第9章 The Woman Who Kept the Books

Cerys was at the table with the boiling book when Hesper came in at half past seven, which was where she was at every hour of the day that summer, and had been since April. "You can see the fire from here," her grandmother said, without looking up. "I can see it from the press. Neither of us can see anything else, and both of us have sat in this room for four months pretending." "I said I'd lay the fire." "You said you'd lay the fire in March." Hesper shut the door behind her and put her bag down and stood for a moment in the front room, which smelled of cold ash and ink and the particular sourness that lamp oil makes in a room that is not often aired. "How's the hand?" "The hand's the hand." "Your grandmother's hand." Cerys turned the page over with the side of her little finger, which took her four seconds where it had once taken none. "The book wants copying out. The wet column's got to be copied into the fair column before the end of the month or we've a month of salt that weighs nothing, and the wet column's where the frost got in in February, and I can't read my own hand from January." "Then I'll do it." "You'll not do it in my hand." "I'll do it in mine and you'll check it." Cerys put the pen down and pushed the book across the deal with two fingers, and Hesper sat down and read from January. Outside the window the tide was in over the flats and the light off it came up under the sill and lay along the edge of the board. The Saltwyke book was not a beautiful thing. It had been begun in a fair hand in a year Cerys's grandmother could remember and had gone on in nine hands since. Cerys wrote in a small upright hand that got smaller as the years went, so that the pages from 1953 were the size of the pages from 1975 and the pages from 1975 were the size of a stamp. "Weighed and in: fourteen hundred and six. Drew off: four hundred and forty. Sold to Wick: two hundredweight to a Mr Tranter for Ildwater." Hesper stopped. "Mr Tranter." "Aye." "That was the man who came about the roll." "That was the man who came about the roll. He used to buy in the house and he bought in the house for thirty years and he was deaf in one ear from the boiling and he told everybody about the Steps." Her grandmother took her hand off the page. "There's four Mr Tranters. That one's dead." Hesper copied the line out. The ink from January was brown and the page had a cockle in it that took the nib, and she had to press, and the room was so quiet that she could hear the pan ticking at the other end of the yard. "Mam came out here in 'sixty-one," Hesper said, "when I was six." "Your mother came out here in 'sixty-one." "And she was shown the desk and the lamp and the press, and she was told about the office, and she cried at the sea like everybody does at that age." Hesper went on copying. "She never once opened it. In twenty-six years. Did you know that? She came in here every day and she never once put her hand on the press, and when I asked her why she said there was nothing in it that belonged to her yet." "It belonged to me." "It belonged to you and to the bank and the bell, and half the village, and she had been brought up to understand that if you ever took hold of it you would be holding all of it at once." Hesper looked up. "And that's why I'm asking you now, while there's still a fortnight, instead of finding out on the twenty-ninth with a box at the door." Cerys did not answer for long enough that the fire clock ticked nine times. "You'll open it," she said. "I'll open it." "And you'll not read past the first leaf." "I'll read it, Gran. You'll sit here and I'll read it and you'll tell me if I've got it wrong, and then in a fortnight I'll be the one who signs for a box, and I'd rather be a person who knows what she's signing for than a person who finds out in a county store with the lid off." Her grandmother's hands lay flat on the table on either side of the book. They were the hands of a woman who had lifted wet salt by the hundredweight for thirty years and who now could not open a jar without both of them. "There's a thing in there," Cerys said. "That isn't in the ledger and isn't in that book and isn't in the county's list either, because it's not a record of anything the company would understand. And when you see it you'll want to do something about it, and I want you to promise me before you open the press that you'll do nothing." "I can't promise that." "Then don't open it." Hesper stood up and went and took the key off the nail behind the door, which is where it had hung since 1953 and where it hung now because there was nowhere else, and she unlocked the press. The bundle came out the way it always came out, with the smell of the sea through sixty years of other people's hands. "Gran, come and look at the binding while I'm here." "I'm not getting up for a binding." "There's a leaf missing out of the 1893 section. Somebody's cut it out close to the stitch and the thread's been done again." The clock ticked. Cerys's face did nothing at all, in the particular way a face does nothing when a woman of sixty-four has spent thirty-four years practising. "Then that's what's missing," she said. "Who cut it?" "That's not yours to write down." "It isn't yours either. You've been sitting in this room since 'fifty-three." Hesper laid the roll on the table between the boiling book and the lamp and did not open it. "Gran. Did you cut it?" "A leaf is cut," Cerys said. "That's all that can be said about it, and you can put it in a letter, and it's true. And now you know what I know, which is that there's a hole in this house and there's no door on it, and it was here before me and it will be here after me, and the only mistake I ever made in my life was sitting in the dark with a bread knife." "What's on the leaf?" "Nothing." "There's nothing on it, or you wouldn't have cut it out." "There's a great deal on it," said Cerys, "and the whole of what's on it is a list, and a list can be made again by a person with time, and there has not been a person with time in this family since your mother died." Hesper put her hand flat on the leather cover. "I'll read it, and then I'll give it to the county with everything else," she said, "and I'll not write one word of it anywhere else, and if Deakin asks me what's in it I'll tell him it goes back further than the company and further than the Act, and he'll take that for an answer because he's a decent man who doesn't want the answer to be complicated." "That's the answer I'll give at the box," said Cerys. "They'll want a reason. It's a good one. Put it on the label." ---