Chapter 15 Return With Salt

She had come to Carrowen for a channel and a dredging contract and she had, by the Wednesday of the second week, no channel, no contract, a duplicate lead plug in a navigation mark, a false buoy in the water, a stolen plate, a book in an old man's drawer, and a boat on Thursday. What she still had was a tide, an inshore pass, and a fortnight's work that would have to be done before the Thursday boat, and so she did it, and doing it was the only thing that made any of the rest of it bearable. She started on the Monday at six with the first light and had the inshore buoys done by ten, and the flood channel by one, and the sandbank off the Ardra mole by four, and she ate her lunch in the car at the top of the hill with the sea in front of her and the wind on the wrong side of it, and she did not think about a white stone once, deliberately, the way you do not think about a name, and it was in the whole of the day about forty times. Emmett brought the salt at half past four without being asked and put twelve bags on the wall above her slip and did not stay. "Bit much," he said. "You've brought me a winter's salt." "It's the winter's worth of salt in one man's boat and I was going to Ardra anyway." He looked at the water. "You'll be all right in it?" "No." "Good." He got back in the boat. "That's a better answer than the one you'd have given me on Monday and I want you to keep giving me the bad one, because the good one is a lie you have to maintain and I have not got the time for it." She watched him go and then she carried the salt up the hill, all twelve bags, in two trips, on a shoulder that had not carried anything at all in eleven years of office work, and it took her longer than it should have, and she was glad about that. Morwenna had the fire going and the kettle on and was, it seemed, entirely unsurprised by the salt. "Enoch came up on the Sunday," she said, before Nell had the bags through the door. "Thursday." "Thursday. He came up on the Thursday and he sat in that chair and he told me he'd told you, and I said that was about time, and he said I was not to be angry with him, and I wasn't." She took two bags and put them by the fire without looking at her. "He was thirty-one in 1952. That's what he is now minus his age then, and you do the sum and tell me what that makes him, and then you come and sit down and drink your tea and tell me what you want to do, and I will not tell you what to do, and I have not told a single person what to do since 1946 and I am not going to start now that I've a granddaughter with a theodolite." Nell sat down. "I want to go out on it," she said. "Yes." "Alone." "Yes," said Morwenna Shand, and poured the tea too full, exactly as she had done every day of Nell's childhood, so that the cup had to be put down and left to settle before it could be drunk, which was, Nell understood at twenty-eight years' distance, the entire method. "That's the whole of what I wanted to say," said her grandmother. "Forty years I've had that. There's nothing else you can ask me that will be more use, and there's nothing I can tell you now that I haven't told you, and I'd not have told you any of it if Isolde Kerr hadn't walked down a hill on a Sunday with a letter in her bag, and I want that said out loud in this room, because I've earned having somebody else hold the end of it, and it's her and not me and I've had no part in it since the Wednesday." Nell put the cup down and let it settle. "Who sent the letter," she said. "That's the one thing I'll not do," said Morwenna. "Not because I don't know. Because the moment I say it out loud in this house it stops being mine to keep and starts being a thing that's been said, and there's forty years of that in the walls of this place and I'm not adding to it in my own kitchen with the fire lit." Outside, the wind came over the headland and did the thing it did at four o'clock, which was come all the way through and turn, and Nell sat with her hands round a cup that was too full and listened to the sea doing the ordinary business of a bay in the last week of a month, and she thought about a woman who had walked onto a set of stones in 1946 and come back the same, and about the eleven words *same* in a hand that never changed, and about the fact that she was going to walk out on a set of stones in eleven days whatever her grandmother thought, and that the thing she actually wanted, and had wanted since she was nine years old and had been on a seventh stone for an hour and ten minutes on the fourteenth of April 1998, was not an answer. It was somebody to have been there with her. "Emmett's asked me to marry him," said Morwenna. Nell put the cup down too hard and tea ran over the rim onto the flagstones. "When." "Sunday. On the wall, at four, in the rain, with his hands in his pockets, and it took him nine minutes and it was the worst nine minutes of my life and I have had a great deal of a life." She picked up the cloth and wiped the stone. "I said I'd want to think about it, and he said that was fair, and then he said that he'd thought about it for about eleven years and would be having to be patient, and I told him to go on home, and he went on home." "How did you—" "He told me at the start of the week, because he is the only person in this parish who has ever thought I would say no and has told me so to my face, which is a thing you do not do for a woman of eighty-eight in a house on a hill." She wrung the cloth out. "I have said no to two men and one shipwreck and I intend to go on doing it, and I want you to understand that the answer I gave him on Sunday is not an answer I have given anybody, and that if I ever tell you what it was, I would like it to be after the fourteenth, and not before, and not from this chair."