Chapter 4 The Archive at Collow Ness

Lowri Collow worked out of a room in the old customs house at the point of Collow Ness, and the room was cold and dry and smelled of cardboard and cinnamon and the damp of a hundred years of salt air. She had, on the shelves, everything the parish had ever written down, and most of what it hadn't. She was forty, thin, quick, and she did not look up when Tamar came in. "You're the barrage woman. Sit down. I have coffee, and I have a table, and I have a lot of things I've been waiting to give to somebody." They sat on either side of a folding table, which was the whole of the archive's infrastructure, and Lowri laid out a box of tin-tied packets. "Harbormaster's tide tables," she said. "One thousand eight hundred and twenty-one to nineteen forty-four. Not the ones in the national collection. These are the local ones. The harbormaster wrote them by hand, because he had opinions." She opened a book. The pages were ruled in three columns, and the middle column was headed, in a careful copperplate hand, "predicted, official." The left column was headed "predicted, folk." The right column was headed "observed." "See what happens," Lowri said. "The middle column is what the Admiralty said. The left column is what the village said. The right column is what the water did." She turned the pages to a date in the spring of nineteen forty-four. "The middle column says a range of three point one. The left column says the long ebb, do not put to sea. The right column says a range of three point nine, with a low water of minus one point eight, sustained for three days." "Minus one point eight." "Minus one point eight metres below chart datum. The chart datum is a line on a chart. Below the line, there is a floor of mud, and below the floor of mud there are stones, and the stones have been built." "Built how?" "In steps. Nine of them. That's what the harbourmaster wrote on the margin. He did not write it as a description. He wrote it as a fact, the way you'd write 'low water at five forty-one.'" Tamar looked at the page. The margin note was in a different hand, smaller, and dated a week after the low water. "Nineteen thirty-four chart," Tamar said. "The steps aren't on it." "They weren't on any chart from eighty-nine to forty-four. There's a reason. The chart was published by a company that wanted the depth of the channel, and the depth of the channel depended on whether the steps were in or out, and the steps were out when the survey was done, and the surveyor did not see the steps, and the chart has been wrong since, and the whole of Ebbmouth has been navigating by a chart that is wrong by two fathoms at the narrows and nobody has ever gone to the trouble of telling anybody." "Why not?" "Because the people who knew didn't write things down, and the people who wrote things down didn't know, and the gap between the two is the whole of the reason this bay is the way it is." Lowri shut the book and pulled a second packet out of the box. "Now, this is the Sounding list." She laid it on the table. It was a single page, typed on a machine of some age, with a handwritten heading in blue ink: THE SOUNDED, WITH NOTES. Underneath, a list of names, in columns, with dates. "What is it?" "It's a list of people who have heard the bell at home. Not out at sea. At home. Inland. Some of them in Ildwater, which is eleven miles up the river. One of them in a place that doesn't exist any more, which is the point of the list." "One of the columns says 'memory given'." "That's the second column." "The third column says 'object'." "That's the third column." "Who kept this?" "Somebody. Every forty years or so, somebody picks it up. It's been in this room since nineteen ninety-nine. I've been here since two thousand seventeen." "Read me the last three entries." Lowri read, in the flat voice of a woman reading a list she had read before. "Three: a woman, sixty-one, Ildwater, March of two thousand and two. Memory given: the name of her eldest child. Object: a thimble of hammered copper, dated by her own grandmother to be of Ashenholt make, though her grandmother had no record of receiving it. Four: a man, forty-four, Ildwater, spring of two thousand and fourteen. Memory given: the walk to his own wedding, which he did attend. Object: none. He says he brought nothing back, but he says he has not opened the drawers of his writing desk since, and he does not know why he has not. Five: a child, nine, Harnsey Wick, spring of eighty-four. Memory given: the walk. Object: none." Tamar looked at the page. "Eighty-four is on the ledger, too." "It is." "It's written in green ink on the ledger." "It is." "Your list says a child. The ledger says a child. Who else knows about this child?" "Somebody who came after me. Somebody in this room, and somebody next door, and somebody who has never come in at all and knows it anyway." Tamar folded the page in half and put it in her bag. "I'm going to ask you something, and you can say no." "Ask." "Is the bell still sounding?" Lowri looked at her for a long moment. "Yes," she said. "It is. It is sounding now, and it is not in the water." She reached under the table and brought out a cassette, old, white, with a label in blue ink that said BELLRIGG, NIGHT, UNDATED. "Somebody recorded this in the nineties and gave it to me. I have never listened to it. Would you listen to it for me, and then tell me?" "I'll listen to it." "Take it. Don't play it here. There's a reason." Tamar took the cassette and stood up. "I'll be back Thursday." "You'll be back when you've heard it. That's how these things go." --- On the drive back to the cottage she put the cassette in the car player and did not start it. She drove eleven miles to the gate of Collow Ness, and turned the car around, and drove back, and put the cassette in her bag, and sat on the front step in the cold and looked at the bay through the fence railings, and did not play it. At nine forty-four the bell rang in the cottage, under its dust sheet, in the hall, once, and twice, and a third time that lasted longer than the other two. Tamar stood in the middle of the hall with her hand on the doorknob, and listened, and did not open the door. Outside, at the mouth of the road, a car came down the hill and stopped at the top of the village, and a light came on in the front window, and the light stayed on. She did not go out to see who it was. She went up the narrow stair and put the cassette in the player in her bag and closed the bag and set it on the floor by the bed and lay down on her back and listened to her own breathing, and did not put the cassette in anything that had a screen. At some point in the next hour the bell rang again, once. It did not ring again. She got up and went to the kitchen and made tea and did not drink it, and sat at the table with the rolled-up pages of the Ebb Ledger in front of her, and read the third column until her eyes stopped. Who went. Who came back. What they left behind. There is a fourth column, she thought. There has always been a fourth column. It is the one that has never been written down, and it is the one that is going to be written down by the machine she is going to put in the water on Thursday. She picked up the phone and called the project office. Ellerby did not answer. She left a message, and put the phone down, and read the pages again. At half past twelve she got into the car and drove to the harbour and knocked on the door of the harbourmaster's office and asked, without introduction, if the harbourmaster could recommend a diver. He said yes. He said his nephew. He said the nephew was available Thursday, but that Thursday was the wrong day, and that if she wanted a diver she should ask for Friday, because on Friday the water was right. "Who told you Thursday was the wrong day?" "Ruan. He's in Ildwater. He'll be back in the morning. He told me last week, and I'm telling you now, because I don't want to be the one who sent you out on the wrong water." "Does Ruan tell you the water, or do you tell him?" "He tells me. He tells everybody. That's the job." She drove home in the dark. The bay was flat, and pale, and going out, and out past the narrows there was, in the last of the light, the shape of a line of stones, spaced with the regularity of masonry, running out into the water and stopping. Nine of them. She could count them from the window of the car. She did not count them. She pulled over, and sat in the car, and looked at the bay until she could not see them any more, and then she drove home. ---