unclaimed-recollection / 31 - The Pot.md# 31. The Pot > **Narrator:** Sevran Hallow · **Setting:** Pinecliff · **Act 3, Part 10** > An ordinary evening at Pinecliff, and a pot that is already hot.  The snow had been lying for a week, and I had not yet grown used to the sound of it. It is not a sound. That is what I find hard to say. It is the lack of one, so that a platform that has always clanked and ticked and complained under a person's boots now takes them without comment, and the whole of the Reach seems to have been put down on a cloth. I stood on the Tern platform at the quarter past six with my hat in my hand and my breath going up white, and listened to the yard not making a noise, and I thought that I should like to remember it, and then that I should not need to try. "You have your face on," said Zahir, "the one that thinks." "It is the only one I have for the platform." "You have a different one for the kettle." He had come off the late yard shift with his canvas bag over one shoulder and his brass flask in his fist, and he had snow in his curls and a rope-burn newly pink across the heel of his hand. He is always tired in the same way, which is to say gladly. "I should like it noted that I am off tonight. I am off, and I am going home on a train at a time that a person may call evening, and nobody has asked me to stand in a shed." "It is noted." "Idrin said it to the sky again. 'Adequate.' Twice. I think he is saying it to the weather now, so that he need not say it to us." "I have heard it at the gate." "He said it to your knot," said Zahir, "and then he looked at the sky, as if for a witness." Odran had come across the yard behind him with the satchel against his hip and his collar up, a man who has kept a pocketful of things so long that he walks with them. He said nothing. He nodded at the foreman's window, where somebody lifted a hand, and he stood with us under the lamp for the length of time it takes a train to be slow. It was the green local, the evening one, with its lamps lit all down the two carriages and the brake van with its stove-pipe putting up a thread of smoke that went straight up in the cold. We climbed on. I took the window on the left, facing, and Odran sat across from me, and Zahir dropped on to the bench beside him with his bag on his knees and the whole of his young body arranged to fall asleep and not quite managing it. I should like to set down what I noticed, because it is the sort of thing I now notice. I noticed that Odran's hand was on his knee and not on the strap. It lay open, palm up, as it does when he is not holding anything in readiness. I noticed that his satchel sat beside him on the seat and was not looked at. I noticed that Zahir counted the doors as we went out of the station, one, two, three, and the brake van, under his breath, in the manner that he has taken from Resa and does not know he has taken. I noticed that the carriage was warm, and smelled of wet wool, and that a child at the end of it was eating a roll and being told not to. The train drew out. The yards went by, white, with their long sheds and their pale blue lights in the racks, and the gantry with a cap of snow on it like a hat. Behind us the chime sounded across the tracks, four notes, falling, and I gave them back as I do. Then there was only the wheel-beat, and the larches going by outside, bare and blue-grey now in the dusk, with the gold gone out of them and the snow lying on every bough. "Krel says the noon is gone for the season," said Zahir, with his eyes shut. "Pinecliff's noon," said Odran. "Pinecliff's. It is a Tern notice, on the board. Krel's clerk says a brokered place on the noon costs more than a man earns in a month, and that the broker will not talk to a settlement that cannot show a person to sign for it." He opened one eye. "He said it as a thing about brokers. Not as a thing about us. I thought you should hear it, in case it was news." "It is not news." "No. I thought not." I did not look at Odran, because it is rude to look at a man while he is being asked a thing. I looked at the window, where the carriage lamp had laid a pale copy of the three of us on the dark and the snow was going through it. "I told Edda," said Odran, after a little, to the window, "that the offer stands. When and if Pinecliff needs a place on the noon, and the council wants it, and not before. She said she would tell the thin man on the council that I said it, and that he would say no, and that I should say it again." "Will you?" "Mm." "That is a yes," said Zahir, with great satisfaction, and shut the eye. I had not known it. I understood, sitting very still, that Odran had said something to the council that he did not need to say, and that nobody had asked him to, and that he had not mentioned it to me, because he does not mention the things that he does that cost him. I found that I was not sorry to have been allowed to hear it at last, in a carriage, in a voice put down so that it should not make a noise. I put it with the other things. It was a little after that, with the dusk going blue and the line climbing, that I looked for the question. I want to be exact about it. For a great many evenings it has come to meet me at about this hour, in a window, at a table, at the end of a day when nothing has been asked of me and I have no more occupation for my hands. *Who were you,* it says. It does not say it unkindly. It says it as a doorman says it, at a door one has not been given a key to. I have learned to say good evening to it and to go on, and I had been doing so for some months, and I had thought that this was the whole of the art. It did not come. I looked, in the way one feels for a thing in a pocket, and it was not there. There was the train, and the larches, and Zahir's mouth slightly open, and the warm weight of the basket-sized absence at my feet where the crock used to ride. There was a man across from me with his hand open on his knee. *Ça ne pèse plus,* I thought, quite quietly. *Siapa dulu. Quién fui.* And it went by, and I let it, and it did not leave a shelf behind. I turned my hat over in my hands. Odran looked at me, once, and away again. He did not ask. He said, to the window, "It is a long climb." "It is a very good one," I said. "Mm." * * * The platform at Pinecliff took the train as the snow takes everything, in silence, and then the chime. I have said that I do not need to listen for it. It is true, and it is also true that I always have. The local drew up along the boards with its long small sigh, and from the post at the far edge of the platform, by the cistern, out of the walkway, where somebody had hung them thirty years ago to be rung by the wind and the wheels, the three bells took the vibration of the stopping train and made their small broken chord. The first, the second, and the third. It was true. I had heard it eight times now, and I should like to say that it had stopped surprising me. It has not. It rose through the snow clean and level, three notes standing one under another like three men on a stair, and there was no rest in it any more, no place where a fourth step ought to be, and I stood with one hand on the rail of the carriage and the other flat in the air in front of me before I knew I had raised it. I lifted it to the post. I held it there for the length of a breath. It is not a bow, and it is not a wave. It is what I do to a thing that has been made right when I had not expected to be present for it. "Someone has mended it," I had said to Resa, a week ago, in the dusk, with my hat in my hand, and she had said, *A man with a mallet this morning.* I had not asked more. There was no more to ask. A bell had been flat, and now was not. That is how it is with some things in the world. They are put right on an ordinary day by a man on a list, and someone stands on a platform and hears it. "You do that every time," said Zahir, at my shoulder. "I am told that it is a failing." "It is the best thing about you." He yawned enormously. "I shall go and be a good lodger. Teva has waited up. He says that he happens to be awake." He lifted the flask to us, and then, because it was there, to the post, and went away across the white boards with his bag banging at his hip, towards the square of yellow that was the window over the shed. A man was in it, looking out at the weather with elaborate unconcern. A hand was lifted to Zahir. The curtain, with the same elaborate unconcern, was drawn. His mother is to come on Friday, he had told us on the train, with a coat and no goat. A message had come on his cord bead. He had read it twice, and put it away in his tunic, and said the goat was being kept at home for the wedding, and then said it a third time. There was a lit door on the platform, and a woman in it. She had a shawl over her head against the snow, and the cream apron, and the kitchen's light behind her making a warm room out of the dark, and she was holding something in both hands that she held like a thing in its first hour. When we came up to the step she did not say good evening. She held it out to Odran. It was a pot. It was a small squat stoneware one, brown, with a cloth tied over its mouth and its handles wrapped, and it was heavy by the way he took it, and there was a fine breath of heat coming up from under the cloth that smelt of barley and onion and the sweet root she puts in for the cold. "It is ready," said Resa. "It has been ready since six. Put it on low. Slowly. Do not let him stir it." "I do not stir it." "You stir it like a man who has something to prove." She looked at me, and then at the pot, and at him, and her mouth did what it does, which is to go about the business of not smiling as if it were a duty. "He does. The two of you will have it between you, and you will eat all of it, and you will bring the pot back washed. It is the small pot. I am fond of the small pot." "Mm," said Odran. "That is not an answer." "It is a good pot," he said. "It is the best one I have." She put her hand on the cloth, for a moment, as one puts a hand on the head of a child who is going somewhere, and took it away. Then she looked at me with her sharp small face quite still, and said, "Mind the path. The third step is under a drift." "Thank you," I said. I said it to her, and then because it seemed right I said it to the step, and to the light behind her, and she shut the door. I heard the latch go. I heard her say something to the room, to the stove or to the kettle, and the sound of her moving about in it. It is a small and a very particular sound, a person putting a house to bed. I have heard it from the road every night for a week. "She has done this before," I said. "She sends a pan up when something is in the air." "Is something in the air?" "I am told the air is very good." He had gone red to the ears. I watched it come up above the collar of the moss-green coat like the colour in a lamp. He shifted the pot against his chest in both arms, a man holding something that is more difficult to carry than it looks. "Mind the drift." * * * The path goes past the cistern and the coal shed, and the snow was over the tops of my boots. Odran went first, because it is his path and he knows where the stones are, and I came after in the dent of his steps, with my satchel on my back and the dark all round us blue and clean, and the three bells behind us, hushed, with their snow-caps on, and the lamp of the platform going out of sight behind the shed. We did not speak. It is one of the things that can be done now. There was a light in the window. I had not left it. It was the old light, on its stool in its brown knitted cosy, turned up of its own accord at the sound of the gate, so that the window stood in the dark like a held breath. "It has been doing that since about four," said Odran. "I think it knows the timetable." "It is a very punctual lamp." "It is not a lamp," he said, "it is a nuisance," and I saw his back go slightly with the laugh he did not let out. Three steps. The third was under the drift, as Resa had said, and I took it by memory, and then it was the door, and the iron latch, and the smell of stone and old tea and the banked stove. The room stood up out of the dark. I should like to describe it, and I find that I only want to name it. A small square table. A chair at each side and the third at the corner. A hook by the door, which I have used. A bed against the left wall, made, under its blue and grey quilt, which is long. A stone sill under the east window, as wide as a hand and a half, and on it, with its cloth turned back an inch, a squat brown crock with a chip out of its lip. "Good evening," I said to it. "I have been to Tern. I have a great deal to report." I took off my coat. I hung it on the hook. I went to the sill and put my hand flat on the lid, and I told it the day, as I do, standing, with my back to the room. I told it about the knot and the sixth post and the yard in its snow. I told it that Zahir was gladly tired. I told it that the three bells were in tune, and that I had lifted my hand, and that it should not be surprised by it, because I did it every night. I told it that the child on the train had been told not to eat the roll, and that I had understood the child very well. The fount made its small settling sound under my palm. Someone, long ago, put it down to the ferment. I put it down to the ferment myself, because I have been told that it is the right explanation. Behind me, I heard the stove door. I have said that it is the first time. I should like to be exact. It was not the first time that Odran has lit the stove in that house, because he has done it every morning that I have been in it. It was the first evening that he lit it before he had taken off his coat and I did not offer to. He knelt and put his hand in at the grate, and I stood at the sill with my own hands at my sides and let him, and the little yellow tongue of the kindling came up, and he fed it, a piece and a piece, until it caught and settled and began to talk to itself. He set the pot on the plate. He took the cloth from its mouth, and the steam came up all at once, thick and gold in the lamplight, and the whole small room smelt of someone's kitchen. "The pot is on," said Odran. He said it to the stove. He said it quite quietly, the way a thing is said that has been said before to a person at a door in a camp in the cold, and has been kept. I had heard it in the dark at Halloway, and I had heard it on the night I came out of the passage with a pencil in my hand, and each time it had been a small hard bright thing, laid down where a man might step on it. Now it was said in a house with three steps. It was said to the stove, and I was in the room. I found that I could not thank it. I stood with one hand on the sill. I do not think that a thing has ever required so much of my manners, and given me so little to say. "Mm," I said, in the end, which is not mine. I saw him hear it. He did not turn his head. He took two bowls down from the shelf, and two spoons from the jar, and set them on the table with the care of a man laying a charter. I sat. He ladled. He sat, in the chair that is his, and I in the chair that is mine, with the third at the corner like a man who had come in late and had decided to stay.  We ate. It is not a thing that can be said to have a plot. It was barley, and a little root, and a good deal of black pepper, and an onion that had been fried before it was put in, which is Resa's secret and the whole of her cooking. The bread was Zdena's rye, the end of it. The stove ticked. At the window the frost wrote its small scripts on the glass, and the snow lay quietly on the sill outside, up to the lip of the crock. I put my spoon down along the rim of the bowl, as I do, and I saw him see it, as he does, and neither of us remarked on it. The two spoons lay at the same angle, side by side. I have decided that this is a language, in which a great deal can be said without any person being obliged to answer. "It is a good pot," I said, after a time. "It is the small pot." He put his own spoon down. "A good deal of what she does is to send you a thing until you are able to take it." "She is exceedingly exact." "She is," said Odran, "my sister." It was said in the tone of a man who has described a mountain. * * * It is a rule in Zdena's kitchen, and in the Kandren fashion generally, that business is done after the meal. I had thought about the rule on the train. I had thought it a great deal, in fact, in the quarter hour after the question had gone, in the place where it had been, when I had nothing to put there but my own hands. I had found that I had a thing to say, and that it was a business matter, and that it had been waiting for the soup. When the bowls were empty and the bread was gone, and the pot was drawn to the back of the plate, and Odran had gone to get the kettle, I put both of my hands on the table, flat, side by side. "I should like to say something," I said. "I should like to say it plainly, and I should like you to be at liberty to say that it is not wanted." He stopped with the kettle in his hand. He put it down. He did it slowly, and sat, and put his own hands, one on the other, on his knee. "I have heard it said in the yard, and on the train, and by you, that Pinecliff has lost its noon," I said. "I have heard what it costs to buy another. I have not been told the sum, and I do not think that it is a sum I am to be told. But I have the whole of the history of it, in order, because I do not forget numbers, and it is a very simple sum. The Guild asked the settlement for a thing, and the settlement gave it, because of what had been done for it. The settlement was put to a cost. The thing that was done, was done for me." "Sevran," said Odran. "I should like to finish. I have been practising on the fount, and it is not a good listener on this subject." I looked at my hands. They were where I had put them. "I did not ask for the favour, and I did not know of it, and I am told that this makes no difference. I am a man who has been placed by a great many people's kindness into a house. It is the best house that I have been in. I should like to be a man who pays for it, and not only one who lives in it." He said nothing. His ears had begun to go. I did not look at them, because it is not courteous to look at a man while he is thinking. "I have three things to propose," I said. "I should like them to be heard in order. The first is this. When our share of the find is paid, which the Hall says will be some months, I should like mine to go to the council, to the fund that they keep for the slot, and not into a house account. I do not need a great deal of money. I have been shown the kind of man I am, and he needs a pair of boots and a notebook." "That is not a small thing." "It is a very small thing, and I am quite sure of it." I took a breath. "The second is that until that day, which is a long time, I should like to give them my evenings. They keep a slate in the shed, and a broker's calendar, and a thin man on the council who I am told is anxious. I do not forget a date, or a column. It is the only skill that I have that nobody has had to teach me. I should like to offer it. I will sit in the back of the hall and keep the slot book, and when they wish to know what the noon costs and what it has cost and what it will cost, I will know." "They will want to argue about it." "I am given to understand that it is how a settlement says it is pleased." There was a small sound across the table, in the nose, which is the beginning of a laugh in a man who has decided not to. It stopped, and I felt that the rest of what I had to say was lighter for it. "The third," I said, "is a request, and you may refuse. I have heard you say on the train that the offer stands, and I have understood that you made it to Edda, and I think that you made it of your own account. I should like you to put it somewhere that is not your own pocket. I should like it to go into the same fund as mine, so that it is Pinecliff's and not Odran's, and so that when the council says no to a man in a moss-green coat, they are saying it to a fund, and may say yes to it. I do not think a person should be made to carry a place alone. I know that you do. I would like you to be made to carry it with a man who keeps a good ledger." I stopped. It was all that I had. It was very quiet in the kitchen. The stove ticked. The snow came down on the sill, a grain at a time, and I heard the old light, which makes no sound at all, make some. "Mm," said Odran. I waited. I have become good at it. "Yes," he said. It came out of him as it had at Zdena's table, one word, put down gently so that it should not make a noise. Then, after a moment, "The council will argue." "I have said so." "The thin man will say that it is not seemly to be given a place by a man who is not from the place." "I am from the place," I said. "It is on my bead. A man at Tern wrote it, and a witness signed it, and I have been given to understand that I have lived here since the Guild's paper said so." I thought about it. "It has taken me the whole of the autumn to make it true. I consider that a reasonable time." He put his hand over his mouth. He held it there for a moment, quite still, and when he took it away he had a look on his face that I have seen on him twice, and cannot name, and have decided is allowed. "I shall say it to Edda myself," I said. "If the council will have a man who counts." "They will have you," said Odran. "They have had you." And he got up and filled the kettle, with his back to me, for rather longer than a kettle requires. * * * I took the notebook out while the water was heating. It is a green cloth one, with a pencil in the spine. It is not a great book. It has four lines in it, and a page after them that has been blank for some weeks, and I had not decided what went there. I had thought it should be a thing I remembered, because that is what a notebook is for. I had waited for it at the end of several days, with the pencil over the paper, and nothing had come from the place the pencil expects it to come from. I had thought that this was a failure. I had been, I think, a little ashamed. I opened it at the page. I read the four lines, in order. The first word of a sentence I could not place, which I do not read aloud. *Pinecliff.* *Tea, three times, from a height.* *Signed as witness. Seen, not taken.* I did not look for the fifth. It was already there. I wrote it beneath the others in the plain hand that I use for my own business, and I found that it was not a thing I had remembered, and was not a thing I had been told. It was a thing I had chosen. *The pot is on.* I looked at it. It is the shortest of the five, and the only one that I should be content to have written on the first page. I did not read it aloud. I closed the book on the pencil, and put it into my coat, and thought that a person might build a great deal on a line like that, and that there was, so far as I could tell, no hurry.  Odran put the kettle on the plate, and took his coat from the hook. "I shall see to the coal," he said. "It will snow again before morning. It would be a poor thing to be out of coal." "It is very sensible," I said. "It is a quarter of an hour." He had gone to the door. He did not look at the sill, or the table, or me, and I understood that he was doing the kindest thing that was in his power, which is to go and stand in the cold for fifteen minutes with a scuttle. "Do not wait up with the lamp." "I shall not wait up." "You will." "I shall," I said, "wait up with the lamp." He went out. The door shut on the cold, and the latch dropped, and I heard him on the three steps, and then in the snow, going across to the coal shed in the blue dark with the scuttle knocking on his knee. Through the window I saw his shape go past the glass. Then there was the white yard, and the shed, and its door open on a square of black, and the snow coming down on the roof of the cottage and on the broad pale back of the path that had taken both of us up to it.  I went to the sill. * * * I took the cloth off. The smell came up, sour and sweet, with the whole of the sweet in it. It has been so since the cold week, and I put it down, as I put everything down now, to a house in which things are being kept. "Good evening," I said, again, because I had said it before and did not wish it to seem a matter of routine. "I have not yet told you the rest of the day. It is a rule of the house. I shall try to be brief." It did not answer. It never does. "I do not know whether my memory will come back," I said. I said it quietly, with my hand on the lid, in the old careful Kandren that I use for things that are not for the room. "I have been told that it may, and I have been told that it may not, and I have been told, by a man who is exceedingly kind and exceedingly bad at it, that it does not signify. I used to think that the last was a thing a person said. I find that it is the only thing that has been said to me that was true." The stove ticked. Snow slid from the roof, in a soft collapse, and settled. "I am not afraid of it," I said. "I want to tell you that, because you are the only one who has been told everything else. A great while ago I stood on a platform and I was afraid, and I did not know of what. I am not afraid. If it comes, I shall say good evening to it, and I shall be courteous, and it may sit in the third chair. If it does not come, I find that there is a great deal in front of me to be going on with." I stopped. I had to, for a moment, because the lid under my palm had gone warm. It does that. It is the stove. "I should like to be thankful," I said. "It is a thing that I have a rule about, and I should like to do it properly. I am thankful for a house with three steps, and a table with three chairs, and a stove that is kept. I am thankful for a bell that was flat and is not. I am thankful for a man at a yard gate who counts every head and says *Adequate* to the sky, and for his trainee, who makes tea when he is frightened, and for the woman who keeps a pot on and sends it up a hill, and who knew before anyone did. I am thankful for a doctor who made a thing true that was not, because it was the kindest thing that anyone had thought of. I am thankful for a woman at Tern who gave me you." The fount made its small sound. "They made a new man out of a man who had nothing," I said. "I should like it to be known that I was not obliged to be grateful, and that I am. Whoever I was, I do not think that he had this. I should not like to exchange it." There was a silence. It was not an empty one. "And I am thankful," I said, lower, "for my guide." I had not meant to say it so. I had prepared, on the train, a number of finer sentences, and they had not been needed. It was a plain thing. It is the word that stands on a Guild form beside my name, for a man in a moss-green coat who has counted me in and out of every place that I have been. I have never found another that was as exact. I do not intend to look. "I do not have a better word for him," I said. "I have stopped looking for one. It is the first thing that I have had in my hands that I should not wish to put down." I put the cloth back. I laid my palm on it for the length of a breath. "Good night," I said. "Thank you." Behind me the latch lifted. I did not turn round at once. I heard the door, and the cold come in with the smell of coal, and the scuttle set down on the hearthstone with a small iron noise. I heard him stamp the snow from his boots, once on each side, as he does. He did not speak. He was standing at the door, I think, for a little longer than the coal required, with his hand on the latch, and I do not know how much a person can hear through a door in the snow, and I have decided not to ask. "Mm," said Odran. "Good evening," I said. I said it to him, and then, because it seemed right, to the door. He banked the stove. I rinsed the two bowls at the basin, and he took them from my hands and dried them, and put them in their place on the shelf. I wiped the table. The spoons I put in the jar, the pair of them, side by side, at the same angle. The old light was left up on its stool, in its cosy, as it is. I do not know who decided that. I have long thought that it was neither of us. I put out the oil lamp. The old light glowed in the window against the snow, for two, as it does, and the three bells hung quiet on their post at the far end of the platform in their white coats, in tune, with the night all round them. It did not seem to me that anything had been said. It did not seem to me that there was anything left that needed to be.