Opening the book…
Set Fair
The barometer came off its nail with a puff of dust that showed exactly how long it had hung there, and Meg Harmon had it half into the crate before Edwin was across the kitchen.
“That’s Grandad’s.”
“It’s the house’s,” Meg said. “I’m the one who reads it.”
“Reading a thing doesn’t make it yours.”
“No,” she said, wrapping the barometer in the good tea towel, which she was also taking, “loving a thing doesn’t make it yours either, or we’d be having a different year.”
That was lower than she’d meant to go. Edwin took the blow the way he took everything now, with a small adjustment of the jaw and a return to his side of the room, and Meg set the wrapped barometer in the crate with the mustard pot and the photographs and hated the sight of it there, boxed, and packed two more things on top of it so she couldn’t see it.
The feed was on above the bench. The feed was always on now; everyone’s was. Three weeks it had run, the same story cycling under different faces — the survey release, the disputed survey release, the confirmed survey release, men and women in good coats standing in front of the same starfield graphic saying the same careful things in different orders. The sky was measurably dimmer at the faint end of the field. The effect was real, was ongoing, was not local, was not instrumental error. Beyond that the coats disagreed. She had watched a man from a northern institute say centuries on Tuesday and a woman from Pune say millennia, if the early rate holds on Wednesday, and watched the two of them together on Thursday decline to agree even about the disagreement, and through all of it the word the presenters kept reaching for and the scientists kept declining to give them was the one everybody at every bench and table on Earth had already supplied for themselves.
They argued straight over the top of it, mostly. It was wallpaper. It was the end of everything, at the faint end of the field, on a forecast nobody could pin inside an order of magnitude, and it was wallpaper, because the crates had to be done by the twentieth and the argument about the barometer was a month overdue.
“You’ll want the ladder for the top shelf,” Edwin said. “I’m not getting it down for you.”
“I’ve never once asked you to get anything down for me.”
“No,” he said. “You haven’t. That’s been the trouble on this farm for thirty years—”
On the feed a presenter asked her guest, in the voice presenters use when they’ve been told to land the segment, how long humanity had. And the guest — young, tired, wearing the three-week beard of a man who had been in studios since the release — didn’t give the careful answer. He looked into the camera, the first time all segment, and said: “The honest answer is we don’t know if this is a problem for our great-grandchildren or for nobody you could name a relation to. The bands are that wide. What I can tell you is which way the number moves every time we refine it. It has not once moved kind.”
The kitchen went quiet. Not because of him, exactly — a hundred coats had said worse in three weeks — but the kettle was off the boil and the argument was between breaths, and the sentence landed on the lino between them and lay there.
Edwin stood with his hands on the back of a chair, watching the screen. Meg stood with a half-wrapped serving dish, watching him. Thirty years, two of everything, and they were both looking at the same wall for the length of four heartbeats, which was longer than they’d faced any one direction together since the spring.
“Owen’s lot come into it,” Edwin said at last. “The returns. They posted the third schedule this morning.”
“I saw it at six.” She had it by heart. Fourth group, no earlier than the eighth of next month, subject to revision. She checked the family board every morning before the kettle, the way she read the glass every morning before the kettle: tap, read, know the day. “We’re not telling him about any of this in a message. We agreed.”
“We agreed,” Edwin said. The one thing left standing that they had built together and both still stood under. Owen would come down the drive with his kit over his shoulder, and they would feed him, and let him sleep in his own bed one night in his own house, and then, at the table, both of them there, they would tell him what the house was about to become. He was not going to hear it over a fleet relay with a hundred ratings queued behind him. He was going to hear it from his parents, in person, like a son. The crates would go out to the shed before the eighth; the house would stand as near to whole as they could stage it, for one more night. It was not a good plan. It was the one they had.
The gate clicked at the bottom of the yard.
Two figures were coming up the drive in the grey afternoon, and behind them at the road stood a car with a government fleet plate, and one of the figures was young and carried a folder, and the other was old and carried nothing, and walked with a cane, slow, letting the young one shorten his stride to match.
Meg put down the serving dish.
Afterwards she could never say at what point on the drive she knew. Not the car; cars came. Not the folder. Somewhere in the gap between the two of them, in the fact of the old man — in the unhurried, appallingly respectful pace of a man who had come a very long way to walk twenty metres, and whose face she knew from the feeds without ever having expected it to arrive at her own gate under her own weather. It arranged itself all at once, the plate and the folder and the face, into the one shape it could possibly make, and the serving dish was already down, and her hands were already cold.
“Edwin,” she said.
At the door Edwin stood square in the frame, a farmer at his own threshold, and said, stupid with it, “You’re Marcus Cole.”
“I am,” the old man said. “May we come in, Mr Harmon.”
They sat in the front room, which nobody had sat in since Christmas. The young officer perched on the edge of the settee with the folder squared on his knees. The old man took the chair Edwin steered him to, by the cold hearth, and thanked him for it, and sat with both hands on the head of the cane, and told them their son was dead.
The words themselves came off the folder, some of them, read by the young officer in the manner of a man who had been taught that reading them exactly was a kindness, that families should not get a stranger’s improvisation. Fell in action. Final operations. Location and particulars to follow at declassification. The Service’s profound— Meg lost the thread of it in places, the way you lose a road in rain. The old man did not fill the gaps with anything. He sat still and let the words be read, and when the officer had finished he said the only part she kept whole.
“Mrs Harmon. Mr Harmon. Your boy did his work and it mattered, and he was coming home when the last of it found him. I won’t dress it kinder than that. You’d see through it, and you’d be right to.”
The old man named the ship. Meg lost the name immediately and forever. It was a word, and it had eaten her son.
Edwin, from the doorway — he’d not been able to sit past the second sentence — asked the question nobody else was going to ask.
“Why you.” It came out flat, farm-flat, no ornament on it. “They send a car and a folder for everyone? Or just for us.”
“They send the officer and the folder for everyone,” the old man said. “The rest of it they send in the post.” He turned the cane’s head under his hands, a slow quarter-turn, the first movement he’d wasted since sitting. “I’ve read that letter, Mr Harmon. I signed the form of it. It’s a bad letter.” He looked up, and the eyes in the old face were not doing the sympathetic-glass thing that official eyes did; they were just looking at Edwin, one man at another. “I answer for the fleet. Most of what that means is rooms and paper. This part I do myself when I can, and I can’t often, and I’m sorry it’s your door I had the strength for this week and not some other mother’s.”
It should have sounded like a speech. Said flat, at their own cold hearth, by a man who had buried the fire in his voice somewhere south of it, it sounded like an apology.
Meg made tea because her body had decided that was what was happening, and to refuse the body just then was to find out what else it might do. The old man took his cup and drank it, properly, all of it, unhurried, while the young officer let his go cold at his knee. They did not talk about Owen. She could not, yet, and he did not make her. Edwin asked, in the wreckage-voice of a man keeping the forms up because forms were what he had, whether it was true what they said about the winters coming harder, and the old man said that his marsh at home had skimmed over early this last winter, a fortnight before its day, and that his grandfather would have called it a hard-water year, and Edwin said his own grandfather would have said the same, and both men held on to that nothing for a moment the way men hold a rail.
There would be a decoration, the old man said at the door. It goes to the family now; that’s how that works; a man would come about it, and they should feel free to make him wait. The young officer left a card and the folder. The car took the road north with the light going, and Meg stood at the window with the undrunk half of her own tea and watched its dust settle back onto the paddock in the last sun, and the feed in the kitchen went on quietly telling the empty room about the sky.
The crates stayed exactly as the afternoon had left them. Nobody could have told her about the weeks after: half the kitchen in cardboard, the tape gun on the sill with its end folded under so it wouldn’t stick to itself, and neither of them packed another box, and neither of them opened one. They moved room to room around the stopped decision, careful as thieves.
The fight, when it came, came at one in the morning over the not-telling, which is to say over everything. Edwin standing in the dark hallway in his socks saying at least the boy never knew, at least he went thinking the house was whole, thank God we waited — and Meg hearing it go through her like a slammed door: he died thinking we were something we weren’t. We sent him to the war with a lie by omission and he banked on it and died on the strength of a house that had already—
Meg said a great deal of that out loud. More of it than was true, in the way of one-in-the-morning, and some things about Edwin’s mother’s crockery that had nothing to do with anything and had been loaded since August. Edwin went white and quiet and said, “At least I wasn’t already out the door when the car came,” and then they were both standing in the hallway hearing that sentence finish existing, unrecallable, the worst either of them had ever said in that house — and neither of them apologised, and neither of them left, and after a while she went and lay on Owen’s bed with her shoes on and he went out to the shed and did something to the quad’s engine that the quad’s engine did not need, and they kept the house’s two ends till morning.
The awful arithmetic she did alone, the next night, at the kitchen bench at three, with the feed muted and captioned and the coats still at it. NEW CONSTRAINT ON DECLINE RATE, said the caption. MODELS CONVERGING. She stood in the dark with her hands flat on the cold bench and read the sky’s numbers, and did the other numbers, the ones with nobody to release them. Owen’s children. She had never met them. The introductions had come only to their possibility — a girl with Edwin’s cowlick, some boy with her own bad temper on a good frame — and she had made room for them the way you clear a shelf for something ordered but not yet arrived. The models converging on the screen were converging, among everything else, on those children, and on their children, and she stood at her own bench in her own dark trying to work out which grief she was feeling at which second — the boy, or the boy’s unarrived world; the sky, or the fact that he’d never now stand under any version of it — and the two of them would not separate, would not hold still to be weighed. They were not two griefs at all. They were one grief that was too big for its box, and she was the box.
Meg went out into the yard because the walls had got close. The night was hard and clean, no moon, the basin doing what the basin did — the whole southern field out, horizon to ridge, in its tens of thousands, the sky that had been the district’s one boast for three hundred years. It looked the same. That was the outrage of it. She stood in the frost-stiff grass in Edwin’s coat and looked at the enormous unchanged announcement overhead, and could not see one star fewer, and knew from a month of coats that she couldn’t, that no naked eye on Earth could, not yet, not for years — and it made no difference at all. The sky had looked infinite because she had believed it was. Now the same sky stood there over the same paddocks with the same stars in roughly the same places, and it looked like what the numbers said instead: like something with an end on it, far off, past everyone, but an end, the way a field looks different — same grass, same fence — the day after you learn the lease won’t be renewed.
Behind her the kitchen light came on. Edwin, up at three as well, filling the kettle for one and then, visibly, through the window, standing a moment before filling it the rest of the way for two.
Her sister rang on a Sunday. The name came up on the handset and Meg nearly let it go — Fee had rung every second day, gently, relentlessly, and Meg had developed a whole repertoire of not-answering — but some duty reflex fired and she picked it up, and knew from the first syllable that Fee’s voice was wrong. Bright-wrong. Terrified-bright, the voice of a woman with news on her hands that would not keep and could not, in any decent universe, be said.
Justine had had the baby. Three weeks early, all well, mother and child, six and a half pounds — the details arriving in a rush and then Fee running aground, mid-sentence, on the thing itself, and the line going so quiet Meg could hear her sister’s kitchen clock. I’m sorry, Fee said finally, wretched. The timing of it. I told her not to ring you herself, I said I’d — you don’t have to say anything, Meggy. There’s nothing right to say. I know it.
A baby. Meg stood in her half-boxed kitchen holding the handset. Somewhere north, this minute, in a plastic cot in a bright ward: a person to whom none of it had happened. Not the war, not the crates, not Owen — a person for whom Owen would only ever be a photograph on an aunt’s wall and a name said in a certain voice at Christmas — and not the sky either; a person who would grow up under the survey’s numbers the way you grow up under weather, native to it, nothing missing, because you cannot miss a brightness that was spent before you opened your eyes. The first of the family born on the far side of everything. It was obscene. It was the only good news the family had had all year. Both of those were entirely true and stood there side by side, not cancelling.
“What did they call her,” Meg said. Her voice came out about right, which surprised her.
“Alba,” said Fee, and then, anxious, hearing everything the name could bump against: “It was Nan’s, you remember, it’s for Nan—”
“I know who it’s for.” White. Nan’s name meant white, dawn-white; Nan had hated it and answered to nothing but Nan for ninety years. “It’s a good name, Fee. Tell Justine it’s a good name.”
After the call she stood a long time at the window. Down the road at the Kerrs’, out of school for the winter break, the two boys were doing what they did every clear afternoon, which was ride the farm track from the shed to the cattle grid and back, standing on the pedals, racing nobody, their noise arriving across two fences thin and bright as wire. The universe was ending at the faint edge of the field on a forecast of centuries to millennia, and Colin Kerr was going to beat his brother to the grid or die in the attempt. She watched them the way she had lately caught herself watching everything young — with a sensation she refused to call by any of its available names — and then Edwin’s step was in the doorway behind her, and she said, without turning:
“Justine’s had the baby. A girl. They’re calling her Alba.”
Edwin was quiet. In the old accounting — the spring accounting, the accounting of the crates — his quiet had gone down in the books as absence, as the thing he did instead of being in the marriage. She listened to this one with the new ears the year had beaten into her and heard it exactly: a man at a door with his whole chest full and no way through the bottleneck of his own voice.
“Alba,” he said, finally. And then, rough, from nowhere: “Owen liked Justine. She used to put him in goal because he was hopeless and he never once worked out it was a demotion.”
It was the first time either of them had said his name in the past tense on purpose. The sentence had a laugh inside it that came out in the wrong shape, and Meg turned around, and her husband of thirty years was standing in his own kitchen doorway with his face given up entirely, undefended, ruined, his — the face she had been trying to get behind since April with argument after argument after argument, and grief had simply walked through it — and she crossed the kitchen and stood against him and his arms came around her and his hands closed in the wool of her cardigan, and they stood there among the crates a long time, not speaking, not fixing anything, two people under one roof holding the one other person on Earth who had lost exactly, exactly what they had lost.
None of it was solved. The things they had fought about since the spring were real things and stayed real. He was still the man who went silent in exactly the places she needed sound; she was still the woman who reached for the wound in an argument and hit it. The house was still half in boxes because she had still, in April, in May, in June, been right about most of it.
But standing in the kitchen with her face in the work-smell of his shirt, Meg did the last of the arithmetic, the only sum of the whole terrible season that came out clean. Everything on the far side of that door was subtraction. The sky was leaving at the speed of centuries; Owen had left at the speed of a government car; the futures she’d shelved space for had left with him, quietly, without a notice in the post. Against all of it the books held exactly one entry that was hers to keep or throw away, and it was breathing into her hair with its hands closed in her cardigan, and the question — she saw it now with the 3 a.m. flatness, which turned out to work in daylight too — had never been the spring’s question, can this marriage be saved, whatever that had ever meant. The question was the one the year had stripped it down to.
Do we want to lose this too?
Everything else was being taken. This one they would have to throw away themselves, with their own hands.
“Stay for tea,” she said into his shirt. Ridiculous. It was his house. He held on and did not point that out.
The frost came early again that week, a fortnight before its day. A hard-water year, all over the world.
Meg came down first, as always, put the kettle on for two, as now, and stood at the bench while it worked itself up. The crates were still along the wall. They would be dealt with — some things really were leaving this house; she had not been wrong in April, and being less lonely did not make her wrong — but dealt with later, slower, argued properly, one object at a time — taken apart, not detonated. Not by the twentieth. The twentieth had gone by unmarked, ten days ago.
The crate by the door had the good tea towel poking out the top.
Meg unwrapped the barometer standing at the bench. The nail was still in the wall — thirty years of nail, a shadow of clean paint around it where the sun had never got. It took her a moment on tiptoe, both hands, the kettle roaring under her, and then the barometer was back, slightly crooked, as it had hung slightly crooked since Edwin’s grandfather banged the nail in on some other cold morning under some other sky’s full complement of stars.
Meg tapped the glass, twice, with one knuckle: the morning stroke, the oldest habit in the house.
The needle stirred, swung a little, and settled — a shade below Change, a shade above Rain, weather coming, nothing the basin hadn’t survived a thousand times. High on the dial, unreachable, off where the fine mornings lived, sat the two old words in their worn gold letters.
Edwin’s step on the stair. The kettle coming to the boil. Out the window the basin lay white to the fences, and the Kerr boys were already on the track, early, their breath in flags, racing nobody through the best sky in the world.
“Glass’s back up,” Edwin said, from the door.
“It is,” Meg said, and got down the second cup.