第19章 What the Tin Held

The box was under the stair on the left, the length of a tea chest, with a sliding lid that had been painted the colour of the door at some point in the last forty years, and Ismay had walked over it every day of the summers of her childhood and had never once moved it. "It'll be stiff," she said, coming up with a screwdriver. "Let me do it." "You'll do nothing of the kind." Celyn stood over the box while Ismay worked the blade into the seam. The lid came up with a sound that made them both jump, because something inside went moving, and what went moving was not a mouse but a great dry shift of paper settling. Boiling books. Seven of them, and a lot of them. "That many?" "They're the boiling books," said Ismay. "Every year since 1871. Weighed and in, drawn off, sold. Coal. Wages. And there's one for 1849 and one for 1893 and one for 1919 and one for 1933 and one for 1973, and I've never in my life looked at any of them." The 1893 book was the second from the bottom, which is where a book about a bad year goes, and it came out with a piece of card for a cover and a flyleaf that said, in a fair nineteenth-century hand, *House book of the salt-boiling at Sallowry, kept by A. S.* "Weighed in, twelve hundred and ninety. Drew off, five hundred and ten. Sold at the Wick, four hundred and twenty. Coal, ninety-one pounds." Ismay ran her finger down the column and came to the bottom of the page, where the ruling changed and the ink changed with it, and there were two ruled spaces left empty at the foot of the sheet. Then a line in the same hand, dated the following March: *and the name given to the child born the eleventh, so that she is in the house.* And underneath that, the name. Cerys. She read it, and then she put the book down on the step and put both hands over her face for about four seconds, in the doorway, out of the wind, with a five-year-old standing in front of her. "Mam?" "I'm all right. I know that name. That name is my grandmother's name. That name is the name of the woman who could not lift a wet barrow and who kept a desk for sixty-four years, and it is the name in the aerial photograph in the front room of every house on this bank, and it is a name this family has been putting on little girls in a churchyard since 1894 so that the water couldn't take the house." "Ismay—" "That's my handwriting," said Ismay. She had got to the flyleaf. There was a page at the front with a list on it, in the same hand as the 1893 entry, going down the page the way a list of wages goes down a page, and the list had four names on it. *Cerys, born the eleventh of March 1893, of Bronwen, his wife.* *Cerys, born the second of June 1908.* *Cerys, born the fourth of October 1923.* And then, in a different ink, a thinner line, in a hand Ismay had never seen on paper before and would recognise anywhere on earth: *Cerys, born the fourteenth of March 2013. Six pounds fourteen. Nothing sent.* The date was hers. The figures were hers. The book was the day-book she had bought for the house in 2013 because the last one had gone in a flood in the bathroom, and she had gone on with the family practice of writing the year's salt in a fair column and the year's losses underneath it, and there was no salt in it that year because there had been no salt for twenty-six years. *Nothing sent.* She had written those two words on the eleventh of March 2013 at about eleven in the morning, with her daughter two hours old, in a hospital in Ildwater, with no thought of anything in the world except that she had walked into that house at twenty-two years of age and been handed a thing with a hole in it. "There's nothing sent," said Ismay Saltwyke, out loud, in a cold hallway in August. "Nothing sent. Six pounds fourteen and nothing sent. I wrote it down in the family book." The bell in the road went for the quarter hour and she heard it under the words, under the tide, the way she had heard it in a church in 2016 and had told her daughter there were people asleep under the water. "Mam," said Celyn, "you're doing the face." "I'm not doing a face." "You're doing the face," said Celyn, "the one you do at church. Come and look at this." She was holding the 1973 book, which she had taken off the pile and opened on the step and was looking at with her finger on a line, and she had the whole weight of it tilted up towards her in the way children hold a book they are about to be asked about. "This one's got the crossed-out on it," she said. "There's a lot of crossed-out on this one. Mam, there's a man crossed out here and there's a date." "Which date." "Nineteen seventy-three," said Celyn, "and it says, and one returned, not questioned. And then in a different bit, under the list, it says, put on the low water, four, and brought up the bank, three, and one not questioned, and that's four, so that's not wrong." "That's not wrong." "It's got a list though," said Celyn. "It's got all the names on the same page, the walked ones and the others, and I could have copied them out like you did yesterday." "What did you copy out yesterday?" "Nothing," said Celyn, and shut the book. Under the door, where the sea had got in when the wind had been on the south-west, there was about an eighth of an inch of water on the tiles of the hall, and it had been coming in under the door for three days, and it came over the step and over the boards and went to the corner where the walls met and made its own small going shape. ---