第29章 The Lamp That Would Not Light

The seventh lamp went out on the ninth of April and would not come back. That was the first time in a hundred and twenty-one years. Pippa had the whole of the winter's record in her little book and the arithmetic was simple and she did it on the back of her hand: one hundred and twenty-one winters, eleven lamps, one lamp, and in the book at the back there were four pages of lamps carried out and not one word about a lamp lost. * * * It was a nothing of a thing. That was the first thing Pelyn said and the first thing Pippa thought. The wick was fine. The oil was four days old and there was a half-can on the shelf. The glass was clean. The wick had been cut at six o'clock by a girl of eleven who knows more about wicks than anybody in the house. She trimmed it, and touched it to the taper, and it went out, and she trimmed it again, and touched it again, and it went out. "I've cut it twice," Sella said. "Cut it a third time and bring me the lamp." "It won't take." "I know it won't take. Bring it." * * * They brought it to the kitchen and Pelyn carried a lamp in each hand up behind her and Pippa had the register under her arm, because she had begun, in the last fortnight of March, to carry the register about the house in daylight the way an old woman carries a handbag, and nobody had the nerve to ask her why. The wick was cut. The oil was there. The taper was Wilby's, and Wilby was in the room over the parlour with the door open and the stick across his knees, and had not said a word, which was how he had told her three times since March that he knew what was happening and had decided she should do it herself. Pippa put it on the table and touched the wick to the flame. Nothing. Nothing at all. There was no splutter, no catch, no moment of a flame that might have gone out. The flame came to the wick and went round it. "That's not a wick that won't light," said Amberley. "That's a wick that isn't there." * * * "The wick's there." "Look at it in the glass." He held the lamp up. "Miss Danby, look at the top of the wick. It's been cut level with the brass. It's not a bad cut. Somebody's cut it right off, right at the collar, and it would take a fire to light that because there's no wick above the collar to take a flame and there's no wick below it to carry it down." "Wilby," said Pippa. Wilby said nothing. * * * "Then light the first," said Pippa. "You've got the order." "I've got the order and I'm the keeper and I'm going to light the first lamp, and then the second, and then the third, and then the fifth, and then the fourth, and then the sixth, and then the eighth, and then the ninth, and then the tenth, and then the eleventh, and I shall come back down the passage for the seventh, and by which time there will be a lamp in every bracket in this house but that one, and every one of them will be leaning towards it, and I want to see what it does." * * * She started at the front door. Third. Fifth. First. Fourth. Second. Sixth. Eighth. Ninth. Tenth. Eleventh. And every single lamp as it took its flame turned and leaned, very slightly, down the passage, away from the wall, all of them at once, like a field of corn going over before a wind that hasn't arrived, and the passage filled up with a leaning. And at the stair head the bracket was bare and there was nothing in it and there was warm air coming out of the wall, out of the hole Mowbray's father made in 1991 when he went after a nail, a hand's width of warm air in a corridor with ten degrees in it, and it smelled of hot iron. And then Pippa put a lamp into that bracket, and the wick was cut off at the collar, and she touched the taper to it. It took. The flame went up the wick in one movement, all at once, without a sound, and it stood about four inches high and it was the colour of the bottom of a swimming pool and it did not lean, because there was nothing for it to lean towards, and Pippa stood in a corridor with a taper burning in one hand and eleven lamps in brackets behind her and let go of the taper because her hands had gone. * * * They came out of their rooms. That was the thing she understood afterwards, and she understood it in about eleven seconds, which was the first time in her life that understanding had arrived at that speed. They came out because a noise had gone through the house. Not a loud noise. The opposite of a loud noise. Eleven lamps had gone quiet at the same moment, all in the same second, and a house that has had a noise in it every night for one hundred and twenty-one years going suddenly silent in one second is a noise that will bring eleven people out of their beds. Sella was first, because Sella was already up and in the passage. Then Ferrenby. Then Tibb, in her apron, from the kitchen. Then Pelyn with his shirt over one shoulder. Then Marlowes, and behind him Elverston, and behind him Bredon, and then Kerrith in a dressing gown and shawl with her hair up in a thing nobody could explain, and then Margery Otterburn holding Idony's arm with Idony entirely asleep and walking in both of them, and then Bel Starveling, and then a dog that had come down with them and was making a great deal of noise about nothing, and then Wilby, in the passage, with his stick, in his shirtsleeves. Eleven people in a corridor in the dark with ten lamps lit and one lamp lit four times too big and blue. Nobody said anything for a while. "It's lit," said Pelyn. "It's lit," said Amberley. "It's lit," said Sella. Wilby put his hand on the wall and began, with the other, to count the lamps along the passage, touching each bracket as he came to it. He took his time. When he got to the seventh he stopped with his fingers on the crooked bracket and stood there. Then he said: "Nobody has done that in a hundred and twenty-one years." Nobody asked what. * * * "Cut off at the collar," said Wilby, "at night, in the dark, with the house asleep, by somebody who wanted the seventh lamp to be unlitable and not merely unlit. And not a child. A child would have pulled it out and put it back and been in the register for it by breakfast." He turned round. "There's one person in this house who knows where everything is in the dark, who is sixty-eight, who has been standing up in this kitchen for forty years, who has a hip and a stick and a grudge, and I say that as a man who has put the same lamp in that bracket every night for forty years and been cut at the collar four times by somebody who thought I would not count the wicks in the morning." * * * Tibb said, "Wilby." "It's Tibb," he said. "Yes. I know. And I'd be sat on the step at six in the morning saying what I said, and you'd have got up and gone at me in the middle of the night and been three hundred yards down the lane before I'd got my coat, and you'd have been right to, and I was wrong, and I'd not have been able to say so because there's no room in this book for a man of sixty-eight saying he was wrong about his wife." Pippa said: "Wilby—" "Let me finish, girl, I'm eighty in October." He put the stick down against the wall and leaned on it. "In sixty-one she carried that lamp up the hill four nights. In sixty-one there was nobody in this house at all except me and a woman of thirty-one who had gone to bed and stayed there and told everybody to go to bed. And in sixty-one she went up the hill with the seventh on the last night, on her own, with the other ten out of the bracket, so that it would be her hand on the last one, because she could not stand to have a machine do it." "You cut it." "I cut it at the collar on the fourth night at about two in the morning, and I put it back, and I did it again at four, and at about six she came down for her coat and I wasn't in the kitchen and I went up the back stairs and I wasn't in the house, and at nine o'clock in the morning there were two men at the door from Selborne and I said I'd sent the Thawkeeper for help and they asked me her name and I said I'd not written it down." He picked the stick up again. "And she's been dead eleven years and I'd not told anybody in this village that there was a woman who went up that hill alone, because the whole of it would have been about me." * * * Nobody spoke. Then Bel Starveling said, from the back, in a small voice, "Is that why you stand at the oven door?" "Yes," said Wilby. "All those years?" "All of them." * * * Pippa went to the register and wrote the entry at the lectern with nine people standing in the passage watching her do it, which she had not permitted before and permitted now. She wrote: *On the ninth of April the seventh lamp was found cut off at the collar and would not take a flame. It was cut by hand, in the dark, in this house. The cutter has said so out loud in front of eleven people and has said why, and the reason is in 1961 and in the lamp and not in this book, and it is not going in this book either, because it is his and not mine and there is a difference.* *And I am going to write one other thing, which is that a woman of thirty-one went up the top of this hill four nights in a gale in 1961 with ten lamps out of their brackets so that her own hand would light the last one, and that she did it and nobody in the village has known for thirty years, and that it has been sitting in this house all this winter in a man who oiled a lock and stood at an oven door, and that the reason this book has felt like a warm thing to me since the first of December is that people keep doing it and then going quiet about it.* *A lamp can be cut at the collar. A covenant can be broken in nine seconds. And what this house is keeping this winter is not the lamps and not the snow and not the ground under the top byre. It is that somebody comes back in at nine in the morning after four nights on a hill and says a small thing out loud in a kitchen.* *Nothing was different this morning. The lamp is lit. That is the whole of the news and I would not have this entry any longer.* * * * And then the book did a thing that Pippa Danby would spend the rest of her life being glad she had seen. Under the date, in the damp grey hand, three lines came into the page. *March's lamps and April's lamps are on the same wick and it has not been cut.* *He did not do it to break the rule. He did it to be asked. He has been standing at an oven door since 1961 waiting for somebody in this house to be the kind of person who would ask, and there has not been one, and there is one now, and she has had her name written on a chair in pencil since January and did not know it until he told her tonight.* *Pippa. Go and ask her.* ---