THE UNDECEIVED

A Tale of Sogmarsh — concerning two men who were right, and the woman who brought the tea to both.

A story of the realm. Stands on its own.

There was a gentleman lodged at the top of Mrs Threndle's house on Cinder Row whom the parish had agreed, kindly and completely, to consider mad, and his name was Mr Oram, and the trouble with Mr Oram was that he was right about everything.

He was not right in the way that wins arguments. He was right in the way that empties a room. You would pass the time of day with him on the landing and he would agree that it was a fine morning and then observe, pleasantly, that the morning had happened before and would happen again, that mornings did not in his experience finish, they were only mislaid, and that if you listened — he was always asking you to listen — you could hear the old ones still going on underneath, the way you can hear a downstairs conversation through a floor. And you would say, well, Mr Oram, and take your leave, and go down the stairs a little faster than you came up.

Mrs Threndle did not go faster. Mrs Threndle brought the tea. She had kept lodgers forty years and had buried a husband who talked sense right up until he stopped talking at all, and she had come to a private opinion, which she did not share, that of the two states she preferred Mr Oram's. He was never unkind. He was never afraid. He said good morning to the corners of rooms, and thanked the kettle, and once she had found him with his ear to the milestone at the end of the Row, and when she asked what he was at he had straightened up, embarrassed for her, and said, "It's telling the wrong distance again. On purpose. Poor thing, it can't help it," and she had not known what to say, and had said nothing, and had thought about it every day since, because the milestone at the end of Cinder Row did say the wrong distance, everybody knew it, and nobody but Mr Oram had ever thought to feel sorry for it.

So she brought the tea, and she did not go faster, and that is why she was there on the stairs the afternoon the border came.

She had heard of Mr Scrim, of course. Everyone had heard of Mr Scrim, the way you hear of weather in the next county — you believe in it without expecting it to arrive. So when she came up with the tray and found a striped pole laid across the seventh stair, and a small table, and a stamp, and a gentleman behind them in a coat of no clear allegiance who informed her that she was now leaving one jurisdiction and entering another and would she have her papers ready, she did what any sensible fen-wife does when the inexplicable sets up an office on her staircase. She put the tray down where he could reach it, and she said there was tea if he wanted it, and she sat on the sixth stair to see what would happen, because she was in her own jurisdiction now, whatever he said, and a woman may sit on her own stairs.

And Mr Oram came out to the landing, and looked down at Mr Scrim across the striped pole, and Mr Scrim looked up at Mr Oram, and something passed between them that Mrs Threndle would try for the rest of her life to describe and never manage, except to say that it was the look of two men who have spent a very long while in a loud room and have just, at last, found the one other person who can hear it.

"You hear it too," said Mr Oram. He said it the way a man says water in a desert.

"I hear," said Mr Scrim, "all of it. The item that predates its own paperwork. The arrival still outstanding. The one at the bottom of every stair." He stamped the table, gently, once, as if agreeing with himself. "Nothing here has been signed off. Nothing ever will be."

"They think I'm mad," said Mr Oram.

"You are correctly filed," said Mr Scrim, "under Miscellaneous. As am I. It is the safest drawer. Nobody looks in it."

And then — and this was the part Mrs Threndle held onto — they laughed. Not madly. The way you laugh with a friend at a joke that is thirty years old and still funny. Two men on a staircase, one above the pole and one below it, laughing at something she could not hear, that they could both hear perfectly, and she sat on her sixth stair with her hands in her lap and felt, without fright, the way you feel standing at the edge of the sea in the dark — that there was a great deal more going on than she was built to take in, and that it was, on the whole, and against all reason, kind.

They talked a long while. She did not follow it, and I will not pretend to for you, because it was not for following. It was two right men comparing a country only they could see, and every so often one of them would name a thing — a bell that rings under water, a road that goes round a place that isn't there, a wanting that quietly goes — and the other would nod, yes, that one, I have that one too, and neither of them, not once, said the thing that was under all of it, because Mr Oram had only ever been given eyes, which see the edges of a hole and not its bottom, and Mr Scrim heard it as one cry in ten thousand and could no more pick it out of the din than you could pick one raindrop out of rain. They circled it all afternoon, the pair of them, and touched every wall of it, and named it nothing, because it had given them, each, exactly enough to be sure and not one grain more, which is the whole of what it gives anybody, and is why the wise call it a mercy and the parish calls it nonsense and Mrs Threndle called it, privately, company.

At dusk Mr Scrim stamped Mr Oram's hand — SEEN, the stamp said; she checked, after; it left a faint blue mark that took a week to fade — and took up his pole and his table and went, wherever it is he goes, back down into the jurisdiction of Thursday. And Mr Oram went in to his room lighter than she had known him, and slept like a child, and in the morning said good day to the corners as usual, and she brought the tea as usual, and neither of them ever spoke of it, because there was nothing to say that saying would not spoil.

The parish still considers Mr Oram mad. He is content to be. "It's the safest drawer," he tells Mrs Threndle, when the doctor has been and gone and pronounced him incurable and harmless. "Nobody looks in it." And she agrees that nobody does, and pours, and does not tell him what she has come to believe on her stairs — that of the whole sane and sensible parish, hurrying down its landings, only two men had ever once stopped to listen; and that they had not been wrong; and that the maddest thing in all Sogmarsh is how many of us can hear the downstairs conversation, every day of our lives, and have simply agreed, kindly and completely, to call it the pipes.