Short story · 3 min read · Set in Victoria Street ·
The Money of the Second Counter
A paying-out teller remembers the counter that opened twice in four winters and never once came up short.
The second counter at the Victoria Street Savings Bank sat behind the rope eleven months of the year. It had its own pen on a chain, its own brass number, 12, and its own ledger, ruled differently from ours, with a column the ordinary books did not carry: TALLY ON RETURN. I worked the paying-out desk for four years and was asked to work the twelfth counter twice, both times in winter, and both times I said yes, because you said yes.
You were told it opened on the later bell, and no one could tell me which bell that was. The hall had two: nine o'clock for the street door, a quarter past for the staff stair. The twelfth counter answered to neither. It was simply open when I came round the screen, rope unhooked, the pen lying squared to the ledger as if the last hand that used it had measured it into place.
The customers arrived in an order rather than a queue, the way people stand at a graveside. They were quiet, they knew their passbook numbers by heart, and several of them, when I checked the slips afterwards against our records, had closed their accounts years before. Properly closed, with receipts and the manager's initials and everything done that the rulebook asks. I paid them all the same. They signed the little ledger at their own pace, thanked me by the name of the counter, "you're the second girl tonight", and went out into Victoria Street, where the lamps were lit if the hour was after four and dark if it was not, and I never once thought to test which.
At closing I carried the small drawer under the twelfth counter down to the head cashier, Mrs Utting, who counted it against the ledger without raising her eyes. Nineteen payments the first night, twenty-two the second. The drawer still held everything. The TALLY ON RETURN column said SAME, in the machine's own print. Mrs Utting ruled the line under it, signed, and said, "Now the day-book," and that was all she said either time.
There is no place to stand in that arithmetic. I have looked for one. The customers took cash; the drawer kept its cash; the ledger agreed with itself. When the inspectors came, the February after, they spent a morning at the empty counter and wrote that the bank had not lost a halfpenny in the period under review, which was true, and which was somehow the wrong thing to have been true.
The second time, the hall smelled of wet stone and the radiators ran all day for nothing. There were more of them, and among them a boy in a school coat who signed where the adults had signed and took eleven pounds and said thank you twice. I was glad when the queue was done. The last man folded his notes into an envelope instead of a wallet and said, before he went, "You'll want to lock it behind us." I locked it. It is the only instruction I was ever given at that counter that I fully understood.
In the morning the little ledger was ruled and initialled for a day I had not worked, and the TALLY ON RETURN column said SAME again, and the drawer went down to the counting room heavier than sense allows, because I never weighed it and wrote nothing and was not asked. What I have never settled is the patience of that queue, the closed accounts opening like doors, the drawer that would not go light. If the money never left the drawer, and the queue never left the hall, what was it I carried down at closing each night, wrapped in the cloth and heavy as a bell?