Chapter 12 What the Woman Typed

Berta Vinter opened the door in an apron and a cardigan with the elbows gone and looked at the three of them on her step and said, "You have brought a rota." "You have seen it?" "I ran this town's notices for thirty-one years, girl. You do not get a surprise in your own street." She turned round without opening the door any wider. "Leave your wet coats on that mat. There is tea in the pot and it is already been used once, so do not look at me." The kitchen was exactly as it had been in September: the blind down, the scrubbed table, the stove with the small iron door, the mug with the chip out of the rim that had belonged to a house before this one. Tove sat down where she had sat in September with a plastic bag on the table between them, and this time there was nothing in the bag. "Sit down," Berta said. "I have had this speech in my chest since March and I would like to get it out before I lose my nerve, and I am not going to be asked one question at a time like a policewoman on a telly." "Grandmother—" "You have got his initials on a piece of paper in a coat pocket," Berta said, "and I have not had to see it, which I am going to be grateful for until the day I die. So here is the whole thing, and then you may ask, and I will answer what I can and I will not invent the rest." Tove took the leaf out. She put it face up on the table and turned it so that her grandmother could read it without moving her hands, and Berta read it with her glasses still in her cardigan pocket, at arm's length, upside down to herself, without touching the paper at all. "Two," Berta said. "Both along the line of an entry. Yes." "You did the second one." "I did both." She put her hands flat on the tablecloth. "They came twice." "Who was they." "A man I did not know, and I did not ask, and I want you to understand that the not asking was not fright. It was arithmetic. In this town you can ask a person one question and never ask them a second, and I was saving my one question, and then the year went by and I had not spent it, and then it was too late to spend it on anything that mattered." She got up, and opened the drawer of the dresser, and did not go to the dresser. She went to the press by the door and knelt down in front of the low cupboard, and took out the bottom shelf, and underneath the shelf there was a tin of Swedish biscuits with a lid that had been pried, and inside the tin there were four things: a brass button, a photograph of a boy Tove did not know, a folded piece of carbon paper gone the colour of a thumb, and a child's shoe. She put the carbon paper on the table and took her hands away from it as though it might go off. "That is the worst thing I own," she said. "I did not keep it to sell anybody and I did not keep it to protect myself. I kept it because I have been in this kitchen since 1972 and there was going to come a morning when there was nothing in this house that had ever been mine, and I could not stand that. So I took one thing out of a typewriter and I hid it, and that is the whole of my courage and it took eleven seconds." Piet unfolded it with two fingers, because carbon paper wants to crease along the lines you already have. It was grey, and it had a fold through it that had gone white at the bend, and it carried five lines of the Selkie Cove library's oldest machine in the thin spread type of a thing that had never been cleaned since the eighties. *SELKIE COVE PARISH. BAPTISMS.* *4 March 1990. No. 27.* *Child of Britta Kowal, late of the Aran road, and —* And then the line went on, and Tove leaned over it, and there was a grey thumbprint of grease sitting exactly across the father's name, which had been typed, and had been smudged, and in the middle of the smudge two letters were standing up out of it like two posts in a flood. "J," Berta said. "That is a J. It has always been a J. I have looked at it more times than is good for a woman of my age." "You knew the name in 1990." "I typed it in 1990 at eleven at night on a machine in the back room of that library with a girl of seventeen holding the door because she had been asked to by her mother, and I typed what I was given, and then in the morning a man I did not know put a razor to the page along the line of the entry and took the father's name off it in one stroke, and I watched him do it and I did not say anything, and then for thirty-six years I have told myself a story in which I did not see it." "The girl of seventeen," Tove said. "Holding the door." Berta looked at her for a long moment with the expression of a woman deciding how much of a thing she can afford. "Your mother," she said. "And I have said her name in this kitchen once in nine years and I am not going to do it again today. Ask her. She was seventeen and she was working the line at the cannery in the summer and she stood on the wall at the end of the slipway on the eighth of October, and she has told you none of that, and you will have to go and be told." The blind went up two inches and came down again, which was how Tove knew her grandmother was frightened. "Now the part that is hard," Berta said. "In 2010 that man came a second time, and he had a sheet of paper in a plastic wallet with a list of volumes on it, and he said it in a voice like a man ordering at a counter. He said the pages had to come out at the boards and not at the gutter, because a gutter cut shows and a board cut does not, and he said I was to help him because I had the only key to that room that was not a council key, and because his hands had gone." She held her own hands up. They were very steady, and that was somehow worse than if they had not been. "And I said yes," Berta said. "And I want you to sit there and understand that I said yes in about two seconds, and that for thirty-six years I have told myself that I said yes because a man made me. I did not. Nobody made me. That man said a sensible sentence about boards and gutters and I agreed with it because there had been a great deal of life in this town that I could not say out loud and I wanted it to be over." "So he cut them." "He cut four and I did the other twenty-five, and he counted them out loud, and then we put them under the shelf and the shelf into the hole and I asked Ole to paint it because he would not refuse a request for tea." She put her hands down. "And the reason, girl, the reason, is that he said: there will come a day when somebody asks whose name is under all of this, and I cannot be the one standing there when they ask, so let us decide now what the answer is going to be. And I sat in that basement on a Wednesday afternoon in 2010 with a blade in my hand and I thought, that is a kind man. That is a man who is trying to spare us." She stopped, and looked at the tin of biscuits, and did not say anything else for a while. "He is not a kind man," Hester said. "No," said Berta. "He is an old man with a bad chest who has been frightened since before you were born. Those are worse and they are much more use to a town like this." Nobody spoke for a while. The clock on the wall that had been stopped since 1994 ticked four seconds and then stopped again. "One question," Tove said, and she kept her voice level, which took all she had, the way it had taken all she had in a library in September. "Did he ever say who told him to do it?" "He came with letters," Berta said. "Every letter that has come to this town since March has had Norhaven on it and not one of them has a name on the envelope, and I have never seen the hand that writes them, and I have never once wanted to, and you may make of that whatever you find comfortable." Outside, the tide was at the bottom of the page and Piet's phone went in his pocket and came out again. "The man above the bait shop came down at ten past seven," he said. "He is on the strand. He has a flask and he is sitting on the wall at the end of the slipway, and he has not moved in two hours, and I think he is waiting for us, and I think he has been waiting for us since March." --- ---