第13章 Paraffin and Paper

There was paraffin at the works because there was paraffin at every works, in the drum at the end of the pan house with the pump, and the boilings were finished, and nobody was on the bank at eleven o'clock on a night in August. She wrote the sheet first. It took her three attempts and she threw the first two into the pan, which was a long way to throw something, and she could not burn a sheet of paper in a pan that was still wet, so the first two went into the fire under the front pan and did nothing much at all. The third one she wrote at the weigh-table on the mud bank at half past eleven at night, by the light of the tide, lying on her front with the board on the stones because she could not see to write standing up. She wrote the year first. Then the tide and the date, in September, then the thirty-one names in their column with their marks against them, and she got every mark right because she had it in her own copy and in Mererid's. And then she came to the last line. She wrote the three names that had gone down and not been brought back, in the order they stood, and then she came to the fourth, and she stopped for a length of time that the tide measured, and then she wrote: *and one returned, not questioned.* And she left the last ruled line empty. Not struck through. Not abbreviated. She ruled it and she left it a blank line going the width of the page, the way a column of a ledger is left when a house has decided not to fill it in. Then she took the book out and wrote at the foot, under the tally, in her own hand, which was a small upright hand and got a little smaller with every year she used it: *not written here by choice. H. S.* She read it four times. Then she went at the last line with an eraser, which she had brought for it, and rubbed until there was no trace at all of the writing on it, and blew the rubber crumbs off into the water. "You could have struck it through," Mererid said. Mererid was sitting on the weigh-table with her feet hanging and a bicycle lamp shining down on the board. "I could have." "They'd have seen it." "They'd have seen it," Hesper agreed, "and they'd have asked, and I'd have had to say which name." "Your mother said the name to you on Monday." "My mother said the name to me on Monday," said Hesper, "and I have not written it down, and there is nobody in this world now who can put those two together, except the three of us, and one of us is going to Collow Ness on Friday." Mererid got off the table and stood in the shallows. "I'm not going to Collow Ness to get away from you," she said. "I'm going because they're moving him home for the summer and I've not seen him since Christmas. He's twenty-one and he's twenty-one, and he asked me last Christmas whether I was the one who signs the papers." "What did you say?" "I said I'd think about it." Mererid's voice was steady and it cost her something. "And I've thought about it and I've decided I will, because it's the only thing I know how to do that isn't nothing. And if I sign a piece of paper with his name on it for a house where he can't wash his own shirt, then I'll have signed a piece of paper, and that will be in a file in Collow Ness until somebody dies, and the file will say Saltwyke on it." She looked at the sheet. "Is that how it works? That's how it works, isn't it." Hesper gave her the board to hold and showed her how to lay the sheet on the stones with the writing up, so that the water could go over it from one side. "I'll do the last of it," she said. "Go and stand at the top of the bank and count to a hundred." Mererid went up the bank and stood at the top of it in her good coat and counted aloud, and Hesper heard her get to sixty and give up, and come half way down again, which was not what she had asked for and which Hesper was glad of. The oilcloth bundle came open on the stones in six inches of water with the tide turning over it. The first of the slips went down in about four seconds. It was cream-coloured and thin and it had been folded since 1849 and the fold had gone to powder in places, so it went in a rush, the way a leaf goes, and what was left of the words came up off the water in pieces. *SENT DOWN, KEEPING THE HOUSE. Three from the salt-boiling and two from the* The second went the same way. The third, which was 1893 and which had in it the family's whole account of its own hands, went faster than the others, because its ink had been made in an office in Ildwater with a different recipe in it, and it curled and blackened in about the time it takes to say a thing twice. Then the fourth, and then the fifth. And then the leaf. She had kept that one to last on purpose and she was glad she had, because she found that she wanted to look at it for a moment first, which was a thing she had not planned. It was the best of them. The ink of 1893 was brown and beautiful and it had not faded at all in a hundred and thirty-four summers, because the bank kept the ink dry, and the writing went straight down the middle of the page the way people wrote when they were writing on a table with nothing else on it. The lie was at the top of a line and it was in her own hand, the woman of 1893's own hand, small and even and a little bit hurried at the end of the surname, where the pen had had to be lifted and set down again to get round something. And the truth was at the foot of the page in exactly the same writing. "Off you go," said Hesper Saltwyke to it. It went. The water took it sideways and there was one moment, about a second long, where the tide at the top of the flow met the tide that was going out and held the whole sheet up flat and level and dry for the length of a breath, and she could see the whole of 1893 on it at once. Then it went under. She stood in the ditch in her stockings and let the water go past her ankles and watched the oilcloth, which had been round the slips and had not burned, go grey and then go and come back up on the next tide with a corner of 1849 still printed on it in letters the size of her thumbnail. Then she went and poured the last of the paraffin over the spot, which was against every instruction in the health and safety pamphlet that had hung by the weighbridge since 1974, and put the match to it, and stood back twenty feet. It made a noise like a bucket being filled and emptied very slowly. ---