Her Hand

The letter came by internal post on the Monday, in the grey envelope the service used for things it was pleased about and things it was not, and Margaret opened it at half past nine with her second tea, because post waited for tea and not the other way round, and read it the way she read everything, in order, twice.

The service noted, with regret, her resignation of the twenty-ninth. It accepted the same, with warm thanks for thirty-one years of exemplary service. Her final working day would be the last Friday of the month. A form was enclosed concerning her lanyard, her locker, and the return of any keys. Somebody’s typed name wished her a long and happy retirement, and a signature sat above the typing, and the signature was not the interesting one.

The interesting one was hers.

Because the letter, being an acceptance, referred throughout to an original, her letter of the twenty-ninth, reference enclosed, copy attached for her records, and the copy was attached, and Margaret set down her tea and held her own resignation in both hands and read it, in order, twice.

It was one paragraph. It was courteous, plain, and final, which she would have approved of in anybody. It gave no reason, which she would also have approved of, reasons in resignation letters being like flowers on counters, pleasant and in the way. It thanked the service for thirty-one years. It was signed.

It was her hand.

She took it to the window light and read it a third time, which she had done with perhaps five documents in her life, and she brought to it the whole of what she was, the thirty-one years, the renewals and the reservations and the sick notes and the leaving cards, the ten thousand signatures that had passed under her stamp, the d’s of the world and their curls and their chapel hat pegs, and she found nothing. The height right. The slant right. The crossbars level as a good shelf. Her m with its slightly impatient middle. Her full stop, firm, close to the last letter, a full stop that did not hold with gaps. Whoever had written this had not practised her. They had learned her, all the way down, and if she had been shown it across the returns desk she would have said, without one heartbeat of doubt, that Margaret wrote this.

Margaret had not written it.

She sat with that, in the strip-light hum, and checked the fact the way she checked any fact, against the shelf she kept where nobody could reach it. The twenty-ninth had been a Tuesday. Trolleys at eleven. The hymnal finished and set to settle. A gentleman’s fine of forty pence, disputed by way of the Corn Laws this time, paid in the end as they were always paid. She had written three reservation cards, one overdue notice, and a note to the milkman. She had resigned from nothing. She had met herself, every morning, for sixty years. The acquaintance was long, and it did not include this paragraph.

“Hm,” said Margaret.

There are people the world can make doubt themselves with a single good forgery, and there are people it cannot, and the difference is not cleverness, it is housekeeping. Margaret’s memory was swept, stocked, and audited daily, like her desk, like her kettle, like her seams, and she knew what she had written on the twenty-ninth the way she knew what was in her larder, and no piece of paper, however perfect, outranked the larder. Paper could be made to say anything. She had spent thirty-one years watching what paper got up to when it thought nobody who mattered was reading.

So. Somebody had practised Cal’s hand, and been caught by the d’s. And somebody had learned hers, and made no mistake at all, and the no-mistake was itself the finding, because in thirty-one years Margaret had never once met a flawless document that was up to any good.

She did not telephone the personnel department, who would be pleasant, and would consult a file, and the file would agree with itself. She had seen where that road went, in the small print of the modernisation, in questions marked resolved on her behalf. Files that agreed with themselves were the fashion now.

Instead she took her lunch at the workroom bench, and thought, and at four o’clock she did the two things she had decided on, in order.

First, she took the date stamp, her stamp, thirty-one years in the hand, and stamped the acceptance letter with the day’s true date, square in the margin, and beneath the stamp she wrote, in her own unambiguous letters, four words.

Not my hand. M.

The initial was for the avoidance of doubt. Doubt avoided nothing in her experience, but you gave it no encouragement.

Second, she carried the letter, and its enclosure, along the counter to the issue desk, where Cal was working the last returns of the day, and laid the two pages flat on the wood between them, level and true, the way evidence is laid.

“Somebody’s been practising my hand now,” said Margaret. “Practising isn’t the word. They’ve got it. Every stroke. I’d have passed it myself.” She let that sit for the time it deserved, which was not long, because deserving and dwelling were different things. “Except I didn’t write it, and I don’t retire, and my hand does not resign.”

She watched Cal read the letter, and then the enclosure, and Cal’s hands were level and her face was where she kept it, and whatever moved behind it moved in the place Margaret had never once been able to read, and Margaret noted, again, professionally, that of the two people off that Thursday she had never been able to read, one was standing at this counter, reading her letter with a level face.

“May I keep these,” said Cal.

“You may have them,” said Margaret. “I’ve kept what I need.” She tapped her temple once, which in thirty-one years she had done in front of exactly nobody. “The twenty-ninth is in here. Trolleys at eleven. The Corn Laws. A note to the milkman. Nobody’s practised that yet.”

“No,” said Cal, and something in the way she said it made it a finding of her own, filed where her findings went. “Margaret. Until this is put right, you change nothing. The hours, the trolleys, the kettle. Everything as it stands.”

“I had no intention,” said Margaret, “of changing so much as the teaspoons.”

She went back along the counter to the returns desk, and worked the last hour, and the stamp came down level on the due dates of the world, the way it had come down through prime ministers, two refurbishments, and one modernisation, and at seven she put on her coat, and looked once around the floor of the building she had not resigned from, the shelves, the trolleys, the high windows going the colour of the evening.

“Returned,” said Margaret, to no one in particular, and went home to her own kettle.