Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
Yesterday's Coal
The coal lorry delivers each week for a stove her house removed in spring, and the receipts are signed in her father's hand, twenty years gone.
- dated: "November"
- narrator: "Marguerite Foal, widow"
- reliability: unreliable
4 November, first frost. A coal lorry came up the lane and stopped at my gate as if it had always done. The driver stepped down with his sack-talk as if he knew the house. I stood in the doorway with the rag in my hand and said he had the wrong house, and he read from his black order book, in the friendly voice they use, that the house was right and the delivery was mine, and that he would carry it round the back as before. I let him carry it round the back.
We took the stove out in the spring; I called the man from the parish myself, and the chimney has a cap the colour of the slates. The grate is under sacking in the outhouse. The driver did not need telling any of this, and what he did need telling my mouth could not get round.
The receipts he left me are three carbon copies, tipped and straight, the weigh-house style. I read one by the kitchen window while he was still in the yard. Each is signed in the payer's hand at the bottom, in the space before PAID.
The hand was father's. His loop on the M, his bad steep K. He has been gone twenty years this spring, and the receipts are dated this morning.
5 November. I know what I promised myself at the window, and I did not keep it. I got the outhouse key and I looked. The bin that was emptied in April, that the man from the parish charged me for emptying, is full again to the staples of the lid: round coal, dry, the size they sold before the war. I did not open it. I did not go in far.
I signed nothing for the driver. He signed himself.
8 November. The carbon copies are in the drawer with his winter gloves, which is a foolish place and I put them there knowingly, so let no one say I did not. This evening I read the weight column under the lamp: nine cwt to the quarter, and the prices alongside are the old prices, to the old farthing. I checked them against the parish book in the loft.
There is a page in the black order book I saw through his arm as he turned it. My address at the top, and under it a second address I did not read, because his body was moving across the light. Eleven November now as I write this over.
11 November. Cold snap. The grate stays unlit and I write it plainly: yesterday evening I found myself in the dark kitchen with the grate half-dressed and the box of lumps in my hands, no memory of the standing there, and I put it all back, and I did not light it.
What I want written here before Thursday is this, and let no one file it differently. Whatever comes up that lane knows the house. It has the weights. It has the prices. It has a hand for the signature that the man in the office downstairs would swear to, and I have his gloves, and I have the receipts, and I keep them where I kept his gloves.
The driver said, getting up on the cab this morning with the sack-talk gone quiet, that he was sorry for the bother, and that they'd see me Wednesday after next, same as ever. My name is on the order. I read it over the pocket. The hand was mine. Twenty years I have been able to write my own name, and that was my loop on the M, and that was this morning, and I have not signed anything since the spring.