Twenty-Six Beds

I · THE EVE

On the twenty-sixth of October, at five in the afternoon, I had three things left: forty-one nights of bookings for the entire year, three hundred and forty thousand euros of debt, and a building from fifteen forty-one with twenty-six made beds standing empty. Beto had left for the city at seven in the morning. He had his meeting with the bank at half eleven and then he was going to stop by his mother's, and he'd told me he'd be back for dinner, and at that moment I thought he would be back for dinner.

We took out the mortgage in January two years ago. That needs to be said first because it's the only thing that explains everything else. He's a building surveyor and had spent eleven years doing energy efficiency reports for a firm in York, and I worked fourteen years in the county historical archive, in the monastic collections section, cataloguing paper that no one ever requests. We were both in our forties, no kids, and an idea that sounded good over dinner: buy a ruin on a secondary pilgrim route and open a hostel.

The ruin was St. Ives of the Ridge hospital and it had been without a roof since nineteen fifty-eight. We bought it for twenty-nine thousand pounds from the diocese and it cost us three hundred and eleven thousand to put it back together, which is exactly the sum you get wrong when you fall in love with a building. We opened in May. In five months of the season, one hundred and seventy-nine pilgrims slept in our beds. We needed six hundred. In October, three had slept here.

At five o'clock that afternoon I was doing the last thing a hostel warden does when closing up for the season: counting the linen. You count the sheets, the pillowcases, the blankets, and the towels, note what's missing and what needs replacing, and store it all in the hall cupboard with mothballs. Twenty-six beds mean seventy-eight sheets if you count three sets per bed, and I'd counted fifty-two when I heard the car. It wasn't Beto's car. Ours is a Berlingo with a blown silencer and you can hear it from the junction; this one arrived without me hearing it come and stopped right in front of the gate.

II · TWENTY-SIX BEDS

Before I say who got out of that car, I have to explain the business about the beds, because otherwise what comes next won't mean a thing. The hospital of St. Ives was founded in fifteen forty-one with an endowment deed that's in the archive where I worked for fourteen years, in box two hundred and eleven of the monastery collection from up the hill. I've held it in my hands over a hundred times. I transcribed it in two thousand and eleven for a catalogue that was never published.

The deed is signed by a canon named Iñigo de Zaldúa and it says, in clause four, what all hospital endowment deeds say: how many beds are endowed, with what income, and with what obligation. Thirty-two beds. With the income from two mills and a meadow, and with the obligation that none should stand empty while there is a traveller in the parish. That clause is standard. It's in four hundred deeds in this country and it means nothing unusual: it means the hospital cannot turn anyone away while it has room.

What is not standard, and what I'd known since two thousand and eleven because I'd read it with a magnifying glass, is clause five. Clause five says the number must not be altered. That the beds shall be thirty-two and not thirty-one nor thirty-three, neither before nor after, and that whoever alters them shall be bound in their own person to make good the deficit. That, in a document from fifteen forty-one, is a guarantee formula and it translates easily: if an administrator sells a bed, they pay for it out of their own estate. It's an economic clause. That's how I translated it in two thousand and eleven and that's how it stands in my transcription, and I'm certain it's the correct translation.

When we bought the ruin, Beto's plan had thirty-two places in four dormitories, because thirty-two places is what makes a hostel viable on a secondary route. And I asked him for twenty-six. I didn't explain clause five because I was embarrassed. I told him twenty-six was a more intimate number, that six fewer beds would give us less cramped rooms and that it looked good on the website, and he, being a practical and decent man, said twenty-six and redrew the plans in an afternoon. Six fewer beds, over five months of high season, works out to about eleven thousand pounds a year. I remembered that too, that night.

III · FIVE WITHOUT CREDENTIALS

Five of them got out. A man about seventy, two women in their late forties, a man in his early thirties, and an older woman they helped down from the back seat. They were dressed for walking. Worn boots, hiking trousers, waterproof jackets, thirty-five-litre rucksacks with their rain covers on because it was starting to drizzle, and aluminium walking poles hanging from the straps. There was nothing unusual about them. I want that stated clearly, because in the weeks since I've asked myself a hundred times: there was absolutely nothing unusual about those people when they got out of the car.

The seventy-year-old came up to the gate with his hat in his hand, which is a gesture almost no one makes any more, and asked if I was the warden. I said I was. He said his name was Frank, that they'd been walking from the pass and had had to do the last nine kilometres in a local's car because the older lady, who was his aunt, had a swollen ankle. And he asked if we had any beds left.

This is where I have to be completely honest with myself, because this is the point where it all got decided, and no one decided it but me. They had no booking. They had no pilgrim credential, which is the booklet each hostel stamps and which in theory you're supposed to present. And it was the twenty-sixth of October, the first day out of season, with the closed sign already printed and sitting on the office table. And the car. The car was what grated on me from the very first second, because a pilgrim who does nine kilometres by car isn't a credential pilgrim, and hostels like ours are for those who walk. I had three perfectly valid reasons to say no and all three were there in my head at the same time, standing there, with fifty-two sheets counted and the rain starting.

And I said yes, and I didn't say it out of charity or fear or any of the things people assume afterwards. I said it because I'd been a warden for five months and there's one thing you learn in the first week: when a walker asks if you have beds, and you have twenty-six, you can't say no. Not because of the fifteen forty-one deed. Out of shame. Because the question has no way out: if you say you're full, you're lying and they know it, and if you say you don't want them, then what kind of hostel are you running? So I opened the gate and told them to come in, that it was raining now, and Frank thanked me and wiped his boots on the mat four times before stepping inside. They all wiped their boots. All five of them.

IV · THE STAMP

Registration is done at the table in the hall and it takes four minutes per person: name, ID, place of origin, and the stamp in the credential. A hostel stamp is something you grow fond of. I had ours made in March at a printer's in the county town, rubber on wood, with the drawing of the hospital's frontage and the legend around it: HOSPITAL OF ST. IVES OF THE RIDGE, and below it the year of foundation. I stamp it myself, with the blue ink pad, and in five months I'd stamped it one hundred and seventy-nine times.

I told them they didn't need the credential, that I'd stamp it anyway if they had it, and Frank took his out of the inside pocket of his waterproof, in a folded plastic bag the way you carry an important document. It was an old credential. Not from this year, not from this season: a cardboard booklet of the old kind, with stitched pages, worn at the folds and with the corners rounded from being in many pockets. And it was full. Eighty or ninety stamps from hostels all over the country, some overlaid, some already illegible. He placed it open on the table for me to find space, and while I was looking for space I saw ours.

Our stamp. The rubber-on-wood one I had made in March at the county-town printer's. The hospital frontage, the legend around it, the foundation year below. Stamped in blue ink on page four of that booklet, between a hostel in Stafford and one from a village I'd never heard of. And with the date written by hand next to it, as the date is always written next to the stamp. Fourteenth of August, nineteen eighty-seven.

In nineteen eighty-seven, the hospital of St. Ives of the Ridge was four walls without a roof, with an almond tree growing inside the refectory. That's not my impression. It's documented. There's a photograph from nineteen eighty-four in the county heritage catalogue, which I myself digitised in two thousand and nine, showing the building open to the sky and the almond tree. And the stamp is mine. Not similar: mine. With the flaw it has, which is a nick in the G of RIDGE that the printer got wrong and which in March I nearly sent back. I stood there looking at that page with the ink pad still in my hand and said nothing, and Frank waited, very politely, until I found a space on page eleven and stamped it, and he thanked me and put the booklet back in its plastic bag.

V · DINNER

What they did that night was what any group of pilgrims does in a hostel with a kitchen, and that's why it took me two days to understand that something was happening. They had dinner. They bought their dinner from the vending machine in the hall, which is a tinned-food-and-pasta machine I'm embarrassed to have but which brings in money, and they cooked in the communal kitchen, which is what it's there for. And they sat down at the long table in the refectory, the five of them, and invited me, and I came down and ate with them because I'd been eating alone for three weeks.

It was a pleasant dinner. We talked about the building work: what it costs to rebuild a barrel vault, that the stone has to come from the same quarry, and that quicklime burns through gloves. Frank knew about that. He knew far more than I did and almost as much as Beto, and he asked me two very good technical questions about the drainage of the north wall. The older woman, the one with the ankle, was called Prudence and she didn't speak during the whole meal. She sat at the far end, ate slowly, and looked at the ceiling almost the entire time, and I thought she was tired. And there were three things at that dinner. All very small. I told all three to Beto two days later, and all three, said out loud, amount to nothing.

The first: when I went to get the oil, the younger of the two women in their late forties already had it in her hand. The oil is in the second cupboard on the right, behind the sliding door, in a place you can't see and that every pilgrim asks me about. The second: the man in his early thirties, getting up for water, switched off the service corridor light as he passed. He switched it off without looking, with the back of his hand, at a switch that's at shoulder height and behind a beam, and which took me a month to use without fumbling for. And the third is the one I remembered to tell last and the only one that still stays with me. The third is that throughout the entire dinner, none of the five asked me a single thing about myself.

That doesn't happen in a hostel. A pilgrim who has dinner with the warden always asks the same things in the same order: whether the hostel is yours, how long you've been here, and why you did it. It was a conversation I'd had one hundred and seventy-nine times in five months and for which I already had the three answers worn out. That night I didn't need any of them. We spent an hour and forty minutes talking about vaults, lime, the north-wall drainage, and a hostel in Dartmoor that no longer exists. And when I went up to my room at ten past eleven and sat on the bed to take off my boots, I realised I didn't know what any of the five did for a living.