Everything in Its Place

The Chamber of Commerce kept rooms above the Savings Bank, in a parlour dressed for another century: brass lamps, a barometer, portraits of aldermen with the look of men who had never once lost an argument. Constance Ward poured tea as though pouring were policy. She was sixty, silver-haired and flawlessly assembled, and she watched you sit as one would watch a new part being fitted into a machine.

“A town is a body, Dr Voss,” she said. “The cannery is its heart, the chapel its conscience, the school its nervous system. When the heart is shocked the body shudders. Mr Crane’s death is a fever, and a wildcat strike is the infection that brought it on. Treat the infection and the body recovers.” She ticked her points off on neat fingers. Goals: jobs and wages. Adaptation: the works and the workforce. Integration: Thrift Day, the lapel badges, the shared sense of belonging. Latency: rules, and a constable for anyone who has forgotten them. “Order isn’t an accident. It is a function. Everyone has a part to play and, on the whole, everyone plays it.”

“And when someone doesn’t?”

“Then we remind them, gently first,” said Ward. She smiled. “Less gently after.”

From a drawer she brought out the seating plan for the dinner, a card the size of a small tablecloth, and laid it between you like a map of a battlefield. Wives at the far end. Crane at the head. Josiah Penhale, the chapel’s bookkeeper, had left at twenty to ten. Crane had followed at ten to. Tom Rudd, naturally, had not been invited.