Chapter Five
Reconciled
She woke at the usual hour, before the alarm, the way she had woken for eleven years, and lay a moment in the grey of the room and felt rested.
That was the thing she would come back to, later, when there was a later to come back from. That she had slept, deeply, without dreams, and woken whole. The weight was off her arms. There was a small clean feeling in her, the feeling of a thing handed to the right person, and she lay in it a moment and did not hurry, because there was no hurry. She had carried the largest thing she had ever held up the proper channel, and today was the first ordinary day, and she meant to do it the ordinary way.
She got up and made her tea in the cup's twin, strong, one sugar, stirred three times, and drank it at the window looking out at the street. It was a fine morning, going to be warm later, the first real warmth of the year. A man washed a car. The post came. She washed the cup and dried it and set it on its shelf, and put on her coat, and went down to the bus.
She caught it at the usual stop and rode it the seven stops, and got off where she always got off, and walked to the gate. The brass plate was where it had always been. The fence. The lamps, dark now in the daylight, the dark stretches between them reading as ordinary shadow, which is what she had made them read as. She did not look at any of it twice. She had walked this last hundred yards eleven thousand times and her feet knew it without her.
She came to the door at the foot of the building, the staff door, the one her badge opened, the one she had passed through twice a day for eleven years.
She took the badge out of her pocket — it had warmed to her on the walk, against her hip, the way it always had — and held it to the reader.
The light went red.
She did not understand it at first, which is to say she understood it as a fault.
A reader has a bad morning the way any machine has a bad morning. A strip wears. A reader's eye clouds. She had logged a hundred such faults in eleven years and signed off their repair, and the first thing in her mind was not something is wrong with my card but the reader wants servicing. That was the reading the paper supported, and Margaret read the reading the paper supported.
She turned the badge over and wiped the strip on her sleeve, the way you do, and held it to the reader again, square, the way it wanted holding.
The light went red.
She stood a moment. There was a second reader, the older one, on the goods door round the corner, that her grade also opened. She walked round to it, unhurried, a woman going the long way because the near door was playing up, which was an ordinary thing to be, and held her badge to it.
Red.
She looked at the badge in her hand. It was the flat card it had always been, her grade on the front, the strip on the back that the readers knew. Nothing had changed about it. It was warm from her pocket. There was nothing to see, because there was never anything to see; a dead strip looked exactly like a live one, and the only way to know was to hold it to a reader and watch the light.
Two readers do not fail in one morning. She knew that the way she knew the building. One reader is a fault. Two readers reading the same card the same way is not a fault in the readers. It is the card.
She put the badge back in her pocket, against her hip, where it lived, and she felt the first cold thing go through her, very small, no bigger than a wrong tag.
There was a man at the goods door, an ordinary security man in the ordinary uniform, sitting in the little glass booth with a sign-in book and a kettle, and Margaret knew him, not by name but by his face and his hours; he did the early turn three days a week and had done for two years, and she had passed him twice a day on those days and they had nodded to each other the way you nod to a man you do not know.
She went to the booth. He looked up.
"Reader's playing up," she said. "Both of them. Front and goods. Can you sign me in by hand while it's seen to?"
It was the ordinary request. He had done it for her once before, a year ago, when the front reader had genuinely failed — turned the book round, she had signed, he had written the time, and that was the whole of it.
He turned the book round.
He was reaching for the book and the pen before he looked at her properly, the way you reach for a thing you have done before — and then he did look, to take her name for the line, and something happened in his face that she did not at first have a word for.
It was not suspicion. She had braced, in the half-second, for suspicion, for the man to harden and ask her business, and she had the answer ready, her grade, her desk, eleven years. It was worse than that. It was a small ordinary blankness, the blankness of a man who has turned a book round for a stranger and is waiting, politely, for the stranger to give a name he does not already hold.
"Name?" he said.
She gave it. "Margaret Vane. Coverage. Third floor." And then, because his face did not change at the name, did not do the thing a face does at a name it knows — "You know me. I come through here. Tuesdays, Thursdays. Your turn."
"Do you have an appointment, miss?" he said.
Miss. He had called her miss once, two years ago, the first week, before he learned her face. He had not called her miss since. He called her nothing now, because two people who pass twice a day do not need names, and the not-needing had been a small daily proof that she was known. And here he was at the start of it again, miss, the word a stranger gets, his pen ready over a clean line, waiting for her to be a visitor.
"I work here," she said. "I've worked here eleven years."
"I'll just check the roster," he said, kindly, because he was a kind enough man, and he turned to the screen in the booth and tapped at it, and she watched his eyes go down it, and she knew exactly what the screen was, because she had specified it years ago: the roster the door staff checked when a card would not read, the list of every soul the building held with a face beside each name. She had written the rule that put it there.
He scrolled. He went down it once, and then, because she was still standing there, he went down it again, slower, the way a man reads a thing twice to be kind to a woman who is plainly certain.
"There's no Vane on it," he said. He said it gently, the way you tell a person a thing that is going to inconvenience them. "Sorry, miss. Have you maybe got the wrong building? There's the annexe up the road, sometimes people—"
"Go down to the V's again," she said. Her voice was level. She was proud of that, later — that her voice was perfectly level. "Vane. V-A-N-E. Coverage. Grade's on the card." She held the card up to the glass.
He looked at the card through the glass. Then he looked at the screen. And the kindness in his face was tipping over now, from the kindness you show a colleague into the kindness you show a person who may be unwell, and he said, "I can't sign in a card that's not on the roster, miss. That's the rule. I'm sorry."
It was the rule. She knew it was the rule. She had written it.
She did not make a scene, because Margaret Vane did not make scenes, and because a scene was the worst thing she could make, here, at a door, with her card refused and her name off the list. She knew exactly what a scene at a door looked like from the inside of the building. It looked like the man at the gate with the photograph and the letter and the ring, who had his face, which no one could check, and his story, which no one could check, and against him a record that everyone could.
She had watched that. She had thought, watching it, that the system had worked.
She stepped back from the glass. She said, "There's been an error in the roster, then. I'll have it seen to," in the flat sure voice of a woman of grade who has found a clerical fault and means to close it, and the man's face eased, because that was a thing he could file — a roster error, not his to fix, somebody's above him — and he said, "Best go up to the personnel office, miss, they'll sort you out," and she said thank you, and walked away from the booth at the speed she always walked, and did not look back.
It was a roster error. She made herself hold to that the whole length of the walk back round to the front, because it was the only reading the paper supported, and the alternative was not a reading at all but a fear, and Margaret did not deal in fears. A name dropped off a roster. It happened. A clerk re-keyed a list and a line was lost, and the lost line was hers, this morning of all mornings, and the coincidence of the morning pressed at her, and she would not look at it.
The personnel office was not in the secure part of the building. It was off the front lobby, the ordinary lobby, the one with the desk and the plant and the chairs, where a person with no card could stand and wait and be a person. The lobby door was a glass door, no reader, and she went in through it, out of the warm morning, and the hum was there, very low, the hum she felt in her teeth, the building's one constant, and it was a small comfort, because it meant the building still had her in it whatever the readers said.
The personnel clerk was a young woman Margaret did not know, new, neat, with a screen and a telephone and a queue of one, which was Margaret.
Margaret laid the card on the counter and explained it the clean way, the grade way, the way that gets a thing fixed. A roster fault. Her name dropped from the list. She would like it restored, please, and her card re-enabled, and she had work to be getting on with three floors up. She gave her name, her grade, her desk, her eleven years, the load-bearing facts first.
The clerk typed the name.
Margaret watched her type it, watched the small competent fingers, and the clerk frowned at the screen, the polite frown of a person whose machine has not done the expected thing, and typed it again, and Margaret said, helpfully, "Two words. Vane is V-A-N-E," and the clerk said, "Yes, I've got that," not unkindly, and looked at the screen, and her frown deepened into the careful blankness Margaret was coming to know, the blankness of a person who has searched and found nothing and now has to manage the searcher.
"I'm not finding a personnel record under that name," the clerk said.
"There will be eleven years of one," Margaret said.
"I'm sorry. There's nothing coming up. No current record, and—" she did something, a different search, a wider one "—no archived one either. The system would hold a leaver for seven years. There's nothing." She looked up, and her eyes did the soft careful thing. "Are you sure you were staff here, and not at one of the—"
"I am sure," Margaret said, "that I have worked at this desk for eleven years." And she heard her own voice do, very slightly, the thing the man at the gate's voice had done. The certainty in it — the certainty that was the only thing she had, against a screen everyone could read, that said nothing.
She had thought, watching that man, that the system had worked.
"Let me try your card number," the clerk said, kindly, a decent young woman faced with a distressed one. She read the number off the strip-side and typed it in, the long number, carefully. And Margaret watched her type her own card number into the system she had spent eleven years tending, and saw it return the small flat nothing a number returns when there is no record behind it, and the clerk said, very gently now, "That number isn't issued to anyone. It's not in the system at all. I don't think—" she stopped, and chose her words, and Margaret watched her choose them. "I don't think this is a current card."
She kept the method. That was the thing that held her up. She laid the facts out in the order the paper gave them.
A card that two readers refused. A name off the door roster. No personnel record, current or archived. A card number issued to no one. Four things, every one of them checkable, and all four said the same thing, which was that the building held no record of Margaret Vane.
And she did what the method told her to do with four things that agreed, which was to look for the single fault behind them. Four faults reading the same way are one fault, upstream. The door roster, the personnel record, the card register — they were not four lists. They were four readings of one list. The master record. The thing the building was for.
The cold thing in her grew, and she made herself look at it, because this was on the paper now; this was the most thoroughly papered thing that had ever happened to her.
Somebody had taken Margaret Vane off the master record.
She had believed one thing for eleven years, the way you believe the floor: that the record kept you. A careful list, kept by careful people, was the safe place, and the safe place was where she lived. But a list keeps a person the way it keeps a tin — by holding the line that says the tin is there. Strike the line and the tin is not gone; it was never in the list. Only the line was. She had spent eleven years inside the line and called it shelter.
She did not, even then, let it be the other thing. She would not let it be the ledger, or Ellis, or the open shelf, or the column of the living she had read there. There was no line on the paper from the column to her card. A card could be cancelled a hundred dull ways — a re-key gone wrong, a leaver's record wrongly triggered, a clerk in records keying the wrong number on a slow afternoon. The cleanness of it, the four-for-four of it, pressed at her the way the morning's coincidence had pressed at her, and she held it off the same way. A thing pressing at her was not a thing on the paper, and she did not deal in those.
Under the holding-off there was an older thing, and it stirred. A cold she had known before any register, before the desk, before there was a list at all to stand inside. The dark of a house where nothing was where it should be, where you reached for a thing and it was not there. She had not felt it in a long time. She had built a great many things between herself and it, over the years, and they were coming down now, one a window, and the dark behind them was the same dark. She made herself look at the paper, because the paper was the wall she had left.
But she knew who to ask.
There was one fact left that the morning had not touched, one thing the readers and the rosters and the registers could not refuse her, which was that she knew George Duval, and George Duval knew her, and had known her eleven years, and would not need a card or a roster to know her face. The card was the building's knowing of her. Duval was a man's knowing of her, and the second could not be taken from a register, because it did not live in one.
She would go up to Duval. He would know what had gone wrong. Very likely he was already at the wrong end of it, having found the report he was carrying up the channel tangled, somehow, in her record, and he would set it right with a telephone call and the weight of his grade, and it would be a story, in a month, a bad morning she had had.
She could not get up to Duval, because her card would not open the stair.
She used the lobby telephone, a black house handset on the wall by the lift the public could not take. She knew Duval's extension the way she knew her own, and she dialled it, and listened to it ring in the building above her, three floors up and along, and waited for the heavy unhurried voice that would put the morning right.
It rang. It rang the number of times a telephone rings before you know no one is going to lift it, and then it rang past that, into the long indifferent ringing of an empty room, and she let it ring, because to put it down was to admit he was not there, and she was not ready, yet, to admit a thing she had not checked. She knew the room it rang in. The visitor's chair that creaked, pushed back to the wall. The kettle she had timed, a hundred mornings, to the sound of his tread on the lino. Nothing in it lifted the handset, and the room she could see exactly stayed exactly empty.
She put it down.
She dialled the operator, the internal one, a woman in a room with a board, and got her, a brisk pleasant voice, and said she wanted Mr Duval, Directorate of Coverage, that he was not answering, could the operator try him, perhaps he had stepped out and could be raised somewhere.
"Putting you through to Coverage," the operator said.
It rang. Coverage was a small directorate; there was the general line, which sat on a desk near the door, and in eleven years someone had always answered it. It rang into the empty ringing.
"There's no answer from the directorate," the operator said, coming back on, untroubled, a woman reporting a fact. "Can I take a message?"
"I need Mr Duval," Margaret said. "George Duval. He's the head of it. It's—" she heard herself reach for the word urgent and not use it, because urgent drew attention, and the habit of eleven years of not drawing eyes held even as the building unmade her "—it's important. Is there another way to reach him? A pager. Anything."
A small pause. The pause of a person checking a thing.
"I'm sorry," the operator said. "I don't have a Duval listed for Coverage."
"He runs it," Margaret said.
"I've a directorate of Coverage," the operator said, helpfully, "but there's no Duval against it. I'm not showing that name at all, I'm afraid. Are you sure of the spelling?"
She put the handset back on its hook, carefully, both because the habit held and because she did not trust her hand, just then, to do it any other way.
She stood in the lobby. The plant. The chairs. The desk where the new clerk was already helping the next person in the queue, having helped the distressed woman with the dead card as best she could, and moved on, because that was her work and there was a queue. The hum in her teeth.
She had been wrong about which thing could not be taken. She had thought a man's knowing of her was safe, because it did not live in a register. But she had not reached for his knowing of her. She had reached for his extension, his directorate, his name against a line — and those lived in registers, every one of them, and the registers said there was no Duval in Coverage, and a name not in a register was, in this building, a name that was not.
She did not, yet, draw the line she could have drawn, between her own name gone and his name gone in the same hour, because she was holding hard to the method, and the method dealt in one wrong note at a time, and she had given it, this morning, more wrong notes than it could hold. She filed the operator's no Duval with the morning's coincidence and the four-for-four cleanness, in the small drawer, without a label — things she could not look at and would not throw away.
What she let herself hold, instead, was the smaller true thing: she could not reach George Duval, and the channel she had believed in for eleven years had no door in it she could open from where she now stood.
She thought, standing there: he will find me. He had the cross-cards and the movement card and the small black book under his arm. He knew where she lived. He knew the seven-stop bus. He had said go home, say nothing, let the process work, and the process was working, plainly, working on her — a clerical mistake, her record caught in the machine of the very thing she had reported — and Duval would find it and stop it. He was the proper man. The channel did not fail. It had taken the weight without a tremor.
She went out through the glass doors, into the warm morning, because there was nothing more the lobby could give her, and the building behind her stood the way it always stood, low and grey and patient, and it did not know her card any more, and so, by its own rule, the rule she had trusted like the floor under her feet, it did not know her.
She had things in the world besides the building. A person did. A bank. A flat she had paid into for eleven years. A doctor, somewhere, a panel she was on. The ordinary moorings of an ordinary life, none of them the Registry, none of them a thing the Registry's morning could reach. She would tend to those while Duval found the fault, and let the calm of ordinary errands hold her until the telephone rang at the flat in the evening, Duval's heavy voice saying it was sorted, come in tomorrow.
The bank was four stops back the way she had come. She had banked there eleven years. She queued in the marble cool of it, and came to the window, and asked to draw twenty pounds and to have the balance, please, and slid her bankbook under the glass.
The cashier took the book and typed the account number from its cover, and there it was again, the small polite frown Margaret had learned that morning to dread.
"I'm sorry," the cashier said. "This account number doesn't seem to be active. When did you last use it?"
"This week," Margaret said. "I drew money on—" she thought "—Tuesday."
The cashier typed something else. "I'm not finding it under that number, and I'm not finding it under the name either." She turned the book over, looking for another number, and found only the one, and looked at it — the worn cover, the eleven years of entries in faded ink, a real object, a thing you could hold — the way the personnel clerk had looked at the card, as a thing that ought to mean something and did not. "I can see your book, but there's no account behind it. There's nothing here for me to draw against. Have you been in touch with us about a closure?"
A closure. The flat stamp. The same flat stamp she pulled a hundred times a day.
"No," Margaret said. "I have not been in touch with you about a closure."
She did not go to the flat to test it. She understood, by then, what she was doing — going from window to window holding up her book and her card and her name, and at each window a kind person frowning at a screen, finding nothing, looking up at her with the soft careful eyes. She was the man at the gate now, and the record against her said nothing at all, which was worse than saying she was someone else, because someone else was at least a someone.
But she went, in the end, because the flat was not a window. The flat was a place, with three rooms in it, and the kettle, and the chair by the unlit fire, and the few books, and the cup's twin on its shelf, washed and dried and put away that very morning by her own hand. You could take a name off a register with a stroke. You could not take away three rooms and a kettle. She had stood at the kitchen window six hours ago and drunk her tea.
She rode the seven stops. She came to the building, the ordinary building, the brick and the bins and the entryphone, and she went up the stair to the second floor, to her own door, and she put her key in the lock.
The key did not turn.
She took it out and looked at it. It was her key, the key she had carried for eleven years, the key that had been in her pocket all morning. She put it back in and turned it, gently, then less gently, and it would not turn, and she crouched and looked at the lock, and the lock was new. The brass of it was bright and unworn where her own lock had been worn dull, and a curl of fresh wood-dust lay on the sill below the strike-plate where someone had fitted it, that morning, while she was at the building holding her card to a reader that would not read it.
She knelt at her own door with her own key in her hand that did not fit her own lock, and the warm morning had gone, somewhere in the day, into the flat dead light of an afternoon, and she heard, behind the door of the flat across the landing, the ordinary sounds of an ordinary life, a radio, a kettle, and she thought, with a clarity that frightened her, that she could knock on that door and the woman behind it had known her by sight for years and would open it and not know her face.
She did not test that. She had learned, by the afternoon, where testing led.
She went down to the ground floor, to the door of the porter, who held the leases and the keys, a heavy slow man who knew every tenant, and she knocked, and he came, and she said, before he could speak, holding hard to the level voice, "My lock's been changed. Flat four. I can't get in. There must be a mistake."
He looked at her. He did not know her face. She saw that at once, the same blankness, the careful courteous blankness of a man addressed by a stranger who knows the number of a flat.
"Flat four," he said. "And you are?"
"I live there. I've lived there eleven years. Margaret Vane."
He turned and took a ledger off a hook by his door — a board-bound book, a working book — and she watched him take it down without ceremony, the way the clerk three floors below her desk took the master ledger off its open shelf, and he opened it on his forearm and ran a thick finger down a page.
"Flat four," he said. He read it off. "That's let. Has been a good while." And he read her, off the page, the name of the tenant of flat four, which was not her name, which was no name she had ever heard — a stranger's name in the porter's careful hand against the number of the rooms she had paid into for eleven years and stood in that very morning — and he looked up at her, the stranger at his door, and said, not unkindly, because he was a kind enough man, "I think you've the wrong building, love. There's no Vane here. Never has been, not in my book, and I've kept it twelve years."
The booth man had known her and stopped knowing her. This was a different thing, and worse. His book was a year older than her tenancy. It had run all the eleven years she had lived here, and through every one of them it had held another name against her door, and there was no year in it, not one, where Margaret Vane had ever come up the stair and put a key in flat four. The paper went back further than she did, and it had no room in it for her.
She walked. She did not know, afterward, for how long, or where, only that she walked, because there was nowhere left to walk to. The body, at least, was hers, and it would walk.
She tried the hospital, late, because the body was the last thing left. A name could be struck off a register with a stroke. A body could not. A body was examined, weighed, the blood drawn and the chart written by the people who had it in front of them. She had been a patient there once, years ago, a week of it. The body would be in their book if it was in any book left in the world.
The woman at the records window typed her name and her date of birth and found nothing. She tried it the other way round, the way you do, in case a thing was keyed wrong, and found nothing.
"And you were a patient here?" she said. "You're sure it was this hospital?"
"I was here for a week," Margaret said. "Years ago. You took my blood. There's a chart somewhere with my name on it."
"There's no record of you as a patient," the woman said. "I'm sorry. Nothing under that name at all. If you'd been seen here, even once, even years back, you'd be in the system." So the body was not safe either. They had not taken her off the register the way you take off a name; they had reached back and taken the week she had lain in the ward, the blood drawn, the chart. The woman said it gently, and then, because it was late and the careful kindness had thinned, she said the thing none of the others had quite said, the plain reading of the screen in front of her, said without cruelty, as a fact: "There's no record of you anywhere I can see."
She went, at the very end of it, when the dark had properly come, back to the building. She did not decide to. Her feet took her, the way her feet had taken her every working morning for eleven years, and she came along the last hundred yards in the dark, and the lamps were lit now, the lamps she had spent a fortnight on, bright enough that the dark stretches between them read as ordinary shadow and not as gaps, which is what they were.
She stood across the road from the staff door, in the dark between two lamps, in the gap she had signed off herself, in the ten feet of shadow she knew tile by tile, and she looked at the door she had passed through twice a day for eleven years.
She had her badge in her hand. She had carried it all day, against her hip, where it lived, and it was warm from her, and she stood in the dark she had made and held it and did not cross the road to the reader, because she knew now what the reader would do. There was a cruelty in a thing tried twice, and a worse cruelty in a thing tried when you already knew.
A figure came along the pavement on the far side, an ordinary man of grade leaving at the ordinary hour, and crossed to the door, and held his card to the reader, and the light went green, and the lock gave its small soft click, the sound she had heard so many thousand times that she no longer heard it, and the door let him through into the night, and swung to, and locked, the way it was built to.
She had set the rule for that reader herself, years ago. How a card it did not know would be refused without fuss and no record made. How a card it knew would simply be let through. The door did not know her. It knew the card. She had never once stood at the door and thought about the difference between the two, because there had never been a difference.
There was a difference now. She was on one side of it, in the dark she had made, with her body that had eaten its breakfast and drunk its tea and walked all day, plainly alive, plainly here. And on the other side was the card, her card, the flat dead card in her warm hand, and the reader that would read it, and the building that believed the reader. It had unfiled her in a single day.
She had thought the building kept her. It had only counted her. The keeping had never been safety. It had been inventory, and inventory is struck.
The badge. The roster. The keycard. The account. The lease. The chart. The man at the booth who called her miss. Every record that had ever held her, gone. She had once struck a woman who had cost the budget a great deal and earned it nothing. She had once stood by and watched the system refuse a man his own pension, and thought that the system had worked.
She stood in the dark and held her badge to no reader, because she knew what the reader would say. Her badge had opened that door for eleven years. Tonight, if she crossed the road and held it up, the light would go red, politely, and the door would not open. And on every record that had ever held her — the badge, the roster, the account, the lease, the chart — Margaret Vane had never been born.