Short story · 4 min read · Set in Brannock ·
The Music of the Encore List
The Brannock hall prints its encore list after each concert and frames it in the foyer, and a used frame the hall bought on the cheap has come round again holding the list before the concert.
The Brannock Assembly Hall has one small habit of self-respect. After every concert, the steward types the night's encores as they were actually sung — encore one, encore two, who played, and the time the audience would not stop till the last of it was given — onto a card the size of a hymn sheet. The card goes up in the foyer in a frame, beside the standing portrait of the hall's first hon. treasurer, and it stays up until the next concert drives it out. No concert at Brannock has ever finished till it has an encore to its card. The hall books acts partly on their willingness to be made to sing again.
The frames are cheap and the hall has always been honest about its economy, so the frames come from Casker's, the second-hand shop on the canal side, where the proprietor sells by the box and invoices by the line. In thirty years the hall's buying pattern at Casker's has never altered: frames in, cards in, holes drilled, small brass keyhooks, the whole run of invoices two to a year, settled with the house's rubber stamp. The invoice line says frame only, glazing as found, second-hand, and that is what the hall buys.
The odd frame is the one from the box bought last March.
The hall bought four frames and no more; four were hung empty in the foyer, the way the steward hangs them a fortnight ahead, and the odd one sat on the staging shelf behind the flap of the box office, because its glazing was crazed and Casker's own ledger marked it as the returned frame — the one item in the box with a history at a price nobody at Casker's would do arithmetic on. When the June concert ran, the choir gave three encores, the third unplanned, and the steward typed the card at ten past ten as the hall's custom is, and went to frame it. The crazed frame was chosen from the shelf for the crazed glazing that flatters the card when the wall lamp is on.
The card the steward had just typed was already in it.
It was not a near-match, the kind of thing shorthand errors or a similar programme might leave behind. It was the card in his own type-face, with the error in the ninth line he had not yet noticed and went back and scratched out of the unpacked copy in his basket — the scratch is on the hall's carbon, the correction in the frame matches the scratch, and both carry the same turn of the bar of the h in Ambrose. The frame had come from Casker's in March. The concert was in June. The card inside was printed after the concert, and the frame had been framed, glazing and all, with the card in it since before the concert ran.
The committee did what committees do: they took the frame to Casker's. Casker's is a careful tradesman, and he showed the ledger entry for the frame's previous life — cleared from a solicitor's probate lot in the winter, stored, priced, sold to the hall. Nothing in the probate lot says the Brannock hall. The solicitor who died in the winter left, among Effects, one concert programme wallet, all empty.
The frame hangs in the foyer now with the card for June in it, and the wall lamp on. The steward types his cards after the encores, faithfully, one concert to the next, because the hall's custom is the hall's custom and a printed record after the fact cannot be said to prove anything but that he keeps good order. The four empty frames hung with it, ready for the next three concerts, are the ones the committee has begun quietly to walk past.
They have not asked the steward to open the empty ones since September. The question the committee has failed to arrive at a quorum to put to itself is the only one that matters: if the frame came to Brannock already glazed and holding the June card — printed at ten past ten, after three encores the choir had not chosen — then who kept Brannock's custom, and with what audience?