Chapter 4 The Causeway at Low Water

It was not a low water. That was the thing Nell kept coming back to for the first hour, standing in the wet on the slip in a wind that came over the headland sideways, with her boots full and her notebook in the bag and the instruments in the bag because there was no point in them. "This is not it," she said. "No," said Emmett Roache. "It's three days off." "You said you'd show me why you want the channel moved. This is not the channel." "That's the channel." He nodded at the water, which was grey and moving fast and gave no indication of anything. "That's the whole of it. That's the approach, and in a westerly the tide comes up under the slip and the water you can see there becomes water you cannot see, and it's fast, and it's the difference between a Tuesday and a Sunday in March." Nell had the notebook out. She wrote: *slip approach, westerly, submerged berm, undetermined depth.* It was the kind of note that makes a dredger's afternoon either one minute shorter or one hour longer. "And this?" She turned to face the water where the stones showed through the pale. It was a long way out, past the line of the moored boats, and it was only visible because the light was going and the water was going with it. There was a shape out there. Not a rock. Rocks do not lie in a line. "That's it," Emmett said. "That'll be it." "That's what." "You know what that is." "I know what I can see, Mr Roache, and I can see a line of something under the water about two hundred metres out that could be geology or could be a rowing era training wall. If you want it surveyed I will survey it, and I will write down whatever it is, and I will not write down a road." He turned and looked at her, and for the first time since he had walked in out of the rain she saw how old he was, which was not as old as he was trying to look and not as young as he was carrying himself. "You're going to be here on the fourteenth," he said. It was the first sentence anyone had spoken about the road in the present tense, and it took the wind out of her hands for a second so that the notebook shut. "I'm in Carrowen until the sixteenth," she said. "I have the sheet to finalise, and there's a second pass on the inshore buoys, and the office wants—" "Yes. All of it. Fine." He turned back to the water. "It'll be the lowest of the year. There'll be about forty minutes of it and the water'll be further out than the harbour wall, and the road'll be up along the whole length of it, and you'll hear the stones under the water when it turns, and you won't need a surveyor because I'll show you." "Emmett." "You can write it down as geology. The dredger can't argue with geology and neither can your office. The road is not going anywhere, it's been there before every tide there has ever been, and one boat in three years is not a thing you lose a channel over." Nell did not write anything down. This was the first time in her working life that she had stood in a place with a notebook and chosen not to write, and she noticed herself noticing, which is a thing she usually got paid to prevent. "And if I did walk out there," she said, "on the fourteenth. What would happen." "You'd come back." "That's not what I asked." "It's what I know." He shifted his weight off the bad knee, and looked at the horizon where the water was going off into the last of the light. "I walked it once. I was twenty. I was with a girl called Rhiannon Trahar and there was bad blood in it, and the water was the lowest it had been that year, and we went out to the fourth marker because I wanted to see the end of it. And we came back, and she went to Glasgow in the autumn and I did not see her again, and I have never in twenty-six years wanted to go and find out whether the reason was the water or the blood." "And the stones?" "Different." He said it without drama at all, which was somehow much worse than if he had said it with drama. "The stones under a low spring make a noise like somebody counting. And they are not the same when you come back over them. You go out on the black ones and you come back and they're the black ones, that's the rule, everybody knows that, everybody's grandmother's rule. But the fourth marker isn't a black stone. The fourth marker is a white one, and nobody will tell you what that is, and the first time I went out I walked on it." "Emmett—" "And I have not been back." He said it flatly, to the water, the way a man reports a measurement. "Twenty-six years. Once a year at the lowest, and the road comes up two hundred metres off your slip, and I have watched it come up every time, and I have not once been on it, and that is the only decision I have ever made in my life that I would put in writing." Behind them, up the slip, a door opened and shut and there were footsteps, and a woman's voice, and it was Isolde Kerr coming down the hill with her bag over her arm and the letters in it, which she did every evening whether or not there was anything to deliver, because the post had to be walked whether or not there was post. "Emmett Roache," she said, from behind them, "if you're standing on the slip at this hour telling a woman things, I would like you to know that I deliver to this address and I do not repeat what I deliver, and that is precisely why people say things to me." "I wasn't saying anything." "You were saying it very loudly," said Isolde Kerr, and set her bag on the bollard, and took out two letters, and gave one to Nell by mistake, and then took it back and looked at the envelope and did not read it and handed it to Emmett. "Supposed to be for the herring store," she said. "Supposed to be. I have been doing this for nineteen years and I have never once known what I have."