Chapter 6: Ada

Her name was Ada Hartley and she had been sixty-one years old, and she spent the next several days finding out, room by room, exactly how much of a life that was.

It was not a grand life. She kept waiting, in those days, for it to turn out to have been grand — for the returning to deliver some reason, some weight that would explain why she of all the four thousand had been handed her whole self back like a coat at the end of an evening. It never did. She had grown up in a grey town in the north that smelled of a sea you had to take a bus to see, and she had worked in a chemist’s for nineteen years and then in the office of a primary school for fourteen more, stamping reading records and ringing parents about nits, and she had married a man called Ray who fixed washing machines and other people’s kettles and, in the last four years, had needed fixing himself, slowly, by her, in a back bedroom that smelled of the stuff you rub on a chest. She had nursed him and buried him. She had been on her own three years. She had been carrying milk and a tin of something across an ordinary road on an ordinary grey Tuesday in February when her foot found the black ice, and that had been that — sixty-one years, ended by a kerb, no reason, no grandeur, the most ordinary death a person could arrange, which she could now see was exactly the kind of death she had spent her whole life expecting and exactly the kind she’d have wanted if anyone had asked, quick and stupid and over, except that it had not been over, that was the joke, it had been the opposite of over.

The half-turn on the lamp was Ray’s. She knew that now. Give it here. You have to fight it a bit, that’s all. He had shown her on the kitchen kettle thirty years before and a thousand times since, his big careful hands over her smaller ones, and the hands had kept it when the head had had it taken away, kept it down in the place below memory where the body hoards the things it has done ten thousand times, and that was the cruelty of the whole arrangement laid bare in one brass wheel: that the Mercy, whatever it was, had reached in and taken Ray — taken the back bedroom and the chest-rub and the cold hand going colder, taken the nineteen years of the chemist’s and her mother’s face and the bus to the sea — had taken all of it cleanly and left her glad, and had not been quite thorough enough to get the half-turn out of her hands, and so the whole house had come back in through a brass wheel, the way the sea gets in through one bad seam and takes the boat.

She did the work. She trimmed the wicks. She was, she found, very good at carrying on; she had buried a husband while ringing parents about nits, she knew how to keep her hands steady through the end of the world, it was nearly the only thing she knew how to do. And under the carrying-on she grieved, and the grief had two faces and she could not always tell them apart.

She grieved her life — Ray, her mother, the grey town, the whole lost ordinary freight of it, sixty-one years she would never get back to, people she had loved who were not dead the way she was dead but were gone the way the gone are gone, on the far side of a thing with no gangway. That grief she understood. It was the size of a life and she had room for it; she had carried grief that size before.

But she grieved Halia too, and that one she had no practice for, because you do not, in the ordinary run of things, attend the funeral of a person who is you.

Halia was still in her, getting smaller. Ada could find her, in the prayers especially — she still went to the prayers, she had to, a soul that stopped going to the prayers was a soul with a sign on it — she would kneel forward into the warmth and there, for a moment, would be Halia’s gladness, faint now, like a radio in another room, the seven-week-old soul who had loved the lamps and meant aren’t we lucky the way only the truly empty can mean it. And Ada would kneel in the warmth and feel that gladness going out of her, day by day, replaced by herself, by her sixty-one years and her dead and her flat northern certainty that none of this could be, and she would think: I am killing the happiest person I have ever been. Halia had been lighter than Ada had managed in six decades. Halia had been unafraid. And Ada was the flood that drowned her, and could not stop being the flood, because the flood was just the truth coming back, and you could not un-know the truth to spare a happy stranger, even when the happy stranger was the only good thing your death had ever bought you.

And under both griefs, all those days, sat the question, and the question had no bottom.

Why me.

She turned it over in every spare moment and it gave her nothing. She was not special. She had established that thoroughly; if there was one thing her returned life proved past argument it was that Ada Hartley was the most ordinary woman who had ever stamped a reading record. She had not been chosen. There was no reason in her — no grand sin, no grand virtue, no secret destiny stitched into a chemist’s assistant from a town that smelled of an absent sea. The Mercy had emptied four thousand souls, grand and ordinary alike, and held in every one of them, and had simply, in her, not held, for no reason she could find, the way a stitch drops in a long seam for no reason, the way her foot had found the one patch of black ice on a road she had crossed ten thousand times. It was banal. That was the horror of it, in the end — not that she was important, but that she was not, and that the not-holding had happened anyway, to nobody in particular, which meant it could happen to anybody, which meant —

And there she always stopped, because that was where the question turned from a private grief into something with teeth.

Because if the Mercy could fail in her, ordinary as she was, for no reason — then the Mercy could fail. Full stop. The Mercy was a thing that could fail. And a thing that can fail is a thing that can be resisted, or withheld, or done wrong, which means it is a thing that is done — by someone, by something, by a hand — and a gift that is done by a hand is a gift that hand could have chosen not to give, or chosen to give differently, or chosen to give and then take back — and Ada stood in the Office with a brass lamp in her hands and felt the whole warm kind train tilt very slightly under her, the way the road had tilted, because she had followed an ordinary thought to an unholy place and could not see the bottom of the drop.

She did not have the words for what was down there. She would not have them for a long time, and the train would do everything in its power to make sure she never said them aloud. But she had the shape of it, that early, alone among the lamps: that the Mercy can fail was not a small doctrinal wobble, it was the floor going, and that she was the proof of it, walking around, carrying the dead lamps tenderly.

She made the mistake of taking the edge of it to Pria.

She did not mean to. She had resolved, lying awake, to carry it alone — she had been very clear with herself about that, in the steady managing voice that had got her through the back bedroom: you do not put your weight on a person who cannot bear it, and Pria could not bear it, Pria had one clean room and lived gladly in it. But she was so tired, and Pria was so kind, and they were folding the feast-linens together in the warm and Pria was being Halia’s friend, telling some happy nothing about the refectory, and Ada heard her own voice say, carefully, as if testing ice:

“Pria — do you ever wonder. About the Mercy. Whether it’s — always the same. For everyone. Whether it could ever —” and she could not make herself finish it, fail, she swallowed it, but Pria had heard the shape of the missing word, you did not need the word, the shape of it was enough.

Ada watched it land.

It was the worst thing she had done since she woke, and she had not even managed to say it. Pria’s hands went still on the linen. The gladness did not leave her face all at once — that was what Ada could not forget — it went the way a lamp goes when you let the flame down, slowly, by a thread of a turn, the light getting smaller and smaller while the shape of it stayed, and what came up underneath was not anger, Pria had no anger in her, it was fear, the particular nakedness of a person who has never once doubted the ground and has just felt, for half a second, the ground move. Because if the Mercy could fail — if it could be otherwise, for anyone — then it had been done to Pria. Her gladness, her clean room, her seven weeks of being newly delivered and unafraid: a thing done to her, by a hand, that could have done otherwise. Pria had never had to think of her peace as a thing that had been chosen for her rather than simply true, and Ada had set the thought down in the middle of the clean room in a single unfinished sentence, and could see it begin to take the light.

“It’s the same for everyone,” Pria said. Quietly. Not as an answer — as a thing held onto. “Halia. It’s the Mercy. It doesn’t — it’s the Mercy.” And she looked at Ada with those new frightened eyes and waited, plainly, to be told she was right.

“Of course,” Ada said. “Of course it is. I’m tired, that’s all. Forget I said it.” And she made her face into Halia’s face, the glad untroubled face, and after a moment Pria’s hands moved again on the linen, and the light came back up in her, mostly, nearly all the way, and they folded the feast-linens and Pria told the rest of the happy nothing and Ada laughed in the right places, and inside, Ada shut the door on the thing she had nearly said, and bolted it, and knew with a flat finality that she would carry the whole of it alone now, all of it, forever if she had to — that whatever this cost her, it would not be paid out of Pria’s one clean room, because the one thing worse than knowing the floor could go was making someone else feel it go who had nowhere else to stand.

She went back to the lamps. Forward, the warmth came down off the Fore, patient and kind and watching, and Ada faced into it and gave it nothing, and carried the dead, and waited, without knowing she was waiting, for the day the train would notice what the clerk already knew.