第1章 The Survey Marker

The chart table in the harbour office had been built for a larger room, and the new chart case had been laid across two of its drawers so that the left-hand side sat half an inch lower than the right. Nell noticed this before she noticed anybody in the room. She had spent eleven years learning that the things a room gets wrong tell you more about the room than the people in it do. Padraig Fisk was drinking tea out of a mug with a chip out of the rim and had not stood up. "You're late for the tide," he said. "It's a droning job. Nothing needs to be in the water today." "Everything needs to be in the water today." He set the mug down hard enough that the tea jumped. "The dredger's on its way out and your office wants a number for it to follow, not a poem." That was fair, and she let it stand, because Padraig had been right about weather eleven times out of the last twelve and about everything else more often than that. He had a way of stating a true thing so that it landed like an insult, which Nell suspected he had learned from his father and his father from the sea. She put her bag on the one end of the chart table that did not dip, unlocked the instruments, and began. The steel rule went down onto the chart first, then the dividers, then the parallel rule, and while her hands were busy her shoulders came down about half an inch from where they had been since the ferry. This was the whole of the trade for her. Everyone assumed that a surveyor spent her day arguing with the sea. In truth she spent it in a warm room with good instruments, and the sea was only ever present as a set of numbers that other people were too impatient to wait for. Twenty minutes later she had the fix, and it was not a difficult one. The channel marker at the mouth of Carrowen harbour had shifted four metres to the south-west over two winters, which was a great deal, and which meant the dredging contract had been drawn up against a chart that was two years out of date. She wrote the figure on the corner of the sheet in the shorthand nobody else in the building could read, and then she wrote it again more slowly underneath, because she would be the one reading it in six months. "Four metres," Padraig said, coming to look. "Four metres south-west." "That'll put the fairway under the ballast berth by spring." "That's the dredger's problem." She capped the pen. "It's a contract problem. Somebody drew a line in an office that wasn't me." Padraig grunted, which from him was applause. He picked up his mug, discovered it empty, and looked into it as though the bottom might have changed its mind. "You'll be wanting the old sheets," he said. "If you're doing it properly." "I'm doing it properly." "Mary Latcham kept the good ones. Down to nineteen-something. She'll know which drawer." Nell wrote the name down. Mary Latcham had been dead six years and the harbour board still had not opened her house, which told her something about the board and quite a lot about the house. "I'll want the tide tables going back as far as they've printed them," Nell said. "All of them. The full run." "For what?" "For the record." "For the record." Padraig looked at her. He had a heavy face, weather-beaten at the cheekbones, and he had the particular way of looking at a person that made it clear he was deciding how much of a thing to say. "You'll find there's things in this bay the record doesn't have a shape for, girl." "I'll find there's a lot of things in every bay that the record hasn't got a shape for, Padraig. That's not a mystery. That's just what a bay is." He turned away and rinsed the mug, and that was the end of it, and she let it be the end of it, which was a thing she had got much better at in the last several years. Outside the harbour office the wind was coming off the water with the particular chill that comes in the last fortnight of February, when the air has been cold somewhere much further north and has finally arrived. Nell stood on the slip and looked out at the bay, and her eye went, without any instruction from her, to the place where the water was pale and the stones showed through. Nothing there. Of course nothing there. The road came out four times a year, and it was not February, and the spring tide was still eleven days off. She got her notebook out of her coat and wrote the date, and the wind, and the direction, and the visibility, and the fact that she had come back after twenty-two years to a village that had got smaller, and that she could not think of one thing she had come back for. At the top of the slip she stopped, because Morwenna was coming the other way. Morwenna Shand was eighty-eight and moved like a woman of sixty and looked like a woman of a hundred and ten. She had a basket on her hip and a shawl over her shoulders in a temperature that did not require one, and she took in the whole of Nell, the bag and the boots and the box of instruments, in about a second and a half. "You're on the slip early," Morwenna said. "I'm on the slip on time. You're on the slip late." "I was at the shed." Morwenna came the last two steps and took Nell's elbow, not for support but so that they would be walking together before either of them had agreed to walk. "You'll be wanting the shed." "I want the shed." "You'll be wanting the ledger, then." Nell looked at her grandmother. The shawl, the basket, the hands that had been netting since before Nell was born and had got better at it rather than worse, and the face that gave away nothing at all, ever, in the way that a coastline gives away nothing at all. "I'm wanting a great deal," Nell said. "You'll be wanting tea," said Morwenna, and turned toward the hill, and did not let go of her elbow, and did not ask a single question, which was how Nell had been raised and how she had learned, at considerable expense, to be the kind of person who answered them.