The Low Water Hours

The Ledger

She left the binoculars where they were.

Some part of her wanted to unbuckle them, to carry them down like a rescued thing, but the rest of her had spent eleven years watching the police come through hotel lobbies after stag weekends and break-ins, and it knew you didn't touch what had been placed. Venn had placed them. Or someone had. The strap was buckled twice round the rail, the barrels were level, and the eyepieces had been turned to someone else's eyes. She photographed them on her phone from three sides, her hands so cold the screen wouldn't register her thumb, and then she climbed down through the hatch and shut it behind her.

The attic was dim and smelled of damp felt. She stood at the top of the stairs and listened to the house: rain on the slates, the long groan of a timber taking the wind, the tick of the boiler on the floor below. Nothing else.

When she reached the window on the first landing, the harbour wall was empty. Ten people had stood there two minutes ago, and now there was only wet granite and the three boats nodding on their ropes. Jory had been looking up at her. She was sure of that.

If she walked up to the chapel now, the whole island would watch her do it. Every curtain, every kitchen window on the slope. She'd be the girl from Bristol in borrowed wellingtons, rattling the iron ring on an old woman's door while the light she'd seen was already somewhere else.

Did your mother keep the old ones too?

He had asked it so mildly. He'd been leaning on the doorframe of number three in his socks, his finger marking a page. The ledgers. He'd wanted the ledgers.

Her mother's office had been the old scullery once, a narrow stone room off the back of the kitchen with a window too high to see out of. Maren had not been inside it since she arrived. The door stuck in its frame and gave all at once, and she caught herself on the jamb.

It was exactly as it had always been, and that was worse than any change. There was the desk under the window, its green leather worn through to the board at the right elbow. The anglepoise. A mug of pens, every one of them capped. On the blotter lay a pair of reading glasses, folded, the arms crossed one over the other as if Delia had just set them down to rub her eyes.

Maren didn't touch the glasses.

The ledgers took up the whole back wall. Four shelves of green cloth, each spine labelled on a white card in upright black capitals: 1996, 1997, 1998, all the way along to the current year, which was still out on the hall table where guests signed in. Thirty years, give or take. Some years had two volumes. The summers had been busy, once.

She took down 1996 first, because it was at the end. The cloth was furred at the corners and the pages had gone the colour of weak tea. ARR. 14:20. MR & MRS D. FENWICK, LEEDS. RM 2. 3 NTS. B&B. Every line was in her mother's hand, the capitals small and tight and pressed down hard, so that when Maren turned the page she could feel the whole of the previous day standing up off the back in braille. Delia had logged arrivals and departures, the keys handed over, the meals. RM 4 — EXTRA TOWEL. MR FENWICK — CAUSEWAY 06:40 — WARNED. She had warned them about the tide. She would have warned every one of them, in that voice, and they would have obeyed her.

In season she'd given each day its own page. Out of season the days shared, three and four to a sheet, the entries thinning through November into a single line for most of January: NIL.

Maren slid 1996 back into its gap and ran her finger along the spines to 2004.

It came off the shelf too easily. She noticed that later, when she was looking for things to notice. At the time she only thought that it was lighter than the others, and then she told herself that was ridiculous, because a book doesn't get lighter for losing one leaf.

She carried it to the desk, moved the glasses to one side without letting herself feel anything about it, and switched on the lamp.

June. July. Families from Reading and Solihull, a German couple who'd stayed eleven nights, a Mr Pryor who'd had NO BREAKFAST — EVER — DO NOT ASK underlined. Maren read the names as if they might mean something to her. She'd have carried their cases. She'd have been fifteen and furious and stacking toast. Not one of them came back to her.

She went through August a line at a time, looking for Venn.

He wasn't there. She hadn't really expected him to be. It only meant he hadn't been here under that name, which wasn't the same as not being here at all.

12 AUGUST. ARR. 16:05. MISS C. HOLLOWAY, EXETER. RM 3.

13 AUGUST. The handwriting tightened on that page and the pressure went up. Maren could see it without touching it, the strokes cut so deep they shone under the lamp. GALE WARNING 17:00. ALL BOATS IN. RM 1 & 2 DEPARTED EARLY — CAUSEWAY 11:15. RM 3 STAYING. At the foot of the page, in a different pen, there was one more line. RM 3 — OUT. NOT BACK 23:00.

She turned the page.

The next one was the fifteenth.

She looked at it for a long time before she let her hand go where it wanted to, into the gutter of the book. The stub was there, a strip of paper no wider than her fingernail, running the full height of the page and absolutely straight. Whoever had done this hadn't torn the leaf. They had laid a steel rule against it and drawn a blade down once, in a single stroke, close to the stitching. The edge was clean enough to cut her thumb if she pushed.

At the very top of the stub, where the date went, a fragment of ink had survived the blade: the right-hand foot of a 4. It was pressed so hard into the paper that it had nearly gone through.

Maren sat back in her mother's chair.

15 AUGUST, said the page in front of her. CAUSEWAY OPEN 07:12. RM 3 — ACCOUNT SETTLED. Then a line about a delivery of gas bottles, and a broken sash cord on the second floor. Then the sixteenth, ordinary, and the seventeenth, ordinary, and the rest of the summer marching on in black capitals as though nothing had happened at all.

That was the part that made her cold. The cut she could understand. What frightened her was how calmly the next morning had been written.

She tilted the fifteenth page under the lamp. Faint lines ran across the top half, grooves without ink, where something written on the sheet above had come through. Her mother had always pressed too hard. Maren angled the page to one side and then the other. A long stroke. Something like a T, or a 7. Then it was only paper again, and the rain on the high window, and the boiler ticking.

The address book was in the top drawer of the desk, where it had always been, under a box of staples and a roll of stamps. Maren opened the drawer, found what she wanted under L, and closed it again firmly. She would remember that afterwards: the dull wooden knock as it went home.

There was no signal in the scullery. There had never been signal anywhere on the ground floor of Gull House, only on the stairs and the top two floors, and on the widow's walk, where the bars climbed to four and you could talk to the mainland as if it were the next room.

She didn't want to go back up there. She went anyway, with the 2004 ledger under her arm, though she couldn't have said why she brought it. She didn't open the hatch. She sat on the ladder in the attic with the trap above her, the rain drumming on it, and dialled.

It rang for so long that she had begun to compose the message. Then it was picked up.

"Penzance four-one—"

"Lowenna. It's Maren."

There was a silence that might have been the line. Then her aunt said, "Where are you?"

"At the house."

"On the island." It wasn't a question. Lowenna was Delia's younger sister by six years, and she had the same voice with the edge worn off. It could still cut. "You're on the island now. In this."

"I came over last night."

"Last night was a spring tide with a south-westerly behind it. You could have—" Lowenna stopped. Maren heard a kettle being put down hard. "Well. You're there. What do you want, my bird?"

Nobody had called her that in twenty-two years. Maren closed her eyes.

"I'm so sorry to ask," she said. "I know it's a bad time. I just want to get something straight. In the summer of 2004—"

"No."

"I'm only asking about one night—"

"And don't do your hotel voice at me, Maren Hale. I wiped your nose." The breath on the line was harsh. "I'm not talking about that summer. Not on the telephone and not in my kitchen. Not ever. Your mother and I settled that between us a long time ago, and she's dead now, so that's the end of it."

"Somebody's cut a page out of her ledger."

Nothing. The rain on the hatch. Far off, through Lowenna's window, a car went by on a wet road.

"Fourteenth of August," Maren said. "The page is gone. Somebody used a knife."

"Has anyone been asking you about it?" Her aunt's voice had dropped, and it was very quick. "Anyone come to the house?"

Maren looked at the closed hatch above her. "A guest."

"What guest?"

"He's gone. He went missing last night, at high water."

She heard her aunt sit down. She knew the chair, the one in the kitchen with the loose rush seat that creaked, and she was fourteen again for a second with her feet up on the rung, dunking a biscuit.

"Sell it," Lowenna said.

"Mum left a note. She said not to let them buy it cheap."

"Then don't sell it cheap. Sell it dear. Sell it to whoever's asking, sign whatever that man in Truro puts under your nose, and come off on the next low water. Do you hear me? You walk off that island tonight and you don't look back at it, the same as before."

"The same as before," Maren repeated.

"I've got to go."

"Lowenna, who are they? Who did Mum mean?"

The line went dead with a click. Lowenna had always hung up properly, receiver in its cradle, and she'd done it now.

Maren sat on the ladder with the phone in her lap.

The same as before.

She had been sixteen. She had made sure, over the years, that she was never sure of much more than that.

The attic had been her room then. She'd had the bed under the dormer and a poster of somebody she couldn't now name Blu-Tacked to the slope of the ceiling. And there was a night of wind, one so loud the house seemed to lean, when she woke without knowing why and knelt up on the mattress to look out.

The tide was a long way out. She could tell by the sound, the roar pulled back to the far edge of the sands. Down on the beach below the harbour arm, where the flats began, there were torches.

Five of them, or six. They moved along the wet sand in a ragged line, the beams swinging and catching the rain so that every light carried its own small storm. They stopped. They came together into a knot and stayed there for a long time. She remembered pressing her forehead to the cold glass and her breath fogging it, wiping it away with the sleeve of her nightdress and the glass fogging again. She couldn't see who was holding them. You never could, with torches. You saw the light and nothing behind it.

One by one the torches went out. When the last one went, she couldn't find the beach any more, only darkness and the distant sea.

The next thing she remembered was the stairs. Her mother came up them fast, which Delia never did, and stood in the doorway in her oilskin, wet to the thighs, with water running off her onto the boards. Her face was grey in the landing light. She had Maren's school bag in one hand, packed. Maren never found out when she'd packed it.

"Shoes," Delia said. "Coat. Don't ask me."

Maren hadn't asked. That was the part she'd spent twenty-two years not looking at. She was sixteen and sharp-tongued, she'd argued with her mother about everything, and that night she had put on her shoes and her coat and not said one word.

They crossed the causeway in the black, with the sea still out but turning, its noise coming nearer. Delia held her wrist so hard it bruised, and Maren had the marks for a week. Halfway over, Maren slipped on the weed and froze, and her mother hauled her up by that wrist and put her mouth to Maren's ear.

"Don't stop. The sea is patient. It doesn't need you to panic. It only needs you to stand still."

There were headlights on the mainland slipway. Lowenna's car, its engine running and its wipers going. Delia opened the passenger door, put the bag in Maren's lap and shut the door on her. Then she turned and walked back out onto the causeway, alone, into the dark and the rising water. Maren watched until there was nothing to watch.

She hadn't gone back, and her mother hadn't asked her to. That was how they had both chosen to leave it.

Maren opened her eyes in the attic. Her hand had found the ledger's cover and was flat on it, as if to hold it shut.

She had never put a date to that night. She knew that now, sitting there, the way you notice a tooth you've been chewing on the other side of for years. She had always known how to count to it, and she never had.

The office door was open when she came back down.

She had left it open; she told herself that first. She'd left it open and the lamp on, and the lamp was still on, throwing its yellow circle over the blotter and the folded reading glasses.

The top drawer of the desk stood half open.

Maren stopped in the doorway. She heard again the knock it had made under her hand, wood on wood. She had shut it. She had done it so carefully because it was her mother's desk, and because it was the sort of thing Delia would have noticed.

The staples had been moved. The stamps lay on the other side. Somebody had lifted the address book and set it back almost square, but not quite, a hair off true, the way a person does who knows how something ought to look and is in a hurry. On the shelf the gap where 2004 belonged still yawned, and there were fingerprints in the dust along the spines on either side of it, pale ovals, as if a hand had run along looking and not found.

The air smelled of the house, of damp stone and old paper, and of something else. It was faint and oily, and it caught at the back of her throat.

Paraffin.

Maren held the ledger against her chest with both arms. Somewhere above her, in the stairwell of a house she had believed was empty, a board gave under a weight that was not the wind.