Chapter 11 The Keeper's Own Song

The cold came in on the ninth of November and it did not let up for a month. By the time Wren and Miles had been sitting out on the middle boards four nights running, their hands had gone white at the ends and the nails had begun to sound different when they struck them, a flatter note, as though the wood itself had gone brittle. They took a blanket out to the bend, a grey wool one from Wren's father's cupboard, and they took a flask, and they got into the habit of the blanket the way people get into any habit, which is to say without discussing it. Miles hummed while he worked. Wren noticed it first at the west end, across the water, in the first week of October, and had assumed she had made it up. Then she heard it on the near side of the bridge, standing three feet away from him, and it was not a tune she knew. It was six bars, going nowhere, over and over, and it stopped every time he had to look at what he was holding. "You do that at the mill," she said. "Do what." "Go somewhere with your mouth and no idea where you are going." "I do not do that at the mill." He put the hammer down. "Yes. All day. My uncle says it is a family thing. My father did it. He did it over the plan." "Over the plan?" "You have not heard the plan. You have heard about the plan. They are not the same thing." The blanket smelled of the inside of Wren's father's cupboard, of dust and camphor and a tobacco pipe her grandfather had owned and never smoked. She had it folded across both their knees and the two of them had their hands under it, and the frost was coming up off the water in a thin skin and knitting itself along the edge of the wool. "You said you had a box," Wren said. "You said it three weeks ago and then you changed the subject, and I have been waiting for you to notice that I noticed." "I noticed on the second night." He turned the flask cap a quarter turn and back. "I have been not noticing it for a fortnight." "It is the middle of November and you have a box in the back of the workshop." "Yes." "And you are not going to open it." "Not yet." He looked out at the black water going past under the bridge. "Because if there is a bridge in that box, then there is a reason there has not been one, and the reason is going to be about me, and I would rather be standing here in the cold not knowing than be right about it in a warm room." "That is the least brave thing you have ever said to me." "That is the first thing I have said to you that was about anything." He drank from the flask and handed it over. "I will open it. When you have something you cannot carry on your own, you do not do it in the dark. You ask somebody to stand there while you do it." Wren took the flask. It was full of something hot and sweet and faintly of cloves, and she had expected tea. "What is in this?" "My uncle's. He makes it with whatever is in the cupboard, so it changes every week. Last week it was cloves. In November it is always cloves." She looked at him and he looked back, and then he said the thing he had come down the bank to say. "The J is my grandfather's. His name was Jack. He was the man with the torch before my father, and his father before him, except that when Jack did it he did it out of the shed at the bottom of the mill road and there was no proper bench, just a brick and a plate. He died in November, eleven years ago. I was six. They buried him on a Tuesday and it rained the whole way from the church to the ground, and my father did not say one word in the vestry, and I remember thinking that a man who built things for seventy years ought to have had something to say at his own funeral." Miles put his thumb into the frost on the rail and rubbed a clean line in it. "The letter in the bottle was dated the ninth of November," he said. "That is my grandfather's birthday. The bottle has been under that plank for eleven years, which means he put it there in the autumn of the year he died and then he died in the month of it. He put the apology in the water three weeks before he was going to die." He laughed, once, without any humour in it at all. "That is either very Jack or it is the drink." "You think he wrote it to somebody?" "He signed it with a letter. You do not sign a letter to a person you have never met." "Unless the letter is a kind of question." Wren had been turning this over for a fortnight. "Maybe he was not apologising to somebody. Maybe he was apologising to whoever came after. To whoever was going to turn up in his place, in his own time, and find it." Miles turned and looked at her. "That is a very bad idea for a person to have," he said. "You are the person who had it." "Yes," he said. "I am." She reached into the satchel she had brought and took out the notebook, the blue cloth one with the elastic round it that had gone white with stretching. She had not planned to. She had the notebook in there because she always had it in there, and she had come out on that night to talk about a box. "Give me a minute," she said. He gave her a minute. She got the cap off and found the page she wanted, the one she had written on the planks in the November dark three weeks earlier, and she tore it out along the fold because the poem had been in the middle of a page with something else on the back of it and she was not prepared to have him read the something else. It ran to nine lines. The one from September had been four. She held the paper flat on her knee under the blanket and read it out loud in the voice she used when she was not performing. She did not repeat any of it afterwards, and neither did he, and neither of them wrote it down anywhere else. But the poem was about a bridge with four planks and two posts, simple as a child's drawing, and about two people on a river who had each decided the other was a rumour, and about the water that ran under the whole arrangement saying nothing at all, and the last line was the one that made Miles put the heel of his hand against his mouth and look up at the sky. She folded the page and pushed it under the blanket and put it into his hands. "Keep it," she said. "You are the keeper now. Somebody has to keep the book of what happened at this bend." "I have a chest with a lock on it." "And a deck with a fourth plank in it that moves." "Yes," he said. "I have a great many things." They walked back in the cold with the torch between them, and at the end of the mill road he turned the beam up the hill towards the workshop and stopped walking, and Wren stopped too, and there was a long stretch where neither of them said anything at all. "Saturday," Miles said. "I am opening the box. Come at nine, before the men come in. Wear gloves, the handle is rusted and my father counts the gloves." "Wren," she said. "It is a box, and not a funeral. You do not have to invite me." "It is not a box." He put the torch on his shoulder and the light came off the road and lit nothing at all. "It is the end of not knowing. And I have decided I would rather do that with somebody standing there."