Bryony
Fourteen days to the weld. Morning.
He sat on my stair till past midnight, and I didn't let him in.
I lay on the floor by the vice with my boots on and listened to him not leave. A big man on a wooden stair makes a noise like a ship settling. Every so often it changed, so I knew he'd moved his knee. At one it stopped. In the morning there was a pie on the top step in a twist of paper, gone cold, set where I'd have to step over it. I ate it at the sill. Standing up. It was mutton.
He'd told the gate where he was going. Nothing had come of it, and I'd have liked a fight.
I wasn't angry with him. I'd tried. He'd been asked and he'd answered, and that's what he is. I might as well be angry with a well for being deep. I'd a forge lit and nothing to put in it. I took it to the dockyard.
Ivo's bench is in the open end of a fitters' shed on the quay side, under a tin roof. The Guild yard wall runs forty yards along from it, with the yard steps showing over the top. A good bench. Beech, ten feet, with a leg vice at each end and the grain worn into wells where his elbows go. He'd had it from a shipwright. He keeps it better than he keeps himself.
He wasn't at it. His boy said he was in the lock-pit with a pump and would be back by the bell. I said I'd wait. The boy was twelve and knew what I was. He went the colour of brick and left me to it.
I looked at the bench.
Blanks first. Six of them in a row on a felt, brass, finger-long, three-pronged at the bit and not yet cut. Filed to the width of door four's keyway and not a hair beyond. A file with the teeth gone silver. A drawing under a rasp. Pencil, on a page torn out of a ledger: a hatch seen from the front. The iron, the four hinge-pins, the keyhole. And drawn in beside the keyhole, in a harder line, a second ward. Hollin never put one there.
I know a hand. It's a good one. It had never wasted a stroke in its life.
"Looking?"
He'd come up from the lock-pit with his sleeves rolled and a grey streak of grease to the elbow. He didn't hurry. He put the spanner down on the bench by the felt, and I watched him not look at the blanks.
"Six," I said.
"Seven. One's in the vice."
"For four."
"For four."
"Six of them for one hatch."
"I spoil a few." He took a rag out of his back pocket. "You're off the writ. The whole pit had it before I'd got my boots on. Is it true, what they found?"
"It wasn't mine."
"They never are."
"You were in the store."
"For a rasp." He picked it up and held it so I could see the tar on the handle. "With half the dockyard. Do you think I've time to go round putting beads in your roll? I've a pump to see to and Haverill's got me opening doors I'll never pay."
"You hold the key to four. You hold the blanks. You'd a second hatch key off Hollin, it's in his ledger in his hand, and every door that's been drawn's been done with a key."
"Four's been drawn."
"Because you've been cutting."
"Because somebody's got a copy of mine." He said it flat. "That's what the ward's for. Make mine the only one that turns it. If I'd wanted four empty I'd have emptied it in the skiff, with Haverill sat there watching, and I'd not have bothered to draw it." He wiped his hands. His knuckles had gone white on the rag. "Do you know what you are, Pask? You're a lock that thinks every key's a burglar."
I'd have had something for that on another day.
"I had my mother," I said.
He looked at me.
"Off seven. The bead. She's in it, the whole of her, and she's got a hole in her. A line gone. A drop's been drunk out of her before the notice went up. The tar on that hatch is hard as a plate. So it was before, and you were at the pier. You knew what to say across that boat." My voice was going up. It's like a spring going: you know where it'll end, and you can't get a hand in. "You'd got her word on your tongue and you gave it me to see my face."
"I never—"
"Go on, then, chick." I put it in his voice. I do voices badly. It came out right. "She said it every night at that door. You stood in it."
"Easy, chick."
"Don't."
"Pask. Easy."
"You drank my mother," I said. "I drank the rest. I had her off door seven and there's a hole in her the shape of you."
I'll tell you what a dockyard does when you say a thing like that at noon. It stops.
Not all at once. A mallet in the next shed, which had been going like a heart, came down once more and didn't come up. Then the caulkers on the slip. A carter. The boy with the bucket. Somebody dropped a coil of chain and nobody swore. In my own shop, Hollin's rule: when it goes quiet you've said it too loud.
Ivo hadn't moved.
He'd gone the colour of the wall behind him. Not the red I'd expected, a roar and a fist and the word liar. White. His mouth had gone, and the rag hung off his hand, and he looked at me as if I'd taken his pocket-watch and read him the inscription.
"What?" he said.
It had been my voice, going out across a quay with forty men on it. I'd said, I drank. I'd said, door seven.
I looked over his shoulder at the yard steps.
Stone, grey, forty yards off. There was a man on the top of them in a grey coat. He'd come out of the office door. He wasn't doing anything. He stood with one hand on the rail and a pair of spectacles in the other. He was looking down the quay at the sheds. At a bench. At a woman with a hacked head and a man the colour of the wall.
I'd say he was looking at me. I couldn't tell you. I couldn't read a face at forty yards if you gave me a glass. I could see he'd put them on and taken them off again. When Hollin did that it meant nothing.
"Pask," said Ivo. Low. "Say that again."
"No."
"You drank her."
"I said what I said."
"I want—" He stopped. His hand had closed on the rag. "I want what's mine out of one of them. That's all. I've never wanted anything else." He turned his face from me, and that was the worst thing I'd seen him do, because he's never in his life turned away from a fight. "Go home."
"What's yours?"
"Go home."
The mallet in the next shed started up again. After that the caulkers. After that the chain. It went round the quay like a lit fuse. I took my hands off Ivo's bench and found I'd left two clean prints in the filings, and I wiped them out with my cuff.
When I looked up at the yard steps they were empty.
I spent the afternoon making a pick out of a bedspring. I didn't need one. I had no roll. My hands wanted something to be wrong with. It came out crooked. I threw it in the quench-pot and made a second.
At nine he came up the stair.
I'd been out on the roof an hour. There's a window at the back of my room. It gives onto the sailmaker's slope, tarred slates and a long chimney-stack. From the stack you can see across the Steps to the harbour. The cranes, dark. The tower, a black thumb at the mouth. Riding lights moving. I didn't answer the knock. Him on the landing. Then the door, which I'd left on the latch for him and nobody else. Then the window.
It's a small window. I watched him decide how to do it.
"I've nothing against the slates," he said, from the sill, with his head and one shoulder through. "I'd like that said."
"They'll hold."
"I'm told you can't know till you've done it."
"They'll hold you. Put your feet on the ridge."
He got out like a wardrobe being got round a stairwell. It took the whole of the roof. A slate went clack and settled. He sat on the ridge a yard from me with his knees up under his chin, a very large man on a very small roof, and held out a twist of paper. Whitebait. Fried, still hot, grease coming through at the corners.
I took one. It crunched.
"He heard you," said Gannet. "He came out on the steps. I was at the casement. I saw his back." He hadn't touched the paper. He had it on his knee, and he was looking at it. "He didn't say a word to me, not at the report, not at the gate. I've been walking round it all day like a man round a hole."
"Then he doesn't care."
"He cares. He's the carefullest man I know. He asks me what it took every night of the world, and tonight he said dismissed before I'd got my mouth open." He turned the paper in his fingers. "If he asks me, Bryony—"
"You said. I've heard it. Eat the things."
He ate one. Then three. He eats like a man who's been told it's rationed.
"It was Ivo," I said. "He was white. He was shaking. A man doesn't go that colour for nothing."
"He went white because you said his name and a thing about your mother in the one breath."
"He had the blanks."
"He told you what they were for."
"He would."
He laughed, quietly, to himself. "You'd convict a spoon," he said. "I like it. I'd be very frightened of you if I'd done anything."
"You said yes."
It came out of me by itself.
"I did," said Gannet.
"You'd no choice."
"I'd the choice of how long to take over it. I took none."
"It was true."
"It was." He looked at the harbour. "I'd have liked it to have been something else. I'd have given a good deal."
It's work, anger, you have to keep it warm. I put the fish paper down on the slates and held my hand out, palm up, without having decided to.
He took it.
Big, dry, scrubbed, the nails bitten to nothing, and every time they touch something they do it as if it might go off. He turned mine over on his knee. He held it in the starlight like a man reading a notice on a gate.
"This one," he said. His thumb went over the white seam across my thumb.
"Three-square file. I was ten. I pushed when I should've let it cut."
"This."
"Flux. Soldering. It spat."
"And this."
"Door three. The bit in the middle. You were there."
"I was there." He said it quietly. "It's gone to a shine."
"It's where the grip goes."
His thumb went round the heel of my hand, over the old burns and the callus and the little pale nick from the shears the day I cut my hair. It went into the creases of my palm slowly and exactly. Nobody touches a lockwright's hands. They're for the work. You don't think of them as having a front. It was like the plate, when it's good, when the teeth come up and know what they're looking for and aren't sorry. I looked at the chimney.
"There's a lot of you in here," said Gannet.
"There's mostly tin."
"There's a lot of you."
I should've said something. My hand was in his. The other had gone out flat on the slates by itself. His face was nearer than it had been, and I'd stopped being able to say what the harbour was doing. He'd stopped talking. His breath was a bit uneven. Fried fish, salt. His thumb stopped in the middle of my palm.
"No," I said.
He took his hand off at once. It was the quickest I'd ever seen him move.
"Not that," I said. I wanted the hand back, which was stupid. "Stay where you are. Not till I've got the first one back."
"Bryony—"
"I'm not cutting the second key when the first one's still missing."
He didn't say anything for a time. It's an effort to him.
"That's fair," he said.
"It isn't."
"No. It is, though." He looked at his own hand. "I'd go about with it in my head for the rest of my life, and you'd know I had. You're right, and I'd rather you weren't."
"Good."
"Where's the first one, then? To get back?"
"Eight," I said. "It's shut. It isn't welded till the thirtieth." I'd thought it all out over a bedspring. "The glass for eight's in the tower. The hatch is on the seaward face, and no boat can lie to it but at the big low. Whoever's been emptying the glasses will want it, same as the rest, and they'll have to go in the big low as well. So I go first."
"Go and do what?"
"Pick it."
"The hatch."
"The seaward hatch. At the big low. In a skiff, with a wire and a bad temper. I get the kiss out of the glass before they do." I looked at him. "It's mine. It's in somebody else's keeping, and it's mine."
He'd gone quiet. "That's picking a hatch under the writ. That's the cells."
"I'm off the writ."
"You're off the post. You're not off the law. And I'm—" He stopped. "If I'm on duty, I'll have to stop you."
"Then don't be on duty."
"It's not a thing you can be, or not be. I'm his sergeant."
"Then be somewhere nobody asks."
"Is there one?"
I thought about that. There wasn't, in the port.
The harbour was all one colour. A ship's light moved out by the tower and slid behind it. Down on the Steps a dog barked twice and gave it up.
"The big low," I said.
"Then it's a date," said Gannet.
He put one hand flat against the chimney stack, as if the roof had tilted.