Chapter 13 Mowbray's Beam

The beam over the kitchen range had been going since before Pippa came, and she only found out on the third of January, because Mowbray told her. Mowbray was eighty-one. He came up on the ninth of every month to mend what wanted mending, and he had been coming up to this house since 1931, and he was a small dry man with a beard cut square and hands like a pair of root vegetables. He stood under the beam with his head on one side. "There," he said. "I see a beam." "There's a crack in it a fathom long and it's got rot in the middle where the mallet went in 'ninety-one, and the day there's a fire in that range and the flue's cold, that beam's going to come down on the head of whoever's standing under it." "Who?" "You," said Mowbray. "You stand under it. Everybody stands under it. It's a range, you've to stand at a range." "Then have it out." "I can't have it out." "Why not?" "Because there isn't another one." He said it flatly, the way a man says a thing he has said a great many times and has never enjoyed. "Not in this valley. Not within forty miles I could get to by cart. There's a beam of that oak in Sablewood timberyard and they cut in March and in March this pass is shut and I can't fetch it and I'd not have it in the house before April, and if it came down on you in February you'd be past helping before Tibb got the cloth off the pan." * * * "Then I'll take the range out of service." "You'll take the range out of service in the middle of the hardest winter this house has had in forty years, with fifteen people in it, and then in March you'll put it back in and the chimney'll never draw right again because a mason has been in and he's not the mason that built it." He pulled his cap down. "I'll tell you what to do and you'll not like it either. I'll scarf a new length in and peg it, four-foot oak out of my own stack, and be sixty years making it as strong as that beam was on the day it went in." "At whose expense?" "That's the part you'll like." * * * "Wilby," Pippa said, in the passage, "how much does Mowbray owe this house?" Wilby took his time about it. "There is a sum," he said. "It has been in the accounts since 1974 and it has not moved since 1974, and I have never once been told what it is for, and your aunt refused to have it settled, and I have her reason on a bit of paper in the kitchen drawer which I am not going to read out because it is not mine." "That's not an answer." "It's the only one I've got." * * * Mowbray had the range out by eight the next morning and the old beam down by ten, and what was above the old beam was a floor of lath and plaster that had been black for sixty years, and in the middle of it a shallow brick arch with a tin behind it, and behind the tin a hollow. Pippa was holding the lamp. "That's not a flue," Mowbray said. "That's a cold box. And that's the flue, that tin, and it goes up inside the chimney breast and comes out under the hearth in the parlour." "Why would you have two?" "Somebody did it," said Mowbray, "for the range to draw better, and the range did draw better, and the parlour fire drew worse, and a hundred and sixty years later the parlour fire's been a fire nobody ever complains about because whoever laid this house laid two flues and everybody since has been frightened to change it." * * * She went back to the kitchen drawer that night, after he had gone, and found what Wilby had said he would not read out. It was a slip of paper in her aunt's hand, and it said: *Mowbray put this beam in on the eleventh of May, 1958, for nothing, because there was no other oak and because Cressida's mother was dying and there was nobody to send for it. He has never taken a penny and has never once been asked, because he would have said no and then he would have held it against her for the rest of his life, and a man who is held against is a man who stops coming. Let him have his beam. Let him think the beam is why he comes. Mowbray is sixty-eight and this house is all he has ever been proud of and a man must be allowed one sentence about himself.* Pippa sat on the edge of the range table with the paper in her hand for a long time. Then she got out a sheet of writing paper and began to make a list, and when the list was done it read: One. Mowbray will have his beam and will not be told he is being paid. Two. Pelyn Sedgewick, of the post house, seventeen, will be asked to come up on Mondays and Tuesdays and will hold the other end of everything Mowbray holds, and Mowbray will be told he is teaching the boy because the boy asked, and not otherwise, for ever. Three. The line about the two flues goes into the accounts book, in Mowbray's own hand, with his name and the year, because a thing a man writes down himself is worth more than a thing he is given. * * * She caught him in the yard on the Thursday. "There's a boy coming Mondays," she said. "Sedgewick, off the post. He'd like to learn. I said he asked you and you said he could, which was a lie, so I'll say now that I asked him to come and I'd like you to show him." Mowbray looked at the scarf joint for a while. "I'd be the third old fool in this house teaching somebody something they didn't ask to learn." "Yes," said Pippa. He worked on the beam for another hour. "There's one more thing about the beam," he said at last, without looking up. "I been on this house sixty-four year and there's oak in the cartshed, and oak in the byre, and a beam in the kitchen and a beam over the parlour, and I put two of them in, and in the whole time there has been exactly one piece of oak in this house that has never once been alight." "What does that mean?" "Means it hasn't caught," said Mowbray, "which for oak is a thing I'd not bet a week's wage on. And I have thought about it, and I have decided I'd rather not think about it, and I've not said so to Cressida and I'm not saying so to you, and now the boy's coming Monday and I'll not be able to not think about it." He planed the joint smooth and knocked the peg home. "Set the lamps, miss," he said. "It's near six and the seventh wants doing last." * * * That night Pippa wrote in the accounts column, in her own hand, and then read it back and thought about what she had written for a long time before she left it where it was. *Mowbray is not in my debt and never was. He put the kitchen beam in in 1958 for nothing and I have found out why and I am not going to tell him. He has eleven hours on Mondays and Tuesdays, a boy to hold things for, and an account of his own to sign in the front of the book, and that is all he has wanted since before I was born. The beam stands.* * * * Underneath, in the margin, the damp grey ink had come again, faint, in the small hours. *He has never told her about the beam underneath the beam.* ---