Chapter 20 A Name in Ismay's Own Hand

She had until the twenty-seventh, and on the twenty-seventh she had to tell a solicitor whether there was anything in the house that belonged to anybody else, and there was one item in the house that belonged to a woman dead since 2011, who had held it for twenty-four years without once opening it. Ismay took the roll out of the bag on the Tuesday morning and put it on the front room table with a towel under it, and untied the thread with the knife the way you untie it, which took eleven seconds and which her grandmother had said in 1953 was the way a person undoes a thing they did not mean to open. Then she went at the 1893 page with a scalpel she had bought for the job, and lifted the pasted sheet away from the brown leaf underneath in one piece, slowly, the way you take a stamp off an envelope. She had done it once already in Ildwater with her thumbnail, and she had put it back then. This time she laid it down on the towel face up, with her mother's ruled empty line showing. Then she turned the brown leaf over and held it up to the window of the front room, which faced north-east and had never had a curtain on it since her grandmother's day, and turned it slowly, and the ink of 1893 came up out of the fibre. It was all there. Thirty-one names and their marks, going brown and then coming back. The tide and the date at the head of it. The tally at the foot, three names, and then a fourth line, and in the right-hand margin, where a hand had come to the paper at the last moment so as not to have the fold cut the word short, the name. She read it. She read it twice. She had been expecting a rush of something, and what she got instead was the sensation of a column balancing, of a figure going into a total at the bottom of a page she had been carrying about in a carrier bag on the passenger seat of a car for eight years. Then she sat down and did the thing she had come to the house to do. She got the file out of her bag and took out the contract and read the clause about fixtures and chattels, which asked for a list, and wrote a list on the back of an envelope, and got as far as *one deal box and contents, in the hall*, and stopped. Then she fetched a pen and wrote under it, *Ebb Ledger (Tidewarden), one volume, incomplete, retained by the family.* Then she rang Pyke. "You're not sending it," he said. "I'm not sending it." "The completion is on the eighteenth of October. If anything comes out of the store—" "Nothing is coming out of the store in eleven weeks. Not for this. The county took it in 1987 and it has had a catalogue record since 1991 saying incomplete, and that is the last it is." She looked out at the flat, where the surveyor's stick was standing with its rag on it. "Mr Pyke, what's the house worth to your client if the title comes back with a question mark on the sixteenth century?" "Then we shave eleven per cent and I lose my fee and everybody's disappointed and the sale goes through." "So it's eleven per cent." "It's eleven per cent and a fortnight of nerves. That's the trade. Everybody in this trade is trading nerves for eleven per cent and pretending not to." "And if there's nothing to find?" "Then you get the full number and a certificate of title in November and your grandmother's book goes into a store at Ildwater and gets looked at twice in the next hundred years by somebody who wants to know about tides." Ismay looked at the roll on the table, with its one pasted page out and lying on the towel with the ruled empty line across it. "I'm not sending it," she said again. "It's mine and I'm not sending it, and I am telling you that now so that you can put it in a letter and take it to whoever you have to take it to, and if they want to argue with me they can come and argue with me on a Sunday." "All right," said Pyke. "That's a no. I'll write it down as a retention." "Write it down as a retention." "And I'll send you the draft in the post, and if you change your mind there'll be another fourteen days of delay, which nobody wants." She signed the draft back to him that afternoon with the twenty-seventh on it, and drove to Ildwater, and filed it, and came home at six. It was a house that was a house. She had decided that in the last three days, and it had taken her thirty years to decide it. There was no voice in the walls and there never had been one, and the tide came in four feet at the bottom of the garden twice a day like a dog that had learned the time, and if it had taken anybody out of this family then it had taken them out the way it takes things, which is by making them small and then making them gone. She went down to the hall at six to look at the box under the stair, because the day-books had been left out on the step and it had started to spit, and Celyn was at the kitchen table with a sheet of A4 paper and a pencil, doing what she had been doing all afternoon, which was copying. "Mam, don't be cross." "What are you copying?" "Columns." Celyn turned the sheet round. "You said the book's for putting things in the empty lines. So I've been doing the columns. I've done 1849 and 1893 and 1919 and 1933 and 1973. I couldn't do 1933 because the writing's awful." Ismay stood in the doorway and looked at the sheet. The child had copied, in neat capitals, three columns of names across the width of the paper, one for each year, with a column of figures down the side, and at the bottom she had ruled four lines with the straight edge of a pencil case and filled three of them and left the fourth empty. The three she had filled were not names. They were the single word that heads the fourth line of every one of those books, which is the word at the top of the tally on every page of the roll that had been sitting in her mother's airing cupboard since 2011. And the fourth line was empty, because the year on it was 2013, and there was nothing in the 2013 book for her to copy. "Mam, what does it say?" "It's a word for a person that a family put on the steps," said Ismay Saltwyke, "and it's a word this family has put in an empty line five times." Celyn put her pencil down and pushed the sheet across the table. "You've not done it, though," she said. "You've not done the last one. Do the last one, Mam. It's the rule. You said the book was for putting things in the empty lines." Ismay looked at the sheet, and at the pencil, and at the row of books standing in the hall under the stair with the lid off, and she thought about a woman of seventy coming up a bank at half past four in the morning in a blanket with a hundred and sixty years of somebody else's sentence in her head, and about her mother putting a fire in a ditch in the dark, and about her own name in a row of four, and about the name of a little girl born in March 2013 for no reason at all except that it had been going out of the family since 1894. "I know the rule," she said. She took the pencil and bent over the line and wrote, in capitals, in a hand her daughter would read and would recognise for the rest of her life: CERYS. Then she put the pencil down and said out loud, in the hall of her mother's house on the last Friday in August, with the sea going out two miles off and somebody's survey stick standing in it with a rag on the top: "Right. That's done, then." She went and got the folder out of her bag and took the contract out of it and put it flat on the kitchen table under the light and uncapped the pen and signed it on the fourteenth line, above the schedule, with Ismay Saltwyke in her own hand. Then she turned the page over to check that the vendors had not left the completion date blank, and the pencil word was there, in capitals, right across the middle of the line where her signature had to go, written by a five-year-old who had been told by her mother that this book was for putting things in the empty lines, and had done exactly as she was told, in the last year anybody in that family would ever be asked to do it.