第15章 Low Water, Late August

The tide at Sallowry on the last Friday of August was the lowest Ismay could remember, and she could remember the one in 2013, which had been lower, because she had been told about the one in 2013 by a woman in a telephone box and had written it in a notebook at the time. She came up the bank at eleven in the morning with a bag of shopping and a child in tow and stopped halfway, twice, for breath, and the second time put her hand flat on the sea wall and looked back the way they had come, at the mud going out to sea with the water still coming in underneath it. "Mam. Mam. Why are you stopping." "I live here." "You live in Ildwater." "I live in Ildwater," Ismay agreed, "and I lived here until I was twenty-two." The house was above them at the top of a hundred and eighty steps with a handrail on the sea side only. Salt. The paint had gone the colour of skimmed milk. The gutter on the front had come away at the corner and had been left hanging in a loop, and somebody — Kerra, then, it could only be Kerra — had wired it back up to the fascia with a garden tie. Celyn ran the whole hundred and eighty and waited at the top, and then said, "Mam, this is where you did the thing." "Doed what." "You told me the sea was full of people," said Celyn, "and you said they were under the water and sleeping, and you said it in a church, and Dad said you were being weird." Ismay put the bag down on the step. "That was a long time ago and I was tired," she said. It had been in a car park at Collow Ness in 2016 and she had been driving home with a headache and Celyn aged two had asked where the sea went at night, and she had answered it in a way she had been embarrassed by for three years. The sea doesn't go anywhere. People do. There were people under the water and they were asleep. There. "Also," said Celyn, "you said the bell was old." "I said the bell was old." "You said it was *angry*." "Tell me what you said, and then we'll see how much of it I want to stand behind." "You didn't want to stand behind any of it." Celyn shrugged and went and put her hand on the door, which was unlocked. "Kerra says we're going in the front because the back door's got the water under it." The front room was exactly as it had been, and it was not as it had been. The desk was there, and the chair, and the lamp with its flex mended with tape. The deal table had the ring on it from a hot pan and a square patch where something else had stood. The press was against the end wall and the door of it was open, and the shelves inside it were bare. "Eight years," said Ismay. "Eight years." "Somebody's had a look in here." "Kerra's had a look in here." Celyn said it with the flatness of a child who has been told a fact so often it has worn smooth. "She says she looked in case there was a leak. And she did the roof. Well. She had a man do the roof. She says you'd have come back if it was leaking." There was no roll. There was no key on the hook, because Ismay had taken the key off the wall herself in 2011 and put it in her purse, and the purse was in the car, and the roll was not in the house at all. She stood in the middle of the room and worked it out from where she was standing, the way she worked out a set of figures that had not been added up properly, which was: it was in the airing cupboard in her own flat in Ildwater, in a box that came from a removals firm in 2011, on the top shelf, behind the quilt she never used, and she had not opened that box since the Tuesday she packed it, in a state, alone, with her mother's funeral still fresh enough that people were still sending her cards. "Mam?" "It's not here," said Ismay. "It's in Ildwater. In a box. On a shelf." "Why is it in a box?" "Because I took it out of the press the day after the funeral and I have not been able to make myself put it back in and I have not been able to make myself open it either." "Right," said Celyn, and went and looked at the window. There were two knocks and then the door going, which was Kerra letting herself in, which was exactly what Kerra had done every day since 2011 and exactly what made Ismay want to sit down. Kerra was sixty-one and had got smaller and had not got any softer. She had a cat carrier in one hand and a bag of something in the other, and she put the cat carrier down in the hall and said: "You've cut your hair." "I've cut my hair." "You've cut all of it off the sides, same as your aunt did that time." She looked at Celyn. "There's tea in the pot, I made it before I saw your car. The lock on the back door's been sticking since March and I've oiled it. Don't thank me, you'll only stand there." "You've made tea," said Ismay, "in my mother's house." "Somebody's got to make tea in your mother's house," said Kerra, and went through to the kitchen, and called, "There's no gas. Don't use that hob, it's been off since June." They sat at the kitchen table, which had been in the room when Cerys was alive, and which had a card in a small frame on it that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY and had said so since before either of them was born. "Who's the boy?" said Kerra to Celyn. "This is my daughter." "I'm not daft." Kerra filled the kettle. "I know who she is. I've got her photograph in the drawer by the bread bin, that's the only place it's been in eight years." She set the kettle on its base. "You're the one I don't know." "There's a man come three times about the land," Kerra said, before Ismay had got started. "Mr Pyke. Off Palebank. He's been very polite and he's brought a folder with photographs in it, and I've had to keep offering him a cup of tea because there's nothing else to do, and I've not let him in past the step." "Pyke." "Sells the whole bank, he says. Nine houses. He's not lying about that, because there's nine plots marked out on his plan with numbers on them, and one of the numbers is on the Saltwyke land and another one is on the Saltwyke house." Ismay looked at her. "My house." "Your house, and your pans, and the strip of bank, and the weigh-table thing that's down there in the mud." Kerra poured the water. "And he's got an offer on it, because he's not daft either. He came on the Tuesday with a printed sheet and he said the client would pay whatever it took because the client wants the frontage and the frontage is the only thing on that river with the view that they've got." "What view?" "The Steps." Kerra stopped with the teapot up. "He says it in his own mouth. He stood on that step and he pointed out at the mud and he said, that comes out every forty years or thereabouts, and they call it the Nine Steps, and the developer wants a house on the high bank with a clear line across it." "And did you tell him that?" "I told him I don't know anything about Steps," said Kerra, "and that people who come from here don't talk about it, and he said everybody in the village says that, and I said not to come up my path again until there's somebody Saltwyke in the house." The kitchen clock said four minutes slow, and it had said four minutes slow for longer than Ismay had been alive. "They've made an offer on it," Kerry said, and then, "Kerra," she said, "they want an answer before the end of September, and they want somebody with a clean title, and if there's any chance there's another Saltwyke hiding somewhere in Collow Ness or in Ildwater or married and called something else for all I know, they will not lift a finger until there's a search done." "And the search needs the papers." "The search needs the papers." Ismay looked at the clock. "They've gone into the county store," she said. "They went into the county store on the Friday in August 1987 with a label on them, and it was in the newspaper when you were a girl, and no." Kerra poured the tea. "I heard it off the woman who was in the van. It went down to Ildwater in a box and the box was signed for by your gran the day she handed it over, which is the day after the last of the salt was boiled, and there was no roll in that box. There's no roll in this room. I looked in the press the first week, and the presses in this house have been empty since about 1992." "Mam," said Celyn. "Mam, she doesn't know where it is." "No," said Ismay. "She doesn't." She got out her phone and went out to the step and stood on it with the door open behind her so that she could hear the two of them in the kitchen, and dialled the number of a solicitor in Ildwater she had never used, and asked somebody to look up a bundle of family papers that had been in an airing cupboard since 2011. Then she opened the box of post that Kerra had put by the door, which had been put by the door in 2011 and had been left there ever since, and counted forty-one items, and started at the bottom. The fourth one from the bottom was a letter addressed to her at a flat in Ildwater she had left in 2016. Postmarked the March before. Her mother's writing. "Mam," said Celyn, from the doorway. "Mam, whose is that?" "None of yours," said Ismay. ---