Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Higher Combe ·
The Seventh Place Setting
A catering supervisor who issues every portion off her own tally card serves a table of six with seven plates, the seventh first, to order, and it has never once gone back uneaten.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Edith Passmore, senior catering supervisor"
I have been senior catering supervisor at Higher Combe for nineteen years, and I issue the portions myself, off my own tally card, so I will be understood on numbers before I am understood on anything else. Nineteen years, four thousand portions a month issued, the wastage ledger kept in my own book, and not one remark against the kitchen from the governors.
The difficulty sits at the west table: the table of six by the long window — the two boiler men, the head gardener, the matron's secretary, the night porter and the librarian, the same six, seated together three years by order of the rota. I lay six covers for the west table. I lay them with my own count and my own years behind the count. The tray comes up with seven plates on it.
I want to be exact about the seventh, because the kitchen can be many kinds of exact and I have had to learn which kind matters. The seventh plate goes out first. Not first among equals — first, ahead of the six, before any of the six at the west table have given me an order at the hatch. and it comes out to order. Whatever one of the six was going to ask for at twelve forty-five, with or without mustard, the seventh plate is already carrying it at twelve thirty, correct down to the sauce boat, while the person who wants it is still in the corridor with a tray.
The portions ledger bears me out, in its own dry way. Issued against seated: seven against six, every service, five years of entries in my book. Wastage: nil. The seventh plate never comes back uneaten. It comes back the way all used plates come back, knife crossed where a plate leaves a knife crossed, the sauce boat used or not used according to the dish, and I have turned over enough of them to know used from arranged — arranged has a shine to it, and used does not.
I have run the plain checks as well as anyone could ask. On the Tuesday of the eighth I laid six covers and personally walked the seventh plate back down myself, and Monday's docket to the cook read docketed for seven, in the cook's hand, off a tally card ruled in seven — I grant you the print shop has ruled my cards in sevens since before me, and I grant you that a cook reading a seven-column card will pot an extra ladle without feeling it, because big pots make seven naturally. That is the mild account and I keep it posted on the wall where the auditors can see I keep it. The mild account does not cover the seventh plate arriving at ten to one with the gardener's order on it, when the gardener gives his order at the hatch at twelve fifty-five and I watch him read the plate and go quiet and eat it.
I put a signature line at the foot of the west table's tally, years back, for whoever ate off the seventh plate to sign against. It was presumptuous of me and I did it anyway. Nineteen years of those cards comes to this: six names at the top, in hands I would know anywhere, the seventh line blank, the plates used. I asked the six direct, once, at clearing-up, closing the pass door behind me as the hygiene rules require. The librarian said there are only ever six of us, missus, and looked to her neighbour to be told so as well, and nobody would sign the seventh line then or since.
So it stands uncorroborated, and I record it as such: no signature, no witness, six clean denials off a table that is never short of an opinion about gravy. The question I carry out with the wash, and have carried nineteen years, is the seventh line's to answer and nobody at Higher Combe will take it: whose order is the kitchen answering at ten to one — if none of the six will claim the plate, and the plate has never yet gone back uneaten?