The Discrepancy

Here is how you check a wall like that. It is not mysterious. You measure the room on one side, and the room on the other side, and you measure the overall external envelope of the building, and you do the arithmetic. The internal dimensions plus the wall thicknesses must add up to the external dimension. If they don't, the missing length is hidden somewhere, and the somewhere is your discrepancy. I measure the second bedroom: fourteen feet three inches, front to back. I measure the third bedroom: eleven feet eight. I measure the landing's blank green stretch between their doors: twelve feet one. I write it all down in clean columns, because I am, whatever else happens in these pages, a careful surveyor, and a careful surveyor's notebook is the truest thing she owns. Then I measure the outside of the house along that elevation, walking the cold side passage with the long tape, and I do the arithmetic at the dining table with the city's drawings under my elbow. There is a discrepancy. It is nine feet and a little over. Nine feet of length, on the upper floor, between the second and third bedrooms, that exists in the external envelope of the building and does not exist in any room I have walked into. Nine feet of house with no door, no window, no entry of any kind shown on the wall I keep slowing down outside of. I check my arithmetic four times. Surveyors make mistakes; that is why we measure twice and check four times, and the discrepancy does not move. Nine feet. The building, which cannot lie, is telling me there is a room there. The drawings, which always lie, are telling me there isn't. And Edmund Voss told me, in his tired careful voice, that the moment my count stopped agreeing with the paper I was to stop, leave the house, and telephone him from the road. I should do that. I am writing this at the dining table with the discrepancy sitting in my notebook in my own neat hand, and the sensible, instructed, paid thing to do is to pack the tape and walk out to the road. But I am a surveyor, and a surveyor does not leave a discrepancy. A discrepancy is the whole of the job. It is the thing the paper got wrong and the building knows, and you do not get to walk away from it because the owner of the building has a tired face and a strange superstition about outsiders counting. Outsiders count differently, he said. I have been turning that over and I think I have been understanding it wrong. I think he did not mean outsiders count badly. I think he meant that the people who have lived ninety years in this house have learned, very carefully, to count twelve — to walk that green landing wall at full speed and not slow down, to keep the thirteenth room out of the total by the simple discipline of never letting their attention land on it. And I think the room knows the difference. I think it knows when it is being counted by someone who has not learned to leave it out. It is past four. The coloured-glass window at the end of the hall has gone dim and the red lozenges have slid off the floorboards. I have walked up to the landing once more, with the notebook in my hand and the nine-foot discrepancy in the notebook, and I have stood in front of the blank green wall and — for the first time — actually looked at it instead of hurrying past. It is not quite blank. Now that I am giving it my attention, now that the arithmetic in my notebook has made the room real to me, I can see, very faint in the faded green paper, a vertical seam. And another, parallel, about three feet to its left. The exact width, and the exact spacing, of a door that someone has papered over so patiently and so long ago that the house has almost forgotten it was ever a door. Almost. The wallpaper remembers. The arithmetic remembers. And as I stand here with my hand not quite touching the seam, I can hear, from the nine feet of house that is not on any drawing, the smallest sound — soft, rhythmic, unhurried. Like someone on the other side of the paper, in the dark, counting too.