第1章 The First Setting

The table came to Gort on a wet Tuesday in March, bound in sacking and lashed to the flat bed of a cart that had climbed the coast road from Carra since dawn. Oona stood at the kitchen window and watched the tired horse stop, watched the carpenter climb down and stamp the mud from his boots, and she thought, as she would think again on many later mornings, that the table looked bigger than the room it was coming to fill. She had commissioned it herself in the first winter of her marriage, and the choosing had taken three visits to the yard because she wanted to understand what she was buying. The carpenter had been patient with her. He laid lengths of oak on the trestles and showed her how a quarter-sawn board holds its shape, how the grain will darken and gather character if you give it oil and years, how an edge that is planed square can still be persuaded by a passing hand. "Most folk never touch their table," he said. "They set it and they wipe it and they forget it. If you touch it, it keeps you company." She went home and thought about that, and came back with her grandmother's blue cups wrapped in a cloth to show him, and he nodded as though she had said something worth hearing. Her husband laughed at the trouble she took. A table is a table, he said; you set the plates and you eat and you clear. But he was a man who worked the trawlers out of Carra harbour, and Oona had learned in her first seasons there that men who live on the water notice nothing that happens ashore. She gave the carpenter her own measurements, pacing the bare kitchen with her arms out to span the room, and the carpenter marked the figures in pencil on the window frame and split the difference into three boards. Oak from the wood behind Carra, cut high on the hill where the sawyers had worked for two hundred years; they brought the planks down on a sledge, the same way that town moved everything of size, slowly and in the company of witnesses. The morning it arrived, the two carriers set the table on its edge and walked it through the scullery door in a careful, watchful dance, their boots scuffing the flagstones, and when they stood it upright in the middle of the kitchen the room at once appeared smaller and more settled, as though the house had been holding its breath for the one piece that would finish it. Oona took the sacking off herself. The top plank gave back a warmth to her palm that surprised her, and the grain ran the length of the boards like a river seen from a hill — unhurried, with the river's patience and the river's habit of finding its own way — and in the second board a knot had dried into the shape of a closed eye, the lid drawn smooth, and just beneath it the corner of a folded mouth, so that the wood held the calm expression of someone who has decided to wait and watch. That evening she set the table for two. She used the blue cups her grandmother had left her, a pair of them, one chipped at the rim from a clatter in some earlier kitchen, and she lit a single paraffin lamp and stood it at the centre of the boards, where the light pooled on the wood and ran into the river of the grain. When her husband came in from the shore, his hair still dark with weather, he stopped in the doorway and looked at the length of lamp-lit table between them. "That's a great length of table for two people," he said. "It'll fill," Oona said. And because she was young and had said it in front of the furniture, she made it true. It filled. There was a child in her second year of marriage, and the carpenter came down from Carra to cut a notch on the underside of the first leaf, square and deep, to keep the tally, and Callum came home from the midwife's arms and was laid on a folded blanket on the table, where he looked up at the closed-eye knot and was quiet. The table filled with him: with linen spread out to dry, with flour dusted into bread, with the laundry rail set across its length in winter, with the heavy pot that scorched a brown ring into the far board and left the first scar. Oona sanded and oiled that ring, and when it would not leave she decided to keep it, and respected it from then on as an honest index of the household's haste. The man who was Callum's father drowned on a March night, in the same season in which he had first called the table too long. The weather came in hard without warning, and the boats that made it back crawled into the harbour at dawn one by one, and the men stood at the end of the pier with their lanterns until the light gave them nothing more to look at. Oona watched the sea from the kitchen window the way the house had always watched it, with the glass between the weather and the room. The morning after, when two men from the town came up the yard with their caps in their hands and the trouble standing plainly on their faces, Oona was already at the table, oiling it. Her hand moved with a rag in long, slow strokes from one end to the other, following the grain, and she did not stop when they told her the news, and she did not stop when they left. The smell of linseed and turpentine went out across the kitchen until the whole room smelled of the table and of nothing else, and Callum slept on in his crib in the corner, and the two blue cups stood washed and turned down on the shelf above the range, where they stayed for eight years before Oona took one of them down again. For months she did not set a place across from herself. The chairs at the table were six, none of them matching — two from her grandmother's house, two her husband had bought one wet afternoon at a sale in Carra, two that belonged to no one in particular and were never told apart — and she used only the one nearest the range, which she thought of as her end. It was a long table to eat at alone, and she discovered that she preferred it standing, a plate of bread and tea at her elbow, her eye free to move between the window and the account book and the mending, and the table became less a place for laying plates and more a place for laying out the day the way a tailor lays out cloth, edge to edge, before making the cut. In the end it was the table that kept her in Gort. In the months after the drowning she thought often of selling the house and taking rooms in the town, where there were fewer windows that watched the weather and less that needed fixing. But the table would not fit through the door of any room she could afford, and when she had worked that out for herself, measuring the scullery door against the breadth of the boards, the discovery arrived with the force of a settled argument that had been building all along: she could not move the table, and so she would not move. The house could be made smaller around her. The table could not. Years later, when Callum was old enough to ask why no one ever sat at the head of the table, Oona told him that the head was where the past sat, and the past did not need feeding. She said it drily, the way she said most things that mattered, and she filled his plate and her own and left the rest of the long table to the lamp and to the closed-eye knot and to the river of grain that ran under them all, patient as water, going nowhere in particular and taking its time about it.