Chapter 33 The Man Who Left His Name

## Collis Ferrenby There is a thing that happens to a man in a corridor on the last morning, and it is that the corridor is different and he is not. I have walked out of a great many rooms in my life and I have never once walked out of one that had eleven lamps in it, and I want to put down, while I can still hear the whole of it, that a man who has spent two and a half years being a man with a hole where his name is does not hear a corridor. He hears a set of facts about a corridor. Eleven brackets. The smell of tallow and hot brass. A girl of eleven on the stair with a lamp in her hand and a cloth on her sleeve. The ninth lamp at the foot of the stair, crooked, on the left. I knew all of it in January and none of it until this morning. * * * I got up at five and packed, which took four minutes, because I had not unpacked since November, and at five-fifteen I went out of my room with my bag and went down the four stairs and the three steps and along the passage and there were already two people up. I had meant to go down early and be gone before anybody was down. That is what you do when you have spent two and a half years being the sort of man who leaves quietly, and I got to the bottom of the stairs and there was the old woman of ninety-one in a dressing gown and shawl sitting on the settle with her feet up on the fender and a cup of tea, and there was the shepherd leaning in the kitchen doorway, and there was the Thawkeeper with a lamp in her hand, which was not one of them, which was the whole of them. "You're up," she said. "I'm going down at six." "You'll go down at six," she said, "and there are eleven people in this house and nine of them are going to want to be up, and you have been in it since the eleventh of December and you are going to be walked to the gate." * * * I am not a man who cries in rooms. I will say that for myself and let the record stand, and I did not cry in the corridor of the Hollowell on the twenty-ninth of April, and I am not going to pretend to anybody that I had it in hand. What I had instead was this. At half past five I stood in the middle of the passage with eleven people in it and I put my hand flat on the dark wall beside the fourth bracket, and I said: "I'm going to say one thing and then I'm going to hold my tongue for a fortnight, which if anybody in this valley knows is a considerable undertaking." "There's a room for that at my end," said the doctor. "In 1978," I said, "I had a name. I ran a mill. I had a wife and a house and eleven men on the payroll and a brother in the next county who could not get work and could not be told, and I had built the mill up out of a ruin and I was proud of it in a way that had gone to my head, and on an evening in January I came out onto the mill yard with a bottle in my hand and I said to him, in front of two men, *have the mill, have the house, have my name, you can have the lot, and I hope you choke on it.*" Nobody said a word. That's the thing about that kind of sentence. It gets in. "He had the mill," I said. "He has the mill and the house and my name, and he is a better man than I was and he has been for eleven years and will be for as long as he lives, and I would do it again, and I would do it differently, and I have not been able to work out in eleven years which of those two things is the true one." "That is not true," said the old woman. "It is the truest thing I've got, and I'm the only person here who knows about it, so you'll let a man be accurate in his own house." "I'll let a man be accurate," she said. "I shan't let a man be accurate *and* alone. Those are two arrangements and you get to have one of them and you have been having the other since 1978, and I'd say it's time you had this one." * * * So I came to the lectern at five-forty and I took the pen, the bad pen, the one with the split nib, and I stood in front of the register with eleven people behind me in a passage, and I could not do it. I shall tell you what the trouble was. It was not that I was ashamed. It was that I could make it true in about nine words and I did not have nine words that were the right nine words. I have spent two and a half years being a man whose problem was that he did not have a name, and it turned out on the morning of the twenty-ninth of April that I had had a name the entire time and the problem was that I had been using it as a bolt-hole. You do not get to put down the true sentence when the true sentence has changed underneath you, and you certainly do not get to write the one from November to be kind to yourself. "Pippa." "Miss Danby." "Collis," said the woman who kept the register. "Write it and get it over. You are about to walk off down a mountain alone and if you die on the Holbeck road in April somebody will find you and there will be nothing in your pocket but a loaf and a brass lamp, and I shall have to go down and identify you, and I have never in my life spoken to your brother and I don't intend to start at a wake." * * * So I wrote: *I am Collis Ferrenby, of the mill at Amberley in the south country, which I ran for eleven years and gave to my brother in the winter of 1978 in a temper with a bottle in my hand, and I have been wearing the name of that mill ever since like a coat off a peg, and today is the twenty-ninth of April and I am going down to Sandsgate with a letter from a baker about flour.* *And I put the name at the top as well, because the rule says a true sentence and I have discovered that a true sentence with the name at the bottom of it is a lie with the name on top of it.* *And I would like it entered that I was fed for one hundred and thirty-nine days by people who had nothing, in a house that had been given away and was given away properly.* *And I would like it entered that a woman held the ninth lamp in a corridor for four hours a night so that a deaf man could hear a tune, and that I heard it, and that she will never know how well.* * * * The register has forty pages for the guests and I filled one and a half of them, and then I put the pen down and sat on the bottom step of the stair with my bag between my feet and let it be done. * * * I went down at six. The coach was at the gate at half past seven and there was a crowd on it, because the pass had opened and everybody in three valleys wanted to be on it, and I got on at the front and put my bag in the rack and then came back off it, because I had a lamp. The seventh. I asked her for it at seven in the morning on the twenty-ninth of April and she said no, and I said it was the only one I had asked for in a hundred and thirty-nine days and I was asking it for a reason, and she said, "You are not taking a lamp down a mountain to a coast in April, Ferrenby, there is nothing to keep out." "I'm taking it to Sandsgate." "There's nothing out at Sandsgate. It's been out since the wall went in 1954." "There's a woman at Sandsgate who sent flour to this valley for two winters and never once gave her name," I said, "and she died in 1981, and a baker has got her letter in a tin, and I'm going to take it down to four families and a wall." She went away and came back with it wrapped in a coat, and she put it in my hands at the gate, and she would not let me thank her for it, and the old woman of ninety-one came out in her dressing gown to the gate in the wind to say four words, which were: "Take the long way round." * * * And then the seventh lamp went out at half past eight in the morning on the twenty-ninth of April with eleven people standing in a yard, and everybody saw it, and everybody said nothing at all, because it is a lamp and it was lit and then it wasn't. Afterwards Ferrenby — that is me, that is what it says on the page, that is what the book calls me now — I turned round on the step of the coach and said, "Is that allowed?" And Pippa Danby said: "There's a column at the back headed *Not written against*. And I have read that column for four months and I have never once seen a lamp out of a bracket in it in a hundred and twenty-one years, and I have concluded that in this house it is not allowed, and I have concluded that today I am going to write it in anyway, with the date on it, and that whoever comes next is going to find the line and read it twice." So they wrote it, and I saw her writing it from the window of the coach, which is the last thing I saw of the Hollowell until August. * * * The coach went down to Selborne in three hours and I did not get off, and I got off at Wintergate because that is where a man gets off who is going to walk. There are four days' walk from Wintergate to the coast, or there were, and in April of this year it was six, and I did it in seven because I was carrying a lamp and a tin and a letter, and because I stopped at a farm on the second night and slept, which I had not planned. The Holbeck road was the worst of it and I was on it on the second of May, and I walked up past the wall where Nancarrow said there had been a boy's prints in fresh snow in January, and there was a lot of snow now and the wind had taken it to the hard ground again, and it was carrying. I went through Wrenlow on the fourth of May at about four in the afternoon, and there is nothing at Wrenlow. That is the thing you have to be told before you get there. A village of ninety houses in 1890 and a bakehouse with a die cut by a man who cut two, and a flood in 1954 took the bakehouse wall and the sea wall and eleven houses and the rest went over about a hundred years, one house at a time, and now there are four families at the top of the road who keep each other going, and a church with no roof, and a beach with a great deal of shingle on it. The bakehouse wall is still there. It is down to about four feet and it runs for a hundred yards along the top of the beach and it is not a wall any more in any sense that a builder would recognise, and it is the most obviously made thing on that coast for a hundred miles. I stood at the end of it at half past four on the fourth of May with a lamp in a coat and a tin in my bag and no idea whatever what I was going to say, and that is when the woman came out of the fourth house. She was perhaps seventy. She had a bucket. "You're the one with the letter," she said. "How do you know about that?" "Because there was a letter once," said the woman, "and it never came, and the woman who wrote it came herself in the summer of sixty-two and stood about where you're standing and asked us if we'd had a bakehouse here, and we said no, and she said yes you had, and she stood about where you're standing and cried about it for about ten minutes, and then she went off down the beach to look at the wall." She put the bucket down. "And she died in eighty-one and we heard about it, and we never did anything about it, and I've had forty-four years of nothing doing about it." She held out her hand. * * * I gave her the letter. She did not read it. She looked at the paper and looked at the postmark and looked at the paper again, and then she said, "That's not hers." "It's in his father's hand," I said. "The baker's father. He kept it for thirty years." "Then that's a thing that ought to be at his house and not at mine," she said. "But he's on a mountain nine hundred feet above the sea and I've got a fire in and I've a kettle on, and you can sit down, and you can tell me the whole of it from the beginning, because I've got nowhere to be and you look like a man who has been on a road a long while." So I told her the whole of it from the beginning. About the flour in the second week of December and the mark on the sack and the old cut of the die. About Gammon's seal with the two points and the three. About the woman in 1961 who had asked, in a letter posted on the third of February from Sandsgate, for a seal to be kept in a deep room, and had been told that a seal is not a thing you may put under a hearth-stone. She stopped me at that. "Say that again." "A seal is not a thing you may put under a hearth-stone." "She said that to her." The woman got up and put both hands on the table. "She wrote to Cressida's aunt and Cressida's aunt wrote back and said no. That's the letter. It isn't in the bag. It's in the bag with the suit, and it's in your trunk under the window in the mountain, and it came back to us in nineteen sixty-four in a tin with nine sacks of nothing and it's never been opened." * * * I did not sleep that night. I sat on the beach at Wrenlow from about eleven until about two in the morning with a dead lamp wrapped in a coat, and I went over the whole of it, and there were three things in it that I have not been able to put down anywhere and am putting down here. The first is that she asked. That is all. In 1961 a woman on a coast with no bakehouse and no flour and four families and a wall asked a woman on a mountain for permission to put a piece of iron under a hearth-stone, and was told no, and did it anyway in the sense that she sent it up with the flour and never mentioned it again, and said thank you for the flour and nothing else, and wrote one more letter in 1962 and got no answer at all, and lived twenty more years and never told anybody she had been refused. The second is that the refusal was right. Cressida's aunt was right. Iron under a hearth-stone in a house where nine hundred people eat is not a thing you put there because a stranger asked you to in a letter. It would have been a piece of somebody else's luck in a house that had spent four hundred years arranging to have no luck in it. I have thought about that for a long while and I am certain of it now, and I would not have wanted a different answer. The third is that being right is a thing you can say to a person on a beach in 1991, and a person who was refused in 1961 and told nothing until 1991 is owed that sentence whatever else she is owed, and nobody in this valley has ever given it to her, and I am a man who ran a mill and gave his name away in a yard with a bottle in his hand and I am the last person alive who ought to be the one to say it, and I am going to walk back up that road and say it, and I shall say it badly, and I shall say it at the end, and it will have to do. * * * There are five days' walk home, and it was eight, and I came up the Holbeck road on the ninth of May with a dead lamp in a coat, and the pass was open and the fields on the Selborne side were the greenest I have ever seen anybody's fields. There is a coach up from Selborne on Tuesdays and Saturdays and I got on it at Wintergate with a basket nobody had asked me to carry. The coach came into Fernhollow at twenty past four in the afternoon with the whole village on it, and the first man down was a woman of ninety-one in a shawl, and after her a woman of fifty-three in an apron who got off with four baskets, and after her a shepherd with his hand in a sling, and after him a fiddle player with a case taller than he was and a boy of seventeen carrying a box of lamp oil. And then the whole lane was full of people at once, and Pippa Danby came out of a door with a log book under her arm, and did not come down the lane to meet anybody, and stood on the step and said, "There's tea in, and there's bread, and the register's on the lectern and anybody who wants to write a true sentence may write one." * * * I am not going to describe the rest of that afternoon, because I have been asked not to. ---