The Same Name

The reading room takes eleven people and that week it had two.

Andrea had the table by the window because she had been coming for three years and the girl at the desk knew her, and the Scotsman had the table by the door because he had turned up on Monday without an appointment and had been given the table by the door as a mild form of punishment.

She noticed him the way you notice weather. Sunburned in the way that is going to become a problem for him by Thursday. Notebook, not laptop. Reading glasses he kept taking off to look at things more closely, which meant he did not need them.

On Wednesday the girl at the desk called out a name over the counter for a box that had come up, and the name was Malcolm, and both of them stood.

· · ·

They sorted it out at the counter with the box between them.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m Malcolm. I mean — that’s my name. Callum Malcolm.”

“Andrea Malcolm.”

He laughed, surprised, and then stopped laughing, and she watched him arrive at it about four seconds after she had.

“Ah,” he said.

“Mm.”

“That’s—” He gestured at nothing. “Yes.”

“Half of Portland is Malcolm,” she said. “You will get used to it by Friday.”

She took her box. It was her box; the request slip had her handwriting on it. She went back to the table by the window and did not look up for forty minutes, and she could feel him not looking up either.

· · ·

He came over at lunchtime with two paper cups of coffee and the expression of a man who has rehearsed.

“May I ask what you’re researching?”

“My family.” She let it sit. “You?”

“The same. Sort of.” He sat down without being asked, which annoyed her, and then he put both cups down and pushed one across, which partly undid the annoyance. “My great-great-great-grandfather came out in 1801. From Dumfriesshire. He was a bookkeeper at first and then he was an attorney for two properties, and when my grandmother died I found his letters in a box in her house in a biscuit tin, and I have spent two years reading them.”

“And?”

“And he was good to his mother,” Callum said. “He wrote to her every month for thirty years. He sent money. He worried about his sister’s cough.” He turned the cup around. “And in 1835 he made a claim for compensation on forty-one people, and it was paid, and he went home with it and bought a farm.”

Andrea drank her coffee.

“I’m not—” he said. “I don’t know what I’m doing, to be honest. I keep thinking there’ll be a document that tells me what to do with it.”

“There isn’t.”

“No.”

· · ·

What Andrea was researching was a woman called Rebecca, who was her great-grandmother’s grandmother, and who had been born on a property in the parish about which the family knew two things: the name of the place, and that they had never left it.

She had worked back to Rebecca and stopped, in the way everybody stops. Baptism gave her a mother. The mother gave her nothing, because the register ended, because the register always ends.

She had never used the compensation records. She knew they existed. She had read what they were for — a list of the claimants, the men who were paid, with the number of people claimed beside each name — and she had decided, three years ago, at this same table, that she did not feel like spending her Saturdays reading a ledger of what her family had been valued at by the people who took them.

That was a decision she had made once and never revisited.

“Which properties,” she said.

He told her.

One of them was the place her family had never left.

· · ·

They did not speak for a while after that. Somebody’s phone went off in the corridor. The air conditioning in that room is loud and inadequate and has been for years.

“I have the letters,” Callum said carefully, “scanned. All of them. And the claim papers. I can send you everything tonight.”

“Do the letters name people?”

He hesitated. “Some.”

“Names, or—”

“Names. Sometimes ages. He was a record-keeper, it was—” He stopped. “It was his job.”

“Then send them,” she said.

And then, because she had been doing this for three years and knew exactly what he was going to ask before he asked it, she put her pen down.

“Go ahead.”

“Go ahead what?”

“Ask me the question you came over here to ask.”

Callum Malcolm looked at his coffee for a long moment. “I suppose I wanted to know,” he said, “whether you think there’s anything I can do.”

“About 1835?”

“About any of it.”

“No,” Andrea said. “Not about 1835.” She watched that land. “But you have a box of letters with people’s names in it, in a house in Scotland, where nobody who is looking for those names can get at them. There are people in this country who have been stuck at 1834 for twenty years. You could put them somewhere they can be read. That is a thing you could do this month.”

“That’s it?”

“You asked me what you could do. I told you. It is not the size of thing you wanted.”

“No,” he admitted.

“They never are,” she said, and picked her pen back up.

· · ·

He emailed that night. Two hundred and six letters and the claim papers, and a note that said he had started looking into how to deposit the originals.

She read until three in the morning. In a letter from 1817, between a complaint about the price of shingles and a request for his mother to send seed, the bookkeeper from Dumfriesshire wrote that the woman Rebecca had been brought to the house to work and was quick and would do.

Was quick, and would do.

Nine words. It was more than the registers had given her in three years. She sat with it for a long time, and what she felt was not gratitude and not anger but something with no name she knew, a sort of cold furious arithmetic: that the only reason she had her great-great-great-grandmother’s name in a full sentence was that a man had been writing home to his mother about the weather.

· · ·

On Friday he was at the counter when she came in, returning his boxes.

“Flying tonight,” he said. “Did you get them?”

“I got them. She’s in 1817.”

“I know,” he said. “I flagged it. I wasn’t sure if—”

“It was the right thing to flag.”

He nodded. He had the look of a man who wanted the conversation to go somewhere specific and knew he had no right to steer it. At the door he turned around and put out his hand, and something almost hopeful came into his face.

“Well,” he said. “Cousin, maybe.”

Andrea looked at the hand. Then she shook it, once, the way you do.

“Mr. Malcolm,” she said.

She went back to the table by the window. The girl at the desk brought up the next box. It was a good morning for it, and she had four hours, and there were eleven chairs in the room and only one of them was taken now.

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