第25章 Wilby's Ladder

Wilby's hip went on the twenty-second of March and it did not recover. It was not dramatic. He was on a chair in the passage mending the strap of a lamp on the eleventh, and on the fourteenth he was on the chair with the strap off and the lamp on the floor, and on the fifteenth he was in bed, and on the seventeenth he came out and sat at the foot of the stairs with a stick and would not be helped. "It's the cold in the passage," he said. "It's got into the joint. It'll come out in the thaw." "You've said that since 1987 and the thaw has come eight times." "Then it's come out eight times," said Wilby. * * * It was not dramatic, and it was the end of him. He had been the only person in that house who knew the order of the lamps by heart before Pippa did, and now he had to hold the ninth lamp in his left hand and the taper in his right, which meant the taper had to go in his mouth, which meant he could not have a conversation while he worked, which meant he did not work in the passage any more; he worked in the kitchen, and in the evening he came and sat on the bottom step and told her which of the eleven was likely to want doing and which was not, and she went and did it. "You do it wrong," he said, on the twenty-second. "Which one." "All of them, slowly. You bring them up from the oil store in one arm and you take them two at a time on the way in, and your aunt carried one at a time in the crook of her elbow and put the oil in before she lit them and did not buy oil on a Sunday." "I can't put the oil in with the lamp in my arm." "You can put the oil in with the lamp in your arm," said Wilby, "and you will do it when there are nine people in this house instead of seven, and I am not here in September to say so." * * * So she asked Pelyn. Pelyn Sedgewick was seventeen, from the post house, and had been coming up on Mondays and Tuesdays since the fourth of January to hold the other end of everything Mowbray held, and had grown in eleven weeks from a boy who could not carry a plank without dropping it into a stream into a young man who could hold anything at all for as long as it was asked of him. "Now the lamps," said Pippa. "Now the lamps," he said, in the voice of a young man who has been waiting eleven weeks for a sentence beginning *now*. "Nightly at six. You will bring them up one at a time from the oil store. You will not take two. You will fill them from the can, not from the jug, because the jug has water in the bottom of it from the time before you were born. And you will trim them with the scissors and not with your fingers, because a finger leaves a crease and a crease smokes." "That's what Mr Mowbray says about planes." "That's because it's true about everything." * * * It took a fortnight to get it right, and the fault was Pippa's. On the twenty-eighth she lit the seventh early, out of temper, because she had been up since four with a delivery of oil and had done the second and the sixth twice, and she went out on the strength of the step with the seventh in her hand. Pelyn saw her do it. He did not say anything. He came down the passage with his coat on and stood beside her and waited, and when she had done it and put her hand on the register to mark the hour, he said, quietly: "You'll be wanting to write it down." "I haven't done anything wrong yet." "No," said Pelyn. "But you'll want to write it down when somebody tells you, and I'd rather you heard it off me than off him." * * * They went back down to the cellar together and Pelyn told her what Mowbray had told him, which was that in his sixty-four years in this house he had seen the seventh lit early exactly twice. "The first time was 1961 and Cressida's aunt was so far past managing that nobody in the house dared open their mouth." "And the second?" "The second time was your aunt, in 1991, and she'd been in a bad way for a fortnight with her chest and she'd gone up on a Tuesday and lit the whole set and done the seventh about eight o'clock and she was sat down by the time I came up with the tea, and she did not light it twice." He was looking at the cans. "She sent me down to fetch it and she said, *tell the Thawkeeper the seventh is lit.*" "Which did." "And I said, who's the Thawkeeper? And she said, whoever's in my house, which I thought was a joke, and she died in the September." He shifted the can. "I've thought about it since. Every day since I came up. Who does it when there's nobody." * * * Wilby was on the step when they came up. "Eleven weeks," he said. "Have you worked it out?" "You've been on this step since the fifteenth and you haven't said one word about it, and now you'll not say a word about it, and you'd rather I heard it from a boy of seventeen, which is the last and worst thing a man can do." "It's the third-best thing," said Wilby. "The second-best is to fall down on the stairs in front of everybody and let them manage you. And I wasn't going to do that, because I've watched this house for forty years and the one thing it cannot have is the Thawkeeper and the housekeeper deciding between them who the housekeeper is. Not at sixty-eight, with a hip. You'd have had me out on the step with my box in six weeks, and you'd have been civil about it, and it would have been the loneliest winter of your life and you would not have known why until March." Pippa stood in the passage and looked at the old man on the bottom step with his stick across his knees. "You've been teaching me to be told no since the first of December," she said. "I have." "And you didn't teach me that." "No," said Wilby. "Somebody's got to do that and it isn't me. You've to be got to do that by somebody who'll still be here after you've learnt it. That's the whole of a housekeeper, miss. I'm not the book. I'm the forty years before the book." * * * She went up that night and got the book out and read rule six, which she had read in September and not understood. *Six. The keeper keeps the lamps and the housekeeper keeps the keeper. The housekeeper is paid in the house. The housekeeper is not a guest, is not owed a seat, and does not sign.* "Does not sign," she read out. "Does not sign," said Wilby, from the step. "Doesn't go in the back. Doesn't get a page. Comes in by the yard door at five in the morning and goes out at nine at night and has never once in forty years been asked to stay for a meal and has eaten, every one of those nights, standing up in my own kitchen with the oven door open." * * * "And when the housekeeper's hip goes?" "Then he teaches the boy," said Wilby, "and the boy teaches whoever comes next, and the house goes on, and that's it, and there isn't a single word in four hundred pages of that book about anybody being sorry about it." * * * She read rule six eleven times that night, and then she went down to the kitchen and made a list on the back of a flour sack in pencil, and the list had two items on it, and the second item was crossed out and written again. Then she went to the passage and knocked on the door of the room over the scullery. "Wilby." "Miss Danby." "Come in." He came in, slowly, with the stick, and sat down on the edge of her bed without being asked, which she understood to be the single greatest thing that had happened to him all winter. "I have read rule six," she said. "Then you know." "I know that you have eaten standing up in your own kitchen for forty years, at the oven door, and that the rule says the housekeeper does not sign and does not get a seat, and that the rule is in my great-aunt's aunt's hand and dated the eleventh of March 1904." "Eighteen sixty-four. Before the rule book." "Before the rule book," Pippa agreed, "which means somebody wrote a rule in 1864 to explain something that had been happening for forty years, and by 1904 somebody had got it down, and in a hundred years nobody has changed it." "No." * * * "Wilby, I can't do it." "You can do it. Everybody can do it. It's easier than what you're doing." "I can't do it in a house where the cook has eaten at that table every night since the second of December and the shepherd has been fed at that table and the doctor's had his broth there and a man of ninety-one is sitting in the window seat being the best-informed person in the county." She had her hands flat on her knees. "Rule six is the single cruellest sentence anybody has ever written about a human being, and I have read every word of it twice, and I am not going to start my tenure by keeping it." * * * Wilby sat on the edge of the bed in the dark for a long moment. "They said that in 1864," he said. "Who?" "The two families. The Danbys and the Nancarrows. They argued about the rule for a year, because a housekeeper who does not sign cannot be thanked in public, and a man who cannot be thanked in public will do the work of two and be called harder." He turned the stick over in his hands. "And Cressida's aunt settled it by writing it down, because she thought a rule was kinder than an argument, and she was twenty-six and she had never worked." "Was it?" "Was it what?" "Kinder," said Pippa. Wilby laughed, and it was a terrible sound, cracked down the middle. "Miss Danby," he said, "I've been standing up in my own kitchen for forty years eating out of a dish in front of a hot oven, and the last woman in this house that stood up with me was her aunt, and they did it together every night for a year and quarrelled about it in the morning, and there is not one single word of it in that book anywhere." * * * Then he said: "What are you going to do?" "I'm going to do it wrong." "How wrong?" "Wrong in the front. Wrong where people can see it." She got up and turned the lamp up. "I'm going to write rule six out on a fresh page in the register in my own hand, under the rules, dated today, and I'm going to write under it that the housekeeper keeps the keeper, and that the housekeeper is paid in the house and is not a guest and does not sign, and that the Thawkeeper of this house has read rule six and does not keep it, and will not keep it while she is able to cook and carry, and that the housekeeper's chair is at the long table on the near side, third from the fire, and that anybody who wishes to object may write their objection on the next page and it will be answered there." "And when you can't cook and carry?" "Then rule six stands again, and I'll say so on the page, and I'll date it," said Pippa, "and whoever comes next will have the whole of it in order with both dates on it." * * * Wilby got up off the bed with the stick and stood in the middle of the room. "It's not done," he said. "I know it isn't." "A rule you don't keep is worse than a rule you do, because then it's a lie with a date on it, and a girl of seventeen in this house is going to read that page in about ten years and decide which half of it to believe." "Then I shall write that under it as well," said Pippa. "That it is a lie with a date on it, and that it is written down so that whoever comes after has the choice, and that the choice was mine." Wilby went out. She heard him get to the passage, and then, after a moment, come back. "Miss Danby." "Wilby." "Aye," he said. "All right." * * * The page went in on the first of April, in her own hand, in the front, under the rules, and it was signed, and the signature was the first one she had ever put in the register. Under it, in the small hours, in the damp grey hand: *She wrote it wrong and dated it. That is the first wrong thing anybody has written in that book since 1829 and it is the only one that was ever needed.* *And she has still not asked the second question, and she will, and when she does she will have to go all the way down, and she has not once yet said the word out loud.* ---