Chapter 12 The Long Way Round

The board met on the Wednesday and gave her a bad hour, and she needed it. The Harbour Board of Carrowen met in a room over the chandler's with a table made for eight men and a fire that had been laid by somebody who no longer came to the meetings, and there were nine of them, and for forty minutes they took the temporary buoy off her because she had taken it from a hill. "From the top of the—" the chairman began. "Yes." "Without a boat." "Without a boat, in a flat calm, in a haar, with the water beyond four hundred metres not visible to me or to anybody, and I have flagged it in the book as an interpolated position and it will be re-observed on Thursday in any weather I can get, and it is in the record as an interpolation and not as an observation, and if the board would rather I have it not in the record at all, then I will take it out of the record and I will tell my office the position is unverified and you may all draw your own conclusions about a temporary buoy." The chairman looked at the table. Somebody said something about the man who had moved the bell. Somebody else said something about Aberdeen. "The mark at the mouth," said the chairman, when it had gone round again. "You have told us the plot is duplicated." "Two plugs, same number, same stamp, in the base of the tower. One of them is mine, put in three winters ago. The other one is not." "Nothing was removed." "Nothing was," said Nell. "Nobody took anything out of my mark. Somebody put something into it." "And you believe that was deliberate." "I believe that no surveyor on this earth stamps the same number in a second plug by accident, and that when it happens it is either theft or a survey by somebody who is not employed by anybody and is not carrying anybody's certificate." She shut the book. "That's the whole of what I have. I'm going to be honest with the board about the rest of it, which is that I have been in this village nine days and I have twice watched a thing happen on a day when your harbour could not have been used by a man who did not want it used, and I have not written one word of it in a professional book, and I would like the board to understand how much difficulty that has caused me, and that I have not done it out of any regard for your feelings." The room went very quiet. The chairman said that the board would take the matter back to the district office, and thanked her, in the way of a man who was glad a difficult woman had left a room. Nell walked down from the board room to the harbour with her case in her hand and the fog still on the water, and the day after was Thursday, and the wind came back on Thursday afternoon and by Friday the haar was gone and the bay was white and hard and running with a short sea, and the air smelled of nothing at all. She finished the observation of the temporary at nine in the morning, in a boat, in good conditions, and got a position that agreed with her interpolation to within a metre and a half, and wrote that in the book, and then sat for a while with her hands flat on the pages. Then she drove down to the Ardra road and took the turning that her grandmother had told her not to take in 1998 and had driven on in 1998 anyway, because she had been nine and it had been raining, and it is a single-track road that goes behind the farms and comes out at a field gate above the north end of Loch Skerry, and it is eleven miles longer than the coast road and it takes you round. She stopped at the gate. There was nothing to see. The loch was a long grey plate with the wind combing it, and the far shore was black, and the tower on the north cardinal that had lost its bell was standing exactly where it should be with its light burning in daylight, which it should not have been doing, and which was a fault report and not a mystery and which she wrote in the book. She ate her lunch in the car with the heater on and the rain coming down on the roof, and she went over the ninety-one entries again, and she did the arithmetic she had not yet done, which was the tide on the fourteenth of April of this year against the tide on the fourteenth of April of 1998, and the year before, and the year before that, going back to Morwenna's first hand in the book in 1961, and it took her until the light went and it told her nothing whatsoever, which was a different thing from telling her it was a coincidence. Then she sat in a gateway above a grey loch and thought about a white stone and a shape in the air like a gap where a window used to be, and about a nine-year-old girl on a seventh stone in a bay that was the same bay and was not the same bay, and about the fact that her own office's stamp was in a nail in a navigation mark a hundred yards from where she had been standing that morning. The low spring was in eleven days. She had been telling everyone who asked that she would be on the Thursday boat back to the city on the seventeenth, and she had said it in the office and to Padraig and to Isolde Kerr at the postbox, and she had said it in a way that made all three of them believe her, and she was aware while she was saying it that she was doing the thing that Morwenna did, which was decide in advance what a person could bear and then arrange the whole of the next three weeks around it. The rain came off the roof. The loch did its grey plate. Nell Ashgrove turned the engine over and drove the eleven miles back the long way round, because going round was the only decision she had left that she had not already made. She was not two hours on the water before the board's letter came, and the letter was not from the district office. It came from a man in the county who had been the harbourmaster's apprentice in the year Nell was born and who now, apparently, had the district office, and it asked her to confirm, in writing, that the temporary buoy had been positioned "in the course of normal survey practice" and it asked her to do this by return, and it noted that any position recorded as an interpolation would not be capable of being certified. Nell read it twice on the drive down from the Ardra road and then she pulled over at the top of the hill above Carrowen and answered it in the car, and the answer took four sentences, and the fourth of them said that if the district office required a certified position it could send a surveyor or it could send an instruction to a boat, and that the conditions on the water on the Monday had not permitted a boat, and that she would be glad to know which of the two they intended to arrange. She posted it on the Tuesday and did not tell anybody, and the reply came on the Wednesday, and it was two lines long, and it said the district office had noted her comments. Then she got the telephone call, which was from Padraig, and which was the single most useful thing that happened to her that week. "They've taken the buoy in," he said. "The temporary. Harbourmaster's had a winch crew out on the Tuesday night and they've lifted it and they've put a name on it and a number and it's in the book under a different mark entirely, forty metres south, like it was never anywhere else." "Forty metres south," said Nell. "That's where the cardinal was moved to." "Aye. So now there's a cardinal where the temporary was and a temporary where the cardinal was, and both marks are lit, and there's one bell plate on the deck of a boat at Ardra, and the harbourmaster's telling everybody it was an error." Padraig paused. "And the error was made by the fella who oils padlocks." Nell sat down on the wall. "Padraig. Is the harbourmaster Enoch." "That's the one." "He's a member of the board." "He's been the harbourmaster for twenty-two years and he's on the board because his grandfather was on the board, and that's how it works in this place, and you know that's how it works in this place, because you've spent a fortnight discovering it." "He moved the cardinal forty metres south in the dark on a Friday night with a diver and a torch," said Nell, "and he left the light burning, and he left the chart alone, and he told me a story about a fifty-year tide belt and a plate that nobody's seen, and then he put a false mark in on Tuesday night, on a night he knew I'd be on the water, so that whichever of the two positions I recorded, one of them would be his." "That's the part I worked out on the way to the boat," said Padraig, "and the part I have not told the board, and the part that means you should come down to my office and shut the door, and not on the telephone, and not today, because there's a man coming down the hill at this moment with a boat book in his hand and I can see him from the window and he has been a member of this board since the year you were born."