Tale 87THE UNDECEIVED

There was a gentleman lodged at the top of Mrs Threndle's house on Cinder Row whom the parish had agreed, kindly and completely, to consider mad, and his name was Mr Oram, and the trouble with Mr Oram was that he was right about everything.

He was not right in the way that wins arguments. He was right in the way that empties a room. You would pass the time of day with him on the landing and he would agree that it was a fine morning and then observe, pleasantly, that the morning had happened before and would happen again, that mornings did not in his experience finish, they were only mislaid, and that if you listened — he was always asking you to listen — you could hear the old ones still going on underneath, the way you can hear a downstairs conversation through a floor. And you would say, well, Mr Oram, and take your leave, and go down the stairs a little faster than you came up.

Mrs Threndle did not go faster. Mrs Threndle brought the tea. She had kept lodgers forty years and had buried a husband who talked sense right up until he stopped talking at all, and she had come to a private opinion, which she did not share, that of the two states she preferred Mr Oram's. He was never unkind. He was never afraid. He said good morning to the corners of rooms, and thanked the kettle, and once she had found him with his ear to the milestone at the end of the Row, and when she asked what he was at he had straightened up, embarrassed for her, and said, "It's telling the wrong distance again. On purpose. Poor thing, it can't help it," and she had not known what to say, and had said nothing, and had thought about it every day since, because the milestone at the end of Cinder Row did say the wrong distance, everybody knew it, and nobody but Mr Oram had ever thought to feel sorry for it.

So she brought the tea, and she did not go faster, and that is why she was there on the stairs the afternoon the border came.

She had heard of Mr Scrim, of course. Everyone had heard of Mr Scrim, the way you hear of weather in the next county — you believe in it without expecting it to arrive. So when she came up with the tray and found a striped pole laid across the seventh stair, and a small table, and a stamp, and a gentleman behind them in a coat of no clear allegiance who informed her that she was now leaving one jurisdiction and entering another and would she have her papers ready, she did what any sensible fen-wife does when the inexplicable sets up an office on her staircase. She put the tray down where he could reach it, and she said there was tea if he wanted it, and she sat on the sixth stair to see what would happen, because she was in her own jurisdiction now, whatever he said, and a woman may sit on her own stairs.

And Mr Oram came out to the landing, and looked down at Mr Scrim across the striped pole, and Mr Scrim looked up at Mr Oram, and something passed between them that Mrs Threndle would try for the rest of her life to describe and never manage, except to say that it was the look of two men who have spent a very long while in a loud room and have just, at last, found the one other person who can hear it.

"You hear it too," said Mr Oram. He said it the way a man says water in a desert.

"I hear," said Mr Scrim, "all of it. The item that predates its own paperwork. The arrival still outstanding. The one at the bottom of every stair." He stamped the table, gently, once, as if agreeing with himself. "Nothing here has been signed off. Nothing ever will be."

"They think I'm mad," said Mr Oram.

"You are correctly filed," said Mr Scrim, "under Miscellaneous. As am I. It is the safest drawer. Nobody looks in it."

And then — and this was the part Mrs Threndle held onto — they laughed. Not madly. The way you laugh with a friend at a joke that is thirty years old and still funny. Two men on a staircase, one above the pole and one below it, laughing at something she could not hear, that they could both hear perfectly, and she sat on her sixth stair with her hands in her lap and felt, without fright, the way you feel standing at the edge of the sea in the dark — that there was a great deal more going on than she was built to take in, and that it was, on the whole, and against all reason, kind.

They talked a long while. She did not follow it, and I will not pretend to for you, because it was not for following. It was two right men comparing a country only they could see, and every so often one of them would name a thing — a bell that rings under water, a road that goes round a place that isn't there, a wanting that quietly goes — and the other would nod, yes, that one, I have that one too, and neither of them, not once, said the thing that was under all of it, because Mr Oram had only ever been given eyes, which see the edges of a hole and not its bottom, and Mr Scrim heard it as one cry in ten thousand and could no more pick it out of the din than you could pick one raindrop out of rain. They circled it all afternoon, the pair of them, and touched every wall of it, and named it nothing, because it had given them, each, exactly enough to be sure and not one grain more, which is the whole of what it gives anybody, and is why the wise call it a mercy and the parish calls it nonsense and Mrs Threndle called it, privately, company.

At dusk Mr Scrim stamped Mr Oram's hand — SEEN, the stamp said; she checked, after; it left a faint blue mark that took a week to fade — and took up his pole and his table and went, wherever it is he goes, back down into the jurisdiction of Thursday. And Mr Oram went in to his room lighter than she had known him, and slept like a child, and in the morning said good day to the corners as usual, and she brought the tea as usual, and neither of them ever spoke of it, because there was nothing to say that saying would not spoil.

The parish still considers Mr Oram mad. He is content to be. "It's the safest drawer," he tells Mrs Threndle, when the doctor has been and gone and pronounced him incurable and harmless. "Nobody looks in it." And she agrees that nobody does, and pours, and does not tell him what she has come to believe on her stairs — that of the whole sane and sensible parish, hurrying down its landings, only two men had ever once stopped to listen; and that they had not been wrong; and that the maddest thing in all Sogmarsh is how many of us can hear the downstairs conversation, every day of our lives, and have simply agreed, kindly and completely, to call it the pipes.

Tale 88THE NIGHT NED WAS READY

Ned Bellowcombe had been ready for the war for thirty-one years, and the war had the poor manners not to arrive.

This did not discourage him. A lesser man, un-invaded for three decades, might have put away the whistle and the lantern and the hand-drawn map of the parish with the arrows on it showing where the enemy would most sensibly attack (across Mudge's water-meadow; it was always across Mudge's water-meadow; Ned had war-gamed it forty times and the enemy never varied). Ned did not put them away. He oiled the whistle. He trimmed the lantern. He redrew the map when the water-meadow moved, which in Sogmarsh it does. "Readiness," he told the Hand and Reed, to a room that had heard it, "is a war you fight every day and win every night by nothing happening. You're welcome," he would add, to the drinkers, who had not thanked him, and would raise his small beer to the thirty-one years of victories they had all slept peacefully through without knowing it.

He kept a Watch. The Watch was Ned. He had recruited, over the years, a great many volunteers, all of whom had volunteered by being spoken to firmly in the pub and had un-volunteered by going home, so that the Drudgeford Volunteer Watch Against All Comers had, on its books, a membership of one, and on the ground, of one, and Ned commanded it with the full gravity of a man leading thousands, which is a thing you can do with an army of yourself if you have the character for it, and Ned had exactly the character for it and nothing else.

So it was Ned, and only Ned, who was awake and dressed and ready at two in the morning on the worst night of the Wet, when the lights came across the fen.

He saw them from his window: a string of lights, low and swimming, coming on out of the black over Mudge's water-meadow — over the water-meadow, he had said so, he had SAID — moving wrong, breaking apart and bunching, the way a thing moves that does not know the ground. And Ned Bellowcombe's heart, which had waited thirty-one years for exactly this, went up like a lark.

"THEY'VE COME," he told the empty room, joyfully, and seized the whistle.

He was halfway across the green, whistle to his lips, the great recruiting-cry of his whole life swelling up in him — TO ME, DRUDGEFORD, THE HOUR IS — when the wind brought him a voice off the marsh, and the voice was not an army's. It was thin, and frightened, and small, and it was calling a name, over and over, the way you call a name when you have stopped expecting an answer, and it was a child's name, and the lights were not an advance. They were lanterns. They were held by people who did not know the ground, out on the water-meadow in the Wet, at two in the morning, spread and stumbling, and one of them had a light held low and swinging because the person holding it was on their knees.

Ned lowered the whistle.

There is a moment in the life of every man who has prepared for the wrong thing, and it is a cruel moment, and it is the making of him or the breaking, and it is this: the moment he understands that the thing he trained for is not the thing that has come, and that the thing that has come needs him anyway, right now, and worse.

Ned understood it in about a second and a half, which for Ned was fast.

He did not blow the whistle for an army. He blew it three times, short, the way you signal here, to me, the ground is good here — a signal he had invented for a war and never once used — and he lit his trimmed lantern and held it high and steady on the one firm spit of land that ran out into that meadow, the causeway only a local knew, the causeway that was on his map in a thick sure line because Ned Bellowcombe had walked every yard of this parish thirty-one years looking for where an enemy might come and had learned instead, without meaning to, every place a friend might safely stand.

"HERE," he roared, in the voice he had built for thousands, that carried now across a drowning meadow to a scatter of lost travellers and a mother on her knees. "STRAIGHT TO THE LIGHT. MIND THE GREEN, IT WON'T HOLD YOU — COME ON MY VOICE — I HAVE THE GROUND — I HAVE THE GROUND."

And they came to his voice. Out of the dark and the wet and the treacherous shining green they came, stumbling, weeping, a lost christening-party who had taken the low road in the fog and lost the causeway and then lost a child off the edge of it — and Ned went out along his own sure line into the black with his lantern and his thirty-one years of knowing exactly where a man could stand, and he found the little one up to the waist in the bog not forty feet from firm ground and bawling, and he had her out and up on his shoulder and roaring encouragement the whole way back like she was a regiment, and he did not stop roaring, he did not know how to do this quietly, he only knew how to do it loud and ready, and loud and ready turned out, that night, to be precisely and exactly the thing required.

Nobody enlisted, after. They never do. But the christening-party named the child, when at last they got to the font, Edwina — for the man on the causeway, they said, the whole army of him — and Ned, who had a speech ready for the surrender of an enemy and none at all for this, stood in the Blessed Loaf with his hat in his hands and his mouth working and produced, in the end, nothing but "well," and "the ground was good there," and sat down very fast.

He is still ready. He oils the whistle. He redraws the map. The war has still not come, and Ned Bellowcombe is thirty-two years undefeated, and if you tell him, in the Hand and Reed, that he has wasted a life getting ready for a battle that will never arrive, he will not argue with you. He will only look, for a moment, at the small blue ribbon a christening-party sent him, that he keeps pinned inside his coat where his medals would go if the realm gave medals for turning up, and he will say what he always says, and for once you will not laugh at it.

"You never know," says Ned, "when they'll need a man who's ready."

And you will buy him a small beer, and you will not, that night, tell him he is wrong.

Tale 89GRANDMOTHER NETTLE

I went up to Grandmother Nettle for a wart. That is the truth, and I want it said plain at the start, because everything that came after came in through that little door, and if I dress it up now it will sound like I went for wisdom, and I did not. I went for a wart, on the side of my thumb, that would not go, and I was two-and-twenty, and it was the summer I stopped speaking to my sister.

Everyone knew where the hedge-witch was. You did not need telling. You went out past Nettlewick to where the made road gives up and the hedges start keeping their own counsel, and you followed the one that looked oldest, and it took you to her whether you steered for her or not, which is the first thing about Grandmother Nettle that a sensible person declines to think about. She was in her doorway before I was in her lane. She always was. She looks ninety. My grandmother said she looked ninety. My grandmother's grandmother, I am told, remarked upon how well she looked for ninety. Nobody has ever been rude enough to ask, and Grandmother Nettle has never been foolish enough to say.

"Mm," she said, when she saw me. "I know."

"I've a wart," I said.

"You've a wart," she agreed, and did not look at my thumb.

She sat me down and gave me tea I did not want, in the small dark kitchen with the hedge pressing at the window like it was trying to hear, and she took my hand — the wrong hand, the one with no wart on it — and turned it over and looked at the palm of it a long while, not the way the fair-fortune women look, all show and shillings, but the way you look at a letter come in a hand you half-know, working out who it's from. And she rubbed the wart, when she got to it, with her thumb, once, and said a word I did not catch and have never since been able to make her say again, and told me it would be gone by Sunday.

It was gone by Sunday. I want that understood, too. But by then it was the least of what she'd done, and she knew it would be, the old fox, when she took the wrong hand first.

Because while she had my hand she said, not looking up, in the voice you'd use to mention rain: "And how long since you've spoken to your sister?"

I do not know how she knew. I have decided, over forty years, not to need to know. She is the bridge, they say, to the older country, the last one left who keeps the whole road open both ways, and perhaps on the older road a quarrel between two girls carries like smoke and she simply smelled it on me. Or perhaps — this is what my husband believes, who believes in the weather and nothing else — perhaps a two-and-twenty girl who comes up a witch's lane about a wart she's had for months, on the exact summer her whole face has gone shut, is not a hard letter to read, and any grandmother with eyes could have done it, and the magic was only that she bothered.

I have never been able to choose between those, and I have stopped trying, because they come to the same warm place in the end, which is that she saw me, and nobody else that summer had.

I told her about my sister. I had not told anyone. It came out of me in that dark kitchen like water out of a cracked pot, all of it, the thing my sister said and the thing I said back that was worse, and the weeks of the two of us in the one small house passing the salt and not the words, each of us waiting for the other to be the one who broke, both of us drowning politely within arm's reach of a hand that would have pulled us out if either of us could have borne to put it out first.

Grandmother Nettle listened to the whole of it. She did not tell me who was right. That is the thing about her that the frightening things cannot bear, I think, and it is why they keep away from her lane — she is not interested in who is right. She let me finish, and she took my cup, and she looked at me, and she said only this:

"She'll be at the well tomorrow, at the low water, same as always. You go and stand next to her. Don't say the sorry. You'll neither of you manage the sorry, you're too like your mother, both of you, God help the pair of you. Just stand next to her, and pass her the bucket up when it's full, the way you used to. She'll know. Standing next to a person is most of it. The words are only the receipt."

And I went, the next day, to the well at the low water, and my sister was there, same as always, and I did not say the sorry, and neither did she, and I passed her the bucket up when it was full, the way we used to when we were small, and our two hands were on the one handle for a moment in the cold, and she looked at me, and I looked at her, and that was the whole of it, and it was enough, it was more than enough, it was everything, and we have been sisters again for forty years on the strength of a passed bucket and a wart-cure I mostly went for.

I never paid Grandmother Nettle for the sister. You can't; she won't have it; she'll tell you the sister cured itself and she only did the wart, and take an egg for the wart and no more, and be offended if you press. But I have never once, in forty years, passed her lane without leaving something on the stone by her gate — an egg, a loaf, the first of the plums — and she has never once said thank you, because a thank-you is a receipt, and she taught me herself, that dark afternoon, over a wart, that the standing-near is the thing, and the words are only the paper it comes wrapped in.

She'll outlive me. She's outlived everyone. I hope she does. It is a great comfort, at my age, to know that out past Nettlewick, where the road gives up and the hedges keep their counsel, there is one door you will always be at before you've steered for it, and one old woman who will meet you in it saying mm, I know — and who does.