Chapter Two Hundred and Thirty-Three: Margaret Reads the Section

Margaret came to the office on a Tuesday in November.

She had driven herself — the same two-hour drive as Patrick, the village to the city, the council chair making the journey alone. He had offered to come to the village, the way he had always offered to come to the people. She had said: no, I want to see where the drawings are made.

He thought about this. He thought about Margaret wanting to see where the drawings were made — the office, the drawing board, the notebooks on the desk, the sections pinned to the wall in their sequence. He thought about the person who wanted to understand the commission's origin, the place the attending had gathered before it became the drawing.

He had left the office as it was. He had not cleared the board or organised the notebooks. He had left the three community centre sections pinned in sequence and the commission notebook open on the desk and the library notes on the shelf and the school notebook beside them. He had left the office as the working place rather than the presentation place.

Margaret arrived at eleven.

She stood in the office doorway and looked at the room before she came in. He thought about this as the attending — the reading of the room before the occupation. He thought about Frances at the threshold of the rented house looking at him with the flour on her wrist. He thought about Patrick arriving at the school drawings and standing without speaking for the first minutes.

She came in and looked at the drawings on the wall.

She looked at all three sections — the first and the second and the third — in the sequence he had pinned them. She looked at the progression, the sections in their stages of approach toward the truth. He thought about the sections as the evidence of the working — not the polished presentation, the stages of the attending made visible.

She spent the longest time with the third section.

She looked at the entry — the level floor, the covered approach, the timber panel. She looked at the weight-bearing room — the south window at forty centimetres and the December sun line crossing the floor. She looked at the children's corner — the lower ceiling and the north window and the shelf and the bench with the step at its base.

She found the step.

He watched her find it — the moment when her reading of the section reached the bench and the step at the base of it and she understood what the step was for. He watched the understanding move through her the way understanding moved through the attending people — the body first, the mind assembling the language after.

She said: "The step."

"Yes," he said.

"For the child on the adult's bench," she said.

"Yes," he said. "The child sitting beside the adult at the adult's height. The feet off the floor without the step. The step gives the child the ground."

Margaret looked at the step in the section for a long time. He let her look. He thought about the community centre in its eleven years of failed schemes, the wrong rooms, the rooms that didn't know what they were for. He thought about the step as the thing the wrong rooms had not drawn — not the grand correction, not the extended south window or the level entry, but the small step at the base of the bench, the practical attending to the body that was smaller.

"The parish hall has a step like this," Margaret said. "At the front of the stage. For the children when they perform. The caretaker made it forty years ago from scrap timber. Nobody specified it. He just made it because the children couldn't get up without it."

He thought about the parish hall step. He thought about the caretaker making the step from scrap timber because the children couldn't get up without it. He thought about the attending that had produced the step — not the architect's attending, the caretaker's attending, the daily proximity to the children's bodies producing the practical knowledge of the ground required.

He thought: the caretaker drew the section in timber without knowing it was a section.

He thought about the honest element produced by daily attendance — the coat hooks at two heights in the school, the caretaker's stage step, the folding stool at the south edge. He thought about the attending people across the years producing the honest elements before the architect arrived to draw them.

He thought: the section does not invent the honest element. The section recognises what the attending has already made.

He said: "Tell me about the caretaker's step."

Margaret smiled — the specific smile of the person who had not expected the question. "He's been there thirty years," she said. "Raymond. He knows every child in the village by name. He made the step for a girl who couldn't reach the stage. She's in her forties now. The step is still there."

He thought about the step still there. He thought about the step made for a specific girl in her forties still serving the children who came after her — the attending to the particular body producing the element that served all the bodies after it. He thought about the honest element as the one that outlasted its occasion.

He thought: the step made for one child forty years ago is the community centre bench step drawn for all the children to come.

He thought about Raymond. He thought about the thirty-year caretaker who knew every child by name. He thought about the daily attending — the school day and the parish hall event and the thirty years of bodies moving through the rooms and the caretaker reading the rooms from the inside, from all the way in, from the position of the person who was always there.

He thought: Raymond knows the community centre better than anyone. He has been attending to its absence for thirty years.

He said: "I would like to talk to Raymond."

Margaret looked at him. "He's retiring next year," she said.

"Before he retires," he said. "I would like to know what he knows about the rooms the village is missing."

Margaret looked at the section. She looked at the step. "He'll say the same thing I said," she said. "The in-between. He calls it the between-time. The time after the event when people don't want to go home yet. The parish hall clears out because there's nowhere for the between-time to happen."

He thought about the between-time. He thought about the in-between as Margaret's word and the between-time as Raymond's word — the same understanding arrived at from different positions, the council chair and the caretaker both naming the same absence.

He thought: the between-time is what the weight-bearing room is for. The room that holds the time after the gathering when the gathering is not yet ready to end.

He thought about the in-between room and the weight-bearing room and the between-time — the room that held the after, the room that didn't hurry the going. He thought about the section's December sun line crossing the floor and the December gathering that stayed beyond its programme because the room made the staying possible.

He wrote in the commission notebook after Margaret had gone: Margaret reads the section. She finds the step. She tells me about Raymond's step for the girl who couldn't reach the stage — made forty years ago, still there. The section does not invent the honest element. The section recognises what the attending has already made.

He wrote: Raymond's between-time. The gathering that doesn't want to end. The weight-bearing room as the room that holds the after. Meet Raymond before he retires.

He was glad.

End of Chapter Two Hundred and Thirty-Three