Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Alder Hill ·
The Nameplate That Takes Clients
The outer glass keeps both names, and the ledger keeps the father's column balanced.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Cecil Bream, solicitor"
I hold the practice at Alder Hill that was my father's: BREAM & BREAM in gold leaf on the outer glass, and under that a bell push that rings in the back room. I am the second Bream on the glass. The first is Wilfred Bream, who kept the practice thirty-one years and left it whole. The spring of '85 took him. The registry had nothing to show; in the autumn a paper came through the post with a number to be quoted and no name at the foot of it, and I keep that paper in the safe with the deeds. It is the one document in this office that has never once been wrong.
The clients come for my father. Not for the style of him; for him. Tuesdays and Thursdays, his old days. They ask at the glass for Mr Bream senior, by his Christian name in two cases, and Phyllis Norden shows them through and enters them in the clients' ledger, which carries a column to each partner the way the old ledgers were ruled. My initials go in my column at the foot of each matter, C.B., written by me and checked by me, and the fees stand against them and are banked.
The other column fills itself with W.B. in a hand four years settled. I have not written it once. Norden has not written it once. The pen tray in the back room was dry the day of the funeral and the ink that column takes is not from this office. The printed totals at the foot of the month come out even to the penny, both columns together, and I have run them through the adding machine twice and signed no variance, because a variance is a thing you swear to and I would not know what I was swearing about.
His room at the back is kept as he left it: papers squared, coat on the peg, chair pushed in. On the client days that door stands unlocked with the lamp lit, the papers on the desk are moved, and the chair is out where a man would sit to be seen, and I keep to the front room where my own desk is, where my name is on nothing at all.
His appointment cards are in the second drawer, month to month, and they fill themselves ahead a week in hand, Tuesdays and Thursdays, in his hooked W, the way he used to do it, and Norden swears the filling is none of hers, and it is none of mine, and the cards are there whenever a client wants one and never one day out.
For who else has put a name to this: Norden confirms the second column and the carbons, and has done since March in her own neat hand. The clients confirm the appointments, pay the fees, thank the house and go away satisfied, which is the trade working and says nothing about the glass. The bank confirms the balances, which is worse than either. The paper in the safe confirms only that my father's death went in unentered, and that is the whole of what the dead will sign for.
Last spring I sent for a glazier's man to take the father's name off the outer glass. He stood under the letters, folded his own ladder without opening it, charged half an hour and wrote on the docket: ONE NAME LEFT AS FOUND. I paid him from the office account and filed the docket under W. Which of us takes the clients on the Tuesdays and Thursdays, and into which column will my own last entry go?