Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Victoria Street ·
The Registrar of the Quiet Desks
A clerk of nine years describes the registry's second desk, which is staffed every working day and has no entry in any diary the office keeps.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Bernard Spackman, registration clerk"
I have been a registration clerk at the Victoria Street registry for nine years, and in nine years nobody has been able to tell me what the second desk is for.
The floor has two desks. Mine stands by the window, takes the birth and death walk-ins, and has a carpet in front of it worn down to the weave in a neat crescent where people stand, shuffle, and wait for their receipt. The other desk is nine feet further along, oak, older, with a green lamp, a blotter changed more often than mine, the stationery tray kept full, the inkwell filled. There is a stool at it, polished at the seat. There is a man at it most days. I call him the registrar because that is what everyone at the registry calls him, and because the actual registrar has never once objected to sharing the word.
He keeps hours. The lamp goes on at nine and off at five, precisely, such that I have set my own pairings by it when the clock on the stairs has run slow. People come to him. Ordinary people, coats, shopping, a folded document handled the way you handle something that has been handled already. They queue at my window, get their certificates, and then some of them, not all, move along the floor and sit at his desk, and he takes up what they have brought, reads it all the way through before he speaks, and then they sign something. I have watched dozens of those signings. In nine years I have never once been near enough to see what the signing is a copy of, because I am always wanted at my own window, and when I get there they are gone.
Here is the part I have written down in order. There is no diary entry for that desk. Not none that week: none, ever. The appointment book rules Victoria Street by the half-hour and every half-hour of every day belongs to a window or an interview room, and the quiet desk appears in it as free, unallocated, available for delegations, every day, going back to a book from before my time. Yet it is used daily, and used is the word: the blotter, the tray, the ink, the emptied chair, somebody is doing the work of the desk, and the desk does not exist to the diary.
And the carpet in front of it has never worn. Nine years of feet at my window cut a crescent into the floor inside two. The quiet desk has had, by my count, a longer queue and a slower one, and the carpet there is as the fitters left it in 1961, flat, uncreased, the pile the same all the way to the desk leg. It is as if the people who sit at my desk stand somewhere, and the people who go to his come and go by a different arrangement that does not press down.
I put it to two colleagues this week. Grace Carlow, deputy clerk, thirty-one years in the service, said yes, of course, the desk, he keeps the quiet hours, and could not say what his hours are for, and looked at me as if I had asked her to justify the weather. The day porter, Mr. Dunn, said he shows people to that desk every morning, that he has never seen the man arrive or leave, and that he could not describe a single face of anybody he has shown in, though he is good with faces and it is the one part of his work he is praised for.
So it is corroborated as far as it goes: the desk is real, the hours are kept, the blotter is changed. What neither of the two could confirm, and what I find I cannot settle, is whether they have ever once watched a person leave it.