The §ection Chief

He did the coat up to the throat, though the cold had stopped reaching him a long while back, and carried his hat in his hand, because the hat in the hand was part of it. Then he went up the path with the younger man a half step behind.

He could not have said how he had come to the street. He never could. The instruction was simply in him when he woke, if waking was the word for it: the address, the name, the form of words to use, all of it set down in the place where a man keeps the things he has always known. He did not go looking for where it came from. A man does not interrogate his own hand before he lifts it.

The first of the morning had been an easy one. They mostly were, by now. The hard ones got seen to before he ever reached them, so that the man or the woman who opened the door was half gone soft already and only wanted telling where to stand. The first had been a man who took the form of words off him on the step and nodded and fetched his coat and was sat in the motor before the kettle he'd left on had come to the boil. No trouble in him, no noise. A clean start to the round. There had been a street before that one, and a street before that, and the Chief could not have laid the three of them end to end and made a town of them. The kerbs would not have met. The light in each was a different hour of a different day. But he did not try to lay them together. The not-trying had worn a smooth place in him where the trying used to be. There was a wrongness in the streets that would not sit still to be counted, and it had been there a long time, at the edge of his eye, and he had got good at keeping his eye off the edge of things.

There were houses, and a low gold sun lying along them, and a milk float at the kerb with its crates ticking as the engine cooled, and two doors down a woman taking shirts off a line into a basket against her hip. It was a fine ordinary morning. It was not the morning he had left. The one he had left had different motors in it, squarer and louder, and a thin grey light, and a year that sat at a colder slope than this one. He noticed the change as he noticed weather, which was to say he noticed it and let it pass through him and leave nothing, and he went on up the path.

The younger man at his shoulder was new. You could always tell the new ones. They carried their faces a little wrong, as though the faces were borrowed and did not quite do up at the back. They looked at the houses as if the houses might turn and look at them. And they had a question working away behind the smoothness they were learning to keep, like a stone working in a shoe. This one's question had come out of him on the path, low, nearly not said at all.

Would she understand. When they told her.

"She'll understand what helps her understand," the Section Chief said. "You don't give them the rest. The rest isn't kind."

It was a thing that had been said to him, he supposed, somewhere back along, though he did not reach after the when of it, or the who, and the not-reaching was as easy as breathing and gave the same small ease. The younger man took the words. His face went a shade smoother around the eyes. The question lay down in him and was quiet, and the Chief felt the clean small satisfaction of a thing fitted neatly to its slot, which was very near the only satisfaction left to him, and was enough.

He knocked. Two knuckles, soft, unhurried. The knock of a man who has called about nothing that won't keep.

The woman who opened the door had her cardigan done up a button out of true and flour to the wrists and the bright, braced look of a person who has been listening a long time for a particular knock while telling herself it would not come. She knew them. They always knew, in the half second the door swung, before the smoothness came down over the knowing and put it away. She looked from the Chief to the younger man and back, and then the smoothness came down, and she said wasn't it raw out, and wouldn't they step in, and stood back off the door to let them by.

The house behind her was clean and close and smelled of baking and of paraffin. There was a kitchen down the passage with a scrubbed table, and set square on the end of the table a hard-backed book she kept her accounts in, the spine gone soft with handling. She was a careful woman. You could see it in the house. The careful ones were the ones who saw, in his experience. They kept their books and their counts, and they noticed when a sum that had always come out the same stopped coming out the same, and they could not let it alone, and the not-letting-alone was what brought the knock. He had nothing against the careful ones. He could not, by now, have said he had anything against anyone.

He could stand in a front room and take up no space and give none back. He stood in hers now with the hat in both hands and told her, in the form of words, that arrangements had been seen to. That she was to go along and stop with her sister a while, where it was warmer, where there'd be someone to do for her. That she needn't trouble to bring much.

The words did the work. They always did. She had no sister. He knew it, standing there, and she knew it, and the words stood up in the warm floury room between the two of them and were believed all the same, because the not-believing of them was a door, and there was nothing on the other side of that door a person could let themselves look at and go on standing up.

He had known it from the step, from the braced look the smoothed ones lost early. While he spoke she watched him, steady, with none of the sliding-off the others had, and when he had finished she did not weep and she did not thank him and she did not go for her coat. She wiped the flour from her hands on her apron, slow, and she said:

"The lad at the dairy. He's been nineteen eleven years. Same gap in his front teeth. Says ta, love, when you've paid him, same as he said it when my Brian was alive. I worked it back off the rounds book, off the Christmases, and wrote it in the margin where I keep the accounts." She said it plainly, flat and sure, the voice you'd use to report a fault to the man come about the drains, as though he of all the men in the world would want to know. "Eleven years he's been nineteen. You can go and look. It's wrote down in pencil."

Something moved in the Chief that had not moved in a long time.

It was not the lad at the dairy. It was the saying of it. The flat, certain voice of someone holding up a thing they have counted and cannot stop seeing. His fingers had closed on the brim of the hat. He did not know why. Then the things came up in him, unasked. A blue ring of gas turned down low under a kettle. A hand of cards left fanned face-down on a cloth where a game had stopped. A name called up a flight of stairs, two notes of it, the second one falling. He could not say whose name. He could not say whose stairs. For half a breath a warm back room stood open in him, with a smell in it he nearly had and a kindness in it that had frightened him, and he had very nearly. He had very nearly.

The Section Chief stood in the woman's front room and let the thing go down.

It went easily. That was the mercy in it, the one mercy, that it had been made to go down easy. The blue flame guttered and was gone, and the staircase with it, and the two falling notes of the name, and the room was only the room again, warm and floury, and the woman was only a woman who was going to stop with her sister. The ease came up through him level and warm and asked nothing of him. His shoulders let down a little under the coat. The grip he had not known was in his hand came off the brim of the hat, finger by finger, and that was all.

"You'll be glad of the warm, at your sister's," he said.

She looked at him a moment past the saying of it. Whatever she had seen in the dairy lad she was seeing in him now, and for the first time in longer than he had, the sense of being looked all the way into did not slide off the smooth of him but caught, somewhere, briefly, like a thread on a nail.

"They had you and all," she said. Not afraid of him. Sorry for him. She looked at him the same as she'd looked at the dairy lad, working him out, finding the place where the years didn't add up. "You poor man. There's nobody home in you at all, and you can't even feel it gone."

The younger man by the door shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

The Chief gave her the smile that was kept for this part. "Now then," he said. "We'll have none of that. You're getting on nicely." And he did not know that the words were not his own, that they had been put in him where his own words had been lifted out, that there had ever been a flame or a staircase or a name with a falling note. He held the smile, level and pleasant, a good plain face with the light kept somewhere a long way behind it, and her sorrow came up against it and found nowhere to land, because a thing has to land on something to do its work, and there was no longer anything in him for it to land on. It slid off. He watched it slide off, as he watched weather.

She got her coat from the hook. She brought hardly anything, in the end. On the step the cold did not reach him, and the gold light lay quiet along the road, and two doors down the woman at the line lifted one hand off her pegs and gave a small bright wave, quick, finished before it was well begun, and bent back to her basket. A motor stood waiting at the kerb that had not been at the kerb before. The floury woman went to it and got in without anyone laying a hand on her, because by then she wanted to, because the wanting-to was easier to carry than the door with nothing behind it, and the motor took her off down the street toward the low end of it, where the road went pale and the houses left off being houses and there was only the even grey standing where the far end of the street should have gone on. He did not watch it to the end. There was no call to. It was seen to.

The younger man was quiet coming back down the path. His face had gone another shade over toward smooth. He had watched the whole of it, and some part of what he had been was lying down in him now and would not be getting up again, and he did not know to grieve it; and the Chief, who also did not know, set a hand on the young one's shoulder, the small settling weight, the kindness that is the first lesson taught and the last one needed.

"You did right by her," the Chief said. "It comes easier. You'll get on nicely."

The younger man took the words. They went down into him where his own had been, and they fitted, and his shoulders came down off his ears, and the Chief felt again the clean small satisfaction of the slot.

There was a name in him already. It had risen while he stood on the step, an address with it, a form of words, the next of them. There was always a next. He did up the coat button that had come undone, that he had no need of done or undone, and settled the hat back into his hand, and turned toward the next house, which stood on a street that was not quite this street, and he marked the change as he marked weather, and let it pass through him and leave nothing.

Behind his ribs a thing had once been warm. It went out now, the last small coal of it, and he did not feel it go. He went up the path. The younger man came a half step behind him, learning the walk.

~End~