Chapter 17 Hours for Sale

The Hour Market on a Thursday night in the last warm week before the frost was about two hundred people, and Nyle had never been in a room where so much of the ordinary business of a life was being done on the strength of a number cut into a strip of brass. The trade was simple. A man with a band and hours to spare walks. A person with a need and no hours waits. They find each other. Six hours buys a fortnight of bread, or a place on the winter coach, or a burial lime, or three nights of a room with a stove in it. Everything has a rate and the rates are terrible and everybody knows them, and the whole market runs on the same arithmetic that runs the civic account, with the same people losing. Enid Scarfe was there on a Thursday night because Thursday was the night she could afford the walk there and back. She found him in the first hour. "You should not be in here." "I am an inspector of the rolls who has no post and no authority and no place to be," Nyle said. "It seemed honest." She looked at him for a moment and then hooked her thumb at the far wall. "Come and stand where you can see the board." The board was a slate with the winter's rates chalked on it in a hand that had been rubbed out and rewritten twice. Bread, six hours. Coal, fourteen. Lime, nine. Coach, twenty-two. A physician's call, forty. The rates had gone up eleven per cent since the posting on the wall outside the Hourhouse, and the number of people who could afford them had gone down. "Three years ago I could sell an hour for something," she said. "Now I have to buy one." "How much do you have?" "Thirty-one." She said it the way he would have read a figure off a plate. "When my mother died I had ninety. Twenty-four went on the physician's call and the rest went on nine days of a room with a stove and a man to sit with her at the end of it, and thirty-one is what is left at fifty-one years of age." Thirty-one hours. Less than the twenty-four for a journeyman advance, plus anything else. "When they struck my plate," she said, "there was a clerk at the ward desk and he said the word along with the others and he said it the same way as the others, and I thought: so that is what advancement is. You turn up and they take it and something happens." She stopped. "Nothing happened. I went back the next spring and I was the same and my hands were the same and the only thing anybody could tell me about it was that I had paid." Nyle wrote nothing, for the second time in a month, and hated himself for it, and did it anyway. "Who took the ninety?" he said. "The physician." "South ward man. Third street. He has a board with his rates on it in the window and he came the same night for the call and the second night for the lime and the third night to look at the register, and every night I gave him hours, and on the fourth night he said there was nothing more he could do and he took eleven hours for coming back on the fifth." "And you paid it." "I paid it." She looked at the slate. "Fourteen hours of coal and thirty-one on my arm. That is my winter, Inspector. That is what the assurance levy bought and what the phantom cut took, and both of them are in the same band." Nyle watched the market for a while instead of writing. It was the only thing in eight weeks that he had watched without counting it, and it took him about four minutes to stop counting. A man with eleven hours on his arm was standing in front of the slate trying to work out whether to buy a fortnight of bread or a half-load of coal, and doing it out loud, and getting it wrong, and going back to the numbers twice. A woman with more hours than sense was trying to sell him six of them at a discount because she needed coal worse than bread. Somebody at the back was paying a boy four hours to copy a page out of a ledger, and the boy was doing it in a fair hand with the paper braced against a barrel, and the transaction was conducted entirely in writing and one of the two parties could not read. "That is a boy of eleven copying a page," Nyle said. "Why is he copying it?" "Somebody's mother is claiming a levy back," Enid said. "She says she paid it twice. The ward says there is one entry. So she is paying four hours to a boy to copy the page out of her own ledger so she can take it to the Hourhouse, and the ward will look at it and say there is one entry, and she will look at it and say there is one entry in this book and the clerk has another, and that is where that ends." "How much does a copy of a page cost in a fair hand?" "Four hours, and it is worth it, because without the copy she has nothing, and with the copy she has a thing that is in the wrong book." Enid straightened the hood of her coat. "Your whole case is a copy of a page, Inspector. You know it better than I do. You just have a docket that says you are allowed to want it." He said that it was the first use of the word *case* anyone had made in his hearing that he had recognised, and she said that she had been at the ward desk long enough to know what a case was, because the desk took cases and the desk also turned about two in three of them away. "How is your band?" she asked. "You have not mentioned it and you have been looking at your arm since the second hour." "One hundred and eighty-one hours," Nyle said. "Sixteen years of salary, minus two advances I did not take." "That is a great deal of hours." "It is four advances I did not take, and a house I have lost, and a winter of coal I have put on somebody else's ledger." He turned his forearm over so that the strip of brass was out of the lamplight. "I have been counting other people's bands since April and I have not once counted my own, and the reason is that my band is the only figure in this city that has been correct for sixteen years, and I have been getting nothing out of that." Enid Scarfe looked at him for a while, and then she laughed, once, without any warmth in it, which he understood was the sound she made when she thought something was funny and sad at the same time. "Then you are the only man in Brackmoor I could lend two hours to," she said, "and I am not going to, because I do not lend." "I should not expect you to." "You will get your coal in December or you will not," she said, "and I have seen the notice about the guarantee, and there is no clerk in this ward who believes a suspended thing comes back." He walked with her to the door and stood in the draught while she went out into the street. Then he went back inside and did the thing he had come to do, which was to find the rate board and copy the numbers off it, including the increase, including the date the increase was chalked, and including the four households who had their names scored out at the bottom of the winter list, which somebody in the ward had done in chalk in a hand that had not wanted to. Four households had already been crossed off the guarantee. He copied the names, and the fact that they were crossed off, and the fact that they had paid the levy regardless, and he stood looking at the slate for a long time afterwards with the chalk dust on his cuff. ---