A Name Not Crossed

Edith Crewe had taught two generations of Pol Treven to read, and she had never quite forgiven the village for how little it now did so. The library was a cupboard. The newsletter was gossip with a staple in it. So when the Maritime Heritage committee asked whether she might catalogue the old harbour records before the damp finished them, she said yes before they had finished the sentence, and she said it because she was lonely, and she would have admitted that to no one alive. The records lived in the harbourmaster's loft, in a tin trunk that smelled of salt and sleeping mice. Most of it was what she had expected — landing tallies, lighthouse correspondence, a century of weather noted in a dozen different hands. But underneath all of it, wrapped in oilcloth as though it mattered, was the tide register. She knew what it was, of course. Everyone in Pol Treven over a certain age knew what it was, though few had seen it. It was the old custom, older than the lifeboat, older than the chapel clock: every boat that left the harbour was written into the register by the harbourmaster, with the date and the tide and the names aboard, and every boat that came home again was crossed through with a single line. A boat with a line through it was safe. A boat without one was a prayer. The custom had lapsed in the nineteen-eighties, when the radio made it sentimental, but for two hundred years before that the register had been, quite literally, the village's account of who the sea still owed. Edith took it home. She told the committee she needed good light, which was true, and she set it on her kitchen table and worked through it across a week of evenings with a magnifying glass and a pot of tea, and she found it the loveliest thing she had handled in years. The hands changed as the harbourmasters changed. The ink went from iron-gall brown to a hard mid-century blue. Boats were born and named and sold and renamed and lost. Nearly every entry had its line, its small black absolution, and the few that did not had a date beside them in a later hand, and the word she did not like to read aloud even alone in her kitchen. She was almost at the end, in the blue ink, in the nineteen-seventies, when she found the name that was not crossed out. The boat was the Mary Gwen. The date was a Tuesday in October, nineteen seventy-eight. The tide was noted as a spring ebb. And the register said that the Mary Gwen had gone out that morning with two names aboard — Stephen Pascoe, and a second name the damp had taken almost entirely, leaving only a capital R and the ghost of a descender. There was no line through the entry. There was no later date beside it. There was no word. Edith sat with her tea going cold, which was a thing she disapproved of in others, and looked at the uncrossed entry for a long time. It might mean nothing. She made herself say that, in her teacher's voice, the voice for a child who had leapt to the end of a sum. The custom had been dying by 1978; perhaps a harbourmaster had simply grown careless, written boats out and forgotten to write them home. Perhaps the Mary Gwen had come back on a busy day and the line had been missed. There were a dozen dull explanations and Edith Crewe had spent her life teaching children to prefer dull explanations to thrilling ones. But she had also lived in Pol Treven for forty-one years, and she knew its dead the way she knew its lanes, and she knew that no one named Stephen Pascoe had drowned out of this harbour. She would have known. A drowning was the one piece of news the village never lost. There was a Pascoe family still — there was a Pascoe on the lifeboat crew now — and there had never, in her forty-one years, been so much as a hushed October anniversary, never a name read in the chapel, never a stone. Either the Mary Gwen had come home in 1978 and the harbourmaster had failed to cross her out. Or she had not come home, and two men had gone into the sea on a spring ebb tide, and the village of Pol Treven, which never lost a drowning, had somehow lost this one so completely that forty-six years later not one living soul had thought to grieve it. Edith closed the register. She poured the cold tea down the sink and disapproved of herself, and she stood at the dark window looking down at the harbour lights, and she found that she was no longer lonely at all. She was something a great deal more dangerous in a woman of seventy-three with nothing left to lose and a lifetime's habit of insisting that sums be made to work. She was curious.