Chapter 9 The Ledger of Small Hours

The account book was in a tin under the third board of the shed floor, and it had been under the third board of the shed floor since before Nell was born, and she found it on the Sunday because Morwenna had left the shed door open and the tin was on the bench with the lid off and not a cobweb on it. The book was aledger of the sea. She had known that it was. She had been told about it as a child, the way you are told about a well, in the past tense and as a fact about somebody else. It had not occurred to her that it was a working record. The tide for every day of every year, in Morwenna Shand's hand, in two columns, with the time of high water and the time of low water to the minute, and beside each low water a note if anything had happened. That was the shape of it. Eighty-odd years of a woman's handwriting recording the movement of a bay in the most complete private detail imaginable. *Ninth of March. LW 09:41. Nothing.* *Twenty-second of June. LW 12:04. Nothing.* *Fourteenth of April. LW 05:11. Out on the stones to the seventh. N. nine y.* Nell sat down on the shed floor with the book on her knees and read that line four times and then had to put the book down. It was not the only one. She went through the whole book over the following two days, in the two hours between four and six when the light was good and the shed was warm enough, and she made a list on separate paper so that the ledger itself stayed clean, and by the Tuesday she had ninety-one entries. The pattern was not a mystery and could not have been a mystery, and Nell found that the part of her which had spent eleven years being paid to look for patterns was almost angry at how simple it was. It happened on low spring tides. Not every one. The book recorded dozens of low springs where the note said *nothing*, and then one where it did not. And the ones where it did not were nearly always the lowest of the year, and nearly always the fourteenth of April, or near enough to it, and there were three other days in the eighty years that moved in the pattern and those three were in a different month, and when she looked at those three years the tide had been lower than it had ever been. The entries were short. That was the thing. She had expected something — a name and a mark, a person described. What she got was eight words at most, in the flat register of a woman recording a tide. *LW 04:52. Out to the fourth. Came back. R. T. went to Glasgow in the autumn.* *LW 04:58. Woman from Ardra out and back. Speaks the old way now. Cannot be got to answer.* *LW 05:03. Boy out past the marker. Would not say. Slept eleven hours after.* *LW 05:07. Out and back. Same.* *Same.* *Same.* The last eleven entries, spanning from 1988 to the present, said the same word. She read them in order and then read them again in a different order, checking for a day, a year, an incident, anything at all that might distinguish one from another, and there was nothing, because there was nothing to distinguish. Something had gone out on the road on eleven low springs in thirty-five years and come back and been the same, and Morwenna Shand had written *same* eleven times in a hand that did not change at all. Then Nell went back to the front of the book, to 1998, and read the whole of that spring. *Fourthteenth of April. LW 05:11. Out on the stones to the seventh. N. nine y.* The next line, for the fifteenth, was the same length as every other line in that month. *Fifteenth of April. LW 05:39. Nothing.* And the sixteenth. Nothing. The seventeenth. Nothing. Whatever had happened to a nine-year-old girl on the fourteenth of April 1998, it had not left a mark on the following three days, and Nell had spent twenty-two years not remembering it, and had come back to a village where the only person who had been on that wall that morning would not discuss it, and had been handed instead a brass key. She was still on the shed floor with the book open on her knees when Morwenna came in, and neither of them pretended, because it was too late in the day and too far in for that. "Ninety-one," said Morwenna. "You knew I'd count." "I've known what you'd count since you were old enough to count." She came and sat down on the bench opposite, and looked at the book, and did not reach for it. "That's the whole of it, Nell. There's no more in there than you can see. Your grandmother's grandmother kept it and she kept it the same way, and it's not because anybody wanted a record kept. It's because somebody has to be the person who writes it down, or else it's a thing that happened to somebody, and a thing that happened to somebody is just a thing that happened." "You watched me from a wall and you didn't come." "No." "Ten minutes. You told me an hour and ten minutes by your watch. You had a lamp." "I had a lamp and a bag of bait and a tide to sell in the morning and I was fifty-nine years old," said Morwenna, "and I had already lost one person I loved to that water and I was not going to be the reason a second one was lost to it in a different way, and I have never once regretted that and I will not start tonight to pretend to you that I might." Nell looked at her grandmother's hands, which were net-mender's hands, and had been net-mender's hands since 1961, and were steady, and had been steady on that wall in 1998. "Who was the first one," she said. "Ask me something else." "You said you'd lost somebody to that water. That's not a guess, that's you telling me, and I have four days of work here and then I go back, and I am asking you now while there are still four days." Morwenna Shand looked at the open book on her granddaughter's knees, and then at the door, and then out of the door at the bay, which was at half tide and going out. "Her name was Nella," she said. "And she was my sister, and she was thirty-one, and she went out on the fourteenth of April of 1946, and the war had been over for a year, and there was no war and there was no reason of any kind on the face of the earth, and she came back." "And?" "And she was the same," said Morwenna. "That's the whole of it and that's what I have never once said to a living soul. She came back the same, and she was my sister, and she was Nella, and in the June I asked her a question I had asked her every summer of her life and she gave me the answer without stopping to think about it, which is what she had always done, and I stood in my own kitchen in Carrowen and understood that the person standing in front of me was my sister and was not my sister, and that nobody in the world was ever going to be able to tell me which, and that I would spend the rest of my life being polite to a woman who had my sister's hands."