Nothing in the Margin

As Hugh Cotterill opened bidding on Lot 6295A, a seam in the roof split above the back row. Brown water struck the empty chair beside the woman in the navy coat. Eleven bidders stood. She pulled her chair six inches forward and raised paddle 28. By then she had been outbid on three lots, and Nadia had begun keeping a second account of the sale.

“Twelve settings, one teaspoon absent, and the case is worth more than the spoons,” Hugh Cotterill said from the rostrum, without looking up. “Sixty I am bid. Sixty-five. Seventy in the room. Seventy-five, madam, thank you.”

At the clerk’s desk below him Nadia Prosser wrote the price in one column and the buyer’s number in the next. Then she wrote 28 in the margin, where nothing was supposed to go, and put a short line under it. It was the fourth mark beside that paddle. Twenty-eight was R. Naylor. Nadia had checked her in at half past five, holding the registration sheet under her arm against the rain.

The coat had not come off in three hours. It had been a good coat once, navy, with the collar turned up and rain still sitting on the shoulders. When a price went past her, Naylor put the paddle face down in her lap and looked at the floor until the next lot. She never looked at the person who had beaten her. Nadia thought that was the part she would remember.

Nadia’s job was to record what sold, not who had wanted it. The margin was her own invention. It had no column heading, no status in the accounts, and no use she could defend if Hugh leaned over and asked. Four marks meant that one woman had come through a November storm to fail at buying four unrelated things.

She had been at Cotterill’s for seven months of a twelve-month probation. If Hugh kept her for the full year, her initials would go under her own catalogue entries instead of an office correction. She wanted that with an intensity she had never found a dignified way to mention. In her file there was one printed line from April: condition notes to be confined to condition. Underneath it somebody had added, in biro, a note about discretion, which she understood to mean the ability to leave a true thing out.

6295A. Canteen of cutlery, twelve settings, electroplate, in fitted oak case. One teaspoon lacking. Some wear.

Eleven days earlier she had catalogued that case on the warehouse floor. The bowls of all twelve spoons were worn thin on the left side, as if one person had stirred the same way for forty years. She put that in. The office took it out. Condition notes to be confined to condition, the correction said, although wear was condition and forty years was only her guess.

The same stem appeared four times on her sheet: 6295, 6295A, 6295B, 6295C. A bureau, the cutlery, a rocking horse, and a piano stool. Split suffixes usually meant one lot divided after cataloguing. Here they joined four objects no cataloguer would have grouped. Nadia had noticed it at six and decided that somebody had repeated a number. Now paddle 28 had risen for two of the four.

Curtis Meacher stood beneath the brass panel beside the goods door, drinking tea and watching the sale. His lots always arrived on Tuesdays in a hired van with the name painted over, every object already carrying a brown card tag on waxed string. The number was in soft pencil in his own hand, his fours open and his sevens crossed. Cotterill’s printed the tags into the book because renumbering four hundred lots was a week of somebody’s life and there was nobody spare.

“They aren’t in any order,” Nadia had said on her first Tuesday. “The numbers just jump.” Ada Sowerby was guiding a tool chest off the lift with PADDICK stencilled across its lid. “They’re his,” she said. “Not ours.”

Ada ran the warehouse and had run it for Hugh’s father before him. She spoke in short lengths and lifted things she should not have been lifting. On Nadia’s first morning she had set four fingers against the brass panel beside the goods door and tapped the letters printed beneath its digits.

“Two two seven four,” she said. “It spells cash. Somebody thought that was funny in 2011 and nobody has thought so since.”

Meacher was a mild man in a good coat who called everybody boss. When Nadia turned the sheet enough to show him 6295A, he did not lean closer. “All mine tonight, boss,” he said. “Near enough.” Then he looked back at the room.

“They’re chattels,” he said, when she asked him once where a bureau had come from. “Family calls me in, I clear the house, I take the risk on what shifts. That is the trade, boss.”

“And if somebody comes looking for something?” Nadia had asked. Meacher looked at the brown tags rather than at her. “Then I look at my paperwork. Nobody comes looking, boss. They have had the funeral by then. They want the house empty for Friday.”

“Half of it sits in my unit for six months while the family decides,” he said. “They stop paying me. I have a lien, so I can hold the goods. The terms also let me sell enough, after notice, to recover what I am owed. That is the arrangement, not my opinion.”

Hugh’s hammer came down on a box of plated fish knives. Meacher watched paddle 28 fall into Naylor’s lap, finished his tea, and set the mug on the sill. Nadia remembered a wet morning in June, when Ada had been fighting a bureau down the ramp and Meacher had given her one piece of shop wisdom for free.

“You never put two out of one house in the same book,” he said. “Buyers talk. Two nice things off one van and some clever lad decides there is a story in it.”

By November his loads were bigger and his tea was quicker. He was the consignor of two hundred and thirty of the four hundred lots in the night book, and in the last week of the month he brought in a hundred and ninety at once and told Hugh he was thinking about Spain. Tonight he stayed beside the door.

Hugh had hired Nadia because she once catalogued a church jumble sale properly for nothing. He had paid her late twice and apologised both times, in person, standing up. She owed him some loyalty. She had thirty-eight minutes to decide what kind.

Hugh sold Lot 4255, a mahogany workbox. Inside its lid was an enamel plate awarded to E. Hall for needlework in 1974. Beneath the tray, Nadia had found a half-made collar with the needle still in it. She wrote the needle and thread into the condition note. She wrote that somebody had put the lid down mid-stitch, then crossed it out. The stitch was evidence. The evening she imagined around it was not.

Lot 3690 was a pair of field glasses with FOY in marker inside the case. Lot 2736 was a clarinet with a repair ticket taped inside: Brennan, pads and one crack, collect Tuesday. Naylor did not bid on either. Nadia wrote the prices and watched their names leave the room.

Lot 9966 hung behind Hugh: a timber sign reading WYNNE, FRUITERER in three feet of gilt letters. It hung on the wall behind the rostrum all night, three feet of a man’s name in gold paint, and it was catalogued as unprovenanced, and nobody in the room found that strange.

Water reached the goods door. Ada laid a sandbag and two carpet rolls against it while Hugh sold faster. He had a great deal of candour and used it the way other men used charm, admitting the fault in a thing before anybody could find it, so that the buyer felt they had been told the truth and bid accordingly.

“It has been re-veneered, it has been re-veneered badly, and there is an invoice glued underneath it in the name of Keane, which means nothing at all,” he said. “Lot 5326. Forty to start me. Forty. Thank you, forty-five.”

Then 6295B came up and the woman in the wet coat lifted her paddle on the first increment, which she had not done all night.

6295B. Child’s rocking horse, painted timber on bow rockers, repainted twice, one ear repaired with a wooden pin. Losses to mane.

She got it at ninety. A woman near the front went to a hundred and then did not go on, and the hammer came down, and Nadia wrote the price and the paddle and for once had nothing to put in the margin. Behind her Ada took the horse off the block by one rocker and carried it out the way you would carry a chair.

The bureau had gone at a hundred and five, two hours earlier, five pounds over its reserve, and the reserve was the only figure in the whole night book that Meacher had ever argued about. He had come into the office in a wet coat and argued about it for twenty minutes over eighty pounds, mildly, without once raising his voice, until the office gave in to be rid of him.

Nadia looked down her sheet. 6295 the bureau. 6295A the cutlery. 6295B the horse. Three lots off one number in one book, and a fourth still to come, and she reached for her pen to correct it, because a repeated stem is exactly what a cataloguing error looks like from underneath.

She did not correct it. She sat with the pen in her hand and listened to Hugh sell a barometer, and thought about a mild man saying you never put two out of one house in the same book, and about a hundred and ninety lots off one van in one week, and about Spain.

The registration list was in the drawer under Nadia’s knee. She already knew what it said, but she pulled it out and laid it beside the clerking sheet: paddle numbers down the left, names down the right, lot numbers filling the other page.

Twenty-eight was R. Naylor. The name had been in front of her since half past five. What changed was its position beside 6295. Nadia looked across at the brass panel by the goods door and at the letters printed beneath the digits, worn shallow by twenty years of thumbs.

N was six. A was two. Y was nine. L was five.

It took her a moment to make her hand do it, and then it was there on the corner of the sheet in her own writing, 6295, in the ordinary way that anybody keys a name into a door panel that spells cash.

She had thought the numbers were random because they belonged to somebody else. That was the whole of her mistake and she had made it in her first week and kept it for seven months. They were not random. They were not the house’s. They were his, exactly as Ada had said, and they were the only thing he ever wrote down.

She went back through the book. 4255 was the workbox with the prize plate in the lid, awarded to E. Hall for needlework, and the half-made collar underneath. H, A, L, L. 2736 was the clarinet with the repair ticket. B, R, E, N. 7233 was the tool chest that had stood by the warehouse door under a rag with PADDICK across the lid. P, A, D, D.

3690 was the field glasses belonging to somebody called Foy, and Foy was three letters, and the last digit was a nought because there was nothing to put there. It was the only number in the entire book that ended in a nought. She had noticed that in October and decided it meant nothing, which, in a way that made her feel ill, it did.

And 9966 was hanging on the wall three feet behind the auctioneer with the name painted on it in gold, so that the only lot in the sale that had never needed decoding was the one the room had been looking at all night.

Every name she could match was a name she had found on the object herself, on a ticket or a plate or a stencil, and written into a condition note, and watched come back trimmed. The office had a settled position on the trimming. The names were not material, it said, because a name on a pan does not tell you who owns the pan now.

Which was true, and she had never once been able to answer it. It was also the reason that the only place those names had ever been written down together was a notebook in her coat pocket, and the place each number had first existed was a brown card tag on a length of waxed string.

Lot 6295C was eleven lots away. Meacher was putting on his coat beneath the goods-door panel. By the next lot the hook was empty. Nadia knew what was inside 6295C because she had opened it, and she knew what the catalogue said because she had watched the entry go through the office. They were not the same document.

6295C. Piano stool, walnut, hinged seat, upholstered in later fabric. Contents unexamined.

The contents were three notebooks in a woman’s hand, a fold of dressmaking patterns, a birthday card with nothing written in it, and a child’s hospital band, the paper kind, cut off rather than untied. She had written all of it down. She had used four lines. She had been careful about it, because she had already been careful once that autumn about a chest that was a marriage of two different pieces, and the buyer had walked away, and the house had lost four hundred pounds, and Hugh had been decent about it and the office had put the line in her file.

She wrote it out on a slip and sent it up to the rostrum between lots, which is the proper way and which is what a clerk is for. Hugh read it in something under two seconds. He put it under the elastic on his book and sold a set of brass scales and a deed box for two hundred and ten pounds.

Nine lots. Then six. Then two. The rain came on again so hard that Hugh had to raise his voice over it, and the woman in the wet coat took her paddle out from under her arm and held it in both hands, and Nadia understood that this was the one she had come for, and that everything else tonight had been the cost of being in the room when it came up.

“Lot 6295C, the piano stool, contents unexamined, and I have a hundred bid before we start,” Hugh said. “A hundred. A hundred and twenty. A hundred and forty, sir, at the back.”

Paddle 28 went up at a hundred and sixty and again at two hundred. The man at the back was a general dealer from Colchester who bought anything with a lid on it, sight unseen, and he went to two hundred and forty without taking his hand out of his pocket.

Nadia’s hands had gone cold and stupid. She had eaten a sandwich at four and nothing since, and the room smelled of wet wool and hot lamps. She could write the number down, finish her probation, put her initials under her own entries, and keep the flat that required all three. Two hundred and sixty. The dealer had still not taken his hand out of his pocket.

She stood up. She had not planned to stand up and afterwards she could not account for what her legs had done. The desk was low and she came up hard against the edge of it and the water jug moved.

“Lot 6295C is catalogued as contents unexamined,” she said. “I examined it. There are three notebooks in it and a child’s hospital band, and the name written in all three notebooks is Naylor.”

Nobody said anything for about four seconds, which is a long time in a saleroom. The rain filled it. Somewhere at the back a man laughed once, the way people do when they have understood the first half of something.

The woman in the wet coat did not turn round and did not put her paddle down. That was the thing Nadia had not prepared for. She had prepared to be looked at.

Hugh Cotterill put his hand flat on the book. “Lot 6295C is withdrawn,” he said. “Six two nine five C, withdrawn, and my apologies to the room. We will move on. The next lot is a pair of library steps. Who will start me at forty?”

And the sale went on. That was the part she had not been ready for either. It went on for another fifty minutes and made eleven thousand pounds, and people put their coats on and queued at the office and complained about the parking. Ada took the piano stool off the block and wheeled it past the collection bay and along the office corridor and stood it against the wall outside the door.

“Not the bay,” she said, to nobody in particular.

Meacher’s mug was still on the sill and still warm. Nadia put her hand on it twice, once going out and once coming back, as though the second time would tell her something the first had not.

The woman was under the canopy with her hood up and her collection ticket for the rocking horse held in her fist, and the rain was coming off the edge of the canopy in a sheet a foot in front of her face.

“How many others,” she said. She did not say it as a question.

“Eight that I found a name on,” Nadia said. “There will be more than eight. I only get the ones where somebody wrote on something.”

“Where is it written down?”

“In a notebook. Mine.”

“Then it is not written down,” the woman said.

She was smaller than she had looked from the desk, and older, and she was not grateful. She did not thank her. She stood and looked out at the yard for a while, at the water going along the gutter and turning at the drain.

“The horse has a pin in the ear,” she said. “My dad did that. He put the pin in and sanded it back and you can still feel it if you know where to put your thumb.”

Then she went out into it with the ticket pushed up inside her sleeve.

Ada was backing the trolley in through the goods door out of the wet, because Tuesday’s delivery had been standing in the yard under a sheet since Tuesday and the sheet had given up. A hundred and forty lots for the December book. Brown card tags on waxed string, soft pencil, the fours open at the top.

Hugh came and stood in the doorway behind her with his jacket off and his shirt stuck to his back, and said nothing, which for him was a considerable quantity of nothing.

“Leave it,” he said. “Ada will do it. Come inside.”

The tag on the top of the pile was face up in the rain. The pencil had run a little at the edge of the card but not in the middle. 2688.

His mother had gone into Marrow Court in March. He had said so in the office once, in the middle of a conversation about money, in the flat way people say a thing they have already said forty times. Meacher had done the house in a day and a half and had not charged him for the second day.

Nadia took the notebook out of her coat pocket. She wrote 2688. Then she wrote the four letters after it. Then she put the notebook away and held the goods door open for Ada, who came through backwards with the trolley, out of the rain.