Banked Fire

Tremayne's chandlery came with shelves of uncounted stock, a rolling ladder on a brass rail and three men who touched each other without noticing, and Senara had been hired to sort out only the first of them.

The key came in a brown envelope with her name on the front in capitals, posted to Southampton a fortnight before she left it, and Senara had carried it the whole way down the A30 in the inside pocket of her jacket, where she could feel it against her ribs every time she changed gear.

It was a Yale, newly cut, the brass still bright at the edges. The door it opened was at the side of the chandlery, up two granite steps and painted the dark green of the shopfront, and at a quarter to eight on a Monday morning in March it was the only door on the harbour front that anyone was using. She turned the key and the lock went over cleanly. She stood there for a moment longer than she needed to with her hand on it.

Then she went up.

The flat was the whole of the first floor: a front room with two sash windows on the harbour, a bedroom at the back over the yard, a bathroom with a bath that had feet, and a kitchen just big enough for one person who knew where she had put things. Someone had cleaned it. Someone had also left a pint of milk in the fridge, a loaf on the side and a note under the kettle in a broad, careful hand: Heating is the switch by the boiler, not the dial. Shop opens at nine. J.

She unpacked before she did anything else, because that was the order things went in. Four boxes and two cases, labelled on two sides. Kitchen first, then the bathroom, then the clothes, the shirts on hangers in the order she would wear them across the week, jeans folded on the shelf, the wrap dresses at the end of the rail in case there was ever anywhere to wear them. She broke the boxes down flat and stacked them inside the bedroom door for the recycling, which she would have to ask about. She wrote recycling — which day? on the first page of a new notebook and underlined it.

At eight forty she twisted her hair up off her neck, pushed a pencil through it to hold it, rolled her sleeves to the elbow and went down the inside stairs to the shop.

The stairs came out behind the counter, and the shop opened in front of her like the hold of a ship somebody had been filling for fifty years and never emptying.

It was long and narrow and high, running back from the harbour windows under a ceiling of tongue-and-groove boards gone the colour of tea. Both side walls were shelving from the floor to that ceiling, and every shelf was full. Shackles in wooden trays. Blocks hanging on hooks. Tins of antifouling in three colours and two of them discontinued. Coils of line in the rope bin by the door, where a large grey cat was asleep with its chin on a coil of blue braid and did not open its eyes for her. Further back, past the chain locker and the bins of galvanised fittings, she could see brass: navigation lamps, a whole shelf of them, and above that a row of something boxed that she could not read from here.

Running the length of the left-hand wall, on a brass rail fixed at shoulder height, was a wooden rolling ladder. Its rungs were worn pale in the middle. Its wheels sat in a track along the floor.

Senara looked at it, and then up at the top shelves it served, and felt the particular calm that came over her in front of a job nobody had done.

"You'll want a list," said a voice from the back, and she turned.

Jago Tremayne was bigger than his voice on the phone had suggested, and his voice on the phone had not been small. He came down the shop between the shelves with his head bent slightly out of habit under a beam that cleared him by inches, a tall, heavy man in a navy fisherman's jumper that fitted him across the chest and shoulders as though it had been knitted on him. Black hair cut short and curling anyway. His face and his forearms were burned brown by wind, and his hands, when he shook hers, were careful about it.

"I'll want a list," she agreed. "Is there one?"

"There's my father's." He reached under the counter and brought up a ledger, cloth-bound, a strap of elastic round it. "And there's what's actually on the shelves. They have not been on speaking terms for a while."

"How long a while?"

He considered that with more honesty than she had expected. "He died three years ago," he said. "So at least that."

She took the ledger. She did not open it yet. "Then I'll start from the shelves and work back to the book, and we'll see where they disagree."

Something went across his face at that, quick, and was put away. She noted it and did not ask.

He walked her through the shop. He did it well, she thought: what sold and when, which skippers paid on the day and which paid at the end of the season, why the antifouling had to be on the floor by the second week of March and not the third. He knew the weather the way she knew lead times. Storm cable goes the day before a gale, he said, and never the day after. He knew what everything cost, and he said the numbers flatly, the way people did when the numbers hurt.

At the back, under the brass lamps, he stopped.

"Those were his," he said.

"They're all his, aren't they? The ordering."

"Those especially."

She looked up at them. Fourteen, at a count, and she would count again from the ladder. "How many sold last year?"

There was a pause long enough to be an answer.

"Right," she said, gently, and wrote brass nav lamps — 14? — check against ledger on her clipboard, and when she looked up Jago had his hand flat on the edge of the shelf as though it might go somewhere.

By ten past nine she was up the ladder.

It ran better than it looked. She pushed off with one foot and it rolled the length of the rail with a low, even rumble, and she stopped herself at the first bay with a hand on an upright. From up here the shop was a plan of itself: aisles, bins, the counter, the till, the top of Jago's head as he served the first customer of the day a box of split pins and a conversation about the weather. She worked from the top shelf down, left to right, count, description, code if there was one, a question mark if there was not. The pencil in her hair came out twice to be used and went back in twice. She pushed the ladder on.

She was four bays along when the back door went and the cold came in with somebody.

"She's up the ladder already," said a man's voice, pleased, like a man reporting a good wind.

"She's been up the ladder since nine," said Jago.

Senara looked down. The man who had come in from the yard was a head shorter than Jago and seemed to take up the same room. Compact, broad through the shoulders, a grey knit pushed up at the sleeves over forearms corded like rope, sandy hair cut close. His nose had been broken once and set by someone in a hurry. He had sea-grey eyes, creased at the corners from squinting at mastheads, and he turned them up at her and smiled as though she were exactly what he had hoped would be up there.

"Colm," he said. "I do the rigging. Shed out the back. If anything up there is wire, it's probably mine, and if it's labelled, it isn't."

"Senara."

"I know," he said. "He's said it about forty times since Thursday."

He went past the counter on his way to the stairs, and as he passed Jago he put his hand on the back of Jago's neck. Not quickly. He left it there for a step, his thumb moving once under Jago's hairline, and Jago tipped his head into it the way you would turn your face to the sun, without looking round and without stopping what he was saying to the customer about split pins.

Then Colm was gone up the stairs, and Jago finished the sale, and nobody said anything about it, because there was clearly nothing to say.

Senara counted the shelf in front of her again, because she had lost her place.

Ruan came down at eleven to make the tea.

She heard him before she saw him, a long way up: a door at the top of the house, feet on bare boards, then the inside stairs taking him lightly, two at a time. He was tall and lean, with dark chestnut hair tied back off his face with what looked like a length of waxed twine, a fitted charcoal shirt with the cuffs turned back, and ink on the side of his right hand from the heel of it to the little finger. He had the paleness of a man who worked under a skylight all winter. He looked at the ladder, and at her on it, and then along the shelf she was counting, as if checking her figures.

"That's the sailmaker," said Jago, unnecessarily.

"I'm the sailmaker," Ruan agreed. He had a grey, level gaze and a mouth that did not give much away. "Loft's at the top. If you hear swearing, that's me, and it's about a luff. How do you take it?"

"Take what?"

"Tea." He was already through the door at the back of the shop, where she now saw there was a sink and a kettle and a shelf of mugs she had not counted. "I make it. It's the only rule in the building."

"White, no sugar."

"Good," he said, as though she had passed something, and she heard the kettle go on.

He brought it to the foot of the ladder and held it up to her. She came down three rungs to take it and their fingers touched round the mug, his warm and dry and rough at the pad of the middle finger, and he looked up at her for a second longer than he looked at most things, she suspected. Then he took Jago's through to the counter and set it by his elbow without being asked, and went out the back door with the third mug to the shed, and came back without it, and went up the stairs again. A circuit. A route he had run so many times he did not need to think where the turns were.

She drank her tea on the ladder and wrote down the sailmaker's route in her head the way she would have written a delivery schedule, and did not entirely know why.

By six she had done the left-hand wall, half the back store and nothing at all about the brass lamps except count them twice. Fourteen. She shut the clipboard and turned the sign on the door to CLOSED because Jago had his head in the till, and when he looked up and saw her do it, he did not say anything, but he looked at her in a way she put down as surprise and then was not sure about.

"Supper's at half six," he said. "Upstairs. Top kitchen. You're eating with us."

"You don't have to—"

"You're eating with us," he said, the way a man reads a forecast out loud: no opinion in it, only fact.

The second floor was theirs, she gathered. A landing with three doors and a fourth open on a kitchen that ran the depth of the house, low-beamed, lit yellow, warm from an old cream range at one end, and smelling of onions and something with wine in it. Above it, through the ceiling, she could hear Ruan walking about in the loft, and then the loft door, and then him on the stairs.

The table was a big scrubbed rectangle that had been somebody's grandmother's and would be somebody's grandchild's. There were four chairs at it. That was the first thing she noticed and she noticed it because it was the kind of thing she noticed: four chairs, four places laid, and one of them had a mug at it already, white, with tea in it, no sugar.

Colm was at the range, stirring. Jago was opening wine. Ruan came in, pulled out the chair beside the mug and stood behind it, and it took her a moment to realise he was holding it out for her.

She sat. The chair did not wobble. It had been there a long time; she could tell from the wear on the rail where people's feet went. It was only that, until tonight, nobody had been sitting in it.

They ate stew out of wide bowls with bread torn off the loaf. They talked about a boat called the Morwenna needing a new halyard by Thursday and whether the Truro rep would ring before the end of the month or make them ring him, and Senara answered when she was asked something and was asked something often. She learned that the recycling went out on Wednesdays and that the grey cat had no name because the old man had never given it one and now it was too late to start. She learned that Colm ate fast and Jago ate slowly and that Ruan saved the best piece on his plate till last and then gave it away, tonight to Colm, who took it off his fork without looking.

And she watched them.

She did not mean to. It was what she did; it was what she was for, in a shop. She could stand in a room for ten minutes and tell you where everything was and how long it had been there. So she watched Colm reach past Jago for the salt and leave his forearm resting along Jago's shoulders afterwards, as if it was where his arm lived. She watched Jago's hand find Colm's knee under the table and stay. She watched Ruan lean back on two legs of his chair and nudge Colm's ankle with his foot to make a point about wire rope, and Colm nudge him back, and none of the three of them so much as glance down. Touch went round that table like the salt did. Nobody kept count.

It was lovely. She thought that quite plainly, and then thought, with the same plainness: it was finished before I got here.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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