Short story · 4 min read · Set in Wharf Street ·
The Map of the Other Pier
The plan that hangs in the harbour office at Wharf Street shows two stone piers where the water keeps one, and the stone lists and the tide tables go on counting for the other as payday counts for a man no one can pension.
The plan I mean hangs where the harbour office keeps its visitors, on the north wall between the tide staff and the framed list of harbours, and it is titled IMPROVEMENTS OF THE HARBOUR AT MURROW, 1847. It draws the whole of our water with a clean hand: the town, the quais, the deep-water berth, and two piers running out to beak at the entrance, the East Pier and the West Pier, each with the quoin stones numbered and the leading bearings written in. The East Pier is the one every child on Wharf Street has walked and every pilot has rounded. The West Pier on the drawing stands in open water where no stone shows at any tide, and no one airs the difference in conversation, because a plan of 1847 is paper and the water is the water.
Except the paper does not let the difference lie. I have kept the pilots' room at the foot of Wharf Street for eleven years now, and the papers pass my table. The stone lists are the first of them. The quarry up the valley has supplied our harbour stone since the old pier was rebuilt, and its out-book carries the tonnage away by destination. Against Murrow the quarry enters the stone in two lines, East Pier and West Pier, month by month, the West column a little the smaller of the two, and the harbour's own receiving side carries a West column to balance it, entered to the ton by the trustees' clerk, Mr W Vye, whose figures never tie wrong. The stone for the West column is received, paid for, and set down as landed; the porters' tallies, which time every landed stone from the crane to the stack, show no landings but the East's; and the stacks, counted twice a year under the rules, always answer to the East column alone. The tonnage is not missing. It is simply entered as received in the West, and received is as far as any column will let me follow it.
The tide tables are the second of them, and they are the part I trust to matter. The almanac prints, as the standard stations of this port, the pier head, the quais, and a third it calls Midstream, Between the Piers. The pilots correct their working times against it, and have done all along; the tide gauge book notes the between-water setting twelve minutes ahead of the pier head; and the masters ask for it in the ordinary way, as in give me the between-water and I shall lie snug till it. A man who did not know our harbour would take the tables for a port with both piers built.
The third paper is old and it is the one that settled me. In 1931 the trustees underpinned the East Pier after the scour of that winter, and the mason's daybook of the works survives in the tin box under the counter. The foundations were opened on the west side, at low water of the year's lowest tide, on a dry day, and the entry in the mason's hand for the second of the working days reads, in full: opened the footings; the footings wet when cut; the joints weeping and the beds sweating, no water to be seen on the ground about them. The works were suspended four days while the engineer had the thing watched, and his report to the minute book says what it can: that the west face of the pier, as opened, answered stone for stone to the offsets of the West Pier drawings, stepped true to the 1847 scales; and that the wet at the footings rose no further than the footings, as if the stone above had been keeping a weather of its own off the water.
I have read the papers to more visitors than I can number, and the room hears them out the way rooms do. Nothing in them is wrong that a man could put an objection to. The stone is paid for, the tide gives its time, and the footings have kept their wet off every dry day since 1931.
The question I set on the table of the pilots' room, and leave there when I bank the fire, is which way the water is going at the between-water on a night the tide tables give no time for: whether it is making for a pier that stands somewhere the columns call received, or standing off from the roadstead we do have, giving the pilots their twelve minutes, in waiting for the other half of its harbour to be let into the day.