Chapter Four

The Woman Who Waited Eight Years Sunna Kettil was already in the Luna's rooms, and she had brought her own tea. "You're up," she said. "Good. I've had them light the fire in here because the other one smokes when the wind's in the east, and nobody tells you that, they just let you find out." "I'm sorry, who are you." "Sunna." She put a cup down for me without asking whether I wanted one. "Kettil. I've done the pack's charity work for six years and the winter relief for four, and I have about nine hundred pages of paper that somebody now has to sign, and I would rather it was you than Ivar because Ivar signs things without reading them and then complains." I have thought since about how easy it would have been if she had been a different sort of woman. She put the accounts on the table and opened them and turned them round so they faced me. Columns. Sub-columns. A ruled line down the middle in red with running totals on both sides. "Relief goes out on the ninth," she said. "That's the fuel allocation, that's the widows' portion, and that column is the one everybody argues about, because it looks like it should balance and it doesn't, and it doesn't for a reason that takes about ten minutes to explain." "Explain it." She did. It took nine minutes. I understood perhaps half. "You've never done accounts," she said. It was not unkind. It was a woman finding out where the floor is. "I drove a truck." "Then you'll have done load sheets, and a load sheet is this with fewer columns." She turned the page. "It's learnable. I learned it. I'll walk you through the ninth and you'll do the tenth on your own and it'll be fine." "Why would you do that." She looked up. "Because the fuel allocation goes to two hundred and forty households," she said, "and I am not going to let it fall over because of the two of us." And that was the thing. She meant it. She had a better claim to that table than I did and she was going to teach me anyway, and I sat there with a cup of tea I had not asked for and could not find a single place to put my dislike of her. Ivar came through at four to say the dinner was at seven. She stood up when he came in. Not formally. The way you stand when it is somebody you have known a long time. And she put her hand on his arm while she told him about the relief, flat on his sleeve, and left it there for the length of two sentences. He did not move away. I watched his face and there was nothing on it. There is never anything on it. But he did not move away, and she took her hand back when she was finished and not before, and something went through me that I did not have a name for and did not want one. She caught me looking. "Eight years," she said, after he had gone. "I didn't ask." "You were going to. Everyone does, and they do it badly, so I'd rather just say it." She squared the pages. "We were understood. Not betrothed, there was never paper. Three years of everybody assuming, and then he ended it, and he has never once said why to me or to anyone else." "That's not eight years, that's three." "No," she said. "The three were the understanding. The eight is how long I have been in this house doing this work." She went to the door. "He is going to be very difficult to be married to," she said. "I want you to have that from someone who is not enjoying telling you." The dinner was at seven and I was placed on his left in a dress that had been fitted to me that afternoon by a woman who did not speak once. Forty people. The long table with the wolf's head cut into the end of it. Emeric four seats down with his coat off and his sleeves pushed back, talking to two elders and making them both laugh, and I understood within about ten minutes that everybody at that table liked him and nobody there liked his brother. An elder called Roskild started it, over the soup. "The Brennan girl," he said, to the table generally. "Anja's." "Yes." "Your mother ran freight." "West route. Fifteen years." "And you drive." "I did." "And what is your count, girl?" The table did not go quiet. It went slower. Forty people continuing to eat at three-quarter speed with their attention pointing one way. "Three," I said. I said it clearly. I have had seventeen years of practice at saying it clearly and I have never once managed to say it in a way that does not sound like an apology. "Three," Roskild said. "For a Luna." Emeric put his spoon down. "Elder," he said, "Anja Brennan carried relief over Kessel in the winter of the bad ice when three of your drivers turned round at the bridge, and she did it with a nine-year-old asleep in the cab because there was nobody to leave her with." Warm. Pleasant. Absolutely lethal. "So when you say for a Luna, I find I want to ask what exactly you think a Luna is for." Somebody down the table said hear him. Roskild went the colour of the tablecloth and said something about no offence intended, and the noise came back up, and Emeric picked his spoon up again and caught my eye and gave me a small tip of the head. It was perfect. That is what I keep coming back to. It was word-perfect, and he had my mother's route and the year of the bad ice and my age in the cab, and none of that arrives in a man's head between the soup and the fish. Ivar had not moved. He had not said anything, he had not looked at Roskild, and I sat there beside him with my face burning and the whole table's pity settling on me like snow and thought: he will not even do this. He will not spend one sentence. Then he put his hand over mine on the table. He did not look at me while he did it. He was answering something the Beta had asked about the road crews and he reached across with his left hand and closed it over mine, in front of forty people, and left it there. He did not let go for the rest of the meal. Two hours. Through the fish and the meat and the toasts and the long dull business about the timber contracts. He ate with one hand. Twice he had to gesture and he did it with his fork rather than take his hand back. Nobody at that table could see anything below the tabletop and every single one of them knew. And I sat there and felt my own pulse in my palm for two hours, which is not a thing I had known was possible, and could not eat anything at all. It was not tenderness. I want to be clear about that, because it would be easy to make it tender in the retelling and it was not. It was a man putting a hand on a thing to say the thing was his. He did it the way he does everything, without expression and without explanation, and it should have made me furious. I have thought about that dinner more than I have thought about the north station. Emeric walked me out. The corridor was cold after the room and he took his coat off and put it over my shoulders before I could say anything about it, and he did it lightly, and it was warm from him, and I let him. "Roskild's an i***t," he said. "But he says out loud what the rest of them say in the kitchen." "I know." "You did well. You said it plainly and you didn't cry, and half the women at that table would have cried." He stopped at the door to the yard. "Can I say one thing that isn't kind?" "Everyone's been kind all evening. Go on." "My brother has never in his life done anything without an exit written into it." He said it gently, which is how you say the worst things. "Not once. Not since we were boys. It isn't cruelty, it's just how he's built, and I'd rather you heard it from me than found it out in eleven weeks." "He held my hand for two hours." "He did." Emeric nodded slowly. "Have you read page eleven?" The wind came in under the door. "You should read page eleven," he said, and he took his coat back off my shoulders, and he smiled at me, and he went. I stood in that corridor in a dress that did not belong to me. I had signed a page eleven. I had put my name at the bottom of it at two in the morning while a man watched me from a window, and I could not remember one single word that was on it.