that beach twice a day. I’d settled on a boat, because the entry before it’s about pitch.”
“That’s a very good reason.”
“It was an excellent reason. It was wrong.”
? ? ?
He got up and fetched the books.
All six of them, off the shelf and laid out on the table in the order he wanted. I’ve watched him do this before and I’ve come to understand it’s how he thinks. He doesn’t think on paper. He thinks on furniture.
“Here.” The green board one with the water stain. He turned it round and slid it across. “1811. Third line.”
Ilmarren quiet this season, no alteration, my father content.
“And here.” The homemade one, sewn through the fold. “After the cut. Different hand. My grandfather’s, forty years on or thereabouts.”
I am told Ilmarren is held again. I do not know by whom and I have not asked and I intend to go on not asking.
I read it twice. The second time I read it out loud, under my breath, the way you’d test a plank before putting your weight on it.
“Held again.”
“Yes.”
“So there was a time when it wasn’t. And somebody up here knew about it. Knew enough to be relieved when it was over.”
“And knew enough not to ask.” Elias sat down heavily. “That’s the sentence I can’t get past. That’s not a man writing down a rumour. That’s a man choosing not to look at something he could perfectly well have looked at.”
The fire slumped in the grate. Neither of us got up to see to it.
“Threnn said that. On the terrace. She said the arrangement wasn’t made in the Deep alone. That somebody up here was party to it.”
“She’s right.”
“You’re not going to argue with me?”
“Rose.” He dragged both hands down his face, hard, and when they came away he looked forty-five.
“I’ve spent eleven days telling myself my family were caretakers who kept bad records.
They were party to it. There’s a difference between a witness and a signatory, and I’ve been standing on the wrong side of it since September and never knew. ”
? ? ?
Two days later I went down to the Gull and Anchor, because I couldn’t stand another hour in that house.
It was a bright, hard morning, the kind you get after a week of rain, light flashing off every wet slate in town and the wind gone round into the west and the whole place looking as if somebody had taken a brush to it.
The harbour was full. The tide was making, and the boats had lifted off the mud and sat out there in a row, upright and very pleased with themselves, like they’d never once lain on their sides.
Wren had the door propped open and was doing the flags with a bucket and a stiff brush and a lot of resentment.
She saw me and stopped with the brush half raised and water running off it down her wrist and into her sleeve.
“You’re back.”
“I’m back.”
“Eleven days.” She dropped the brush in the bucket. Her hands were red to the elbow. “Eleven bloody days, love, and that man of yours down at the cove twice a day like something out of a ballad, and me telling the whole room you’d gone to Rellhaven to see about your aunt.”
“I haven’t got an aunt.”
“Nobody checked. That’s the beauty of an aunt.”
? ? ?
She sat me by the fire with a plate I hadn’t asked for and scrubbed the flags round my feet, which meant she didn’t mean to look at me while she asked, which meant she was frightened.
“Was it bad?”
“No.”
“Rose.”
“Honestly, it wasn’t. Nobody hurt me. Nobody threatened me. There was a very polite woman with paperwork.” I pushed an egg round the plate. “That’s the trouble, if you want to know. It’d be a lot easier to tell you if somebody had been horrible to me.”
Wren straightened up with both hands pressed into the small of her back.
“Then tell me the other sort of thing.”
I opened my mouth to, and nothing came out.
? ? ?
I did try. That’s what I keep coming back to. I sat in the Gull and Anchor with the fire on my left and a woman I’ve loved for nineteen years scrubbing flags four feet away, and I tried, and everything I reached for had turned into a lie by the time it got as far as my mouth.
I said, there’s a city. And what she heard was a city with streets and doors and a market in it.
I watched it land behind her eyes, all wrong, watched her put together Rellhaven with fish swimming down the high street.
I said no, not like that. She said, how, then?
I said the light comes up out of the floor, and she said, kindly, “Like a fire?”
Like a fire. What was I meant to say to that?
No, Wren, not like a fire, not like anything, not like anything you’ve ever stood in.
Like being inside an oyster with a lamp lit somewhere behind the shell, except that it moves, and breathes, and the whole rose-coloured lower quarter goes up and down about seven times a minute and nobody there has ever once mentioned it.
I said there’s no sky. She said that must be frightening. I said no, it isn’t, that’s the strange part, you stop noticing in about a day. She said how, and I had nothing to give her.
Then she asked me, with real interest, because she’s a good woman and she was trying so hard:
“And the people? Are they, what, like us? Or fishy?”
“They’re like us.”
“So what’s the difference?”
I sat there with my fork in my hand.
The difference is that on the third day a boy carrying a net stepped round me in the street without so much as a glance, the way you’d step round a bollard.
“They ignore me,” I said.
Wren waited for the rest of it.
There wasn’t any rest. The biggest thing that had happened to me in my adult life was a boy walking round me, and I couldn’t lay it in front of her without it sounding like a vain woman moaning.
She looked at me with the brush in her hand and her sleeves soaked through and her face wide open and completely lost, and I was sitting in a room I’d been at home in for nineteen years, on my own.
? ? ?
She knew, though. That’s Wren for you. She knew before I did.
She put the brush down and came over and sat on the stool across from me with her elbows on her knees.
“You’ve gone somewhere I can’t follow.”
“Wren.”
“Don’t. Don’t give me the kind version, I’d rather have the true one.
” She was looking at the fire. “I’m not clever, Rose, and I’m not asking to be.
I’ve known since September there’d be a day.
I thought it’d be a door shutting. I never thought it’d be you sat there working like a dog to make it small enough for me, and neither of us able to do a damned thing about it. ”
“I don’t want it to be small.”
“No. You were trying, though.” She wiped her hands down her apron, twice, which is what she does when she’s done with something.
And then she didn’t get up.
I hadn’t expected that. She stayed put, forearms on her knees, red hands hanging, eyes on the fire, and said:
“My sister went to Ostwich.”
“I know she did.”
“You don’t know the rest, because I’ve never told a soul, and I’m not about to make a performance of it now.
” Her voice had gone very ordinary, and with Wren that’s the warning.
“She came back the once, the summer after. Sat where you’re sitting.
Talked about a house with a stair up the middle of it, and I couldn’t see the stair.
Whatever she said, I couldn’t get the shape of that house.
And she watched me not seeing it, and she stopped, and she asked after the barrels. ”
A log settled. Somewhere out the back a stool scraped.
“We had four hours,” said Wren, “and we spent three of them on barrels, and she went back on the Tuesday coach. Nineteen years ago last month, that was.”
My throat had closed right up.
“So I’ll tell you what I’d have told her if I’d had the sense at twenty-six.
” She looked up. “Don’t stop trying. Do it badly.
Come in here and say the mad part out loud and let me not understand it, and then we’ll have a row about a barrel, and that’ll be that, and you’ll come back Thursday and do it again. ”
“You’ll be bored out of your mind.”