第6章 The Knife With the Black Handle

Olwen came up from the George at four o'clock with a bag of laundry and a stone in it that she had picked up off the beach at Sallowry without noticing, which was the sort of thing that happened to her now that she lived where people did not go on Sundays. "You've cut your hair," Cerys said. "I had it cut. It's hot in Ildwater and I'm on the stairs." "You've cut all of it off the sides." "It's the fashion." Olwen put the bag down and looked at the pan room. "God. You've a fire in this in June." "You've a fire in this every day of the year except when it's too warm to want it, which is four weeks, and I'd thank you not to start." There were two women on the bank when Olwen came up, doing what the women on the bank did, which was to stand at a gate and look at the flats and say something small and cheerful. One of them said, "Your sister'll be in for tea," to Cerys, meaning Olwen, in the voice people used for a family they had known all their lives and would be seeing at a funeral inside the year. "I'll be in for tea," Olwen agreed, and waved, and the wave was the wave of a woman who had not lived there since she was seventeen. They ate salt cod and a great deal of bread and went out on the bank after, because it was that hour when the water had drawn off the flats and put a mirror where the mud had been, and the whole of Ebbmouth was in it upside down with the sky underneath, and Collow Ness standing in the middle of the sky with a black crow on it. "You've the same colour in your face as the pans," Olwen said. "You're boiled." "I'm working." "You're thirty years old and you've got a fire under a pan in June because somebody in a wet coat asked you for a book." "Somebody in a wet coat is coming back on Thursday." Olwen took the sleeve of her cardigan off the rail and folded it. "I've signed something." Cerys stopped on the step. The water went along the mud out there in a long lump like a dog getting up. "The memorial," Olwen said. "For the eleven of March. They've got a list and they want the families to sign, and Mrs Pugh put it on the counter with a collecting tin and a picture of the boat, and I signed on the Saturday because the Saturday girls were off and there was nobody else." "Under what name." "Under mine." "And where did you put it." "On the line, where anybody would put it." Olwen turned to face her. "Third from the bottom. Under Harris and under a man from Collow Ness and above Threave, because Ivor's gone and his mother couldn't get down the stairs." Cerys stood very still. The tide was coming in along the far side of the flats and you could hear it, a long tearing sound, the sound of the mud being given back. "You put your name under ours." "I put my name on a list of people who lost somebody." "The list is the family that keeps the account, Olwen. Every name on it is a family that sat at a desk and wrote down who was out on the mud. Harris kept the register at Collow Ness for thirty years. The Collow Ness man is a Threave's grandson. You've signed the Saltwykes to a memorial in Ildwater in front of everybody in the shop." "Have I." "You have." Olwen was quiet a while. A curlew went over them out of the salt and turned twice and went inland, which it should not have done at that hour, and which neither of them mentioned. "Mrs Pugh says you're the family that knows," Olwen said. "She says it as a compliment. She says, the Saltwykes will know, and she says it to me across a counter in front of customers. Two thousand people heard me say yes to it." "I'd take it back if you could." "I can't take it back, it's on a list with a boat drawn on it and a tin." "Right," said Cerys. "Then it's done and there's no use chewing at it, and you'll get no further grief from me about the list, and you'll not put a penny in the tin." That was the end of it. They went in at seven because the light went at eight in June, and the front room was where Cerys had left the roll on the table with the lamp lit, and the lamp made a warm yellow circle on the deal and the rest of the room the colour of weak tea. Olwen stood in the doorway. "You've got it out," she said. "I've got it out." "Show me the hole." Cerys looked at her for a while. Then she went out to the step and down the slope in the dark with a lamp, and Olwen heard her boots go over the boards and then nothing, and the length of that nothing, and then the sound of a stone being lifted out of wood. She came back with the bundle under her arm and gave it to Olwen and went and stood at the window with her back to the room, which was the most Cerys thing that had ever happened in that house. Olwen undid the sail thread on the corner where it had been mended twice. The oilcloth was stiff with age and smelled of the sea through sixty years of other people's hands. Inside was a sheet of paper, folded in four, brown at the folds and white in the middle where it had been kept shut. The tide of 1893 had been the small one that year, the sheet said at the top, in an upright hand that had gone the colour of tea. Thirty-one names in a column. Four ticks. And at the foot, under the four columns of the ledger proper, the tally. *Gone down and not brought back:* And the four of them. Three of them Threave and Bellrigg and the rest not names Olwen knew. The fourth line was the end of the line and the name sat at the right-hand margin where a hand had come to the paper at the last moment and written to save it from being cut short by the fold. Beside it were the two letters, and a stroke through the name above them, which Olwen did not understand at all. "Don't," said Cerys at the window. "I wasn't going to." "You were going to ask." "I was going to ask whose it is." "No." "It is our great-grandmother's, isn't it. It's Mam's grandmother. It's yours and mine and Gwyn's." Cerys turned round. "How do you know that." "Because there is nobody else in this bay it could be," Olwen said. "Because our family has sat at that desk for a hundred and sixty years and there is no other family on this bank that's been on the Steps and come back. Every single one of them that went out and came back has a name in the village. Mam told me the whole of it when I was little, on the wall at the top of the stair, with the lamp. She said, we were the ones that came back, and it was a great joke, and the joke was that she did not know what the great joke was." Cerys sat down on the end of the bed in her working coat. "That was my grandmother," she said. "Sitting on that wall telling you. And she had seen the page, because the page was in the press, and she read the whole of it before she told you the joke." "And struck through." "And struck through." "Then the joke is that she came back." "Yes." "And the page says she didn't." "Yes." Olwen folded the sheet along its own folds, which took a certain amount of doing because the paper had learned the other way. When she had it she sat down on the other end of the bed, at the other end, with the parcel in her lap, and the two of them looked at it between them. "You cut it out with the bread knife," Olwen said. "The bread knife cut it out with the bread knife." "I've had that knife out of the drawer at Ildwater four hundred times." "I know. It was the only one that would go through without bending." Olwen put the sheet down on the quilt between them and looked at it, and Cerys looked at the window, and outside the tide came the last half mile up the flats with the sound of a bucket being filled and emptied very slowly. "You should have burned it," Olwen said. "I thought about it for a week." "Why didn't you." "Because if I'd burned it, then in twenty years' time somebody would come and ask me where the 1893 leaf went, and I'd have to say it went with me." Cerys moved her hands. "I can hold a hole. I've held it thirty-four years already and I can hold it forty more. A hole's quiet. A fire is a thing people can see." "And what do I hold?" "You hold it by not asking." Olwen laughed, once, without much in it. "That's not holding anything. That's just you, alone, with it, for ever." "Yes," said Cerys. "That's what it is." "And when you're gone?" "Then it's in the press, and then it's in the house, and one day a woman from a Board of some kind will put it in a cabinet with a number on it and the hole will be in a cabinet, and nobody will ever know there was a hole." Olwen stood up and picked up the parcel and did not hand it to her. "I'm going back on the Saturday bus," she said. "And you'll put that back in the leg tonight, because I'm not carrying it to Ildwater in a laundry bag and because you'd never sleep." "You'll not ask me about it again." "I won't ask." "Not at the shop. Not at Christmas. Not in twenty years when you're forty-six and I've been dead a decade." "I won't ask," Olwen said, "except once, and I'll ask it now so that I've done it and can stop. Was it her choice? Did she go, or did they send her?" Cerys looked at the brown sheet for a long time. "There are three ticks on that page, and then the tally," she said. "A tick in this house means we fed them and gave them boots and kept them in the pan room for a week before they went, and a dash means we gave them money and let them go. There is no mark at all for anything else. There never was." "That isn't an answer." "No," Cerys said. "It is the nearest thing to one that can be written in a book without the book lying." ---