Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
My Inheritance in Triplicate
A seamstress inherits a house, three copies of one signed promise, and a hall lamp whose hour was set by strangers.
- dated: "probate weeks"
- narrator: "Dorothy Hobbes, seamstress"
9th of October. Probate is granted and the papers came home tied in a ribbon: the deeds, and folded with them an obligation executed in triplicate, top copy on paper firm as linen, my tissue carbon, and the Registry's stamped receipt standing for the third. The house is four rooms and a hall, plain and square, with my work-room at the back where the light is honest. The obligation reads plainly too: that in every year of my occupancy I leave the hall lamp lit one hour in the twelve-month. The top copy sets the hour: the first Sunday in November, from three o'clock until four. My carbon agrees with it word for word. It is the Registry's receipt that wants looking at, for its minute line reads 2:59 to 3:59. One minute, laid crooked where a hem was put in by a learner's hand. I wrote to Mr Quayle about the minute.
23rd of October. Mr Quayle's answer: the three are one instrument and not three promises; the minute is a copying slip of no account; the top copy governs; I will oblige by keeping the hour entire, neither broadened nor moved nor held ahead of itself. I set the matter the way I set a hem — pressed, middled, and left alone. The lamp is a brass bracket standard with a glass the colour of weak tea, and it has plainly stood in that hall longer than any of the three papers.
6th of November. The first Sunday came up grey, which is the easiest hour there is to keep, and I kept it by the book: lit at three o'clock exact, the kitchen clock checked against the wireless the same noon, and out at four to the second. I took my hemming into the hall and worked by it, since a lamp asks to be used or it sulks into smoke, and the light went through the cloth like water through a cloth. At four the hall was only a hall again, dark at the stair, and the wick went down sweet and even.
12th of November. A card came from the Registry, pencilled, with the blind-stamp squared in the corner: KEPT WITHIN THE HOUR AND THE MINUTE. NO REPLY WANTED. There is no signature to it and nothing to indicate which minute was meant, top copy, carbon, or receipt, and I am at the bottom of my patience with copies that cannot agree among themselves but agree about me.
13th of November, a year on. I asked, through the new clerk at Quayle's office — Mr Quayle having retired to the coast with his golf clubs and his opinion of probate — whether the hour might come to be mine to set, being mine to keep, what with the wick mine, and the oil mine, and the match mine, and the chair drawn up in that hall mine likewise. The clerk's letter came back kind as a receipt: the hour is fixed at probate and is not the occupier's to elect; compliance of the intervening year noted with satisfaction. So I keep it as the top copy says, three until four by my clock, with a quarter-minute either side allowed to cover the receipt, because whatever clock they read their own parts by has never been named in any of the three. The wick is mine, the oil is mine, the match is mine; only the minute at either end of my flame is somebody else's. Whose minute is it — and with my lamp the only thing burning in that hall at that hour, what do the strangers need of it?