Chapter 2 Olwen's Two Suitcases

The suitcase was on the bed when Cerys came in from the pans at one o'clock, and the second one was on the floor with its lid up, and Olwen was standing in the middle of the room folding a blanket into the shape of a pillow. "You'll be four hours in the pans," Olwen said, without turning round. "I've been waiting two." "Waiting for what." "For you to come and ask me what I'm doing in our mother's room." The room was the same room it had been for nineteen years: the deal press, the two beds, the washstand with the jug, the window that looked at the bank and the top of the nine steps of the stair. Their mother's things were still in it. Her cap on the shelf, her shoes under the bed, her good black apron folded on the drawer handle. Cerys had told herself she would clear that out in June. "Washing's on the line," Olwen said. "I've to be at the drapery by two on Thursday, so you'll want to say whatever it is you're going to say before Thursday." "You'll want tea." "I'll want to know why a man with a case was up at the pans at ten o'clock and came down at four." Cerys put the bar down by the door, where it lived. "Ivor Threave's brother is lost. The Board is asking about the Steps. It's a thing that comes round every spring and goes round again." "And you sent Gwyn down to tell him you'd be boiling." "Gwyn told him what Gwyn was told." Olwen turned round then. She was twenty-six and looked thirty and looked her mother, which was the whole difficulty, because Cerys could not look at her sister for long in daylight. "Cerys," she said. "I've been in Ildwater five months. If somebody had come to me with a case under their arm and the words Harbour Board out of their mouth, what would you have told me?" "You would have told me nothing," said Cerys, "and been right." Their eyes met. The wind was getting up off the water outside and pushing at the window frame the way it did, four days in every seven, and somewhere down on the flats a gate was being banged by nobody. Olwen went back to the blanket. "There's a third thing," she said. "Mam's room." "Your room." "I slept in it when she was ill and you've never once said the word about taking her things down to the coast." Olwen folded a corner over twice. "You've kept it as it was. There's a cup on the sill with the tea still dried in it. I'm not asking you to throw it out. I'm asking what you're waiting for." "I'm waiting for nothing. It's a house. Things stay." "That's what you say about the house. You said a different thing about the roll." Cerys went to the door and picked up the bar she had just put down, and held it, so that her hands had something in them. "There's tea in the pot," she said. "And if you say the word roll in this room again I'll take the pan off and let the salt in it go to ruin, and then you can tell them that too." "You'd never." "No. But I'd enjoy the twenty minutes." Olwen laughed, and then stopped laughing, which she had been learning to do since her mother died. She put the blanket down on top of the case and pressed it flat with both hands. "You've got it under the stair," she said. "Under the third step. I know it's under the third step because I put my hand on the loose one when I was a girl and you took hold of my wrist so hard I marked my own arm on the banister." The kitchen went on with its noises: the pan, the fire, the clock that had lost nine minutes in the winter of the flood and would never be put right. "Sit down," Cerys said. "Both of us. There's something I never told you and I'm not going to start now, but there's a thing I can show you, and after today you'll have seen it, and that puts you in it, so I want you to have asked for it." "You've gone about this very oddly." "I have." Olwen sat. Cerys went into the front room where the press stood, and unlocked it, and brought out the long brown cover with the brass corners and the tie that had been mended twice with sail thread. She set it on the deal table between them and undid the thread with her thumbnail because her thumbnail knew where the weak place was. "You can look at the first two leaves," she said. "That's all. Then you shut it and I shut it, and you don't say anything in Ildwater. Not to Gwyn Morris, not to the man at the counter, not to that woman who asks after everybody's grandmother." Olwen turned the first leaf. It was ruled in two columns in brown ink. HEADED along the top in an upright nineteenth-century hand that Cerys could read and Olwen could not: "AT THE LONG EBB, SEPT. MDCCCXCIII." Below it, a list of surnames, twenty-one of them, set out clean as a wages sheet. Beside certain names a mark in the second column, a small cross or a dash or nothing at all, and a key at the foot giving the marks their meaning. "Marks for what?" Olwen said. "For what the house did about them." "That's not an answer." "It's the only one there's in writing." Cerys put her finger on the key without touching the paper. "Saltwyke kept this because a family that takes the tide's money keeps a record of the tide. That's all it ever was. Every house on this bank has got a book of some kind. We kept the names." "And you never told me." "You never asked." "I asked you every Christmas what the press was for." "You asked what the press was for and I said it was the deeds, and the deeds were in it, and that was true for forty years." Cerys turned the leaf over with the flat of her hand. "The second leaf's the same and you can stop now." Olwen did not stop now. She had got to the bottom of the second leaf and was reading a name slowly, lips moving, the way she had read the shipping lists in the porch in 1948 when she thought nobody was looking. "There's thirty-one here," she said. "Not twenty-one." "Second leaf's the women and children." "And you've counted them." "Somebody's counted them every forty years since the eighteen-sixties. It's a duty, not a grief." Olwen pushed the chair back from the table. "Then it's a grief," she said. "Cerys, if it's just a duty, why does it live in the front room?" "Because the front room is dry." Their eyes met again, and this time Olwen held it, and Cerys was the one who looked away first, at the salt-white window, at the tide coming up the mud flat with the black oysterman going before it. "Tranter's coming at ten tomorrow," Cerys said. "He's going to ask for that book to be handed in. He'll say it's the Board's, because the Board's held the Tidewarden office in law since the sixteen-fifties and nobody ever took it out of the schedule." "Will you hand it in?" "No." "You said you didn't have it." "I said there was no list of men on the Steps. That's true. There's no list of men because the Tidewarden never wrote one, because the Tidewarden never wrote down a living man going out over the mud at a low tide, and I'll not start in 1953." Cerys put both hands flat on the cover. "But in that book there are names on the other side of the column from the ones the village already knows. Names of women who went out and did not come back. And there are names of family after family that the Bay has had the better of one way or another since the sixteen-fifties. Hand this to a clerk in a wet coat and it stops being ours. It becomes a record. Records get answered to." Olwen sat quite still. "Somebody's going to come and take it." "Yes," said Cerys. "In a few years, when somebody's cart comes up the lane for a different reason, they'll take it. And I shall not be here to argue." ---