Verdicts

Margaret did not hold with appointments.

A library ran on hours, not appointments. The doors opened at half nine and the doors shut at seven, and between those two facts the whole of civilisation was available to anyone with the sense to walk in, and if you needed a special time and a booked room and your name in a diary to meet a person, then in Margaret’s experience you were either a solicitor or a difficulty, and there was considerable overlap.

The public meeting room had been booked twice this month. By appointment. Same booking both times, Records Assurance, eleven o’clock, and both times a neat man in a dark suit had crossed the floor at one minute to, hat in his hand, shoes you could have processed fines by, and both times Margaret had watched him from the returns desk over the top of a repaired atlas and issued her finding at a distance.

Smooth. The verdict had arrived complete, in one word, the way the good ones did. Not smooth like the young men with the phones, who were merely unironed. Smooth like a banister. Smooth from handling.

Nobody had asked for her verdict. That was usual. She kept it with the others.

The morning proceeded. The self-service machine swallowed a card at ten and was made to regret it. A gentleman disputed a twenty pence fine on a book about frugality, at length, invoking first principle and then Magna Carta, and Margaret let him get to the end of the argument because it was raining and he’d clearly prepared, and then said, “Twenty pence,” and he paid it, and they were both satisfied, and he would be back next week, because they always came back, that was the whole business model of a library, things coming back.

At eleven she took the trolley up, and at half eleven she settled at the workroom bench to finish the hymnal, the one with the spine broken in a way she still considered morally instructive, somebody having pressed it flat to photocopy Abide With Me, of all the hymns to flatten a binding for, and she had the thread waxed and the first station sewn when Cal came through for the accessions box and went out again, and Margaret took in the state of her in passing, completely, the way she took in a spine.

Better than the winter. Not right. The winter’s Cal had gone quiet like a book put on the wrong shelf. This spring’s Cal was a different matter, present, working, laughing on Thursdays even, and underneath it, lately, something held very straight, the way you hold a tray you have just been told is heavier than it looks. Margaret had a verdict about it forming and declined to hurry it. Verdicts, like seams, held better if you let the wax set.

It was the diary that finished the morning.

She took the room diary in hand at noon to enter the water-stain inspection for the borough, because the diary lived at the issue desk and the issue desk was hers when it was anybody’s, and she flipped back through the month to find the last free Tuesday, and there were the two bookings, Records Assurance, eleven, in Cal’s hand, and beside each, one word.

Confirmed.

Margaret looked at the confirmations for a while.

Thirty-one years of signatures. Renewals, reservations, complaints in the suggestions book, sick notes, leaving cards, the whole floor’s handwriting passing under her stamp, and she knew Cal’s hand the way she knew her own kettle, which was to say without ever once having thought about it, and there was nothing wrong with these two words at all, the height right, the slant right, the crossbars level as a good shelf.

Cal’s d’s didn’t curl.

Thirty-one years. Not once. A d like a chapel hat peg, straight down, finished. These two d’s curled at the tail, small, tidy, pleased with themselves, the way a signature curls when the writer has practised being somebody and is rather good at it.

“Hm,” said Margaret.

She did not hold with mysteries either. Mysteries were what people called facts they hadn’t sorted yet. She held the page flat under the lamp, and looked once more, and the finding arrived complete, in one line, the way the good ones did, and she carried it the way she carried everything, along with the trolley and the post and the kettle’s descaling, until the right moment presented itself, which was four o’clock, at the workroom door, Cal passing with the last returns of the day.

“That room diary,” said Margaret, to the hymnal, drawing the thread through. “Somebody’s been practising your hand. The d’s are wrong.”

The returns did not stop. That was the thing Margaret noticed, and went on noticing after, the way you notice the one stitch pulled tighter than its row. Cal’s hands kept moving, level, book onto trolley, book onto trolley, and her face stayed exactly where it had been, and the whole of whatever happened, happened somewhere Margaret could not see it, which annoyed her, professionally, because Margaret read everyone, and this was the second person off that Thursday she could not read.

“Thank you,” said Cal.

“I’ve not touched it,” said Margaret. “Not mine to fix.”

“No,” said Cal. “Leave it.”

Margaret disliked leaving things. That was why she mended them.

And she went out with the trolley, unhurried, the door swinging to behind her, and Margaret sat with the hymnal in the cradle and the thread in her hand and the afternoon light going the colour of old varnish, and reviewed the facts, which were few, and sorted, and did not add up to anything she had a stamp for.

A booked room. A smooth man. A practised hand. Leave it as it lies.

Margaret finished the seam. She tied off, and trimmed the thread, and set the hymnal aside to settle, and looked for a moment at the workroom door, and the corridor beyond it, and the ordinary evening arriving through the high windows the way it had arrived for thirty-one years, on time, unbooked, needing no appointment.

“Trouble,” said Margaret, to no one in particular, and went to put the kettle on.