第17章 Rhosyn Threave Remembers the Fire

Rhosyn Threave lived in the last house at Collow Ness, with the road in front of it and the sea behind it and a gate in the side passage that came out on a lane with nothing at the end of it, and she had lived there since 1961 and had been the only Threave on that bank since her aunt died in the flood year. She was eighty-two, small, and entirely bald, and she had a way of looking at a doorway that made it clear she had decided about you in the time it took the door to open. "You've her jaw," she said. "I beg your pardon?" "You've her jaw. And you hold your teacup the way she did, on the saucer, with both hands." Rhosyn put her own down. "She came here in 1987 in a car and sat in that chair and asked me three questions and would not have the tea, and I've thought about that afternoon more than I've thought about most things." "My mother." "Your mother. And she asked me whether I'd seen a fire in the ditch by the weigh-table on the twenty-eighth of August, and I said I had, and she asked me what I'd seen, and I said a woman with a lamp, and she said, that's me, and I said I know it's you, and then she cried in my kitchen, which nobody had ever done in that kitchen in my life, and I made her a cup of tea she wouldn't drink." Ismay sat in the chair Rhosyn had not taken. "You were sixteen," she said. "In 1953." "Seventeen. It was the summer of the flood the winter before, and my gran had the Lowtide with Ivor's brother on her hands from March to June." Rhosyn looked at the window. "And I was the one that carried the lamp." "Carried it where." "Down to the top of the Steps, on the low water, on the fourth morning." The woman said it as flatly as a woman says where she put a bucket. "That's what was done. My gran went with it because she'd carried it in 1919 and she wasn't having anybody else's hands on it, and I went because I was seventeen and my gran said it would be the best thing that ever happened to me. And it was. I have never in my life seen anything like it and I have never told anybody that I saw it." "And then?" "And then I came back up the bank at four in the morning with my gran's hand in mine and the lamp in the other, and the whole village was on the bank, and your great-gran — " She stopped. "My great-grandmother." "Your great-gran had gone in off the top of the steps and come back up along the causeway with a blanket round her shoulders, and she went straight past all of us and up to the house, and I stood there with the lamp and my gran said, well, and I said, she'll have somebody to sit with her, and my gran said, no she won't, and she was right." Rhosyn folded her hands. "And that's the whole of what I saw. A woman of seventy in a blanket at half four in the morning going up a bank without looking at anybody." Ismay put her hands flat on her knees. "You said in 1987 that you had seen my grandmother carrying something down to the weigh-table." "I said what I said." "The oilcloth." "I said a woman with a lamp." "She had a lamp in 1953 as well. You're the one that carried it." Rhosyn Threave looked at her for a long moment and then made a noise that was not quite a laugh. "Aye," she said. "I was the one that carried it. And when your great-gran came back up that bank with the blanket I was sixteen and I thought, well, that's that, and I thought, somebody's got a fire and a bed, and I thought, that's the Saltwykes, they'll be all right. And I've carried it for sixty-six years and I have never once said it out loud to another living soul, and then a woman came in here in 1987 and asked me directly whether I'd seen a fire in the ditch, and I said yes." "Why did you say yes?" "Because your mother asked me properly," said Rhosyn. "Nobody's asked me anything properly since 1961. Your mother sat in that chair and put her hands on the table the way I'm putting mine on this one and she asked me four questions and did not interrupt me once, and she asked the fourth one last, and the fourth one was, what did the fire smell like. And I told her." "What did it smell like." "Damp card," said Rhosyn Threave. "It smelled like damp card, because there was no card in it. It smelled like a wet Sunday and it smelled like paraffin off the drum at the end of the pan house, and if you'd told me at the time there was oilcloth in that fire I'd have said you were daft. Nobody burns oilcloth." Ismay's mouth had gone dry. "She burned papers," she said. "She burned six sheets of paper from the back of the roll." "Aye." "And then she went home and she pasted a new page over the hole, in her own handwriting, with the name left off." "Aye." "And eight years ago she died and left me a house with an empty press in it and a son on the telephone wanting to know whether there's anybody else called Saltwyke," said Ismay, "and I have spent a fortnight finding out that the whole of what I've got is a blank ruled line in a dead woman's handwriting." Rhosyn Threave sat back in her chair. "Then you'll have found out about as much as there is." "There's the name." "Is there?" "It's not on the page she pasted in. She left the line blank. But it was on the page she cut out, and she told it to my grandmother in a pan room in 1987, and it's in my grandmother's grandmother's name, because that's the name this family gives out." Ismay heard her own voice go as thin as the light on the flat. "There's a woman called Cerys who's dead in a house on that bank and there's one in Ildwater who's been dead since 2011, and there was one before that, and there was one before her, and they all had the same name because the woman who went out in 1893 had it." Rhosyn did not move. "It'll be on the far side of the river," she said. "Sorry?" "The name." The old woman got up, and went to the dresser, and took out a tin — a proper biscuit tin, dented, with a picture of a hillside sheep on the lid that had been there since before the war. "Your mother's name for it was the tin. Your gran called it the tin. And I've had a tin of my own since 1974 that nobody has ever asked me about, and it's the same tin, because it came down off the pans with the pans when the pans came off in 1987 and a man in the gatehouse said, that'll want throwing out, and I took it off him for nothing." She put it on the table between them. "What's in it?" "The Threaves' half," said Rhosyn. "That's what we called it and that's what it is. Every forty years, since 1849, the Threaves wrote down who we put on the low water and who we brought up the bank and who we didn't ask about afterwards. Same years as yours, same tides, same Low Ebb. Because we were the ones that carried the lamp and the Saltwykes were the ones that wrote the book, and a house that carries and a house that writes gets its own account, and we've never in a hundred and seventy years had anybody ask to see it, because nobody's ever asked us for anything except to be daft about it." Ismay did not touch the tin. "My mother could have had it," she said. "In 1987. She could have had both halves and she wouldn't have had to burn anything and she wouldn't have had to leave a blank line on a page to keep her own hand off it." "Your mother did know about it." "How do you know that?" "Because she asked me the fourth question last." Rhosyn put her hand on the tin. "The third one was what I saw, and the second was what I was told, and the fourth was, do you keep one too. And I said we did, and she put both her hands flat on my table, and she said, you'll keep it." The tide was making a noise at the back of the house. "And if I come," said Ismay, "what would I do with it?" "Nothing," said Rhosyn Threave. "That's the answer I gave your mother and it's the only one I've got. You'll put the two halves together or you won't, and either way it's two old women who made a fire out of paper they were entitled to keep. There's nothing in it for anybody. It isn't evidence of anything. It's a list of who a family put on a low water, and there'll be a hundred names on it between the two." "Then why did she burn hers?" "Because she was thirty-two," said Rhosyn, "and because she'd had a fortnight in a weighhouse finding out what her grandmother had done, and because in 1987 the pans went cold and there wasn't a single person left in this bay who could read the hand. You burn a thing when you're the last one who can and there isn't going to be anybody else. It's not courage. It's housekeeping." "And in 2014 she posted it to me," said Rhosyn Threave, "and it came in an envelope with Rhosyn Threave written on it in her own hand, and inside it was one page with all the names on it copied out by hand, and a note that said, I have carried this for twenty-seven years and I am seventy-nine and my hands have gone, and I would like somebody to have it who might do something with it, and I cannot think what. And there was a P.S. that said, tell Hesper's girl the 1973 page is the only true one in there, and I am sorry about her brother, and I am sorry about all of it." "She'd never been told about the fire from you." "She wasn't told anything from me in her whole life," said Rhosyn Threave. "That's the trouble with the two halves. You keep them apart for a hundred and seventy years and then somebody has to hold both, and by then the only people left are the ones who were children." She pushed the tin an inch towards her own side of the table. "You'll not take it now," she said. "You'll not take it now because you've a child in a car outside and a sale to sign. You'll come on a Wednesday. Ring me and I'll have it out." ---