Short story · 3 min read · Set in Gold Street ·
Coats of Roman Winters
The coat shop at the top of Gold Street sells each winter exactly once, and no numeral on its ticket board has ever been hung twice.
Coram's, at the top of Gold Street, sells coats the way other shops sell bolts: one to a customer, and never the same winter twice. Behind the counter hangs a board of hooks, one hook to a ticket, every ticket a Roman numeral in black on bone, and the house's first rule is written on the board itself in the old man's hand: NO NUMERAL HUNG TWICE.
The rule lives in the lining, not the ledger. Open a coat from Coram's anywhere in this city and the sateen inside reads FOR THE WINTER OF MCMXLIX, or MCMLXI, or whichever numeral its hook held when the coat was sold. The coat will see its owner through that winter. I know this on the evidence of my uncle's household, which got three winters out of three Coram coats and inserts the fact in every family letter like an investment figure. Nobody argues it. Nobody argues it the way nobody argues the tide tables.
I bought mine the November after my overcoat gave out at the collar. The fitter asked me fewer questions about my chest than about my winters so far — cold ones, middling, or mild — and ran a thumb along the hooks while I waited. Then he took down MCMXC and turned it to the lamp. A long winter, he said, and a stout one, worth the lining, and the price was the price of the ticket plus the price of the cloth. When I asked why MCMXC, since the year we stood in was not that numeral, he wrote the ticket stub into a book of sold winters and said the board does not sell the winter you are in. It sells the winter you will need.
The January that followed was the coldest the depot's cold book had recorded since the fog years, and I went through it the way one goes through a remembered room. I want to be careful here: I was warm, that is all I mean, and a coat that keeps a man warm through a hard January is doing tailoring's ordinary business. But the cold came down the river in a colour I had not seen on it before, and the coats of my acquaintance, and there were mornings my breath went out of me in a shape like initials, and none of it got inside the lining. The coat had its winter. At the end of the winter, by the custom, I took it back to Coram's, which paid me sixpence for the return and retired the numeral, and the MCMXC hook stayed empty.
It did not stay empty long. In the spring the fitter rehung it — the board is only ever one winter long, he told me, it is the size of the wall and we fill it — and above mine a fresh ticket went up for a numeral I had never seen on the board, or saw before, or anywhere. I have been back twice since to watch the hooks, the way other men watch the shipping lists. Each visit, one more numeral gone, one more ticket written into the sold book, and the top hook always ticketed ahead for a winter the fitter will not read aloud.
So I carry the question home along Gold Street in my five shillings coat, and it weighs more in winter. What happens to the board when the numerals run level with the years — when the sold book and the arriving cold meet page for page, and the last hook comes off the wall into somebody's hands just as its winter turns up at the door. I asked old Coram outright once. He half-turned the board to the wall, poured me a cup of coffee I did not drink, and told me the price of wool. I count the blank hooks on my way past some mornings. I stopped counting at eleven.