IS THERE TEA?

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which the sun comes out, the roofs fill with men, the lane fills with women, and the entire parish conducts an afternoon of longing over hot drinks it does not really want.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

There are, in the calendar of Sogmarsh, perhaps six afternoons a year when it does not rain, and the parish has an arrangement for every one of them, and the arrangement is called Tea Weather.

You must understand the mechanics first, because the mechanics are the whole of the comedy. This is a wet realm. Roofs are thatch, thatch rots, and thatch can only be re-reeded dry — so a thatcher spends eleven months of the year unable to do the one thing he is for, and then the sun comes out, and every thatcher in the district goes up. Up onto the roofs, in the rare warmth, and — because it is warm, and because reeding is hot work, and because a man cannot swing a leggett in a good coat — in his shirt.

And the lane, which on any ordinary day is empty because everyone is inside keeping dry, discovers, all at once, that it has a very great deal of doorstep-sweeping to do.

This is the point at which a coarser realm would be coarse about it, and Sogmarsh is not, and the not-being-coarse is exactly what makes it a Tale.

Because what actually happens on a Tea Weather afternoon is this: the women of the lane come to their doors, with their tea, and they look. At length. Openly, but not — and this is the fine distinction the whole parish observes without ever once stating — not rudely. A woman on her own doorstep, with a cup in her hand, watching a young man re-reed a roof in the sun, is doing nothing whatever that anybody could name. She is having her tea. It is her doorstep. If her eyes happen to travel upward, well, that is where the roof is.

The tea is the alibi and the tea is the point. You cannot stand in a doorway doing nothing — that is loitering, and a Sogmarsh woman would sooner drown than be caught loitering. But you can always, at any hour, in any weather, be having your tea. The cup makes the whole thing decent. Remove the cup and it is ogling; add the cup and it is a break. The realm that invented deniability out of a filing system invented it here too, out of a kettle.

Widow Marle, that particular afternoon, cleaned the same step four times. It had been clean since Monday. She knew it was clean. Everybody knew it was clean. But a step, unlike a woman, may be attended to indefinitely without comment, and so the step got attended to, and the Rennie boy got re-reeded, and the tea got drunk, and the afternoon was, by the standards of the realm, thoroughly enjoyed by all.

Now. Here is the tale inside the custom, and it turns, as everything in this realm turns, on one small unbreakable rule.

You may look. You may not offer the cup.

To carry your tea out — across your own threshold, down the path, up to the foot of the ladder, and hold it up to the man on the roof — is not a kindness in Sogmarsh. It is a declaration. It is done in front of the entire lane, which is watching, which is always watching, and everyone in that lane knows exactly what it means, and so does he, and so, the moment the cup leaves the doorstep, does everyone's mother.

It is the boldest thing a Sogmarsh woman can do sober, and it is done perhaps twice a decade, and it is never, ever done lightly, because there is no taking a cup back.

The afternoon of this tale, it was done by Alma Crouch.

Alma Crouch you may know, if you know the parish, as one of the two shyest people in it — she and Tibb Sennet having been walked out, years back, by the whole village pretending to run errands, because left to themselves the pair of them would have looked at each other across a lane for the rest of their natural lives and called it courtship.

They were long married by the Tea Weather of this tale. And that is the thing that makes it a good tale and not merely a sweet one: it was not a young girl declaring herself to a stranger. It was a married woman of some years, watching her own husband — who thatches, in season — up on the Sennet roof in his shirt, in the one warm week of the year.

And Alma Crouch, who had never in her courting life been able to say a forward thing out loud, stood in her doorway with her tea, and looked at the man she had somehow, against all the odds of two shy people, ended up married to, and thought — the lane agrees she must have thought something, from what she did next — I never once told him. The whole parish told him for me. I never got to.

And she put down her own cup. And she made a fresh one, properly, the way you make it for somebody. And she carried it out — across her threshold, down her own path, in front of the whole watching lane, to the foot of her own husband's ladder — and held it up, and said the words that are the plainest love a Sogmarsher will ever speak, which are not I love you, which no one in this realm has ever managed, but:

"Is there tea? There's tea."

Tibb Sennet came down off that ladder so fast he took a yard of reed with him.

The lane, to its eternal credit, looked very hard at its own doorsteps and saw nothing at all. Widow Marle cleaned her step a fifth time with tremendous concentration. Nobody said a word, then or after, because to remark on it would have been to have seen it, and the whole architecture of Tea Weather depends on nobody having seen anything.

But it is in the parish now. Alma Crouch carried the cup out to her own husband, in front of everybody, after all those years, because the village did her courting for her and she wanted, once, to do a bit of it herself. And when a Sogmarsh woman wants to say the largest thing she has, and cannot find the words, because the words were never given to her, she still, to this day, in that lane, makes a fresh cup, and carries it out, and says the only words the realm has ever trusted with the weight.

In a realm too shy to say the word, tea is the word — the cup on the doorstep is a look, and the cup carried out is a vow, and a whole parish has agreed, without ever admitting it, that "is there tea?" may be made to mean "I have loved you the entire time and never once got to say so." Offer it carefully. There is no taking it back, and in Sogmarsh, that is precisely what makes it worth offering.