第10章 Isolde's Letter

Isolde Kerr came up the hill on the Sunday at four o'clock with her bag over her arm and the letters in it and a face on her that Nell had not seen before and could not immediately name. "There's one for you," she said. "And I'm going to say first that I've not read it, because I'm not a fool and because I've been doing this nineteen years and I know what a letter in a hand like that is." "Morwenna said you had a way of knowing what people have sent." "I've a way of knowing what people have sent," said Isolde, "which is the same as knowing what envelope it came in and what stamp and what the paper's like and whether it's been through a machine, and none of that is reading it, and I'd take it as a kindness if you'd not go round telling people in this village that I read the post." She handed it over. It was a cream envelope, airmail border, one stamp, and on the front, in a small careful hand that Nell did not know at all: Miss N. Ashgrove The cottage above the ferry slip Carrowen Isle of Skerry The cottage above the ferry slip had not been a house since 1994. It had been a store for two seasons and then it had been a store for nothing at all, and the door had a padlock on it that belonged to the harbour board, and the address stopped being an address in the year Nell turned thirteen and had been printed on nothing since. "Is that where you went," said Isolde, watching her. "To the little girl. You went up there in the September." "You knew I'd come back." "I knew you'd have to at some point. There's not many people in the world that can be got back to a place. Most of the people that left a place don't get got back, and the ones that do usually come back for a reason they can name on the second day and can't name at all by the third." She shifted the bag on her hip. "That letter's been in the box since Thursday. It came in on the Tuesday boat, which means it's been through a sorting office, which means whoever sent it didn't hand it in at the postbox in Ardra, and the postmark says a place with a post office and not a place with a pillar box." "Read it." "No." "Isolde." "No." And then, after a moment, in a completely different voice, the voice of a woman standing at a gate in the rain with nothing at all to gain by it: "I'll tell you what I know and then I'll tell you I'm not telling you the rest, and if you go up to that cottage with a torch and a spare key you'll find that the padlock on the door has been oiled in the last two months, and the board have a key, and nobody in this village oils a padlock for a store that's been shut since I was forty." Nell looked down at the envelope. "You said you don't deliver to addresses that don't exist." "I said I don't deliver to a place where nobody can be found," said Isolde Kerr. "I said that in the office in front of Padraig Fisk and a mug of tea, and I meant it, and I'd like you to understand that I've been at this postbox for nineteen years and I have never in nineteen years walked up that hill with a letter I wasn't able to put somewhere, and that this is me putting it somewhere, and that you are extremely lucky and that I'd not be surprised if you spent the whole of your life not understanding why." She went back down the hill without waiting for an answer. Nell stood on the top of the wall above the harbour with the letter in her hand and the wind coming over from the headland and the low water going out four hundred metres below her, and she did not open it, because she had learned something that week about the difference between a thing you do and a thing you let somebody else do to you first, and she stood there for eleven minutes and then she put it in her inside pocket and walked down to the cottage above the ferry slip and did not go in, and stood in the road outside a shuttered building with a padlock on the door that somebody had been keeping. Below her, out in the bay, the water was going out the way it went out every day, and in eleven days it would go out further than it had gone that year or the year before, and there would be a set of stones there with a kerb and a white stone in the middle of it and a survey mark in the top of the white one, and she had a brass key in her coat that did not open a door, and she understood with complete clarity, standing in the road, that she was going to go out on it by herself and that she was not going to tell anybody she had decided that, and that this was the first decision she had made in twenty-two years that she had not made by running. She went up to the cottage and unlocked the padlock with a key she did not expect to have been given, and inside the air was cold and dry and had been nothing at all for a great many years, and there was a smell of old paper and machine oil, and the boards were bare except for a wooden crate in the corner and a folded chair, and the salt had got in through one failed pane and put a bloom of white along the north wall about a foot high, which was the exact height the water had stood the week she was nine. She stood in the middle of the room and did not open the letter for another hour. Then she took it out and read the outside of it again, and put it back in her pocket, and went down to the shed and told Morwenna that a letter had come. "I'd not expect anything else," said Morwenna, without looking up from the net. "You knew the address." "I gave the address to your mother the year you were born and I have never once used it and I was not going to start." She drew the needle through. "Who brought it?" "Isolde." "Ah," said Morwenna, and stopped, and looked at the net as though it had made a mistake. "Then it's a real one." "Is that a way of telling?" "It's a way of telling that the woman has decided to be involved, and she has not decided to be involved in anything since about 1994, and there is no reason on this earth she'd do it for a shop full of nets." She tied off and bit the thread. "Read it or don't. But don't do it out here, and don't do it on the hill, and don't do it in that room upstairs with the north wall sweating, and do it at the table with the lamp on and the door shut, and then take it out of the house and burn it or don't, and either way don't keep it in a drawer for eleven years, because that's what I did and it cost me a visit from a man from the district who was very polite about it."