Minutes of a Meeting That Never Happened
開かれなかった会議の議事録
The of the Little Wibbling Heritage Committee had always been a work of fiction, but never before had they been fiction on purpose.
Deirdre, exhausted beyond the reach of , reasoned that if no real meeting could ever agree, then perhaps a meeting that had never occurred might succeed where the real ones had failed.
And so she wrote.
"The Chair opened the meeting at 7 p.m.," she began, in the flat, eternal past tense of all official , "and welcomed those present."
She recorded that Mr Binks had stated that he had always believed the name should be spelled in full, and that he wished it to be minuted that he had said so from the very beginning.
She recorded that Mrs Crumb had replied that she had understood Mr Binks to have said the opposite at the previous meeting, but that she was content, on this occasion, to let the matter rest.
The elegance of the lay in its tenses, each reported remark folded neatly inside another like a nest of official spoons.
"It was agreed," she wrote, the passive voice absolving everyone and implicating no one, "that the plaque should read 'Alfred Albert Pockle', in full, in a font to be determined."
She added that the Chair had thanked members for their spirit of , a spirit which had, in strict point of fact, never once been observed on the premises.
It was, she reflected, the most harmonious meeting in the committee's history, and it had the singular advantage of never having taken place.
She signed it, dated it a Tuesday that had passed without incident, and slipped it into the minute book among its truthful and quarrelsome brethren.
What Deirdre had failed to consider was that , once written, acquire a life entirely their own.
At the following session, Miss Featherstone read the fictional aloud, as procedure demanded, and asked whether they were a true and accurate record.
There was a silence of the profoundest sort, the silence of people each privately certain they had missed a meeting.
"I confess," said Mr Binks slowly, "that I have no of this session."
"Nor I," admitted Mrs Crumb, "though I am to learn that I behaved so graciously."
Each member, it transpired, was too proud to confess a lapse of memory and too vain to so flattering a portrait of himself.
Mr Binks was reluctant to deny having been reasonable; Mrs Crumb was unwilling to surrender her recorded generosity.
And so, one by one, they nodded, and the of a meeting that had never happened were adopted as a true and accurate record.
"It appears," said Miss Featherstone, who suspected everything and could prove nothing, "that we are agreed after all."
She looked, for a long moment, directly at Deirdre, whose pen had never held so steady nor her conscience trembled so hard.
"The matter," the Chair concluded, "is resolved."
It was a curious sort of truth, arrived at through a document that was wholly false, and yet it held.
The plaque was, at long last, sent to be engraved, bearing the full and name of a man nobody had liked.
Deirdre told herself that she had done no harm, that a helpful fiction was surely better than an honest war.
But she noticed, in the weeks that followed, that she could no longer look at the minute book without a small flush of shame.
Somewhere in Little Wibbling, a truth had been manufactured, and the town, gratefully, asked no questions of it.
Which was fortunate, for the answers were all sitting quietly in a drawer, waiting to be found.