Nineteen Years
His rooms were two, on the top floor of a house on Cleat Lane, and he had lived in them for fourteen years.
A bed. A chair. A table with one drawer. A stove that drew badly. A washstand. On the table, a brass pocket-watch that had stopped in Rime and that he wound every morning anyway, because a man who has wound a watch for nineteen years does not stop on the grounds that it has stopped. And along the whole of the inner wall, on a shelf he had put up himself in his second year and levelled twice, nineteen ledgers, standing upright in order, spines out, dated.
He came in at the eleventh hour, hung his coat, and did not light the stove.
He sat down at the table instead, and put the ring and the folded Coyle sheet in front of him, and looked at them, and found that he did not want to think about either, and so he thought about the one thing further back than both.
He had been fourteen.
The kitchen had been in the Ninth, three streets up from where the Coyle house now stood, which he had noticed on the walk home and had refused to make anything of. His mother had been thirty-nine and had looked sixty, and the verdigris had been at her throat for two months, and everybody in the lane had known what day it was, and every shutter had been closed.
The tallyman had not knocked twice. He had knocked once and come straight in, with his hat still on, and he had read the count fast, running the words together the way a man reads a thing he has read four thousand times, and when he got to do you contest the count he had not waited for an answer before going on.
He had not offered last words. There was a column for them; Rook had learned that later, and had gone back through the House copies in his fourth year and found the sheet and found the column blank.
And when it was done — and it had taken forty seconds, and the man had been out of the door inside two minutes — he had said, to the boy standing against the wall, not unkindly, in the tone of a man giving useful advice:
"Don't take one, son. That's the lesson. Don't take one."
Then he had gone down the lane, and the shutters had stayed closed, and Rook had stood in the kitchen with his mother in the chair and understood, with the total and useless clarity of a fourteen-year-old, that the terrible thing was not that it had happened.
The terrible thing was that it had been done badly.
The sum had been agreed. She had taken eleven years at four hours the day in the year twenty-eight because his father had gone and there was a boy and no trade, and she had known the price, and she had said so, more than once, calmly, in that kitchen, when he was old enough to ask. The debt was not the outrage. The debt was arithmetic and she had done it herself.
The outrage was a man in a hat who did not take it off, reading the numbers of her life at the speed of a man reading a shipping list, and not waiting at the door, and not writing down what she said.
At fourteen, Rook could not do anything about the arithmetic.
But someone was going to walk into those kitchens. There were four hundred a year in the lower wards alone. Somebody was going to be the man in the doorway, and it could be a man who ran the words together, or it could be a man who knocked twice and waited, and read the count out loud like a real number, and took his hat off under a low ceiling, and wrote down the last thing anybody said.
He had gone to House Ferrow at twenty-two and asked for the trade. They had been surprised; nobody asked for it. They had given it to him.
And for nineteen years he had been extremely good at it, and he had knocked twice every time, and he had never once left the last column blank; and he had told himself, all the way through, that this was the whole of the available decency and that he was spending it well.
He got up and took the first ledger off the shelf.
Year twenty-two. The binding had gone soft at the corners. He opened it at the front, where a young man's handwriting — larger than his own, rounder, trying visibly to look like the handwriting of a serious person — had entered the first collection of his career on the ninth of Thaw.
Dunmore, Cecil. Principal four years. Outstanding eleven days. Collected in full. Debtor conscious and civil. Last words: "Tell them I said it was fair."
Rook read it and felt nothing much. He had been twenty-two and had been sick in the lane afterwards and had written civil because Vessey told him it was the professional word.
He turned pages.
Aldritch. Ware. Sumner, twice, the second time the wife. Penhale. Carrow — no relation to any Carrow now living in the ward, he had checked once, for no reason.
Line after line of it, in his own tightening hand, four hundred of them, nineteen years, every count, every name, every last word that had been permitted and not required.
He turned to the back.
At the back of every tallyman's ledger were four ruled pages for private reckoning, because the House understood that a man who counted for a living would count on his own account and preferred him to do it where it could be inspected.
In nineteen ledgers, Rook had used two lines.
Year twenty-four: Vessey d. 14 Sedge. Owed him for the trade. Paid nothing.
Year thirty-one: Wage at grade IV. Sufficient.
That was all. Nineteen years.
He sat with the book open on the table and looked at the two lines and thought about the beneficiary box.
It came round every quarter on a buff form: Officer to nominate a recipient of accrued pension and death benefit in the event of decease in service. He had put nineteen of them in the stove. He had never once considered it a decision. It had simply been a form that did not apply to him, the way the form for married quarters did not apply to him.
Sitting there at forty-one, with a year in his pocket, he examined the reasoning properly for the first time and found there wasn't any.
There was only the shape of a man who had decided at fourteen that the correct response to watching someone he loved be collected was to become extremely good at collecting, and who had therefore arranged his life so that there was never anybody in it whose collection would have to be survived.
Nineteen ledgers. Four hundred names. Not one of them his.
"Oh," said Rook, out loud, in the empty room.
He put the ledger back on the shelf, in order, spine out.
Then he took the Coyle sheet and read it again, though he knew it by heart now.
Bound the fourth of Ash, year thirty-four. Principal: eleven years. Rate: four hours the day.
Eleven years at four hours the day. It was the standard instrument for a widow with a minor and no trade; it had been the standard instrument in the year twenty-eight as well. His mother's had been eleven years at four hours the day.
He looked at that for a long time.
Then he did the thing he would think about afterwards as the actual beginning — not the ring in his pocket, not the lie to Pellam, but this: he took out his pencil, and turned to the back of the current ledger, and on the third private line, under Wage at grade IV. Sufficient, he wrote:
Wend. 14th of Rime. One year. Average, not promise.
And then, because he was a man who could not leave a column half-filled, he wrote the only other number he had.
Coyle, M. Outstanding: 276.
He looked at the two figures sitting under each other on the page.
Three hundred and sixty-five. Two hundred and seventy-six.
He did not do the subtraction. He was aware of not doing it, in the same way he had been aware of not looking at the boy's cap on Ostrow's table, and he closed the ledger on it and put out the lamp and lay down in his coat.
He did not sleep for a long time.
Somewhere below, the woman on the second floor who owed Halloran's came in late and went up her stairs quietly, the way the bound went up stairs; and out over the water the assay-house lamp burned steadily on its black rock, saying its one sentence to the whole city, all night, without interruption.