第15章 The Sisters' Truce

The quarrel came back on the ninth of January over a bucket. Idony Otterburn had taken the grey water out of the scullery on the Monday to pour it on the lane, and Margery had poured it out of the same bucket two hours later and been about to do it again on the Tuesday, and the word *bucket* was said four times in as many minutes in a voice that made Tibb put her hand on the edge of the range. "Am I in the wrong house," said Idony, "or has this one always been like this?" "You have been in this house four weeks," said Pippa. "Four weeks is long enough to know somebody's doing it on purpose." She put the bucket down on the flags hard enough to make it ring, and went out, and the door banged, and Margery sat with her hands in her lap looking at the fire with the expression of a woman who had been waiting twenty years to win an argument and had just lost the only one she had left. Pippa let an hour pass. Then she went and knocked on Idony's door. "She's right, you know," Pippa said, when it was opened. "She is doing it on purpose." "Thank you." "Not entirely. She's doing it on purpose because if she does it first, then for once in her life she is the one who did something first, and she needs that on a Tuesday." Pippa leaned on the frame. "Your mother died in October of the year before last. Did you have her in the house?" Idony's hand went up to the door post. "You'll want to sit down for this," said Pippa, "and there's nowhere in this corridor to sit down, so stand up." "Twenty-three years of it," said Idony. "Three of us and she never once got up off that chair, and the chair went with her, and it was a good chair, and when the lawyer read the will out in the front room at Selborne I said *the chair is mine* and Margery said *the chair is meaningless* and that's the first thing we have said to each other in twenty years that wasn't about the house." "And where was Margery?" "Sitting on the stairs." Idony's mouth went. "Sitting on the stairs, at the funeral, by herself, at the back, where the family couldn't see. And I went up and she wouldn't look at me, and I said, *you could have been in the front row*, and she said, *you could have come down the stairs*, and then we didn't speak for eleven years." Pippa stood in the cold corridor and let that be the end of that. "There's a lamp out there I need lit," she said. "And I want you to do it. Not Wilby, not me. You. Ninth lamp's crooked and it takes two hands and an opinion, and I'll tell you the order as I go, because you may as well learn the house now." * * * She walked her down the passage and named the order as she went, third, fifth, first, fourth, second, sixth, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, seventh, and by the time they got to the ninth Idony had stopped being a guest and become a person being shown where the spoons were. "I've been going down the valley every third night," Idony said, at the eighth. "I know. I saw the light on the low road." "It's the house. Marlowes End." "Your house." "My mother's house. Ours." She turned the wick down. "She left it to me. It's shut. There's no one in it and there's no one in it has been for two years and I have been going down there and putting a light in the front room and sitting for an hour and taking it out again." "Why?" "Because there was a lamp in it," said Idony, "and nobody was in it, and I could not bear that there was a lamp in it and nobody was in it." * * * On the eleventh night Pippa walked down with her. The road over the beck and up the far side was a mile and a quarter and it took forty minutes in the dark, and they went in silence, and half way up Pippa understood that this was the correct thing to do and that no amount of talking would have improved it. Marlowes End was a low grey house with the shutters closed and the yard gate open and one lamp burning in the front room, and it was the smallest, coldest, saddest room Pippa had ever been in. There was a table with the cloth on it and a chair pulled out and a lamp on a stand. "It's not the same lamp," said Pippa. "No. I bring it up in a bag on the coach and I carry it back down on the coach. It's the one from our father's boat, that's why it's ugly." Idony set her hand on the back of the chair. "He read in this room every night of his life. He read the shipping paper by that lamp in that chair from 1911 to 1957 and my mother used to say that the house held together because of a lamp and a chair and two people who would not be out of the other's way." Pippa looked at the table. There was a stack of newspapers in date order, and a plate with the crusts cut off a slice of bread, and a tin with two buttons in it. "Nobody's been here since 1957," she said. "He died in March. My mother kept the room until she went in October of the year before last, and then she was moved, and then—" Idony stopped. "Margery moved her. She's the one who signed for the care. I signed for the house." * * * They sat in that cold room until the lamp began to gutter. "Margery came to the funeral and sat on the stairs," Idony said. "Yes." "And you know why?" "Not yet." "Because there were forty people in that front room and every one of them was a person who had come to be told what to do by somebody who was not going to be there," said Idony, "and she had been that person for forty years and she had had enough. She came because she was asked. She sat at the back because she was not being asked to be anything." She stood up and put out the lamp. "She has never once, in twenty years, told me she was sorry. And I have never once, in twenty years, told her I know." "You could tell her now." "You could ask me to take the lamp down the road and put it in a fire," said Idony, "and that also." * * * They walked back up the mountain with the ugly lamp in a bag, and Pippa put her arm through hers without deciding to, and when they came in at the half past one there was a light on in the parlour and two people awake in it who had no business being awake. Margery was in the chair by the fire with a blanket over her knees, and she looked at the bag, and at Idony's face, and she did not say one word. "Two hours," she said. "Two hours." "You'll want to explain." "I won't." "Then I'll want to know." "You may want," said Idony. "That's the difference. That's the whole difference and it has taken us twenty years and it's taken a mountain." She put the lamp down on the table, and sat down in her own chair, on the far side of the fire, at an angle, where they could both see the door. Margery looked at the lamp, and then at the fire, and Pippa saw her put one hand up to her mouth. "I'd like to put a line in the book," Pippa said from the doorway. "One line, both of you, if you want it. And I want to say that it's not been written yet, because I wasn't sure you'd come home." "Write it," said Idony. "Write what?" said Margery. "Write that we were both tired," said Idony, "and that we have been tired since before there was anything to be tired about, and that neither of us did it on purpose." Pippa went and got the book and came back and stood in the doorway with the pen and the two of them watched her from the two sides of the fire. "They went down to the house," she said. "They were two hours. They have come home." ---