Chapter 16 The Short Sack

Tibb did the sums in the kitchen on the fourteenth, on the back of a flour sack, in pencil, and then she did them again on a different sack because she did not like the first answer. "It's short," she said. "Short by how much?" "By February." Pippa sat down on the end of the table and looked at the number. The house held food for eleven weeks. It had fifteen people in it and two of them were Selborne women who had come down a mountain to say a thing and had said it and were still there, out of politeness and because neither would go first. "They'll go in a fortnight," said Pippa. "They'll go when the pass opens, and the pass opens when the snow lets them, and in a bad year that's the middle of March." Tibb took her pencil off the sack. "There's eleven weeks. That's to the fourteenth of March on a good day and the sixth on a bad one. And there's no flour coming up because the mill's shut and the cart won't run till the pass is clear, and if I put my hand on the flour I can do to the third of March. If I put my hand on the salt we don't get to the twentieth." "How many could we let go?" "Two." "Who?" "That's your job and not mine," said Tibb, "and I'll tell you now that if you say a doctor I'll put the pencil down and go and lie down." * * * Pippa did not put anybody out. She went down to the cellar on the fifteenth and moved the house's own allowance to the back of every shelf, behind the flour, where it had to be reached for, and she wrote it in the book, in the accounts column, as a resolution, with a date: *From the fifteenth the household allowance is last. Guests and the village before the house.* The household allowance was hers and Wilby's, and it was forty pounds of flour between them for the winter, and she and Wilby ate the back of it out of a bin with the lid down like two people stealing. Wilby found out on the sixteenth and came and found her. "That's not clever," he said. "No." "It's not a good idea to be clever with your own house in February. The house notices." He looked at the shelves for a while. "There's two hundredweight of meal in the cartshed that belongs to no one. I know it belongs to no one because I saw the coach company put it there in 1988 for a contract they cancelled and never came back for, and nobody has ever asked me what's in my cartshed because asking would make it theirs." "Then it's the coach company's." "No," said Wilby. "It's the coach company's in the sense that the sun is the sun. It's nobody's, which is a different thing entirely, and if you write it in that book under *Given* somebody will be cross in about 2030. Write it under the other one. Write it under debts, and put it down as owing to the house, and let the house pay it back to itself in thirty years out of nothing, which is how this valley has worked for two hundred years." * * * The sacks went out on the seventeenth, and the news went round the valley faster than the sacks did. By the nineteenth there were eleven different things left on the Hollowell step in the night, and Pippa gave up trying to keep a list and started writing them in the back of her own book instead, under a heading she had not thought of until she found herself needing one. She called it *The Step*, and she filled four pages of it by the end of January, and it turned out to be the best record she kept that winter, because it was the only page in the book that nobody had written to hide anything. A side of mutton from the Kerriths. Twelve eggs, wrapped in a cloth, from Bredon's cottage. Butter. A jar of greengage. Four pounds of tea from Trevose, and under it, in his terrible hand: *From the office. The office is not a person and has no stores, but I have a tin.* And on the twenty-first, a single sack of flour, forty pounds, on the step at midnight, with no note, and with a maker's mark on the corner that Pippa could not place. She carried the mark down to the kitchen on a Saturday and showed it to Gammon. "That's not ours." "I know it's not ours. What is it?" "Half past," said Gammon, taking the sack by one corner and tilting it. "Half past is a brand out of the southern counties. But this is the old cut of it. That's the die they used before they changed the die, and they changed the die in about 1968, so anything with that on it is eight-and-thirty years old or more." "So it's an old sack with an old mark on it and nobody's name." "It's a sack somebody has been keeping," said Gammon, "for a long time, in a dry place, against a bad winter." * * * The pedlar came up on the twenty-third, on foot, with a hand-barrow. Goodman Wrenfield was sixty and enormous and had been selling small goods between the passes for thirty years, and he had got the last cart up on the eighteenth and walked the rest, and he came into the yard and put the barrow down and looked at the house and the eleven lamps in the passage and said, "Well. They said there was still somebody keeping it." "Who said?" "Everybody. There's a woman in Bredon cottage said there was, and a man at the gate said there wasn't, and I came up to see which." He rubbed his hands. "I've a barrow of nothing. That's the truth of it and I'd sooner say it at the door. I came up with four hundred pounds of goods and the road shut on me with a hundred and forty in it, and what's in the barrow now is what's left: thread, tape, two combs, a horn, some bootlaces, a paper of needles, and about ninety feet of oil lamp wick." "That last one's yours to leave here," said Pippa. "I've eleven lamps and I buy oil and I have been burning the wick I had in November and putting it back together since." "Aye," said Wrenfield. "I thought as much." * * * He stayed three days and slept on the settle in the common room and sold, in three days, almost nothing, which he bore philosophically. "What's the matter with them, miss?" he said on his second night. "I've been round this valley thirty year and there's a baker, a smith, a postman and a doctor, and in three nights I've sold one comb." "They've nothing and they've been snowbound since Christmas." "Aye, but a body's not buying when a body's not got any," said Wrenfield, "and that's the whole of retail and always has been. But there's another thing and I'll say it to you because you'll hear it from nobody. Nobody up here will be short of oil till March." "That's not a thing anybody would tell me." "It's a thing I've not got to tell you, miss, it's a thing I can see." He nodded at the window, at the weather. "You've a chimney smoking good and eleven lamps burning and a store of coal in that back yard that I've seen from the lane and I know who bought that coal, because there's one coal man in this valley and he came up the road in October and he went to Selborne and he did not come up this lane." "That's not possible. The road was open in October." "The road was open," Wrenfield agreed. "The coal man didn't come up this lane. So that's my barrow's worth of advice, which is worth a great deal more than the barrow, and you can pay me in bread." * * * She paid him in bread. He went down on the twenty-sixth with an empty barrow and a hundred and forty pounds of cash in a belt, and at the top of the lane he turned round and shouted, unasked: "It's an old mark, miss! The one on the sack! It's the mark of a bakehouse, not a mill! Old cut die, southern counties, and there's one of them left in the north and it's not a bakehouse anybody's using, because there's nobody left up the coast that wants flour brought in by sea!" He was gone down the lane before she could ask. She stood in the yard with the sack at her feet and the gate swinging, and the snow beginning again, and she worked it out the way she worked everything out, by walking round it. An old mark. Flour kept dry for thirty years. A bakehouse nobody is using because there is nobody left on that coast. And, in the ledger at the back of the register, in a damp grey hand that had begun writing in the small hours: *Two names in one book is one name too many.* * * * That night she wrote in *The Step* page, in her own hand, in the middle of a list of eggs and tea and greengage: *Flour sack, 40 lbs, mark unplaced. Gammon says it is thirty years old or more and made south of here. W. says it is a bakehouse mark and there is only one left on that coast and nobody uses it. A house has been kept dry and shut and stocked on a coast where nobody lives, by somebody who has never once written a name. That is either a very sad thing or a very useful one, and I have not got to the bottom of it, and I am going to leave the sack where it is until I do.* ---