Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Wexler Court ·
The Coats on the Hall Peg
A landlady who has let her Wexler Court rooms for thirty years counts her tenants' coats on the hall peg every night and the count always comes one over the letting book, until morning puts it level again by whatever takes the coat down.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Doris Sallow, landlady"
The hall peg in my house holds twelve hooks and I count it every night at lamp-out, the way my mother counted hers before me in the same court. What I have to report has gone on longer than my temper and shorter than my book, and I have a second book besides mine, which is more than most landladies can put to it.
The house is five letting rooms. At the letting count there are, this autumn, seven coats: the grey topcoat that belongs to the man on the first floor, civil service; the navy one to the apprentice at the formatting works; the belted brown to the gentleman who lodges long term; the corduroy to the man in the back room; and three of the ordinary kind belonging, in the order of the hooks, to the second floor. Seven tenants. Seven coats by the letting book.
By evening the count is eight. Not nine, never two over, always one, from the first of November 1969 to this wet October without a break I can find in the fly-leaf. The eighth hangs on whichever hook is shortest of light and is not wet, not walked in, not folded, and never smells of pipe, rain or bus the way a coat does when a man wears it home. By seven in the morning the count is seven, whoever's coat went down and whatever the weather let off.
I have gone at it every way a house allows. I have asked at breakfast, plainly and then sideways, and every tenant has given me his own coat by description, and every description matched one of the seven by daylight, and the eighth was nobody's by anybody's word. I have counted in the Thin Hour, out of what you might call diligence, and the count holds its overage there too, which was the night I stopped leaving the hall lamp off.
The second book I mentioned is Mrs Colbridge's. She is on the second floor and is not, strictly speaking, my tenant for books, being my tenant for the room, but she has kept a tally in the fly-leaf of her own book since the spring of 1975 and her numbers agree with mine. Twenty-two nights running this season, with the dates parallel down both pages. When the apprentice counted once with me on the 4th, getting my own number back word for word, and when Mrs Colbridge's fly-leaf agrees across three winters, you may say as the court would say it: the overage is corroborated. It is not the counting anybody doubts. It is the arithmetic of the eighth.
What my book and Mrs Colbridge's agree on, and stop short of, is the name. Whose coat comes down by morning we have never caught out, and we have agreed, not in writing, to go on not catching it. The one question I would put before the court reads it into the record is this: is the house keeping one coat over for a tenant that has not yet been let to, or is the tenant that has yet to come being asked, quietly, every evening, to hang something of his in a hall that is only borrowed?