第20章 The Mouth of the Long Ebb

The consent was approved on the nineteenth of September by four votes to one and the objection in the name of Lowri Collow was read in full into the minutes and the file went up to the MMO with the third number on it, minus two point one metres, from the Ashenholt tidal compression record, 411 events, 1922 to the present. Tamar signed the survey. She filed the datum. She wrote a covering note of two pages and attached four hundred and eleven events and a photograph of the tithe plate and one sentence that made the whole file: The prevailing explanation for this phenomenon is not fully supported by the site data, and the number filed here does not depend on the phenomenon. Ellerby countersigned it the same afternoon. In the margin of the second page he wrote: Agree on facts. Disagree on arithmetic. Recommend proceeding. Cragmere got his consent on the nineteenth of September and did not speak at the meeting. He shook Tamar's hand at the back of the hall and said, "I've read your covering note six times and I want you to know that it is the best technical document I have read in twenty-six years and it argues against me," and then he went out to his car. Lowri was in the corridor afterwards with a folder under her arm and her coat over her arm. "He could have taken it to determination," she said. "Anybody in his position could have let it run for fourteen months and it would have died quietly on a conveyor in Leamington and nobody would ever have read any of it." "Yes." "Why didn't he?" "I don't know," Tamar said. "Ask him." "I did ask him. He said, because she told the truth in writing and then she let me build it, and I have never in twenty-six years had an engineer do both, and I am not going to waste it finding out why." Ruan was not there. He had gone to Ashenholt Rigg with the handset in his pocket, which was what he had been doing four or five evenings a week since February, and which nobody had asked him to do and nobody had paid him to do. Work started on the eleventh of October. The mouth was taken out in a fortnight, the old roundhead quay and the boat slip and the landward wall of the Bellrigg haulage yard went first, and the turbine house went up out of the mud behind the new outfall in eleven weeks. The line was opened on the twentieth of January, the day after the commemoration, by a schoolgirl of eleven from Harnsey Wick who had won the naming competition and did not want to be near the water. The Tidewarden came back to the Council a month later in Tamar's name and was not used, and she has never learned who bought it. Tamar stayed to the end of the spring and moved to a flat inland with no window in it, and she never went back to Harnsey Wick. The month before she left, Lowri Collow telephoned her at the archive, which she had not done in twenty-four years, and told her that on a Tuesday in the previous November a man had come into the archive at Collow Ness with a portable recorder and asked whether the archivist knew anything about bell sounds on the Ashenholt signal, and had recorded eight hours of her talking about 1922 and 1934 and 1944 and the tithe plate and the partial at one hundred and fifty-six hertz. "He had a list," Lowri said. "He had it written down and he went down it. That is the part I want you to hear, Tamar. He did not come in here to be kind to me. He came in here with a printed list and he worked down it in order, the way a man does a job." "What was on the list?" "Names. Places. Dates. And a column with a tick in it that said, has the subject ever given an account directly." "And you ticked it." "I ticked it every time," Lowri said. "I gave him a great deal of detail, because the Sounding list was in my room and the ninth entry is in my hand, and I was eighty-one by then and tired of being careful." "He didn't ask you to stop." "He did ask me. He was very polite about it. He said, Doctor, if anybody found this on a hard drive in a litigation disclosure it would be an absolute gift to whoever wanted to say the record was manufactured, and he said, I am telling you that as a courtesy and not as an instruction, and I said, no, go on." "So he went on." "He went on," Lowri said. "He said he was writing it up. He said he would want to go back and take it again, a proper set, with the reference channel. And I said of course, come any time, the door's open." So he came again in the following February, and again in the March, and she let him in and made him tea and did the tea the way her grandmother did it, and she let him record eight hours. And the Ebbmouth Engineer and its sister sheet at Bellrigg both published in the summer, and in October the person doing the work went inland with a laptop and a set of headphones, and they started with the Ashenholt file, because that was where they started, and they found six minutes and forty-four seconds of tone at seven hundred and eighty-two hertz that had been sitting in the dataset since the previous winter, and they cross-referenced it against the tidal compression model and they found a beautiful, complete, four-hundred-and-eleven-event explanation for it, and they put it in a box and wrote two pages that were completely correct. Then they started listening further in. The first one was Lowri's. An old woman in a cold room on the headland, talking for eight hours about a morning, describing the light coming up behind her hands, saying she could not have told anybody how she knew the sun had come up. The second one was Ruan Threave's, and it was made on a handset at the top of Ashenholt Rigg on a Tuesday in September, in wind. The third one was Tamar Saybrook's, made in the archive at Collow Ness in the March, in a voice she did not recognise from the woman who was speaking, and there is a moment at six minutes and eleven seconds into the fourth hour where she stops describing 1922 and says, in the flat and careful voice of somebody reading a figure off a page: "And then you go down the steps, and you take the nine, and there is no tenth, and at the bottom there is a stone that is warm, and you stand on it, and you are not frightened, and you are not anything at all, and it is eleven seconds, and it is eleven seconds, and it is eleven seconds." Eleven seconds. Eleven seconds. Eleven seconds. And then in the fourth dataset, which was made on the eleventh of July in the year the sluice shut, on a phone that belonged to a man in his fifties who had been told to get off the steel, eleven seconds apart, under every voice, on every take, in every file, all the way in. Eleven seconds. Eleven seconds. Eleven seconds. ---