Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Marchmont House ·
My Own Copy of the Register
A parish steward certifying copies at Marchmont House finds his signature already standing in the margin, dated eleven years ahead of the ink.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Harold Pym, parish steward"
I have kept the registers at Marchmont House for nineteen years, and on the ninth of November I certified a copy of the baptism register for the estates office, in my own hand, at ten past eleven in the morning.
Certifying copies is my whole winter. The rule is simple and I have followed it perhaps a thousand times: the original lies open under the reading glass, the copy is made by the assistant and set beside it, line by line, and then in the margin of the original I write the certification in full, the date, the folio, certified a true copy, my signature. It is the same each time. My hand has written the same fourteen words so many winters that the fourteen words come as one motion, and my pen, one of a box of three kept in the drawer for the purpose, is the same pen.
I had done the copy for folio 112 and set the glass aside, and there, in the margin, was the certification already.
It is my signature. I will not hedge on that, because nobody who keeps registers hedges on anything. It sits the way my signature sits, with the slip in the looped letters that I have had since school and have never cured, the p unclosed, the crossing bar set too high; there are two people I have shown it to who knew it was mine before I told them whose it was. The fourteen words are there in full, word for word in our settled order. The folio cited is 112. The date beside it is the 9th of November, and the year is 1998.
Eleven years on. I certified nothing for 1998. The ink and the entry do not differ, and I am the steward; nobody else's hand writes in that margin; the register is never out of my keeping except the hour it lies open under the glass, and it lay under the glass that morning, and I was standing at it.
I did what I hope any steward would do. I closed the book, locked it in the east cupboard, signed the key book with a note of the hour, and wrote to the diocesan office, asking in words chosen slowly whether a certification may stand which the certifier has not yet reached. The reply came back that the question has never been put, and asking me to forward a photograph, and the photograph, developed by the chemist at Siddeley's, came back showing the margin ruled and blank and nothing besides.
I carried the register itself, locked, to the vicar and the estates auditor together, both witnesses of standing, and we opened it by lamplight the same evening at Marchmont House, with the key book read aloud first, and the margin at folio 112 held the certification, and it still held it then. That is as far as corroboration goes in this account, and I report it exactly: the vicar confirmed the writing was mine; the auditor confirmed the date was eleven years forward; and then the auditor, who is careful with arithmetic, pointed quietly at the folio invoked and asked the only question either of them was able to leave me with.
The 112 of 1998 is not the 112 of now. In eleven years the register will have been recast, the folios cut new, and 112 will sit somewhere else, holding some other child, some other family, whose paper I have already looked at through the glass and pronounced a true copy. Uncorroborated further: the chemist lost the negative, the vicar keeps the book locked and prefers the matter not raised in Chapter, and nobody else at Marchmont House has seen it since, because I have not opened the east cupboard again, and have not been asked to look inside it since. The question I was left with, and that I carry to the office every morning, is not whose signature it is. It is whose register.