Carrowmere

The Handover

From The Carrowmere Regimen: A Pamphlet for the Guidance of Patients and Their Families (1933): "The first law of the cure is stillness. The body mends only what the body is not asked to spend. Lie quiet, breathe the good cold air, and let the mountain do the rest. Those who learn to be still get well; those who fret are a trouble to themselves and to others."

The road gave out at the second cattle grid, and after that there was only the track, climbing into a cloud that smelled of snow.

Nora knew that smell. It had a colour, almost — a flat, mineral grey at the back of the throat, the smell of weather deciding something. She wound the window down an inch to take it in and the cold came at her like a held breath let go, and she coughed, once, into her glove, and turned it so Adam would not see.

"All right?" he said, eyes on the track. The wheel jumped under his hands where the frost had heaved the ruts.

"Fine. The air." She made her voice light. "It's good air."

"That's the idea, isn't it. Good air." He smiled at the windscreen, the smile he wore now like a coat he had bought a size too big and meant to grow into. "Bracing. You'll be running up that fell by Christmas."

She let it stand. There were a hundred things she could have said and she chose, as she chose most days now, to say none of them, and the quiet between them was a careful, padded quiet, the kind you build with both hands so that nothing inside it knocks against anything else. Eleven years of marriage had taught them to drive like this for an hour without a word and call it peace.

The cattle grid clanged behind them and was gone. The hedges fell away to drystone, and the drystone to nothing — to rough white grass laid flat by wind, to a long emptiness running up into the cloud on either side, so that the track seemed to be the only made thing left in the world, a grey thread sewn up the shoulder of the fell. Somewhere off to the left, below the cloud-line, water showed. A dark wedge of it, very still, blacker than the sky it ought to have mirrored, with a faint paleness moving over one end like steam off a kettle. Then a fold of ground took it and it was gone.

"There it is," Adam said, and she thought he meant the water until she lifted her eyes.

The house came out of the cloud the way a ship comes out of fog — all at once and too large, a great pale frontage standing across the head of the track with its many windows catching the last of the light. Three storeys, then more behind, wings going back into the murk. A balustraded terrace. Tall windows, taller than rooms needed to be, ranks of them, glazed in small old panes that the dusk made the colour of pewter. New scaffolding clung to one corner like a splint on a limb. And over the porch, on a board so fresh the gilt of its letters still had a wet shine in the grey, the name:

THE LARCHES

She read it twice. Beneath the new board, cut into the stone of the lintel itself and not quite hidden by it — the board hung a few inches proud, the way a plaster will lift at the edge — older letters ran on into the dusk. She could make out the start and the end of them where the board did not reach. C A R R — and then nothing, and then, at the far margin, — R I U M. The middle was covered. She did not need the middle.

"Larches," Adam said. "I don't see any larches."

"There." She pointed. Down the near side of the forecourt a double row of trees ran away toward the water, and they had been larches once: tall, regular, planted by a hand that wanted order. Now half of them were dead standing, bare and grey and barkless, their dead crowns broken off at a height, so that the avenue had the look of a colonnade after a fire — every second pillar fallen. The living ones held a few brown needles and dropped them as she watched, a slow thin rain of them onto the snow that had begun, without her noticing, to lie.

"Picturesque," said Adam, in the bright voice, and put the car at the last of the slope.

A figure came down the steps to meet them before they had properly stopped — a man in a good waxed coat and the wrong boots, town boots, picking his way and waving as though they might fail to notice a man on an empty mountain. Lionel Brandt had a soft handsome ruin of a face and a handshake that arrived a half-second too early, gripping Adam's hand while Adam was still climbing out of the car.

"You found it. Marvellous. Marvellous. No bother with the road?" He did not wait. "It closes, you know, properly closes, once the snow means it. That's rather the point of you two." He bent to the window with a smile for Nora and the smile flickered, very slightly, the way a flame ducks in a draught, when he took in the pallor of her, the scarf at her throat, the careful way she held herself. He covered it well. "Mrs. Fairbank. You'll feel a different woman up here. People did. They came up half dead and they—" He stopped, straightened, clapped his hands together against the cold. "Come in, come in, before we all freeze. I want to show you everything and I want to be down the hill before that"—a jerk of his chin at the falling white—"makes a liar of me."

Inside, the hall ate sound. It was a great cold panelled space, the panelling dark and old and oiled to a low shine, hung now with a chandelier under a dust sheet so that it bulged from the ceiling like a chrysalis. A reception desk had been built across one end in pale new oak that did not match anything. The floor was a chequer of black and white stone, worn into shallow valleys along the lines men's feet had taken for fifty years, so that even empty the room seemed to suggest a traffic, a coming and going, the path to the desk and the path to the stairs walked smooth. Their footsteps clicked and the panelling drank the clicks. Under the fresh paint smell, under the size and the cold, there was something else — a low chemical sweetness, clean and old, that she could not place and then could: a hospital smell, scrubbed surfaces, the ghost of carbolic. And under that, fainter, sweeter, a third thing she did not try to name.

Brandt was already moving, talking, his voice bouncing off the high ceiling. The bar — through here, dust-sheeted stools, optics not yet stocked. Two show suites done to the nines, he wanted them seen; he opened the doors on rooms staged for a photograph, white linen turned down on beds no one had slept in, and shut them again. A boiler the size of a cottage in the undercroft, coal-fired, temperamental, and he showed Adam its dampers and its gauge with a sudden practical seriousness, because this at least Adam would understand. The generator beside it, diesel, for when the line came down, which it would. And the telephone: one telephone, black, heavy, screwed to the wall by the desk, with a cord that vanished into the stone.

"This is your lifeline, literally," Brandt said, lifting the receiver, holding it out so they could hear the thin dialling tone that lived in it. "When it works. It comes down in weather. Don't rely on it and you won't be disappointed. No signal up here for those"—he nodded at the dead phone in Adam's hand—"none, not a bar, the fell sees to that. So." He hung the receiver back on its cradle, gently, almost tenderly. "You're on your own. That's the job. That's what we pay for."

"We'll manage," Adam said. "I've wintered places."

"I'm sure." Brandt was steering them back toward the desk. "Now. House rules, and then I'll leave you in peace. They're nothing, really, but I'd be failing you if I didn't say them." He counted on soft fingers. "Rest hours, two till four. Heating goes down, lights stay low, and you'll want to do as the radiators do and keep still a couple of hours — the pipes knock something dreadful if you're up and about and running taps, it's the old system, it doesn't like to be disturbed in the afternoons. Easiest just to take a rest yourselves. You'll find it grows on you." He smiled. "Second. The east wing's shut. Old part, unrenovated, not safe — floors gone, that sort of thing. It's locked and it stays locked; there's nothing through there but damp and danger and I don't insure it. Third." The smile thinned by a degree. "The water. The Mere — the tarn, the black water you'll have seen coming up. Keep off it. It doesn't freeze, not properly, not even in February; there's something feeding it from underneath, a spring, warm, who knows, and the ice is a liar end to end. People have gone through. Don't walk on it, don't let it tempt you on a clear day, just— leave it be." He spread his hands. "Quiet, east stays shut, off the ice. That's the whole of it."

"Two to four, no east, no ice," Adam said, and Nora heard him filing it the way he filed measurements, and she thought: he is glad of it. Rules to keep. Things to fix and tasks to do and a list to be a good man against.

"Splendid." Brandt produced from his coat a book.

It was old — that was the first wrong note, a thing she would only hear properly later. Everything else in the hall was new or sheeted or being made new, and the book he set on the pale oak desk was none of those, a long ledger bound in black cloth gone grey at the spine, its corners furred, its pages edged with the brown of years. He opened it to a marker and turned it to face them and uncapped a pen.

"We like a record of who's in the house," he said. "Insurance, again. Health and safety. If you'd both just— name, and the date. Old-fashioned, I know." He laughed at himself. "I inherited the book with the place. Seems a shame to break the habit."

Nora looked at the open page. The right-hand leaf was blank, ruled in faint columns, waiting. The left-hand leaf was not. Down it ran names in a fine sloped copperplate, an old confident hand, the same hand all the way down by the look of it, name after name with dates beside them that she did not stop to read, the ink gone the soft brown of dried blood. The new page and the old page in the one book, and only the gutter between them.

Adam signed first, his ordinary jagged signature, A. Fairbank, and the date. He held the pen out to her.

She took it. The desk was cold through her glove where her wrist rested. She wrote her name — Nora Fairbank — and the loops of it looked, beside that old copperplate across the gutter, like a child's, like something that had not yet decided what it would be. She added the date. The pen dragged on a downstroke; the nib had caught, or the paper had, and a fine dark line ran down off the a of her name and into the rule of the column, a small spill, like a root. She lifted the pen. The room was very quiet. The panelling had drunk even Brandt, who for once had stopped talking and stood watching the page with an expression she could not read and that was gone when she looked up — replaced by the salesman, beaming, reaching to turn the book back round and close it.

"Lovely. That's us legal." He capped the pen and pocketed it and the moment with it.

"The last people," Nora said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted in that hall. "Whoever was here before us. Did they—"

"There was a chap. Wenlock. Saw the place through last winter, near enough." Brandt was buttoning his coat, glancing past her at the windows, where the grey had begun to crowd with motion, fat slow flakes wandering down out of the cloud and not hurrying. "He left in the autumn. Couldn't stick the quiet, I gather. It takes some that way — the silence. Not everyone's built for it." He said it lightly and he said it to the door. "You'll be different. You've each other."

"What did he—" she began, but Brandt had his keys out, the great cold ring of them, and was pressing them into Adam's hand and folding Adam's fingers shut over them with both of his, and saying the things people say, the numbers, the dates, the man who came once a fortnight with the post if the road held, Mrs. Garrow at the shop in Coldgill, ring if you need, ring while you can — and he was moving, talking, drawing them with him to the porch and no further, out under the wet-gilt board with the older name buried behind it, and into the cold.

The forecourt had gone white while they stood inside. His car wore an inch of it. He scraped a porthole with his sleeve, climbed in, and lowered the window a last hand's-breadth.

"Good people," he said, and she did not know if he meant them or himself. "I'll be up at the thaw." The window went up. The engine caught on the second try and he swung the car round in a slow arc, tyres squealing faint on the new snow, and went off down the track between the dead larches with his lights coming on as he went.

Nora stood on the step. Adam was saying something behind her about the boiler, about getting it banked up before dark, about how this wasn't so bad, was it, this was all right, and she let his voice be weather. Brandt's taillights shrank to two red coals and went out in the falling white, and behind her the house let out a long warm breath that smelled of carbolic and something sweet beneath it, and Nora told herself it was only the heating coming on.

House Rules

Morning came grey and total, the dale gone, the windows white, and Nora's breath bloomed on the cold glass and faded, and for a moment, watching it, she was almost happy.

She had woken before Adam, in the one finished room they had chosen at the front of the house, under a duvet that still smelled of its packaging, and lain a long while listening to nothing. No traffic. No gulls. No clock. The radiator under the window ticked and settled, ticked and settled, and beyond the curtain the light had no source and no edges, and when she finally rose and crossed the cold boards and drew the curtain back, the world was not there. The avenue she had walked up yesterday in the last of the dusk — gone. The drive, the gateposts, Brandt's tyre-tracks, the fell shouldering up behind: all of it sealed under a flat, sourceless white that pressed against the glass like a face. She put her hand to the pane and felt the cold come through it, clean as a held coin, and she leaned in and breathed, and her breath spread on the glass in a soft grey country and slowly closed over itself and was gone.

She did it again. Watched it bloom and shrink. Such a small living thing.

Downstairs she found the kitchen they had been promised, half a kitchen really, a steel range and a hospital sink and a run of new cabinets that stopped where the money had, and she ran the tap until the water lost its rust and filled the kettle and stood with her back to the warming range while it came to the boil. The coughing she did into a square of kitchen roll, low and careful, the way you cough when you have learned to do it quietly in waiting rooms, and she looked at the paper before she folded it small and pushed it to the bottom of the bin. Nothing this morning. A good morning, then. She told herself it was a good morning and made the coffee strong and carried two cups up through the cold house to the room where Adam still slept with one arm flung off the bed, and she set his down where he would knock it, and he didn't, and woke instead to the smell of it and smiled at her before he remembered to be tired.

"Snowed in already," she said.

"Brandt said a week." He pushed up on his elbows. The light from the white window lay on him flat and forgiving, took ten years off, and for a moment he was the man who had measured her doorframe in a flat in another life and told her, deadpan, that it was three millimetres out of true and he could not in conscience leave it. "First proper fall. It'll settle, then the road wagon comes through. We're not the only soul up here." He said it like a man laying a level along a board. Reassuring himself by the trueness of the line.

"There's a list," she said. "Brandt's list. On the bar."

"Course there's a list."

They went down together with their coffee, and that was the almost-happiness, the thing she would try to hold afterward: the two of them padding through the dust-sheeted dark of the front rooms in borrowed slippers, finding the long bar with its single working lamp, the chandeliers above them swaddled in muslin like things hung to dry, the new carpet that ran out at a chalk line on bare concrete. Brandt had left an envelope weighted under a bottle of supermarket Scotch — for the cold nights, on me — and inside it the list, and the keys on a steel ring, and a single sheet of house rules in his blunt managerial hand.

Generator: run 2 hrs am, 2 hrs pm, sparing. Boiler: coal in the cellar, don't let it out. Phone in the office, line's temperamental, don't rely. Anything urgent, Mrs Garrow at Coldgill takes a message. Snow's coming — you'll be snug. And then, lower, underlined twice as if it had been added after the rest and pressed harder for it: East wing stays shut. Nothing in there but damp and danger. Don't waste your heat on it.

"Damp and danger," Adam read aloud, and grinned. "He's a poet."

"He's covering himself," Nora said. "Insurance. Half that wing's probably one footstep from the cellar." But she touched the line where the pen had bitten deepest and did not say the other thing, that a man who didn't care wouldn't have pressed so hard.

Adam was already gone in his head to the work. He had brought his roll of tools up in the van and his own folding rule, brass-jointed, worn pale at the elbows, that had been his father's, and he went round the front rooms tapping skirtings and sighting along architraves while she trailed him with the coffee pot, and he made the small contented sounds of a man whose hands have been given something honest to do at last. The bar needed its end returns made good. The reception desk was a carcass with no top. There was a whole show-suite of panelling to hang on the first floor, larch, Brandt had said, matches the name, see, classy, and Adam had only nodded because the timber was bought and stacked and it was not his job to tell a drowning man his rope was rotten.

"Six weeks of this and we're square," he said, to the architrave, not to her. "More than square."

"Square," she agreed, and did not ask square with whom, because she had learned that the number was a door he kept shut, and she had her own shut doors and respected the architecture of marriage, which is largely a matter of which rooms you agree not to enter.

It was she who found the seam.

She had gone looking for more cups, or told herself so, down a service corridor off the kitchen where the new paint gave out, and the paint giving out was the first strange thing, the way the fresh magnolia simply stopped on a wall halfway along as though the roller had been set down and never picked up, the bristled edge of it dried mid-stroke, and below it the older surface showed through, a cold institutional green the colour of pondwater, and a smell came up off that green that the magnolia had been laid over and had not killed. Carbolic. Sharp, clinical, scrubbed into the very plaster. And under the carbolic, fainter, the thing that made her stop with her hand on the wall: something sweet. Not flowers. Not sugar. The sweet that comes up off fruit a day past turning, the sweet of a sickroom where the window has not been opened, banked and patient under the soap and the new paint like a thing kept in a drawer.

She should have gone back. She went on.

The corridor turned and gave onto light, of a kind: the long sun-galleries, three of them stacked along the south face of the old building, walls of small steel-framed panes from waist to ceiling, and beyond the glass the white nothing pressing in so that the galleries floated, shadowless, in a grey aquarium glow. They ran the whole length of the east wing. Iron-railed balconies opened off them at intervals, the rails furred with old paint and older rust, and along the inner wall stood the chairs. Long wicker reclining chairs, a dozen of them and more, set in a row facing out at the glass and the snow, each with its footrest and its high back, and on each a blanket folded down in a neat grey oblong, tucked at the corners with the squared, merciless tidiness of a bed made by someone trained to make beds. The blankets had rotted where the damp reached them. The tucks held anyway. Twelve empty chairs facing the white, made up and waiting, and the cold in that gallery was a different cold from the cold of the rest of the house — not the dead cold of unheated rooms but a moving cold, a clean cold, a cold that seemed to come up out of the floor and the glass at once and to smell, very faintly, of the snow itself.

She breathed, without thinking, the way she had breathed at the bedroom window. Her breath stood on the nearest pane in a small grey bloom and shrank and went. Living. She did it again, to be sure of it, and watched it go, and something about the row of chairs at her back made her not want to turn around quickly, and she turned around slowly instead and there was nothing, only the chairs, only the blankets, only the long grey light.

At the gallery's end a doorway gave on to the heart of it.

The nurses' station. She knew it before she had a word for it, the way you know a room by its bones: the low counter worn pale along its lip by the lean of forearms, the pigeonholes behind, a high desk with a sloped top for writing standing up, and on the wall above the counter, the board. It was a handsome thing, mahogany gone black, the size of a tall window, and set into it in rows were the little brass cups and behind each a coil of fine wire and a tongue of brass on a spring, and beneath each, screwed to the wood, a small enamel plate, white with a black number. The call bells. Each lettered to its room. ROOM 4. ROOM 5. ROOM 6. Up one side and down the other, and a separate cluster lower down marked GALLERY, OFFICE, MORTUARY, and she read that last one twice and felt the carbolic-and-sweet draw closer in the cold and told herself it was an old building and old buildings had been honest about their dead.

The wires ran up from the board and away through neat holes drilled in the cornice, off into the dark body of the east wing, to rooms she could not see. To pull a cord by a bed two floors up and three rooms along, and to have, here, a hundred years ago, a small brass cup tip and a tongue swing and a bell ring, and a woman in a starched cap look up from this counter and read the number and go. She put her finger to one of the plates, ROOM 9, and the brass was so cold it was almost wet, and she took her hand back.

She found Adam by following the sound of his rule snapping shut, and brought him to it because she wanted, suddenly and childishly, not to be the only one who had seen.

"Look at the workmanship on that," he said, which was Adam all over, finding the joinery in the graveyard. He ran his thumb along the board's beading. "They don't make a fixture like this to come down. This is built to outlast the building." He stepped back, hands on hips, pleased. "Half of this could be a feature, you know. People pay for this now. Authentic." And then, because he was watching her face and not the board: "You're white as the window. You cold? You shouldn't be down here in this, you'll set the cough off."

"I'm fine," she said. The lie had its own small fluency by now. "It's just—" She gestured at the chairs in the gallery beyond, the blankets, the made-up emptiness of it. "They left everything. As if they walked out one afternoon and meant to come back after tea."

"They ran out of money," Adam said. "Same as everywhere. Same as me." He said it lightly and it landed hard and they both let it lie. He looked once more at the board, fondly, the way you'd look at a clever old dog, and turned for the warm part of the house. "Come on. I want to see this panelling I've to hang before the daylight goes. Show-suite's up the front stair."

The show-suite was where the renovation died.

It was meant to be the jewel, you could see that, the room they would photograph: a wide bay, a marble surround swept clean, a bed-frame still in its plastic. And along the long wall, the new larch panelling, the very work Adam had been hired to finish — but it stopped. Not at a corner. Not at a door. Halfway across the open wall it simply stopped, three boards hung and the fourth held to the batten by a single screw, hanging askew, and the rest of the boards stacked neat on trestles with the saw still set in the cut, a board half-severed, the kerf furred with sawdust gone grey, and a mug on the windowsill with a skin of mould drawn tight across cold tea. As if the man had set down his rule between one breath and the next and walked away and not come back for it. Adam picked the rule up off the trestle. A folding rule, brass-jointed, the twin of his own, worn pale at the elbows.

He turned it over in his hands and did not say anything for a moment, and then he said, "Sloppy," and set it down again, careful, exactly where it had lain.

They went back down to make the early supper while the generator still had its two hours in it, and the light failed early and from no particular direction, the white going to grey going to a blue that swallowed the dale, and they ate at the end of the bar by the one lamp with Brandt's Scotch open between them, and it was, again, almost the thing she had hoped this place might be — quiet, sealed, no one to fail, the two of them and the snow and a job of work. Adam talked panelling. She let the warmth of the room and the warmth in the glass do their work and her shoulders came down from her ears for the first time in a year.

The bell rang once.

A single clear stroke, small and brass and very near, from the dark beyond the kitchen, from the cold corridor and the station at the end of it, and then nothing — but the both of them up and the lamp lifted and carried down the service passage past the dried edge of the paint, and Nora got there first with the light and held it up to the board.

The bell hung trembling on its wire above the old nurses' station, its small brass tongue still swinging, and beneath it the little enamel plate read ROOM 14; and then the wire went still, and the house held its silence like a held breath.