第15章 The Fair Copy

It was cold in the counting floor and the windows had been painted out so that the clerks could not see out. The fair copy was a book two inches thick with a lock in the back of the spine and the key on a chain round the neck of the man in the chair, and it was a fair copy in the sense that everything in it was true, and it was the only book in the building in which the south ward's advance account was entered at what it actually was. Ryam had eight minutes before the change of the guard and he used the first four of them reading. The tariff for a south-ward prentice was one third of the band of birth, and the fair copy said so in a column with a rule down the side of it. Beside it, in a second column, without a rule, was the figure the office had charged. Beside that, in a third column, was a memorandum number, four digits and a letter, and a great many of the memorandum numbers in that column were identical. 1,300 — 1,420 — 2147. 1,300 — 1,420 — 2147. Two hundred and sixty-six — two hundred and ninety-one — 2147. Nine hundred — one thousand and twenty — 2147. All the same number. He wrote it on his palm in pencil and then he started at the back of the book, because there was one thing he needed to know before he decided anything, and it was how long it had been going on. The memorandum column began in the fair copy for Newyear of nine years ago with four hundred and eleven in the empty cells, and after Newyear of eight years ago it was four hundred and nine, and it had never risen above four hundred and twenty since. Nineteen years of the sheet had no memorandum numbers at all. Ryam read the foot of the fair copy, which said that the memorandum column had been instituted by order of the warden's office in the year of the last revision, and that no earlier entry was required to be carried forward. That was the first thing he understood, and it was the second thing as well, and the third thing he understood was that if the memorandum column had begun in the year of the last revision then it was not eleven years ago. He had been keeping the count for eleven years on the back of the chit stubs. The wards were not supposed to know that the memorandum numbers had only ever existed in one kind of chit. But a clerk who has been in a building for four years knows which chits come out of the south desk press and which come out of the north, and Ryam had cut a great many of his own, and the four digits and the letter on the stub was not stamped on the stub at all. It was written in the press. Which meant that the standing fee was not a fee the office had discovered. It was a fee the office had invented, and it had invented it at the moment the memorandum column was instituted, and the memorandum column had been instituted in the year of the last revision, and the last revision was the year the south-ward tariff had been set in the standing book. Nineteen years he had been counting the wrong thing. And in nine years it had gone up by about ten an hour a year on every prentice, and in nineteen years it would have gone up by two hundred, and two hundred hours on a band of three thousand nine hundred is a difference in the sort of man you are. He went back and read the four digits and the letter eleven times. 2147. A single number. Not a code for a rate. A code for the warden's account. He had four minutes. He got the wax off the back of the book with the flat of the knife he had taken to the stall, and then he did the thing that took the most time of all, which was the copying, because he had nine hours of a labourer's bone in his hands and a book that had been bound by somebody in a temper. Two thousand two hundred and one, two thousand two hundred and twelve, two thousand two hundred and thirty. He counted them and got two thousand two hundred and thirty-one. Halberd Jessop's four. And then, on the bottom leaf, in a smaller hand, in the memorandum column, in a column that had not been in the fair copy a year ago and was not ruled and had been added by somebody who had a fountain pen and not a stub: 2147 — OPEN — south ward — arrears. He got the knife under the page and lifted it and pressed the paper against the copy underneath it with his thumb and went along the page at the rate of a finger, and then he turned it and went along it again, and then he did the figures twice, because he had learned in nine weeks what it was to do a number twice, from a man with a wagon full of grain and a half in him. The guard came round the corner of the shelves at the forty-second hour. He got the page flat, the book back on the shelf, the knife down his sleeve and the seven words into his mouth, where they were for the next eleven hours. "Sergeant, is the count of the twenty-first on the outer file, or in the press?" "There is no count of the twenty-first." "Then I would be obliged if you would find the right place for it, sergeant, because I want to put it in." The guard looked at him. He was fifty-one and he had been on that floor for nineteen years and Ryam had learned, in four weeks, that men who had been in a building nineteen years had opinions about him, and the opinion in this one's face was not unfavourable. "The outer file," the guard said. "Second shelf, left." Then he went up the stairs and stood at the turn. Ryam went to the second shelf on the left. It took him four minutes to find, and then it took him twenty seconds to understand, and then he stood in front of it for the rest of the change of the guard. There was no count of the twenty-first. The outer file had a page for the twenty-first and the page was blank, and the page had never been written on, and it was a very clean page with a very fresh binding and a very sharp corner, and it was between the twentieth and the twenty-second and it was exactly the right thickness, and the guard had told him that the count of the twenty-first was in the press, and he had said it to him to see whether a man would go and look for it, and the answer was that a man had gone and looked, and had found the thing, and had understood. Ryam walked back down to the south desk at half past six with a clean account of the coal company yard for eleven hours and a head that would not stop turning over. *"Arrears."* ---