Everything in Its Place

Peggy and Iris were on the slipway with a tea urn the size of a small child, handing out mugs to a queue of strikers who took them without looking, as one takes a coat from a peg. Iris did the pouring. Peggy did the sums. It had not escaped you that neither of them was doing the talking.

“Ruth said you’d come,” said Peggy, wiping her forearms on her apron. She had a ledger under her arm that was not the committee’s: a strike fund book, the cover softened to felt. “You’ll be wanting to know where Tom was on Thursday.”

She opened it at the page. The fund had been counted three times, in three hands, and signed at the foot: T. Rudd, Peggy, Iris, 8.05 p.m. to 12.10 a.m. “Tom, me and Iris,” said Peggy. “Seven hours in the hut and he never went out for a pipe. We’d four hundred pounds in pennies.”

“Nobody’ll count it,” said Iris. She had stopped pouring. “You know that? Three women and a strike fund, and the town’ll say Peggy and me would swear to anything. It’ll say it in the Sentinel.”

“It’s the book that’s evidence,” said Peggy. “The book says ten past twelve.”

“It’ll say the book was written by the tea rota.” Iris set the urn down. Her voice shook, once, and steadied. “I took the tea up to the gate on Friday morning at ten past six, for the constable and for Gil, because somebody does. He was on Gil’s telephone to Mrs Ward before he’d so much as looked at the stair. I heard him say ‘the usual arrangement’. I thought nothing. I only thought he sounded hungry.”

Peggy did not look at her. “It’s not the men, Iris,” she said, without much heat. “It’s the pay.”

“It’s both,” said Iris, “and it’s always tea.”

You wrote the times in the notebook carefully, as one writes down things that will not be believed. An alibi from the tea rota, you reflected, had never been admitted in any court in Saltmarsh. That did not make it untrue. It only made it cheap.