第11章 The Fold in the Roll

She did it in the weighhouse on the Monday, after the last lorry, with the door shut and Mererid in the room because Mererid knew how to look at a thing without appearing to. The Ebb Ledger came out of the holdall in a cloth bag and went on the deal counter where the invoices had been, and it was bigger than it looked on the shelf, which was always the way of it. Brown leather, brass corners gone green, a tie of sail thread, and inside it eleven sections and a lot of them sewn. The village half came first. Year, tide, names of the whole of the bank and the hamlets above it, from the earliest leaves in the seventeen-fifties forward, in nine hands, and the great majority of it in one hand, because whoever began it had run out of the will to change. Against each name a mark, or no mark. "They're not marks for the people," said Mererid. "Look at them. They're marks for the family." "I'd worked that out." "Which means the bank is keeping an account of which families looked after which families. It's a poor's book. It's a list of who fed who." "It was never asked for." "Nothing in this bay is ever asked for. That's what makes it a book." Hesper turned the leaves forward. 1933. The tally at the foot: four names, and a line under them, and the line said that of the four brought back one was brought back by the road and not by the water, and gave no name. 1953, the page Mererid had photographed the year before, when Mererid had been told by a girl of nineteen that her brother was not in it and had come away with a list written on the boxes of an invoice book. 1973. Thirty-one names. The tally: three names, and beneath them, in the same hand, and one returned, not questioned. "So the family wrote down that one came back," said Mererid, "and wouldn't say how." "Yes." "Who was it?" "That is not a thing the book says," Hesper said, "and that is precisely why I have brought it out here instead of at home." She turned to the back of the roll, past the village half, where the stitching changed and the leaves were smaller and stiffer and not the same colour, and where, tucked one inside another at the back of the final section, was a set of loose sheets. Six of them. Cream-coloured, and each about the size of a postcard, folded in two. "What's these?" "That's what's not in the company's list." Hesper put the first one down and opened it. "Read it out. If you can read the hand you can read them all." The hand was upright and dated 1849. *SENT DOWN, KEEPING THE HOUSE. Three from the salt-boiling and two from the wickers. Fed three days and given boots and put on the low water of the fourth morning at the top of the Steps. Kept the light in the lamp-house. Kept the brine at the pans and sold at four shillings the hundredweight. Nothing asked. A. S.* "That's my great-grandmother," said Hesper. "I'd a guess." "It's not a record of what the bay took. It's a record of what we did." Hesper opened the second. "Three from the salt-boiling. Fed three days. Nothing asked. 1851, 1893, 1919, 1973." "There's four of them." "Five. There's a fifth of a sort." She had not touched the last one. It lay on the counter with its fold closed, and Hesper looked at it a long moment and then turned it over. It was not cream-coloured. It was the same brown sheet as the 1893 leaf, and it had been out of the roll and folded small and put back in the wrong place, at the back of the slips, which was why nobody had ever found it, because nobody had ever turned the slips over. "There's the leaf," said Mererid. "There's the leaf." Hesper did not open it. She put two fingers on the fold and left them there. "Gran cut it out in 1953," she said. "She told me on Wednesday, with the door shut. She said she'd been sitting in the dark with a bread knife and that it was the only mistake of her life." "Then why is it in here?" "Because I took it out of the leg of the weigh-table on Thursday night, and it was in the leg of the weigh-table on Thursday night, and I have known it was in there since I was a girl of nine and put my hand on the loose board." Mererid put her hand over her mouth and then took it away again, because she had at twenty-six learned that the people who did that in the office got talked about. "The thread on that roll is black," Hesper said. "Every other stitch in the whole of it is brown and has been brown for a hundred and sixty years. Nobody sewed with black thread in this house until a woman went into Ildwater in 1953 with a shilling for a reel of cotton, and cut a leaf out along the stitch, and then sat down at that desk and put the thread through again herself, a hair's width wide of the old holes, because a book with a hole showing is a book that invites a question." She turned the leaf over on the counter without opening it. "So there's been nobody in that front room at all. She's the one who cut it and the one who mended the cutting." "So she hid it by putting it back." "She sewed the empty space up so that nobody would know a page had gone," Hesper said, "and then she put the page in the leg of a table two hundred yards away and carried on boiling salt for thirty-four years. If somebody's been keeping this family straight, Mererid, it hasn't been the bay." She opened the leaf. Mererid moved round the counter and looked over her arm. The hand of 1893 was in an upright nineteenth-century script, brown ink, faded to the colour of weak tea, and it began with the tide and the date and the list of thirty-one, and beside the list the marks. And at the foot, the tally, and beneath the tally the four names, three of them Threave and one of them the last one on the line, written into the right-hand margin where a hand had come to the paper at the last moment so as not to have the fold cut the word short. Beside it, and beneath it, two letters. The office clock said eleven minutes fast, as it had said since the winter before the flood. Somewhere outside, on the second fire of the day, a man was raking a crust and the rake had a note in it, the same note it had had every day since April. "It's us," said Mererid. "Yes." "She went out and she did not come back, and the Saltwykes wrote it down." "Yes. And then somebody struck her name through and wrote that she was not taken, and went on sitting at the desk with the lamp for a hundred and sixty years." Hesper stood quite still with the leaf in both hands. "Mererid. Who struck her through?" "Your family, over a hundred years, one woman at a time." "I know that. I mean who struck her through and then wrote NOT TAKEN in the same ink on the same afternoon." Hesper looked up. "Because whoever did that thought she was owed the lie. You don't write that down for the village. You write that down for the desk." Mererid sat down on the edge of the office desk. "Hesper." "Say it." "You've read the 1893 page and it's got your family on it and your family were the ones who went, and there's a woman of sixty-four sitting up at that house who has spent her whole life being the family that came back." She turned her hands over. "And you came down here tonight with a Gestetner copy of every name in the bay." "And what would you have me do with it?" "Nothing. I've thought about it. I thought about it all the way down the lane. I'd do the same and I'd have thought about it longer." Mererid's voice did not rise. "What I'd say is that the leaf that came out of the weigh-table leg isn't the only page that's been cut. Somebody's been cutting for a hundred and sixty years. And every time they've cut, they've taken out the page that says what the Saltwykes did, and they've never once taken out the page that says what the bay did." Hesper looked at her for a long time. "No," she said at last. "They never have." "What are you going to do?" "Two things, and I've only got one of them." "Which?" "I'm going to burn the slips," Hesper said. "All six. The lot. They're the only part of this that the family put in writing for anybody to see, and when the county opens that bundle in a store in Ildwater with a number on it, they'd read the house's own account of itself, in a fair hand, and there'd be a list in it of every Saltwyke woman who ever stood on a low water and put a lamp on and told the ward there was nothing to ask." "And if you burn them—" "Then there's a hole in it as well," Hesper said, "and I shall be an old woman who lost them in a fire at the works before it shut, which will be exactly true, because there will have been a fire at the works on the twenty-eighth." Mererid did not say anything at all. She took the copy of the roll out of her own bag and put it on the counter beside the leaf, and then took it back again, and then, when Hesper looked up, put it back and squared the edges of it. "Keep that," Hesper said. "It's not yours." "No," said Mererid. "It's yours, if you want it. I took it because I wanted it and I've spent thirteen years wanting it, and now you've got it in a bag in a weighhouse, and I can't think what to do with it after that." ---