Eighteen Clothes-Pegs

In the spring, when the wind came in under the observatory window and lifted every map on the table, Maren walked down to the meadow well and borrowed eighteen clothes-pegs. She pinned the maps along the window frame. The wind gave up. She meant to take the pegs back the next morning.

That was in April. Summer had come and gone since then, and the well keeper had started ringing the bell.

The bell on the meadow well is rung twice when somebody wants Maren. That morning it was rung twice, and slowly, by somebody who had plainly got all day.

“That’s the pegs,” said Maren. She was at the map table with her sleeves pushed up and ink on one wrist. The apprentice was at the field board by the stove. “I’ll run them down now. Five minutes.”

She did not reach for her coat. Maren did not wear a coat. She said it got in the way of her arms.

It should be said that Maren had never done anything in five minutes in her life, and the well keeper knew it. That was why she had rung slowly.

The pegs were not on the window frame. The maps were still there, held flat by a teacup, a boot and a book about frost. Maren looked at them for some time.

“I put them in the tin,” she said. “I’m nearly sure I put them in the tin.”

The tin lived on the shelf by the door, next to the saucers of cooled star flecks, each fleck grey and dull and labelled in Maren’s hand. The tin had a label too. It said PEGS (Well) — return Tues.

Maren and the apprentice looked at the label together. Neither of them could say which Tuesday.

“One of the early ones,” said Maren. She looked into the tin the way people look into a tin they already know is empty. It looked empty. She put it back.

* * *

She found the first peg by accident, a little after noon. She had lifted a pile of maps to look underneath, and under the maps was the bread, because at the observatory the bread is always under the maps. A peg was pinching the paper bag shut.

“One,” said Maren.

She took the peg off. The bag fell open on most of one of Poppy’s loaves, and Maren discovered that she was very hungry. She tried to remember when she had last eaten. She thought it was yesterday’s soup, which was also today’s soup.

The apprentice put a knife, the butter and a plate beside her, and pushed a chair up behind her knees until she sat down in it. She ate two slices and then a third.

“Five minutes,” she said, with her mouth full.

After lunch the pegs came faster. One was clipped to the hem of the curtain. One was on the loft ladder, third rung up. One was holding a sock to the rail of the stove, a sock Maren had been looking for since Thursday. One was on the edge of a star chart, and one was on the water bucket.

The seventh was on the soup pot. It held the ladle upright against the rim, so the handle stood clear and could not slide in. Maren tried to remember the last time the ladle had slid into the soup. She thought it was about a week ago.

She took the peg off very slowly, as if it might mind. The ladle slid into the soup at once and went under.

“That one was earning its keep,” said Maren.

The apprentice fished the ladle out with the tongs.

Maren dropped all seven pegs into the tin, put the tin back on the shelf, and turned to wipe the stove. Behind her, the apprentice went out for the afternoon reading. The observatory door needs a shoulder, going out and coming in, and it got one, with the usual thump. Then something on the shelf clattered, like a handful of dice.

When Maren turned round, the tin was empty.

There were two pegs on the edge of the shelf. There was one on the latch, one on the bucket, one on the tongs, and two on Maren’s own cuff, which she had not felt at all.

“Oh,” said Maren. “Oh, that’s lovely.”

Anything that will not stay where it is put is, to a charter, very nearly a present. She gathered all seven up and put them back in the tin, and said “Seven. Again,” in the voice of someone who has just been given pudding.

* * *

The eighth peg was under the stove. The ninth and tenth were on the rail of the loft. The eleventh was holding the lid on the tea caddy.

The twelfth was behind the curtain, pinning a map flat against the window. It was the map of where the frost lies first on the meadow. Maren had started it in March and lost it in March, and by April she had decided she had only dreamed of starting it. It was two-thirds done. The part that was not done was the corner by the well.

“That needs finishing,” said Maren. She unpinned it and sat down. “Five minutes.”

The afternoon went by. Maren drew frost. The apprentice went in and out for readings, with a thump each way, and in between sat at the field board with its little lamp, drawing stroke after stroke and writing things down. Every so often Maren looked up at the tin, and every time there were fewer pegs in it than she had left there. She said “Fourteen,” and later “Eleven?” and later “Fifteen, if the one on the kettle counts,” and went back to the frost.

By the time the corner by the well was done, the light through the window had gone long and yellow. Maren put down her pen.

“Right,” she said. “What have you noticed?”

The apprentice turned a notebook round and pushed it across the table. It was a page of times, in pencil.

“1.40. Door, out. Seven pegs out of tin. All near the door.”

“2.25. Door, in. Four out. One on M’s sleeve. M did not notice.”

“3.10. Door, out. Three out. Kettle.”

There were nine lines like that. At the bottom, underlined twice, it said: “Only after the door.”

Maren read the page through twice. Then she laughed out loud.

“The door,” she said. “It’s the door. Of course it’s the door.” She was already on her feet. “Oh, well done.”

She put every peg she had into the tin, and the tin on the shelf. Then she opened the door and shut it again, with her shoulder, the way everybody has to.

This time she was watching. The pegs jumped up out of the tin all at once, like corn in a hot pan. Each one went for the nearest edge it could find, caught hold, and stayed there looking perfectly ordinary. Two took the shelf. One took the latch. One took Maren’s cuff again.

She picked up the tin and tipped it to the window. Down in the seam, where the side met the bottom, was a speck no bigger than a seed. It was grey, mostly. On one side of it was a point of light the size of a pinprick, steady as a lamp in a window a long way off.

Maren looked along the shelf. Beside the place where the tin had stood was a saucer labelled COLD (April). The saucer was empty.

“I labelled that one cold,” said Maren. She sounded thrilled. “In April. And put it right next to the pegs.”

She lifted the fleck out with the tongs and shut it in a little dish with a lid. Then she got out her field book and wrote down everything it had done: the door, the tin, the nearest edge, the times from the apprentice’s page. At the top she wrote, “Labelled cold in April. Was not.” She did not cross it out. Maren never crossed out a mistake. She liked to see what she had noticed next.

Then she counted the pegs back into the tin, with the door shut and everybody standing still.

There were seventeen.

* * *

They looked for the eighteenth on the ladder and the stove rail and in the bread. They did not find it. Outside, the light had turned blue, and below the knoll the meadow lamps were coming on one at a time, which meant Wick was out, checking every cover twice. At the well, the bell rang twice.

“Five minutes,” said Maren, more cheerfully than ever, and went to get her scarf.

The scarf hung on the hook by the door, with the coat. Linnet knits Maren’s scarves extra long, and this one went round three times with enough left over to sit on. Clipped to the end of it, holding it fast to the collar of the coat, was the eighteenth peg.

Maren tried to get it off. It was the stiff one. Every set of pegs has one, and this one held on as if it had been paid to.

The bell rang twice again.

It was quicker to wear the coat than to argue with the peg. So Maren put the coat on, and the scarf with it, and went down the hill with the tin under her arm. The apprentice came behind, carrying something flat in a paper sleeve.

The well keeper was taking in the washing. She saw Maren coming and stopped with a sheet half folded.

“You’ve got a coat on,” she said.

“I have,” said Maren.

“I’ve never once seen you in a coat.”

“It’s attached to one of your pegs,” said Maren.

She held out the tin. The well keeper counted the pegs into her apron pocket, properly, the way anyone counts their own pegs when they have been gone all summer. Then she reached up to Maren’s collar, gave the stiff peg one short pinch in exactly the right place, and it came away in her fingers.

“That one always sticks,” she said. “Eighteen.”

“And this,” said Maren.

The apprentice took a card out of the paper sleeve. It had been drawn that afternoon at the field board, from the notes, with the apprentice’s mark under the last stroke.

“It makes a peg hold on in a gust,” said Maren.

The well keeper looked at the card. Then she looked at her washing line, which had lost three pillowcases over the hedge in August.

“Does it do anything else?” she said.

“Not yet,” said Maren.

“Then it can stay.”

She clipped it to the post with one of her own pegs, under the brass box, and went back to her sheet. “Kettle’s on,” she said, without turning round. “And keep that coat on going up. It’s turned cold.”

So Maren drank a cup of tea by the well with her coat on, and then walked home up the hill in it, under a sky gone deep blue. She had eaten lunch, finished the frost map, caught a fleck she had labelled cold, and been warm out of doors. She had not meant to do a single one of those things.

It was the best day’s work she had done since April, and she had only ever meant it to take five minutes.