Chapter 13: Madame Vetch

Casper Noll had found him a list of everybody who slept forward of the oak door.

It ran to four hundred and twelve names, in Casper’s small, exact hand, on nine sheets, with carriage and berth and ticket class against each one, and a tenth sheet headed Exceptions (Seasonal, Medical, Disputed), which had three names on it and a great deal of crossing out. Casper had produced it in an hour and a half without being asked twice, and had handed it over with the face of a man who suspected that it would lead to a requisition he would have to explain.

Elliot spent the morning on it at the end of a desk in the administrative carriage, with the clock above him saying first nine, and then ten, and then, with what felt like reproach, eleven. He struck out the residents who could not have managed a single flight of stairs, let alone a passage. He struck out the stair-keepers, whose nights were written in their own books. He struck out anyone over eighty and anyone under ten, and then, after thinking about Portis’s small, smaller than me, put the under-tens back in, and then took them out again, because he could not quite believe in a child who knew which boards talked well enough to carry a gramophone over them. He was left with three hundred and six names, which was a smaller number than four hundred and twelve, and no use at all.

He had not slept. Every so often he found he had read the same name four times, and that the name was Hebble, and that he had no idea why.

He had decided, somewhere around the laundry on the walk forward, not to tell Albion about the workshop. It was not his to tell. He had turned that over for most of an hour, between the market and the kitchens, and it had come out the same way every time.

At a little after two, Albion stopped in front of the desk and looked at the nine sheets, and at the tenth, and at Elliot.

“Vetch,” he said.

The shop was in Carriage 19, which was the first carriage of the First: the one you stepped into off the bare carriage and the oak door, where the carpet began. Elliot had walked through it eight times. He had taken the windows along its corridor for the windows of a furniture store, which in a sense they were, and had not looked any further, because a man in open-carriage boots did not stop to look into windows in the First Carriages if he could help it.

The doors were double, and glazed, and had VETCH on them in gold, and nothing else. Albion opened one and stood aside, and Elliot went in, and stopped.

It was the whole carriage. Behind the long glazed front that ran beside the corridor, the ground floor was a single room from the vestibule almost to the far end, and every foot of it was full. Wardrobes stood in rows like terraced houses, making streets. A harp leaned against a dresser that leaned against a longcase clock. There were three rocking horses in a line, all of them looking the same way, as if they had seen something. A dining table ran down the middle of one aisle laid for twelve, with a different pattern of china at every place. Chandeliers hung unlit from the ceiling at all heights, one of them so low that Albion went round it. And everywhere, on every wall and shelf and mantelpiece, there were clocks — dozens of them, carriage clocks and bracket clocks and a cuckoo clock with no cuckoo — all going, and none of them agreeing, so that the room was full of a soft, continuous ticking, like a crowd of people all counting under their breath and none of them to the same number.

Elliot looked for the far end. There was a gleam of brass a long way off that might have been it, and between him and it a great deal of somebody else’s furniture.

He went in among the wardrobes. Within a dozen steps he had lost Albion, who had been directly behind him, and found himself in a small clearing among the furniture with a stuffed heron, which regarded him with the same flat contempt as Greer’s goats, and a sideboard drawer pulled out to show a hundred silver spoons, each in its own felt groove. He went round a bookcase. He came out, by a route he could not have repeated, at a counter in the very middle of the shop, where Albion was already standing, waiting, as though he had been there for some time.

Behind the counter, on a high chair, sat Madame Vetch. She was tall even sitting, and heavy-lidded, perhaps seventy, in a dress the colour of old port, and she sat above her shop the way an auctioneer sits between lots — patiently, with the whole room in front of her, waiting to see what it would offer.

She was not, at present, looking at them. She was looking at Lotz.

“Four,” Lotz was saying. He stood at the counter with a pair of long wooden poles under one arm, black with age and capped with brass at both ends. “I had it at two. Two porters, it says on the rota. Hartley-Voss’s rota. Printed.” He said printed as other men might say in blood. “And now it is four, on the night, at the busiest hour of my life, because she’s over-built the armature again.”

“Then you’ll want the long poles,” said Madame Vetch.

“I want my porters.” Lotz slapped down a handful of chits on the glass. “These are from a sedan chair.”

“They carried a Conductor’s aunt for thirty years,” said Madame Vetch. “They can carry a cake to the end of a corridor.”

Lotz made a noise like a pan lid, and picked up his change without counting it, and turned to go; and saw Albion, and Elliot, and stopped.

“Albion,” he said. He looked at Elliot. “You.” He drew a breath, plainly to say that he had twenty minutes, and then remembered that he was not in his kitchen and had nothing on the boil, and for a moment did not seem to know what he had. “I have poles,” he said finally, with great dignity, and carried them off between the wardrobes, and they heard the brass ends knocking against furniture all the way to the door.

“Albion,” said Madame Vetch. “You’ve brought me something.”

“Marsh.”

“The stamp.” She looked at Elliot properly then, from his boots upward, in a single, unhurried pass that he felt had told her his weight, his ticket class and roughly what she could get for him at auction. “I don’t buy people, Mr Marsh. I’m told it’s frowned on.” She folded her hands, which had a ring on every finger, and no two rings alike. “Go on.”

“The gramophone,” said Elliot.

“I never had it through my door.” She said it plainly, as if it were a line in a book. “I know of it. Everyone my age knows of it. It used to play in the old Conductor’s rooms on feast nights, when I was younger, and you could hear it from the corridor if you stood very still and were not seen standing.” She looked past him, at nothing in particular, for a moment. “Afterwards, things from that household went everywhere at once, which is what things do when nobody is permitted to say why. A good deal of it came through here. Not that.”

“Has anybody offered it to you? Since it went?”

“No.”

“Asked you for it?”

“Drummond.” Something dry happened at one corner of her mouth. “Drummond asks me for everything. He once asked me for a harp that was standing directly behind him.”

Elliot tried to think how to put the next part. He was very tired, and the clocks did not help.

“If somebody took it to sell it —”

“I’d have known by the second morning.” Madame Vetch did not need him to finish. “Somebody would have come in here with a cloth over something and a face on them, wanting a price without my looking too hard at what it was. That is what a thief is like, Mr Marsh. A thief is in a hurry. He wants the thing gone from his hands and the money in them, and he does not much mind who has it after.” She let that sit. “Nobody has been in a hurry. Nobody has been in at all.”

The clocks ticked. Somewhere among the wardrobes one of them began to strike three, and thought better of it at two.

“You’ve been looking for a thief,” said Madame Vetch. “That’s your mistake.”

Elliot looked at her.

“Then what am I looking for?”

“I’ve no idea,” she said. “I’ve never met them.” She leaned forward, a little, into the light from the lamp on the counter. “But I’d stop asking where it is, if I were you. Everybody’s asking where it is. Ask what it is.”

“It’s a gramophone.”

“To you,” said Madame Vetch. “To the Lender, it’s a debt with a horn on. To Drummond it’s a hole in his life the shape of a box. To the person who has it —” She opened her hands, and all the rings caught the lamp at once. “Find out what it is to them. The who follows from the what.”

He showed her the mark, because he had come this far, and because it was what you did with the one thing in your pocket that nobody could explain.

She looked at it on the open page of the grey notebook without touching it.

“A restorer,” she said. “One who didn’t sign.” She handed the book back. “In my trade that’s either modesty or sense, and you’d be surprised how seldom one meets either.”

“Do you know whose it is?”

“I know a great many marks, Mr Marsh. I make a point of forgetting the ones that don’t want knowing.” She looked at him over the counter, steadily. “It saves a great deal of unpleasantness, and nobody has ever once thanked me for it.”

He put the notebook away.

There was a tray at his elbow on the glass, of small things waiting to be priced, and while she was speaking his hands had found their way to it, as hands do near a tray of small things in a shop. A seal with a stag on it. A thimble. A pair of spectacles folded small. A compass in a brass case with a lid, the lid open. And a tuning fork, dull dark metal, about the length of his hand, lying on a square of grey felt.

“Pick things up,” said Madame Vetch, watching him. “Everyone does. I’d rather it was where I can see.”

He picked up the tuning fork. He did not know why that one, except that of everything on the tray it was the only thing he understood the purpose of. It was cold for a moment against his palm.

Then it was not.

It rang.

He had not struck it. He had not knocked it against anything, or brushed it, or moved it at all; it lay across his palm with his fingers loosely round the stem, and from it came a single note, thin and clear and very high, the note a fork makes when it has been struck on a knee and held up, except that nobody had struck it. A struck note fades. This one held. He could feel it in the bones of his hand, and then in his wrist, and then somewhere further in that he had no name for.

The shop stirred.

There was no better word for it, and later, trying to find one, he never did. Away among the wardrobes, one clock among the dozens struck once, a deep soft note, out of turn and out of time, and stopped. Somewhere nearer a music box he could not see turned over a single tinkling bar and fell silent. Above his head the drops of the unlit chandelier shivered against one another with a sound like a spoon on a glass, though the train was running straight and nothing else in the room was moving. And on the tray, in its brass case, the needle of the compass swung away from where it had been pointing, and swung back, and swung again, and settled, and stayed — a quarter-turn from where it had been, pointing at nothing Elliot could see.

He put the fork down.

The note went on for a moment after he had let go of it, quite steady, and then it thinned, and was gone. The chandelier went still. The clocks went back to their arguing.

Madame Vetch was looking at the compass. Then she looked at him. Her face did not change in any way he could have described, and yet he had the feeling, very strongly, of being re-entered in a ledger at a different price.

Albion had not moved at all. He was looking at Elliot’s hand.

“What was that?” said Elliot. His voice came out smaller than he wanted.

“That,” said Madame Vetch, “is why that fork isn’t for sale.”

She took a cloth from under the counter and laid it over the fork, carefully, the whole length of it, the way you might cover a birdcage. She did not pick the fork up. She closed the lid of the compass with one finger, and the needle went out of sight still pointing where it pointed.

“It’s been on that tray nineteen years,” she said. “It has never once done that for me.”

“Is it — did I —”

“Break it? No.” She folded her ringed hands again. “Some things came aboard with nobody, Mr Marsh. No maker’s mark. No first owner in any book I’ve seen, and I’ve seen most of the books. The great part of them are only old. A few take to some people better than others.” She paused. “I don’t know why. I’ve had them through my hands for forty years, and I know two things about them: what they fetch, and that it’s wiser if nobody upstairs sees one do what that just did.”

“Why?”

“Because upstairs collects.” She said it lightly, as if remarking that upstairs dined late. “Things, mostly. Not always things.” She looked at him a moment longer. “I’d keep your hands in your pockets in Drummond’s company, if I were you. Not that Drummond’s the worst of them. He’s only the one who asks.”

“And you?”

“I’m seventy-three,” said Madame Vetch. “I’m too old to want things. It’s a great saving.” She turned on her high chair towards the ledger at her elbow, and the conversation, Elliot understood, had been sold to the highest bidder and taken away. “Good afternoon, Albion. Mr Marsh. Mind the heron on the way out. He doesn’t.”

They found the doors without getting lost, which Elliot suspected was Albion’s doing and not his. The corridor outside was carpet and lamplight and nobody at all. His right hand felt as if he had been holding it near a fire. He put it in his pocket, and then took it out again, because that was where Madame Vetch had told him to keep it and he did not want to start doing what he was told.

He had seen where Albion had been looking. Not at the shop, when it stirred. Not at the clocks or the chandelier or the compass. At his hand, the whole time, from the moment he had picked up the fork; as if that was what he had come to see.

“You used me,” Elliot said.

“Yes,” said Albion.

That was all. Elliot waited for the rest of it, and there was no rest of it, and after a little while he found he believed the yes more than he would have believed anything that came after it.

They walked to the end of the carriage. Beyond the vestibule was the oak door, and just through it the two enforcers were on their bench, and one of them was eating something out of a paper. He put it down, and wiped his fingers, and wrote Marsh, E. in the book, and the hour, and w. Albion, and picked the paper up again.

At the far end of the bare carriage Albion went to the dark door with no name on it, and knocked once, and went in, and did not come out.

Elliot sat down again at the end of Casper’s desk with the three hundred and six names, because he could not think what else to do with his hands. Casper went home at the evening bell, after squaring everything on his desk twice and glancing at the nine sheets as if he would have liked to square those too. The clerks went one by one. Ivy Gell stamped a last form, and put the stamp in a drawer, and locked the drawer, and put the key on a string round her neck, and said goodnight to him on her way out in the voice of somebody who had learned her lesson. The clock said seven, and then eight. He read the names. He read Hebble several more times. Nothing in any of them was a gramophone.

It was nearly nine when the dark door opened and Albion came out, and stopped by the desk, and looked down at the sheets.

“Four days,” said Elliot. It came out without his deciding, as things did when he was this tired.

“Three and three quarters.”

Elliot looked at him. “You count in quarters.”

“The soldier counts in quarters,” said Albion, as if quoting a sign on a wall somewhere, a long time ago.

Elliot thought about asking which soldier, and where, and saw from the side of Albion’s face that there was a door there too, and let it be. He had let a good many doors be in the last day. He was beginning to feel like a man walking down a corridor of them.

“It’s not a thief,” he said instead. “She’s right. If it were a thief, it would have moved. It would have gone to someone. It hasn’t gone anywhere. Somebody’s keeping it. Which means it’s — it matters to them, what it is, not what it’s worth, so if I can work out what it is to somebody, then —” He heard himself going round, and round again, and could not find the place where the circle opened. “Then the who follows from the what. Which is what she said. Which is what I’m saying. Which I’ve now said.”

He stopped. Albion was looking at him with something that in another man’s face might have been sympathy.

“Tomorrow you’ll be clever,” said Albion. “Tonight you’re just tired.”

He went out through the vestibule towards the oak door and the carpet beyond it, at the same pace as always, and did not look back.

Elliot gathered up Casper’s nine sheets, and the tenth, and squared them, because Casper would want them squared. Then he walked aft into the noise of the working carriages with his right hand in his pocket after all. It went on feeling warm, faintly, all the way through the laundry and the market and the tea car, or he imagined it did; and somewhere in the low sixties, among the stove smoke and the bunks, he found that he could no longer tell the difference.