第18章 Celyn and the Long Grey Coat

Pyke came on the Saturday at eleven with a briefcase and a fleece on in August, because men who sell land on a coast always arrive in something you can spot from a mile off. He was very good at it. He had the particulars, which were better than anything the house deserved, with photographs taken in February in a flat light that made the bank look like a putting green; he had the location plan with the nine numbered plots and the boundary in red; and he had the phrase, which Ismay read four times in his own kitchen and then had to go out and stand in the yard for a minute. "Uninterrupted easterly aspect across the Ebbmouth to the horizon," he said. "It's not a marketing line. It's a technical line. It appears on the plan because it's an aspect, and it appears in the brochure because it's worth nine hundred an acre more than a north one." "It's a mudflat." "It's a mudflat for four hours a day and a horizon for the other twenty, and they're not going to sell the four hours." Pyke turned the plan round to face her. "I'll be honest with you because you'll find it out on the searches anyway. My client's problem isn't your house. My client's problem is that there's a title question going back to the sixteen-fifties with an office called Tidewarden on it, and the county has had whatever that office left behind in a store since 1987, and my client's solicitors will want to know whether the Saltwyke family has ever disposed of anything that office held." "I've handed it in." "You've told me you've handed it in. What you've told me you've handed in is a bundle that a woman with a folding stool signed for on a Friday in 1987 and carried off a weighbridge. There's a difference and it's the whole of this job." "Then ask the county." "I have. Twice. Their answer is that they will produce the bundle within eleven weeks for a fee, and that the description on the label reads Saltwyke family papers, and that the catalogue record from 1991 describes the contents as tide accounts, incomplete." Pyke shut the case. "That's the answer twice. Eleven weeks, Miss Saltwyke, and your client's solicitor has thirty days of his own time on it. So either I can tell him nothing further is coming, or the sale stands still until December, and if it stands still until December this goes on next spring at a different number." "There is nothing further coming." "Are you sure of that?" "There's nothing in it but paper," said Ismay. "Go and do your searches." Celyn was at the window with her back to both of them and had been for some time. "What does incomplete mean," she said. "It means the record has gaps in it." "Is it the sea?" Pyke looked at her. "Is it the sea what?" Celyn turned round. She had been five for eleven weeks and had long since stopped apologising for the things she said in rooms. "It was the Steps," she said. "You said the Steps. And you said the sea's full of people sleeping. And if the record's incomplete it's because they took them out and forgot them and put them back with the writing wrong." Nobody said anything for a moment. "That's not—" Pyke started. "It's all right," said Ismay. "She's right about the forgetting. That's what incomplete means." She put her hand on the back of a chair. "Tell Mr Pyke what you know about the house, and then put your coat on, and then you can go and sit in the car and I'll be about ten minutes." Celyn went and got the long grey coat, which she had insisted on bringing and which she had not been allowed to wear since the airport, and put it on, and went out, and shut the door behind her with the particular care of a child doing something she has been told to do exactly right. "There," said Ismay, when the door had shut. "Now you can ask me whatever you actually came to ask." "I came to ask you about the sale." "You've asked me about the sale." "I've asked you about the sale, and you've said nothing about whether you'll sign, and you do this for a living, so I know what it means when somebody doesn't answer." Pyke sat down without being invited. "I'll tell you what I'd do. If it were me and there was a hole in a book going back to the sixteen-fifties, I'd sell the house and let whoever comes after me deal with the hole. Land doesn't keep anything. Land goes. The title's a piece of paper with a chain of people on it and not one of them is you." "Yes," said Ismay. "But you'll not do that." "I don't know what I'll do." "You'll know by Friday." He went. She stood in the kitchen and then went out to the step, where the car was, and found Celyn in the back seat with the grey coat on and her hands in her lap, looking out through the windscreen at the mud, at a flat with a survey stake in the middle of it and a rag tied to the top of the stake for the birds. "They've put a stick in the sea," said Celyn. "They've put a stick in the sea." "For the house people." "For the house people." Celyn considered this. "Mam," she said. "I'm not going to be able to do the thing where I don't remember being two." "What thing." "The thing where you go quiet and then you're not quiet any more and everybody says what a relief and nobody says what you were." Celyn was still looking through the windscreen. "Kerra did it. She said it about a man in a home in Collow Ness and then she wouldn't say any more. And you've got the face you get when somebody says the Steps." Ismay opened the car door and got in on her side. "I've got the face I get because people keep talking about the Steps." "You're doing it now." "I'm doing it now," said Ismay, "and you're five and you shouldn't have to sit in a car park being told things. Ask me properly, at home, tonight, and I'll answer you properly." "Will you answer me about the bell?" "Ismay." "You said the bell was angry. You said it in a church. And Kerra says there's a bell out at Ashenholt that rings before the water goes right down, and there's no bell out there, Mam. There's no church out there. There's nothing out there at all. It's rocks and mud." "Yes," said Ismay. "There's nothing out there at all. That's exactly right. And I'll tell you about the bell tonight and I'll tell you the true version, which is that nobody in this family has ever seen it and the four people who mattered most all said they could hear it, and that is the whole of what anybody in this bay has ever known about the Steps, and your great-great-grandmother wrote the result of it in a book and then cut the page out and burned it." Celyn turned and looked at her. "So it's not a real bell." "No," said Ismay. "It's a story about a bell, which is a thing people tell so that they can say something else. And the something else is in a box under the stair, and we will go and look at it after tea, and you may sit up as late as you like, and if you get tired you can go to bed, and I will not mind." They sat in the car park with the engine off and the sea going out and the surveyor's stick standing in it. "You promised in a church," said Celyn. "You said there were people asleep under the water." "I did." "Are there?" "No," said Ismay. "There are names. That's worse and it's better, and I'll show you tonight, and you're going to be quite cross with me when you do." ---