A Sunday in Sump Lane
Sogmarsh Wireless Presents — being thirty minutes of a wet Sunday, and the passing thereof.
Rain. Just rain. And the bucket at No. 4½, dripping, keeping the only time there is.
ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless presents A Sunday in Sump Lane; in which nothing whatever occurs, at considerable length, and Mr Horace P. Dudgeon attempts to make of it an Occasion.
Interior. The kitchen. The drip. A long, long pause. HORACE exhales enormously.
HORACE. ...Mercy.
MERCY. Mm.
HORACE. It is Sunday.
MERCY. It is.
HORACE. (pause) It is very Sunday. (pause) It is the Sundayest Sunday I believe I have ever sat in. (pause) Is there anything to do?
MERCY. No.
HORACE. (pause) Are you certain there is nothing to —
MERCY. It's the Wet, Horace. It's Sunday, in the Wet. There has never been anything to do and there never will be. Sit still and let it rain.
A pause of monumental proportions. The drip.
HORACE. (new energy) I could improve my mind. (rummaging) Where is that almanac. (finding it, opening it, reading grandly) "The Root-Book, being a full account of every root..." (reads on silently, brow furrowing) ...Mercy, what is a chit?
MERCY. The eye of a potato.
HORACE. (pause) ...And why is it in a book?
MERCY. Because a man had a wet Sunday and nothing to do.
HORACE. (snapping it shut) The mind is not improved. The mind is, if anything, worse. (pause) Billy! What are you doing?
BILLY. (contentedly, from a corner) Watching the drip, Mr Dudgeon.
HORACE. And is it — is it rewarding?
BILLY. It's very regular. (pause) That one was a big one.
HORACE. (despairing) We are three grown souls watching water leave a bucket one drop at a time. (rising, pacing) No. NO. A man of destiny does not let a Sunday defeat him. I shall — I shall found something. A society. A movement. (seizing paper) "The Sump Lane Society for the Advancement of the Wet Sunday." First resolution —
MERCY. (not looking up) You founded a society Thursday. It's above the wheelwright's. You lost it to Billy.
HORACE. (deflating) ...So I did. (sitting) ...So I did.
The longest pause yet. The rain. The drip. And then, unexpectedly, HORACE goes quiet and still, and looks at the wall.
HORACE. (softly) ...Mercy. Look at the damp patch. Over the range.
MERCY. I've looked at it for eleven years, Horace.
HORACE. No, but look. There — the brown of it, where it spreads. Is that not — do you not see — a face? An old man. Sorrowful. Looking off. (genuinely taken) He has been coming through the plaster all this while and we never marked him.
A pause. MERCY actually looks.
MERCY. (after a moment, quietly) ...That's Mr Sole. Lived here before us. That's his chair you're in. (beat) Funny. It does look like him, in the wet.
BILLY. (peering) He looks like he's waiting for the drip to stop and all.
A companionable silence. Not an empty one now. The rain eases, very slightly.
HORACE. (quietly, no grandeur left in him at all) ...You know, Mercy, I set out this morning to make something happen. And nothing has. Not one thing. The whole Sunday has gone by and we have watched a bucket and found a man in the plaster and that is the entire sum of it.
MERCY. That's most Sundays, Horace.
HORACE. (a small realisation) ...And it was — I find it was — not so bad. (pause) The company, chiefly. (clears throat, embarrassed by the sentiment) The drip was neither here nor there.
MERCY. (the ghost of a smile, getting up) I'll put the kettle on. That'll be something happening.
HORACE. (rallying, magnificent again, immortal) At last. Mark the hour, Billy. Tea. On a Sunday. History is made in Sump Lane.
BILLY. (happily) I'll watch the kettle. It's like the drip but hotter.
SFX: the kettle, beginning. The rain. The drip, slowing.
MERCY. (to herself, fond, flat) ...Just about a perfect day, really. If you don't ask too much of it.
ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless has presented A Sunday in Sump Lane. Nothing happened. It was, on the whole, and taking one thing with another, and allowing for the drip — just about enough.
The kettle sings. Slow fade on the rain.
— end —