第14章 The Last Weighing In

The county woman came on the Friday at eleven with a folding stool and a box of ties-on tags and a train ticket from Collow Ness, and she was called a Mrs Fielding and she had done six of these in her time and had got very quick. "It's a bundle of papers," Hesper said. "Tidewarden at Harnsey Wick, from about sixteen-fifty. Eleven sections and a number of loose sheets at the back of the last one. There are gaps in it. There were gaps in it when I got it." "Anything we should know about?" "Yes. It goes back further than the company and further than the Act. If anybody writes a description of it, they'd better write that it is a Tidewarden's roll and not a company record, because the distinction is the whole of it." Mrs Aldwin wrote that down. She wrote it on the tag, which took three lines, and then she tied the tag on with a tie-on, and then she weighed it, because that was how the job was done. "One kilo two hundred," she said. "Huh. It weighs more than a Bible." "That's a good deal of paper." "That's a great deal of paper." Deakin stood in the doorway with his hands behind him and watched his office go out of the building in the hands of a woman from the county, and did not say anything, which was the most decent thing anybody did all week. At the door Mrs Aldwin stopped and turned round. "There's no accession number on the front of it." "That's the family style," Hesper said. "The front of it is the front of it." She felt her own face do nothing, which it was very good at by then. "You'll give it a number." "I'll give it a number. I'll call it what it is." Mrs Aldwin put the box down again, unhooked the tag, and turned it over, and wrote four more words on the back of it, and hooked it on again. "There. Saltwyke family papers, Tidewarden, Harnsey Wick, sixteen-fifty to nineteen eighty-seven. And the Saltwykes are in there somewhere, aren't they, or nobody would have bothered to keep it." "They're in it," said Hesper. "Right." She picked the box up. "I'll tell you now and I'll not say it again. Nothing goes in a store with a number on it that anybody can't look up. What you've given me today isn't lost. It's just out of your kitchen." The last boil went on through the afternoon. There was no ceremony about it and the men were not told to come in early. The lorries came at eight and at ten and at two, and were weighed, and the figures went in the book in Mererid's hand and in Hesper's, because Mererid had not gone to Collow Ness in the end, she had gone on the Friday and come back on the Saturday and said nothing about either thing and did the figures because somebody had to. At twenty past three the front pan was drawn off for the last time in the history of the Saltwyke house at Sallowry, and the wet salt went up the bank in barrows, and the last barrow went up by the men from the boiling house and not by a Saltwyke, because there was no Saltwyke left who could lift one. They shut the fire at four. The smoke went along the roof and off the top of the pan house in one long grey line and hung there over the water with nothing under it, the way a rope hangs when there is nothing pulling it. "Miss Hesper," said the man at the rail, the same one as in June. "Do you want the second fire on tonight?" "No," said Hesper. "Thank you. Don't lay it." He stood there a moment with his hand on the rail. "It's a good fire for the time of year." "It's the last one," said Hesper. "Go home." Mererid found her at the weigh-table with the last page of the tonnage book under her arm and the copy of the roll in her satchel, because the copy was in her satchel and had been in her satchel since Saturday and neither of them had said one word about it for two days. "There's a thing we ought to settle," Mererid said. "Settle it." "That page. The 1973 one. It's the last page in that book that isn't a lie, and I know it isn't a lie because my brother is on it in the only way a person can be on a page like that, which is not at all." Hesper looked out at the cold pans. "It isn't yours to keep," she said. "You took it off a machine in a company office and if anybody ever looked into it you would be the one they looked at, and you'd be the one that goes, not me, because I'm the signatory on the tag." "I know that. That's why I'm telling you." "So send it to the county. Put it in the box." Mererid laughed, one syllable, without any humour in it at all. "There," she said, "is the family, in one sentence, after three generations. I hand you the only true page in the whole of it and you tell me to give it away." They stood there while the light went off the water. "Then keep it," said Hesper. "You'll want it." "I'll not want it. I'm not going to have anything else to do with it than keep it, and keeping it is the only thing any of us have ever done with any of this." "I'll keep it," said Mererid, "in Collow Ness, in a drawer, for ever, which is the thing I have spent thirteen years being ashamed of wanting." She put the box down on the deal counter and squared it, because she could not leave a thing square without doing it. "And you'll not open it again until there's no other woman in your family who could do something with it." That was the arrangement. It held for twenty-two years. Deakin came out at twenty past five with a bottle and four paper cups from the gatehouse and did the thing that men do, and drank to the works, and drank to the pans, and would not drink to the closure, and then drank to the closure anyway because he had been in the army. At six Hesper walked up the bank alone, and past the site of the weigh-table where the mud was, and past the two marks on the stones where the fire had been, which were already going under the tide. At the house she let herself in and put the tonnage book on the desk in the front room, under the lamp, and stood with her hand on the press for a while, because there was nothing in it now. There was a lamp and a desk and a hook with no key on it. She took the hook off the wall and put it in the drawer. Then she went and made a cup of tea and took it out to the step and sat there while the tide came the last half mile up the flats. She was thirty-two years old, and there were no pans to light at four in the morning, and the count of the house was her, and a woman who had been holding the book for sixty-four years had handed it to her on a Tuesday at the age of thirty-two because she could not hold a pen and would not say so twice. There was a lot of light in the sky at the north-west and nothing in it at the south-east, and about a mile off the point a boat went through the dark with its light on, going the other way, and did not turn in. "Twenty-eighth of August," Hesper said to the water, quietly, for the length of a cup of tea. "Twenty-eighth of August, 1987. And the pans are cold." She noticed then that she had been sitting with her other hand flat against her stomach, and had been for about a minute and a half, without having decided to, in a way that had nothing to do with a roll or a stub or a black cotton thread. She took her hand away and drank the tea and did not finish the thought, and went in, and washed the cup. ---