第34章 The Sisters Go Home

They went down on the thirtieth of April, on the same coach, in the same seat, having spent twenty-four hours in a mountain inn agreeing to leave on the same coach. Margery had the window. Idony had the door and the case and a basket she had packed herself and would not let anybody touch, which had contained, as far as Pippa could establish, the entire of a household's memories in about eleven pounds of weight. * * * They had been in the house since the eighth of December, when they had come up the last coach before the pass closed and argued about a chair. "You are not obliged to like each other," said Pippa, in the yard, on the morning of the thirtieth, with the coach waiting at the gate. "I have never once in four months expected you to. And I want to say something and I have thought about how to say it and I am going to say it badly." "Then say it badly," said Margery. "You came up this mountain because you could not bear to be sisters in the same room, and you stayed because the snow shut, and the snow shut until April, and in five months neither of you has had a single day in a house with the other one that you did not both spend counting." Idony laughed. Margery did not. "I do not know what you are going back to," said Pippa, "or whether you are going back to the same house or two houses or one house with a wall put up in the middle of it. And I have found out, this winter, that I am extremely bad at knowing. But I know two things about the two of you, and I know them because of the fire, at six o'clock, every night, in my own room, which is not where a register is read." * * * "What two things," said Margery. "One. You have never once in five months sat with your back to the other one. You think you have. You have sat at a table on either side of a fire for twenty-four weeks and your chair is on the side of the fire that lets you see the door, and the other one is on the side that lets her see the door, and neither of you has ever moved." "Well," said Idony. "And two," said Pippa. "On the night of the ninth of January you quarrelled over a bucket in the scullery and I went to Idony's room and told her that her mother died in October of the year before last, and she told me about a chair in a front room at a funeral in Selborne, and I have never told a living soul either, except Tibb, and Tibb has forgotten it on purpose. I am telling you both at once because you have had four months of it each on your own and it has made you twice as strange about it as it had to." * * * Margery looked at the ground. "So you knew," she said. "I knew." "And you let us go on." "I let you go on for four months because there was nothing in this house that would have fixed it and there was a great deal in this house that would have been broken by it." Pippa turned to the gate, where the coach driver was looking at the sky. "There is a chair on the step of this inn that has been yours since the third of December and neither of you has ever asked for it back, and the housekeeper has been moving it a foot to the left every night for eleven weeks so that it does not catch the draught off the door, and neither of you has ever mentioned it, and he has done it every night." * * * Idony said, "I'll not take it on a coach." "Heaven forbid. Take the other one." "There is no other one." "Take the chair," said Margery. They looked at each other on the step of the Hollowell with the snow coming off the roof in slabs and the coach horses stamping. "Right," said Idony. "Then we'll have to have it between us." "You cannot take a chair on a coach." "You have said that twice." "There are two of you," said Margery, "and there is one chair, and neither of us is having it, and so we shall have it in the middle, and it shall go in the cart between the house, and I do not care in the slightest what anybody thinks and I have been not caring since December." * * * Pippa went and got the register, and she did it on the step of the inn in the wind with the coach driver holding the horses, and she gave them one ruled white leaf from the sheaf at the back. "You do not need—" "You may write what you like on it. One true sentence each. And I have written two lines at the top, and if you would rather tear that off you may tear it off, and if you would rather not it will not be there when you get home, because it is in pencil." * * * The two lines in pencil said: *They came up on the eighth of December in a quarrel about a chair and they went down on the thirtieth of April in a quarrel about a chair, and neither quarrel was the one they came up for.* Idony wrote: *I shall not be able to manage her and I am going to manage her anyway, which is what I have meant by my whole life whenever I have said the word family.* And Margery wrote: *I have come to believe that my sister is a better woman than I am, and I have not told her, and I am telling her in this book because I have run out of any other way of saying it and I am sixty-one.* * * * And then, at the gate, holding the leaf in one hand, Idony said: "The house." "Which of you—" "Marlowes End," said Idony. "It's mine, and it's shut, and it's been shut two years, and I have been carrying a lamp up and down the road to it in a bag twice a week since December, and I would like to stop, and I cannot stop." "That's the lamp in the front room. That's Cressida's aunt's lamp, is it? The one with the green glass on it?" "Yes." * * * Pippa went and got it, and gave it to them. "That was not in the rules." "It was under a mat on the half landing for a hundred and twenty-one years," said Pippa, "and I found it in January and I have not mentioned it to anybody in this house except you two and one doctor, because I have been waiting for the person who was entitled to it. I did not know that there was anybody entitled to it until a fortnight ago, when Mistress Bredon said out loud at the reading that a Thawkeeper does not get to keep a lamp she has not paid for, which is true, and which I have been dreading for a fortnight." "Where shall I put it?" "Anywhere you like. It's a lamp." "There is going to be a great deal of coming and going in that house," said Idony. "There will be a great many people in that house who are not us, because a house that is shut is a house that is nobody's, and a house with a lamp in it is a house that somebody's, and I have had eleven weeks to work that out and have not told anybody because I did not want to be talked out of it." "Then light it," said Margery. * * * "Eleven eleven nine, off the top of the shoulder," said Idony. It was not off the top of the shoulder and they both knew it and Pippa, standing on the step of her own inn, understood that she had just listened to a piece of the old rule in a language she had not been taught and would never be taught and did not need to be. "You have one of them," said Margery. "You cannot put a second one in it, or it'll smoke." They argued about it on the step, in the wind, for four minutes, while the coach driver held the horses and Pelyn came out of the lane to find out what the shouting was, and then they agreed that the second one would go in the back window and be lit every night at six, and that it would not be lit in a particular order, because it was not a keeper's lamp, and they knew that, and had said so out loud, and had been told nothing back, because there was nothing to tell them and Pippa Danby had the sense to keep her mouth shut. * * * The coach pulled away at half past three. At the top of the lane Idony put her head out of the window and shouted something Pippa could not hear and would not have heard if she had, and Margery put her hand up to her sister through the coach window and held it there for about a quarter of a mile, and then the coach went round the bend at the top byre and there was a white road going down to Selborne and a yellow one going up to the pass, and after that there was nobody in the lane at all. * * * Pippa went and found Sella in the passage with a cloth and a tray. "Two people have gone down the hill." "Yes, miss." "It's quarter past four." "Yes, miss." "And there's forty-four stairs and eleven lamps and a register with a hundred and nineteen nights in it, and a book at the back with nothing in it, and a housekeeper who is going to be seventy in August, and a doctor whose chest is better and won't admit it, and a man who has gone to a coast with a dead lamp, and a woman who is going to go and post a letter in about eleven days, and a woman of ninety-one who is going to sleep in the window seat, and a schoolmistress who is going back to eleven children on the eighteenth of May." "Yes, miss," said Sella. * * * "Sella." "Miss Danby." "You may call me Pippa. I have been thinking about it for five months and I have been too frightened to ask, and you are going home in eleven weeks and I would rather not hear about it from somebody else." * * * The girl stood in the middle of the passage with the tray and the cloth and eleven lamps burning behind her in the order that they were burned, third and five and one and four and two and six and eight and nine and ten and eleven and seven, with the seventh four inches high and blue and leaning at nothing. "Pippa," said Sella. "That's it once." "Pippa," said Sella again, "there's a coach coming on the Saturday and you haven't got anybody to carry the oil up from the cellar, and I'm not as tall as Pelyn, but I'm faster and I've been doing it since January." ---