第39章 The Page for Next Winter

Mrs Valebrook posted the letter on the twenty-ninth of May. She had carried it in a tin box from Bredon's cottage to Fernhollow on the second of December in a basket with two loaves on top of it, and it had been in the bottom of a trunk under a bed in the room over the parlour for a hundred and seventy-nine days, and she came down at ten in the morning and asked Tibb for a bit of string and the right stamp. * * * It was not a sad letter. Pippa had assumed for five months that it was a sad letter, because a woman of fifty-four who travels nine miles in a blizzard with a basket in December is not writing about anything pleasant, and because it had a tin box round it. It was about a shop. "Mrs Quillets's daughter keeps the shop at Selborne," she said. "I have been sitting in a room over a parlour since December going through the only two things I have that anybody could want, and one of them is a hundred and thirty pounds of good stock that was in a shop in Amberley in 1987 when I had a shop, and I sold the shop, and the stock is in a cellar at Fernhollow, and the lease on it went to my daughter-in-law, and I cannot sell it and I cannot give it away and I cannot eat it. And I have put it in eleven requests and every one of them has been a refusal in a polite letter, and the last one of them said *your inventory is of no interest to us*." "That's not a sad letter," said Pippa. "It isn't a sad letter," said Mrs Valebrook. "It is a letter of thirty-one words to a woman named Rhoda Quillets at the Selborne post office, and it says, I hear you have a bakehouse coming free and empty, and I have flour, and I am a woman of fifty-four who has been in a mountain inn since December with a hundred and thirty pounds of shop stock, and I will come and talk about it any afternoon except Wednesday." "Has she answered?" "She's not answered and she won't until the road's been open a fortnight, and she won't mind. I know Rhoda Quillets. I've known her since 1961." Mrs Valebrook put the stamp on. "It has taken me a hundred and seventy-nine days to write thirty-one words because I could not make the first sentence be about flour. Everybody in England thinks it has to be about the other thing." * * * Pippa walked down to the lane with her to watch the post go into the box at ten past ten, and the post came up twice a week on a Tuesday and a Saturday from Selborne and it was going down for the post office at Bredon's cottage and not further, because the road south was shut. "It won't get there until the third of June." "It'll get there on the third of June," said Mrs Valebrook, "and she will answer it by the seventh, and she will offer me the bakehouse, and I shall say no, and then she will offer it again in July and I shall say yes, and I shall be sixty-two when I open a shop in a village of two hundred with nine children in the school and no bakery in it since 1983." * * * "That is the best thing anybody in this house has done this winter," said Pippa, "and you did it in thirty-one words and eleven months' thinking, and I have been here since the first of December and I could not have done it and I want you to know that I did not even think about it, because I have been thinking about snow." "I've been thinking about snow," said Mrs Valebrook, "I have been sitting on the end of a bed in the dark for five months, which is what everyone in this house was thinking about, and the only difference between me and the rest of you is that I have been writing thirty-one words in my head since the second of December and the rest of you have been writing a hundred and nineteen nights in a book." * * * The register went into the common room on the second of June. The pass had been open for nine days. Four of the guests had gone: Wrenfield with an empty barrow and four people in it; Pelyn Sedgewick back to the post house with a lamp and a list; Bel Starveling to a cousin in Marlowes who had a piano; and Mrs Valebrook, who left on the first of June, four days before the letter came back, and had posted it in any case, because a person who has decided to do a thing does not need to wait for the answer before she does it. She left a page in the register and Pippa read it, in the common room, out loud, on the second of June at eight o'clock at night. *Thirty-one words to Rhoda Quillets at the Selborne post office, and a hundred and thirty pounds of shop stock in a cellar at Fernhollow that nobody wanted in January. And I was in a mountain inn from December to June with a tin box under a bed and I could not put a sentence together about anything except flour. Somebody was very kind to me here for five months and the kindness was mostly soup and I am not being ungrateful. It is only that I am fifty-four and I have been a shopkeeper and a wife and a mother-in-law, and the only thing I have ever wanted to do is open a shop in a place where there is no shop, and it has taken me five months in a mountain and thirty-one words and a tin box to put my hand on the thing that is actually mine.* * * * And then Pippa opened the last page of the volume and cut a new one, and wrote the date at the top of it. *First of June. The Old Volume. One hundred and nineteen nights, thirty-one names, eleven lines under a rule in four hands, four pages headed Not written against, one sheet with a rubbings on it, and an account of a line I rubbed out myself with a rubber in January and entered against myself on the twenty-ninth of the same month.* *The New Volume begins here, and it is blank, and I have written the date at the top of it and I have written the night of the twelfth of March at the bottom of it, and the names are not in it yet.* *The names go in when they arrive. Not before. I have been asked, in the margin of this book, since January, what I am afraid of, and I have answered it, and the answer is that if you fill a page in with names before the names turn up, then you have made a lodging-house out of a covenant, and the covenant will keep the snow off the top of the shoulder for exactly as long as somebody finds it interesting to.* *And it will not be interested in October.* * * * Pippa put the pen down and looked at the blank page for a while. "There's a page rule," said Bredon, from the window seat. "There's a rule about a guest who cannot write, and a rule about the order, and a rule about the housekeeper not signing, and there is not one word anywhere in four hundred pages of this book about how you begin a volume. Have you noticed?" "I've noticed." "It wants deciding tonight," said Bredon, "and not in June, because in October you will not be able to think about it with anything but the cold, and every keeper of this book that ever lived has decided how to begin in a hurry in the dark." * * * So they decided how to begin. It took two hours and forty minutes, and eleven people were in the room, and by ten o'clock there were four lines at the top of a blank page in a hand that had four inks in it and belonged to nobody, and they were as follows. * * * One: nobody writes in this volume until there is a name on the page, and the name is written by the person it belongs to and by nobody else. Two: a guest who cannot write a true sentence on the page they are given is given another page from the sheaf, and it says so on page two, and it has said so since 1889. Three: the housekeeper keeps the keeper. The Thawkeeper of this house has not kept rule six since the first of April and does not intend to, and has entered that in this book under her own name with the date on it, and would ask any successor to read it before deciding. Four: *no keeper neither* — and that is in a different ink, and it is in a different hand, and it is the hand of a woman of ninety-one, and under it she has written: *and never again, and whoever rubs this out is a fool and a coward and I shall be watching from the window seat and I do not sleep after ten.* * * * Sella Quillets wrote the last line of the page, because she said she was the only person in the room who had not been asked, and she wrote it large and upright and it took her eleven minutes. *The eleventh lamp is lit last of all, and it is crooked, and somebody in this house has cut its wick off at the collar once in one hundred and twenty-one years, and we know who, and he has said so, and the seventh is to be lit last and we shall all be in the passage to see it done.* * * * And then, because it was the first of June and there was nothing else to do, somebody suggested that the register ought to be read, and it was read, at eight o'clock, from the beginning, in a common room, out loud, from the first of December to the first of June. It took three hours and ten minutes and there were eleven people in the room and two of them left at the end and went to bed and two of them had been crying since the twenty-seventh of December and neither of them said so. And at the last of it, at quarter past eleven, at the bottom of a blank page with the date at the top of it, in the damp grey hand that had been asking questions since the eighth of January: *The volume begins. Put the dates in the wrong order next year. She will not mind. She has had four months of them in the right order and she has not once been warm.* * * * There is no proper word for the first of July, and the ones who use one are lying. What happened was this. The road came back on the ninth of June and stayed back. The coaches ran on the Tuesdays and the Saturdays and the timetable came out on the eleventh and was nailed to the post office door by Pelyn Sedgewick, who is nineteen now and is the housekeeper at the Hollowell and who pins things up crooked on purpose because his aunt Tibb says a crooked pin is a thing that lets you see it again. The ewes went off the high pasture on the night of the eighteenth of June, all eleven hundred of them and forty store lambs, through a wall with the top off and a lamp on the ridge, and Nancarrow sat on a stone at the fold with his good hand round a stick and watched the whole thing happen, and did not move, and did not try to. Sella Quillets went home to her aunt in the city on the third of July, on the coach, having said her piece to Pippa on the step in about nine seconds and then having spent forty minutes in a shop in Selborne buying a brass oil lamp, a box of pencil stubs, and a pair of boots that are two sizes too big. "Pippa." "I'm not going to say anything about it." "You were going to say something about it." "I was going to say something about the boots," said Pippa, "and they are two sizes too big, and I have decided that this is not a thing a person of twenty-nine says out loud to a person of eleven on a step in July." "You were. Thank you." * * * The last of them went on the fourteenth of July, and after that the Hollowell was a very quiet house with a very full book in it. Pippa walked the line on the last of May and the fourteenth of June and the third of July, and each time there was nothing over the posts, and each time she went up to the ring at the top and put her hand flat on a foot of snow in July and found it as cold as a flagstone in the yard, and each time she said the words out loud, into a hill, with nobody listening, which had started as an office and had by June become a habit, and habits are the whole of a thing at four hundred years' end. And on the evening of the fourteenth of July she lit the lamps for the first time since the second of May. Third. Fifth. First. Fourth. Second. Sixth. Eighth. Ninth. Tenth. Eleventh. Seventh. She did them in the passage at six o'clock in the evening on a warm evening in July with the door open on to a yard where the hens had got at something, and Pelyn held the ninth and Sella's steps were still in the tread of the mat at the half landing, and the sixth came off the range where Tibb had put it at ten past six, and the seventh went in crooked into a bracket that Mowbray had straightened in June and that had gone crooked again by July in about four days, and it did not smoke. "It's not a litting for anybody," said Pelyn. "There's nobody in the house." "I know." "Then why—" "Because it's July," said Pippa, "and I am not going up to that hill in the dark in the next hundred and twenty days on my own any more, and if there's anybody up there who hasn't got somebody's weight, then this is the night we do it properly, with all eleven, in the order, and with a lamp on the ridge." * * * And in the common room that night, at eight o'clock, the two of them read the register. One hundred and nineteen nights. One hundred and ninety-seven days. Sixty-one entries in her own hand in a new volume, four of them about the twelfth of March and one of them about a woman of ninety-one in a window seat, and one of them, in the small hours, that she had written about herself and had left in and had not been able to take out and did not want to and no longer needed to: *What I am afraid of is the twelfth of March, and it has been the twelfth of March, and it will be the twelfth of March again, and I am not going to be a woman who is good at sitting in a room. I am going to be a woman who gets it done by the time the weather turns, and I am going to keep a register, and I am going to light them in the order, and I am going to write down what is true and not what is comfortable, and I am going to be here on the first of December, and the only thing I have left to say about fear is that there are eleven people in this house tonight who have read those words and not one of them has looked at me differently, and that is the entire reason any of it works.* * * * The fire was low in the grate. The clock in the corner was eleven minutes slow and had been since April, and nobody had ever put it right, and Elverston had said that a clock that is eleven minutes slow in a house that does not need the time is a clock that has been given a holiday. * * * The knock came at half past ten. There was nobody on the road. The coach had gone at four and the lane had been empty since six, and Pippa said so, and Pelyn said so, and they both got up, because the door of the Hollowell was bolted and had been bolted since six o'clock. Somebody knocked again, and there was a woman standing in the yard with a lamp in her hand and no hat on and her coat over her arm, and she was about sixty and she was wet to the waist, and when Pelyn opened the door she came in and put the lamp down on the table in the passage and looked straight down the passage at eleven lit brackets. "Oh," she said. "Oh, good." * * * She had walked up from Selborne. In July. Eleven miles, in a day, on a road that had been open for five weeks, and she had no hat and she was wet to the waist, and she stood in the passage of an inn she had never been in in her life and put her hand out. "I'm sorry," she said. "I've walked it. There was no coach after the four and I thought, there'll be a light on in a house like this." "There is. There usually is." * * * "My name's Prue Amberley," she said. "No — I'm sorry. My name's Ruth Amberley, and the Amberley is my mother's, and I live at Wrenlow on the coast, and I've come four days up a mountain because there's a woman in my village who has been getting letters from a man called Ferrenby and I could not walk past that any more." * * * * * * Pippa looked at her for a long moment. "You've come up on the coach from Selborne." "I've come up from Wrenlow," said Ruth Amberley. "On the coach from Selborne. There's four days' walk from where I live to the coach office at Wintergate and the coach from the north doesn't come down past Selborne until the spring, because the road on my side of this mountain doesn't open until the middle of May." * * * Pippa put the kettle on. "Eleven miles," she said. "In a day. In July. On that road." "It's four days," said Ruth Amberley. "It is exactly four days and I have done it and I would do it again and I am not brave, I am just extremely stupid and there is no coach." * * * So she sat down at the long table, third from the fire, on the near side, in a wet coat, and had a cup of broth and a piece of bread and butter, and Pippa Danby sat down opposite her with the register, and did not lie, and did not decide what she was going to say before she said it. * * * "Nobody may leave before the thaw," said Ruth Amberley. "It's in your rule and I've heard it and I've come up in the middle of July. So you'll want to know what I came for, and I'll tell you straight, because I've walked four days and I'm not going to waste it being polite." "Then tell me." "Two hundred years," she said. "There's a bakehouse at Wrenlow that went into the sea in the wall in fifty-four and there's a bound on the top of the shore that's been ours since 1829, and we've had a Thawkeeper since before the flood, and I am the fourth one and I am sixty-one and I have got no apprentice and my mother had one and he went to sea in 1988 and didn't come back." * * * "There's nobody up there at all," she said. "There's four families and a church with no roof and a wall. And in January the snow came up out of the ground and stood up in nine places and there were no lamps lit in that house for three weeks because I was up the road in the north with my mother's sister and I did not know it had started until I came back on the sixth of February and there was ice inside the wall." * * * "I've had it down once," said Ruth Amberley. "Once, on the twenty-second of February. It took four days and it took me never sleep and it was me and four men and two of them are seventy. And it came back on the second of April and it is not coming back down a third time, because I have not got four men and I have not got a boy and I am sixty-one and my hip has been bad since Christmas, and I have been sending letters to every inn on this road since the eleventh of May and I have had three answers and two of them were from men who were very polite and did not come." * * * And Pippa Danby put her hand flat on the table. The eleven lamps were burning behind her in the written order, 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 crooked in a bracket that Mowbray had fixed in June. "You're not going to be able to get it down this year," she said. "No." "Not this year. And I can't come up there in August, and I can't send anybody up there in August, and there's no sense pretending." "I know that. That's not why I came." Ruth Amberley took her hands out of her lap. "There's a sentence about it in your book. There's one in a letter that came down the road to the north in April, put in by a woman at Wrenlow who had it out of the middle of a sack of flour in nineteen sixty-one, and the clerk at Wintergate read it out and he said it was on the list, and the list of things that the Thawkeeper of the Hollowell has said out loud to a hill on the thirtieth of January in the dark, and the clerk had it written down, and it has been up and down this road four times since May." * * * It was in Ruth Amberley's hand on the back of the letter, and it was in the damp grey hand in the register, and they were the same sentence, word for word, and it had been carried down the mountain and up the mountain and across a valley and along a coast by a woman who had come four days up a mountain with a lamp in her hand. *Ask her what she is afraid of.* * * * "She was on my mother's step in June," said Ruth Amberley, "and she read it out to me and she said, that's not a threat, that's somebody asking a question, and she said, if you ever go up to the Hollowell you tell the Thawkeeper there that somebody has been trying to ask it right since the eighth of January and nobody has answered it yet, and she'd ask you to bring her a line in the book." * * * "I've brought you a line in the book," said Ruth Amberley, and put a folded paper on the table. "And I'll not stay, and I know the rule, and I don't mind, and I've had a cup of broth and I've been dry for a minute, and my road back is the four days in the other direction and I shall go down at five in the morning and I shall not be asked to stop." * * * Pippa Danby looked at the folded paper on her own table. "Then you'll stop," she said, "because it is the fifteenth of July and the rule says no guest may leave before the thaw, and there is no guest in this house on the fifteenth of July, and I have decided, in the middle of the afternoon, on my own authority, with no book and nobody behind me, that Ruth Amberley of Wrenlow is a guest of the Hollowell until the first of December, and that she will sleep in the room over the parlour, and that Elverston will look at her hip tomorrow, and that if anybody in this house asks me why, I shall say that it is because somebody has been at that gate since January." * * * She put the folded paper into the register at the back, in a page of her own with somebody else's four lines on it, and did not read it out, because it was not hers. And then she went and did the last thing of the evening, which was to go along the passage and trim the seventh lamp. The wick was level. The glass was clean. The bracket was crooked, and it would be crooked in August, and Mowbray would have a word about it when he came up on the ninth, and it would go crooked again. Behind her, at the bottom of the stairs, in an empty house with the door bolted and the clock eleven minutes slow, a woman who had walked four days to ask a question sat down at the long table on the near side, third from the fire, in a wet coat, with a book in front of her, and began to read it. ---