The Hall the Night Before

The village hall had been built in 1923, and it said so over the door, and it had been getting ready for things ever since.

Pat had the keys. She had had the keys for nineteen years, since the previous keeper of the keys had moved to be near her daughter, and in that time the hall had been got ready for harvest suppers and pantomimes and the flower show and the parish council and, once, memorably, a tortoise race. But a wedding was a wedding. A wedding was the hall at its best, and Pat had opened up at four o’clock on the Friday afternoon with the intention of not leaving until it was.

The others came at five. Sheila, who was the mother of the bride and who arrived with the car boot full of tablecloths that had been ironed within an inch of their lives. Colin, who was Sheila’s husband and the father of the bride and who had been told to bring the stepladder and had brought two, to be safe. And Rosie, who was the bride, and who was not supposed to be there at all, and who had come anyway, in her wellies, because it was her wedding and she was not going to sit at home and imagine it.

“You’re meant to be having an early night,” said Sheila.

“I’ll have one after,” said Rosie. “Where do you want the bunting?”

The hall was one long room with a stage at the far end and a kitchen off the side and high windows down both walls that had been put in to let in light, and did, in the afternoon, in long slanting bars that came down across the floor and showed every mote of dust. The floor was boards, wide ones, worn pale in a path down the middle where a hundred years of feet had gone, and it had been polished on Thursday and smelt of it. That was the first thing anybody noticed on coming in. Polish, and, underneath it, the smell that was the hall’s own, which was old wood and tea urns and, faintly, from somewhere no one had ever found, the ghost of a thousand cheese and pickle sandwiches.

The trestle tables came out first. They lived on their sides in the store behind the stage, and Colin and Pat brought them out one at a time, walking them across the floor with the boards ringing, and set them up in two long rows down the length of the hall with a gap in the middle for going up and down. Each table had a wobble. Each wobble had a fold of cardboard under one leg, and had done for years, and Pat knew which fold went with which leg, and did not need to look.

Then the chairs. Stacking chairs, wooden, with a little curved back, ninety of them, brought out in stacks of five and unstacked with a clatter and set along the tables, a chair, a space, a chair. Rosie did the chairs. She did them in her wellies, going up and down, and by the end of the second row she had stopped talking and was just doing them, and Sheila watched her from the kitchen door and said nothing.

“Cloths,” said Sheila, eventually.

The cloths were white, and long, and there were exactly enough of them, because Sheila had counted twice. They went on with a snap and a float and a settle, the way a good cloth does, and once they were on, the hall stopped being a hall with tables in it and started being somewhere a wedding was going to happen. That is what a tablecloth does. It is a small thing and it does a great deal.

Colin went up the stepladder.

The bunting was Rosie’s. She had made it, over the winter, out of scraps, every triangle a different fabric, and it was long enough to go twice round the hall with some over, and she had not measured, she had just kept going until it was done. It went from the corner by the door to the first window, and from the first window to the second, and along, and along, with Colin on the ladder and Pat holding the ladder and Rosie on the floor saying, “Higher. No, that’s too high. There,” and the triangles turning slowly in the air as they went up, blue and yellow and a green one with a print of small ducks that had been a dress once, a long time ago.

By the time the bunting was up it was going dark outside. The high windows had gone from gold to grey to nothing, and Pat went round and put the lights on, which in the hall meant six big pendant lamps down the middle that took a moment to think about it and then came on all together with a hum.

“Kettle,” said Pat.

They had a cup of tea in the kitchen, standing up, with the big urn in the corner not yet on and the hatch through to the hall propped open, so that they could see it, the two long white rows and the bunting and the empty chairs. Nobody said anything for a bit.

“It’ll do,” said Colin.

“It will more than do,” said Sheila.

Rosie said nothing. She was looking through the hatch, holding her tea with both hands, and she had the look on her face that Sheila remembered from a much smaller Rosie on a Christmas Eve, a long time ago, the look of someone who knows that a thing is coming and cannot quite believe it and is in no hurry to have it arrive.

There were still the flowers. There were not many. Rosie had wanted jars, not vases, jam jars with a bit of string round and whatever was out in the hedges and the garden, and there were three boxes of jars in the back of the car and a bucket of what was out, which in April was not a great deal but was enough. Cow parsley, mostly. A bit of blossom. Some of the daffodils that had held on. They did a jar each, at the kitchen table, and carried them out, and put one on each table at intervals, and stood back, and moved one, and stood back again.

“That one’s leaning,” said Colin.

“It’s meant to lean,” said Rosie.

“Right you are.”

Then the stage. There was going to be a band, three people from the next village who did this sort of thing, and they needed a space and some chairs and somewhere to put the drum. Colin set it up. He put the chairs where he thought chairs should go and Pat moved them, and he said nothing, because Pat had seen more bands on that stage than he had.

Then the little table by the door for the cards and the book to sign. Then the signs for the loos, which had fallen down, put back up. Then the fire exit checked, because Pat checked it, every time, even though it had never once been anything but a door. Then the urn filled, so it would only need switching on in the morning. Then the hatch shut.

Then there was nothing left to do.

They stood in the middle of the hall, the four of them, in the hum of the big lamps, and looked at it.

The cloths were white. The bunting hung still. The jars stood on the tables with their bits of hedge in them, one of them leaning, and the chairs waited with their little curved backs, ninety of them, for ninety people who were at this moment in bed, or in the bath, or looking at what they were going to wear and wondering if it still fitted. The floor shone in its worn path. The stage had its three chairs and the space for the drum. And the whole of it, the whole long room, had that particular stillness of a place that is ready, that has been made ready by people who love someone, and is now only waiting for the morning.

“Right,” said Sheila. “Bed.”

Rosie did not move for a moment.

Then she went round, quite quickly, and touched the back of one chair on each table, lightly, with the tips of her fingers, the way you might touch a horse’s neck, and came back.

“Bed,” she agreed.

Colin folded the stepladders and carried them out. Sheila got the car started. Rosie stood in the doorway with her wellies on and looked back one more time, and then she went.

Pat put the lights out.

She did it from the door, one switch at a time, and the big lamps went off down the hall one after another, six, five, four, and the room went darker and darker and longer and longer, until only the last one was on, over the stage, and then that went too.

And then the hall was dark, and it was not dark.

The moon had come up while they were working. It was nearly full, and it was coming in through the high windows on the east side, in long pale bars, the way the sun had done in the afternoon, but cool now, and blue, and it lay across the white cloths and the floor and the backs of the chairs, and the bunting hung in it with all its colours gone to grey and silver, turning, very slightly, in the air that Pat had let in when she opened the door.

She stood and looked at it for a minute.

She had seen the hall by moonlight before. Not often. But it was, she thought, the best way to see it, when everything was ready and nobody was there and the room was just holding itself, quietly, full of tomorrow.

She went out and locked the door behind her.

The village was asleep. Her own house was three doors down, and the light was on in the hall, as she had left it, and she walked to it slowly along the lane with the keys in her pocket and the moon on the road.

Behind her, in the hall built in 1923, the tables stood in their two white rows, and the jars of hedge stood on them, and the bunting turned in the moonlight, and the floor shone, and the ninety chairs waited.

Nothing moved.

The urn sat full and cold, ready to be warm.

And the moon went slowly across the high windows, one to the next, all night, and the hall kept everything as it was, until morning.