Short story · 3 min read · Set in The Vale of Aldermere ·
The Choir of the Dry Fountain
At noon a granite fountain that has run dry for years is heard plainly running, and the sound is held only by the office stairwell, which agrees on the hour to the minute.
Aldermere Vale is a sunken precinct of planes and benches behind the colonnade, and its fountain is granite, three tiers, four mouths, and it has not held water since the drought order. The feed was capped that summer under a cover plate; the tiers were filled with sand the spring before last; the drawings of the precinct, which are good drawings, agree on all of it.
The Assessment Office stands over the colonnade. Its stairwell, concrete, plain, is open to the Vale through tall glazed lights, and it is on that stairwell — the sound being audible only from the office stair, and nowhere else in the building, and nowhere at all at ground level — that the fountain runs.
It runs at noon. When the office clock strikes it, which is a clock four minutes slow and consulted by nobody official, the stairwell holds the sound of a fountain in quantity: water falling with somewhere to fall, the four mouths going at their four levels, the tiers catching the tiers, the basin taking all of it underneath. It lasts the seven minutes of the lunch hour and stops when the office stops the lunch hour, and people on separate days, weeks apart, have given the same account without conferring. The stairwell agrees on the hour. The radio pips are not consulted; the quarter is not. It keeps the office's own noon, which has struck faithfully four minutes slow since before anybody now on the stairs was posted there.
It is not heard in the Vale. From the benches at noon you are given traffic and trees and the pigeons off the colonnade cornice, and the fountain does nothing whatsoever, being dry and sanded and capped. It is not heard in the office itself, two storeys up behind a good window, where the traffic comes through plainly enough to show what is not being heard. It is a stairwell matter. Sound keeps to a box, and the stairwell is a box, and the office has stopped remarking on the luck of that.
The caretaker who keeps the Vale, Plumridge to the office, opened the valve once to test it, the spring before last, before the sand went in. The cap came up with the drought order's date scratched across it, and the pipe held no more than a breath of air. He wrote no defect found at the fountain in his book, the book being for defects, and let it stand, and the stairwell has run its seven minutes every noon since, Sunday as well, when the office is shut and the lunch hour is only a habit kept by a clock.
The people who knew the fountain running are the generous ones about it. They say the sound has its parts — the top tier bright, the middle tier busy, the basin underneath carrying the bottoms of it — and they say it is a choir with all its parts kept, and they say it gratefully, the way you speak of a body that has kept up its training through years of no occasion. Two of the retired staff come to the half-landing on fine days to hear a bar of it, and they go down again satisfied, and nothing is asked of them at the door, because the door is off duty at noon.
The office keeps a suggestion book by the stair door, and the noon was suggested to it twice and ruled out twice — once as the heating, once as the pigeons — both rulings made on paper by hands that do not take the stairs. The book has been left the last of it. There is a form for water and a form for no water, and the drawings agree, and the pipe is a breath of air, and the tiers are sand. The question the stairwell keeps, noon after noon, seven minutes a noon, in parts, level with the bell, is the one nobody has put in the book: if the feed is capped and every drawing holds, what is all that falling water falling into?