Chapter 4 Cutting the Year Out

The wages were done on a Thursday, on the bench by the step, out of a shilling book in a tin, in coin and in fives and tens and once in a pound note that had been folded so often it went at the crease. Gwyn was seventeen that summer and had the face of a man being described to somebody else in another room. "There's more men on the books now," he said. "Since Easter. There's three on the Wick and two of ours and the Wrights have put their boy on." "Three on the Wick." "Them that boil the crude. It's cheaper." He turned his cap over in his hands the way the men of that bank did with their hands. "Miss Cerys, can I ask you a thing." "You may ask it." "Is there a list?" "What list?" "A list of who's on the Steps." He said it in a low voice, without any humour in it, and he looked past her shoulder at the house and then at the flats. "The woman at the Post Office asked me if there was one. Mrs Vaughan that runs the counter, she said, tell Gwyn Morris I asked him and not his mistress, because your mistress will tell you there's no such thing and I'd rather somebody told me." "What did you tell her?" "I said I don't know." Gwyn shifted his weight. "And then she said, your family reads it out at the low water, and I said I don't know that either, and she said, everybody on this bank knows it, they just don't say it in front of you." Cerys counted out a ten and put it in his hand and did not look at him while his hand closed on it. "That's the answer I gave the man in the wet coat and it's the answer you give to the woman in the Post Office and it is the only answer there is. There's no list." "There is, though," said Gwyn. "There's one, because my mother's got a story about the year my uncle went out, and she won't tell me which year it was, and she says I'm too young and I've been twenty for three years." "Your mother has got a story about every year on this bay, because there are seventy people on it and about one in ten of them goes out on the mud in a hard winter and doesn't come back with his boots. That's arithmetic. That's not a book." "And you won't read it out." "I couldn't read it out," said Cerys, "because there is nothing to read. And if there were, a boy of seventeen is the last person on this bank who wants to stand on a mud flat at night with a lamp in his hand while somebody else calls the names. Do you want that? Because that's the whole of what this family's privilege has ever bought anybody. Not the right to be on the steps. The right to be somewhere else when the names go." Gwyn said nothing for a moment. "Miss Cerys, the weigh-table leg is coming loose." "It's been loose since before you could walk." "It'll go in the winter. It's the sea side leg." He was looking down the bank at it, at the old timber standing in the mud with the socket in it going green. "Mr Pyrs from the Wick was saying on Saturday he'll have a look at it with a boat, and I said you'd not want him near it, and he said he'd not touch it without asking. But that's the sort of thing a man goes and does." "You tell Mr Pyrs from the Wick that if he puts a spade to that table I'll have him off the flats by the ears and the Harbour Board by the end of the week." "I'll tell him." "And you keep your own hands off it. That's an order and it's the last order you'll get off me this year." He went up the slope with his wages in a twist of paper. She sat on the bench for a while with the shilling book shut on her knees, and the tin with the money still in it, and the wind coming up the bank in a way that made the pans ticking an hour before she had any business hearing them. She did it on the Thursday, at midnight, with the tide at the top of the mud. Cerys had known for four days that she was going to do it and had spent those four days finding the reasons, which is what a person does instead of simply deciding. The salt had gone into the second pan and she had got used to the sight of the sheet. Tranter had come back on the Thursday at ten with a form of words to fill in and she had not filled it in. Olwen had gone back to Ildwater on the Wednesday without a scene, which was worse than a scene. She took the roll into the front room and shut the door and turned the lamp down. Outside, at the top of the tide, the water came quietly up the flats and put a shine on the inside of the window glass so that she could see herself twice, sitting down. The third leaf came out where it should. The key at the foot of the first leaf she had never needed; she knew its signs the way she knew the signs of the weather in the bay, which is more than she knew of any living face. Thirty-one names on the second leaf. A tick beside the ones the house had fed. A cross beside the ones it had let go to Ildwater or to the sea. And at the foot, clear of the column, four names in the same upright hand as the heading, with a date and a word after each of them, the word being: NOT RETURNED. That was the tally. Every forty years somebody in this family took the roll and wrote at the bottom of it who had gone down and had not come up. The word was the same each time. There were four names under it for 1893 and four for 1851 and two for 1798, and Cerys had been taught in the front room at the age of seventeen that this was the way a house kept faith with the water. The last name of 1893 was in the same column as the rest of them, and it was the only one of the four that Cerys had never once heard spoken aloud in the house, and there was a small thing beside it, a mark she had to lean close to read: a stroke through the name and then, underneath in the same ink and the same size, the letters NT, which stood in that book for not taken. She sat with the lamp for a long time after that. Because if the name had been struck through, then it had been the family's account that she came back. If it had not, then the family had written on a leaf in a fair nineteenth-century hand the fact that its own woman went out on the Steps at the Long Ebb in 'ninety-three and was not brought back, and had kept the leaf, and had gone on sitting at the desk with the lamp. Somebody's great-grandmother had stood at that window in the dark for the same length of time Cerys was standing at it now. She went into the kitchen for the bread knife. It was not a good knife. It had a black handle cracked along the grain from being dropped on the flagstones and a blade that had been sharpened so many times by people who did it on the drain board that it had gone thin as a leaf. It cut bread and string and, if you were careful, the edge off a sheet of paper at the extreme corner so that a person could lift the sheet by the untouched margin and say that they had. The lamp wanted trimming. She trimmed it with the little scissors off the sewing box, which she thought was the womanliest thing in the house and which had in fact been her mother's. She cut from the inside margin outward, four inches in all, and it went through the second sheet as well at the top and she had to turn the lamp away and finish that corner by hand with the tip of the scissors so that she would not take the name. The paper made a sound like a moth. The sheets below it, the ones for 1933 and the small ones for the years in between, came free of it one after another and lay open on the table like a deck of cards spread and left. The tub under the desk took the whole bundle, and the bundle was still warm when she had finished, which she noticed, and which she tried afterwards to forget noticing. She sat down on the floor by the fire with her back to the desk and listened to the sea doing what it does, which is nothing, continuously, for nothing. Then she got up and found that her hands were doing it without asking her: she took the bundle out of the tub, took a square of oilcloth off the shelf where the pans were mended, folded the bundle into it, folded the oilcloth twice more, and went out onto the step in her stockings at twenty past midnight with the water round her ankles at the low of the tide. The weigh-table at Sallowry stood on four legs on the mud like a horse with its saddle on. It was the oldest thing Cerys used. Her great-grandfather had built it and her grandfather and her father had all used it and it had been standing through two floods. Under the leg on the seaward side the mortice had gone soft and the leg had begun to lean. She knelt in the mud on the ebb and worked the wedge out with the heel of her hand. Inside the leg there was a socket, and in the socket was a stone, and under the stone was dry. Somebody had thought of it, whoever it had been, and had thought of it well: no beetle, no damp, and a smell like a church on a Sunday. The oilcloth bundle went in, and the stone went over it, and the wedge went back, and she pressed the mud of the ebb into the joint with her palms until the joint was the same colour as the rest of the leg. Then she went and washed her hands in the trough by the pan room door in water so cold that her fingers went the colour of the salt. At the top of the slope she stopped and looked back down. There was no moon to speak of. There was the sound of the pans ticking as they cooled, which was a sound Cerys had heard every night of her life and had never once noticed until that week, and there was the smell of brine off the mud, and about eleven rooks still walking the flats in a place where they had no business to be. "I didn't take anything," she said out loud, to nobody, in the yard, in the dark. "Nobody took anything. There's just the roll with a hole in it now, and the hole's where it always was." ---