Epilogue
The Stones in the River
It was a year, almost to the day, before she could bear to mend the machine.
She did it herself, at the kitchen table, on a Sunday in early October, with a jeweler's screwdriver and a pot of glue and a magnifying lamp borrowed from the conservation room. She was not good at it. There were eleven pieces of gray plastic, and a cracked circuit board, and a spool of tape no bigger than a matchbox, and the little red lamp on the front that had been blinking the night the telephone rang in a cold bedroom and a woman's voice said, Mrs. Hale, I'm very sorry. She had thought the board was past mending. Dennis Alcott, who had once restored a thirteenth-century charter from a puddle, had looked at it through his thick glasses for a long time and said, "Oh, it's only the one trace, my dear. Give me a minute."
It took him four.
"There," he said, and handed it back. "You'd want to be careful with the tape."
She carried it into the hall in both hands, as one carries a bird. She set it down on the table, on the little crocheted mat where it had always stood, beside the telephone, and plugged it in. The lamp came on. It glowed dull red in the shadows, and a small green display blinked once, twice, and settled on a number.
1.
One message.
She had known there would be. It had been the one she had not played, on a night in October, a year before, with the house full of the smell of him and the chrysanthemums still in their wrapping. She had played three of the old ones, from the spring, a dentist, a plumber, Dera. Then she had put out the light and gone up to bed, and had never come down to play the last. She had told herself she was afraid. She had told herself it would be the bank, or a stranger, or a man selling double glazing. She had not let herself think that it would be him.
For a year she had not touched it. The police had taken the machine, and the tape, and had given it back in a plastic bag, and had said that it held an hour of silence at the end and a click. She had not asked to hear. She had said, I'll know when.
She stood in the dim hall now, with her hand over her mouth. Outside the front door the rain had started, softly, on the step. She pressed the button.
The tape hissed. There was the crackle of an open line, and the long wide sound of a room somewhere far away, a clock, a radiator, and the soft rasp of his breath. And then, in the dark, a voice.
"Mara. It's me. It's nearly ten to ten."
She shut her eyes.
"I tried you earlier but you'd gone to bed, I think. I'm only ringing to say goodnight. I'm in the flat. You'd hate it. It smells of paint and fish. You can see the lighthouse from the bed, though, you'd like that. It goes round every nine seconds. I've counted." A pause. A soft, tired, wondering laugh. "I've been lying here counting it, like a boy."
She could see him. She could see him as clearly as the lamp. He was lying on a narrow bed in a rented room, in his shirtsleeves, with a book open on his chest, and a long pale beam crossing the ceiling every nine seconds.
"I'm going to tell you everything. Properly. When I get back. I've decided. I was going to put it in a letter but I'd rather do it in the kitchen with the kettle on. You can shout. I'd like you to. I'd like to see your face." He was quiet for a moment. "And there's someone I want you to meet. His name's Kit. He's nineteen. He's got my chin, God help him, and he won't say much for the first hour, and then he'll eat all your pepper soup. You'll love him. I know you will. I'm only sorry it took me nineteen years to say so."
The rain had grown louder. She was standing with her forehead against the wall, and her palm flat on the wallpaper, and she did not know that she was weeping.
"I think you'd understand anything. That's the thing about you. I don't know what I did to deserve it. I've never known."
"I'll be home Saturday. We'll go down to the river, like we used to. Take a flask. We'll throw some stones."
And then, very faintly, in the background, a sound. She knew it. It was a sound she had heard in a hundred hallways: the flat creak of a weight on a stair.
A pause. His breath changed.
"I'll call you back, love."
A click.
The tape hissed on, in the dark hall, for a few seconds more, and ran out.
She stood there a long time.
She had thought it would break her. She had braced for it for twelve months, as one braces for a blow, and had lain awake, and woken, and been afraid. And now it had come, and she was still standing, in her slippers, in the lamplight, with the machine blinking at her and her own heart going on. Nothing was different. Nothing was lost that had not been lost. I'll call you back, he had said, and she had been waiting a year, and it was all right. It was, in a way, the thing she had been waiting for.
It was the whole of him, she thought. It was the man in the green cardigan, and the man at the graveside, and the boy in the rented room, and the husband in the kitchen. It was a man who had lied for twenty years, and had spent his last quiet evening telling his wife that he loved her and that he would never let her go, and that there was someone he wanted her to meet. She did not have to choose. She had only to carry it. It was heavy, and it was hers.
She took out the little cassette, and wound it back, and held it a moment in her palm. Then she put it in her cardigan pocket, with the notched stone she had taken from the Kilner jar on the windowsill that morning, and put on her coat.
The Wex was high that day, brown and quick with the autumn rain, curling in long glassy ropes under the stone bridge at the bottom of Marsh Lane. A mist lay on it. The willows along the bank had begun to turn, and a few yellow leaves went by on the current like little boats. Up on the hill behind her the cemetery wall showed through the trees, and beyond that the bell of St. Aldhelm's was tolling twelve.
She went down the steps to the shingle. They had come every October, with a flask, and sat on the old plank, and thrown stones at a rotting post until it was too dark to see. Last October she had come alone; she had sat there for an hour, and thrown nothing. This year Dera had said, I'll come, and she had said, No. Not this one.
There was the post. It had a new green skin of weed. There was the plank, gray and split, under the alder, and there, in the wet, at the edge of the shallows, the pale smooth flat stones that the river always left, in the same place, year after year, as if it kept them for her.
She sat down on the plank.
She took the first stone from her pocket, and turned it over. It was small and round and gray, with a faint white line across it like a seam. A knife had notched it on one side: one short deep cut, the mark of a boy who did not know how to say what he meant. She had a dozen of them now, in a Kilner jar on the windowsill at home. This was the last. She held it a moment, against her cheek. It was warm from her pocket.
"This is for you," she said.
She did not say which of them. It went out in a long arc over the water and struck the surface far out with a small clean plip, and skipped, once, twice, three times, and vanished in the brown.
She took the second stone.
It was a good one. Flat and black and smooth, a palm-sized disc, perfectly balanced. She had picked it up from the shore a moment before, at the edge of the shallows. She weighed it. It was a little warm, a little damp, and there was a thing she had meant to say, and she found that she could not recall it.
"And this one," she said, "is for me."
She threw.
It went a long way. She watched it fly, a small dark thing against the white sky, and fall, and strike the water with a ring of silver that spread, and spread, and was taken away. The mist closed over it. The river went on, quietly, as it always had, indifferent and kind.
She sat on the plank for some time, listening. A moorhen called from the reeds. The bell finished tolling. In her pocket, her hand closed round a small plastic cassette, which she would play again, in the kitchen, in the evenings, until the tape wore thin.
Then she got up, and brushed the wet from her coat, and climbed the steps to the lane. At the top, she did not look back. There was a light on in the house, in the kitchen window, where she had left it. It was a small yellow light in the gray afternoon, and it shone out over the garden, and the wet black gate, and the stone doorstep where somebody, that morning, had set down a covered pot, still warm, wrapped in a tea towel, with a note in Dera's hand: Eat.
She walked toward it with her head up.
She was a widow, and a witness, and a woman who had lost almost everything and kept the truth; and she was, for the first time in a year, very nearly at peace. She was forty-two years old. She would put the kettle on. She would call her sister. She would eat, and sleep, and go to work in the morning, to a quiet building full of the dead, and put the world in order, one box at a time.
And somewhere under the river, in the dark and the silt and the long green drifting weed, two small stones lay side by side on the bed of the Wex, as they would lie for a thousand years, waiting to be found by someone who knew where to look.
You're just where I left you.
She opened the door.
THE END