第8章 Weighhouse, Half Past Six

The clock in the weighhouse was eleven minutes fast and had been since the winter before the flood, and Hesper had stopped correcting it in 1979 because the lorry drivers had built their whole day out of it. Six thirty in the morning, in June, and the weighhouse was already hot enough to have a window propped with a folded sheet of the Gazette. The floor was concrete and it came up cold through her shoes at the one door that did not let the wind in. Two lorries were already on the weighbridge: one from Harnsey Wick with sea water, which they weighed for nothing and weighed anyway because the Act of 1902 said the salt company must be supplied with a return, and one from Bellrigg with two tons of rock salt for the pans, which they weighed for money. "Two fourteen and three quarters," said Mererid, writing. "Two fourteen and three quarters." "You can say it, you don't have to write it, I can write it." "You wrote the tare at quarter past and you wrote the gross at half past and the difference is the weight of the load, and the man pays for the load, so somebody in this office does the subtraction in front of him." Hesper took the book and signed it and turned it round so that Deakin could see the figure from the door where he was standing with his hands behind him. "Two fourteen and three quarters. Next." Deakin had been standing in the weighhouse door for a quarter of an hour. That was his way: he came and stood, and then everybody in the building got on with whatever they had to do faster than they would have done. "I've put the notice on the board in the gate," he said. Mererid read the figure back into the book without looking up. "What notice." "The one about the twenty-ninth of August." Hesper kept her eyes on the column of figures, which went on being figures after the notice had been read out in the only voice that could carry a building of salt-pans without appearing to shout. "Twenty-ninth of August," Mererid said. "The last boil. After that the pans are cold and they stay cold. The company are putting men on the closure list this week." Deakin came into the room at last, and sat down on the bench by the stove, which nobody was allowed to sit on, and put his hat on his knee. "I want to say a thing before the rumor gets about, so that when it gets about you can say you heard it here. The pans are done. It isn't the coal. We haven't had a bad week with coal since the miners came off. It's the salt coming in off the boats at Ildwater at eleven pounds a tonne landed and us standing here boiling it the old way at forty." "That's not a reason," Mererid said. "That's a price." "It's the reason, girl." "It's the reason you gave the company in the paper. The reason in the paper's that it went out of fashion." Deakin put his hat down on his knee and turned it. "It's in fashion," he said. "It's in fashion in a shop in London at a price nobody on this bank will pay. A woman in London puts a box of it on a table and gives away a book of matches and gets four times what we get for a hundredweight and uses a tenth of the coal and half the men." He looked up. "I'm not going to stand in front of the two of you and say there's another way of boiling salt, because there isn't. I've asked. I've gone north and asked, and they've got plants like laundries with pipes in them and forty men to do what we do with two hundred." "How many on the closure list." "Sixty-one at Sallowry. Another thirty at the Wick." "Us?" "Both of you are on it." The lorry moved on the bridge with its load of rock salt and the plates rang under it. Hesper wrote two fourteen and three quarters at the top of a fresh page and then wrote the same figure again under it, which she had never done in nine years of doing the book. "And the Tidewarden?" she said. Deakin's head came round. He had not expected that, and she could see him deciding what she knew and how much of it. "The office goes with the works," he said. "The company's solicitor has it in correspondence. When the pans stop, the company will hand whatever's held here to the county, and the county will put it in a store with a number on it, and that will be the end of that." "Somebody would have to sign for it." "The company's solicitor will sign for it." "There's nothing in this office called a company solicitor." Deakin looked at her for a while. He had a way of arriving at a thing from the side, and this was him arriving. "There's you," he said. "There's me," Hesper agreed, "and there's my gran at the house, and there's the roll in the press, and when you go back to the office on Friday you will put it in a box and I shall sign for the box, and the box will go to the county, and inside forty years somebody will write a note in a catalogue saying what a Saltwyke is and get it wrong. I'd rather you said so plainly now, before the twenty-ninth, so that I can be thinking about it for a fortnight." "I said so plainly now." "Right," said Hesper. "Thank you." She went out to the bridge and stood on the plate with her hand in her pocket and looked at the pans, which from up there were six long lines of dark timber and iron with the water standing green in three of them, and the far one with the fire under it going. Her grandmother was sixty-four and had been doing the salt on her own since February, because the Saltwykes had not had a pair of hands on the pans since Michael, and Michael had been dead four years. Cerys could not lift a wet barrow any more. Cerys could not get up out of a chair without putting her hands on the arms. Cerys had, on a Tuesday in April, tried to rake a crust and had put her back out for a fortnight, and had said nothing to anybody about it, and had afterwards told the whole of Harnsey Wick that the damp had got into her hip. The Saltwyke house was two hundred yards from the top of that bank, with its front room facing the water, and the press in it, and the lamp, and the roll. "Miss Hesper." One of the men from the boiling house, at the rail. "Will you want the second fire on Saturday? We can lay it or leave it." "Lay it," Hesper called. "And tell Mr Saltwyke I said, lay it, and don't let her near the front pan." ---