Grief in the Open

The shop kept his hours without him, which Hesper had not expected and could not seem to stop.

At half past eight on the Tuesday she was at the near end of the counter with a dry cloth in her hand and nothing whatever to do with it. At six she put the mutton on ten minutes later than the mutton required. The docket book sat under the ledger with a line ruled beneath the eighty-eighth entry in the back of a knife and the date written small in the margin, and it was the tidiest closed account she had ever kept in her life, and she had opened it twice in three days to look at a total that was not going to change.

Three hundred yards up the lane a man ate at a long table with nine others and a stool.

She got through the first two days on arithmetic. Twenty pounds of Tuesday blend. Four standing orders and two of them moved to Thursday. Eleven pots of the three-minute green on the Monday, which was the most she had ever sold of it, because half the village had discovered a sudden thirst for a thing they could order without having to say anything about it.

On the Wednesday the shutter had been chalked.

Tamsin was out there with a bucket before seven and had the worst of it off by the time Hesper came down, and what was left was a grey ghost of capitals half a foot high that would want a week of weather to go.

TO THE HAND THAT HELD.

“It’s not even a good hand,” Tamsin said, wringing the cloth out over the kerb. “There’s four men in this village write like that and three of them can’t—“

“Leave it.”

“I’ve nearly got it.”

“Leave the rest. It’ll wash.” Hesper took the bucket off her. “If I stand out here scrubbing my own shutter at seven in the morning with the chandler’s boy watching, that is a thing that has happened, and it’ll be at the mill by noon with me crying in it. Come in and eat something. You’ve been at that since before six and don’t tell me otherwise.”

Tamsin came in. She ate half a slice standing up, which was not a victory, and Hesper let it go, which was not one either.

· · ·Scene break

Colm came on the Thursday afternoon with his hat in his hands and rain on his shoulders.

“I’ve taken his statement. It’ll go with yours on the Friday post, and the old man’s with it, and then it’s the office’s and nobody’s here.”

“How long?”

“A fortnight to acknowledge. After that I’m guessing, and I’ll not guess at you.” He turned the hat over. “He gave me the twenty-fifth without my asking. Word for word the same as yours, down to the bell being tied back. And then he gave me the first of this month as well, and the hour, and how long you were in the room, and that he’d told you to go back down and you’d not gone.”

“That was mine to give.”

“You’d have given it me on Thursday. He knew that. He got there first so that it’d be on his paper and not only yours.” Colm looked at the wet lane. “Between the pair of you, you’ve built the office a better case than Garrow ever could. I’ve been a warden six years and I’ve never once had two people compete to hang themselves.”

“Have some tea, Colm.”

“I’ll not, thank you. If I sit down in here every time this gets worse I’ll be the fattest man on the border by harvest.”

· · ·Scene break

On the Tuesday following she took the blend up to the mill herself.

The mill collected, always, and had for eleven years, and a woman who suddenly carries her own sacks three hundred yards uphill is making a point whether she means to or not. Hesper had gone back and forth on it for a day and a half and had settled it by admitting, in the scullery, at eleven at night, that she wanted to be in the room.

Tamsin picked up the second sack without being asked and was out of the door first.

The mill kitchen at noon smelled of scorched barley and eleven men. The long table ran the width of it; the miller’s wife was at the range with her back to the room, doing sixty dinners a week and holding no opinion she could afford to hold in public; there was a settle by the door with Old Garrow on it and his mug in what was left of his right hand.

Aurel Donnacha sat at the far end on the stool with a bowl in front of him.

He had the coat on that he had got wrong for the weather in the spring and right for the village, and he had gone greyer at the temples in eight weeks, and he did not look up when the door went, which she understood before she had got the sack off her shoulder. He was not going to give three hundred people anything to carry down the lane. He would sit there and eat his dinner and let her stand ten feet off and not be looked at, and he would take that whole thing on himself and call it nothing.

She put the sack on the end of the table. She said, “Twenty pounds, and the note’s in the top of it,” to the miller’s wife’s back, and the miller’s wife said, “Right you are.”

That was the whole of what Hesper Quill was permitted to say in that room, and she stood in it with her hands empty and did not say anything else.

Tamsin put the second sack down beside the first.

Then she straightened up, and turned round, and said, to the room, at the volume of a woman calling the weights across a counter:

“The hen’s called Parish.”

Nine men stopped eating.

“She’s been on that step since the nineteenth and she’s been laying in the straw under the bench and Mistress Haddon won’t have her back and there’s a man up there feeding a bird he won’t name, which is daft, and it’s been going on for weeks.” Tamsin’s chin was up. Her hands were perfectly steady, which Hesper noticed, because she noticed hands. “So she’s called Parish. Because she’s not his. She belongs to everybody and she eats out of whoever’s yard she fancies and nobody buried her with anybody.”

Nobody in that kitchen made a sound. Two of the men had been in the shop on the twentieth of the arrival month when a girl of twenty-two told a Caldemoor general about a yoke, and Hesper watched them work it out.

Tamsin looked down the length of the table at Aurel for the first time since that morning.

“It’s not yours,” she said. “But it’s got a name now, and you’ll use it.”

Aurel put his spoon down and stood up, which cost him something with the knee and was done anyway.

“Parish,” he said.

“Don’t make a speech.”

“No.”

“And don’t thank me.”

“I was not going to thank you,” Aurel said. “I was going to say that I have been calling her the hen for three weeks and she has been ignoring it, and I am not sorry to find out that the fault was mine.”

Tamsin’s mouth went sideways, once, for about a quarter of a second, and she got it back under control, and she went and stood by the door with her arms folded like a woman waiting for a cart.

· · ·Scene break

Prue Haddon came in for her flour at ten past twelve, which was not when Prue came for her flour.

She put her basket on the end of the table, and she looked at the stool, and then she came the length of the kitchen at her own pace with every man in the place watching her do it, and she sat down on the bench opposite Aurel Donnacha with her hands folded in front of her.

“You’ll finish that,” she said. “I’ll not be blamed for a cold dinner.”

“It is finished.”

“Then you’ll sit there.” Prue turned her wedding ring round once. “My son was Ned Haddon. He was twenty-three. He went into the ground on the first day of the first snow, at Dunmoor, and the parish had the letter on the Tuesday and I have had it eleven years in a house with a damp wall, and in the whole of that time nobody has told me one single thing about that day that did not have a flag stuck in it.”

The miller’s wife had stopped moving at the range.

“I asked you in the spring what the first day was for,” Prue said. “You didn’t answer me, and you were right not to, because I’d have thrown it at you. I’m asking you now, at a table, in front of everybody, and I’d like it plain, and if you’re kind to me about it I’ll never speak to you again.”

Hesper stood by the sacks with her hands at her sides and did not breathe.

“I was released from confinement in my own country nineteen days before that morning,” Aurel said, “and given the southern command back, and ordered to force the Dunmoor road before the snow closed it. On the first day I put two regiments at the spur above the beck, between half past seven and nine. That is where your son was and that is the hour.”

“Go on.”

“We took three hundred yards of the road. We gave it back the following afternoon and I did not make a second attempt at that ground.”

“Why did you do it at all?”

“Because I believed on that morning that the pass could be forced and the thing ended before the winter, and that a war ended in the autumn costs less than a war ended in the spring.” He said it levelly, looking at her. “I was wrong. I was wrong by the second afternoon and I knew it, and three hundred yards of road is what your son is. There is no better answer under it. I have looked.”

Prue Haddon sat very still.

“And the third day?” she said. “There’s a third day in this that nobody will say a word about. They stand on that green and toast the third day every spring.”

“The third day is not mine alone,” Aurel said. “There is another person’s part in it and I will not spend it at your kitchen table.”

“That’s a no.”

“It is a no.”

“Aye, well.” Prue picked up her basket. “It’s the first honest one I’ve had off anybody in eleven years, and I’d rather have it than the seed cake.”

Garrow’s stick came down on the flags.

“There’s no call,” he said, from the settle, “to tell a woman that over her dinner.”

“I asked him, Garrow.” Prue did not raise her voice at all. “I’ve been asked nothing and told everything since the Tuesday that letter came, mostly by men who were not there, and you have been answering questions for eleven years that I never once put to you.” She got up. “I’m not eating my dinner with him. I’m sixty-eight and I’ll not be improved. But I’ll have what I asked for.”

She went out past Hesper and did not look at her, because there was nothing on earth she could have looked at her about in that room, and the door shut, and the mill kitchen went back, very slowly and with enormous tact, to the subject of the weather.

· · ·Scene break

The village moved after that, and it moved the way villages do, which is to say not all in one direction and not for the reasons anybody would have chosen.

The mill’s standing order came back to thirty pounds on the Friday with no note and no mention. Two carters walked up the lane at the same hour as Aurel on the Thursday and were seen to be doing it. The chandler’s wife stopped coming in altogether and sent her boy instead, which was worse than the coin on the counter and was meant to be. A woman who had said nothing to Hesper in a month put a hand on her arm outside the church and said, “That poor soul, with her boy,” and meant Prue, and meant something else as well, and went off before she could be answered.

Garrow did not come back through the door.

· · ·Scene break

Tamsin was scrubbing the quern at eight that evening and had been scrubbing it for some time.

“I’m not forgiving him,” she said, to the quern.

“I know.”

“I’ve named a hen. That’s the whole of what I’ve done. Anybody can name a hen.”

“That’s right,” Hesper said.

“He can keep the eggs and he can say the name and he can feed her, and that’s not me saying one word about the Fold, and if anybody in this village tells it as if it were, I’ll—“ She stopped and put the brush down. “She’s been sat on that step for three weeks with no name on her. It’s not right. You can’t have a thing about the place for three weeks and not call it anything. It makes people peculiar.”

Hesper stood behind her own counter and did not say any of the things that presented themselves.

Her apprentice had walked three hundred yards uphill with a twenty-pound sack she had not been asked to carry, and had stood in a kitchen with nine men in it, and had made a man an arrangement he was not permitted to make for himself, and had put the one word in it that meant this is not forgiveness and you may have it anyway.

“Eat something,” Hesper said. “There’s the heel of the loaf.”

Tamsin turned round with the brush in her hand and looked at her for a long moment, because in four years there had never once been a heel of a loaf in that kitchen by the time she got to it.

“You keep that,” she said.

“I’ve kept it since I was nine and it hasn’t made me any happier. Eat it.”