第8章 A Second Ascent

She went out on the Tuesday with the inshore buoys to do a second pass, and she went alone, because the second pass takes a boat and a day and there was no reason to put a second person in it, and because after the Thursday she had not been able to look at Emmett Roache for longer than about four seconds at a time without thinking about a white stone, and she needed a day of work where nothing in her head had a white stone in it. The buoys were where the buoys were. That was the good news, and she took it in the way she took all good news now, which was by writing it in three places and confirming it with a second instrument before she let herself feel it. Kellard Bight, four buoys, all correct to within a metre and a half. Then the two off the Ardra mole, both dragging where the chart said they were planted, both by the amount you would expect on a coast that had been eating itself for a couple of centuries. Then the marker at the mouth of Carrowen, which had not moved at all since the fourteenth, and which was exactly where the chart had put it, and which was the reason her office had sent her. The reason her office had sent her, she wrote, in the book, in a hand that was not quite steady, was this. She then went and looked at it. The mark is a steel lattice tower about four metres high, painted in bands, with a topmark and a light that had not been working since the previous winter. It is the sort of thing you climb. She had climbed three of them that day. She put the bag down on the base, took the rule, and ran a tape from the base plate up to the top of the lattice, and got four metres one, and wrote four one, and then went round to the other face to do it again because the wind was up and the first one had a lot of give in it. On the north face she got four metres zero, and the difference was fine, the difference was always fine, a lattice tower is not a precision instrument, that is the first thing you learn. She wrote it down anyway. And then she did the thing she had been telling herself she was not going to do, which was to take the rule out of the case and lay it against the base plate where the datum was cut, and to check the datum against the datum, because a datum mark is the only fixed point in the entire business and when a datum does not agree with itself something is very wrong. The datum agreed with itself. What it did not agree with was the small lead plug her own office had put in three winters ago, with a number stamped in the head, when they had rebuilt the base after the storm. Her plug was on the east face. She was looking at the north face. Both plugs were there, unmoved, seated in sound concrete, and they were forty-one centimetres apart from each other, and there was only supposed to be one. She sat down on the base of the mark. The wind was coming over the headland the way it had been all week, and out past her to the north was Loch Skerry, and out to the east was the open bay, and she had been trained since she was twenty-two to distrust a reading before she trusted it, and to go back and re-observe before she reported anything, and she did that now, three times, and the number did not change, and it was a good number, and it was the correct number, and there were two lead plugs in one base because somebody had put the second one there with a number stamped in its head in the same hand as the first, and the stamp was the office stamp, and the office stamp was the office stamp. She sat on the base of a navigation mark for a long time with a case of instruments at her feet. When she came off the slip at half past four she did not go to the harbour office, and she did not go to the shed, and she walked up the hill instead and sat down on the low wall above the harbour where you can see the whole of the bay, and it was low water again, ordinary low water, four days after the lowest, and the water was out over the flat sand where the road would be in a fortnight. Emmett found her there at about six. "You've had a day," he said, sitting down on the wall on her other side, well away, the way a man sits down who has thought about it first. "I've had a day." "Bad one." "Emmett." She had it in her hands and had been holding it since the mark, and now she put it down flat on the wall between them like a plate of food. "There's two lead plugs in the base of the mouth marker. Same number, same stamp, same hand. Somebody put one on the north face when it should only be one and it should be on the east." He did not say anything for a while. Below them the bay did its evening, unimpressed. "Would your office have a reason," he said. "My office has no reason. My office puts one plug, once, and records the number. A duplicate is either a mistake or it's a marker of some kind, and a mistake does not have the same number stamped in it twice." "Or it's a fix," said Emmett Roache. "That's what a second one would be, if you wanted it. If you wanted a spot a person could come back to and know they'd got to the same place. You don't need a chart for it. You need a nail." "Somebody drove a nail into my mark," said Nell, "and put a stamp in it that says my office did it." He turned his head and looked at her, and she saw him decide to ask the question he had been not asking for two days, and she felt the whole of the week arrive at once. "When you were nine," he said. "When I was nine." "You went out on the fourteenth of April, and the road was up, and your gran was on the wall, and you went to the seventh stone." He said it as a list, because that was the way she had heard it, and being handed her own life back to her in somebody else's flat voice was a thing she had not been ready for and did not have anywhere to put. "She told me that in November when I asked her why she was afraid of you, and I've had seven months to think about how to ask you and I haven't, and I'll not do it now either, but there's a nail in a mark at the mouth of this harbour and there's four days a year a person can walk out to the place it marks, and you've come back to this village for the first time in twenty-two years and you've been down at the wall twice a day, and I need to know whether I am standing next to you because of the road or because of a marker, because I have got thirty-three years of one of those and I can't do the other one as well." The bay went on doing its evening. "I don't remember coming back," said Nell. He turned and looked at the water. "Neither do I," he said. "That's the answer to the question I actually asked. Twenty-six years I've had a hole where the answer should be and I have never once been able to say what I did, and you have been in this village four days and you have told me more about that road than I knew, and I would like to be careful here, because you are the first person in twenty-six years who could fill in a piece of it and I am not going to be the man who rushes you at it." "I've been out there," she said. "On the fourteenth, with you. I stood on it and I felt the ground push and I watched you walk out and I did not stop you, and I've not written a word of it, and I went out there on a day that is not a low spring because I have not been able to stop going and looking at the place where the water comes off it." "That's not the same as walking it." "No," said Nell. "It isn't." They sat on the wall above Carrowen until the light went, and neither of them said anything else, and it was not an uncomfortable silence, and it was not a comfortable one either, and it was the first silence between them that neither of them had to manage.