Chapter 11 The Effects Ledger

The weekly run to the railhead with the effects came round on the eighth of October, and Milly took the passenger seat of Number Four beside the hospital orderly who drove it, with a stack of labelled bundles behind them, and made herself small and useful for the whole length of the road. At Marlefield the effects were handed over at the railway goods shed to a rheumy-eyed storeman who counted them twice, out loud, and signed a chit, and then went off to his tea, and through a door that he left open when he went, Milly saw the room where the whole trade was written down. It was a small office with a coal fire and a shelf of ledgers, and the ledgers were the ordinary kind that every establishment kept: stores received, stores issued, effects discharged. She had a quarter of an hour, no more, and Hilda was at the door, and she had brought, in her tunic, a folded paper from Farlow that she had not asked for and that Farlow had not signed, and a pencil, and her nerve. The effects ledger was the third book on the shelf, and it was open at the current week. She turned back to August, watching the door, and found the eleventh, and found, in the column for effects discharged to next of kin, a line that stopped her heart. *Ryecroft, H., Pte. Effects signed for by H. Ryecroft, Pte, in person, 3 September 1916.* Signed for by the dead man himself. A man three weeks in his grave had come to a railhead office and collected his own boots, his own pay-book, his own photograph of a stranger and a dog, and had signed for them in a neat hand, and the transaction had been entered in the ledger and closed. She looked further. It was worse, or better, than she had feared: there were seven such signatures in the ledgers for August and September, seven dead men who had walked into a store and signed for the salvage of themselves. Two of them had the same surname as a family in the Scottish highlands; one was a man whose brother Milly knew by sight, a boy from a Wiltshire farm who had come out in the same draft as Ted. She copied every line into her notebook, in the small hand, and copied also the name at the foot of the page where the storeman entered his own entries: *E. Cradock, Q.M.S.* The sergeant's name was on every page. The officer's was on none of them, because officers do not write in storemens' ledgers. Officers sign nothing and are signed for by nothing, and that is how they stay clean. She was copying the last name when the door opened and Cradock came in. He stopped. For one long second nobody in the room moved, and Milly had time to think, in a strange detached way, that the room had a fire and a rug and a picture of the King, and that this was what a man's whole mortal existence came down to at last: a line in a book kept in a warm room by a man with a key. "Miss Passmore," Cradock said. "The effects run is Anderson's, I think." "It was," Milly said. "He has a fever. I came in his place." Cradock closed the door behind him. "And while you were here," he said, "you thought you would look at the ledgers." "I thought I would look at the fire," Milly said. "It is a cold day." "Then you have looked," he said, "and the fire is a poor one, and you should go and wait for your driver in the yard, because the yard is where a person waits, and in this establishment persons who are not storemen do not read the stores." He crossed to the ledger, and closed it with one hand, and his neat smile was gone entirely. "The fourteenth, incidentally," he said, "is a day you should arrange to be somewhere else." She went out, and Hilda looked at her and did not ask, because Hilda could read her face, and they waited in the yard in silence until the orderly had finished his tea. The small office smelled of coal and wet wool and old paper, and for the quarter of an hour she had, Milly read the ledgers the way she read a register at the clearing station: quickly once for the shape of the thing, and then slowly twice for the truth. The effects ledgers for August and September were three in number, and their entries were dull and orderly, which is what makes a crime invisible. Stores received. Stores issued. Effects discharged to next of kin. Effects discharged to depot. Effects sold to salvage. And in among these honest rows, in the column for effects discharged to next of kin, the signatures of dead men. She copied the names in her small hand and did not let herself stop to be angry, because anger blunts a pencil. There was Ryecroft, H., who had signed for his own effects on the third of September, three weeks after his body had gone into the ground under a word that was not his name. There was a man called Macfarlane, whose signature appeared twice, once in blue ink and once in black, which meant that two different men had claimed the same dead name on two different days. There was a boy from a Wiltshire farm whose brother Milly knew by sight, entered as discharged to his unit, when his unit was forty miles up the line and had not seen him for a month. Seven names in all, and every one of them a man who had died at Argentonne and then walked, with a pen, out of his own grave. Afterward, she could not remember crossing the yard. She remembered standing in the rain with the document against her chest and her heart going, and she remembered that the orderly from Number Four had asked her whether something was wrong, and she had said no, and she had smiled, and the smiling had cost her more than the wheel had. Then she was in the tannery with Hilda, and Hilda was looking at her face and not asking, which was the greatest kindness Hilda ever did her. That night she wrote the seven names out again, fair, on a separate sheet, with the dates and the figures and the fact of the two signatures in two inks, and she put the sheet in the lining of Ted's boot and the loose page in the back of the notebook and the notebook against her ribs, and she lay down in her clothes and did not sleep. Somewhere in the dark a man with a key was deciding what to do about a driver who had read the ledgers, and somewhere at a railhead a man with a black book was deciding what to do about the same driver, and she could not see either of them and could not stop either of them and could only keep, in two places at once, the one thing in France that could not be burned without her knowing it. At about four in the morning she got up and went to the window and looked out at the yard where the ambulances stood in the rain, and she made a decision about the shape of the thing that lay ahead of her. A document was not enough, and a name was not enough, and a book was not enough. What she needed before the fourteenth was a room and a witness and a man with the power to sign, and she needed all three at once, and she needed them before the market could move the way it always moved, which was quietly, in the dark, one step ahead of whoever was chasing it. She went back to the bench and began, for the first time, to write out everything she knew in the order a stranger would need it, from the beginning, from the clean card, from the ninety-first name. Milly carried away, in the notebook against her heart, seven names and the date of a delivery and the ordinary name of an ordinary sergeant, and behind her the fire in the small office went on burning, and a man she had last seen with wax on his face lay in the fourth row from the hedge under a cross that said UNKNOWN, and somewhere in the tangle of the line a boy from a Wiltshire farm had a name that was loose in the world, and so did Ted. ---