Any Other Business
その他の議題
The grand unveiling took place on a bright Saturday, before a crowd larger than the town had assembled for anything since the flood of '78.
Miss Featherstone gave a short speech, which for her meant under twenty minutes, and grasped the little cord.
The velvet cloth slid away, the sun caught the brass, and there, blazing before three hundred souls, gleamed the name ALFRED ALBERT PICKLE.
There followed a silence of the kind that precedes either murder or laughter, and for one second the town could not decide which it would be.
Then Mr Thorne, of all people, began to laugh.
It started as a wheeze, became a splutter, and finally erupted into the helpless, roar of a man seeing himself clearly for the first time in forty years.
"Pickle," he gasped, wiping his eyes. "Two months. Two whole months. Over a pickle."
And the laughter, once loosed, could not be recalled.
It rolled across the green, taking baker and butcher, Alfredian and Albertine, the whole ridiculous, warring parish into its warm and forgiving flood.
Mrs Crumb laughed until she had to sit down, fittingly, upon the bench itself.
"Do you know," she said to Mr Binks, whom she had not addressed civilly in seven weeks, "I can't for the life of me remember why we quarrelled."
"Nor can I," admitted Binks, "which is, when one thinks about it, rather the whole trouble with us."
It is a strange and humbling thing to watch a town laugh at itself, and stranger still to find the laughter kind.
For beneath the ran a current of genuine relief, the relief of people who had glimpsed their own and, , been let off.
"With all due respect to the late Mr Pockle," said Binks, reviving the phrase that had started the war, "I rather think he'd have preferred Pickle."
"He was, by all accounts, a sour old thing," agreed Mrs Crumb, and for once the two of them laughed on precisely the same side.
Miss Featherstone, surveying the scene, permitted herself a smile of the sort she normally rationed to weddings.
"Shall we," she asked, "correct it?"
The town answered, with one voice, that they would not dream of it.
The bench would stay exactly as it was, PICKLE and all, a permanent brass monument to the of taking oneself too seriously.
That evening, when the crowd had drifted home and the green lay quiet, Deirdre approached the Chair with a weighing heavily upon her.
"It was me," she said. "The minutes. The meeting that never happened. The spelling. All of it was me."
Miss Featherstone regarded her for a long moment, with the expression of a woman who had known the truth for some time and had simply been waiting to be told.
"My dear girl," she said at last, "you did in one evening what this committee failed to do in thirty-one years."
"You brought us to agreement, and you gave us something to laugh at afterwards; I should call that rather a successful meeting."
"But it was a fiction," Deirdre protested.
"So," said Miss Featherstone gently, "is every set of minutes we have ever adopted; yours merely had the decency to be a good one."
And with that, she opened the book, turned to a fresh and honest page, and wrote at the top, in her small, hand, the two words with which every meeting in Little Wibbling had always, in the end, come round to the truth: "Any other business?"
There was, for once, none whatsoever.