Chapter 3 What Morwenna Would Not Say

The key was brass and it was not new, and it was not old either, which Nell understood as soon as she had it in her hand: it had been turned so many times in a lock that the ward edges had gone round, like a stone that the sea has been working on a long time without yet deciding whether to make anything of it. "What is it for," she said. "That," said Morwenna, "is a question I have been waiting nineteen days to be asked, which tells you that I already knew you would take the thing before you knew what it was, and that you have not changed." "That's not an answer." "No. It's a preceding." Nell put the key in her coat pocket, in the one where she kept her pen, and she understood while doing it that she had made that choice on purpose and that the reason was so that her hand would find the key when she reached for the pen for the rest of however long she had left here. There was a knock at the door, and it was Emmett. That was the first time she had seen him since she was nine years old, and the first thing she registered was not his face. It was that he was wet to the thigh, which meant he had come off the slipway, and that he was standing with his weight on his back foot, which meant the knee was bad again, and that he had not come in out of the weather so much as arrive in it and then decide. "Mrs Shand," he said. "Emmett." "Sorry for the hour." "There's no hour. It's a Tuesday." Morwenna did not get up. "Tea, then, or will you say what you've come to say standing there dripping on my step." He looked at Nell, and had to start again, which told her he had not known she was there, and had been told by her grandmother in the last minute, and had decided to come in anyway. "Surveyor's here for the dredger," he said. "I know what she's here for." "Then I came to say I'll take her out. Tomorrow, if she wants. There's a stone in the channel at the mouth I've been meaning to shift for four years, and if she's going to write a number down she'll want to see why I want it moved, and I can show her in ten minutes what I've been arguing about for ten years." Nell looked at the rain coming off the sill. "You asked my office to change the approach to your slip." "I asked whether they'd consider it. There's a difference and you know it." "There's not much of one." "There's enough of one to have taken me four years to build." He said it evenly, without heat, the way a man says a thing he has said to himself several thousand times. "The dredger's coming to dig the middle of the fairway. The middle of the fairway is where the tide comes up under the slip in a westerly, and when it comes up under the slip in a westerly, Teague can't put a boat in, and if Teague can't put a boat in then he doesn't earn, and if he doesn't earn then he goes to Aberdeen, and Aberdeen is a town that has never once asked anything of him and would not be troubled to have him." The fire had gone out while he was talking. Morwenna neither got up nor commented, which was her way of making it clear that the fire was a matter between the three of them. "Mr Roache," Nell said. "The marker at the mouth has moved four metres to the south-west in two winters. That's not a design decision. That's the seabed doing what seabeds do, and the dredger contract was priced against a chart that is two years out of date. If I write a number that says the channel has moved, then the dredger digs where the channel is, and the dredger digging where the channel is will make the approach to your slip better, and not worse, and your brother will be able to put a boat in." Emmett Roache looked at her for long enough that it stopped being an introduction. "Will you write that down," he said. "In the book you people write in." "Yes." "Even knowing it makes your office's contract look wrong." "Especially then. The contract is priced against a wrong chart. That's not my office's fault and it's not the dredger's fault and it's certainly not the road out there. But the road out there is going to be dug according to what's actually in it, and if what's actually in it is a channel that has moved four metres, then that's the number that goes in the book, and your slip gets a better approach, and you can stop asking." He put his hand flat on the door frame, and took the weight off the bad knee by leaning, and did not say anything for a moment. When he spoke again he said it to the door frame. "Four years I've been going round that office." "I know." "Not once did anybody ask what the number would be. They just wanted a number." "That's not a complaint about your office. That's a complaint about everybody's office, and it's a true one, and I can't fix it from this room." He laughed, once, without any humour in it at all, which she had not expected and did not entirely know what to do with. "Right," he said. "Tomorrow. Seven, before the tide's got at the slip. Bring the boots you can get wet, not the ones your office bought you." "I'll bring my own." "I know you will," said Emmett Roache, and went out into the rain, and Morwenna Shand said, to nobody: "He's been in love with you since the Tuesday," and then got up and made more tea, and did not say anything else about the road.