Chapter 2 Four Tides

The tea was in the same pot and the same cup, chipped in the same place, and Morwenna poured it the way she had poured it every day of Nell's childhood, which was too full, so that Nell had to wait for it to stop moving before she could drink it without getting some on her sleeve. "Nine hundred and ninety-eight for the channel marker," Morwenna said. "Mary Latcham's daughter told me that." "Who's Mary Latcham's daughter." "Rosemary. She has her mother's way of telling you a thing so that you have to ask the other thing." Morwenna drank her tea. "You've come up on the Tuesday boat with a case of instruments and you've been on the slip an hour and you've not asked me one thing, which means you've been told something already, or you've decided you won't ask." Nell put her cup down. "The office is doing a droning survey. It's not a job that requires you." "I said I knew what the job was." "You said what my job was. You didn't say what I was going to be told." Morwenna looked at the fire for a while. The fire was a small fire, kept for the kettle, and it made very little heat, and neither of them mentioned that they were sitting about a foot too far from it. "Emmett Roache came down Tuesday night and said the dredger was coming and the fairway's wrong and there'd be a survey," she said. "He said it to me, not to you, because he knows I'd tell you and he hadn't got the nerve." "And you told Padraig, who told me, in the harbour office, in front of a mug." "I told Padraig nothing at all. Padraig knows things the way a wall knows things." She set the cup down. "Emmett wants to move the channel. He's wanted to move the channel since his father was in the boat, and the reason he wants it is that it makes the approach to the slip narrower, and the reason that matters to him is that the slip is where his brother's boat sits, and the reason that matters to Teague is that if the slip isn't a good approach in a westerly, then Teague doesn't work, and Teague is thirty-one and bad at anything that isn't on the water." Nell had been in the room for eleven years' worth of holidays and had never once been given the shape of the thing she was about to be told, and now that she had it she found she did not much want it. "The marker has moved four metres," she said. "Which is not the same thing as the channel needing to move. It's drifted. Everything drifts. The dredging contract is drawn against a chart that's two winters old, that's all it is." "That's what the dredger wants to hear." "That's what the dredger will have to write down, because that's what the instruments say." Morwenna Shand looked at her granddaughter over the rim of a cup that had been chipped before Nell was born, and said nothing at all, and the nothing said everything, and Nell heard it, and got angry. "Don't do that," she said. "Which of the several." "Decide what I can bear before I arrive. I'm twenty-two years gone, Morwenna. I'm not nine. If there's something you don't want to say to me then you can say that and I will leave, which is a thing I can actually do, and which is more than I could do at nine." The fire settled. Somewhere below the hill the harbour was doing what it did in the dark, which was nothing, slowly, and with sound. "Four times a year," Morwenna said. "The lowest spring tide, and it has to be the lowest one, not a big one, not a storm one, the actual lowest, the one where the sea goes out furthest and gives back what it doesn't want. And the road comes up. Not all of it. Most of it. Enough to walk on, if you know which stones are the ones under the middle." Nell had not moved. "Gran." "You don't walk it twice." Morwenna's voice did not change at all, which was how she had always delivered the things that were not up for discussion. "There's four of them in this bay that I can name, and I can name them because I was taught the way it's taught, and three of them are walking it in some way or other at any moment you care to look at it. A man on the south side walks it on the wrong side of the stones and he thinks he's on the road. There is a woman in the town of Ardra who walks it and comes back with a language that isn't hers. And there is a girl, at night, further along than anybody goes, who walks it for a boat that isn't coming." "Which girl." "You know which girl." "I do not." "You were nine," Morwenna said. "And it was the fourteenth of April, which was a low spring, and it was the lowest, and I had a fish to sell in the morning and I was not going to sit up all night with you. And I put a lamp in your window and I went down to the harbour and I sat on the wall for a while, and the road came up, and I watched you go out onto it, and I watched you get to the seventh stone." Nell had a great deal of professional practice in the matter of not filling silence. It was the single most useful thing her training had given her. You could stand in a boat in bad weather and say nothing at all, and the boat went where it was going. "How long was I out there," she said. "You were out there for an hour and ten minutes by my watch." "And you didn't come and get me." "No." "Morwenna. You were twenty feet away on a wall and you had a lamp and you did not come and get me." "No," her grandmother said, "I did not," and put the kettle on, and would not say anything else about it that night, or the next night, or for the remaining years she had.