We made a ritual of it, because people do. Every morning, before tea or toast or the first stumbling resident at the bakery door, Elliot Marsh sat me down at the corner table with the green ledger open between us and read me my own life. He called it the Reading. I called it, privately, the roll call, because that is what it felt like: a teacher going down a list, pausing at each name, waiting to hear if anyone would answer. He did it gently. He did it in the same low even voice every time, with his tired kind eyes on my face and his finger moving down the page, and I’d sit with my hands round a mug and say yes, and yes, and yes. And then, now and then, quietly, no. On the morning of the twenty-ninth, it was the bus. “You told me it was the forty-one,” said Elliot. “With a driver on Thursdays who hums.” “I remember that.” “Do you remember the song?” I opened my mouth. I waited. It was somewhere near, I could feel it, the way you feel a word on the tip of your tongue. “No,” I said. “I don’t think it’s there.” Elliot wrote something small in the margin and didn’t look up. “That’s all right. You’ve still got the bus, and the driver. You’ve only lost the song.” “Only the song,” I said, with a laugh that came out wrong. “Listen to us.” “I think it’s better to be able to say only,” said Elliot. “I’ve been trying to say it for eleven years.” That was the day it began to be bearable. Not because it hurt any less. Because I wasn’t carrying it alone. On the sill outside the bakery window, a black cat with one white whisker was sitting upright with his back to us, looking at the square. He had been there since six. Nobody had fed him. Nobody ever had. They began to come to us in the cold bright hours after breakfast. Not all at once. I’d braced for a stampede, a hundred empty faces pressing at the bakery door, and instead they arrived singly or in twos, a shy thin trickle that went on all morning. They stood in the square for a while in that blank bright waiting way. Then something moved behind their eyes, and they turned, and walked up to me, and said it. I want it back. Nobody had taught them. I think it was the Oak’s own law working in reverse, like a spring held down for centuries and at last let up. Once a resident’s longing grew strong enough, the smooth mask of the face would crack, and what was underneath would ask. Elliot wrote them down. Tomas fetched the lantern. I took each one down through the cellar and the roots to the long gallery where the real bodies knelt, and stood beside them while they did what Dorothy had done. And every time one of them asked, up on the library roof, the crows called. One crow, one note. Caw. A pause. Then, an hour later, caw. They weren’t counting guests any more. They were counting something else, and I didn’t know what. “They keep tally of the ones who come back,” said Elliot, when I asked. He had gone a bit pale. “I can’t think why. I’ve never known them count anything but arrivals.” Eleven came that day. Each took an hour. I won’t tell you all of it. But I’ll tell you about three, because they taught me things, and because I think you should know that not all of it was grief. The first was Fenwick. He crossed the square at ten o’clock with his hands in the pockets of a leather apron and his big red face working. He was six foot three at least, with a laugh I’d heard roll out of The Last Order on three separate nights. I’d liked him enormously. He’d sat us at the best table by the window. He’d refused to let me see the bill. But the man who stood in front of me now wasn’t laughing. “I need to ask you something,” he said in a low uncertain voice, “and it’s going to sound daft.” “Go on.” “I think I’m too loud.” I blinked. “I think I’ve been too loud for thirty-one years. All that booming. All those jokes. I don’t think I’m a loud man. I don’t think I’ve ever been one. I think somebody took something out of me and put a big laugh in the hole.” He looked at me, hunted and sheepish. “I came in 1995. I was twenty-six. I was the quietest lad in Doncaster. I used to sit in the corner of the pub and nobody knew I was there. And I thought, God, if I could just be somebody people noticed.” “You gave up your shyness,” I said slowly. “I gave up my quiet. I think it’s the same thing. And it turns out, Mira, I liked it. I liked being a man in a corner. I liked listening. I’ve been shouting over the top of it for thirty years and I can feel it all down there, like something in a cupboard, scratching to get out.” I took him down. His own kneeling body was enormous, bowed over its folded knees, grinning like a man at a very long party. When I asked if he wanted back what he’d given, he said, “Yes. Oh, please. Quietly.” The light that came to him was small and pearl-grey, hardly bigger than a moth. It touched his forehead. His shoulders dropped three inches. The big boisterous red-faced grin went out like a lamp being turned down, and what was left was a large gentle rather diffident man with wet eyes and a shy smile. “Oh,” said Fenwick softly. “There you are.” He didn’t say another word that afternoon. He sat on the cellar steps with his hands between his knees, perfectly content, and nodded to everyone who passed, and I think it was the happiest I’ve ever seen anyone. The price was two things. The one that hurt: the smell of the back office at the pharmacy, which I’d have told you was nothing, and which had been, I discovered, the smell of my first real wage. The one that didn’t, until Elliot found it: the colour of the bus, the forty-one. I could remember the bus. I could not have told you its colour. The second was the clockmaker, and she was the hardest. Her name was Marguerite Odette Laurent, and she was seventy-four, with a face like folded silk and a lens strapped to her forehead that had worn a red ring in her skin. She came across the cobbles slowly, leaning on a stick of black wood, and she said nothing until we were standing among the clocks in her tiny crowded shop. Three hundred of them. Grandfathers and carriage clocks and little gilt mantelpiece things. Cuckoos and chronometers and one huge brass sunburst with a pendulum like a fallen moon. They ticked and whirred and whispered, each a little out of step with the others. It sounded like being inside a hive. “I made them all,” said Marguerite. Her accent was soft and French and faint. “Over forty-one years. I didn’t know why. I only knew that I couldn’t bear them to stop.” “They’re beautiful.” “They are time.” She laid her hand on the great brass sunburst. “I came in 1985. My husband died in March. A stupid thing, a stroke, in the garden. He was pruning roses, and I was in the kitchen and heard nothing. He lay in the grass two hours before I went out to ask if he wanted tea.” Her voice didn’t shake. “I couldn’t live in a world where I’d made tea while he was dying. I gave it away. The garden, the roses, the kitchen, the hour. And the Oak said yes. And it gave me the clocks.” “Gave you?” “It put them in my hands. It said, you will never again lose track of an hour. And for forty-one years I haven’t.” A small terrible smile. “I know where every second goes. I’ve counted them. That’s what I do.” I understood then. The three hundred ticking clocks weren’t art. They were a wall. A great ticking whirring tireless wall of now, built against the one moment she couldn’t look at. “Do you want it back?” I asked quietly. “No,” said Marguerite. I waited. “I do not want it. I would give a great deal never to want it. But I think I should like to have it.” She lifted her chin. “There’s a difference, I think. Wanting is for the young. I’m seventy-four. I should like to go into my own kitchen before I die, and sit with the hour I made tea. And have it be mine.” She didn’t weep when the light came. She stood straight among the clocks with her black stick and her lens glinting, and the pale blue spark touched her forehead and went in, and for a long moment she didn’t move. Then softly, in French, she said a name. Henri. And all round us, from three hundred clocks, a single great chime began. I don’t know whether it was the Oak or the shop or Marguerite herself. But every clock in that low crowded room struck the same hour at the same moment, a vast bright silvery chord like a cathedral organ, and when it faded, they were all silent. Every one. They didn’t start again. “There,” said Marguerite, with a small tired smile. “They’ve finished. They’ve nothing left to hold back.” That one cost me the face of a woman I used to sit beside in the back row of a church, and the name of the church. I don’t know which one. I don’t know why I went. The third was a man I didn’t know, and I didn’t even get his name until it was over. He was one of the oldest. I hadn’t seen him in the square, only in the long gallery, where he knelt in the farthest alcove in a uniform jacket that had once been green and was now the grey of old ash. His page on the slate was 1944. He asked in the dusk, when the lanterns weren’t lit yet. He walked up to me from the far edge of the square, a thin upright perfectly still old soldier who must have been a hundred, though he stood like a much younger man in a coat that didn’t fit him, and said in a clear flat English voice: “Madam. I should be grateful for a word.” He asked to be shown down alone. I let him. I stood with my hand against the wall of the passage while he went into the alcove and knelt beside his younger self, and I didn’t go in and I didn’t hear what he said. I only felt the root in my back go warm, then hot, then, quietly, cold. When he came out his face was grey and fixed. “Thank you,” he said. “That is all. I wished to see what I had done with it.” “What had you done?” “I had put it down,” said the old soldier. “And the Oak had picked it up.” He drew himself to his full height. “It was a heavy thing, madam. I believe I had been dreadfully unfair to the man who was carrying it.” His name was Abel Crane. He said no more. He went and sat on the bench by the dry fountain under the stone bird and watched the lamps come on as the dusk came down. He sat there, perfectly upright, for three hours, and nobody disturbed him. The price that evening was the one I could least afford. It was a name. I knew at once. I’d come back to the little room on Tallow Street, washed my face, taken off my boots and sat on the bed under the sloped ceiling with the red plastic hair-clip in my palm, turning it over and over. A cheap thing, bright, the kind a girl buys in a chemist’s for fifty pence. Somebody had tossed it down to me. I remembered that. I remembered the bus and the steps and a girl at the top of them, blotchy from crying. The red hair, a wet laugh, a thin voice saying something fierce. So you remember who you’re doing it for. I knew every word. I knew the exact weight of it, the way you know a stone in your pocket. But I couldn’t remember her name. I sat still. A church clock that wasn’t a church clock struck nine. I held the clip and said into the empty room, quite quietly, “Come on. You know her.” There was a girl in the story. A boy in the square in a white mask. An old woman with a stick. I could see their faces. I couldn’t summon a single name. There was a knock on the door. “Mira?” Elliot’s voice, low. “May I come in? I have the book.” He had it under his arm and a candle in his other hand. He came and sat on the end of the bed and didn’t say anything for a moment. He only looked at my face. And then, gently, as one reads a bedtime story to a frightened child, he opened the ledger and began to turn the pages. “Pippa Mills. Leeds. Twenty-three. Red hair, loud laugh, brilliant at lists. She has a brother called Danny, who is fourteen, and whose tea she makes every evening. She’s the bravest person you’ve ever met, and you told me so the night we went down into the Hollow.” I shut my eyes. “Jonah Reyes. Nineteen. His father’s in a hospice. He’s at home tonight with a gift that’s breaking, and he promised you he’d ask for it to be taken away. Winifred Aldous, seventy, who is annoying her daughter at this very moment and has never been so happy. Tomas Vey. Cecily Ashe. Dorothy Webb. Fenwick. Marguerite. Dougie in the tweed jacket, who hears his Margaret every morning. The woman who took the Hush and wouldn’t look at you.” He read every name. He read them slowly and clearly, one after another, as if they were prayers. And as he read, I felt them settle back into me like birds settling on a wire. Not as memories, exactly. As facts. Held up by someone else’s hands. “I can’t carry them,” I whispered. “I’m losing them. I’ll wake up one day and there’ll be nobody left in my head.” “Then I’ll carry them.” He said it so simply. “That’s rather the point of me, isn’t it? I never lose a word. Your people will be here. In the book. In me. They’ll always be on the page, and I’ll always be able to read them to you.” He looked up, and in the candlelight his face was open and unguarded and young. “I couldn’t save my sister’s voice. I could only keep it. But I can keep yours. All of it. I’d like to.” There was a silence in the little room. I don’t know who moved first. I think it was small. I think I only leaned my head against his shoulder, and he only put his arm round me, and neither of us said anything at all. We sat there a long time while the candle burned down and the Toll rolled softly in the cellar far beneath us, and for the first time in four days I let myself be held. It was just after midnight when the bus came. I heard it before I saw it, the long diesel sigh of an old engine coming down the road through the pines. We ran down through the sleeping square in our coats, Elliot with the candle, I with the hair-clip in my fist. The red bus stood at the kerb with its headlamps on and its doors folded open, and the driver, the silver-haired man with the calm unkind face, was standing beside it with a canvas sack over his shoulder. He set it down on the cobbles. “Post,” he said. “Already?” I said stupidly. “Letters travel faster than people.” A short dry shrug. “They have no luggage.” Then he looked at me properly, and something in that calm hard face eased, slightly, round the eyes. “You’re Ilse’s girl.” “I am.” “I drove her down in ninety-eight. She asked me, the last night, to take her anywhere that wasn’t here.” A pause. “I’d have taken her to the end of the world. She was the only guest in forty years who ever thanked me for the ride.” I didn’t know what to say. So I said, “What’s your name?” He looked mildly surprised. “Hollis. Nobody’s asked me that since the war.” And he tipped two fingers to his forehead, the smallest, most precise of salutes. “Keeper.” Then he got back into the bus and drove away into the pines, and we were left in the square with a sack of post and cold stars coming out above the roofs. There were four letters. The first was in a round hasty schoolgirl’s hand on a sheet torn from a spiral notebook, with a drawing of a bad cat in the margin. DANNY HAS ANNOUNCED THAT I AM BOSSY. I SAID YES. I AM MAKING HIS TEA. I AM CRYING INTO THE KETTLE. LOVE FROM PIP. I read it three times, and at the end of the third I found I was laughing, and I didn’t stop for some time. The second was in a small upright furious script on cream paper. Dear Mira. Ruth and I have now had two rows. The first was about the thermostat. The second was about who is to blame for the first. It was glorious. She hung up on me. I have never felt so alive. I enclose a recipe for gooseberry tart which is not nearly so good as the one in the Tallow Street bakery. Do not tell Dorothy. W.A. I sat down on the kerb and wept. The third was addressed in a careful boyish hand, and I could tell by the weight that it was long. I held it with both hands and didn’t open it. “Jonah,” said Elliot softly. “He wrote it before. Thursday is over now, one way or the other, and I don’t know which.” “Then we’ll keep it until you’re ready.” I nodded and put it inside my coat with the others. The fourth letter was at the bottom of the sack, and I almost missed it. It was a different kind of envelope. Thicker. Greyer. The paper had a woven grain like linen, and the flap was sealed with a lump of dark green wax pressed with a mark I didn’t know. Not a tree, exactly. A tree seen from below, roots drawn at the top, and on the trunk a tiny delicate thread of red. The address was in a bold upright unfamiliar hand. To the Keeper of the Hollow at Ashgrove. By hand. Urgent. I turned it over. There was no name on the back and no return address. Only, beneath the wax, a single line in the same bold hand, in ink so fresh it hadn’t quite dried. You are not the only one. Elliot had gone still. I felt his breath stop, there on the cold cobbles beside me. “Mira. Don’t open that. Not yet.” “Why not?” “Because I’ve just remembered something.” His voice was one I’d never heard from him. “On the map. The old one, in the cellar. The roots ran past the edge of the paper. All of them. And at the corners, drawn so small I had to hold the lantern up, there were little black crosses. Not in the valley. Hundreds of miles away. In places I didn’t recognise. And I remember thinking, in the dark, that I must be mistaken.” I looked at the green wax and the inverted tree and the thin red thread running down its trunk like a vein. “I wasn’t,” said Elliot. Above our heads the wind moved in the strings of dead lanterns. Under our feet, deep in the stones, faintly, the Toll beat on. But it sounded, I thought, for the first time, like a heart that was listening. Find the original chapter at novelping(.)com.
Chapter Fifteen: The Reading
The Night of Names