第7章 Ivor Threave Counts Three

Tranter came back on the Thursday with the form and Cerys gave him the first leaf, copied out in her own hand on a sheet of foolscap from the school exercise book, names and marks only, and he read it standing up in the pan room while the noon draw ran off over the front pan. "That's all of it," she said. "That's the 1893 leaf." "It's the 1893 leaf. It's one of eleven like it. You'll find them all if you've the right seasons and somebody to show you which sheet is which, and I'm not going to be that somebody for a Board with a wet coat." He folded the sheet into the case and then took it out again and put it back, and she understood that he was deciding whether to be the man who had been fooled or the man who had been let in as far as he could be got, and that he chose the second, because the second was the one that would still have a job in the autumn. "You'll get a letter," he said. "It'll be courteous. It'll say that the Board notes the family has made a partial disclosure and reserves its rights under the Act." "Say what you like." "I'm sorry about Ivor Threave." "So am I." "You're not, though." "No," said Cerys. "I'm not. What I'm sorry about is that he's been out on that mud for every spring tide since March with his boots on, waiting to be told." She heard him go up and away, and then she stood in the pan room with the crust coming hard on the second pan and the fire talking to itself, and she thought about what she had said to him and about how it had come out of her without any effort, the way a thing does when it has been kept behind the teeth for years and gets out at the first quiet moment. Tranter's letter came on the eighth of August. It was courteous. Ivor Threave came on the ninth. He came at the end of the day with his case, because he always came with his case, and he sat on the stool in the same place, and he took out a sheet of paper folded to the size of a stamp. "I've been counting," he said. "Counting what." "The mud." He unfolded it. It was a copy of the Coastguard's log, made by hand, in a schoolbook hand, with the tide times written down the side. "The eleventh of March. The Coastguard wrote six names for the men on the flats and the second step. Six, and there's a boat's crew of five, and one man from the house up at Bellrigg, and that's six. The Board printed five in the paper and the Herald printed four." "Four and six are not the same and that's the whole of the story." "That's the whole of the story," Ivor agreed. "Because I've been down there twice this week at the small ebb and I've been up the bank at the house and asked, one at a time, and I have got seven names and not five, and two of the seven are men who were not in Bellrigg that day by anybody's account, and one of those two is a man who is seventy-one years old and was in bed in Ildwater with his leg." "Then you've got a wrong list." "I've got a wrong list and I've got no reason to be printing it, and I've come up here to give it to you because I think you've already got one." Ivor put the paper on his knee. "Miss Cerys, my brother is not on your page and you know he is not on your page, because the page is the Steps and the Steps were not out, it was a small ebb in March, and he went out on a Tuesday like a man going to Ildwater for a bag of meal. So don't sit there and let me put it to you like a trick. I've come for one thing and I'd rather ask it straight, because I've had a great deal of being handled since March." "Ask it." "Was he wrote down." Cerys put the bar into the pan and turned the crust. "Once in a while there's a year when somebody writes more than names," she said. "And then there's a year when somebody writes what the family did about it. A tick. A dash. And now and then the tally at the foot." "And in the years where nobody writes anything." "There are four of those since 1851." "That isn't what I asked you." Cerys turned round. The fire was low and the pan room had gone dark at the edges, and she saw him properly for the first time since March: a man of twenty-four with his brother's shoulders on him and no brother. "It was wrote down," she said. "That I can give you. Whoever wanted to know what happened to him would have found his name, and would have found that the name had a line through it, and would have found out after that the family meant that he came back in by the front door and not by the water." Ivor Threave sat on the stool in a pan room at Sallowry and put his hand over his mouth. "I wanted it to be wrote down," he said, after a while. "That's what I've been walking up here for since March. I wanted to walk up here and be told it was wrote down, and I have got what I came for, and I have never in my life been so sick." "You'd rather I hadn't." "I'd rather you hadn't than have had it as a lie." "Then it wasn't a lie." Cerys moved the crust to the barrow. "It was written, and it's a true thing that he came back, and it isn't true that he came back the way the family says, and there is nobody in Harnsey Wick or Bellrigg or Collow Ness who could tell you which of the two halves of that to put your mother's tea in when she asks you in the evenings." Ivor got up and put the case down under the bench and did not pick it up again. "You'll not tell the Board." "No." "You'll not tell Mrs Pugh." "No." "Then I'll keep it." He said it flatly, as though he were being paid. "I'm not going to use it. There's no use in it. But I'll keep it, and if the day comes when somebody in this bay starts saying that the Saltwykes knew which men were on the mud and said nothing, I'll be a man who was told otherwise by the woman who kept the book. That's all I want out of it. That's the whole of what I came up here for." Then he said: "There's a thing I ought to say, and I've been not saying it for four months." "Say it." "The Threaves have got one as well. We don't write ours down, so we say it. My great-grandmother Threave was the one that carried the salt cake up the bank in 'ninety-three and she was the one that held the blanket." Ivor's voice went down and came back up. "And what she said in this room, to my grandfather, in his hearing, was, the Saltwykes went down with a lamp and a blanket and came back without her, and I held the blanket at the top of the Steps and I never asked. That's what we say. That's what we've said every day since. And I've never once asked myself where a Threave would have got the phrase." Cerys stood at the pan with the bar in her hands. "You've a family that keeps an account," she said. "Every family that lives on this water keeps one. Yours in the mouth. Ours on a shelf." "Mine says we were let down." "Yes." "Mine says the Saltwykes came back without her and left us holding the blanket and never asked." "Yes," said Cerys. "That's the one you say." The tide had come up to the foot of the pans. Beyond it, out where the light went off the water at the edge of nothing, the first of the September gulls were working over the mud in a long line. "Is there a Tidewarden now?" Ivor asked, at the ladder, with his hand on the rung. Cerys looked at the pans, ticking as they cooled, at the smoke going along the underside of the roof boards, at the fly hanging in its own coil above the front pan where it had hung since her mother's day. "No," she said. "There's nobody. There's a desk and a lamp and a press and a bundle in the leg of a weigh-table, and a woman of thirty who cannot boil a pan in June without a man watching her do it." "Then there's one now," said Ivor Threave, and went up. ---