第19章 The Spring Tide

The lowest of the year was at ten past five on the Wednesday morning, and Nell was on the wall above the harbour at ten to five with the lamp, and the wind had gone round to the north-east and dropped, and the sky was clear, which was wrong for the fourteenth of April and which she noted and then decided not to think about. Emmett came up at twenty past four and put the lamp on the wall and did not say anything, and then he took the second lamp out of his coat and set it beside the first, and then he sat down on the wall. "I'm not going," he said. "Emmett—" "I've had it once. I've not had a good time of it. I'm thirty-three years into it and I'm not going to be the man who leads you out there, and if I come down off this wall tonight and you're not on it I'm going to have to go and look for you, and I've been that man for somebody before." He put his hands in his pockets. "Padraig's on the wall. He's got the handheld and he's not been told what for, and he's not going to ask, and he's going to stand there for five hours and shine a light at a set of stones in case you want looking at. That's what I've arranged. That's all I've arranged." "And Morwenna?" "Down at the slip. With a pot of tea and the tide tables, because she's not going to be able to stay in the house and she's not going to be able to stay on the wall, and she was the same in 1998 and she told me so herself on Saturday, which was the first time she'd said a whole sentence to me since I was twenty-one." Nell looked down the hill. There was one light at the slip, and one on the water that wasn't theirs, and the harbour was at half ebb and going. "Send them home," she said. "No." "Emmett. If it's true that they come back the same, then nobody's needed. If it's true that something happens, then one person is bad enough. Either way these people have better things to be doing at five in the morning than standing on a wall for a woman they've got no obligation to." "That's the whole of the arithmetic," Emmett agreed, "and it took me thirty-three years to work it out and I'm telling you it's wrong. Ninety-one entries in a hundred years, and not one of them is out there on their own, and I'll bet you the family money on it." He stood up. "I'll be in the cottage above the slip. I have a key. Bring your lamp and don't be clever, and come back before the flood, and if you're not back by the turn of the tide I'll come out for you, and I don't care what's out there, that's not a threat, that's just the arrangement, and I've had it since I was twenty." He went down the hill, and stood at the slip for a moment with the pot of tea and said something to Morwenna that Nell could not hear, and then went up the track to a store that had been shut since 1994, and shut the door behind him. By twenty to six the water had gone out past the wall and past the road and out to the north and south of it, and the harbour was a mile of wet sand with the boats sitting on their keels like animals that had been put down for the winter, and the tide tables in Morwenna's hands had a low water of five minutes past six and a rate of nine feet an hour afterwards, and there were four hours of it. Nell went down the slip in waders and took the lamp and the handheld and the rule, and Padraig Fisk came down behind her with the other lamp, and neither of them said anything, and they went along the line of the harbour wall and out onto the sand where the water was still going off the top of the bank in a sheet, and then they came onto the road. It was there. It was exactly there. Nell had been out on the fourteenth and had been out on the Thursday and had walked it in both directions with a man who had not been able to look at it, and neither of those times had prepared her for what it was to come out onto it at five in the morning in clear light with the water going off it. It was a foundation. There was no road. There was the footings of something built out into the bay by people who had not been worried about what the sea was doing and had had a very good idea what they wanted, and it went out from the harbour mouth in eleven straight lengths of cut stone with a kerb down both sides and a change of level every two lengths that a person could feel underfoot through a boot. The pairs of cuts ran the whole way out. The white stone was in the middle of the ninth length, and the pairs of cuts stopped either side of it, and the mark in the top of it was small and round and had been made by somebody with a steady hand and a great deal of time, and it was not a survey mark made by her office, and it was not a trade mark, and it was not a mason's punch, and Nell got down on the stones with the lamp and looked at it for eleven minutes and then sat back on her heels and said, out loud, to nobody, on a set of stones in a bay with the tide going off it: "Well. That's not possible." Padraig Fisk said, "That's what I said," from about eight feet away, and then he said, "Are you wanting to be funny, because if you are I'll go up the bank a bit." And then they walked out. Both of them, in a line, at a surveyor's pace, because that is what two people who do this for a living do when they are walking out over a foundation that is coming up under their feet at four inches to a foot, and they went out past the ninth length and out to the eleventh and the sea was coming back behind them at the two hundred metre mark and coming back fast, and Padraig said, in the ordinary voice of a man who is fifty-eight and has crossed a bay in worse weather than this, "That's the turn," and they turned round, and they came back in along the eleven lengths, and they got off the top of it onto the bank with about forty minutes to spare and the water coming up the flats in long lines with a sound like somebody counting. Nell Ashgrove sat on the harbour wall at seven in the morning with her boots full and her notebook in her hand and wrote down four things. *4.8m above chart datum, centre of structure, no charted obstruction.* *Construction visible: eleven lengths, kerbed both sides, deliberate changes of level.* *White stone, 9th length, circular mark on upper surface, tool unknown to me.* *No indication of harm to any person, at any time, in my presence.* And then she wrote a fifth line, which was not a professional observation, and she looked at it for a while, and then she wrote it anyway. *I was on it and I came back and I do not know what I was before I went on it.* That was the whole of it. That was the entire result of a surveyor's career spent being careful, and she had written it on a harbour wall at seven in the morning with a man from the harbour office sitting four feet away waiting to see whether she'd finished. Padraig looked at it when she had shut the book. "That's not the answer to anything," he said. "No." "It's not even the beginning of an answer." "No," said Nell. "It's the opposite. It's the only sentence I've written in fourteen days that hasn't got a number in it and it may be the only true thing in the book." She stood up and pushed her hair out of her face. "Thank you for the lamp, Padraig." "You'd have had it anyway. She's not stopped doing it since." He got off the wall and started to walk up the hill, and then stopped, and did not turn round, and said the thing he had been not asking since the first morning of the year. "It was a bad thing you did, going out. I'll not pretend it wasn't. And I want to say to you, one time, and then never again: my gran went out in 1946 and my mother went out in 1971 and I have spent my whole life being the man who stands on a wall in the rain and says it isn't worth it, and I have said it to you, and you went anyway, and you came back, and I am going to go on saying it isn't worth it, and I'm going to be glad to be wrong about it every single time for the rest of my life."