Chapter 135: Wednesday

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 135: Wednesday

The boiler went on the Tuesday night, which meant that by the time Ivor arrived for the first of what Dana was calling the sessions and everyone else was calling nothing, there were two men from a heating company in the kitchen and the kettle was the only hot water in the building.

"I can come back," Ivor said from the doorway.

"No, come in, just — " Mia was on the floor by the airing cupboard with a torch. "Don't stand there, that's where he needs to — yeah. There. Sorry."

"It's no trouble."

"It's a lot of trouble, it's freezing." She shone the torch into the cupboard. "Is that meant to be that colour?"

"Which?"

"Green. There's a green."

One of the heating men said something about a diverter valve and Mia said something back that indicated she knew what a diverter valve was, and the conversation went on for about four minutes while Ivor stood by the table with his coat still on and Cole watched him not look at anything.

That was the thing Cole clocked first and did not mention for three weeks. A man in an unfamiliar kitchen looks. Everyone does it — the whiteboard, the photographs, the honey jar with the peeling bear on it. Ivor kept his eyes at chest height and slightly left and did not scan the room once, and it was not shyness, it was a habit so old it had stopped being a decision.

"Sit down," Cole said. "Coat's fine, it's cold."

"Thank you."

Dana came in with a folder and a biro and said "right" and then the heating man asked if anybody knew where the stopcock was, and it turned out nobody did, and for eleven minutes the session was four people and a torch looking under a sink.

It was Ivor who found it, eventually, behind a panel nobody had ever taken off.

"How'd you—"

"Nineteen-thirties conversion," he said, straightening up with some difficulty. "They put them there. It's the only sensible thing about the plumbing of that period and they stopped doing it in about 'forty-eight."

Mia looked at him for a second.

"You've been in a lot of houses," she said.

"I have."

"That's such a horrible sentence when you say it."

"Yes," Ivor agreed, and sat back down.

Dana got about nine questions in before Dov came through in a dressing gown and stopped dead, because nobody had told him there'd be a stranger at the table, and Cole said "Dov, this is Ivor" and Dov said "the letters man" and Ivor said "yes," and Dov nodded and got a bowl out and made cereal with his back to the room and stayed, which everyone understood and nobody commented on.

The questions went badly at first. Not hostile — unproductive. Dana had built them in a logical order and Ivor answered each one accurately and none of the answers went anywhere, and Cole could see her getting frustrated in the particular way she got when she was doing everything right.

"How many people at Halvern knew about the second floor?"

"I don't know. I was never inside."

"You said you'd tell us eleven things about it."

"About the building. The doors, the stair treads, where the fire alarm panel was, the fact the third window on the north side was bricked up from the inside rather than the outside." He said them flatly. "That's a list of things a man who has stood outside a building for a long time knows. I told you I could give you eleven things that weren't in a record. I did not say they'd be useful."

Dana put her pen down.

"That's a distinction you knew I'd miss."

"Yes."

"Why let me?"

"Because you'd have found out on the Tuesday and been angry with me on the Tuesday," Ivor said, "and I would rather be caught early and cheaply than late and expensively. That's not virtue, it's cost management."

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Reeve, who'd come in halfway and was eating toast standing up, said: "Does everything you say have that shape?"

"What shape?"

"The shape where you do a thing and then immediately tell us it's not a good thing you're doing."

Ivor considered it.

"Yes," he said. "It's how I've stayed alive. People will forgive nearly anything if you say it first."

"That's grim."

"It's extremely grim. It's also true and I'm too old to dress it."

The heating man came in and said the part would be Thursday and could somebody sign, and Mia signed, and there was a discussion about whether the flat would have hot water before Thursday which concluded that it would not.

"There's a leisure centre on Vardon Road," Reeve said. "Two pounds for a shower."

"I'm not paying two pounds for a shower in my own city."

"You've been complaining for nine hours—"

"I'll complain for nine more, it's free."

Ivor sat through all of it without any expression Cole could read. At one point Dov offered him cereal, which he declined, and then accepted when Dov said "there's only the one bowl left and I've had mine," and ate about half of it.

By eleven Dana had got two real things out of him and had stopped trying to get them in order.

The first was that the four organisations had each lasted between sixty and a hundred and forty years and each had collapsed the same way, which was that somebody near the top decided the arrangement was theirs personally rather than something they were holding, and everybody below that person spent eleven or twelve years pretending not to notice.

"And the current one?"

"Started sometime around 1911, though they'd tell you it's older and they believe that." He turned his cup round. "It's at the stage where the collapse has begun and hasn't been announced. I'd say it's about nine years in."

"2015," Dana said.

"That's when the letters stopped being read, yes. I wouldn't put it all on one year."

"But she stopped reading them."

"Somebody stopped reading them." Ivor's eyes came up for the first time in an hour. "I'd be careful about assuming that's the same thing as her deciding to."

The second thing came at half past twelve and came sideways, because Vesper asked about something else entirely.

She'd been sitting on the counter for most of the morning with the notebook shut on her knees, and she said, "Can I ask you a stupid one," and Ivor said "please," and she said:

"Do you sleep?"

"Six hours. Badly. Why?"

"Because I've got a friend who doesn't, and I've been wondering whether it's a thing that happens to people who — " She stopped. "Sorry. That's not a question, that's me fishing."

"It's a good question and I don't mind fishing." He put his cup down. "I sleep. I eat. I've had pneumonia twice and a hernia. I want to be clear that I'm not a different kind of thing from you, I've just gone on longer, and I've watched four people decide that going on longer made them a different kind of thing and it went badly for all four."

"Is that a warning?"

"It's a description of a pattern. I'd rather not call it a warning because warnings imply I know how yours ends."

Vesper opened the notebook then, which she had not planned to do, and turned it to the page from last April — the dense rings, not yet in the middle — and slid it across the table, and Cole did not stop her, and Dana, who would have, was looking at her phone.

Ivor looked at it for a long time.

"Where did you get this?"

"I drew it."

"No, you didn't," he said, and there was something in his voice that had not been there all morning, and everybody in the kitchen heard the difference. "I'm sorry. That's rude. I mean that your hand made it and I don't think you did, and I've seen — "

He stopped.

"May I have a minute," he said, and got up, and went and stood in the hallway by the front door for slightly longer than a minute, and came back and sat down and put his hands flat on the table the way he had the first night.

"Twice," he said. "I have seen that twice. Once in 1847 and once about nine years ago, and both times it was a person's own handwriting doing something the person hadn't asked for, and I'd like to tell you what happened afterward and I'd like you all to understand I'm going to be accurate rather than kind."

Nobody said anything.

"In 1847 the woman died within the year and I don't think the two were connected, and I want to say that first because it's the only part that isn't frightening." He looked at Vesper directly, which he hadn't done all morning. "Nine years ago it was a man in Tromsø, and he wrote eleven pages over four months and none of them were his, and at the end of it he wasn't a person any more. Not dead. Not smoothed. He was — the word I've used to myself is addressed. Something had been writing letters through him and when it finished he didn't have anything left to do."

Vesper's face had gone very still.

"How long did four months take," she said.

"He wrote eleven pages in four months."

"I've got eleven pages in two years."

"Yes," Ivor said. "That's the first genuinely good news I've had about any of this, and I'd like to be honest that I don't know what it means. Slower might mean smaller. It might mean more careful."

Dov, from the counter, without turning round: "Or it's not finished."

Everybody looked at the back of his head.

"Sorry," he said. "That's the third thing it could be."

The boiler man came back at one to say he'd been wrong about Thursday and it was Monday, and there was a row about that, and by the time it was done Ivor had put his coat on and was standing by the door and the morning had simply run out the way mornings do.

"Same time Friday?" Dana said.

"If you'll have me."

"We'll have you," Mia said, before anybody else could, which surprised her as much as it surprised the room, and she looked annoyed about it and added, "That's not a change of position, that's basic manners," and went to put the kettle on again, because it was the only hot water in the building.

Cole walked him down.

Three flights, slowly, and neither of them said anything until the street door.

"Thank you for not asking," Ivor said.

"About what?"

"The thing I'm holding. Nobody's asked. Six people, two sessions, and not one of you has asked me what it is." He pulled his collar up. "I'd assumed I'd have to refuse on the first night. I had a whole way of doing it and I've had to throw it away, and I find I mind that less than I expected."

"We'll ask eventually."

"I know." He almost smiled. "That's why I said thank you now. It won't be true for much longer."

[End of Chapter 135]