‘The old hen is worth forty chickens,’ Hebe Jones replied, when she finally handed over the spectacles.
After dialling the owner’s number in Århus, given to her by the receptionist at the eye manufacturer’s, Hebe Jones doodled on her pad as she waited.
‘Hallo,’ came the eventual reply.
‘Hallo,’ Hebe Jones repeated cautiously. ‘Frederik Kjeldsen?’
‘Ja!’
‘This is Mrs Jones from London Underground Lost Property Office. I believe we may have something that belongs to you.’
There was a moment of pure silence, after which Frederik Kjeldsen began to weep with his good eye. When the damp sound eventually came to an end, the man apologised, and began to explain what had happened.
‘Two years ago I lost my eye in a road accident, and spent seven weeks in hospital,’ he said. ‘I was too scared to drive again and had to give up my job as a teacher. I was so depressed, I didn’t bother getting a…what do you call them?’
‘A prosthesis?’
‘Ja, a prosthesis. It wasn’t until my sister announced her wedding that I decided to get one to save her the humiliation of my solitary eye in the wedding photographs. I made the decision that, once the celebrations were over, I would take my own life.’
There was a pause during which the two strangers held on to each other through the silence.
‘I had to take two buses to reach the manufacturer’s,’ he continued. ‘But the moment the eye-maker lifted her head from her instruments, and spoke to me with the voice of an angel, I fell for her. After eight months, and what I have to admit were many unnecessary appointments, I proposed to her under the same fir tree that my father had proposed to my mother. Our wedding emptied the florists for miles. I was so happy I cannot tell you.’
After swallowing loudly, Frederik Kjeldsen continued: ‘Ten days ago, I was travelling back to the airport after a weekend in London to see my niece when the Tube suddenly stopped. I banged my head against the glass and my eye flew out. There were so many feet and suitcases in the carriage I wasn’t able to find it before arriving at Heathrow. If I had stayed looking for it any longer, the train would have taken me back to London, and I would have missed my flight. I needed to get back in time for work the next day, and I had such a headache you wouldn’t believe, so I put on my sunglasses and got off. Of course my wife has made me another eye, but I so wanted the one that had brought us together. And now it seems that you have found it. It is truly a miracle.’
After Frederik Kjeldsen apologised again for his salty state, Hebe Jones assured him that she would get it into the post immediately. As she put down the phone, Valerie Jennings approached and peered at the eye over her colleague’s shoulder, scratching her nest of dark curls, clipped to the back of her head. She then walked to one of the shelves and returned with a box containing a hand-blown glass eye purporting to have belonged to Nelson, and another made of porcelain, which, according to its accompanying label, was used by a fourteenth-century Chinese emperor whenever he slept with his favourite mistress. After showing them to her colleague, Valerie Jennings, who had started to smell the rank breath of boredom, asked: ‘Fancy a game of marbles?’
Hebe Jones was certain of winning, particularly as she was prepared to suffer the indignity of lying flat on the office floor to execute a shot. She had honed her skills as a young child on the cool, tiled floors of the house in Athens, and her talent flourished when the Grammatikos family moved to London when she was five, despite the challenge of carpeting. Her ability to win even blindfolded led to the widespread belief that her expertise was due to exceptional hearing, rather than the more obvious explanation that she was peeking. She subsequently claimed to be able to hear the talk of infants still in the womb, and mothers from the Greek community, who were more ready to believe such ability in one of their own, presented their swollen abdomens to the girl to learn the first utterances of their child. After demanding absolute silence, she would sit, one ear pressed against the protruding umbilicus, translating the squeaks, whistles and centenarian groans with the fluency of a polyglot.
‘No, thanks,’ Hebe Jones nevertheless replied, turning over the prosthesis in her hand. ‘Look. It’s concave. And anyway, that poor man’s eye has rolled around enough of London as it is.’
After sealing up the box with brown tape, kept on the inflatable doll’s wrist by mutual agreement following one too many disappearances, Hebe Jones added Mr Kjeldsen’s address, and dropped the package into the mailbag with the warm glow of victory. As she looked around her desk for the next task, her eyes stopped at the urn. Feeling a stab of guilt for having ignored it since its arrival, she turned the wooden box round in her hands and ran a finger over the brass nameplate bearing the words ‘Clementine Perkins, 1939 to 2008. RIP’ in an elegant script. She tried to imagine the woman whose remains had been travelling around the Underground, but felt even greater pity for the person who had mislaid them. Hoping to find something to help her trace Clementine Perkins’s relatives, she decided to look up her entry in the national register of deaths.
‘I’m just popping out to the library,’ she announced, standing up. And within minutes, Hebe Jones and her turquoise coat were gone.
Valerie Jennings watched her turn the corner and immediately regretted not having asked her to bring back a Chelsea bun from the high street bakery. Despite her patronage, she had long lamented their offerings, and had once even boycotted the establishment when she noticed two French tourists looking into its windows discussing whether its wares were for the purpose of plugging holes. But eventually she relented, defeated by patriotism and necessity.
After labelling a yellow canoe, she took hold of one end, and dragged it through the office shuffling backwards in her flat black shoes, uttering a string of profanities. Eventually, she managed to slide it on to the bottom shelf of the nautical section. Standing up, she arched her back, then made her way to the original Victorian counter, and noted down the shelf number in an inscrutable code in one of the ledgers.
It was the only office in the whole of London without a computer, the introduction of which the two women had refused with a steadfast obstinacy. When, five years earlier, they were informed that the unfathomable machines were to be installed, both immediately offered their resignation with the freaky concurrency of twins. Then, like two circus curiosities, they demonstrated their encyclopaedic knowledge of every item stored on the meticulously numbered shelves, including on which Tube line they had been abandoned.
Their invincible memories were not, however, enough to dissuade the authorities from accepting their resignations until an attempt was made to follow the logic of the cross-referencing in the ledgers. The antique code, invented by clerks to make themselves indispensable, had been handed down from Victorian times when the office was established to handle the onslaught of muffs and canes left behind on the breathtaking new transport.
As soon as management realised what they were up against, one of them filled his pockets with barley sugar, and visited the only staff still alive who had worked in the antiquated office. He found the pair propping each other up in the sitting room of an old people’s home, covered in a coat of dust. But despite the joy of an unexpected visitor, and one with such treasures in his pockets, nothing could persuade them when their mists of senility temporarily parted to give up the key to the code that had ensured them a job for life. All attempts at modernisation were therefore abandoned until the next change of management, which, despite renewed tactics, always failed as emphatically as its predecessor.
Arriving back at her desk, Valerie