Witness account · 3 min read · Set in The Regal ·
My Signature in the Cast Book
The Regal's cast book carries my signature against a Thursday performance I can set receipts, tickets and three counties between us, and the book has never yet needed correcting.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: "Arthur Bastable, house steward"
I am house steward at the Regal, and the cast book is my book. It has been my book for nineteen years. Anybody who plays the house signs it, page against performance, and I countersign beneath, which is how I know my own line when I see it.
The disputed page is the fourth of November last, a Thursday. Against that date the cast book says a variety bill ran, two hours and a quarter, called at 8.2, cleared at 10.19, and that the house steward entered the auditorium at both the interval and the finish to check the aisles. My countersignature is there. My countersignature is also there for the three Thursdays either side of it, and for every Thursday for nineteen years, and I have signed it against every one in the usual way, at the top of the stairs, with my habits — coat buttoned, watch chain out, book flat on the ledge where the ice-cream till sits now.
What the book does not know is that I was not at the Regal on that Thursday. I was in Glossop, three counties off, sitting with my sister while her heating was off, and I have the pieces of paper to show it: the carrier's receipt for the coal she had in that morning, dated the fourth; the bus ticket out of Glossop, dated the fourth; the filing counterfoil for her pension book, signed by the counter clerk, dated the fourth. I walked forty minutes to the picture palace in Glossop with her to keep warm, and its own doorman remembers the queue in the rain. It rained in Glossop. The Regal's page says nothing about rain, and there was rain here too, so that proves nothing either way, which I noted at the time and note now.
The clerk of the Archive took the page and compared my countersignature against nineteen years of it, and against two signatures at the bank standing to the same hand, and the verdict that came back was that the fourth of November is mine. Not similar. Not traced. Mine, laid on the same pressure, made with the same habit of pen lift before the A in Bastable that only tiredness gives me. I wrote tired that week, my sister's boiler being what it was.
Then the house said the opposite thing. The Regal's manager for that season signed a statement that the variety bill of the fourth was cancelled at noon and no steward was called for; the box office showed no takings for the date; the cleaning rota shows no interval spilling. The bill exists on the page and nowhere else in the house. The page is in the book. The book has never been out of the safe, and the safe has never been drunk open or lost its key, and both of those have been checked twice on my account.
So the Archive has my hand where the house has an empty hall, and it will not say which is the error, and I am the one on the disputed line either way. My sister signed her statement that I was beside her at eight o'clock with the wireless on, and hers is the only paper in the bundle written by a person who watched me through the times in question, and I notice the clerk filed hers under corroboration and mine under the dispute.
What I cannot get a straight answer to, and what keeps me signing the book every Thursday still, is this: if the bill was cancelled at noon that day, who was it cleared the aisles at 10.19, and why did that person sign my name with my tiredness in it?