The Colour of Closing Time

Rook had been in the Glowmarket for eleven minutes and had already been asked about the bridge twice.

“Will she take a cart of slate?” said a man by the cheese stall. “Wet slate,” he added, as if that made it friendlier.

“Twelve hundredweight,” said Rook. “Keep to the middle. Not the rail side.”

“And on Thursday,” said a woman with a barrow, catching Rook’s sleeve, “could I bring my sister’s piano over?”

“On a four-wheeled cart, yes. Not on a handcart. Not on your sister.”

Rook did not much like being stopped in a market on a day off. But a question about a load limit has a right answer at the end of it, and Rook had never once managed to walk past a right answer and leave it lying in the road.

This was the whole trouble, really. At Kettlebridge, at the end of every day, when the last cart was over, Rook unhooked the queue rope, coiled it round its post, and went across to Nessa’s for supper. And at about the second spoonful somebody always put a head round the door to ask about the bridge, and Rook always put the spoon down and answered. Nessa had tried deeper bowls. Nessa had tried a lid. The soup went cold all the same, and Rook had not finished a hot supper since the spring before last.

So Rook had come up to the Hollow for a lamp glass.

* * *

Brindle’s glasshouse was the hottest room in the Hollow, and Brindle stood in the middle of it in a leather apron as though it were a mild afternoon. Blue glass cooled on racks along both walls.

“The little lamp on Nessa’s porch,” said Rook. “I want a new glass for it. The colour of the sky over the river at the minute the rope comes down.”

Brindle set down her tongs. “Describe it.”

Rook gave this the care owed to a cart with a wobbling axle. “Blue,” said Rook. “Less than that.”

“That isn’t a colour,” said Brindle. “That’s a direction. I don’t make colours from descriptions. People say blue and mean the sea, or their grandmother’s good jug, or a shirt they had when they were nine. Then they come back in a month and tell me I’ve got it wrong.” She wiped her hands. “Why that blue, anyway?”

“Everyone who’s waited at that bridge has stood and looked at that sky while I took the rope down,” said Rook. “They know it. If the lamp’s lit that colour, they’ll know the rope’s down and I’m eating.”

“A lamp that tells people to go away.”

“A lamp that tells them after supper.”

“I could make you something far better,” said Brindle. “A deep blue with a gold thread drawn through it. A lamp people would cross the river to look at.”

“That’s what I don’t want,” said Rook. “They’d queue. I’d have to put the rope back up.”

Brindle sighed. “We’ll do it the slow way, then.” She fetched a rack of test pieces, nineteen squares of blue no bigger than a playing card, and set it on the bench.

“These are off the left-hand rack,” she said. “Edges only, please. That glass remembers a finger for weeks.”

Rook took the first piece by its edges and held it to the window. It was the blue of a jay’s wing.

“Blue,” said Rook. “Less than that.”

The second was the blue of milk in a blue jug. Rook looked at it for a long time. “Blue. Less than that.”

“Less blue?” said Brindle. “Less bright? Less what?”

“Less,” said Rook.

The third was so pale it was hardly blue at all, and Rook said, “More than that,” which was no help to anybody.

The fourth Rook picked up without thinking, by the face, with a thumb square in the middle of it.

“Edges,” said Brindle.

“Sorry.” Rook moved the grip, but the thumbprint stayed where it was, plain as a postmark. “Blue. Less than that.”

“That one will have your thumb on it until the first frost,” said Brindle.

And so on down the rack, with the afternoon light coming in hard and white through the window, and Rook saying no to every one. Around the twelfth piece a carter put his head in at the door and called, “Roadwarden! How many sheep at once?” and Rook said, “Forty, walking, don’t let them bunch,” without looking round.

The apprentice had been sitting on an upturned crate by the door all this while, waiting for a new chimney for the observatory lamp. Maren had cracked the old one by using it to hold down a map.

“When does the rope come down?” the apprentice said.

“When the light goes off the water,” said Rook. “It isn’t a clock time.”

The apprentice went out into the street and took a sky reading: a long look at the sun over the roofs, a squint to the east, a figure written in a notebook and checked twice. Then the apprentice came back in.

“Then it isn’t now,” the apprentice said. “It’s about an hour off. Just before dusk. And it wants open sky to the east.”

“Dusk,” said Brindle, “is the worst light there is to judge glass in.”

“It’s the light the lamp’s for,” said Rook.

Brindle looked at Rook, and at the rack, and at the apprentice, who was already holding the door. Then she pulled a sack out from under the bench. It was full of old market bunting, last year’s, faded little flags in every colour, and she began wrapping each test piece in its own scrap.

“Straw scratches the soft ones,” she said, to nobody in particular.

* * *

They carried the rack up through the Glowmarket between them, Rook at the front and Brindle at the back, with nineteen little bundles of red and yellow and green nodding along the top. The apprentice walked alongside with Maren’s chimney. People stepped out of the way and smiled, as though it might be the start of something. Somebody outside the Last Cup clapped.

“And if the slate’s dry?” said the slate man, as they passed.

“Same,” said Rook, not stopping.

The arch at the top of the town had nothing behind it but sky. To the east the hills went down and away toward the river, which was too far off to see, though Rook looked for it anyway. Behind them the Hollow’s lamps, which had been blue and gold all day, began to look as if they meant it.

They set the rack down on the cobbles. Rook stood under the arch and watched the east. Rook’s hands, which had taken that rope down some thousands of evenings, knew the minute a moment before the rest of Rook did.

“Now,” said Rook.

Brindle unwrapped the pieces quickly, in order, and passed them up one at a time. Rook held each one against the sky.

“Blue. Less than that.”

“Blue. Less than that.”

“More than that.”

The fourth came out of its bit of bunting with the thumbprint on it. Rook held it up.

The glass went.

Nothing dimmed and nothing shone. The glass was simply not there any more. Rook’s fingers held two edges of nothing at all, and between them, hanging in the evening air above the arch, was a thumbprint. Every ridge and whorl of it was there, faint and plain, stuck on the sky like a smudge on a window.

“That one,” said Rook.

“You turned that one down this afternoon,” said Brindle.

“It was the afternoon,” said Rook.

Brindle did not argue. Brindle, who argued with the colour of nearly everything, stood under the arch and looked at that thumbprint for quite a long time. When Rook lowered the glass it came back, blue and ordinary, with the thumb on it.

“Hold it up again,” said Brindle.

Rook held it up again. The glass went. The thumbprint stayed.

“People ask me what my best blue is,” Brindle said at last. “I’m going to tell them it’s on a porch at Kettlebridge, and it’s only lit when they’re meant to go away.”

“Tell them to come back after supper,” said Rook.

Brindle took a scriber from her apron pocket and scratched a small mark on the edge of the piece, just below the thumb. “Write down the minute,” she said to the apprentice, who already had. “Next firing’s in nine days. I’ll blow it then. Bring the frame up so I can make it fit. I am not blowing a glass to fit a description either.”

“Nine days,” said Rook. “Good glass.”

“I know,” said Brindle.

* * *

At the top of the market a woman was packing up a pie stall, and Rook bought the last three, because there were three of them. The apprentice took the rack without being asked, and Brindle took Maren’s chimney, and that left Rook with nothing to carry but a pie.

They went down through the Glowmarket in the blue evening, past stalls being covered for the night and people heading home with their baskets. The slate man came up the hill the other way with an empty barrow. He looked at Rook, and then at the pie, and said, “Evening, Roadwarden,” and nothing else at all.

It took nineteen minutes to walk down through the market, and nobody asked Rook a single question. It was not supper, and it was not at Nessa’s, and there was still the frame to bring up and the firing to come. But the pie was hot from the first bite to the last, and Rook ate every crumb of it, and thought the lamp was going to work very well indeed.