Chapter 19 The Re-Keying

The town took it the way towns take the truth, which is slowly, and sideways, and with a great deal of tea. It did not take it all at once. Myrtle Soper told the market on Wednesday, and the market told the square, and the square told the post office, and by the following week the story of the Wexford fire had gone round Thistlecote twice and had settled into the shape it would keep: that the mill had been set alight by a man nobody now living had ever liked, that the Wexfords had been blamed for it, and that a locksmith and a woman in a green coat had between them got it out of a bank box that had been shut for forty years, which was, for a small town, about as good a piece of theatre as a wet Tuesday could hope for. Delphine Jellicoe, who had been the doctor who signed a death certificate one November on the coast road for a woman who had died in a car that was not hers, drove to the county records office herself and came back with a copy of the register, and put it on the counter of the shop, and said, "There. It's official. Beatrix Wexford died on the coast road in November, in a car that belonged to a man who was killed beside her, and I signed it under the name she was born with because it was the only name I had for her, and I've asked the registrar to add a note." "A note that says what?" "That says Beatrix Wexford, of this town." Delphine shrugged. "It's a small thing. It's the only thing I can do. But a woman should be allowed to be from the place she was from." The town council, which met on Thursdays in the back room of the Noke Arms, did something it had not done in years, which was to vote. They voted to apply for a grant, and to ask the county about a listing, and to put a bench on the towpath by the second pound with a small brass plaque on it, and on the plaque, because Mr. Quarrell the solicitor would not allow a word more, were four words: THE WEXFORD MILL, 1908-1979. The objects went home first, before any of the rest of it, because Verity insisted. She took the brass bell back to Bridie Vardy herself, and stood in the tea room while Bridie set it on the shelf above the till and turned it so the dent faced the wall. She took the damson jar back to Tabitha Osgood, who filled it that afternoon from the first of the new season and put it in the cellar window where the light could get at it. And she walked the photograph of the mill out to the shed at the bottom of the cut, where Wilf Marples had a new padlock and, to his considerable pride, a key he could not lose, because Verity had put it on a chain and fixed the chain to the door with a bolt he could not reach without a ladder. "The little girl in the picture," Wilf said, looking at it on the shed wall. "Beatrix. I said she'd gone abroad." "She went to London," Verity said. "Then Devon. She had a life, Wilf. She just didn't get to have it here." Wilf was quiet a while, in the way old men are quiet when they are reckoning up a debt they did not know they had been carrying. "She used to come down to the lock and watch the gates," he said. "Every Saturday, when she was small, and she'd ask me why the water went up when the gates came down, and I told her it was because water is contrary. She'd laugh at that every time, the same laugh, every single Saturday." He turned the photograph a little on its nail, so the light fell better on the water. "I'll keep it here. It belongs where the water is." The county came on a wet Tuesday and walked the mill with a surveyor and a man from the heritage office, and Frayne walked with them, and the surveyor found the mill sound, and the heritage man found the wheel worth keeping, and between them they found enough to list the building and stop a demolition that had been coming down the lane since the spring. The listing went up on the county register in the summer. Nobody in Thistlecote read the register. Everybody in Thistlecote knew. Netta Wexford did not leave. She had come to Thistlecote to collect a family's things and clear a family's name, and she had done the first and begun the second, and when the day came that she had planned to get on the last bus out of town, she did not get on it. Instead she took the flat over the phone shop for a year, and put a chair in the window, and started, of all things, to draw, which is what she had done before she had spent a year being somebody's grievance, and in the spring she came into the shop and asked Verity whether a person who had been drawing houses for thirty years could be taught how to draw a mill. "Depends," Verity said. "Can you sit still for three hours and be told you're wrong?" "At my age, I've had practice." "Then come on Tuesday." Verity turned the sign to CLOSED and poured the last of the pot into two cups, and they sat in the window with Tibbs between them and the light going gold on the old square, and for a while neither of them said anything at all, which is the first real sign of a friendship. The bell went at the tea room, and a little later Netta said, "Your father's ledger. You've got it back. What are you going to do with it?" Verity looked at the green book on the shelf behind the counter, where it had lived for forty years and where it would live, she supposed, for as long as there was a shop. "Same as he did," she said. "Keep it. Keep the record. Keep the spares." She looked out at Cheaping Lane, the bakery and the post office and the phone shop and the tea room, the whole of the town that she had spent twenty-three years opening and locking. "You know what I've learned this month? A town isn't a set of buildings. It's a set of promises, and most of them are so small nobody ever writes them down. My father kept a spare key for a man everybody had decided was a criminal. That's all he did. One key, one promise, kept quiet, for forty years." She turned the cup in its saucer. "And it was enough. It was enough to put a bench on a towpath." Netta drank her tea. Outside, the clockhouse struck six, badly, one note lagging behind the others, and the two of them listened to it the way the whole town had listened to it for two hundred years, which is to say as a thing so familiar it had stopped being a sound. ---