Chapter 14 The Eighth Stone

The harbourmaster's office was above the chandler's and it took two flights and it was hotter than any building in Carrowen had a right to be, because the window was small and south-facing and had been painted shut some decade before anybody now living had any interest in the question. Enoch was at the desk. He had a kettle, and a radio, and a chart of the bay on the wall that was older than Nell and had his own corrections on it in three different hands going back decades, and he was doing what harbourmasters do at nine in the morning, which is waiting for a boat to come in. "You'd be the surveyor," he said. "Yes." "Close the door, would you. It's the wind in the stair." She did not close the door. "You moved the north cardinal forty metres south," said Nell, "on the Friday night, with a diver, in about six hours, and left the light burning and the chart mark alone, and then on Tuesday night you put a false temporary in the water at the position the cardinal used to be, and the two of them are now forty metres apart and both lit, and one of them has to be a lie, and I would like to know which one you would prefer me to certify." Enoch looked at the kettle for a while. "There'll be tea," he said. "No." "It's the third time I've offered a man tea this week and it's the third time I've been told no, and I'm seventy-one, and I'm going to keep offering it." He filled the kettle anyway, and set it on the ring, and turned it on, and sat back down. "Sit down, Miss Ashgrove." "I'm not sitting down until somebody tells me what's in the drawer." And that was the mistake, and he knew it was the mistake, and she knew it was the mistake, and it was the first honest thing that had happened between them. Enoch Ferryman got up, went to the filing cabinet, unlocked the bottom drawer with a key off his own belt, took out a book bound in canvas, and put it on the desk face down, and sat back down opposite her, and put his hands flat on either side of it. "It was brought to this office in 1946," he said, "by your great-grandmother's mother, and it was left here, and it has been read by three harbourmasters and by me, and there is not one entry in it that has ever been copied out. And I want to say to you before I say anything else that I have had it in that drawer for twenty-two years and I have never once been asked for it and never once had anybody in this village the standing to ask me, and that when you came up to that slip at seven in the morning I decided on the spot that I was going to tell you what was in it, and I have been putting it off for four days because I am a coward, and there it is." He turned the book over. It was the ledger. Not the whole of it. About forty leaves of it, taken out of the middle, and the stitching at the edge had been opened and re-stitched badly by somebody who was not patient, and it was the tide tables for eleven years between 1941 and 1952, and in the fourth column, in Morwenna Shand's great-grandmother's hand, beside the low water, there were eleven entries that were not tide times. Nell did not touch it. "You have had a hundred and thirty pages of the only complete record in existence of what this bay does to people four times a year," she said, "in a drawer, for thirty years." "I've had forty leaves." "You've had forty leaves and you knew there was a rest of it, because it was stitched at the wrong place and anyone could see that. How much is in the shed?" "All of it." "And how much is in the house above the ferry slip?" Enoch Ferryman looked at the window. "There's a tin under the third board of the shed floor," he said, "and it's not the same tin that was there when I was a young man, and your grandmother moved books around after her mother died, and the oil can in the cottage is on the same shelf as the padlock key and it has been the same shelf since the board put me in this room." He turned the kettle off. "And the part I've got here, I copied out in 1958, when I was thirty-four and in this chair, because I could not sit in this chair for forty years with a thing in the drawer that I had not read, and I read it and I went and copied the eleven out in pencil at the office desk, and I have never told that to a living soul, and you are the second person in this building in seventy-five years that has heard me say it." "Why did you copy them?" "Because the eleventh one is a name I know," said the harbourmaster, "and it is a name that has been on this board twice since, and because when I copied it I understood that this bay was going to keep handing things to families in this parish and there was going to be no law about it and no authority, and that the only thing anybody was ever going to be able to do was write it down and not sell it." He tapped the canvas. "The bell I took off that mark in the winter was not a bell. It was the plate out of that drawer, and the reason the plate was on the mark is that somebody put it there, in 1952, and I have been waiting since the November to find out who, and now I know, and I know because of a book in a girl's coat pocket that I have not been able to stop thinking about since the Monday, and the girl's name is Ashgrove and her grandmother is the Shand woman and the plate has a survey stamp on it, and the number on the plate is a number I have not seen since I copied it out in 1958." He turned the book round and pushed it two inches across the desk towards her. "Don't take it," he said. "Take a copy of the eleventh page. That's all anybody should take, and the page is blank, and your grandmother left it blank, and I've copied a blank page, and there is a thing I have never told a living soul and I'll tell you and then I'll not say it again. In 1952 somebody came into this office and asked me for the eleventh page, and I was twenty-eight, and I said no, and he said it did not matter, because the water doesn't keep a diary, and then he took the plate out of the drawer and set it on the harbour wall and walked out, and I let him, and I was twenty-eight and I have had seventy-five years of it."