Tuesday’s chief business at the sluice was a filing. The Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice lodged a second conditions report, the first having gone in on the twelfth of last month and been taken up, after a fashion, at the Subcommittee’s special sitting on the twenty-third. The new report reached the Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee at the close of working hours and was acknowledged under the Clerk’s customary mark. It runs to two leaves, both sides. That is half the length of the first. In the Deputy’s hand, brevity is its own kind of emphasis.
The first section is procedural and holds no surprises. The gates remain serviceable. The wear at the lower hinge, left side, flagged last time, has not worsened, though the Deputy notes it has not improved either. Water levels at the three stations sit within seasonal norms. Sediment at the east channel junction is trending, she writes, in the manner previously indicated. The principal humidity gauge, installed by the Warden a season or more ago and never since calibrated, reads ten and a half drakes. She gives the figure and no comment. She has done that across two reports now, and this paper takes the practice, on present evidence, to be deliberate.
It is the second section that drew this paper’s eye. The “operational continuity” heading from the first report is gone. In the first report it had raised, in plain enough terms, whether the present arrangement at the sluice is a delegation made temporary or a succession in fact. In its place stands a heading reading “matters arising.” Under it the Deputy files three items. The unphotographed marking on the sluice wall. The Warden’s continued absence from the sluice in person. And the question, put with a precision this paper found unusual for so unpressed an enquiry, of the customary party to whom routine matters of the office should now be addressed. Each item gets a paragraph. Each paragraph ends with the Deputy’s mark and nothing further.
The Warden, found above the east channel in the late afternoon, was in reasonable health and tolerable spirits. He had not yet read the report. The Deputy’s reports, he indicated, were generally reliable and could safely wait on the occasion that called for them. Did the matters under “matters arising” want any particular attention from him? They were, he said, such as the office is generally aware of. When had he last visited the sluice in person? The Warden adjusted his position and remarked that the afternoon light on the east channel was, on the whole, holding up.
The Clerk, on whose desk the report now sits, would not say when the Subcommittee would take it up, but confirmed it would be tabled at the next session. He added, in a small aside this paper passes on without enlargement, that the Deputy had lodged a separate enquiry after the photographic record of the wall marking she had asked for earlier, and that the enquiry was under consideration.
The Deputy was at the lower gate in the early evening, writing in her notebook. She did not look up. The humidity gauge stood beside her, in the place she has accustomed it to over recent weeks. The Warden was not there. The question of who minds the office has been open a while now, and in the Deputy’s keeping it has taken on a patience the Warden’s office never before had occasion to show.