Chapter 40 The Second of November

There is a half hour in every night that nobody in this house is asleep in, and it falls somewhere between one and two, and for eleven weeks of the spring Pippa had it alone. She used it to count, at first. She counted the eleven lamps from the stair head, and she counted the forty-four stairs going down and the fourteen going further, and she counted the number of people in the beds and the number of names in the book, and once, in February, in a fit of something she could not afterwards classify, she counted the number of feet of snow on the top of the shoulder by going up there. By June she had stopped counting anything. What she did instead was the thing that she had been doing, on and off, all winter without ever once admitting to it: she walked the passage. Not fast. Not looking for anything. She went down the stairs and she went along to the front door and she stood with her hand on the bar of the latch, because the latch of a mountain inn in winter is cold enough to make a person decide something. And then she turned round and went the whole length of the passage and looked at the fourth, at the end of the foot of the stair, which was the first one she had ever brought up out of the oil store, before the fire was lit, before anything else, so that a man coming in out of the weather had a lamp in the passage to come home to. * * * She had never once told anybody that and she was not going to. * * * The half hour was not quiet exactly. It was full of a child turning over, and of the clock in the corner which was eleven minutes slow and had been since the clock got out of the carriage on the coach from Selborne in 1984 and had never been right, and of the noise the fire made, which is the noise it makes and no other noise in the world makes. And in the last week of June, in that half hour, she began to do the thing that she did not do in front of anybody. She said thank you. Not to anybody. She had said thank you to Wilby and to Tibb and to a woman of ninety-one and to a shepherd and to a doctor and to a cook who had kept a dead man's tuning fork in a tin for forty-four years, and she had said it properly, out loud, in front of witnesses, every single time. The thank you she said in the half hour was to a hill, at two in the morning, in a corridor, with her hand on a wall, and it took her the whole thirty seconds to get round and she never once managed it in the form she wanted. * * * The board across the bottom of the stairs came up on the seventh of July. Tibb had wanted the kitchen floor to be its own floor for twenty-two years and had asked for it every Christmas of her working life, and Pippa had said yes to all of them, and had not done any of them, because the stairs had been that way since January and she did not want the stairs to be any different, and could not have said why. So on the seventh of July Tibb Bryce and Pelyn Sedgewick came up the stairs at half past nine in the morning with a claw hammer and took a board out of the floor, and Pippa came in from the yard with a barrow of coke and stopped in the doorway of the kitchen and said, "No." "It's my floor." "I know it's your floor," said Pippa. "Look at the joist." * * * They looked at the joist. There was a nail in it. It was a nail driven the wrong way, at an angle, with its head standing an inch proud of the wood, and round the nail the timber was dark, and the dark was not damp and it was not rot, and it had a burn mark round it, about the size of a thumb. "Well," said Tibb. * * * She knelt down on the kitchen floor, on the cold flags, in front of a joist, at the age of fifty-three, with her glasses off and her hair coming down, and put her hand flat on the wood an inch either side of the nail. "Nothing under here," she said. "Nothing at all. Not a joist, not a board, not a nail. It's just floor." "I know it's just floor." "Then why have I spent eleven weeks not mending a hole in my own floor." "Because you knew," said Pippa. * * * And Tibb Bryce said, "Yes." And Pelyn Sedgewick said, "Miss Danby, I have been up those stairs with a hammer twice a day since February and there has never been a hole in them." * * * So they put the board back, and they nailed it, and they did not put a second board over the top of it, and the joist stayed exactly where it was, with its burn mark round a nail that had never been driven. And that is everything any of them ever found out about the two minutes of the fourteenth of March, and it stayed that way, and it was put down in the register in about four lines by a woman who has never claimed to understand it. * * * The half hour came back after that. It came back in July, and it came back in August, and it came back on the nights in September when the wind got up early and the first of the cold came down off the top of the shoulder in the dark with no moon at all, which it does, every year, on the second or the third of September, and which nobody in the valley believes until it happens. And on the second of September Pippa woke at half past one because the room was cold, and went downstairs in her stockings, and stood in the passage, and found that the seventh lamp had been burning at half size all evening without being trimmed, and she trimmed it, and it went back up, and she stood there afterwards with the taper in her hand and did not go back to bed. * * * Because that is the arrangement. Nobody has ever put it in the book in those words, because rule eleven says a true sentence is written in the guest's own hand, and this is not a guest's sentence, and the keeper writes her own line at the bottom of the day's page like everybody else, and hers are all about hay and lamps and a woman who is going to post a letter. But it is the arrangement. A woman gets up at half past one in the morning in the dark in a house on a mountain and trims a lamp that is burning at half size, and she does not know why, and she will never know why, and she has not once, in the whole of her life, decided to do it. And that is all a Thawkeeper is. It is the whole of it. It is a person in a house with a book, and a lamp that has to be trimmed, and a rule about the ground, and a willingness to get up. * * * When Ruth Amberley came in on the fourteenth of July she stayed four days and went home on the eighteenth, and she came back up on the second of September with a woman called Nell Sedgewick who is nineteen and is Pelyn's cousin and wants a summer season, and on the twenty-ninth of September there were four people at the long table who had not been in the house the previous year, and the passage had eleven lamps in it and there was a new bracket on the ninth. * * * And on the second of October a girl of eleven came up the lane on the afternoon coach from the city with a brass oil lamp in a cardboard box and a list of forty-four in pencil, and she said, before she had got her coat off, "I'm here for the winter and I've brought the seventh with me, and I've trimmed it myself, and you can look at the wick when I have gone down the lane to the post." * * * There were nine at the long table, and the fire was in, and it was the second of November. * * * Pippa did the lamps at ten past six every evening and had done so for a hundred and thirty nights, and the house had got so used to it that on the last Friday of October the girl from the city did it with her, standing on the settle to reach the eleventh, and neither of them said a word to the other about it. "There is going to be a room," said Sella, at supper, with her mouth full. "There is going to be a room for me in October, you said, and I want to say the whole of it out loud in front of everybody so that nobody can pretend later on that it was different." "You may say whatever you like." "I am not the keeper," said Sella. "I said it in April and I am not the keeper and I am not going to be the keeper, and Tibb was not the keeper either, and there is a page in that book with a cook's true sentence on it and it says *I have a sister in Selborne whom I have not spoken to since 1979* and I have read it, and that is why I know." * * * Wilby was in the window seat with a rug over his knees and a book that he could not see the print of. "You shall have the room over the parlour," said Pippa, "and you shall light nothing at all, and the day you light that lamp I shall take it out of your hand in front of the house." "That's an arrangement I can live with," said Sella, and there were six people at the table who had some idea what the first one had been, and one of them was a woman of fifty-three with a tea towel over her shoulder who did not look up. * * * The kitchen was shut at ten and Pippa went out to the yard with the dog, which was a completely different animal, and which had been nine years old all winter. Somebody had come up the lane. Not the coach. There was no coach until Tuesday and the lane was a mile of wet with a puddle in it that had got bigger through October. It was a lamp on the pass. "There," said the dog. "There," said Pippa Danby, and stood in the yard in the dark with her hands in her pockets and looked at it. "Hello," she said, out loud, to a hill. * * * What it did to her was this. Her grandfather had come up this road in 1944 with a haversack and a bicycle and walked to the inn in the dark and had been let in, and the story went down the valley every year from one person to another, and the story was a man standing in a passage going absolutely berserk because his leg was standing on something round and cold in the corner, and it was the corner of the case he had brought his good shirt in, and it was still there, and it was still on the hearth, because the hearth is always warm, and everything that is put on the hearth of the Hollowell stays warm, and the fire is in that grate from October to May and Pippa had never once thought about that before that night in her life. * * * "Hello," she said again. She had got out of the habit of saying it to herself about three years ago and had not missed it, and that was the last thing she said. * * * She went in and she did the thing she always did, which was to go along the passage and check the count. Third. Fifth. First. Fourth. Second. Sixth. Eighth. Ninth. Tenth. Eleventh. Seventh. Eleven. Eleven lamps, burning at half past seven in the evening on the second of November, and the seventh four inches high and blue and leaning at nothing, and the ninth in a bracket that Mowbray had straightened in June and that had gone crooked again, and the sixth in the kitchen doorway where it had been since April, and the first at the front door because that is where the door is and it has been cold since the house was built and will be until it falls down. * * * "Forty-four," said Sella Quillets, from the stair head, at half past seven in the evening on the second of November. "Forty-four." "Not forty-five?" "There is a stair under the mat and there are fourteen under that and both of them are where they were on the eighth of May and there is nothing at all over the line of that bound," said Pippa Danby. "Nine at the long table and one in the window seat and one in the kitchen and one in the room over the scullery, and the register is on the lectern, and the lamps are in the order, and somebody put a bench out on the step this afternoon for no reason at all whatsoever." * * * There was a knock at half past ten. Not the coach. There was no coach until Tuesday and the lane was a mile of wet with a puddle in it that had got bigger through October, and the woman who had gone up to the pass and looked at it from the yard came in out of the cold and bolted the door behind her and said, "There's somebody on the pass with a lamp and there is nobody up there, because the pass is four hundred feet above me and I have been in this valley since the twenty-ninth of September." "A light on the pass?" "A light, low down, on the shoulder, where the byres were," said Ruth Amberley. "And I have been looking at that hill every night since the twenty-ninth of September from the top of my own head, and I know what that hill looks like, and there is nothing on that shoulder. There is a wall and a fold and forty years of sheep." * * * "Twenty-ninth of September," said Pippa. "Twenty-ninth of September. The Tuesday. I walked down to the coach with Nell Sedgewick and I stood in the lane and watched it go, and I said to her, your people have eleven lamps in a passage and I have two, and I said it as a joke, and Nell said, my cousin's people have eleven and nobody's watching them." * * * She had come up the third time in four months, and this time she had not knocked at a door and asked, and this time she had a bag and a lamp and a hip that had got worse on the way, and she came in out of the weather and put the lamp down on the table in the passage and looked straight down the passage at eleven lit brackets. "Oh," she said. "Oh, good." "You've had that lamp lit," said Pippa. "Three times up a hill in four months." "I've had it lit since May." She put her hand out. "I'm Ruth Amberley, and I live at Wrenlow on the coast, and I'm the fourth Thawkeeper and I'm sixty-one and I've not got an apprentice, and I've come to say a thing I should have said in July and did not have the nerve for." "Say it." "I can't put it down," said Ruth Amberley. "That's the thing. I've put the snow down twice this year and I'm sixty-one and my hip has been bad since Christmas, and in February a man in my village took me out on his tractor to the top of the shore and showed me the iron in the ground where the nine ridges were and he said, Ruth, you and I can't do this again, and I said, no, and he said, no, and then we both stood in the rain for a quarter of an hour being two people who couldn't say the next sentence." "What's the next sentence?" "The next sentence is *somebody has to come up this hill*," said Ruth Amberley. "And I have spent eleven weeks not saying it because it means admitting that I can't do the thing I have done every winter since 1968, and it means asking a woman I've met twice to leave a mountain inn in the middle of the winter with eleven people in it, and it means saying all of that out loud in a passage at eleven o'clock at night in the rain." * * * "Nobody's coming up your hill," said Pippa. "Somebody will have to." "Not this winter. Not until the thaw." Pippa put her hand on the rail of the stairs. "And I want to be careful here, so I'm going to say the whole of it in order. In July I told you that you were a guest of this house until the first of December, on my own authority, with nobody behind me. It is the second of November. You have been a guest of this house since the fourteenth of July, and you are a guest of this house now, and the rule says you do not leave before the thaw, and I am glad of it for the first time since I came up this mountain, because in July it was a kindness I invented and tonight it is the arrangement." * * * "And after the thaw?" "After the thaw you will go down to Selborne on the coach and take a room at the post house for the spring, and Elverston will look at that hip properly instead of writing a pot of liniment for it every ten days, and I will read to you page one through page nine of the rule book and you will find that rule eleven was written in 1889 for you, and you will go back to your own house in the first week of May on the Tuesday coach with a list of what has to be done before the first snow, and I will have written to Mr Lanrick at the Mill at Valebrook, and I will have written to a woman named Prue who keeps a bakehouse at Wrenlow who lost hers in the flood, and there will be three of you by the middle of June, and one of you will be under sixty." "That's an appointment." "It is a plan," said Pippa Danby, "and it is the first one I have made since I came up this hill, and I have made it in a passage at eleven o'clock at night to a woman who has walked up in the rain, and I am going to write it down in the book in the morning, in ink, with the date on it, and if you take it up a mountain to Wrenlow in the spring you will take a Thawkeeper's contract with you, and there is a form of words for that in the back of the register and Cressida's aunt wrote it out for a man at Valebrook in 1894 and never once used it." * * * She put the folded paper into the register at the back, in a page of her own, and did not read it out, because it was not hers. And then she went and did the last thing of the evening, which was to go along the passage and trim the seventh lamp. The wick was level. The glass was clean. The bracket was crooked, and it would be crooked in December, and Mowbray would have a word about it when he came up on the ninth, and it would go crooked again. Behind her, at the bottom of the stairs, in a house with the door bolted and the clock eleven minutes slow and a light burning where it had always burned since the first of December, a woman who had walked up a mountain in the rain to hand over something she could not carry any longer sat down at the long table on the near side, third from the fire, with a book in front of her, and began to read it.