第18章 Two Who Came Back Changed

The woman in Ardra was called Nanny Struan and she was ninety-one and she lived in a house with the curtains the wrong way round and a cat called Admiral, and she was perfectly happy, and she was the reason Nell had stopped writing things down. Nell went on the Tuesday with Isolde Kerr, because a woman of ninety-one does not open her door to a stranger with a theodolite, and because Isolde had delivered post to that address for nineteen years and had a card of her own in her coat for exactly this purpose. "You'll want to say nothing for a while," said Isolde on the way. "She'll talk first. That's the way with the very old, they don't need you in it." "Does she know about the ledger?" "She knows about the book her mother kept, and her mother kept a different one, and there's a family in that house have written the tide down for longer than the Shands have. And she knows what you're here for, because there are only three reasons anybody from off the island comes to that door, and one of them is a funeral and one of them is a doctor, and she has decided on her own which one you are and I haven't corrected her." Nanny Struan was sitting with a blanket over her knees doing something with a piece of netting, and there was a woman in the room with her who was perhaps fifty and who did not look up when Nell came in. "You'll be the one with the instruments," said Nanny Struan. "Yes." "Come away round then, and don't stand in the light, it's for my eyes." She went back to the netting. "Sit yourself. And speak to me the way you'd speak to anybody, not the way the coastguard speaks. I had one of them in 1988 and he was a decent man and he read me a statement and I let him and I have regretted the reading ever since, because you can't un-read a thing, and he's dead now anyway and the paper's in a drawer in a town you haven't heard of." Nell sat down. "You went out on it," she said. "In 1958. My grandmother's book says you came back and speak the old way now." "Aye." "Would you tell me what happened out there?" Nanny Struan put the netting down. "No," she said. "And I'll tell you why not, and then you can decide what to do about it, and I'll not be asked twice. The sea in this bay took something off me and I have had eighty years of not having it, and I am not a young woman, and there's nobody left who could give it back to me, and if I went out there and told you about it in words then the words would be in your book and your book would be in an office, and I would have handed the thing over to a man in a county town who does not know my name, and it would be gone out of the world in a way it is not gone now." Nell did not say anything for a while, and let the room be the room. "Twice," said Nanny Struan. "That's what your people write. Twice, and once was somebody's daughter, and I knew the daughter and I knew what she was afterwards and I never told her mother and her mother never asked me, and we had tea together for nineteen years." "She was your friend." "She was the woman who came back, and I was the woman who went," said Nanny Struan. "And there is a difference, and there has been a difference for eighty years, and you can put that in your book and I will not stop you, and I would think less of you if you did not." Then the woman in the room with her finally looked up, and she looked at Nell with an expression that was not unfriendly and was not friendly either, and said: "Will you be coming to the fourteenth?" "Yes." "Alone?" "That was the plan." "Take two," said the woman, and went back to the fire, and did not say another word for an hour. Nell Ashgrove walked back down the hill from Ardra at four in the afternoon with Isolde Kerr and a completely empty notebook, and the wind was coming round the point, and the bay was doing its Friday, and the water was on its way out and would be out furthest in eleven days. "You'll not write any of that down," said Isolde. "No." "Good." Isolde shifted her bag. "I did tell her you were coming. I didn't tell her what you were coming about, and she worked it out in about nine seconds, and so did I, and neither of us said it, and that's the longest conversation I've had with anybody in this parish in about four years and it was ninety minutes of a woman talking about a cat." "The cat's in the book," said Nell. "She called it Admiral." "Everything's in the book," said Isolde Kerr, "if you know where to look, and nobody does, and that's the arrangement." On the way down the hill Isolde said, without any preamble at all: "There's a thing I said on Sunday and I've not said properly. I said the padlock had been oiled. What I didn't say is who oils it." Nell stopped walking. "You said you didn't know who sent the letter." "I never said I didn't know who oils a padlock. I said I'd tell you what I know and then tell you I wasn't telling you the rest." Isolde went on down, at the pace she went at, which was the pace of a woman who has walked one hill four times a day for nineteen years. "There's a man comes down on the first Monday of the month with a can of oil and he oils the padlock and he puts a squirt on the hinge and he does the gate, and he does it and he goes away, and he has done it for six years, and I have watched him do it and I have never once spoken to him, and that is not because I don't know him." "Who is it." "That's the rest," said Isolde Kerr, "and I've told you the rest of it, which is that it's somebody who would never want to be spoken to, and that in nineteen years he has never once asked me for a letter, and that a man who oils a lock he has no business having a key to, once a month, for six years, in a village where everyone has an opinion about what everybody is doing, is either a man with a very good reason or a man with a very bad one, and I've watched him, and I know which, and I know which because he's got a key and he uses it and he takes it away again and doesn't leave it, and a man who didn't want that lock open would have taken the key off the board in the first year." "Does he have a key?" "He has a key," said Isolde. "That's the whole of what I know and I'm not giving you the rest and you can put the rest of it in the book if you ever find it, which you won't, and I'd not tell you anyway, and that's the fourth time this month somebody's told me they wouldn't tell me something and I've believed every one of you and I'm the only person in this parish that can say that, and it's a poor qualification to have at fifty-one." Nell Ashgrove stood on a hill in the wind and listened to a postwoman be deliberately unhelpful at her, and understood that she was being handed something, and that the something was the shape of a hole, and that everybody in this bay had decided she was to be given the shape of the hole and not the thing in it, and that this was a kindness and that she was going to be able to prove it was a kindness for the rest of her life.