第20章 The Road Under the Bay

She stayed two more days, which she had not intended to do and which she justified to herself in the way she justified everything, by having a chapter to close. She went back to the mouth of the harbour on the Thursday and took the temporary buoy's position properly from a boat in a westerly swell, and the district engineer came out on the Friday and took a cast off the base plate of the north cardinal and found the two lead plugs exactly where they were and certified the mark as sound and made a note of the duplication, and the false temporary was struck from the book and the light was taken out, and the harbours of Carrowen went back to having a chart that was true, which is the only thing a chart is for. On the Friday afternoon she packed the case and did not do it quickly, and then she sat on the low wall above the harbour for an hour and a half in the ordinary light of an ordinary afternoon with a bay in front of her doing its ordinary business, and she thought about what she was going to write in the closing of the book, and she wrote forty pages of it, and the last paragraph of the forty read: *The origin of the structure is not established and is not within the scope of this survey. Its relationship to the recorded tide is such that it is exposed on the lowest spring tides of this bay, four times annually. It is recommended that it be recorded on the local chart as a drying obstruction, that no navigation be attempted over it at any state of the tide, and that the parish be advised — through the harbour board, and not otherwise — that the structure is in use by the local population, and that this use is not a matter for the authority.* She read that back twice, and thought about Isolde Kerr and about the hundred and twenty years of women writing tides in books that nobody read, and about the eleven words *same*, and about the fourth page being left blank in 1952 by a woman who understood that the water does not keep a diary but that a family does, and she thought that the honest thing was to say all of it in a book and that the kind thing was to say it in a book and hand it to somebody who would not print it. So she went down the hill and gave the book to Padraig Fisk, and asked him to put it in the harbour office in the drawer with the other one, and not to give it to the district, and not to the coastguard, and not to a newspaper, and not to the woman from the district office, ever, and Padraig Fisk took the book in both hands and looked at the cover and then at her and did not ask a single question, because he is the man who has the second worst job in Carrowen and is extremely good at it. "And if they want it," said Nell. "They'll not want it," said Padraig. "They never want it. It's not a thing anybody wants, and that's the only reason it's survived." Nell Ashgrove went up the hill for the last time on the Saturday morning and said goodbye to Morwenna Shand, who made her eat, and who did not mention the fourteenth at all, and who walked her to the gate and then said, at the gate, in the middle of a conversation about a bus timetable: "Was it the same." "Yes." "Was it all right, then." "It was all right," said Nell. "Good," said her grandmother, and shut the gate, and went up the path, and did not look back, which she had never once done in her life, in ninety years, and which on that morning was, from the bottom of the hill, the most eloquent thing anybody said to Nell all week. Emmett Roache took her down to the pier. He did not kiss her, and she did not expect him to, and he had put in nine days' leave on the Thursday and had not told her and did not tell her why, and they stood on the pier in the wind with the boat behind him and the bay in front of them going out one more time, on a Friday, like any Friday. "Twentieth of May," he said. "There's a low spring, and it's not the lowest of the year, but it's close, and the water'll be out to the ninth length and no further, and I know that because I've been out there and I've counted and I don't intend to stop counting." "I said I was going to be alone." "You said it on a Monday in the rain to a man who'd asked you to dinner," said Emmett. "It's a different day and the light's on it and I'll be asking you properly, and if you say no then you say no and I'll not ask again for a year and ten months, and if you say no I'll be here on the twentieth in a boat with two lamps and I'll be on the wall when you come off it, because that's the arrangement and it's the whole of what I've got and it isn't a proposal, it's a job." Nell Ashgrove stood on a stone pier in a wind that came off the water with the last of the winter in it, and looked at a man of thirty-seven who had once walked out onto a set of stones in 1971 and had spent twenty-six years being unable to be alone in a room, and understood that the person she had come back to this village for was not a man at all and had never been, and that she had known that since a Tuesday in a kitchen when she was nine years old, sitting on a chair with her boots not on, listening to two women argue about whether a thing was allowed. "I'll have to write to you," she said, and saw his face, and then said, "That's a yes, and I know that isn't a thing anybody says in the twentieth of April, and I can hear it, and I'm saying it anyway because I have a boat to get to and a contract to hand in and a channel to write a number about, and I have got about eleven minutes." "I know what it is," said Emmett Roache. "It's a surveyor." "It's a surveyor," said Nell. The boat went out at ten past four and the tide was making and the wind was north-east and she sat in the stern with her case under her coat and her hand in her pocket on a brass key, and Carrowen went down astern, and then the point, and then there was nothing to see but water. At seven o'clock that evening, four hours after she left, the lowest of the year in that bay reached two feet eleven inches above chart datum, and a set of eleven kerbed lengths of cut stone came up out of the bay for the four hundred and sixth year in a row, and there was nobody at all on it, and it stayed up until about half past nine, and then the water came back and covered it, and it will do that again four times next year, and four times the year after, and it is not on the chart, and it is in a drawer in a harbour office, and that is the whole of it.