Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Mill Row ·
My Third Seating
The cafe I run the floor of serves three seatings every night, and the third is laid and served and settled to the penny although no booking for it has ever stood in the ledger, not once in four years.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Norman Sedge, cafe floor manager"
I run the floor at the Copper Kettle on Mill Row, forty covers, three seatings of an evening, and my own account below is of the third seating, which I have managed four years and never once seen booked.
The bookings ledger has three columns printed at the head of every page — the half five, the quarter past seven, the plain nine — filled in lead pencil by whoever takes the phone or the door. The first two columns fill off-weeks ahead. The third column I have watched since I took the floor, and the pencil has never entered it. Not a booking by the phone, not a walk-in chalked, not a cancellation moved into it. I have the ledgers for my four years on the shelf by the hatch, tied, and anyone may count the leads in the third columns and come out with the same nothing.
The third seating is served. Tables laid by half past eight from the linen store, glasses run, order pads made up. Between nine and half past the kitchen is worked as it is worked at seven, waiters on station, orders called, checks clipped. The bills settle in cash on the tables or at the till, correct to the penny, and the drawer answers. The covers at the nine run eleven to nineteen. The plates go back to the wash like any plates.
I have said to the staff, plainly and at different times, that I would like to know who books the nine. The waitresses will say it is always served. Dora Hemmings, who has waited the floor longer than I have run it, will say the nine takes most of her evening and she has never once shown a party to the door for it; the tables are full when she stations herself and empty-ish at the clear. The head chef will say the orders come in chits clipped to the rail same as any chits, fired same as any orders. The chit pads exist; they are kept; the orders on them are written in my hand. I have looked at my own hand on them. It is my hand. I do not carry the memory of carrying them, and this I put down here because it is so and because to put it down is the whole of my usefulness to this file.
As to the customers of the nine: I have asked, down at the tables or standing with the bill folder, as managers ask. They give their names for the bill and their money more readily, and asked how they came to be booked they say they booked. Asked which of us took the booking, they will say the usual way, the usual someone. None of the three phone sets on the premises held a line open past nine, as the youngest girl on the desk will state. Nobody arrived through the front door at the nine that any of the staff waiting the door remember admitting, and the door checker signs for every party she shows, and the sheet for the nine shows parties shown. The sheet is not the ledger. I know they are different documents and have stopped saying the difference out loud on the floor, because at the difference the staff stop answering and go on laying.
What I will not sign to and what I have never found: one booking slip, one pencil line, one name in a third column. The takings at the nine answer the takings at the seven, seats occupied, cash banked, tips run to the pool, and it may be there is nothing behind a ledger column but the habit of a ledger.
Nobody else on the payroll will confirm the third seating was ever booked. They confirm the laying, the serving, the settling — every one of them, to the word I have given here. The bookings, one and all, they leave unconfirmed, and so do I. My question is the one I stopped asking at the hatch: if no hand ever put the nine in the ledger, whose dinners is the ledger not meant to hold — and why, being unnamed, do they still pay cash.