Wakeholme

The Keys

The road into Caldfell ended at a red flag, and everything worth knowing about the place was already in that flag.

It hung from a steel post set in a concrete collar, the cloth gone the colour of a scab from years of weather, fraying at the fly so the wind had something to worry at. Beside it a sign in Ministry lettering: DANGER. UNEXPLODED MILITARY DEBRIS. NO ENTRY WHEN FLAGS ARE FLYING. The flag was flying. There was nobody for it to warn but me, and I had already stopped the van.

I sat with the engine ticking and looked down off the boundary into the closed ground, because a man who has spent his life taking buildings apart cannot help reading a ruin, and there were ruins enough down there to read for a week. The moor fell away in long brown folds of dead bracken, and out across it stood the bones of houses. Not many. A gable here with the chimney still on it, the breast cold and black where a hearth used to be. A line of wall there, knee-high, the shape of a room you could walk in your mind. Further out, half-sunk in the heather, the rust-red hulks of old tanks dragged up for the guns to practise on, and the cratered ground around them where the guns had not always missed.

The wind came up the fold and into the van through the door-seal Carol had always meant to get fixed, and on it I could smell the place — cold peat, and under it something burnt that had nothing to do with hearths. Cordite. I knew it without knowing how I knew it.

Somewhere a long way south of me, below the cloud, a gun went off. One soft crump, like a door shut in an empty house two rooms away. Then nothing.

I had not come to look at the dead ground. I turned the van around in the gateway, the way you do at the end of a road, and went back up the last green shoulder of the hill to the living one.

Wakeholme sat where the safe land made one last lift before the boundary, a green hummock above the wire, and from the road it looked like a village that had simply been carried up there and set down. That is exactly what it was. I had known the name half my working life. In the trade you knew the open-air museums the way a surgeon knows the famous hospitals — Wakeholme, where Garth had taken whole condemned parishes apart in the thirties and stood them up again on his hill, cottage by cottage, peg by peg. I had even sent a young man here once, years back, to learn cruck-framing off whoever was keeping the buildings then. I had never come myself.

I came now because the advertisement had said night watchman, accommodation provided, suit a quiet single person, and because every word of that was a description of me.

There was a green at the heart of it, a real common with a worn track round the edge, and the buildings stood about it the way buildings stand about any green that has had three hundred years to settle — except these had had thirty. A terrace of stone cottages with their backs to the weather. A little gritstone chapel with a squat tower. A schoolroom. A smithy, the doors open and dark. A long low house joined to a byre under one roof, the old kind, where the beasts had warmed the people through the dark of the year. And on the green itself, set in the turf, a single upright stone about waist-high, worn smooth on the top, with a hole bored through it. I knew a thing fixed in stone for hard use when I saw it. I did not yet know what.

Every house was shut and empty. The museum did not open until spring; a board by the gate said so. No smoke should have stood over any roof on that hill.

Smoke stood over one.

It came up off the end cottage of the terrace, the small one nearest the chapel, a thin blue rope of it leaning away on the wind, the steady honest smoke of a fire that has been lit a good while and banked careful. I sat in the van and watched it the way you watch a thing you have not got the shape of yet. A museum cottage. Closed for winter. A fire in it.

A woman was crossing the green towards me before I had got the door open.

"Mr Mossop," she said, as if she had been saying it all morning and I was late. "You found us."

She was small and very upright, in a good wool coat the green of moss, her white hair pinned up under a felt hat that had been fashionable a long time ago and was none the worse for it. Sixty, I would have said, and handsome with it, the bones still good in her face. She put out a dry cool hand and I shook it.

"Dr Greer?"

"Avice." She held my hand a moment longer than the shake, and her eyes went over my face like she was reading the grain of it for knots. "You've come up the boundary road first. Everyone does. They look at the flag and the broken houses and they think, what a sad place, and then they come up here." She let go. "It is a sad place. But the sadness is all down there. Up here we keep the lamps lit. Come in out of the wind, you must be perished."

I had not yet said I wanted the job. She walked me to it as though that had been settled in another room.

The lodge stood a little apart from the green, behind the chapel — a tall stone house with mullioned windows, plainer and older than the rest. Garth's house, I thought, before she told me; you could see the man's mind in it, the same care that had stood the village up. Inside it was warm and low-ceilinged and smelled of woodsmoke and old paper and something herbal stewing on a range. She sat me at a scrubbed deal table and put a cup of tea in front of me before I had got my coat off, and she talked.

"It is a simple post, Mr Mossop, and an old one. Older than the museum, in a manner of speaking — we kept the office on when we lifted the village, because a place like this does not sit easy without someone to keep it." She moved about the kitchen as she spoke, light on her feet, touching things. "You light the lamps by dusk. Every lamp, every building, the cottages and the chapel and the school and the smithy and the long-house, and the two on the green. You walk the rounds through the night to keep them lit — they're paraffin, they want trimming, they blow out, you go round and round and you keep them. And at dusk and again at the turn of the night you blow the horn."

"The horn."

"On the green. The horn-stone — the upright with the hole, you'll have seen it. The horn hangs in the porch of the lodge, it's a ram's horn, you'll find your wind for it soon enough. You blow it standing at the stone, once to each corner of the green. North, south, east, west." She set a plate of bread and a dish of butter down and stood with her dry hands folded. "It's the old custom of the parish, from before. To set the watch and call the folk home. The men away on the hill, the children out late, the souls abroad in the dark — you blow them home to the fires. We keep it on. People like that we keep it on. It makes a nice line for the visitors in the season." She smiled. "And it settles the place."

"Settles it."

"Old buildings are like old dogs. They sleep better if you make the rounds." She sat down across from me. "The one rule I'll ask you to hold to as if your life hung on it, because it is the whole of the post: never let a lamp go out before dawn. If you find one guttering, you light it. If one's blown, you light it again. You do not come back to the lodge and leave a window dark on that green. Not one. Not for an hour. Can you hold to that?"

It was a strange way to put a thing about lamp oil. As if your life hung on it. But I had spent thirty years among men who said measure it twice as if your life hung on it about a stair tread, and I understood a trade that took its small rituals seriously, because the small rituals were how the big disasters got kept off.

"I can keep a light on," I said.

Something moved in her face, very fast, gone again. "Yes," she said softly. "I rather thought you could."

She fed me. I had not been fed by anyone since Carol, and I had forgotten what it did to a man, to have a plate filled without his asking. There was a mutton stew and the bread and a hard cheese and stewed apple after, and she talked the easy talk of someone who had decided about me, the wage, the half-day a week, the oil kept in the byre, the village I should drive to for my shopping, twelve miles back down the dale. I let it wash over me and ate, and only when I reached for the salt did I see the table.

She had laid three places.

Hers, across from me. Mine. And one more, at the head of the table, between us — knife, fork, spoon, a plate, a glass, a folded cloth — set as careful as the others, and untouched, the chair pushed in.

"Are we expecting someone?" I said.

She did not look at the place. "No," she said. "Force of habit. I lay for the house." And she passed me the salt I had been reaching for, so that my hand had somewhere to go, and went on about the oil.

I let it lie. A woman alone in a high lonely house, laying the table the way she had laid it for fifty years for whoever was gone — I knew that grief, or one of its brothers. I had a porch light at home doing the same dumb faithful thing. I was the last man on earth to call a person foolish for setting a place at a table.

After, she brought the book.

It was a ledger, foolscap, bound in black cloth gone grey at the corners, the spine cracked and mended with linen tape. She set it down between us and turned it so it faced me and opened it not at the front but near the back, to the first clean page, and the pages she turned past were close-written in a dozen different hands, dated down the margins, year on year on year.

"The watch-book," she said. "Each man keeps his nights in it. When he came on, when he goes off, the weather, the lamps, anything wants noting for the next man. It's a courtesy, and it's a record. You'll sign on the first clean line and the post is yours." She set a pen beside it, an old steel-nib dip pen, and an inkwell. "We're old-fashioned. I hope you don't mind."

I turned back a page, the way you do. The last hand before the clean lines was a cramped forward-leaning print, and it ran down the page in short entries — lamps all kept. Wind SW, hard. Horn at the turn. Smithy lamp twice tonight, draught off the door, must look to the latch — ordinary, the log of a careful man, until the last few. The hand changed in the last few. It grew larger and looser and it stopped saying anything about lamps.

The final entry was not finished. It stopped in the middle of a line, with no full stop, the nib dragging off the end of the last word into a hairline scratch, as though the man had been called away with the pen still on the page.

"Who was the last?" I asked.

"Mr Aldous. Peter." She drew the candle a little nearer, though it was not yet dark. "He was with us a year, near enough. Through to last winter."

"He didn't finish his page."

"No." A small pause, the length of a held breath. "He left in a hurry. These posts suit a man until quite suddenly they don't, and then he wants away the same night, and who's to blame him, a place like this in the deep of the year." She smoothed the cloth of the cover with two fingers. "He went off so quick he left his things. They're still in the lodge, I'm ashamed to say — his boots, his books, a coat. I never had the heart to box them, and there was no address to send them on to. You'll want the room cleared. Put what you like of his to use; he'd not grudge it now."

He'd not grudge it now. I let that lie too. There was a deal of letting things lie, that first evening, that I would think about later, in the dark, on the rounds.

I dipped the pen and signed on the first clean line. Walter Mossop. The date. My hand looked like a stranger's, going onto a page after all those other strangers, joining a column of men I would never meet.

"There," she said, and for a moment her hand rested over the back of mine on the open book, dry and light and cold as a leaf, and her face had a gladness in it that was too big for a man signing on to trim lamps. "Welcome home, Mr Mossop."

Home. The word went through me like a draught through a gap you didn't know you'd left in a frame. My hand jumped on the page; the nib snagged and threw a small black star of ink onto the date. I put the pen down careful, the way you put down a chisel when your grip has gone unsteady, and I did not look up for a moment, because I did not trust what was in my face.

"Welcome," I said, "is plenty."

She watched me. Curators watch. "You were in the building trade," she said, gentle. "Joinery. Heritage work. Why did you leave it? A man with your hands."

"It left me," I said, which was not an answer, and we both knew it, and she was kind enough, or clever enough, to take it.

She gave me the keys last.

They came off a hook by the door on a great iron ring the size of a side-plate, two dozen of them and more, long-shanked and warded, each with a paper label tied on with string in that same forward-leaning hand — CHAPEL. SCHOOL. SMITHY. LONG HOUSE. No 1. No 2. The ring weighed like a tool. She closed my fingers round it with both her hands.

"You'll want to start tonight," she said. "Dusk comes early now. Light them all and you'll sleep sound — there's nothing on this hill will trouble a man who keeps his lamps." She looked at me a beat too long. "And whatever you do, my dear — the chapel door stays shut. You light the lamp in the porch, but you leave the door. There's a notice on it I'd not have disturbed."

There was. I found it when I made my round, going from house to house in the failing light with a can of paraffin and a box of matches and the cold coming up out of the turf. A square of paper nailed to the chapel door, under the porch lamp, weathered to the colour of a fingernail and curled at the edges, the print on it faded near to nothing. I did not stop to read it. The door behind it was oak, old and silvered, and it had not been opened in a long time; the threshold was grown over with moss in an unbroken green line, the way a threshold grows when no foot crosses it for years.

I lit the lamps. Cottage by cottage round the green, the warm bloom of each one catching as I touched the match to the wick and the chimney went on over it — No 2, No 1, the school, the smithy with its draughty latch, the long-house, and last the two posts on the green by the horn-stone, while the sky went from pewter to slate to the deep blue you only get on high ground in winter, and the first hard star pricked out over the boundary. I stood at the stone and I put the ram's horn to my mouth and I blew, four times, badly, to the four corners, north and south and east and west, the note cracked and lowing and carrying away down the dark fold of the moor where the broken houses were — to set the watch and call the folk home — and I felt a great fool, and I felt, under the foolishness, something I had no name for, like the moment before a footstep you have waited fifteen years to hear.

The last lamp I lit was the post on the western corner. I turned from it to walk back to the lodge across the green, the keys heavy at my hip, my count of the lamps running easy in my head — eleven, all kept — and I looked up, the way you do, to see the village I had lit.

And one window I had not lit was burning.

The end cottage of the terrace. The small one nearest the chapel, the one with the smoke over it that should have had no fire. Its window stood gold in the dark, warm as a held breath, and through the small panes I could see into the room: a fire banked red in the grate, and a table drawn up to it, and the table laid — a white cloth, and the gleam of plates, and a glass catching the light, two of everything, set for two, and the chairs drawn out a little from the board as though the people had only that moment got up.

And no one there at all.

First Watch

By eleven the lodge had taken the cold all the way into its stone, the way an unwarmed church does, where no fire can reach to fetch it out. My breath stood off the page in a slow grey rope and hung there before it thinned.

The watch-book lay open under it. Garth's house, this had been — Avice Greer told me so that afternoon, the way you'd mention the weather was turning — and it kept a dead man's furniture: a roll-top desk, a horsehair chair gone hard as a pew, a wall of pigeonholes packed with the museum's paper. The book was the one thing on the desk that had been handled. Black boards soft at the corners, a faded ribbon for a marker. Inside, a column ruled for the date, a column for the hour, and a wide field with a printed heading in copperplate that no hand had set there but the printer's: Observations of the Watch.

The last man had filled the best part of a winter. Then the pages went white. My ribbon sat on the first of the blank ones, and the line waited under my breath, clean as new-planed deal, for me to put the date and the hour and write that the place was sound.

I didn't write yet. A man doesn't sign off a job he hasn't walked.

Greer had left me a card propped against the lamp, the order of the rounds in a hand like wire. Smithy, schoolroom, chapel, the cottage row, the longhouse and byre, and last the green. Underneath: The order is kept. And under that, smaller, as if she'd weighed whether to write it at all: The horn at the four corners, mind. Folk like to be called.

Davey, I thought — the way I'd got into the habit of thinking at him, fifteen years of it now, a man talking down a dry well — they've handed me a job that's mostly walking about in the dark with a lamp. You'd have laughed yourself sick.

I took the storm lantern and went out.

—

The cold outside was the clean kind, off the tops, with the iron under it that means more coming. Above the museum the moor went up black to a paler black, and behind that, off east where the range lay behind its red flags and its DANGER boards, the dark gave a small dull thud, and then, a long count later, another. Guns. They'd told me in the village: the Ministry still fired the closed land some days and into some nights, shells walking up an empty valley at nobody. Far off it wasn't much. A door shut two streets over. A heavy thing set down in the next room. I counted the gap between the flash I couldn't see and the sound I could — eight, nine — and the trick of it steadied me the way counting always has.

The smithy first. It sat at the museum's edge with its big doors, a building I half knew in the bones, because I'd lifted its like in my working life — taken framed buildings down peg by numbered peg and stood them up again forty mile off, true to a sixteenth. Somebody had stood this one up well. I ran the lantern along the wall-plate out of habit and read the joints: tight, plumb, the down-braces let in clean. The marriage-marks were cut where they should be, Roman chisel-strokes pairing post to tie so the men putting it back would know which went where. A craftsman's building. I put my bare hand flat on the forge's stone out of the same habit, the way you test a kiln.

It was warm.

Not hot. Not a fire. The low even warmth a hearth keeps for an hour or two after it's banked for the night — ash raked over the coals to hold them till morning. I crouched and looked. The coals sat under a grey skin of ash, banked the way my grandfather banked his, and a thread of heat came up off them into my face.

Nobody worked this forge. It was a museum. The placard said so, screwed to the post: Smithy, removed from Ossing, 1948.

Draught, I told myself. Some flue drawing warm air off the lodge chimney, finding its level here. A building this size breathes. I straightened my knees and the count I'd been keeping had stopped, and I started it again — eight to the next gun — and went out, and shut the big door behind me because you shut doors.

The schoolroom stood along the lane. One room, a master's high desk, forms for the children, a slate-and-easel up front and a cold stove in the corner. On the wall a framed map of an Empire that had since fallen down, and the long thin windows up high so the young ones couldn't watch the day go by. I went in. My boots were loud on the boards. On the easel slate, in chalk, somebody had written a date.

19th December 1943.

A schoolroom, I thought. Of course there's a date on the slate. They put a date on the slate so the trippers know what they're looking at — the day the place stopped, near enough; everyone hereabouts knew the parishes were cleared in the war. It was good staging. I'll give them that. There was a duster on the easel ledge, worn to a grey felt, and I don't know why I picked it up and wiped the slate clean, except that an empty board is a tidier thing than a dirty one, and a man likes to leave a place better than he found it. The chalk came off in a smear and a small cloud, and the board went green-black and bare.

Then I went to the four corners and I blew the horn.

It hung by the door on a leather, an old cow's horn worn smooth at the mouth, and Greer had shown me the way of it that afternoon on the green — not a tune, Mr Mossop, just the one long note, to each quarter of the compass, to set the watch and call the folk home. I'd thought it daft and I'd thought it harmless and I'd thought, mostly, that a man who needs the money does the daft harmless thing the daft harmless old woman asks. I stood in the lane and faced the smithy and blew, and the note came out low and cracked and went off across the dark and didn't come back. I turned a quarter and blew again. And again. And to the last quarter, north, up the moor.

And on the fourth, the night leaned in.

I can't put it better than that, and I've turned it over since. It was the way a full room goes when you walk in and they've been speaking of you — that bank of attention, the small dishonest hush. The dark off the moor got closer by an inch all round, and held its breath, and listened, and the lantern flame stood up straight in air with no wind in it at all. I stood very still with the horn at my chest. The next gun came, far off — and even the gun seemed to wait a beat longer for itself than it should.

Then it passed, the way a held breath lets go, and the night was only the night, and I was a fifty-seven-year-old man stood in a fake village blowing a cow's horn at nothing.

Steady, I told Davey. We're not going soft our first night.

—

The chapel was locked. I'd expected a key on the ring Greer gave me and there wasn't, and the great door wouldn't give a quarter-inch under my shoulder, which a chapel door has no business doing — they're built to stand open. Nailed to it at head height was a paper gone the colour of weak tea behind cracked glass, official print, a crown at the top. I lifted the lantern. NOTICE. The land hereinafter described being required for purposes of His Majesty's Forces... and a list of fields by their old names — Ten Acre, Priest Ing, Long Riddings — and a date to be out by, and the date was the slate's date, the December date, and at the foot the thing they'd all hung on through years of exile and dying: the said lands to be returned to occupation when no longer required. Somebody had read that and packed a trunk and believed it. I moved the light off it. There was a square hollow up in the little bell-cote where a wheel and a rope should be and weren't — the rope gone, the wheel pegged still — and I filed that with the rest and went on, because a man can stand reading dead people's eviction papers all night if he lets himself, and I have my own.

The cottage row was six doors under one long roof, and the second from the end had its window lit.

I knew it would be. I'd seen it at first dusk, when I'd put the last lamp out — gold in the window I'd never lit, and a table laid inside, and not a soul. I'd told myself, going in to find the watch-book, that I'd been twelve hours on the road and short of sleep for fifteen years and a lit window is a lit window, somebody's lamp left burning. Now I crossed the little garth to it and put my face to the cold glass.

A kitchen. A scrubbed deal table laid for two — two plates, two cups, a knife and fork set square at each, a loaf under a cloth, a brown pot. A fire in the range burning low and steady and giving its light up the wall. And on a peg by the door, where another man might hang a coat, a child's coat hung, and below it, set ready, a small trunk, roped, with a paper label tied to the handle. The trunk stood square in front of the door, the way you put a thing you mean not to forget on your way out — first thing your foot finds in the morning.

No one at the table. No one in the chair. The two cups steamed.

I went in. The latch lifted under my thumb like any latch. The warmth came round me, real warmth, a lived-in kitchen's warmth, and under it the smell of a fire and of bread and of something I can only call house — a smell that doesn't live in any building that's only ever had trippers walked through it of a Sunday. The clock on the mantel had stopped. I looked at it because I look at clocks, and the hands stood at twenty past seven. I touched the loaf. Still soft. I lifted the cloth off it, and the cut end had been cut that day, white and even, no skin gone hard. And on the nearest plate the food set out — cold mutton, a heel of cheese — had been started. A corner of the cheese gone. The mutton broken into, the way you'd take a bite standing up and set it down again because they called you from the door.

Touched. Faintly touched. As if whoever it was had been called away mid-mouthful and would be back directly to finish, and had been about to be back directly for eighty-three years.

I stood in that kitchen a long time. I am not ashamed to say what I did then, which was nothing — I didn't run and I didn't pray, I'm not built for either. I read the room the only way I know how, joint by joint and thing by thing, and every thing in it was true, was good oak and honest delf and real bread, and every single one of them was waiting. The trunk to be carried out. The plates to be cleared. The two at the table to come and sit. The whole room held in the breath before a leaving, the way the green had held when I blew north.

Then, out in the lane behind me, somebody played a few notes on a mouth-organ.

Not a tune I could name and then it was a tune I half could — coming and going, the way a sound does over open ground in the cold — a few bars, a breath, a few bars. Thin and small and sweet. Davey'd had a harmonica. Cheap red Hohner, won at a fair, played it badly and constantly through one whole summer till the row, till the door, till the years. I went out into the lane fast, the lantern swinging, and there was no one. Of course there was no one. The lane lay empty up to the dark and the notes had stopped, if they'd ever started, and a man who hasn't slept right since his lad walked out will make his lad out of wind in a gutter.

Wildlife, I said. An owl. Wind in the smithy flue. Lads from the village, more like, in over the fence for a dare, having me on.

I finished the rounds. The longhouse with its byre under the same roof, the beasts' end empty and swept and the family's end laid for supper too, the same as the cottage, the same banked warmth. The green last, and the old standing horn-stone in the middle of it pale as a tooth, and the lamps I'd lit burning steady all around the edges, every one, none gone out, more than I remembered lighting.

I went back to the lodge and bolted the door, which is a thing I have not often done and could not have told you why I did.

—

I couldn't sleep. There's no news in that. I've not properly slept in fifteen years — you lie and you listen for the gate, for a step on the path that's the right weight to be him, and it never is, and somewhere near four you go under for an hour like a man going under water. Carol learned to sleep through my not sleeping. Then this spring Carol stopped, the long grief having worn her down to nothing the way a beck wears down a stone, and now there's only the listening and no one beside me breathing through it.

So I lit the lamp and I took up the dead man's book, to put the night somewhere, and read it from the front to pass the dark.

Peter Aldous, the name inside the cover, last winter's man. Ordinary entries, a working man's hand, no nonsense in him. Nov 4. Cold. All sound. Lamps lit by 4. Rounds, the order kept. Two boards loose, schoolroom porch, will see to. Nov 9. Frost. Smithy fire banked again, spoke to Dr G, she says it draws warm off the chimney, I think a tramp is getting in & will set a trap. I half smiled at that. A man after my own make. Nov 16. Heard the music in the lane, third time now. Dr G says it is the wind. It is not the wind. The smile went off me. Nov 23. The cottage table is laid for two. Tonight there was a name on the labels on the trunk. Tonight one plate is started. And down a few entries, the hand the same and steadier than mine would have been:

Dec 1. The window is lit that I do not light. I have stopped telling Dr G the things I find, because she is not surprised by them, and a woman not surprised by a thing already knows it. I asked her plainly today how long the last watchman stayed. She held my hand and said, kindly, "He never left us, Mr Aldous. None of the good ones do. They come home."

I read that line three times and the cold of the room went into me a different way.

Then the page after it, and the next, and the rest of the book, were blank — and on the last entry, dated mid-December and stopped partway through a sentence, the ink simply ran out of words: Dec 17. I have decided I will

I will. That was all. I will, and then white paper to the back board.

I sat with the lamp till the window went from black to the no-colour that comes before dawn, and I did not write my own first line, and I did not sleep.

—

When it was grey enough to see by I went out without the lantern. The green was wet and ordinary. The lamps had burned down or out. The chapel door was a chapel door with a faded paper on it. In the daylight the place looked like exactly what the brown signs said it was — a tidy collection of old buildings saved from a drowned country, well kept, a bit sad, the sort of place you take the children once.

I went to the schoolroom. I don't know what made me, except that I'd left it tidy and I wanted to find it tidy, to put one true thing under my feet before I slept.

The slate I'd wiped clean stood on its easel. On it, in chalk, in a child's round careful hand — the letters too big, the way they make them when they're learning, the loops drawn slow — was written:

19th December 1943.

I put my thumb to it. The chalk smeared under my thumb, still soft, not an hour set, a child's hand having just that minute taken it off the board and given it back.