Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Age I Am Entitled To
A district registrar keeps a private ledger of her own age and lets it advance only as fast as the office's files do, which is not the speed of the years.
- dated: "the calendar weeks"
- narrator: "Rosalind Kett, district registrar"
Monday, 19 October. Form-filling week, the return lying ahead of us like winter. I did my private count at lunch, in the back of the loose-leaf diary the office does not bind, and the count stands as it has stood since June: by the calendar I was fifty-one in the spring, and by my own ledger I am fifty-five.
The ledger is honest, which is more than can be said for birthdays. A registrar's year does not close when the calendar says so; it closes when the files do. That is the arrangement I have kept since my articles, that my own age accrues one year every time this office completes its return, and not one day before. It seemed a tidy devotion when I was thirty. It has been arithmetic since.
Tuesday, 27 October. The extra years, set out plainly, because a ledger is a ledger. In 1958 the office could not close its year until the Whitworth file was answered, and the year ran to mid-February of the next: one year accrued, none surrendered. In 1963 the same, over the ferry deaths, and again in 1971, and again in 1979. Four years the calendar signed off early and my ledger kept open. Fifty-one and fifty-five, both mine, and the ledger the senior of the two, because the ledger has never once closed a year with a file outstanding in it.
The clerk thinks I keep the count from vanity and has begun, kindly, to say fifty-four at the counter, splitting the difference like a man estimating fences. I have not corrected him. The trouble with correcting people is that you must then give your sources.
Friday, 30 October. Small worry, put down here in ink because paper is where I keep the things I do not say aloud. The files this year are closing early. Unreasonably early, ahead of themselves, the one for Fen Road that has dragged since April was answered on Tuesday, a year, apparently, after it was asked. If the run keeps up, my ledger will close 1987 by the first week of December, and the two counts will be four years apart on a paper I was keeping as a margin of safety. A ledger that starts sprinting is worse company than a slow one. I would rather it lagged.
Sunday, 1 November. Eve of the registration year, the oaths on my desk for Monday first thing. I have taken to sitting with the ledger open at the last entry and the calendar open beside it, as a registrar closes a sitting by reading the two books against each other. The years I am owed and the years I have been given do not agree by four, and both columns are honestly kept, and somewhere between the two of them is the woman who has to sign the return on Tuesday morning.
The question I am carrying into the Misprint day, and that I have not asked anyone, is a registrar's question and no other kind: when the return is drawn up, whose age does the office certify, the calendar's or the files', and which of the two of us does it think is signing.