One Temper, Lady's

by Pratchettian Satirical Fantasy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The Municipal Office of Found Property in the city of Mardle occupies the ground floor and both cellars of a building on Tallow Street that was built to be a bank, and has never entirely forgiven anyone for the change.¹ It has a long mahogany counter, a brass bell with a card beside it that reads PLEASE RING ONCE, and a great many shelves; and behind the counter, on weekdays between nine and half past four, it has Mr Hubert Gammage.

¹ Banks are built to keep things. A lost property office is also built to keep things, but in the hope of giving them back, and the building regards this as a failure of nerve.

Mr Gammage had been Senior Clerk for twenty-two years, and Junior Clerk for nineteen before that, and in all that time he had never lost anything, which some people said was why the job suited him and others said was why it didn't. He knew the Found Property (Municipal) Regulations of 1884 the way some men know the psalms: not merely the words, but where to stand while saying them. He knew that umbrellas went to Shelf U, and that gloves, being found singly, went to Shelf G in pairs of strangers, in the hope that something would come of it.² He knew that anything unclaimed after seven years and one day became the property of the Corporation of Mardle, to be sold at the Michaelmas auction with the proceeds paid into the General Rate.

² Something occasionally did. There is a pair on Shelf G, one brown kid and one green wool, that have been together since 1958 and are not to be separated without a hearing.

And he knew the cellars.

The upper cellar held the ordinary overflow: bicycles, false teeth, a stuffed heron, the things people leave on trams and are too embarrassed to come in for. The lower cellar held Category Four. Category Four was defined by Regulation 31 as "articles found which are not, in the ordinary sense, articles", and it had been added in 1902, after a tram conductor named Dyce handed in a lost opportunity he had found under a seat on the Number 9, and the Office, having no form for it, had been obliged to keep it in a hatbox until one could be printed.³ Since then the lower cellar had filled up steadily and in good order. There were lost causes, shelved by decade. There were lost tempers, lost nerves, lost heads, lost hearts (these were kept cool), and one large crate stencilled FOOTING, which nobody liked going near.

³ The opportunity was never claimed. The hatbox is still in the lower cellar, and on quiet afternoons it can be heard, faintly, not quite knocking.

None of this was considered remarkable in Mardle. People lose things. Somebody has to keep them. That is most of what a city is, when you take the trams away.

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Mrs Ida Fennimore rang the bell once, at ten past eleven on a Tuesday in October, and waited with her handbag held in front of her in both hands, the way women of her generation hold a handbag when they intend to be reasonable.

She was seventy-eight. She wore a good navy coat and a hat that had been to a funeral in the spring and had not yet been told it could stand down. She had the kind of face that people in queues let go first without quite knowing why, and she had not raised her voice since the fourth of August 1971.

That was the difficulty.

"I've come about a temper," she said. "Mine. I lost it on the tram."

Mr Gammage did not ask which tram. He took down the Ledger of Category Four Receipts for 1971, which is green and very heavy, and set it on the counter with the care of a man setting down a sleeping cat. There are things you learn in the Found Property business, and the first of them is that nobody comes about Category Four lightly. Nobody walks into a public office to ask for their nerve back unless they have run quite badly short of it.

He found the entry in under a minute. He was, after all, very good.

4 Aug. 1971. Recd. from conductor, No. 14 tram (Bridge St. to Hollins Lane). One temper, lady's. Medium. Lost, in conductor's opinion, at husband, upper deck, re: a dog. Condition: hot. Counterfoil issued. Shelved L4/71/62. Someone, later, in a different ink, had added: Cooling.

"That's it," said Mrs Fennimore. She had leaned over to read it upside down, which the Regulations forbid and which Mr Gammage permitted, on this occasion, by looking at the ceiling. "That's Walter. That was the dog."

---

There is a procedure for this, and Mr Gammage set about it.

A claimant must first identify the article, which Mrs Fennimore had done to his entire satisfaction. She must then describe it, and she did: it was about so big, and went very red at the edges, and it was not the sort of thing she was in the habit of using; it had only come out the once, over the dog, which Walter had brought home inside his coat without asking anybody, and which had then lived with them for fourteen years and been called Captain. She must then sign Form L-7 (Claim in Respect of an Intangible), which she did, in a neat hand, pressing so lightly that the carbon copy came out more as a rumour.

And then the article must be fetched. Mr Gammage went down to the lower cellar with the shelf mark in one hand and a lamp in the other, and came back up a good deal more slowly than he had gone down.

Shelf L4 had a space on it. It was a temper-sized space, and the dust had grown in around it in the tactful way dust does when something has been gone a long time.

"Pell," said Mr Gammage.

Miss Pell Tunnicliffe was the Junior Clerk. She was nineteen, she had been at the Office eight months, and she was the only person in its history to have read the auction ledgers for pleasure. At that moment she was on her hands and knees behind the counter, counting the umbrellas, because the umbrella count had been out by a small and consistent amount for as long as anyone could remember and she had decided, in the way of the young, that this was a problem with a solution.⁴

⁴ It is out by four point seven per cent. It has always been out by four point seven per cent. Every Senior Clerk since 1884 has counted the umbrellas once, arrived at this figure, and quietly taken up some other hobby.

She stood up, looked at Mr Gammage's face, and went to fetch the Michaelmas Disposals for 1978.

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It took her four minutes. Mr Gammage spent them making Mrs Fennimore a cup of tea in the back room, which is also forbidden by the Regulations, and which he did anyway, because she had begun, very slightly, to look like a person who has walked a long way in good shoes for nothing.

Pell came back with her finger in the book.

"Sold," she said. "Michaelmas '78, Lot 212. 'One temper, lady's, medium, lightly used.' Reserve not met, so it went to the Corporation at the reserve." She turned the ledger round. "To the Rates Department."

There was a pause in the Office, during which several of the shelves were heard to settle.

It would explain a great deal. Everyone in Mardle knew that the Rates Department had a temper. It was not a large department, and it was staffed by perfectly pleasant people who kept cats and sang in choirs, but the letters that came out of it were of a kind that made grown men put on their coats and walk to the Town Hall to apologise in person. The Department itself had never been able to account for this. It had been looked into, twice, by the Committee for the Oversight of the Rates Department, which reported to the Rates Department, and which had found on both occasions that the Department was conducting itself appropriately and that the Committee might in future like to pay on time.⁵

⁵ The Rates Department is in turn responsible for auditing the Committee's expenses, and the two bodies have arrived over the years at an arrangement that the Town Clerk describes as "a perfect circle, and about as much use".

Mrs Fennimore had come out of the back room with her tea and read the entry for herself, upside down.

"Well," she said. "They can give it back."

---

The Regulations turned out to be on her side, in the way regulations sometimes are by accident. Regulation 44(c) provided that an article sold in error might be recovered by the Office on refund of the purchase price; and an article sold while its owner was alive and in possession of the counterfoil was, by definition, sold in error. Mrs Fennimore had the counterfoil. The conductor on the Number 14 had been a stickler, and had torn it off and handed it to her on the platform while she was still too hot to take it in, and she had kept it ever since in the drawer with the Premium Bonds, for fifty-five years, because you never knew.

She did not say why she wanted the temper now, and Mr Gammage did not ask, because it was not on the form. But he had noticed the hat. He had noticed that when she signed the L-7 she had begun, from long habit, to write Mrs W., and stopped, and gone back, and written Ida. And a man who has spent forty-one years among the things people have mislaid becomes, whether he wishes it or not, a fair judge of what is missing from a person.

She had been very good, these last six months. Everyone had said so. The doctor had said so, and the man from the funeral home, and the young woman at the Infirmary who had given her eleven forms in a plastic wallet with the wrong address to send them to, and then a twelfth form apologising for the eleventh, which had also been wrong. Ida had filled in every one of them. She had been calm and she had been patient and she had been, everyone agreed, marvellous; and at night she lay awake in a bed that was too big on one side and knew that there was something she needed to do, and nothing in her to do it with. Grief, in Mardle as elsewhere, is supposed to be processed within a reasonable period. Hers had been sitting in the in-tray since April, because it could not be processed without a temper, and she had not had one since the dog.

---

Mr Gammage went to the Rates Department himself, with Pell, and Form L-44(c), and the counterfoil, and a large brown paper bag.

The Rates Department is on the third floor of the Town Hall, and the stairs up to it are the only stairs in Mardle that get steeper towards the top. The door has frosted glass in it. Through the glass, as Mr Gammage raised his hand to knock, could be seen a faint, steady, reddish glow, like a stove that someone has kept in for a very long time out of thrift.

The Chief Rating Officer was a Mr Lionel Scrope, a mild, round man who grew dahlias. He read the form twice and the counterfoil three times. Then he looked, with an expression Mr Gammage would remember for a long while afterwards, at the tall green filing cabinet in the corner of his office, the one with no label, whose key had been lost in 1981. That was where the glow was coming from.

"We'll be a department without a temper," he said.

"Yes," said Mr Gammage.

"People won't pay."

Mr Gammage, who had always paid promptly and had never once received a letter, felt that this was not the moment to mention it, and said nothing.

Mr Scrope nodded slowly. Then he fetched the poker from beside the fireplace, because nobody had liked to go down to Tallow Street and ask after the key.⁶

⁶ It is on Shelf K, upper cellar. It has been waiting, with the patience of keys, for somebody to come in and describe it.

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The temper came out of the filing cabinet the way heat comes out of an oven, all at once, so that everybody in the room took a small step back and Pell's spectacles misted over. It was not, any longer, a medium temper. Forty-eight years in the Rates Department had done things to it. It had grown by four point seven per cent a decade, which over the period comes to a fair amount, and it had acquired a municipal quality: something formal about the edges, something that knew how to use the words final demand. It went into the brown paper bag with a sound like a letter being torn very slowly in half.

On the way out, for the first time in forty-eight years, the staff of the Rates Department wished Mr Gammage a pleasant afternoon, and meant it, and then looked at one another in some alarm.

---

Mrs Fennimore was waiting at the counter where they had left her. She had finished her tea, and washed up the cup without being asked, and hung it back on the wrong hook.

Mr Gammage set the paper bag on the counter between them. It was warm. A thin line of smoke rose from one corner, which he decided not to make a note of.

"It has been in the Rates Department," he said. "I'm obliged to tell you it may have picked up some habits."

Mrs Fennimore looked at the bag for a long time. Then she opened her handbag and took out a long envelope, much handled, with the Infirmary's crest on it and the twelfth form inside, the one that apologised. She took the temper out of the paper bag and put it into the handbag, on top of the envelope, and snapped the clasp shut.

"Thank you," she said. "I shan't need it long. Just for the one thing."

She signed the receipt book. This time she pressed hard enough to come through on the carbon, and through the carbon, and some way into the mahogany, where it can still be read.

---

What happened afterwards is a matter of record, and Mardle keeps good records.

On the Wednesday morning a woman in a navy coat walked into the Infirmary on Kell Road and up to the office that deals with the forms, and was in there a little under twenty minutes. Nobody heard her raise her voice. Several people said afterwards that she had not needed to. The young woman who had issued the eleven forms came out at the end of it looking thoughtful, and was later promoted; and the Infirmary reduced its bereavement paperwork from twelve forms to three, and then, because the reform had been carried out by a public body, in good faith, at speed, to four.

On the Wednesday afternoon the ratepayers of Mardle began to receive courteous letters from the Rates Department, and found them so unsettling that payments for the quarter rose by nearly a fifth. The Committee for the Oversight of the Rates Department convened an emergency session to look into it. It is still sitting.

And on the Wednesday evening, in a terraced house on Hollins Lane, at the far end of the old Number 14 line, a woman who had been marvellous for six months stood in her front room before an armchair with nobody in it and told it exactly what she thought of him for going and dying like that, without asking anyone, the way he had once come home with a dog inside his coat; and when she had finished she sat down in it, which she had not done since April, and the house, which had been holding itself very still since the spring, the way houses do, let out a long breath through all its chimneys at once.⁷

⁷ The temper came back to the Office of Found Property by post on the Friday, in the same paper bag, with a note: "Much obliged. I find I have no further use for it. Please keep it for whoever needs it next." It is on Shelf L4 again, in its old space, which the dust had kept for it. It is, Mr Gammage notes in the ledger, a good deal cooler than it was, and something less than medium. This is the usual way with things that are properly lost and properly claimed. They come back smaller, and in time you can put them down.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (19 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Satiricō Pratchettiānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Pratchettian Satirical Fantasy Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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