SAINT TARRY'S PLATE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which a kind woman fills the empty plate, and the parish has to explain to her, gently, why it must be emptied again.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

Saint Tarry is the patron of the about-to-be-served, and he is, by a wide margin, the most popular saint in this realm, for the excellent reason that he is the only one whose job description matches anybody's actual life.

He is not the patron of the fed. The Loafians have that, and are welcome to it. He is not the patron of the starving, who are looked after — in the parish's opinion, badly — by a committee. Saint Tarry belongs to the enormous middle: the ones whose dinner is nearly coming. The ones on the third hour of a four-hour wait. The ones whose ship is due, whose ford will be passable by Thursday, whose harvest is looking not bad if the weather holds.

That is most people. That is most of everybody's life. And the parish's word for it — the whole theological position of this realm, in two syllables — is "just about."

Ask a Sogmarsh man how the crop is. Just about. Ask him how his wife's chest is, or the roof, or the year. Just about. It is not optimism and it is not despair; it is the precise and honest grade of hope available to people who live in a bog, and Saint Tarry is its saint, and his shrine is at an inn in Murkminster called the Empty Chair, and his shrine is a plate.

One plate. Clean. Laid at a set place at the long table, with a chair nobody sits in.

And empty. Always empty. Emptied, if need be, by whoever notices — which is the same arrangement the parish has with the bucket, and it is not a coincidence, and nobody has ever remarked on it.

Now: Aunt Sowerby.

She was not from that parish. She had married in from Drudgeford and she had been there eleven years and she was, by every account I have collected including the ones from people who were cross with her, a genuinely kind woman — the sort who notices a cold child at the back of a room and does something about it before anybody else has finished feeling sorry.

And she had been looking at that plate for eleven years.

You can see how it happened. She came from a market town, where a plate is a plate. She sat at that table week after week with her own dinner in front of her and an empty plate beside her, at a place laid for a guest who never came, in a parish where a good half of the congregation were going home to less than she was. And one evening after a Loafian sermon on abundance which she had not much enjoyed, she got up and went and put food on it.

Not a token. A proper plate: bread, a good piece of the ham, two of the eggs she had brought in. The best of what was on that table, laid out neatly, the way you would for somebody you were glad to see.

Then she sat down again, rather pleased, and waited for the room to notice.

The room noticed.

There is no version of this story in which the room does not go quiet, and I want to be fair to Aunt Sowerby here and record what she said afterwards, which is that the quiet was the worst thing she had ever sat through, and that she genuinely could not tell, for about four seconds, whether she had done something kind or something appalling.

It was old Meg Cobb who got up. Eighty-one, three parishes' worth of funerals behind her, and — this matters — fond of Aunt Sowerby, which is why she got up rather than letting somebody unkinder do it.

She did not clear the plate. She sat down next to her, in the chair nobody sits in, which she was entitled to do and nobody else was, and she said:

"That's a lovely plate, love. That's the best plate anybody's put down in this room in forty year." She patted her hand. "And we're going to have to take it off again in a minute, and I'm going to tell you why first, because you've earned that, and because if we just took it off you'd think we were mad or cruel and we're only the one."

Here is what she told her. I have it from two people who were there and they agree, which in this realm is a stronger warrant than a document.

"He's not hungry, love. That's what you've not got yet. Saint Tarry's not a hungry man waiting on his dinner — if he were we'd have fed him, we're not monsters, we'd have fed him in 1712 and had done with it.

"He's the man whose dinner is nearly here. That's the whole of him. That's his entire job and there's nobody else doing it.

"Now think what you've just done. You've fed him." Meg Cobb turned the plate slightly, the way you do with a thing you are about to take away. "And a fed Saint Tarry is no use to a living soul in this parish. He's finished. He's got his. He's out.

"There's a woman in the third row whose lad's ship is a fortnight overdue and she's been sat here every week looking at that empty plate and it's been the only thing in this building that's been any use to her — because it says the thing she needs said, which is: not yet, and still coming. And you've just gone and given him his dinner in front of her."

Aunt Sowerby, they say, put her hand over her mouth.

"Aye," said Meg Cobb. "Now you've got it."

They emptied it together, the two of them, and they did it reverently, which is the detail the whole parish keeps, and the food went — this was Meg's idea and it is the reason the story is told with affection rather than as a warning — it went to the woman in the third row, in a cloth, to take home, with nothing said about it.

Because that is the other half, and the parish is very clear about it, and I have heard a curate get it wrong from the pulpit and be corrected afterwards in the yard by four separate people: the plate stays empty and the neighbours get fed. Those are not in tension. The empty plate is not an instruction to withhold. It is a statement about hope — that the hope worth having is the kind you have not received yet, because hope you have already got in your hand has stopped being hope and become dinner, and dinner is excellent and is a different thing.

You keep the plate empty so the parish has somewhere to put not yet. And then you feed the actual person, quietly, in a cloth, and say nothing about it.

Aunt Sowerby lived another thirty-one years in that parish and was much loved and is remembered for exactly two things.

The first is the plate, which she never lived down and eventually stopped wanting to, and which she would tell on herself, at length, with relish, to any newcomer who looked at that empty place and got the look on their face she had had.

The second is that from that evening until the week she died she was the one who kept it — because the parish, having explained itself to her, promptly and without any discussion handed her the job, in the way this realm always hands the job to the person who cared enough to get it wrong first.

She kept it clean. She kept it empty. And on the bad weeks, when there was somebody in the third row waiting on something, she made sure it was laid especially well.

Hope is the thing that has not arrived. Fill the plate and you have not been generous — you have ended the only prayer this realm knows how to make. Keep it empty, feed your neighbour in a cloth and say nothing, and understand that these are the same act performed by people who have thought about it for six hundred years.