“Thank you for the apple,” I tell him shyly. But I don’t put in my satchel. Instead I leave it on the porch of the grocer’s shop. I know now I should not have taken it. No more and no less!
But sometimes caro is no friend to Caro.
There is a large hoist at the top of the chalk cliff, which swings out over the ocean below. The supplies from the village are much too difficult to manage on the steps, and so I load them onto the platform beneath the lifting hook. Once I’ve lowered them to the house, Nan will carry them inside. Nan says that the villagers used to lower the supplies themselves once, but after Mother and Father died, they wouldn’t do it anymore. So now Nan or I must go to remind them, and since Nan can’t go anymore, it must be me. But this is good, Nan tells me, because the villagers ought to become accustomed to me. They do not suffer strangers very easily.
Nan is waiting for me at the bottom of the steps. She worries for me when I make the climb even though I’m always very careful. She has prepared coffee for me and so we sit together in the vestibulum, the largest of the chambers, where the mouth opens out toward the ocean. This is my favorite place because the noise of the waves is very soothing. Part of the cliff has fallen away on one side of the vestibulum and so the floor sticks out, smooth and gently crenellated, just like my lower lip if I’m sulking. Underneath this lip is the best place for gathering salt, though it can be got from further in the house as well, only with more difficulty. The floor isn’t very curved here. It is easier for Nan.
“The grocer’s mother will be coming to us soon,” I tell Nan.
“How do you know, Caroline?”
“Caro,” I remind her. She’s always forgetting.
“How do you know, Caro?”
“The grocer’s boy told me so.”
“Well.” And after a time: “We will greet her when she comes. Are you ready? How are your Latin declensions progressing?”
“Optime,” I tell her.
“Then perhaps you ought to join me when we greet her.”
I don’t like this very much but there is nothing I can say. I shall try to do my best for Tom and his mother. I shall try to greet her properly.
Several weeks pass before Tom’s mother comes to visit, which is later than I expected. It’s almost time for me to return to the village again. It’s the sound of the winch that tells me she’s coming. Outside the noise isn’t so loud but when I’m inside the house the noises become louder and louder and louder, even as the chambers become smaller and smaller and smaller. Sometimes I think that if I were to come to the end of the house then the noise would be so deafening I’d die!
I run through the chambers as quickly as I can, but carefully too, for the floors are more curved where I’ve been working. Nan keeps our library far away from the vestibulum where the salt and rain would destroy our books. As it is, they aren’t in very good condition and the oldest of them have fallen to pieces. If I had string, I’d mend them, but we don’t have very much string, so the best I can do is to wrap them in strips of my old shifts. As Nan says, waste not, want not! And if we’re to want for nothing, then we must waste nothing.
The noise of the winch echoes like a screech as I make my way through the deep passages to the outermost chamber. My feet hitting the floor make a bum, bum, bum sound. When I reach the vestibulum, Nan has already begun to remove Tom’s mother from the platform. She’s covered in a pale blue blanket but I can see the edge of her hair draped over the heartwood.
“What is the word for death?” Nan asks me.
“Mors, mortis,” I tell her.
“Can you conjugate it fully as a verb?” Nan unhooks the platform from the lifting hook and I help settle it down. The platform is set on wheels so it can be more easily maneuvered into the house with us.
“Morior, which is I die, and then moriris, which is you die, and then moritur, which is she dies—”
“And if it is in the perfect tense?”
“—then it would be moriturus est, which is she has died.”
“Very good, Caroline.”
“Caro,” I remind her.
“Very good, Caro,” she says. “Now what does it mean that the grocer’s mother has died?”
This is more difficult for it goes beyond knowing the pattern of words to knowing the meaning of words. And I’ve only just begun this, but I will try. If Nan corrects me then I shall be wiser than before at any rate.
“Mori is a word used by the ancients to indicate the passage of a creature from one state into another. It’s something like transire, which is to go across but it isn’t about movement outside or over but rather movement inside.”
I’m very proud of this description. I look at Nan very closely to see if it has satisfied her but she’s busy with maneuvering the platform onto the rails that run lengthwise down the center of every chamber.
“This won’t last much longer,” says Nan as the wheels of the platform sing out an unpleasant note. She’s right. One of the wheels has gone wobbly and so the load is badly balanced. When it tips, Tom’s mother begins to slide toward the edge. I lay my hands upon the long folds of cloth in which she’s swaddled. The blanket is more brittle than I had supposed and much more coarse. At last, Nan turns back to me. “That’s a very good description of mori.”
“I’ve a question,” I tell her. “If mori means an inward movement, is it very like somniare, which is to dream? That’s like an inward movement too, isn’t it?”
“What do you dream about, darling?” She’s not looking at me but rather at Tom’s mother underneath the blanket.
“Sometimes I have a dream that I’m dead, or that death is a thing very close to me, but it isn’t so much a passage as . . . a breath, which is, I suppose, a movement of the air from inside to outside, and so it is like a passage.”
“And how do you know that you are dead?”
“Because a great voice whispers it to me. Moriris. You are dead.”
Now Nan looks at me very closely and I can see a strange yellowish cast to her eyes, which seem folded in dark and heavy flesh. “Each of those things is very like death, but it isn’t the same thing.”
“I’ve another question,” I tell her, “must all caro, carnis suffer from death?”
“All things suffer from death except salt.” She eyes me warily.
“Why not salt?”
“Salt has never lived.”
“I’ve another question,” I tell her, “if all caro, carnis must suffer from death and I am caro and this house is caro, does that mean that I’ve suffered from death and this house has suffered from death?”
Nan clucks again with her tongue, which is the sound she makes when she’s thinking.
“When your mother and father died, did you suffer?”
I think about this for a moment. I don’t remember Mother and Father very well. It has been Nan for so long that it may as well have been Nan ab aeterno, which is forever, like the salt. But then I think of the dream I’ve been having, and how the breath is very warm on my face and how it smells very nice and the dream whispers I am your mother but for some reason this isn’t a happy thought but a sad thought.