Chapter 16 The Letter in the Envelope

Hester Kowal had been in room three for one hundred and seventy-one days when she started counting, and she had counted every day since, on the back of her left hand in biro, which she washed off on Sundays. She had also, since the eleventh of April, not opened a single one of the four windows in that room, because a girl who has come to a town to wait does not want the weather, and because the room faces the sea, and because the outside stair is on that side and she could hear it from bed. Nobody knew that about the windows. Tove worked it out on the second evening from the state of the sills, which had a year of dust on the closed half and none at all on the open half, and it went through her like cold water and she did not have a name for it then and does not have one now. "Read it out," she said. "You have described it four times and I have never once seen it." Hester took it from the bottom of the case under her bed. It was not an envelope, exactly. It was a sheet of good paper folded three times and slid into a plain white cover with the fold at the top, and no stamp anywhere on it, and the postmark of Norhaven across the fold in violet ink where somebody had gone over it once with a pen to make certain that it showed. "There is no stamp," Piet said. "There is no stamp because a stamp is a receipt, and the man upstairs does not want a receipt." She smoothed it on the bed. "Four lines. I have read it four hundred times. Listen to it." *Come to Selkie Cove and do not tell your aunt why.* *Your father is one of four men on a page you have never seen. The man who sent you this is not that man. The man who signed it is not the man who will be caught.* *There is a room over a shop. Come in April and stay until the autumn, and do not telephone your mother, because she will ask you to come home and she will be right to.* *You have been told a great deal. Be careful who you tell.* "There is no name," Tove said. "There is no name, and no address, and no way of answering it, and it came into my aunt's house in a bundle of ordinary post because he walks it to a box on a wall in a village outside Norhaven at some point in the week, and he has never once been seen doing it, and I have looked for him." Hester put the letter down. "The letter does not say that your father is dead. It says that the man who will be caught. That is the sentence I have been holding for one hundred and seventy-one days." "What does it do to you?" "It makes me want to stay." Hester said it without any expression at all. "Which is an appalling thing for a letter to do to a person, and it is exactly what it was built to do, and I have known that since April, and I have done it anyway." They went down to bay nine together, because the 2010 parish correction list was in bay nine and Tove had read it once, in a car park, in the dark, with a torch in her teeth, and had read four lines of it and gone home. It was printed on a single sheet and had been folded in three and unfolded so many times that it had gone furry along the creases. Two columns: name, date of birth, date of correction, authority, and then the old value struck through and the new value written in beside it. **Kowal, S.** Born 4 March 1990. Corrected 3 October 1996. Authority: parish. Old: *father, no name entered.* New: *father, Teal M., of the harbour road.* **Kowal, H.** Born 19 February 2010, Norhaven. Corrected 11 April 2010. Authority: parish. Father: *(blank.)* The blank had a line ruled to it in the same typed style as the rest of the form, and nothing at all in the space. "That is the second time anybody has gone into a book in this town and ruled a line to a name they did not write," Tove said. "There is no name in it." "I know there is no name in it. I have been reading about this book for three months." She put her finger on the ruled line. "Somebody stood in a corridor in a hospital in a city a hundred and eighty kilometres from here, or somebody stood at a counter in a registrar's office, with a clerk who does it for a fee, and the clerk left a space and drew a line to the space, because that is what you do with a space. A person who is frightened leaves nothing behind at all. A person being paid leaves a line." Hester looked at the sheet for a long time. "There is a third thing," she said. "There are two entries in thirty years. I have counted them four times." "There is a third thing and it is not on this list." Hester turned the sheet over, which nobody had done, because a printed form is finished when the typing stops. On the back, in pencil, there were eleven lines in a small neat hand, and they were not a correction at all. They were a list of the boats that had passed the point that year. Dates, times, masters, tonnages. And the eleventh line said *Arawak, 8 Oct, 23.00, three persons.* And underneath that, in a different pencil and added later, in a hand that had gone unsteady at the end: *and a child of about three who is not a Kowal.* "I have never seen that in my life," Hester said. "No." "It is not the same pencil." "No." Tove photographed the back of the sheet, and then she sat down on the edge of the table with the camera in her hands and stopped being a reporter for about four seconds, which is a thing that happened to her roughly twice a term. "A child of about three, in October 1996," she said. "So born in about 1993. Not a Kowal. On the list and struck out of the count." "Two children went out on that boat. Everybody in this town has said two children for thirty years and one of them is the boy in the photograph, and the other one has never been asked about once." Hester's voice had gone very flat. "Not once. I have sat in the room where the picture hangs with a woman who looked at it for thirty years and she does not know that child's name. I do not think anybody in this town knows it. I think the whole town has agreed to have a family of three and there are only ever two people in the room." "Do we have anything with a name in it?" "We have the last page of the register." Tove was already on her feet. "One out of every volume. If they cut it, they cut it because of what was printed on it, and a name that somebody has struck out of a count is exactly the sort of thing you cut a page about." Hester did not move. "There is another thing," she said. "You have said another thing twice tonight." "You are going to say that if I say it twice then it is true." She got up and went to the window, which was the first window in that building she had ever opened. "I have seen her twice." "Who?" "My mother." Hester put her hands flat on the sill. "Once on the harbour road in June and once outside the post office in July, and both times she had a bag and she was going the other way, and both times I was thirty feet away in a coat with the hood up, and both times I let her go past, because I was sixteen and I did not have a single thing to say to her that would not have been the wrong thing." Tove came and stood beside her. "What did her hands look like?" "Small. Square. No gloves in June, which nobody in this town does in June." Hester said it slowly, the way a person takes something out of a drawer. "And there is a burn on the inside of one wrist. The old kind. The kind you get from a lid that was hot on a stove in a kitchen with the sleeve pushed back. She does it with the right hand. I have been carrying that about since July." "The letter has a hand." "The letter has a hand and I have been looking at it since March." She turned round. "It is the same hand. It is the same bad hand, with the same little hook on the g, and she learned it off a form, and she writes the way she signed when she was seventeen. I would know it anywhere. And I have been lying in that room since April telling myself that a stranger in a flat over a shop writes like that." Tove did not say anything for a moment, and then she said the thing she had been turning over in her own head since the Saturday. "You should ring her." Hester said nothing. "You have got the number. You have had it since March. You have never dialled it and you have never deleted it, and nobody keeps a number they never want to use, they delete it at the end of the week." Tove kept her voice as level as she could manage. "I am not telling you to do it. I am telling you that you have been not told for sixteen years and it has been done to you by a town, and if you go on letting it be done by a town then you have spent this whole winter exactly where somebody wanted you to spend it." Hester sat down on the end of her own bed and put her hands in her hair and said, "Right," in a voice that was not steady in the least. Then she picked the phone up off the dresser and scrolled for a long time, and stood up, and sat down again, and then she held it to her ear and turned to face the wall, so that Tove could not watch her do it. It rang eleven times. Somebody picked up. Hester said, "I know it is you." A woman's voice said something short. Then Hester Kowal said, "No." And then she said, "I am going to ask you one question and you are going to answer it. And then I am going to come and find you, and you can decide for yourself what to do about that, because I am not a child any more. I have been somebody's not-told for thirty years and this afternoon I worked out who was doing it." She hung up. She put the phone face down on the bed and turned round with her face wet and said, "She has been in this town the whole time. She put me on a bus." ---