第10章 The Two Letters

By the middle of March the table in the cottage had become a desk, and the desk had become an argument with paper. On the table: a buff Board envelope from Oban, four years old, with a return receipt stapled to it. A single sheet of foolscap typed on one side, headed Northern Lighthouse Board, District Office, Oban, and dated the second of April. A second typed sheet of the same stock, same office, same date, headed Certificate, and at question four one word in a good careful hand. A letter from a firm of three in Edinburgh with a grant of probate in it. A letter from a woman in a first-floor flat in a street off Clapham, written in the same hand as the solicitor's envelope and three times as long, in which she said that she hoped he would find time to talk to her, that the lighthouse archive was a limited and closed thing and would not wait, and that she was at no. 4, Garden Row, off the Farringdon Road, on any Tuesday, and that she was sorry to send a form of words to a man who had spent his life keeping one. A telegram about a burner. And a telephone number written on the back of a fish merchant's bill. He had not answered the January letter. That was the sum of his correspondence for four years and he was not proud of the proportion. He picked the two letters up together, which was a thing he had never done before, and that was how he found it. The solicitor's envelope was addressed by machine. Under the typed name, where a young woman who believed in forwarding services had added a line in pencil because the machine had got it wrong, there was a c/o in a small hand that leaned to the right, and the c was open like a cup, and every letter hurried a little as though it had somewhere to be. And the January letter, which was eleven lines and had taken her the best part of an hour, was in the same hand. He had looked at that c/o for four weeks in a drawer in the dark. He had decided it was the hand of a young person. He had not once thought, in all that time, that he knew what he was looking at, and that was because he had not been looking at it, he had been looking at a lamp. So the woman who had come off the Tuesday boat in February had put a forwarding address on a stranger's envelope at some point in her twenties, and had been right about the forwarding service, and had been wrong about the address, and had lived for four more years on the strength of a guess that a man on a headland never corrected. He put the two letters down and went and stood at the window, and it came to him there, standing, in the ordinary way things come. The morning of the fifteenth of February, four years back. She had been in the village nine days and she was going off the early boat, and she had done her own washing in the basin and had come down to the cottage with a coat on and an envelope in her hand and asked him, without any preamble at all, whether the seven o'clock boat could take a letter. It could. The postbag went on the boat and came off the boat on the mainland and the mainland sorter had it by eleven. "I did it," he said, to the window. "I put it in the bag and I carried the bag down and I never told her." That was the whole of the silence, the first layer of it, and it was four feet of snow thick and it was four years old and it was nothing at all: a woman had asked a man to post a letter, and the man had posted it, and neither of them had ever mentioned it, and in the whole of the four years since there had not been one hour in which either of them had not known exactly what the other was not saying. He got the drawer out. He lifted the table for it. There were eleven sheets in the bundle of hand-lettered tide tables that Bess Oram had handed him over the counter, and he had been through them all in the first week, and the pencil on the back of the top sheet was the only writing on any of them, because the man with the clipboard had only ever turned one page over. He looked at it for a while. The hand above the two figures was not the hand below. Above, in a fine upright script that had been taught in an office, it said: last week of exhibition, 14 Feb, found 74 min, see file. And below, in a different pressure, a heavier pencil, a hand that was not being careful because it was being fast, it said one word. It was not a name. It was a letter. A single capital, written large, and then nothing. Iain put the sheet down. He had not expected anything from the back of a tide table and he had got a letter, and the letter was a letter, and he sat with the two of them side by side for a long time and could not make them into one thing. He wrote a letter that evening. It was four lines long. Dear Miss Ellery, I am sorry about the letter of the fifteenth of February four years ago, and I have thought about it every day since and I did not have the words for it until this week. It went in the bag and it went on the boat. Nothing was wrong with it. That is all. Iain MacEoin. He read it four times. He put it in the drawer on top of the finding and the telegram, and shut the drawer, and then opened it again and took it out and put it in his coat, and did not know what he was doing, and left the drawer shut. The second night of the six was the Ellery night, and the light in the second window of the track was in the room above the shop, and it was June Ellery's hand on the lamp, because nobody else would do it and she had asked Bess for the privilege and Bess had said no and then said yes. He went up to the tower to see it. Nine hundred yards of fog between the sill and the window, and one small yellow square in it, and the two of them in the room behind the square sitting closer together than they had sat in their lives, and a woman who was fifty-eight telling a woman who was twenty-nine about a hospital in a street in south-east London, and neither of them once looking at the lamp. He stood in the empty lamp-room with Maren's glass on the sill and the pedestal bare and a hundred and one prisms in a crate in his back room, and the fog took the light from the window after a while, and it was the second of the six, and there were five left.