Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Count of My Own Rooms
A lodger re-measures the house after the clearance and finds it two inches wrong door to door, and no form will certify it.
- dated: "after the clearance"
- narrator: "Ernest Took, lodger"
14th of February. I lodge on the first floor of this house and have lodged nineteen years under my late aunt, who died in the autumn and was removed to the crematorium in the week of the first frost. Her effects were cleared on the 11th under the estate's instruction of removal: three men of the firm, list signed at the door, the van gone by four. I had strung a cord for her curtain blind the spring before last, and I keep a habit of writing useful measures inside the back cover of a paid gas bill: front door threshold to the back kitchen doorway, along hall and passage, thirty-four feet four and a half inches. I took that measure the morning I hung the cord, with plenty of light on the tape.
3rd of March. I put a new blind up for myself and strung the line the same way as before, same cord, same corner to corner, and called it thirty-four feet six and a half. I re-measured at noon and got the same, and again at dusk, and got the same. Two inches, found between the front door and the back, and no door moved, no skirting off, and the boards still showing the pale squares where her furniture stood. I took each room wall by wall against the plan her solicitor lent me, floor to lintel and skirting to skirting, and everything came home to the sixteenths. Then I went outside with a second string and measured front step to yard gate around by the drainpipe, and the outside is exact to the plan. The house is correct wall by wall. It is two inches over between its own doors, and there is no door it is over at.
21st of March. The surveyor came on Wednesday morning for my succession claim — the form wants the floor area certified before the committee will look at it. He laid a steel tape down the passage twice, went out and did the frontage with the tape and a wheel, and stood in the passage a long while with both figures. He declined to certify. He wrote on the form, in a hand kept very level, "measures do not accord with plan; tape ruled sound; plan governs," and had me sign only the parts concerning myself. The floor area he left blank, which fewer men would have dared.
9th of April. The office letter came: not the tape's error, the plan's information, nothing further attempted, the claim to proceed on the deeds as they stand. So there are three figures where there was one — the plan's, the surveyor's steel, and my cord — and the two inches lives between any two of them like a guest no form will take in. I have signed nothing further and I keep the cord coiled in the drawer under the meter. A measure is kept so a house can be found again. The plan will find the house my aunt died in. My cord finds a different one, two inches kinder to the eye, called by the same address on the same rate book. Which house is it I am lodging in — and which of us is the lodger now?