Chapter 11 Fog Without Wind

It came in on the Monday night, and the extraordinary thing about it, the thing that had the whole village talking by Tuesday lunchtime, was that there was no wind with it. Nell had been in enough fog to know that fog is a delivery. You get it from somewhere. It comes off the water or it comes down off the land, and either way it comes with air behind it, and you can stand on the slip with your hand out and feel the thing arriving. This came in with a dead calm. The harbour went flat to a degree that made the moored boats look wrong, as though they were hung rather than floating. There was no sound in it at all. It came up the hill and stopped. "Bad?" said Padraig, when she came in out of it at ten in the morning and put her case down in the office without taking her coat off. "That's not fog," said Nell. "That's the absence of anything. I've surveyed in worse than this. I've surveyed in horizontal rain off a beach with a following sea. I have never surveyed in air that wasn't moving." "Then it's a haar," said Padraig, and did not look up, and Nell understood that she had just been given the local name for the thing and that the local name was the end of the conversation. Her office rang at half past ten and asked her to confirm the position of a temporary buoy they had laid that morning, and she said she would, and then sat at the chart table for a quarter of an hour not moving, because a temporary buoy laid in a flat calm in a haar is a buoy that has no business being trusted, and because there was nowhere on that coast she needed to be less. Emmett came in at one. "You can't go out." "I wasn't going to." "You've had the case on your shoulder since ten o'clock. I've watched you walk up that hill three times and come back down it three times." He put his hands in his pockets. "There's no wind. You know what that is." "I've been in a haar at Ardra with a following wind doing six knots. This isn't the same thing." "It's not the same thing," Emmett agreed, "because a haar with wind is weather. This is a haar that has been let in and has not been let out, and my father used to say that's what the bay does when it's thinking about something." "Your father said a lot of things to keep a harbour from getting restless." "Which is a job, isn't it," said Emmett, "rather than a kind of talking." Nell was aware that she had been about to say something sharp, and that she was saying it because the alternative was the other thing, which was that she had been standing in a flat calm since ten in the morning waiting for something and that it was not the buoy. "I'll take the readings off the wall at the top of the hill," she said. "I can do the temporary from there and I can do the inshore buoys by interpolating and I'll flag it in the book and I'll do it again on Thursday when it's blowing again. That's not a fudge, that's procedure, and if your harbour board wants it done differently they can come and hold the theodolite." "You can do that." "Yes." "And you'll not go down to the water." "Emmett." "I'll not ask you anything else," he said, "and I've asked you one thing and I've been told no, and that's the end of it, and I'm going to go and put a hand on my brother's boat in a dead calm because that is what you do with a boat in a dead calm, and neither you nor I are going to pretend that's not the real reason I'm glad you've decided to stay up a hill." He left. Nell sat at the table and looked at the fog out of the window, which was white and had no grain in it, and she thought about the fact that she had been on that slip in the dark three nights running and had not written one line about it. She went up the hill at two with the handheld and a book of readings, and she did the temporary, and she did the two inshore by interpolation with her own written method for it, which was slower and worse than being in a boat and was defensible, and it took her two hours, and by the end of it her hands were cold and her nose was running and she had not once looked at the water. At twenty past four she looked at the water. The flat calm had gone somewhere. The far side of the bay had gone. So had the headland, and the point, and the whole of the water from about four hundred metres out. The harbour was still there and the slip was still there and the wall she was standing on was still there, and everything past it was a wall of grey with nothing in it, and she could hear the water at the bottom of the slip and she could not see the end of the slip. Nell put the book down on the wall, and took out the rule, and then stood absolutely still with the rule in her hand for a long count of ninety. There was no sound of the sea coming off stones. She had been listening for it since the fourteenth without knowing she was listening for it, and now that the sound was absent she understood that she had been expecting it, and that the whole bay out there had a floor she knew about, and that the floor was not a floor and had not been since before the town. The fog came over the wall and put its hand over her face, which was not a thing fog did, and the wall was the last thing she could see, and she stood on the top of a hill in a dead calm in the middle of a bay that four times a year gave up its bottom, and there was a brass key in her coat pocket in the pocket where she kept her pen, and she understood, with the clarity of an instrument reading, that she was not going to be able to do this from a hill.