第28章 Tibb Sits Down

Tibb Bryce had cooked at the Hollowell for twenty-two years and had eaten in that kitchen standing up for all of them. She had started in 1971 as a kitchen maid at nineteen and had been left the kitchen at twenty-four when a woman from Amberley walked up the mountain in a coat she had bought for the occasion and married a man who was not good enough for her, and Tibb had been the only one in the house who could do four hundred covers at a wedding. She had never sat at the long table. She had eaten at the range, or standing at the dresser with a plate in her hand, or sitting on a sack of flour with her back to the wall so that somebody could come in and go out without moving her. "Take a chair," said Pippa. "There isn't a chair at that table that's mine, girl." "There's a chair at that table that's got Tibb Bryce written under it. I did it in pencil, in January, on the underside, and you found it in the second week and you have not said a word about it, and I have waited eleven weeks for you to say a word about it." * * * Tibb set down the cloth. "You put my name on a chair." "On the underside, in pencil, in the same hand as the rest of the names, and there are seven other names on the other side of that table and four of them belong to people who are never coming back and one of them belongs to a woman who is ninety-one and has asked me twice whether she may have the window seat, which she may, because it is hers." "I've not said a word about it because a thing like that in a house like this is not a kindness," said Tibb, "it's an insult. You'll have Tibb Bryce sitting at your table and what she'll be doing is watching the door. That's what I'd be doing. I'd be at your table watching the door for the woman who ought to be at it, and she'd have gone off in the middle and left me holding a door nobody wanted." "So it's a rule with your name on it." "It is a rule," Tibb said, "and there's four other rules in that book with my name in them and I'd like to know what this one does that the others don't." * * * There was a fourth, and it was on the page Pippa had written on the first of April about Wilby, and it came out in about a minute, in a conversation neither of them had planned. "You applied to be Thawkeeper," said Pippa. Tibb did not move at all. "When?" "Nineteen eighty-nine. There is an entry for it on the page for the eleventh of March." Pippa kept her voice level, which took more out of her than she had expected. "*Miss T. Bryce asks whether she may be Thawkeeper, the house being without one, and is told it is not hers to ask.* And underneath, in a different hand and two days later: *The answer stands.*" "That's Cressida's aunt." "Yes." "So she said no to me in the winter and then she died without ever telling me she had said no." "She wrote it down," said Pippa. "In a book I did not open until the eleventh of March, because I am twenty-nine and I had been in this house eleven weeks. If you had wanted anybody to know, you could have written to her and asked her for her reasons, and there was a post twice a week in those days." "And get what?" "Whatever she was going to say. She had already said the answer. She might have had the civility in it too." * * * Tibb laughed, and it was an ugly sound in that kitchen. "I asked her for four years," she said. "Not once. I never asked her one single time in four years, because I was twenty-three and I was the best kitchen on this road and I had watched four people hold that book and I had made a decision on my own at about twenty-two and I was not going to be a woman who asks." "That's not a reason. That's a shape." "It's the shape I made," said Tibb, "and I've had twenty-two years to sit with it and I've made my peace, and I'm not going to be told about it at this table by a girl who's been Thawkeeper since December." * * * Pippa got up and took the book off the shelf and put it on the dresser by the range. "Then I'll answer it," she said. "The answer of this house, on the page for the eleventh of March, dated the first of April, in my own hand." "That's not yours to do." "It is, actually. It's the only thing about this book that is. There is a Thawkeeper and there is a book and the book can be answered by whoever holds it." She opened it. "May I read it out?" "You may read it out and you may not say a word while you do it, and if you stop in the middle I'll break the pot." Pippa read it out. *The question put by Miss T. Bryce on the eleventh of March, 1989, is answered now and it is answered late, and the lateness is mine and not hers. She asked whether she might be Thawkeeper and she was told it was not hers to ask. The reasons given at the time are not written down and never were, and I have looked for them for eleven weeks and I have not found them, and I have concluded that they were not good ones, because a house that will not write down a reason for saying no to a person is a house that has not found one.* *The office is not blood. It was held by a woman and by a man and by the man's brother before my aunt, and I have this out of the page and I shall have it written properly, and I shall have it in this book where anybody may read it.* *Miss Bryce asked a true question and was answered in silence for eleven weeks by a woman who did not think the answer would be noticed. It has been noticed. I am sorry, and it is a poor thing to be sorry in a kitchen at four o'clock on the first of April, and I am going to say it anyway, because this book is not a place for things to be said well. It is a place for things to be said.* *And I am going to say the other thing, which is that I have not got the office and do not want it in the sense she wanted it, and have got it in a different sense which came at four in the morning on the thirtieth of January with a lamp in my hand and nobody's permission, and that if the person who asked the question in 1989 wanted it the way I understand it now, she may have it in 1991, because I do not know that anybody can hold it twice and I would rather find out in April than in thirty years.* *And the pot is not broken, and the answer stands, and the answer stands changed.* * * * Tibb Bryce stood at the range with the cloth in both hands and did not say a word for a long time, and Pippa did not say a word either, because she had been told not to. "The sixth lamp," Tibb said at last. "The sixth lamp does not smoke and has never smoked and has got a dent in the brass from before the war." "I'll not have it if it takes me off the range." "It doesn't take you off the range. You light the sixth from the kitchen door, which is eight steps away, and you put it out at seven in the morning, which is the one that has to go out, and everything else in this house is lit off the range at six and the lamp's going out and the range's going down and nobody's in the room to see the difference." She shut the book. "I've worked it out. Four weeks, and it's the hardest thing I've done since I came up here." * * * Tibb sat down at the long table that night for the first time in twenty-two years, and there were ten people at it, and somebody — it was Pelyn — said, "There's nothing on the chair where you're sat." "There's a thing on the underside of it," said Tibb. "It's in pencil." And the whole of the long table read the underside of every chair at once, and made an awful noise, and Pippa had to go out of the room. * * * Underneath, in the small hours, in the damp grey hand: *Two women in one month have been answered for keeping quiet about a thing. That is the way it goes and it has always gone that way, and every keeper of this book has done it once and thought nothing of it for thirty years.* *Ask her about the pot.* ---