Out of Sequence

"Something that has never happened before is not the same as something that cannot happen."

I stayed where I was, with my hands in water that had gone cold round the pan while I was not attending to it, and heard the outer door, and then the boot room door, and then the inner one, and the cold came down the passage ahead of her.

Isla brought in wet grass and turned earth and the mineral cold of the hill, which was still coming off her jumper in a slow band I could feel from four feet away. There was mud to the ankle on both shoes and none whatever above it, so the hill path had held her weight and she had not come back through the gate at the bottom, which after two days of rain would have had her over the ankle and up the shin. Across the toes of both shoes ran a dark wet band. The grass on the top terrace, then, and not the flags. Her hair had come down on the left and she had left it down, and she was breathing through her nose and easily.

She went past me to the sink and filled the kettle without looking at what she was doing, and put it on, and had the caddy down before it had properly started.

"They're on the drive," she said. "Both of them. They've got Maeve."

"Maeve's at Olivia's until this afternoon."

"She rang Gran at seven and asked to be picked up." The leaf went into the strainer dry and grey-black and gave off nothing at all in the cold air at that end of the kitchen, three good pinches measured by eye and pressed down with two fingers. "The art thing finished last night. Olivia's cousins are all in the house, so there's nowhere to work. She wants to get on with the booth."

"Right."

The kettle came up through the long climbing note and then the flat one, and she let it go the whole way and stood off it while it dropped, and the water went quiet in the neck, and by the time she poured there was a good deal less heat in it than she thought. She warmed the pot in three swirls and tipped it into the sink half an inch from my wrist without either of us moving. The steam came up off the leaf as the water got at it and the whole of that end of the room smelled for about four seconds of hot wet hay, and then it stopped smelling of anything, because she had put the lid on.

She put her hand flat on the lid and left it there, and did not pick the cup up.

"Gran was strange on the drive," she said.

"Strange how?"

"She asked me whether the vents had been opened this morning."

"They haven't. She knows they haven't."

"That's more or less what I said." Her hand had not moved off the lid. "She asked me again about a minute later. Same words, same order."

I took the pan out of the water and set it on the drainer and left my hands where they were, in four inches of cold grey water with a skin of syrup sugar on it that had come off the pan and had nowhere to go, and I stood like that for a moment longer than there was any reason to.

"And she was talking to Grandpa across the roof of the car while I was coming up the drive," Isla said. "I got the end of it. She said, 'Not the fourth as well.' Then she saw me, and she stopped, and then she asked about the vents."

"Right."

"So either you know what that means or you don't."

"I don't."

She looked at me across the top of the pot for as long as it took her to satisfy herself, and then she took the cup off the counter and held it in both hands without drinking from it, and asked me nothing further, and I would have preferred almost anything to that.

The outer door went again. My father came through with two bags in one hand and the other arm out for balance, and the cold came in with him and a good deal of pipe, which had got into the wool of his coat over years and came out of it whenever he was warm. He put the bags on the end of the table, which was not where the bags went, and stood a moment with his hand on them.

His boots were dry. Not clean — they were never clean — but dry across the welt and grey with the dust of the drive rather than dark with the grass, so he had not been down the terraces that morning, and everything he was about to say to me he had got from somebody else.

"Morning, all. Daniel, lad, we'll want to talk about the greenhouse."

"Now?"

"Later would do." He straightened up with a hand at the small of his back and took longer over it than he would have liked me to see. "It isn't this minute. It's only that it isn't nothing." He put his hand flat on the table. "The Skye variation's away."

"Away."

"Coming into bud. Second and fourth bed. Not the whole of either — six or seven plants, and the rest still where they should be."

He said it and closed his mouth and left it lying there in front of me, and I took my hands out of the water at last and dried them on the cloth over the rail, which was already wet through from the pans and took nothing off them, and I stood there with wet hands in a warm kitchen and could not think of one single thing that would produce that.

Not the fourth as well.

The stairs went above us, four fast steps and then the whole remainder at once, and the door came in off its stop hard enough that I put a hand out towards the pan I had already put down twice.

"Dad, have you seen my maths book, because the test's tomorrow and I've done my bag and I've done the car and I've done the downstairs loo—"

"Why the downstairs loo?"

"Because that's where things end up." She had come down barefoot onto flagstones that had been holding the night since about two in the morning, and she stood on them without any apparent awareness of it, in the fox pyjamas that had stopped reaching her ankles and that she had refused every offer to replace, her hair up on one side and out on the other and a crease down one cheek from the seam of a pillowcase. She got to the middle of the room, saw her grandfather, and turned into an entirely different child. "Oh — hiya, Grandpa. Is Gran doing scones?"

"Good morning to you as well, wee fox." He put his hand flat on the top of her head as he went past for the rest of the bags, and did not disarrange it. "And she is. Once she's had the market off her."

"It's on the tasting bar," I said.

Rowan stopped dead. "What is?"

"Your maths book. Under the ledger with your calculator on top of it. You were in there on Tuesday night doing your homework instead of doing it upstairs, because the testing room is eighteen degrees and your bedroom is twelve."

"It's a north room, Dad, that's not my fault—"

"I've told you to put the second heater on."

"The second heater smells like a hoover fire," she said, from the passage, and the testing room door went, and half a second later, "Got it," and then nothing at all, because she had taken the back stairs two at a time and shut neither door behind her, and a draught came down the passage into the kitchen and moved the light on the table.

My father was still looking at the empty doorway. I gave him a moment with it and then I did not give him any more.

"Tell me about the Skye variation."

He came round the table and put both hands on the back of the chair he never sat in.

"Five weeks," he said. "Give or take three days at either end, and I'd sooner your mother gave you that figure than I did."

"That isn't possible."

"No."

So I started at the bottom, where the things are that can be put on a gauge and argued about afterwards, and I went up from there, and I did it out loud because doing it out loud had always been faster.

"Heat. The north-run thermostat's been sticking since February — it drops the call for twenty minutes and picks it back up, and if it's stuck open at night we could have been running the second and fourth two degrees over since the middle of the month and I wouldn't have seen it, because the logger's on the third."

"It isn't heat."

"Light, then. The auxiliaries come on at four and go off at seven. If the timer's dropped a phase since the clocks went we've been giving them an extra ninety minutes a day for a fortnight—"

"Daniel." He said it gently, which I liked considerably less than if he had said it any other way. "It isn't light either. Second and fourth are on the same circuit as the third, and the third is exactly where it ought to be, to the day. Whatever's at them has been selective."

I went down the hill in my head, in at the door of the forward section and through the partition and along the beds in the order they came, and I put my hand on each thing in turn the way I would have if I had been standing in it. The same air off the same vents, both ends, one lever. The same water out of the same cistern through the same filter and along the same header, and the header ran second, third, fourth, in that order, so anything wrong with the water would have shown in the third bed first. The same lamps on the same timer on the same circuit. The same two pairs of hands, one of them my mother's and one of them mine, most weeks of the year.

There was nothing in that building capable of telling the second bed from the third. That was the whole of my answer, and it took me about eight seconds to arrive at, and it was no use to anybody.

And underneath it, running its own arithmetic without being asked, the other thing.

The bud was not an ornament. The bud was the start of it. A fortnight of watching once it broke, then the cut, and the cut had to be done inside about four days or it was not worth doing, and then the racks and the drying loft above the auxiliary for a fortnight after that with somebody turning them twice a day, and then the grinding, and then the jars. Nine weeks of work that happened once in a year and did not happen again if it went wrong, and had never once begun without my mother standing over it from the first morning and three months of preparation laid down behind her.

The last week of March, and nine days before the festival.

"Your mother's been down there since half five," my father said. "She went before the market. She didn't tell me until we were coming back along the Braids."

Half five was full dark and a heavy dew and forty yards of open grass on the second terrace where the retaining wall drops away, and she had gone down it on her own with a torch and come back up it and changed and driven into town and bought a week's meat and a dozen eggs and collected a granddaughter off a doorstep in Merchiston, and had not said one word about any of it to my father until they were most of the way home.

"What does she think it is?"

My father looked at the passage door, and then at Isla, who had not moved and had still not drunk any of her tea, and then back at me.

"She's worried it's like '39."

The kettle had switched itself off some while back and was ticking as it went cold. The light had come the whole length of the table by then and was up against the fruit bowl. On the cold end of the counter the new syrup sat in its jug with a plate over it, still forty minutes off being worth tasting, and the muslin I had lifted out of it lay on a saucer beside it, going brown at the knot.

I had heard the story perhaps forty times before I was twenty. That they came out of sequence in the last days of August 1939, all of them, all at once, in every bed. That my great-grandmother stood in the doorway of that greenhouse and said a particular sentence about it, which had been said at Campbell tables ever since with the words worn smooth as a stair tread. That the month after, the world did what it did.

Nobody had ever told me what it meant. I had gone looking on my own account once, in a reading room, through nursery ledgers and the horticultural press and the letters of two botanists who had been in and out of that greenhouse in the thirties, and I had found the visits, and a note about a heating conversion, and nothing else whatever, and I had put the folder in a drawer and had not mentioned it to my parents then or since.

"Like '39 how?" I said.

"That," my father said, "is the question."

The door went and my mother came in with the last of the bags and the cold behind her, and she had two steps into the room before she said, without stopping and without greeting anybody, "The north glass is running."

"The vents have been shut since ten."

"I know when they were shut." She put the bags on the counter, in the right place, and began taking things out and putting them where they went, and did not take her coat off to do it. Butcher's parcel. Second butcher's parcel, heavier, wet through at one corner. The eggs, which she stood on the dresser end, because the counter was where everything ended up underneath everything else. "It'll want an hour with both ends open before you go near it. Don't let it out too fast."

"I know."

"I know you know." She stopped with her hand flat on the third parcel. "I'd rather say it."

Her shoes had been down the terraces and back. There was grass mud on them, dried to a pale grey crust up the side of the sole and cracking where it had flexed, and over the top of that, dark and still wet, a second coat of the same mud that had not had any time at all to do anything.

My father said, "I've told him about the Skye."

Her hands did not stop. They went on with the parcel at the same speed, no pause and no gather anywhere in them, and I stood and watched them do it and found that I had put my own hand flat on the edge of the sink.

"We'll not speculate in front of the girls," she said.

Isla was four feet from her elbow with a cup of tea in both hands that had gone cold enough by then to hold against the chest.

She said nothing. She did not look at me either, which she could easily have done. I let my mother say it and I did not put a hand up, and Isla drank one mouthful she did not want and set the cup on the drainer with a single definite click and went out through the boot room to see to her shoes.

"She's eighteen," I said, when the door had gone.

"I'm aware of her age."

"She's eighteen, she's been up since half six, and she came up that drive while the pair of you were talking across the car."

My mother turned round with her coat still on and the bags half out behind her. There was colour high on both cheeks that had not come from the cold, because the cold had gone out of her in the four minutes she had been in the room, and underneath it she had the grey look she got on the second day of a chest infection, and her hands, now that they had stopped, were not quite still.

"Then I'll speak to her myself," she said, "when I've something worth handing her. Which I have not got. I have seven plants in bud and no cause for any of it, and I'll not give my granddaughter a fright as a substitute for an answer."

"You've been down twice."

She looked at me. Then she looked down at her own shoes, and back up.

"After I dropped Maeve at the gate," she said.

Behind me my father had gone very still, which told me he had not known either.

"We'll look at the journal after breakfast," my mother said. "Not before. I want my hands warm and I want an hour where nobody asks me anything."

She reached under her coat into the pocket of her cardigan and put the journal on the table.

It came out of that pocket for greenfly. It had come out the week the auxiliary hygrometer failed so that she could look up what she had written the last time the auxiliary hygrometer failed. It was small and brown and had been rebacked twice, and the second repair was my great-grandmother's work and was better than the first, and the leather had gone dark and slightly greasy at the fore edge from a century of thumbs.

Standing out of it were slips of paper.

Four proud of the top edge and one out of the fore edge, all of them cut off the back of a seed order with scissors rather than torn, my mother's pencil showing on the corner of the topmost. They were not gathered at one end. They were spread through the whole depth of the book, and the first sat very near the front, three-eighths of an inch in, no more.

Five.

One would have been the story we already had, marked where anybody would have marked it, and I could have carried one. Five meant she had gone through that book cover to cover in the dark before the market and had found four further places worth a slip of paper. Four more times. Nobody had ever put four more times in front of me, at any table, in any version, on any of the forty occasions I had been told about my great-grandmother standing in that doorway.

I picked the pan up off the drainer and put it back down in the same place, and did not look at my father, in case he had counted them as well.

Then Maeve's voice came down the passage, saying something to Rowan on the stairs and Rowan shouting the last of it back over her, and my mother took the journal off the table and put it away into her cardigan, and did not take her coat off.

"We'll away down," she said, to the room, and picked her own bag up off the counter and left the meat and the eggs where they lay.

My father took the pipe out of his breast pocket, looked at it, and put it back. Then he collected the two empty bags off the end of the table and went out after her, and I heard the pair of them go up the passage, and somewhere past the second door I heard my mother say something short to him, and I did not hear him answer it.