Chapter 18 The Carbon in the Window

They did it on a Tuesday in the reading room with the blinds down, and Iona Pratt put a chair by the desk for herself and did not sit on it, and Ole Ostrand came down out of the basement for the first time in the working day in about eleven years. That is seven people in a room: a librarian, an archivist, a grandmother of seventy-six with a tin of biscuits, two schoolchildren, a man from Norhaven who had been a boy on a beach, and a girl who had been counting days on the back of her hand since April. "Right," Iona said. "Tove reads, Piet reads after her, and then anybody in this room may ask one question and anybody in this room may answer one. And if a person cannot answer, they say they cannot answer, out loud, in front of the others, and nobody is permitted to be kind about it afterwards." Nobody was kind about it afterwards. Tove had the carbon on a sheet of clean board. It was grey, and it had one hard white crease through it where somebody had folded it into eight and put it in a tin, and there was a thumbprint of grease in the middle of it the size of a thumb. "Flat," Silas Teal said. "I want it flat and I want it lit from behind and I want the window behind it and the sun behind the window, and I want the desk lamp off. And nobody breathe on it." They moved the board to the big south window at half past eleven on a Tuesday in October, which in that part of the world is the best light there is, and Silas Teal put the carbon up against the glass and held it there with two fingers at the corners and did not say anything for a very long time. Piet counted. He counted for two minutes and nineteen seconds and then he said, "I cannot read it. I can read every word except the one that matters." "That is because there is nothing there," Silas said. "There is grease. There is forty years of a finger in exactly one place, and the finger has taken the graphite off the carbon and taken a skin of paper with it, and what you are looking at is a hole with the letters standing up out of the edges of it." He took out a folding lens from his shirt pocket. Tove had not known he had one. He held it a centimetre off the paper and moved it very slowly side to side, and after about a minute he said, "There. Stop." A single stroke stood up out of the grey, going down and to the left, and a second stroke crossing it, and below them a long shallow curve that had been there all along and had simply never had a reason to be looked at. "That is a B," he said. "Not a J." Nobody in the room said anything. "It is the tail of a B," Silas said, "and the top loop has gone into the grease, and a B with a fat thumb over the top loop and daylight coming up underneath it looks exactly like a J. I have shown two hundred children that letter in a classroom. It is the commonest misreading in the world." "Thirty-six years," Berta said. Her voice had gone. She was standing at the end of the board with both hands on the back of a chair, and nobody offered her a chair, because offering her a chair would have been a different conversation. "I have read that letter every year since 1990," she said, "and I have read a J, because J is not a name. That is the whole of it. A J is not anybody's name. If it had been a B then it would have been a man, and I could have made it a mistake, and I have wanted it to be a mistake for thirty-six years, and a J lets you keep the blame off it entirely. I have been reading a J because a J is nobody." "It is a B," Tove said. "It is a B." Berta Vinter sat down, at last, on the edge of the arm of the chair she had been holding. "Go on with it. Read the rest of it out." Tove read the rest of it out. "The child of Britta Kowal, late of the Aran road, and Beaulieu, of Norhaven." Four hundred words went out of the room in about nine seconds. Tove watched them go: Piet first, and then Hester, and then Berta last and slowest. Berta did not put a hand over her mouth or cry. She put her hands flat on her knees and looked at the board for a long time and said, "Norhaven," in a voice Tove had never heard her use, and then, "Well. That is a great deal further away than this kitchen." Silas Teal put the carbon down on the board and squared it with the edge of a ruler. "There are two other things I can tell you about this," he said, "and neither of them is the name. First: that line was typed once. In 1990, on an old ribbon, on a machine that had been used since 1981. When you press that old ribbon hard you get a second strike about a millimetre to the left, because the ribbon has stretched. There is a second strike under the B." "So it was never retyped." "It was never retyped. Nobody has been into that tin and retyped anything, and nobody has been near that page since a man with a razor took the top of it off in 1990." He moved the board and pointed at the fifth line. "And look at the spacing. Typewriter spacing is fixed. This machine is a wider one than the one that typed the parish births in 1996, which is the one in the library back room. Somebody has typed this page with a different machine, and it is a better one, and it is a portable one." Tove looked at the spacing for a while. "Nineteen February 2010," she said. "Norhaven." "Yes." "Nineteen February 2010, Norhaven, on a machine that somebody carried into a room." Hester had not moved from the window. "Tove. My line was not typed by my grandmother." "No. Yours was not." For a while there was only the sea. Then Berta Vinter said, without any drama in it at all, in the voice of a woman getting to the end of a very long list, "I am going to say one more thing and then I am going home and I am not coming back today, and you are all going to let me say it." "Go on." "That girl came back in April." Berta stood up. "Berta's foolscap is in a tin under a shelf in a basement, and the town's lie is in a register, and this town has spent thirty years on a boat at eleven at night. And a girl of sixteen came back on a bus from a city a hundred and eighty kilometres away in the middle of April with a letter that had no name on it, and nobody in this town has asked that girl a single question about who sent her." She looked at Hester. "The rota says a thing gets said in front of five people or it does not get said. I have been sitting on that since March and I am saying it now, in front of seven." Hester Kowal did not answer for a while. "My mother was seventeen in this town in October 1996," she said. "She held a door. She has never told me one word about it, and I have not told her one word about it, and there is a woman walking about this town with a burn on the inside of her wrist who put me on a bus, and I am going to find her, and none of you are going to tell me not to." Elmer Doak came in at twenty past twelve, up the outside stair and along the passage with his hand on the rail, and stopped in the doorway of the reading room with his hat in his hands and looked at five people standing round a board by a window. "I heard you had a Tuesday," he said. "I have had a document proved in a room with a lamp in it twice in my life and both times it proved nothing at all, because both times it was proved by the people it was about." "Then what do you want," Piet said. "I want to say one sentence and go home." He came in and sat down in the chair that Iona Pratt had put out for her and had not used. "You have got a carbon and you have got a name, and neither of those things is worth anything in a town of eleven hundred people, because anybody who wants to say the carbon is a forgery can say so in about nine seconds and you have got no way of standing in front of that. There is one document in this story that cannot be denied by anybody, and I have been trying to get at it since March, and it is the only thing I have ever wanted out of this town." "What is it?" Doak looked up at her, an old man in a coat in a library on a Tuesday. "Ask me again in a chapter where you have the room you need," he said, "and ask me with a copy of the whole of it, because what I am going to tell you is not in a box under a floor. It is printed, and it is in triplicate, and two of them have been in an archive in a city since 1997." --- ---