The Greywell Ledger

The parcel was on the doormat when I came up from the street on Tuesday evening. It was the first week of November, and it had rained since dawn. The stairwell of the Greywell smelled of wet coats and boiled cabbage, as it always did in that month.

I live on the fourth floor. There is no lift. I had climbed all four flights with my umbrella dripping on every landing, and I was in no humour for a puzzle.

The parcel was the size of a hatbox, wrapped in brown paper and tied with garden twine. The knot was an old one, a sailor's knot, pulled very tight. My name was on the label in ink: Miss A. Farrow, Flat 4C, the Greywell, Calder Street. There was no stamp and no postmark. There was no sender.

I stood there a while with my key in my hand. Then I carried it in.

I am a records clerk at the Records Office. I spend my days checking that one piece of paper agrees with another. So I did what I would have done at work. I set the parcel on the kitchen table and looked for the order that explained it. I had no order. I had bought nothing in a month except stockings.

I cut the twine with the bread knife. Under the paper was a box of plain deal, and under the lid, packed in shavings, was a television.

It was a small one. I would say the screen was no wider than my two hands laid side by side. The case was walnut, worn pale at the corners, and the glass was dark and slightly convex. There were two brass knobs and no names on either. I turned the set over. There was no flex at the back and no socket for one. I looked for a battery door and found none.

I said, aloud, "Well, that's no use to anybody."

My voice sounded foolish in the kitchen. I put the set on the chest of drawers in my bedroom, because that was the only clear surface. Then I ate my supper, washed the plate and read the evening paper to the end. I did not think about the parcel again. I want that understood. I was not uneasy.

At ten I went round the flat and put out the lamps. Kitchen first, then the sitting room. Last, the little brass lamp beside my bed. I lay down. The rain was loud on the sash.

Something was wrong with the dark. It took me a moment to see what. It had a pale patch in it, low and square, on the far side of the room.

I sat up. The television was lit.

There was no hum. There was no click. The glass glowed a dull silver, and in it, small and clear, a woman was climbing a stair. She wore a coat and carried nothing. She went up slowly, one hand on the rail. At each landing she stopped and looked up the well, as if counting.

The rail was iron, with a brass cap at the turn. The fourth step from the top was chipped on its nosing, and the wall beside it was painted the green that the landlord had chosen in 1949 and never replaced.

I knew that stair. I had climbed it that evening, with a dripping umbrella.

The woman reached my landing, and turned towards my door.

• • •

I did not open the door. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched the woman on the glass stand outside it, one hand raised, not knocking. Then the picture closed up to a point and was gone. The room was only a room again. I counted to a hundred before I put on the lamp.

On Wednesday I came home at six with a torch from the hall cupboard, a candle and a box of matches. I meant to be methodical. I am a records clerk. It is what I do with anything that frightens me.

I turned out the lamps at ten, and lay with the torch beside me. Nothing. I lay there twenty minutes. Then I switched the torch on, just to see my hand, and the set was already lit. It had not waited for me to turn the torch off. It had waited for me to stop looking at the room, or the room had stopped being dark enough to forbid it. I did not know which. I switched the torch off, and the woman was on the stair again, a little further along.

On Thursday I lit the candle and put it on the sill, and the glass stayed blank. I drew the curtain across the candle. Still blank. I blew it out, and the picture came. I wrote the times in the back of my diary. Wednesday ran four minutes. Thursday ran seven.

On Friday I hung a blanket over the curtain rail, to be certain of the dark, and I sat up in bed with the diary on my knee. It ran eleven minutes. This time the stair gave way to a street, wet and lamplit, and I knew it by the third frame. Calder Street. The Greywell's own railings, then the chemist's, then the post box with the chipped crown.

Between the chemist's and the corner there was a shopfront I could not place. A narrow window. Gilt lettering, too small to read. A blind half down.

Someone knocked at the door.

I put on the lamp, and the glass went out at once. Stanley Ingram stood on the landing in his slippers, with his keys on their ring in his hand. He is sixty or so, and slow, and he has kept the Greywell for as long as I have lived in it.

"Miss Farrow. I'm sorry. There's a noise coming through the ceiling of three. A sort of hum."

"There's no hum," I said. "It doesn't make one."

He looked past me at the bedroom door. I do not know why I said it. "I've been sent a television. I never ordered it."

"A television." He frowned. "Let's have a look."

He stood in the doorway a long while. He did not go near it. "It isn't on the inventory," he said at last. "I have the list of every set in this building, going back to the first owner. Lodgers' wireless sets, the lot. There's no walnut one. And no plug."

"I know."

"Nobody's got one like that, Miss Farrow."

I made him sit down. I told him what I had seen that night, leaving out the stair. I said only that it showed Calder Street, and a shop between the chemist's and the corner.

"Gilt lettering?" he said. "Blind half down?"

"Yes."

He took off his cap and turned it round in his hands. "That was Pell's, the clockmaker. It shut in 1961. It's been a bank for thirty years."

I looked at him.

"Which way was the blind?" he said.

• • •

"Which way was the blind?" Stanley had said, and I had told him. Half down, I said. Pulled to the left, as if someone had meant to finish the job and been called away.

He nodded slowly and put his cap back on. He said he would sleep better not knowing why I asked. Then he went down the stair, and I heard him stop twice on the way.

That was the fourth night. By the fifth I had stopped pretending it was a fault in the wiring.

On the fifth night I sat on the bedroom floor with my back against the wardrobe and the pencil in my hand, and I put out the last lamp myself. The glass woke at once. The woman was on the stair again, the fourth-floor stair of the Greywell, with its brass rod missing at the turn. She came down into the light of the landing window and I saw her face.

It was mine. There was no doubt left to argue with. She wore the brown cardigan, the one with the leather button replaced by a black one. I had worn it that morning to the Records Office. I had hung it on the chair not two hours before.

She carried a suitcase. Her free hand held the rail. She did not hurry, and she did not look back at the flat.

I have never owned a suitcase. I had never once, in eleven years, thought of leaving.

I sat there until the picture went to snow, and then to black. I put the pencil down on the boards. I got up, found the telephone in the hall, and rang a number I had to look for in the back of my address book.

Horace Trevelyan answered on the ninth ring. He was eighty-one, and had handled the sale of the Greywell for the estate. I had met him exactly once, at a signing.

"Miss Farrow," he said. "It's gone midnight."

"I know. I'm sorry. I need to ask about a television."

There was a silence on the line. It was not the silence of a man who had to think.

"Walnut," he said. "Small. No flex."

"Yes."

"It came with the building. It was never in the schedule of fixtures, and I was told to leave it off." He cleared his throat. "The first owner left it. A Mrs Ingram. She lived on the fourth floor herself, as it happens. She told me once that it was the only honest record of the tenants."

"The tenants," I said.

"Her word. I took it for a joke."

"Mrs Ingram. Any relation to the caretaker?"

"I couldn't say. I never asked." Another pause. "She left in October of 1958. Walked out one night with a suitcase, past the porter, who wished her good evening. She wished him the same. Nobody saw her after that. Her rent was paid, you understand. Paid a good while ahead."

I looked down the hall at the bedroom door. It stood open, and the room beyond it was dark.

"Mr Trevelyan, was there a woman living here after she left? A woman who took her flat?"

He did not answer that. I heard him breathing.

"Miss Farrow," he said at last, very gently. "Which floor did you say you were on?"

• • •

"Fourth," I said. "The fourth floor."

"Yes," said Mr Trevelyan. "That's what I was afraid of."

He would say nothing more. He wished me goodnight, and he said it kindly, and the line went dead. I stood in the hall with the receiver in my hand. Then I put it down and went to the kitchen drawer for a pencil.

I found one, and a pad of the buff forms I brought home from the Records Office. I carried them to the armchair in the sitting room. I switched off the last lamp. The television woke at once, as it always did, with that low grain of light, and I sat in front of it with the pad on my knee.

I had decided on a method. I would not watch the story. I would copy it, frame by frame, as a clerk copies a register entry. Time, place, who was present, what each person carried. If it was a record, I could read it like one.

The woman on the screen came out of the front door of the Greywell at ten past six in the morning. Calder Street was wet. She had a suitcase. I wrote that down. She turned left, toward the tram stop, and a man with a milk crate stepped aside for her.

Then the picture cut to the same door, the same hour, the next day. A second woman came in from the street. She wore the brown cardigan. She had my face, my walk, even the small hitch in the left shoulder where I carry my bag. She nodded to the porter, and he nodded back. He did not look twice.

I wrote: *She is not followed. She is not stopped.*

The picture cut again. A different door, a different decade. I knew it by the lamp-brackets. A man in a belted overcoat carried a case out of the Greywell, and the next morning another man in a belted overcoat carried a case in. The same face. The same coat. A hat was lifted to the same porter.

I turned the page and kept writing. A girl with a hatbox. A widow, by her veiling. Each one went out at dawn, and each one was replaced. Nobody remarked on it. Nobody on that screen ever remarked on it.

My pencil had stopped. I looked at what I had written, and it was not a forecast. I saw that now. A forecast is a thing you can refuse. This was a ledger. These people had not been going to leave. They had left already, and the dark had only been showing me the entry.

I thought of Mrs Ingram, and her rent paid a good while ahead.

On the screen, the woman in my cardigan was back in my sitting room. I watched her cross it. She sat in my armchair. She put a pad on her knee, and she began to write. I watched her write for nearly a minute, and I could not read the page.

Then she stopped. She lifted her head, and she looked out of the glass at me. Slowly she turned and reached for the lamp on the side table. Her hand closed on the switch.

I knew what came next. She would put the light on. The set would go dark, and I would go to the bedroom and fetch my coat, and go. I had been going to do it. I could feel it, like a word on the tip of the tongue.

I did not move my hand toward the lamp.

I stood up instead. The pad slid to the carpet. I crossed the room in the dark, with the picture throwing my own shadow ahead of me, and I took my coat from the chair. It was the heavy tweed, the one I wear to the Records Office in winter. I held it up with both hands.

On the screen, the woman in the cardigan was holding up a coat as well.

I laid it over the glass.

The light went out of the room. There was no sound at all, and then, from beneath the tweed, very faintly, I heard something that was almost a knock.

• • •

I did not lift the coat until it was light.

I sat on the floor with my back against the armchair, the tweed held down with both hands, and I let the knocking stop of its own accord. It took some time. Towards five it grew weaker, like a clock running down. After that there was only the rain on the window, and the sound of my own breath.

At eight, someone knocked at the door itself. It was a plain knock, two raps, the knock of a man with a clipboard.

"Miss Farrow? It's Stanley Ingram."

I opened it on the chain. He stood on the landing in his brown overall, with the rent book under his arm, and he looked pleased, as a man does who brings good news.

"Thought you'd want to hear it from me," he said. "Your rent's been paid. A full year in advance, Miss Farrow, in cash, to the office this morning. I've never known the like."

"I haven't paid it," I said.

"No, no. The lady did." He smiled. "Brown cardigan. Very neat. She said you'd be tired, and I wasn't to disturb you till eight. She left something for you in the hall. I've carried it up."

He stepped aside. On the landing, against the banister, stood a suitcase. It was a leather case, old and square, with brass corners gone dull. The strap was buckled once, not twice.

"Did you see her face, Mr Ingram?"

He thought about it honestly. That was the worst of it. "Do you know," he said, "I couldn't tell you. But she knew the building. She never asked for the stairs."

He went down, whistling a little. I heard him reach the third floor, and the second, and then the street door, and then nothing.

I took off the chain. I knelt on the landing mat, where the parcel had lain in November, and I undid the strap. The lid was stiff. It came up with a small dry sound.

The television lay inside, packed in my own blue scarf. The walnut case was warm. I felt it through the wool before I touched it, as you feel a stone that has been in the sun. It was ten past eight on a bright wet morning, with the skylight over the stair full of daylight, and the glass was lit.

The picture was faint but quite plain. It showed a door, painted green, with a brass 4B above the letterbox. It was my door. It was empty on both sides, and the camera stood where I was kneeling now.

The door was opening.

I turned my head. Behind me, my own door stood shut, as I had left it. I looked back at the glass. The gap widened, an inch at a time, and in the gap there was a hand on the edge of the wood, in a brown cuff, with a pencil held between two fingers.

I could hear the latch behind me begin to turn.