Short story · 3 min read · Set in Calder Row ·
The Bank of the Morning
A caretaker signs the Calder Row branch into its day at two hours on the door book, and has never been inside between them.
I have kept the Calder Row branch of the Murrow Savings for eleven years, and I will set down what the book asks, because nobody else remembers it now. The door book of that branch has two lines for every working day: admitted by the caretaker at eight, and opened by the manager at nine. The bank is thus in the building an hour before the bank is open, and both lines want a signature, and after eleven years both lines are mine. W. Poyser, at eight; W. Poyser, at nine, over the manager's key. That is the shape of a working day, and I have never once broken it.
At eight I admit the building. Lodge lights out, hall lights on, which is as much as I am asked to light. I do not light the counting room; that lamp is the manager's, and it is his to find burning. I set the bolt back, walk the hall once for wet on the marble, come out, and return to my lodge for tea. I do not sit inside between the hours. That is the arrangement, and in eleven years I have kept it to the minute.
At nine, when Mr Stedman puts his key over mine and the two of us go in together, the branch is in work. The morning ledgers are open at their days. The cash trays stand on the counter, lids squared, straps laid across, though I left the straps on the shelf. The post is date-stamped, and the dates are always right. The wall clock, from which I set every clock in that place, has neither gained nor lost in eleven years. And the counting room lamp is burning, though no hand of mine lit it, and the stove in the back hall is warm, though I bank it dead at night and light no fires before nine.
Once only, in all that time, I heard something, and I set it down because a man should set down what he heard. My tea was poured. Out of the hall came the sound a ledger makes when a line is being ruled and the pen has stopped on the paper to wait for the ink. It stopped when I stood up. I sat down again. Mr Stedman says I heard the pipes. I have carried those pipes to my ear on a Saturday with the place empty, and pipes do not stop when you stand up.
Here is the part I want understood. The door book is kept in my lodge, and the two lines are printed on it before the day: eight and nine. I sign the eight when the hall light shows under the door, which is my rule and has never once caught me early or late. I sign the nine when the manager and I are both on the mat together, which is the rule for the second and has never once wanted us sooner. Eleven years, and the book between us has never waited for a signature it did not get, and never taken one before its hour. The bank is balanced to the minute, the manager says, and I do not doubt him, because I am the minute.
I am not a man who sees things. I count the walk from the lodge to the door at thirty-one paces, and it is thirty-one paces. But eleven years of one hour is a year of mornings, and every one of those mornings the work was found done, to the day's own schedule, in a building admitted for nobody. If nobody is in the branch between the two signatures, and nobody is, because I hold both keys and the door book sits on my own table, who has been keeping the morning up to time in there, and whose morning is it they are keeping?