Chapter 20 The Bridge Goes On

The girl was eight and she stood in the middle of the deck with her arms inside her coat and asked why the lamp was on in the daytime, and Miles, who had come down to trim it on the Sunday, did not have an answer ready. "Who lit it?" she asked. "Turn round and look." She turned round. There was a bucket on the west bank with a stone in it, wedged against the slipway post, and a slow thread of smoke was coming off it, and about six feet behind the bucket, out of the wind, on a flat stone that had been the last thing put there and was still pale, somebody was sitting with their back to them and a roll-book open on their knees. "Your gran's out," Miles said. "How do you know?" "She is out." The girl considered this and decided to accept it, because eight is a good age for accepting things, and she came and stood beside him and looked at the smoke. "She says the man on the bank is your dad," she said. "And she says your dad keeps a book. And she says his dad kept a book. And she says the man that kept the first book is under the water, and I said that is not a thing you can be, and she said he is under the water at the bend." "He is," Miles said. "He is under the water at the bend, and he is the reason that lamp has a glass on it instead of an open flame, because an open flame goes out in a wind, and a man who wants to keep a thing for fifty years cannot have a thing that goes out in a wind." The girl thought about this for some time. "Can I write in it?" "You can have a line. If you ask." "What do I write?" Miles took the pencil out from behind his ear and put it in her hand, and held the roll-book open on his knee, and put his finger on a line near the bottom where there was room. "The date," he said. "And the weather. And whether the lamp was lit. Those three things. That is all it wants, and that is all it has ever wanted, and it has been writing those three things at that bend since before your gran was born and before the flood and before the map, and every single one of them is true." She wrote the date badly. She wrote the weather as "cloudy" when it was in fact raining. She wrote "yes" against the lamp, and then looked at it and scratched it out and wrote "yes, at 4pm" because she had seen her gran do it that way, and then she put the pencil in the middle of the page and closed the book, which he let her do. "What do I do with it now?" "Take it home. Give it back when you have a line you want in it." He stood up and his knees made a noise. "And do not let anybody tell you the book is finished, because it is not finished, and it is never going to be finished, and if anybody in this town ever tells you different, you come and tell me and I will come and argue with them." She looked up at him. "Are you going to live here?" "That is the plan." "My dad says the mill's closing." Miles looked at the smoke over the bucket. "Your dad is not wrong about the mill," he said. "The mill is closing in the spring and there is a man in the county who wants the yard for something worse than sacks. So the plan on the table in the kitchen is not a plan for the mill. The plan on the table is for the yard, and the yard is going to be a workshop, and it is going to be the workshop that keeps this." The girl did not look impressed, which is correct for eight. "Will Wren be here?" "She will be here at Christmas and she will be here in the summer and she will be here on the September bus, and in between she is two hours away and she is not coming back until she is coming back." Miles put the pencil behind his ear again. "We write. Once a week, one bottle, and the water is the same as it was, and I would tell you it has got easier and it has not got easier at all." He got the step stool out from under the west abutment where it lives, and he put it on the bridge, and he went up it and had a go at the lamp with the wick key, and the girl watched him from the deck. "You are doing it wrong," she said. "Gran says you turn it left." "Your gran does it left because her father did it left, and there is no reason for it to go either way." He turned it, and the flame came up about a finger and settled. "There. That is right." The rain came on properly then, the kind that gets into the wool of you in about nine seconds, and the girl put her hood up and backed off the deck and ran the two hundred yards up the bank at a speed that would have got her sent home from school on any other day. Miles stayed on the bridge. It was four o'clock and it was the last Sunday of November and the light was the light of about five, and he had his hands in his pockets and his collar up, and the whole of the reach in front of him with the weir off to the left and the drift wood turning over and going. He was not in a hurry to go in. That was the entire point of it and the entire difficulty of it, because a man standing in the middle of a bridge in the rain at five o'clock on a Sunday looks, to anybody watching from either bank, like a man who has come out here to do something odd. He stayed anyway. He thought about the count, because he always thought about the count: eleven planks, and the fourth one out and four feet of new oak spliced into each stringer, and the two dark ones on the bank in the fire in March, and the lamp with its glass on it, and the roll-book with a new line in it in a child's handwriting that said cloudy when it was raining. He thought about the bus, which came in at ten past five and would wait four minutes for anybody who was going to the mill house, and which he would catch. He stood until his hands had gone past cold, which took about a quarter of an hour in that weather, and then he took them out of his pockets and put them back in and stood there four minutes past that, and counted them, and when it was done he went up the mill road with his coat streaming and his boots heavy, and the lamp under the deck kept burning behind him at the bend, because the girl had lit it and the man on the bank had not put it out, and nobody in the town of Merrow put that lamp out.