Chapter 9: The Second Keeper

Vesh saw them coming from three alcoves off.

They had come over the sticking plate into the gold, and he was alone behind his counter, and the urn was off, and he was not wiping anything. As they came level he reached out without a word and set a cup on the counter’s edge, on their side, full and steaming, and took his hand back.

Elliot did not stop. He could not afford to stop. He picked the cup up as he passed and drank it walking, aniseed and too hot, and when he looked back from the next alcove Vesh had turned round to his shelf of mismatched cups and was standing very straight, and Elliot understood that he was not going to be charged for it, and was not to mention it, ever, to anybody.

He left the cup on the ledge by the vestibule into Twenty-three, where somebody would bring it back. On the Calloway, he was beginning to see, somebody always did.

Bakers’ row began three carriages on, and he smelled it a carriage before that.

He had come through it more times than he had counted that morning without stopping. Stopping, it was a different thing. The alcoves on both sides of the corridor gave way, for the whole length of Carriage 21 and on into Twenty, to ovens: brick-built, iron-doored, set into the carriage walls one after another behind a run of half-doors, each with its own flue going up through the roof and its own baker in front of it, and every one of them going at once. The heat came out across the corridor in a solid wall. The floor was white. It had been swept to the sides and walked back into the middle so many times that there was a pale road down the centre of the carriage, with the prints of a thousand boots in it, and the drift at the edges stood up to his ankle. Loaves came out of the ovens on long wooden peels and went on to racks and off the racks into baskets and paper and arms. Somebody was singing. Somebody else was telling her to stop. Down at the forward end of Twenty the whole row ran together into a haze of flour-dust and oven-breath with figures moving in it, and he could not have said where the bread stopped and the gold began again.

On the Meridian bread came aft in a sack, and Doss traded a morning on the farm for a loaf of it. Nobody on the Meridian had ever made a street out of it.

Through the deck shutters, across the corridor, the nearest chalk board said T + 3:12.

“Sixth,” said Petris.

The sixth alcove had a half-door with a name chalked on its lintel, METTE, in letters that had been rubbed out and chalked again so often that the board behind them had gone grey. Behind the half-door was a counter, and behind the counter racks, and behind the racks an oven with its iron door open and a girl of about fifteen in front of it with a peel in both hands and flour in her eyebrows, sliding loaves out on to the rack at a speed that suggested she had once been told to hurry and had taken it as a creed.

In front of the counter was a queue of four. At the counter, wrapping a brown loaf in a square of paper for a man with a child on his shoulders, was a woman of perhaps forty-five, broad in the forearm, with grey hair tied back under a cloth and an apron that had been white at the beginning of the day.

She wrapped the loaf. She folded the ends under, and turned it, and creased the paper flat with the side of her hand. She took the man’s chits and said thank you and gave him two back, and said something to the child that made it laugh, and looked up for the next.

The next was Petris. He had joined the queue without seeming to, and was standing in it as if he had been standing in it every day of his life.

Her face did not change. It was a good face for not changing — broad, plain, kind, a face built for saying thank you forty times an hour — and it went on being all those things, and said “Warden,” in a pleasant ordinary voice. But her hands had stopped. She had picked up a square of paper for the next loaf, and her hands had stopped with it halfway to the counter, and as Elliot watched, a little flour sifted down off her fingers on to the paper, very slowly, like the last of something in an hourglass.

She had known. Somebody had come down the row with it hours ago, the way it had come down Twenty-seven and the Tally and Tarn’s. She had known all afternoon, and she had gone on baking, and wrapping, and saying thank you, and she had been waiting for the warden’s coat at her counter the whole time.

“Mette,” said Petris.

“What can I get you?”

“This is Mr Marsh. From the Meridian.”

Her eyes came to Elliot and stayed there. Her hands, very carefully, put the paper down.

“Mr Toll used to come here,” said Elliot. “Every morning. For a loaf.”

“He did.”

“He paid tomorrow.”

The hands moved. Not much. She reached under the counter without looking, as Mr Plum reached for his jam jar, and brought up a book: long and narrow, bound in oilcloth gone soft as felt, with a pencil tied to it on a string. She opened it on the counter between them, to a page near the end, and turned it round so that he could read.

It was a tab. A column of names down the left, and a column of days across, and against a dozen names here and there, in a round, careful, unpractised hand, the price of a loaf. Against one name it was every day. M.T. — brown. M.T. — brown. M.T. — dark (out of brown). And every entry had been struck through, once, neatly, with the same pencil, on the morning after it was written. Down the page. Over the page. She turned the leaves back for him, without his asking, and it went on, struck and struck and struck, for as far back as the book went. The book had been started again, he saw, at least once; there would be another book, somewhere, that went back further.

At the bottom of the last page, yesterday: M.T. — brown.

Not struck.

“He didn’t pay,” said Mette. “He said he’d pay tomorrow. He always said that.” Her voice was quite steady. “He always paid the next day.”

“He didn’t, today,” said Petris.

“No,” said Mette. “He didn’t, today.”

She looked at the unstruck line a moment longer. Then she closed the book, and put it back under the counter, and turned to the oven.

“Tava. I’m stepping out. The white wants four minutes, not three. The brown’s priced, the dark’s priced. Don’t let them argue you down on the seeded; they always try.”

“I know,” said Tava, without turning round.

“I know you know.” Mette wiped her hands on her apron, front and back, slowly, and lifted the flap at the end of the counter. “In here.”

Behind the oven wall there was a store, if it could be called a room: sacks of flour stacked to the ceiling on two sides, a shelf of crocks, proving-trays on a rack under damp cloths, and in the middle just enough floor for three people to stand without touching if none of them breathed out. It was warm as the inside of a loaf. A small window high up let in a slant of light, yellow and thick with flour.

Mette pulled the door to behind them. She stood with her back to it and her hands folded in front of her apron, and her hands were not still. The fingers of one were working at the knuckles of the other, kneading.

“I’m not a brave woman, Warden,” she said. “I want you to know that. Before I say anything.”

“I know it,” said Petris.

“You don’t. You think you do, because you’ve bought bread off me.” She looked at Elliot. “I’m a baker. I go to the ovens before the lamps are up and I go home when the last rack’s sold, and in eleven years I’ve never once wanted anything to happen to me. I’d hoped nothing would.” Her mouth tightened. “I’d hoped he was wrong.”

Nobody said anything. In the alcove beyond the wall Tava’s peel went in and out of the oven, scrape, scrape.

“He signed my licence,” said Mette. “Three years ago. My clerk was poorly and it had run over, and he was standing at the counter and he said, give it here, and signed it on the end of my counter, there and then. Then he went white.” She almost smiled. “He said, now you’re written down next to me. I said, it’s a bread licence, Maren. He said, that’s what I mean.” She drew a breath. “After that he’d stop. Mornings. Not long. And one morning he told me.”

“Told you what?” said Elliot.

“That he came from your train. That he’d come there — the first time, I mean, when he woke — with everything. His mother. The yard where he’d worked. The name of the ships.” She had been looking at the floor between them. Now she looked up at Elliot, and kept looking, a moment longer than the sentence needed, as she might have looked at a loaf to see if it was done.

Elliot did not move. Petris did not look at him.

“He said there were others,” Mette went on. “Not many. He’d known three, on the Meridian. He said you can tell, after a while. They hold still wrong.”

“What else?”

“He said—” She stopped. Her hands had found the edge of her apron and were folding it, small, and folding it again. “He said it isn’t the dying. The forgetting. Everybody thinks it’s the dying does it, like getting old does it to your eyes. He said it isn’t. He said it’s done.” She looked up. “Done to us. All of us. Every one that comes.”

“Done by what?”

“He didn’t know.” Quickly. “He didn’t know. He said it was old. Older than the trains. I said, nothing’s older than the trains, Maren, and he said, this is.” Her voice had gone lower, and faster, as if she were carrying something hot and wanted to put it down. “He said it knows. That was the worst of it, for me. Not old. Knows. He said it’s — aware. It watches what comes through. And when one comes through that it didn’t empty—”

She stopped again.

“He had a word for them,” she said. “For him. For people like him.” She said it carefully, as one says a word one has only ever heard from somebody else, and does not want to get wrong. “Leaks.”

The word sat in the warm little room among the flour sacks.

“Like a roof,” said Mette. “Like a pan. Something gets out that shouldn’t.” Her hands had stopped folding. “And it — he said it contains them.”

“Contains how?” said Elliot.

“His word. I didn’t like it either. I asked him what it meant.” She shook her head, once. “He said, what does it mean when you contain anything that leaks.”

Elliot knew what it meant.

He had sat in rooms in Bristol, at round tables with bad coffee, while men with lanyards and laptops said contain in exactly that voice. There had been a breach, somewhere; something that should have stayed inside had got out. And the first thing you did — before you mended anything, before you worked out how, before anybody wrote to the people whose names had gone — was contain it. You found the leak and you cut it off from everything else. You isolated it. You made sure nothing more got out through it. Then, at your leisure, you decided what to do with it. He had nodded through a dozen of those meetings and never once thought about it from the point of view of the leak.

He found that he had put his hand flat against a flour sack, and that it was holding him up.

“What did he call it?” he said. “The thing that does it.”

“He called it—” Mette began, and stopped, and her face for the first time did what her hands had been doing all along. “No. He didn’t call it anything.” She was quiet a moment. “He said it was all an arr—”

She stopped dead, as if she had walked into a door in the dark.

“He said not to call it anything,” she said. “He said it doesn’t like to be called.”

Petris had not moved since she began. He was looking at her with the patient grey look, and Elliot saw that it was costing him something to keep it patient.

“Did he say what he meant to do?” said Petris.

“Find them. The others. Write them down.” Her mouth twisted. “He said if it’s going to know where they are, somebody on our side should. He was going to give it to somebody. After the crossing. He wouldn’t tell me who.” Her hands came together again, tight. “He said that’s the only safe thing I can have. Not knowing.”

“There’s one more thing,” said Mette. “Then I’ve to get back. The white.”

“Go on,” said Elliot.

“He said, if anything happens to me — he said it like you’d say if the flour’s late, Mette, open the old sack — if anything happens to me, and somebody comes across from the Meridian, at the crossing, asking. Then there’s a message. For one man.” She closed her eyes, and opened them, and said it as if reading it off the inside of the lids, the way you say a thing you have said to yourself every night for three years so as not to lose it. “For Mr Plum, of the Meridian. The bell has rung.”

Elliot did not breathe for a moment.

He saw a flowered curtain in Carriage 74, drawn back, and a man on the edge of a bottom bunk under a jointed lamp with a watch movement open in front of him and his hands not working. Be careful, today. And earlier, before that, Mr Fixer in full flow about the man who had walked across last time with a bag for the morning and never walked back — and below them, behind the curtain, the tap and click of tools, stopping.

“Mr Plum,” he said.

“Mr Plum. Of the Meridian. He said it twice, to be sure I had it.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know.” She said it plainly, without any apology in it. “I asked. He said Mr Plum would know, and I wasn’t to, and that was a kindness, and one day I’d see it was.” She looked at Elliot, and for the first time there was something in her face that was not fear. “Do you know him?”

“He’s my friend,” said Elliot. “He sleeps under me.”

Mette took that in. She seemed to find it neither strange nor reassuring; only true, like the price of a loaf.

“Was he Mr Toll’s friend?” said Elliot.

“I don’t know what he was.” She thought about it honestly, as she seemed to think about everything. “He was Maren’s something. Maren didn’t have a word for it, or he did and he didn’t tell me.” She put her hand on the door. “You’ll tell him.”

“I will.”

“Then that’s done.” She let out a long breath, and something in her shoulders let go with it, and he realised he had been watching a woman carry a thing for three years and set it down in front of him in a flour store. “I won’t ask you anything else. I don’t want to know anything else. I’d sooner bake.”

“I won’t put your name to any of it,” said Elliot. “Not to anybody.”

“You’ll do what you do.” She opened the door, and the heat of the oven came in round it, and the noise of the row. “I’ll want a loaf back for this, mind. From somebody.”

“I’ll take the dark,” said Petris. “Mornings.”

Mette looked at him.

“You don’t eat the dark, Warden.”

“I’ll learn,” said Petris.

In the alcove, Tava had the white out of the oven, four minutes and not three, and was wrapping a loaf for a woman with a basket, badly, with the ends sticking out. Mette took the paper from her without a word, and Tava gave it up without a word, and went back to the oven as though that had been agreed between them years ago.

Mette folded the ends of the paper under. She turned the loaf and creased it flat with the side of her hand, and gave it across, and took the chits, and said thank you. Then the next. Then the next.

Elliot had seen this before. One morning in the winter, word had come up from the farm carriages that Doss’s brother had died there, of something quick, and Doss had not cried. She had spent the whole of that day banging her baskets about at the end of the row, harder and louder than anybody had ever heard baskets banged, and nobody in Carriage 74 had said a word to her about it, or asked her to stop, because some things come out of a person as work and you let them.

Mette’s hands were quite steady now. They took up a square of paper and a loaf, and folded, and creased, and turned, as they had ten thousand times, and would tomorrow morning, before the lamps were up, when nobody came to the counter at the second hour with his coat collar turned and said paid tomorrow, and the line at the foot of the page stayed as it was.