The Marriage Bureau

Sogmarsh Wireless Presents — being thirty minutes of scientific matchmaking, overruled by the heart.

A front room, a desk, a ledger, a hopeful bell on the counter. Rain. The bucket, dripping, keeping time for the lovelorn.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless presents The Marriage Bureau; in which Mr Horace P. Dudgeon, President for Life of No. 4½ Sump Lane, brings system and science to the matter of love, and is comprehensively defeated by two people who cannot stand each other.

Interior. The bureau. HORACE, behind the desk, expansive. MERCY, doubtful, tidies.

HORACE. Mercy. The realm's courtship is a shambles. Two people walk out for a year, exchange insults about one another's potatoes, and marry in the rain on a guess. It is unscientific. I am opening a Bureau. The Dudgeon Matrimonial Bureau. Love, Mercy — by measurement.

MERCY. (flat) You've been married how many times, Horace?

HORACE. (loftily) One does not need to have sailed to draw the chart. I shall match couples by compatibility of temperament, holdings, and potato. No more guessing. The right pairs, proven on paper, before a single walk is walked.

MERCY. In Sogmarsh they betroth by insulting each other's spuds. "The fonder the couple, the worse the insult." You can't chart that.

HORACE. (producing forms) I can chart anything, Mercy. That is the tragedy of my gifts.

SFX: the bell. Enter two clients, separately — DOLLY QUICK, sharp, and a shy, literal young man, BILLY. They do not look at each other.

HORACE. (unctuous) Welcome to the Bureau. You have completed the forms. Let me compute. (consulting) Miss Quick — spirited, quick-tongued, runs the joke in any room. And young Master Saltaway — literal, gentle, guards a back door from the inside. (shaking head gravely) ...Oh dear. Oh dear me. Incompatible. Chalk and cheese. Fire and — and a bucket. I could not in conscience match you. The science forbids it.

DOLLY. (bristling) Incompatible? Him? (jerking a thumb at Billy) He's not got the wit to be incompatible with a gatepost.

BILLY. (mildly, wounded) I've got wit. I just keep it round the back. With the door.

DOLLY. (rounding on him) Oh, do you. Go on then. Say something witty.

BILLY. (pause; earnest) ...Your hair's like the good end of a broom. The soft end. (beat) I meant it nice.

DOLLY. (thrown, softening despite herself) ...The soft end.

BILLY. The end you'd actually want. Round your face. (simply) I've thought it a while, only I keep my thinking round the back.

HORACE. (alarmed, waving forms) No — no, this is — the chart says NO — your temperaments are in direct opposition, your potato holdings do not align, the science is unambiguous —

DOLLY. (not listening, to Billy) ...What else have you got round the back?

BILLY. (shyly) Loads. It's a big back.

Interior. The bureau, weeks later. HORACE, baffled, over his ledger. MERCY, vindicated, sweeps.

HORACE. (despairing) It is a catastrophe, Mercy. Every match I have certified as scientifically sound has come to nothing — the compatible pairs bore each other rigid within the fortnight. And every pair I ruled impossible, every chalk-and-cheese, fire-and-bucket disaster the science forbade — they are betrothed. Dolly Quick and young Saltaway are to wed by Bog Night. My worst prediction. My most incompatible. Married.

MERCY. (mildly) That's because you can't chart it, Horace. I did tell you. The insult's the tenderness. The chalk wants the cheese. Two people who fit on paper have nothing to find out about each other — and finding out is the whole of the walking. You matched people who agreed. Nobody ever fell in love with someone who agreed with them.

HORACE. (hollow) ...Then what is the use of a Bureau? What is the use of the science?

MERCY. (gently) None, Horace. That's the good news. Love's the one thing in this realm you can't file, measure, or improve. It just turns up, in the rain, insulting your potatoes, and there's not a form in the world for it. (beat) Close the Bureau. Go to the wedding. You match-made it, in a way — by forbidding it.

SFX: the bell, once. SOL, hopeful.

SOL. Heard the Bureau's closing. Shame. (brightly) Only I do a lovely line in wedding — commemorative potatoes, "Dolly & Billy" stamped on, tuppence. And a Certificate of Scientific Incompatibility, framed, so the happy couple can hang the proof they were doomed.

HORACE. (with sudden warmth) ...Do you know, Sol, I'll take a dozen of the certificates. (to Mercy) For it is the finest thing my Bureau produced — proof, stamped and witnessed, that the two least suitable people in the parish could not possibly be happy. (beat) I shall give it them as a wedding gift, and they will laugh, and hang it over the bed, and be married fifty years to spite my chart.

MERCY. (fond, flat) Now you're matchmaking, Horace. That's the first true thing your Bureau's done.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless has presented The Marriage Bureau. The Dudgeon Matrimonial Bureau is closed, its every scientific prediction having failed, and its every forbidden match having wed. Miss Quick and Mr Saltaway are betrothed by Bog Night, and hold, framed above the bed, the certificate proving it impossible.

The bucket drips. Slow fade.

— end —