第3章 What Tranter Wanted

The clerk came at ten and dressed for the part: a grey coat buttoned to the throat though it was warm, a case, a hat he took off and held. Mr Tranter had a way of standing that made the pan room small. He stood with his back to the fire so that she had to look at him against the light, and he looked first at the pans, and then at her hands, and then at the press in the front room, which he had already seen through the door. "Miss Saltwyke. I'm obliged to be plain with you, because you'll only think better of me for it." "Go on, then." "The Board has a claim." He took a folded paper out of the case and did not open it. "Under the Harbours and Piers Act the office of Tidewarden at Harnsey Wick is vested, and where an office is vested the records of it are the Board's, and where no officer has been appointed for eighteen years the Board is obliged to take the records into its own keeping. That is the whole of it. I'd rather you had it from me than from a solicitor's letter in a fortnight." "Then you'll have had it plainly." "I've had it plainly." He put the paper away again. "And I'll tell you what usually happens, because I've done this eleven times since the war. Nine times out of eleven the old woman hands it over on the step with the kettle on, and nobody's harmed. The Board keeps it in a cabinet at Ildwater, and it's got a number, and it's dry, and nobody opens it." "And the tenth?" "The tenth time we have to go and take it, and then it gets opened, because a cabinet with a number on it is a thing a man is meant to look at." He paused. "I'd rather it went to Ildwater as a gift than as a thing we had to fetch." "And the boat? The Lowtide?" "Nineteen hundred and fifty-three, the eleventh of March, the small ebb." He said the date without looking it up, which told her he had been told it once and had repeated it to himself until it sat down. "Two aboard, one in at the bow. The Coastguard had him at the second step of the causeway out at Ashenholt at twenty past seven and then nothing. They put a light on the mud for three days and took it off again." Tranter put the back of his hand flat on the doorframe as though testing for damp. "There's no inquiry. A man drowned at a low tide is a man who went out at a low tide. That's the finding. That's what the finding says." "Then I don't see what the roll has to do with it." "That's what I said to the Harbour Master, and he said, does she know the family has an account of it." He took his hand off the door. "He was annoyed with himself for saying it. He'd had a drink." "The Harbour Master hasn't been in this room in eleven years." "No." A pause, longer than the others. "Miss Saltwyke, I have been four hours on a boat with that man's widow. She is not asking you for a list. She is asking whether there is one, because if there is one then the boy went out on the Steps in company and was not let back by himself, and that is a different misfortune, and she can hold that one." He straightened his cuffs. "If there is no list, then he went out alone, and she has to hold that for the rest of her life. I don't know which of those you would call the kinder thing to tell her." Cerys carried on raking. The crust came off the front pan in wet grey slabs and she put them in the barrow and the pan began to show its iron again, red where the salt had gone and black where the fire had been. "There's no Tidewarden," she said. "My mother died in 'forty-nine. My grandmother had the desk before her and the desk is in the front room with a lamp on it. There's no officer, no appointment, no seal, nothing. That's a woman's drawer." "There's a roll." "There's a bundle of paper." "That's a roll." Tranter took his hat off again and turned it in his hands, which she had not expected. "Miss Saltwyke, I want to say something to you now and it isn't in any letter. If there is a page in that bundle with a man's name on it from this winter, the Board will be obliged to act on it, and acting on it means a man from the Ministry comes and sits in the front room and asks questions, and I can't stop that. Whatever's in it doesn't stay in it once it's been asked for." "I've no man in it." "Then hand it over and there'll be nothing to ask." Cerys put the bar in the barrow and stood up. The sweat came off her at the back of the neck and she let it. "You've not asked me for it yet," she said. "You've told me the law and you've told me what you'd have to do with it if I gave it you, and you haven't once stood in this room and asked me for the book, and I'll have you notice that, because when you do ask I'll answer." Tranter's mouth moved a little at one corner. "I'll ask you on Thursday." "You'll ask me on Thursday," Cerys agreed, "and I'll give you an answer on Thursday, and I don't know what it is tonight." He went up the ladder and stood at the top of it and looked back down into the pan room, where the fire was in full roar and the salt smoke had banked up under the roof beams. "Miss Saltwyke." "Mr Tranter." "The Steps were out in 'ninety-three." He said it evenly, an official reciting a date, and he watched her face while he said it. "I'm a man from Ildwater. My grandfather kept the register at Collow Ness and he wrote that down in his hand in the same month, and I've seen the page. Your family's page and my grandfather's page are the same page in two books. One of them's been kept honest for a hundred and sixty years and the other hasn't." "Then you're telling me my family's been dishonest." "I'm telling you mine was written by a man in a bad temper who wanted the whole village in a ledger so that he could hold it over them," Tranter said. "And that mine was on the shelf at the Board of Trade until last year, when somebody paid a woman forty pounds to look at it. And now I'm here, and I find the other one in a front room, and I'd like, if it's any use to you, to be the one who says so out loud." Cerys carried on up the ladder. "That was badly said and true," she said. "Which is the kind that does the most harm." He put his hat on. At the top of the slope he turned and shouted back down, almost cheerfully, as though he had remembered something pleasant. "There's a woman Ildwater side keeping an index of every book the Board holds. She'll know about your bundle without ever opening it. Her name is Collier. If anybody comes asking you about the roll, ask them whether they've spoken to Mrs Trewhella, and if they haven't, then they haven't been told what they're being offered." The wind came round the corner of the house and took the door out of her hand. ---