Chapter 14 The Welder's Son

The kitchen in the mill house was eleven feet by nine and it had a table in it, a radio, two chairs, and a man at the table who had been waiting since eight o'clock to be told something. Miles came in at half past nine on the Saturday night with the logbook under his arm inside his coat and decided that if he was going to be caught he would at least be caught having brought it home. His father had the radio on low, the way he had it every evening, tuned to a station that gave the weather and the road out of town and nothing else. There was a plate on the table with one slice on it, the crust left on, and a mug with the tea gone cold in the bottom of it. Neither of them had eaten. "Sit down," his father said. Miles sat down. He took the book out of his coat and put it on the table between them, and the old man looked at it, and did not touch it, and his jaw moved once. "Saturday," his father said. "I have had a bad week with you. One of the men came in on Tuesday and said he had seen you on the thing at the bend. At two in the morning, he said. He said you were not alone." "He was right." "Then you have wasted four months not telling me something I already knew." His father put the cold mug down on the plate. "Go on, then." Miles told him. He told it in order, because he had been holding it in order since August and he wanted it to come out the way it had happened. The bottle. The J. The eleven weeks of it, one night each way, and the last dry plank, and the flood, and the Saturday morning in the light with his boots off on the gravel. He told his father her name was Wren and that she lived on the east bank below the square and that her father kept a radio in his kitchen too, and he got that far and stopped, because his father had stopped listening somewhere in the middle of it and was looking at the window over the sink. "A Ormerod," his father said. "No." "Then the name does not matter. Not for the shape of it." He turned his head. "Say the rest of it. What does she want." "She wants to keep it," Miles said. "That is all she wants. She wants to keep a bridge." "That is what a girl says when she has not been given a reason to stop saying it." "She has not. She has a notebook full of it and she has never read any of it to anybody and she read me one on a bridge in the cold in November." His father was quiet for long enough that Miles heard the refrigerator come on in the passage. "And the bench," his father said. "Say that part out, so we both hear it." "You are not going to use the bench against me." "I am going to use whatever is in this room," his father said, "because I have nothing else, and I have had it for seventeen years and it has not once been enough to make you look at me." Miles put his hands flat on the table, palms down, the way he had seen his father do it at the bench, and he understood where the habit came from and he did not care. "I know what the plan is," he said. "I have known since I was nine, when you got a chisel for my name. North, and the workshop at Whitlow, and the torch every day of my life, and you will be in the next room and I will hear you breathing. I have never once said no to it because I never once had anything to say yes to instead." He pushed the book two inches towards his father. "I have that now. I found it in the strongbox on Saturday and it is my grandfather's and it is full of his handwriting and there is a woman called R in it who helped him build, and I am telling you that in this kitchen tonight because I have decided that whatever I do next, I am not going to do it in a house where things get kept." His father looked at the book for a long moment and then he got up and took his coat off the back of the door, and put it on, and did not go out of the front, but went out through the yard door and out along the side of the shed, and Miles heard the gravel go under his boots, and then the sound of the roller door going up, and then nothing for four minutes. When his father came back he did not sit down. He stood at the table with his coat still on. "I opened that chest in 2011," he said. "The year after he died. I took everything out of it and I read every page of that book and I put it back and I shut it and I have never once said so to anybody, including you, including your mother before she left, including the men at this mill." His voice went flat. "It is not yours. It is not hers. It is his, and he put it in that corner where the water comes up in February, and I have let it rot on purpose." "You have never taken me down there." "No." "Once. Any year. You could have taken me once." "And told you what," his father said, and did not finish it, and put his hand flat on the back of the second chair, and left the room. Wren was on the bridge at eleven. She had told herself she was going to bed at ten. She had got as far as taking her coat off the hook, and she had thought about the light on the water, and she had put the coat back on and walked down two miles in the dark in the last week of November because she had worked out, somewhere around the top of the mill road, that the boy she had been writing to since August could not be got through the door in front of her and would have to be met. He was in the middle of the bridge. He was not crying. That was the thing she noticed first and she was careful about it for the rest of her life, because it told her what kind of night it had been. She did not ask. She sat down on the two boards below him and put her hands in her sleeves and looked at the water going under the middle, and after about two minutes he said, "He knows about the strongbox." "He opened it in 2011." "He opened it in 2011 and he read it and he put it back and he has never said so to anybody, and he has spent the last ten years letting me sleep on top of a lie." Miles put his elbows on his knees. "So when I walked in there tonight with it under my arm, I did not know whether I was telling him a thing or handing him back a thing he had already put down." Wren thought about her father and the radio and the note on the table in the wrong handwriting. "My mother left a note," she said. "And he has told me about it four times in eleven years, and every time he tells me he gets one sentence further into the part where it was her, and he has never once said her name." She looked up. "That is what it looks like when somebody has a thing they are keeping. It looks exactly like a man being cruel on purpose. My father is not cruel. He is just the only man in a house with a radio." Miles turned his head. "You are telling me your father is like my father." "I am telling you they are the same kind of house," Wren said, "and that both of them have been sitting in it for eleven years not asking each other one question, and that we found a bridge and a bottle and a book with a J in it, and that is all we did. We found some things. That is the entire crime." He came down the two boards and sat beside her, and she felt the bridge take his weight the way it took everything, without comment, and after a while he put his hand out sideways on the board and she put hers into it. "He said the men at the mill have seen us," Miles said. "I know. Hazel says three of the boys from the mill have asked her at the counter whether it is true that somebody has seen you." "What did you say?" "I said I did not know who." "And did they believe you?" "They believed me," Wren said, "because the town would rather it was a rumour than an answer, and a rumour can still be true later, and an answer has to be one thing or the other for ever." She squeezed his hand once. "You have one more week before somebody says your name and her name in the same sentence in front of people who will write it down. Whatever you are going to do about your father, do it before somebody else does it for you."