第7章 The Two Hands

She found the crate on the third day, because she came up the track at four with a thermos and the certainty of a woman who has decided where she is going, and because the back room door stood open, which it had never once in four years. "May I look?" "It's only glass." "I've been reading about glass for a fortnight. I've never had any in the house." It took him a minute to lift the lid. She took the notebook out of her coat and put it on the deal table and stood over the straw and did not write anything for a long moment. "Ninety-one pounds," she said. "Is that what he said?" "That's what he said." "Nobody's ever printed that number." She went round it. "A hundred and one prisms. And the top ring is smaller than the waist. Why is the top ring smaller?" "It has to be. A drum is a lens. The light comes in the middle and has to get out round, and it can't come out straight or it wouldn't reach the edge of anything." He heard himself and stopped. "Say that again. That is the sentence. Say it again and write it down." "I won't write it down for you." "You said it to me twice and wrote it down neither time. That is a habit, not a policy." She came round the front of the crate and looked at the two marks on the deal, the black rings where the drum legs had stood. "How long has it been in here?" "Since Tuesday." "Where was it?" "Store Seven, on the quay at the mainland town, under a cloth, on a shelf, with six other lights' worth of glass." He shut the lid. "That's the whole of where it was. It's the same glass. It went into a shed and it has not moved a yard and it is not dark, and there is no man in it, and that is the entire history of the last four years, and I would rather you had it in one sentence than in a page." "Say the sentence," she said, "and then tell me the sentence that comes before it, and I will go away and write those." He did not answer for a while. The lamp on the front-room sill ticked as it always did, the wick, a small sound a man stops hearing after a year and hears again when somebody else is in the room. "There are two hands," he said. "That's the whole of what I know how to say. A hand that holds and a hand that stores. A hand that holds a thing and uses it while it is warm. A hand that puts a thing away in a dry room and writes a number against it and shuts the door. Both hands are honest. Both hands end up with the same object on the table. Only one of them has been in the weather." "And which is the Board?" "The Board stores. Maren held." He turned the oil saucy out of the way of a wet patch on the deal. "The man who made your old tide tables held them. He stood on the headland and put what he saw into the figures and the figures were wrong by four minutes and the four minutes were the true part." "That is not the story I am writing." "Then what is." "The story I am writing is why nobody came back for it." She shut the notebook. That was the moment the conversation turned and he heard it turn, the click of a small brass catch. "I asked Bess Oram," she said, "for the light and the dark and the grey, because the grey is beautiful and the tower is beautiful and a hundred-year-old tower that has been dark for four years is a gift to anybody who knows how to write one. And you have given me the grey, and the edge, and the small lamp, and the hand that holds, and every single thing you have given me is a thing that happened before the fourteenth of February." "No." "It is. The lamp was Maren's. The edge was Maren's. The old tide table was a dead man's. Nothing you have given me is inside the night." She put the notebook in her coat and did not zip it. "You are very careful, and you are very kind, and I have been on the receiving end of exactly this from a man in a solicitor's office and a man in a hospital and a woman in a bookshop, and I would rather be lied to to my face than fed in pieces I can live with." He put his hand flat on the crate. The deal was cold and had a knot in it that caught his palm. "The light will burn on the fourteenth," he said. "For an hour. Pike is bringing the burner on the Friday. There's a pedestal coming with it. You'll be able to stand in that room with a hundred and one prisms behind you throwing a bar of white out over the water and the whole village on the headland watching, and that is real, and it is going to happen, and it is enough for a piece." "It's enough for a photograph." "It's more than this village has had since the year Maren died." "I know what it is." She was at the door. "It's a thing to point at. In four pages, at the top, with a cut, so the reader has something to hold while you take the rest away from them." She stopped. "You know what I haven't written in three years? I haven't written anything in three years. Not because nobody would print it. Because I wrote one about a man who kept a road salt bin for thirty years and a woman who kept the ledger of what he took, and nobody died, and nothing was ruined, and the whole thing was true, and it ran, and I read it in the Tube, and it was a piece about a salt bin." She put her hand on the frame of the door. "I came up here for one word in a box. None. I want to know who typed it and why, and what else the man did with the seventy-four minutes that nobody put in a box, and if I go home in March with a lighthouse and a small glass lamp and the phrase about the edge, then I have gone home with a lighthouse and a small glass lamp, and that is a salt bin, and I will do it again." She went down the track. He stood in the doorway of the back room with the crate behind him and the fog coming across the point. The lad from the crossing brought a telegram up at six, on his bicycle, with the bell going. It had come off the boat at eleven and been held at the shop, and Bess had given it to the lad without reading it, and the lad had asked for a shilling, and there was no money in the cottage, and this was settled by a jar of plums. NORTHERN LIGHTHOUSE BOARD DISTRICT OFFICE OBAN. BURNER AND PEDESTAL BY FRIDAY'S FERRY. MY MAN CARRIES. BRING THE STATION LOG ORIGINAL IF IN YOUR POSSESSION. DO NOT BRING THE TRANSCRIPT. STOP. A PIKE. I read it four times, because the last two words of a telegram are the ones a man reads four times, and then I put it in the drawer on top of the finding, and the two of them lay there together, and I stood looking at them the way you look at two things you have to decide which of to pick up.