Chapter 37 The Chair by the Fire

Wilby Bryce turned seventy on the second of May and the house gave him a supper and a pound and a bad clock, and on the fourth of May he came down to the kitchen at half past five in the afternoon, which he had never once done in forty years, and said: "I should like to say something to the house and I should like to say it before I stop being able to." * * * They got him a chair. This was the difficulty of the whole business, and everybody in the room knew it before he had got his coat off. There was no chair. There had been no chair in the Hollowell for as long as anybody could remember, and the reason there was no chair was Wilby: he had moved one out of the long room in 1974 and put it in the passage and then in 1979 he had moved that one out to the yard, and there had been a chair in this house that a man kept moving out of the rooms where people sat, for forty years, so that there would always be one fewer. Pippa went and got it off the wall in the yard where it had hung on two nails in the rain for sixteen winters. "That's the chair," said Tibb. "That's the chair." "It hasn't been sat in since 1951." "It has been sat in," said Pippa, "you sit in it. You sit in it to reach the second shelf, and I have watched you do it eleven times this winter, and you have been standing on a flour sack." * * * He was put at the long table, third from the fire, on the near side, which was where the name in pencil was. He did not want it. He sat in it for nine minutes and moved four times and said twice that a man of seventy does not sit at the long table, and then Pelyn Sedgewick said, "Mr Wilby, in ten weeks' time I'm going to be doing your job at six o'clock in the morning, and I'd like you to tell me now, while you're in the chair, how you know which of the eleven wants doing first when the house is full and Tibb's got the fire in the range and it's raining." And Wilby Bryce told him. He told him for an hour and ten minutes. He told him about the oil store and the cans and the jug and why the jug has water in the bottom of it. He told him about the fourth and why you bring the fourth up before you light anything else, so that the man coming down out of the weather has a lamp in the passage to come home to. "Hold on," said Bredon, at some point. "You bring the fourth up first?" "Before the fire's lit. Go on." "Before the fire's lit," Bredon repeated, and wrote it down, and Pippa saw her write it down and understood at last why a schoolmistress had come up a mountain in a snowstorm and been the most useful person in the house for four months. * * * At the end of it he said his piece. "Four things," he said. "And then I'll stop talking, because that's what I'm stopping at seventy for." * * * "One. The housekeeper keeps the keeper. Not the building and not the money. The keeper. Whoever is holding the book. She has been here since the first of December and she has not once come down to this kitchen after eleven o'clock at night since the twelfth of March, because she has been at a sick man's bedside four nights a week, and that is what I have been for, and I would like it said in the room that I know what she has been doing, because there is no way on this earth she could have known that I knew, and I never said a word." * * * "Two. The thaw. The rule says before the thaw, and every fool in this valley thinks it means March. It means the ground. Soft enough to take a cart. There is a week in April when the pass is open and the sky's blue and there is still a cart on the low road that goes through, and if that week comes before your feet go and you go out into it on your own two legs, you will be halfway to the gate before the sky turns. "Snow does not fall. Snow arrives. And it arrives after the foot, not with it." * * * "Three. This house has been wrong four times since the second of January. A lamp cut at the collar in 1961. A rule rubbed out with a rubber in January. A flame put out in a corridor for eleven weeks by a young man who didn't want to play in front of anybody. And a woman who stood at an oven door for forty-four years and nobody asked her." He looked round the table. "Every one of those was done to somebody else and nobody thought of it as a thing done to somebody else. A worm under the seat of a chair. That's what a fault is in a house. It isn't a bad man. It's a thing done to a person that the person who did it never had in their head." * * * "Four," he said, "and this is the one I have been not saying since 1987 and I'll say it now because a man of seventy has nothing left to lose but the pleasure of getting hold of somebody's elbow." He turned round on the chair. "Ask her what she is afraid of." Nobody moved. "It's in the book. In the margin. Has been since the eighth of January, four months, four in the morning, and she's not told a living soul, including the woman who wrote the question for her, and I have watched her not tell about four times and I have known what it said for about three of them, because I read it, and because I have been standing in this kitchen for forty years and I know what a person looks like when they're carrying something they cannot put down." * * * Pippa said, "You read it." "I read it in the small hours on the eleventh of January," said Wilby. "I got up at four because the house was making a noise it doesn't make, and I went to the lectern and the register was open and it had four lines on it in a hand I hadn't seen, and I read them, and I went back to bed and I have been in this house since the first of December not saying four words to a woman I could have said in November." * * * "You should have said it." "I should have said a great deal and I have got it in my head and out of it by the time I open my mouth, and it isn't your job to hear it from a man with a stick." He got up, and picked up his stick, and stopped. "Ninth lamp," he said. "Ninth lamp's lit, Mr Wilby." "Aye," said Wilby. "I know. It's lit. I could smell it from the top of the stairs." He went out. And in the doorway he stopped and said: "It's the chair, by the way. It's the one at the long table. I never moved that one out." "I know you didn't." "Aye," he said. "I moved every other one." * * * Pippa stood in the middle of her own kitchen and put her hand flat on the table. "Sella." She was at the top of the stair. "Go and get the register off the lectern and bring it to the common room and tell Pelyn to put the kettle on and tell Tibb to come and sit down, and tell the doctor, because he's in the room over the parlour and he is not to be got up for anything except an entry in that book." "The doctor will come." "He will." "The woman of ninety-one will say no." "Tell her Kerrith that I have been asked a question by a housekeeper and that I am going to answer it in front of everybody and that I should like her in the room." * * * *What am I afraid of.* She stood in the passage with nine people in the common room and the register open on the lectern and eleven lamps burning behind her in the order, and she found, when she started looking for it, that she already knew, and had known since the eighth of January, and had written four books' worth of register entries about everything else in a mountain inn without once getting near it. * * * "I'm afraid of the twelfth of March," she said. * * * "The twelfth of March," said Marlowes — no; said Pelyn Sedgewick, seventeen, from the post house, from the middle of a common room — "is the day the rule lifted." "It's the day the rule lifted," said Pippa. "Ninety-four days after I got here. Amberley — Ferrenby — came down for his boots at half past six on the sixth and we went up the hill, and I stood in the middle of a passage and told everybody that nobody in this house was going to leave, and then I went back to my room and I sat on the end of my bed for forty minutes doing nothing at all." * * * "That's not fear." "It's fear of the opposite," said Pippa. "Because for four months, the whole of this book — the rule, the order, the sentence, the lamps, the column at the back, the sealed pages, the whole of it — exists in order to stop one thing. And on the sixth of March it stopped. And I have been going about this valley for two months being a woman who has held a great many people in a house through the worst winter in forty years, and there is not one single thing in any of it that requires me to do anything at all." * * * Kerrith said, from the window seat, "Say the rest of it." "The rest of it is that if it stops," said Pippa, "then I have been a woman who was good at sitting in a room." * * * Nobody said anything for a while. "That is the most frightening thing I have heard said in this house since the first of December," said Bredon, "and it is said by the Thawkeeper about herself at eight o'clock at night in front of eleven people, and it is exactly the thing a schoolmistress waits nineteen years to hear a child say, and I want the whole of it written down in the book in her own hand before she goes to bed." * * * Pippa wrote it. She wrote it on a ruled white leaf out of the sheaf at the back, and she read it out, and then she put the pen down and said: "And that is the twelfth of March. And that is what I am afraid of, and it has been in the margin of this book since the eighth of January, and I did not write it, and I have four months of evidence and I have not answered it, and I am going to answer it in the autumn and I shall do it here." * * * Underneath, later, in the damp grey hand: *She has.* *And the twelfth of March is not the day the rule lifted. The rule lifted on the third of April when the ground was soft enough to take a cart, and she was on the stair at six in the morning watching for the cart, alone, and did not call anybody.* *Tell her we noticed. She is going to find this out from a book and she will be hurt that a house full of people did not tell her, and the truth is that four of us wanted to and three of us were frightened, and one of us was ninety-one.* *Send the old woman with the fork. She can carry a thing.* ---