第6章 Teague's Boat

He was not on the road when the water took it. That was the first thing Nell was certain of, and she was certain of it for forty minutes afterwards and for the rest of that day and, if she was honest, for a good deal longer. She stood in the rising water on the causeway and watched the pairs of cuts go under one after another going out, and the fourth marker went under, and the far end of the road went under, and then there was only water where the road had been, and Emmett Roache was not in it. Then he came up the slip on the other side at a fast walk with his lamp still in his hand, and he was dry to the waist and shaking, and he did not look at Nell, he looked at his own hands. "You went out," Nell said. "I went out." "Onto the fourth marker." "Yes." "And the rule is you don't walk it twice." "The rule is you don't walk it twice," he agreed, and sat down on the bollard where Isolde had put her letters, and put the lamp between his feet, and said nothing else for a long time, and Nell let him have it, which was the second time in three days she had let a Shand silence do its work on somebody. When he spoke he was looking at the lamp. "It's not a road," he said. "That's what I have to say to you first, because you're a surveyor and you'll go looking for a road. It's a set of stones. Somebody set them, four hundred years ago or a thousand, and whatever they set them for is finished, and the water has come back over the top of it every day since, and what comes out four times a year is what's left of the bottom of something. There is no road under that bay. There's a building's foundation and the sea has been using it as a floor for longer than anyone here has been alive." "And the kerb?" "The kerb is a kerb," he said. "I know what I told you. Don't build a church on me about it." Nell wrote nothing down. She had the notebook in her hand and she wrote nothing down, and it was the second time in twenty-four hours. "Emmett. What happened out there." He turned the lamp over and looked at the base of it, and then he laughed, one short dry sound, entirely without humour, and Nell understood that this was what his whole family did instead of crying and that she had never noticed until that week. "I walked out to the fourth one," he said. "I was nineteen. That's the thing I should have said on the slip, and I said twenty-six, because twenty-six is when I stopped. I went out at nineteen, on the lowest of that year, with Rhiannon, and we got to the fourth stone and it was white and it was not a stone." "Then what was it." "It was the place where a window used to be." He set the lamp down. "There is a shape in the air on that side of it that people who have been out there describe and they all describe it the same, which is a thing that does not happen. I can see a gap. A gap like a door, a bit narrower than a door, and a wall going back from it about six feet, and then nothing. And a smell off it like a room that's been shut up for a year, only it's a smell like a room that's been shut up since the sea was somewhere else." "Rhiannon was with you." "Rhiannon was on the stone behind me and she did not come any further, and she has never in twenty-six years told anybody what she did or did not see, and neither have I, and that is the arrangement we have." "And then you walked back." "I walked back on the black ones," he said. "I walked on the black ones all the way, and I counted them, because that is what you do, and I got to the harbour mouth and I stood in the water on the other side of the slip and I could not tell you, to this day, whether the harbour was the same harbour." Nell looked out at the bay, which was an ordinary bay, doing an ordinary Tuesday, with two boats moving and the water going back to where it always was. "Then what," she said. "What changed." "Nothing," said Emmett Roache. "That's the trouble and that's the whole of it and you can put that in your book. I went out onto a thing I was told not to go out on, and I came back, and the world did not have a hole in it, and I am fifty-two years of age and I have spent thirty-three of them doing things at four in the morning so that I would not be alone in a room. That's all. That's the whole of it. There's no curse and there's no road and there's nothing on the other side, there's just a man on a slip who cannot be in a room." "Emmett—" "And I would do it again next February," he said, "and the February after, and that is the part your grandmother would like you to have, so you can have it. Don't go putting it in the book as a warning." It was Teague who brought the argument, and he brought it at ten past four in the afternoon on a slipway that had three inches of standing water on it and no way of getting out of it. He came on foot from the yard with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders up, which Nell had already worked out from Morwenna was simply how the young man of this family stood, and he did not say hello, he said: "There's a man in Ardra with a van that wants a pallet out to the Rowan buoy on the neaps and he'll pay cash and he won't ask, and I've said yes, and I need somebody to tell my brother he's wrong before I do it." Emmett did not turn round. "There's nobody to tell. I've told." "You've told me I'm thirty-one. You've not told me anything else, and I'm asking a lady who writes things down to write down that I'm asking." "Write down that you're asking," said Emmett. Nell stood on the wet stones between them with her case under her arm and had the distinct sense of being an item of equipment in a dispute that had been running for some years. "Which Rowan buoy," she said, because she had learned that a question with a number in it was the only kind that got a straight answer. "Rowan, south one. The one with the broken light." "There's no light on the south Rowan. That mark's a bare spar and hasn't had a light on it since before I qualified." "Course it hasn't." "Teague," said Emmett. "Don't do the voice." "I only said the name." "You said it like a warning." Teague came further down the slip, and stopped, and looked at the water, and then at Nell, and she watched him decide to be honest in front of a stranger, which cost him something visible. "It isn't freight, is it. That's the thing. Nobody's moving a pallet to a bare spar. He wants a boat on the water at night and he'll not care where." "Tell me about the Rowan buoy, Teague." "That's it," said Teague. "A night passage, twice a week, nothing heavy, and a man aboard who doesn't sign anything, and I've been on it twice and both times he was civil and he paid on the slip in a brown envelope and he did not once ask where we were going, which is the part I cannot get round, because a man who isn't asking doesn't want to know. He wants to be able to say afterwards that he never knew." The water on the slip was coming down the stones in a sheet. "Nobody's going on it," said Emmett Roache. He had turned round at last and he had not raised his voice, and it was somehow much worse than if he had. "That's the whole of it and you can stand there and be as disappointed with me as you like for the four years I've made you stand there. Go to Aberdeen. Take a berth on the Monday boat. There's a yard on the east side of the harbour that would have you by Friday because the man that runs it owes me a favour he will not admit to, and there is not one person on that boat who will ask you a single question for a year and ten months, and you will come home in a different boat, and you'll not be the man that walked down this slip with a lamp, and that's the deal and I have been offering it since you were twenty-four." "It isn't that simple." "It's the only simple thing in this entire business and you've spent seven years refusing it." They stood there. Teague's hands had come out of his pockets and then gone back in, and Emmett had not moved, and the disagreement was not a discussion and had not been a discussion for a very long time; it was two men pulling on the same rope from opposite ends of a wet slipway in April, with a third person standing in the middle of it holding a case of instruments. "Give her the lamp," Emmett said. "What?" "Give her the lamp. If you're going to stand there being disappointed, you can at least give the lady her light, because she can't see the state of the stone under her and she'll ruin a pair of boots." Teague Roache took the lamp out of his hand and put it on the bollard and walked back up the slip without another word, and the door at the top of the hill shut about a minute after that, and neither of them mentioned it again.