legends · 4 min read ·
Pawn
A pawnbroker advances forty pounds on an iron key, and an unlocked door appears at the back of his safe.
*TICKET 40117. Item: gold watch, gents. Advance: £90. Redemption: 6 months. Customer: signed.*
*TICKET 40118. Item: guitar, acoustic. Advance: £60.*
*TICKET 40119. Item: wedding band, 9 ct. Advance: £25.*
· · ·
My father ran the shop before me and his father before him. Three brass balls over the door, a counter with a grille, a safe the size of a wardrobe, a window of other people's trouble. It is a trade of faces. You learn to tell, in the first second, whether the person at your counter is going to come back.
Most do not. That's the dull truth of it. They take the money, they sign the ticket, and they drift away, and in six months the item is mine to sell. I sold a great many watches.
The man in the long grey overcoat came in on a wet Saturday just before closing. He was somewhere between fifty and seventy, with the pinched, courteous face of someone who has been through a bad patch and out the other side. He put something on the counter and slid it through the gap in the grille.
It was a key.
An old iron key, about four inches, with a trefoil bow and a plain bit. Heavy. It had the faint oil-black shine of a thing handled for centuries.
"I'd like an advance," he said.
I said I didn't lend against keys. I explained I could not value it. He said, "Value it as you see fit. I only want what you think is fair."
I turned it over under the lamp. There was a little engraving on the bow, worn nearly smooth: a pair of letters and a date, 1647. Honest age. I thought: ninety pounds, maybe, from a collector. "Forty," I said.
"That will do," he said.
He signed the ticket in a beautiful italic hand. I counted forty pounds into the tray. He took it with a small bow, as though I had done him a favour. He said, "I'll be back for it in a year and a day."
I laughed, because it's an old phrase, and I said, "That's not the usual six months."
"It is for this," he said. He went out into the rain.
I put the key on the hook behind me, with the other pledges. I forgot about it. The shop was busy that month. In the dull afternoons I would see it hanging there and think of the man's hand.
It was a week or two before I noticed that the shop had become quiet. Not empty. Quiet. The customers still came, and we still talked, but there was a lack of friction, a sense of things going smoothly. Disputes did not arise. Nobody tried to pawn a stolen item. The man in the next shop, with whom I had a feud of long standing about the bins, offered me a cup of tea.
Money came in. Ordinary, honest money. Items were redeemed. I've never seen so many redeemed. People came in with the cash in hand, a bit shamefaced, and took their guitars and their rings and their grandmothers' brooches back home.
By the autumn I had two walls of empty hooks.
I checked the key. It hung on its hook, unchanged. But I noticed, in the lamp, that it had grown a little bright at the bit. As though it had been cleaned. As though it was being used.
I thought: whatever the key opens, it's open.
In December the first of the others began to come in. Not as customers. They stood at the grille, courteous, grey-coated, and asked me politely if they might use the back room. They did not want to pawn anything. They wanted to look in the safe. They walked in with such calm good manners that I let them. I did not stop to ask what they wanted. The safe stood open, with its old lock of black iron, and one by one they went in, and came out again with a faint, relaxed expression, like men after a long bath.
I have not been told what was in the safe. I never kept anything there but the pledged jewellery. But I looked yesterday. The shelves were bare. At the back of the safe, where I have never looked in thirty years, was a door. An old oak door in the steel, with a lock, and a keyhole just the size of a key.
The ticket says a year and a day. It has been eleven months.
I've been wondering what the redemption price will be. I only advanced forty pounds, after all. The interest, as it was explained to me by my father, is calculated on what the thing is worth to the man who gave it up.