Chapter 24 The Man Who Wanted to Walk Out

Amberley — Ferrenby — came down for his boots at half past six on the sixth of March and found Pippa in the passage, sitting on the bottom stair, in the dark, in her coat. "Marlowes said you'd come out in the cold." "Marlowes says a great deal for a man who can't hear past his own elbow." "He said you were on the stairs. He said you looked like you'd been there a while." She got up. "You can sleep until four if you want. There's the lamp in your room and the register's on the lectern and the kitchen's shut." "Is the rule lifted?" "The rule is not lifted. It's nine weeks since it lifted. It's forty-one weeks long, by the actual text, and it doesn't say a word about March, and the second line says no keeper either." "Then you'll have somebody after me." "I'll have a doctor in a bag and a great deal of arguing and a woman of ninety-one who will make a scene on the step," said Pippa. "And I'll have to write it in the book, and you'll have to be in it while I do." Ferrenby stood in the dark passage with one boot on. "I have been in this house for eleven weeks," he said. "I've had your bread and your broth and your lamps and a page of my own with a man's real name on it, and there's eleven people here who have eaten with me and one of them is a cook who has never once looked at me to see whether I am fed, which I have understood, because I have worked in a kitchen and I know exactly what that is." "Say what you've come to say." "I've come to say I am going to walk out of this house at seven in the morning and go down the road to the pass, and if the pass is shut I shall walk to it and sit at it until it opens, because I have been a man with a hole where his name is for two and a half years and I have discovered that the hole is worse than the cold." He set the boot down. "And I am telling you at half past six at night instead of at seven in the morning, because you have never once in eleven weeks let me lie to you and I would like, if I am permitted one thing before I go, to be a man who says things out loud." "Go and put your coat on." "Where are we going?" "Out to the posts," said Pippa. "Where do you think?" * * * They walked out at seven in the morning with the seventh lamp and a hooded lantern, and it was twenty-two degrees below freezing and there was no wind, which was somehow much worse than wind. "You've not argued," Ferrenby said, at the yard gate. "I've not argued." "Eleven weeks. Not once." "There's no point arguing with a person who is owed an exit by the rule itself," said Pippa. "Page one. *No guest may leave before the thaw.* He didn't write *and may never leave*. He wrote the other one, and the other one is my great-aunt's aunt's sentence from 1902, and I have found out this month from a woman of ninety-one that the true sentence is about the ground being soft enough to take a cart. So no. I have not argued. I have decided what to do instead." "And what is that?" "That you will walk to the line with me, and if you set one foot over the posts I shall put a hand on your coat, and if you set the second one I shall shout, and there are nine people in that house who will hear me and all of them will come out in the cold and watch a man stand on a frozen hill and decide." Ferrenby walked on for a minute. "That's absurd," he said. "That's the arrangement. I made it up on the stairs at six o'clock this morning and you may tell me it is absurd all the way to the top and I shall not alter a word of it." * * * The snow was thin now and hard and had gone grey on top, and the posts were down to about four feet of drift on the wall side and stood out black and clear above it, and the ridges were gone — all of them, all nine up on the top and all seven along the wall, gone flat back into the ground in eleven days. "Where's the ring?" said Ferrenby. "Under about a foot. You'll not see it. Come on." He went up in front because she made him, and Pippa came after with the seventh lamp, and when they got to the shoulder she told him to stand still and not to step forward, and he said, "Why?" "Because you would be over." * * * She stood on the near side of the ring with the lamp and looked at the floor of it: the iron packed in, the crust set hard, the green railway lamp standing up on its little foot in the middle with nine inches of drifted snow banked round its base. "There's a lamp in the middle of a ring on a mountain," Ferrenby said, "in the middle of nine feet of snow, and nobody's put it there and nobody's taken it away." "A hundred and sixty-one years." "That's a hundred and sixty-one years in the cold with a wick in it." "It's out," said Pippa. "Look at it. It's out and the glass is unbroken and the wick is clean, and it was burning the whole of the winter of 1961 when the snow came up off the ground and a woman in this valley sat up four nights with it." Ferrenby did not answer for a while. Then he said: "What did you say to it? On the thirtieth of January. I heard you through the floor of my room, because I do not sleep, and I heard you say a paragraph to a stone." "You were awake." "I was awake for all of it. I heard you go out at nine and come in at ten and light eleven lamps, and I heard one of them change its note, and I came down and stood at the bottom of your stairs for about a minute, and then I went back up, because it was not my business." He pulled his collar up. "I've thought about it every day since. I thought, that woman has made a speech to a mountain. And this morning I have walked out of a house where a man made a speech to a stone and I have decided that everything I do with the rest of my life gets decided on this hill, so I should like to know what you said before I decide it." * * * So Pippa told him. She told him all of it: the ridge of iron coming up through the snow and the green lamp and the fourteen, and the four hundred yards and twenty feet of warm room underneath, and the slate and the sixty-one years of temperatures taken twice a day, and the fact that she had made the words up because nobody had given them to her, and that she had said them out loud on a frozen hill in the dark to whatever had come up out of the ground through a ring of iron filings set in 1829. Ferrenby listened to all of it without a word. When she had finished he said: "That is a very small job." "Yes." "You stood on a frozen hill in the dark with a hand lamp and told a mountain that you did not know how to keep it and that you were keeping it anyway, and you said the word *anyway*." "That's what I said." "And there was a lamp in the ring with a wick in it and you told me it was out." "It was out." "Then it will need lighting," said Ferrenby. "Who lights it?" "I do." "By what authority?" "That's the whole of my question," said Pippa. "It's the question I have been putting to that book since September and the only answer I have had is in damp ink at four in the morning, and the damp ink will not sign anything." * * * Ferrenby looked at the ring for a long time. "My name is Collis Ferrenby," he said. "I have never in my life written that name in a book that somebody else would keep. I wrote it once, in December, on a page you gave me, and I have read it every night since and I did not know why I read it every night until about four o'clock this morning on a stair in your house." "And now?" "Now I know why," he said. "Because it was in there. With the rest of the sentences. That's what a register is. It is not a list of guests. It's a list of things that were true, and somebody kept it, and it only counts if somebody else reads it." He turned round to face her. "I'll stay." "You'll stay until the pass opens. That is the entire promise and I would like it in those words." "I'll stay until the pass opens and then I'll go down it on the coach and get a room in Selborne and start again from nothing with my name, which is the first time since 1978 that I have started again from anything." He looked at her. "And on my way down I am going to stop at Sandsgate, because a woman sent flour to this valley for two winters in 1961 and 1962 and never gave her name, and a baker on this mountain has a letter in a tin that says so, and I have been a man who carries things for a living and I find that I have an appetite for carrying something to somebody who has been waiting thirty years for it to arrive." * * * At the second post he stopped and turned round. "Miss Danby." "Miss Danby is my aunt. It's Pippa." "Pippa." He said it as though he were trying it in a new room. "Then say it plainly, because I am asking it as a man who has been carrying somebody else's name since 1978 and I would like to hear a woman ask me a direct question. In your aunt's column, in the back, under *Given*, in your own hand — is there a line that says I gave it away?" * * * Pippa had been carrying a pencil in her apron since the second of January, and she had not needed it, and she took it out now. "There is not," she said. "There is a line that says *Flour. Nine sacks. With a seal. By a person of the village, and she is not to be asked*, and it is in the damp hand, not mine, and it is dated the third of February 1961, and I am not going to copy it out in ink because if I copy it out in ink it becomes my line, and it is not my line." "Then what do I do?" "You carry a baker's letter four days' walk to a wall on a coast," said Pippa, "and you give it to whoever is living in the house behind the wall, and you do not ask for anything, and if they give you bread you eat it and you say thank you and you go." Ferrenby stood in the snow at the second post with the seventh lamp lighting one side of his face. "That's the first sentence anybody has written for me in two and a half years," he said, "and I have to walk back up a hill to hear it, and it is a sentence about flour." "It's about a great deal more than flour. Go home. It's eight o'clock and there's a woman of ninety-one who wants to know why I took the dog out at six in the morning." ---