The Last Name in the Book

Off Season

The VACANCY sign had buzzed since before the tide turned, a wasp trapped in glass tubing, and Fenn had stopped meaning to fix it about nine years ago. Against the white September sky it gave off no light worth the name. It only buzzed. He stood at the bay window of the front room with a cup of tea going cold in his hand and watched the word fail to glow over an empty Parade, and out past the rotted railings, on the green slime of the groyne, a cormorant stood with its wings hung open to dry. Black against the white. A cross nailed up where the sea could see it.

He counted the foghorn. One. A long wait. Two. The Cormorant guesthouse had been named for the bird before he ever owned it, and he had thought, the day he signed the papers, that he might paint over the sign and call it something hopeful. He had not. A man who buys a failing house on a dying front does not get to call things hopeful.

The tea was stewed. He drank it anyway.

There was a way to close a season when nobody had opened it. He did it every year, the same as a priest does the same words over a church with three in the pews. He went down to the dining room where six tables stood dressed for guests who were not coming — cloths ironed, cruets filled, a single dahlia going brown in a bud vase he refilled every Monday from the back garden until the frosts took the last of them. He straightened a fork that did not need straightening. The room held the particular cold of off-season dining rooms, a cold that came up out of the lino and had nothing to do with the radiators, which he bled and ran for an hour each morning so the damp would not get into the walls and finish what the salt had started.

"Full house tonight," he told the empty tables. His voice went nowhere. The tables had heard it before.

Behind the little reception desk in the hall, the guest register lay open at a page two-thirds blank. The book. Twenty-odd years of his tenancy in it, and the Cormorant's whole century before that in the older volumes shelved beneath, names in copperplate and biro, honeymooners and commercial travellers and a coach party of Methodists who'd come once in 2009 and filled the place to the rafters and never come again. He turned the new pages sometimes the way some men turn over old photographs. Whole weeks with nothing. A line here and there. The blank line at the foot of the page always waiting, patient as a grave, for the next name.

He poured the first one at half three. He was careful about it; he was always careful. The bottle lived in the sideboard with the good glasses nobody used, and he measured it by the width of two fingers laid against the tumbler, and he did not pour the second until the light started going, because a man who pours the second before the light has lost the argument. He told himself this was discipline. He knew what it was. He had interviewed enough careful drunks to recognise the species, the ones who could tell you to the half-hour when they'd had their first and would lie to you about the rest with their hands flat on the table and their eyes clear.

The computer in the back office gave a small sound he did not, for a moment, place. A chime. It came again. He went through and found, on the booking screen he checked perhaps twice a week, a new line glowing where the others were grey.

One night. Tonight. The last room, the small double at the front called Three on the door though it was the only one he ever let. Cash on arrival, the box ticked. There was a name field and a line for anything the guest wished to say, and the guest had written nothing in it, which suited him; he disliked the ones who wrote looking forward to our stay as though the Cormorant were a thing to look forward to. He scanned the name the way he scanned everything now, fast and incurious, a habit grown over the place where his attention used to live, and clicked to accept before the sense of it arrived.

He went up to make the room.

Three faced the sea. He kept it the way it had always been kept, which was to say the way Marion had left it, though no one alive but Hugh knew that and Hugh had the grace never to say so. He aired it now, hauling the sash up against its swollen frame so the salt wind came in cold and clean, and he ran a cloth over the sill, and he turned back the candlewick counterpane she had chosen the spring before she went, the colour she'd called eau de nil and he'd called green and she'd laughed at him for. On the dressing table stood a little dish of shells one of them had picked up — he no longer knew which — and a framed print of a hare in long grass that she had loved and he had never seen the point of and now could not have taken down for any money. He squared it on its nail. He set out the two good towels and the small soap.

He did not sleep in this room and he did not let it, not really, not in twenty years; the booking screen showed it free and he priced it like a joke, and when the rare guest took it he gave them one of the others and came in here himself after to put it back the way it was. He told himself it was kept ready. Ready for what, he did not let himself finish. A light left on in a window for a ship that had already gone down. He smoothed the counterpane where his own hand had creased it and went back down to wait for the dark.

Hugh came at six, the way Hugh came most evenings, the swing of the gate and then the particular two-knock-and-in that no guest ever used because guests were a rumour here. "Daniel," he called from the hall, "you'll want to put a coat on that wind, it's got teeth tonight." And then he was in the front room in his good overcoat with the collar still up, seventy-one and pink with cold and entirely at his ease, setting the bottle and the chess set down on the low table by the gas fire as though laying a meal for an invalid, which in a manner of speaking he had been doing for two decades.

"You've poured already," Hugh said, not a question, glancing at the tumbler by the window. He never made it sound like a charge. That was the thing about Hugh; he could see straight through you and forgive you for it in the same breath. "Good. Save me catching up." He produced two clean glasses from the sideboard without asking where they lived, because he knew, and poured for them both, two fingers, the same measure Fenn used, which Fenn had never decided whether to find companionable or unnerving. The amber went into the glass before Fenn had said a word. Hugh poured before you asked. He always had.

"Sit," Hugh said, "before you fall down looking at that bird."

"It's drying its wings."

"It's been drying its wings since Tuesday. I think it's dead and propped up there to fool the gulls." He set the board out between them with the soft clack of weighted pieces, his pieces, the good boxwood-and-ebony set he'd brought the first winter and never taken home, white to Fenn because Hugh said a host should always move first in his own house. "There. Defend yourself."

They played. The gas fire ticked. Outside the light went out of the white sky by degrees and the VACANCY sign began, at last, against the dark, to mean its small electric meaning, red on the wet Parade. Fenn lost a pawn he should have kept and Hugh took it without comment and they talked, the easy nothing-talk of men who have said everything important to each other long ago or have agreed, without saying so, never to. The Stade boats. The price of heating oil. A locum doctor up at the surgery Hugh did not rate.

"They're taking Carrow End," Hugh said.

Fenn looked up from the board. "At last."

"Before Christmas. Before the gales, if Calthorpe's man is to be believed, which he isn't, but the engineers agree for once." Hugh moved a bishop, unhurried. "The cliff's within nine metres of the morning room. They've condemned the lot. Julian's regeneration nonsense pays for the demolition and the demolition pays for the sea wall and round and round the money goes, but the end of it is the house comes down and the cliff gets shored and the whole green hill above the Stade is to be — what was the word in the parish notice — stabilised." He said the word the way he said most of Julian Calthorpe's words, as something held at arm's length between finger and thumb. "Eighty years that family's been promising to fix that cliff and now they'll knock the house down sooner than spend a shilling saving it. There's the Calthorpes for you."

"Big house to lose."

"It's been losing for forty years. The garden went over in the eighties. The summerhouse in two thousand and one — I remember because Vivienne rang me as though I might do something about the sea." Something passed over Hugh's face and was gone, the small weariness of a man recalling an old patient's unreasonableness, and he took Fenn's knight. "Your knight, Daniel. You leave them en prise and you wonder why you lose."

"I don't wonder."

"No," Hugh agreed kindly, "you don't, do you." He topped both glasses, two fingers, and for a moment the only sound was the fire and the buzz of the sign through the glass and, far out, the foghorn. Fenn counted it without meaning to. One. The long dark wait. Two.

Hugh's eye had drifted, the way it did, to the hall, to the desk, to the register lying open under its lamp. "You've a light on in the book," he said. "Don't tell me. A guest. An actual paying guest, in the Cormorant, at the back end of September." He was smiling. "Should I dress?"

"One night. Cash."

"One night, cash, and signs the screen and not the book." Hugh shook his head, amused, settling deeper into the chair that had become his chair. "You'll be murdered in your bed, Daniel, and the coroner will rule death by hospitality. Who is it, some birdwatcher come for your dead cormorant?"

"Didn't read it."

"Of course you didn't." Hugh said it with great fondness, as a man might say of course you didn't to a friend whose particular ruin he had long ago made his peace with. "You keep a hotel and you don't read the names. The whole town's a closed book to you and you like it shut." He moved his queen out into the middle of the board, where it sat like a small dark threat, and leaned back, and looked at his friend with an affection that was, Fenn would think later, the realest thing in the room. "It's good you've someone coming. The house wants a stranger in it now and then. Keeps the damp off."

"Keeps the cold in."

"Same thing, in your hands." Hugh checked his watch and did not get up. He never hurried away; that was another of his kindnesses, that he sat as though there were nowhere in the world he would rather be than a freezing front room with a man the county had finished with. "Your move," he said, "and mind the queen, she's not there for her health."

They played on. It got late the way it got late between them, without anyone marking it, until the bottle was lower than two careful men could account for and the board had gone against Fenn past saving and Hugh, at last, rose and shrugged the good overcoat back on and put up the collar against the going. At the door he paused, the way he always paused, and laid a hand briefly on Fenn's shoulder, warm and dry, the touch of the only person who touched him at all.

"Don't sit up for your stranger," he said. "And Daniel — pour the rest of that down the sink tonight. Just tonight. You'll thank me at the chess next week." A smile. The gate's swing. Gone.

Fenn did not pour it down the sink. He stood the bottle back in the sideboard with the good glasses and he washed Hugh's tumbler and his own and set them to drain, and he turned off the dining-room lights over the laid tables, and he went and stood again at the bay window where the night had filled the glass and only the red of the sign came back at him, and his own grey face behind it, the way the dead look out of the windows of houses that are coming down.

It was long after dark when the headlights came.

They swung up off the coast road and down the empty Parade and washed the wet tarmac white, slowing, slowing, until they stopped outside the Cormorant and went out. A car door. Footsteps that knew where they were going. Then the knock — not the two-and-in of a friend, but three even raps, level, unhurried, the knock of someone who had decided a long way off that this door would open.

He went down the cold hall and put the chain off and drew the door against the salt wind, and there on the step under the buzzing sign stood a young woman, slight, dark-coated, a holdall at her feet, her collar turned up against the spray coming off the front. Too young by half for anything he could account for. She looked at him the way you look at a thing you have travelled a long way to see, and she did not smile.

"You've a room?" she said.

The Last Name in the Book

The pen scratched in the silent hall, and Fenn let it.

Rain had come in on her coat — he could smell it, that and the diesel off the harbour wall and under both of them the particular mustiness of the Cormorant's hall carpet, a smell he had stopped noticing in 2009 and noticed now only because she had brought the outside in with her. The clock on the half-landing ticked. Somewhere a gutter overflowed in the steady patient way it had since August. He had meant to see to the gutter.

She wrote without hurry. That was the first thing, before he had any reason to mark a first thing: she was not cold-fingered or fumbling, not apologetic for the lateness of the hour the way travellers usually were when they fetched up on his step out of the dark. She held the desk pen — his pen, the cheap blue biro chained to the register by a length of grubby string — and she formed her letters slowly, as if the act mattered, as if she had all night and the night belonged to her.

"It's twenty-eight pound," Fenn said. "Breakfast's extra and frankly not worth it."

The corner of her mouth moved. Not a smile. An acknowledgement that he had made the shape of a joke. She set down a twenty and a ten on the counter, smoothed flat, and stepped back from them, and he understood he was meant to make the change, which he did, from the tin under the desk, two pound coins he laid beside her hand. She didn't pick them up.

Cash. He marked that too, the way you mark a draught in a room — not knowing yet where it comes in, only that the air has moved.

"Room's at the top," he said. "Front. You'll hear the sea."

"I'd want to," she said.

He had been doing this for nineteen years and he could check a guest in asleep. Key, register, the small lie about breakfast, the smaller lie that the Cormorant was anything other than a man and a bottle and eleven empty rooms keeping a light on for nobody. His hands knew the work. So when she finished writing and turned the register a half-turn on the counter, turned it to face herself and not him, he noticed the wrongness of the gesture without yet feeling it. People didn't do that. People signed and pushed the book back across, glad to be rid of the formality. She turned it toward her and looked at what she'd written, the way you check a thing you've made.

Then she turned it back.

"You'll want to read it," she said.

Fenn took his glasses from his shirt pocket. He had reached the age where the world went soft past arm's length and he resented every inch of it. He slid them on and bent to the page under the brown wash of the desk lamp, and the hall and the gutter and the clock all went away.

She had written in fresh blue ink, in a careful left-leaning hand, the down-strokes dragged the way the left-handed drag them, smearing a little where the heel of the palm had passed:

Nell Garrick.

The name went into him the way cold water goes into a man over the side — not at the skin, deeper, in the chest, in the long muscles, a clench that had nothing to do with thought. Twenty years stood up out of the page. The cliff path in the wet. A torch beam going nowhere across the saltings. Eddie Sallow's face the last time he saw it, the soft startled face of a man who could not understand what was being done to him. The smell of the interview room. The inquiry. The day he handed in the warrant card and the sergeant on the desk could not look at him. His wife's car pulling off the Parade with the back seat full. All of it, in one line, in wet ink, a generation too late.

He did not move for a moment. He had learned, in the bad years, the trick of not moving. A man who keeps still gives nothing away, not even to himself.

"Quiet town," she said, into his stillness. Conversational. "For the season."

He straightened. Took the glasses off, because he wanted to see her now, all of her, not the smeared name. And the second wrongness arrived, the one the name had hidden.

She was young. Far too young. Twenty, twenty-one — younger than the missing girl had been when she missed, and Nell Garrick, had she been anywhere on this earth, would have been thirty-seven. He did the sum without wanting to; the sum lived in him. This girl had not been born when the other vanished off the cliffs in the Michaelmas gale. She watched him do the sum. She had wanted him to do it. That was the whole of why she had turned the book toward herself first — to set the name down clean and then hand it to him and watch it land.

"It is," he said. "Quiet. The pier closed in the eighties. We get walkers. Birdwatchers, off the marsh."

"And the regeneration." She said the word the way you'd hold up something faintly distasteful. "The sea-works. Carrow End's coming down, isn't it. They've condemned it." Not a question, the last part. A fact laid on the counter like the twenty and the ten. "Metres from the edge now, I read. They're racing the storms to get the demolition through before it goes over on its own."

Fenn had spent his life across a table from people who were telling him only what they needed him to believe. He felt the old reflex wake in him, the careful interest, the patience that was really a kind of hunger. He kept his voice level and idle, a tired man behind a desk.

"You've read up," he said. "Family interest?"

"Should it be?"

"Most people who know Carrow End by name have a reason."

"What's yours?"

He let that sit. The clock ticked. The gutter ran.

"I've lived here a long time," he said.

"The Calthorpes owned half of Saltgrave," she said, as if he hadn't spoken, as if she were reciting to steady herself, the facts coming out of her in order, each one set down precisely. "The house, the pier, the lido. Half the seafront. There's a boathouse, isn't there, down on the Stade. The old Calthorpe boathouse. And an ice house, Victorian, sealed up. By the slipway." She tipped her head a fraction. "Does the slipway still flood on a spring tide?"

The question went through him like the name had. Not the same depth. But a near thing.

Because that — the tide, the slipway, what floods and when — that was not in any guidebook, not in the regeneration leaflets with their watercolour marinas. That was knowledge a person carried in the body or got from someone who had. A girl of twenty from somewhere with flat vowels and dry consonants, an accent off the middle of England, the Trent and not the North Sea in it — and she knew that the Stade flooded on the springs. She knew there was an ice house by the slipway. She had said the old Calthorpe boathouse the way Iris said it, the way the town said it, the way you say a thing you've heard a hundred times and not a thing you've read once.

"It does," he said. "Floods. Spring tide takes the whole landing. You wanting to walk down there?"

"Should I not?"

"It's dark and it's coming on to blow." He nodded at the door, at the rain pearling on the glass, the VACANCY sign throwing its weak rose light back off the wet. "There's a gale forecast. Michaelmas. Always is, this end of September. Be a better day for it tomorrow."

"Michaelmas," she repeated, and he could not read what she did with the word, only that she did something, folded it away somewhere. "I'll wait for the light, then."

He looked at her properly, the way he'd once been paid to look at people, and the small true things came to him one after another, the way they always had, the way they were both his gift and the place he'd been wounded — because twenty years ago he had read a whole town wrong and a gentle man into his grave.

She was steady. Not nervous, not brittle, not lonely the way the late ones often were. Watchful in the way he was watchful, taking the hall in over his shoulder, the dead barometer, the framed print of the pier in its glory, the stairs going up into the dark. The signature drying on the page was left-handed; she'd written with the book turned, drawing the pen toward herself, and the ink had smeared under her hand. And her eyes —

He had not let himself fix on them till now. People's eyes, in the bad light of the hall, you took on trust. But she stood square under the lamp and let him, and one of her eyes was grey, a flat sea grey, and the other was green. Not a trick of the light. One grey, one green. He had seen that once before in his life, across a kitchen table in a council house off the marsh road, in the face of a woman he had failed and never stopped failing — Peg Garrick had it, that mismatch, and they'd said in the town it ran in the Garricks, the witch-mark, the cat's eyes, and Nell had had it, it was in the one good photograph, the school photograph that had gone out on every front page and every lamp-post twenty years ago.

One grey eye. One green.

He felt the floor of the thing he'd been standing on for two decades shift very slightly, the way the cliff shifts, soundless, a clod at a time, and then a field.

"Anything else you'll need," he said, and his voice did not betray him, he'd give it that, "there's a kettle on the landing and not much else. I'm down here if the place catches fire."

"You don't sleep much."

"No," he said. "I don't."

She took the key. Her fingers were cool and dry and did not tremble. She lifted her bag — a single bag, soft, not heavy — and went past him to the stairs, and on the third stair she stopped, one hand on the rail, and did not turn round.

"Goodnight, Mr Fenn," she said.

He had not told her his name.

He stood very still in the hall and listened to her go up, the old stairs giving under her, the seventh tread that always cracked, the door of the front room opening and closing, the small domestic sounds of a stranger in his house. Then nothing. The clock. The gutter. The sea, faint, working the shingle.

He had not told her his name.

Fenn went behind the desk and sat down in the chair that had moulded itself to him over nineteen years, and he reached without looking into the drawer where the bottle lived, and the glass beside it, and he poured two fingers and did not drink them yet. He drew the register round under the lamp and put his glasses back on and looked at the name.

Nell Garrick. In fresh blue ink, the down-strokes dragged left, drying now, the smear set. Twenty years of signatures above it — the salesmen, the birdwatchers, the couples who'd come for one anniversary and never come back, the names in their hundreds going up the page and up the pages before it, a book of everyone who had passed through this dying house and gone on. And under her name, the last line on the page, the blank line. The line the next one would sign. He looked at the blank line a long time.

There were three ways this went, he made himself think, the way he'd have thought it in the job. A coincidence — some Garrick, some Nell, an ordinary name. He killed it before it finished. The girl was twenty and had two-coloured eyes and knew the slipway flooded on the springs and knew there was an ice house by the boathouse and had said his name he had never given her. There were no coincidences with that many edges.

A cruelty, then — a joke, a punishment, someone in the town who'd never forgiven him and had found a clever way to put the knife in. He turned that over. The town had reason. Annie Sallow had reason enough to last her grave. But this was no town cruelty; the town's cruelty was open, it spat, it crossed the street, it did not check into the Cormorant under a dead girl's name with the Garrick eyes in its head and ask, level as a tide table, whether the slipway still flooded.

Which left the third thing, and the third thing was that she had chosen the name. She had chosen it the way you choose an instrument. She knew exactly what it would do in this town and in this hall and to the man behind this desk, and she had carried it in from the rain and set it down in wet ink and turned the book so she could watch it land. She had chosen the name, and out of every shuttered guesthouse with its VACANCY sign that never came down on the whole drowning length of the front, she had chosen his door.

He did not believe in ghosts. He had given a great deal away in his life and that, at least, he had kept. The dead did not come back and sign your book.

But the living came back. The living came back carrying the dead.

Fenn lifted the register off the counter, both hands, and held it up to the desk lamp the way you hold a negative to the light, and the name stood out wet and dark across the page, a dead girl's name written tonight, twenty years too late.

Out in the dark, beyond the wet glass and the rose buzz of the sign, the foghorn sounded. Two long notes, low, one and then the other, the second falling a tone under the first.

Exactly as it had the night she disappeared.