Chapter 16 The Second Hand in the Roll

The solicitor could not do anything until the twenty-seventh, and Ismay had the roll in a carrier bag on the passenger seat from the Friday, and did not open it, and by the Tuesday she had driven it to work and back twice and once to the car park at Collow Ness and had left it on the passenger seat with the bag hooked over the mirror so that she would have to look at it. On the Wednesday she opened it on the kitchen table with a knife, because the tie was sail thread and had been mended twice and had not been designed to be undone a second time. The smell came up out of it into her face: cold paper, lamp oil, sea, and something underneath that she had no word for and had smelled twice before in her life, once at eight years old on a wet afternoon in this house, and once in 2011 in a kitchen in Ildwater with her mother's things still in the bags. She untied it on a folded towel because the paper, when she lifted the first leaf, came away in a piece at the corner, and the inside of it was the colour of weak tea and of a hundred and sixty years. Eleven sections. Loose sheets at the back of the last one: nothing. She turned to the back of the last section first, because that was where a person starts. The six slots that held the loose sheets were empty and had a burn mark round three of them, a brown tide-line that came up from the edge of the paper in a soft irregular front, the way paper browns when it has been near something burning and then near damp. "Ismay," said Celyn, from the table across the room. "Ismay, your face has gone all funny." "It hasn't." "It has gone all funny," said Celyn, "like when you cut your thumb on the paper." "It was burnt," said Ismay. "Somebody burnt something that had been in here, and then it got damp, and that's the stain." She laid the sections out in order on the towel. Eleven of them, each about the size of a folded newspaper, and the first one a fair copy in an upright hand with the tide and the date at the head of it and a list of names running down the middle. "Is it a diary?" "No." "Is it a ship's log?" "It's a list of who was out on the mud," said Ismay, "at low water, every forty years, and what was done about them. It isn't a diary. There's no weather in it and nobody's feelings." "So it's a bill." Ismay looked at her daughter. "Yes," she said. "It is." "Then why are you crying." "Because it's eight years in a cupboard and I have not read one word of it before this week," said Ismay, "and I have been the keeper of it since the day they buried her." Celyn considered this and decided it was fair, and went back to the table. She got to the 1893 section and stopped. The page was there. She had been certain it would not be, and she had not been able to say why, except that everything her mother had ever told her about this family had been about something being taken out of it. The 1893 page had been out of the book. She could see the place. Two leaves, and the inner one was a hair's height short at the top edge, and there were two rows of stitch holes where there should have been eleven and there were ten, and the second row was a shade darker than the paper around it and sat a hair's width further in from the fold, which is what a thing looks like when it has been cut out along a thread and then sewn back in by hand. Black thread. Everything else in the roll for four generations was brown. And in place of the missing leaf there was a sheet of paper that was the same size and was not the same age. It was cut to the shape and it was gummed at the top and down the inner edge in a strip about half an inch wide, which is how a person pastes a thing into a book when they have never been taught a better way and have not wanted to ask. Ismay put her hand flat on the sheet and lifted it very slightly. The paper came away with a sound like a page of a calendar. Underneath, on the brown leaf, there was the ghost of the writing. Where the original had been, the ink of 1893 was still on the fibre, pressed in, faded almost to nothing but there under raking light if you held the leaf up against the window and turned it. And the sheet in her hand was not in the hand of 1893. It was in her mother's. She knew the writing before she had read a single word of it. Her mother had done the accounts for a stone merchant in Ildwater for twenty-two years and had been kept on because her columns were square, and Ismay had grown up doing her homework at that kitchen table under those hands, and had been shown, once, when she was about nine, how a person's letters lean. Hesper's hand leaned. The whole page leaned, to the right, and got a little more upright as it came down the page, the way a hand does when it is being careful and is also, underneath, in a hurry. It had the year at the top. It had the tide. It had all thirty-one names in their column, and every mark against them, in the right places. And at the foot of the page it had three names in a line, and then a fourth line, ruled across the whole page and empty from end to end. And under the ruled line, in the same leaning hand, five words: *not written here by choice. H. S.* Ismay sat down. Her mother's name, at the end of her mother's sentence, in her mother's initials, in a book that her mother's grandmother had cut a page out of with a bread knife, and Ismay understood that her mother had known exactly what was on the missing leaf, had known it in the year her mother was thirty-two, had been told it in a room by a woman of sixty-four, and had gone to a works one night in August and put a fire in a ditch and then come home and pasted in a page with the name left off it. Ismay sat at the table with a sheet of paper in her hand and could not make her eyes go from the ruled line. "I don't know what this is," said Celyn, from six feet away, in a voice that was not asking. "Ismay. I don't know what this is." "You don't." "You're crying." "I'm not crying." "You've got a bit on," said Celyn. "You've got a bit on your chin. Do you want me to tell Mam?" "You are Mam." "That's what I said," said Celyn, and got up on the chair to look at the page, and then got down again quickly, as though she had thought better of it. "Go and do something for ten minutes." "I'm bored." "Then be bored somewhere else," said Ismay, "and don't touch anything, and I'm going to make a telephone call." She took the sheet and the roll out to the step and shut the door behind her and sat down on the top step with her back against the wall and looked out at the flat, and there was nothing out there but mud and a stake with a rag on it and the tide coming in two miles off. She photographed the outside of the roll, page by page, thirty-one images, and then she photographed the loose brown leaf again with the light behind it, and then she photographed her mother's page flat on from above with the ruled line across the middle of it. Then she put the roll back in the carrier bag and tied it, and put the bag inside the house, and went and telephoned Kerra. "She'll want to see it," said Ismay. "I never saw no such thing." "I know you never saw it. That's why I'm ringing. I've got it in my hand and it's got a page in it that my mother wrote in 1987, and my mother was thirty-two, and she left a line blank on purpose and wrote under the line that she'd left it blank on purpose. And I've got exactly nobody to ask about it." "Ask the woman who kept the fire," said Kerra. "Who kept the fire?" "Nesta Threave's girl. That'd be Rhiannon, and she's got a daughter in Collow Ness called — " the sound of a door, and a woman shouting something in the background, and then Kerra again. "Rhosyn. Her name's Rhosyn Threave and she'll tell you she's too old, and she's eighty-two, and she was sixteen when your gran was doing whatever it was she was doing down there with an oilcloth. She'll say she doesn't remember. They all say that and then they talk for two hours." ---