The first object out of the time capsule was an unpaid roofing bill. The second was a paid roofing bill. Lenna held both by their corners while the council chairman said this was a fascinating glimpse of everyday life.
“There should be a photograph,” she said.
“Perhaps underneath.”
Underneath were five more bills, a pencil without an eraser and a dead wasp. Lenna closed the lid before the photographer could see the wasp.
The box had been recovered that morning from beneath the brass plaque beside the community hall. They were opening it in private first, at Lenna’s insistence. She had taken a short collections course and knew enough to distrust a ceremony arranged around things nobody had seen for forty years. Now the ceremony would begin in two hours. The hall was decorated. There was a cake in the shape of a clock, with plastic hands fixed at three.
“We could open it again for the audience,” the chairman said. “Keep the bills in the order you found them.”
“It’s not the capsule.”
“It was under the plaque.”
Lenna pointed to the invoice dates. All were two years later than the inscription.
He put on his glasses, took them off, cleaned them and put them on again. This gave him enough time to think of a different proposal.
“We say the contents have deteriorated.”
“The roofing bills are fine.”
He looked at the empty display case. Lenna had written the labels herself: THE TOWN WE THOUGHT WE WOULD BECOME. She had also designed the invitations and brought her aunt’s wedding tea set for the reception. The chairman said they would have to manage expectations. Lenna said she would like to manage the right box.
He gave her until two thirty.
Ada was already in the hall kitchen, removing the clock cake from its cardboard sleeve. She had helped organize the original burial. Lenna had invited her to speak, and Ada had prepared six pages in a blue folder.
“Roofing bills,” Ada said when she heard. “That sounds like Bernard.”
“Who is Bernard?”
“The reason I stopped being treasurer.”
Ada came to the workroom and read the invoices. She remembered a leak over the stage, a carpenter who never sent a proper receipt and a discussion about storing the paperwork where it would stay dry. She touched the box’s rusted lid.
“He was always full of good ideas.”
“Where was the capsule?”
“By the bench.”
There were three benches outside. Ada rejected all three. The one she meant had been removed when the ramp was installed. Lenna asked where it had stood. Ada pointed to the plaque.
For a moment neither spoke.
“Perhaps the plaque moved,” Ada said.
They found the hall’s renovation plans in a folder behind the fuse cupboard. The ramp had replaced a narrow strip of garden. Its construction record showed the bench relocated to the park and the plaque fixed on a new plinth. The buried box had been found during the work and reburied beneath the relocated marker. Whoever did it had assumed that a metal box beneath a time-capsule plaque was a time capsule.
“That is fairly reasonable,” Ada said.
“It isn’t helpful.”
“No.”
Lenna checked the original programme. It gave the burial date, named the contributors and reproduced the plaque’s inscription. A photograph showed Ada in a light coat standing beside a deep square hole. She was holding a spade. A younger man at her elbow held a box with handles.
“Bernard?”
Ada nodded.
“That’s not our box.”
“No.”
“Then why did you think—”
Ada turned the programme over. “Because I haven’t looked at this in forty years.”
The photograph’s reverse had a handwritten date. It was three weeks later than the printed programme.
Outside, volunteers began arriving with sandwiches. The chairman came to check their progress. Ada asked him to leave, using the brisk tone Lenna had heard in some of the oldest committee recordings. He left.
“It rained,” Ada said. “We postponed it.”
“So the plaque’s date is wrong.”
“It was already engraved.”
“Would you have buried it somewhere else?”
Ada opened her blue folder. On the second page, in carefully typed words, she had described the congregation gathered beside the hall, the minister’s prayer and the children putting their wishes inside the capsule. She took a pen and drew one line through the paragraph.
“The children weren’t there,” she said. “They were at school. We did it on a Monday morning because Bernard could get a trailer.”
Lenna wanted to shake her. She also wanted to sit down beside her. The labels in the display case had made a promise as confident as Ada’s speech.
“Is he still here?” she asked.
Bernard lived above the garage he had once run. His granddaughter answered the bell. She called upstairs that two people wanted to see him about a box. He shouted back that he had given the socket set to Kevin.
“A buried box,” Ada called.
There was a pause. Then footsteps.
He came down slowly, wearing a jumper with one cuff unravelling. He looked at Ada and smiled. She did not smile back.
“I wondered if you’d come,” he said.
“For the anniversary?”
“Ever.”
Lenna held out the photograph. He took it close to the window.
“That was in the park. We moved the whole thing after the rain filled the hole. The hall garden was too wet.”
“I thought we took it back,” Ada said.
“We took the spade back.”
He pointed to a dark shape behind the people. A bench, with a short back and curled metal arms. In the park there was only one like it. Lenna knew because she ate her lunch there when the hall kitchen was booked.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Ada asked.
“I told you.”
“You said it was done.”
“It was done.”
They stared at each other with the exhausted precision of people returning to a quarrel they had never quite left. Lenna called the chairman. She told him they had a location and needed the parks crew. He asked if she was certain. She said no, but the photograph and Bernard’s account agreed.
The crew brought the box to the hall at two forty. It had handles, just like the photograph. Lenna laid it on a clean sheet. The chairman told the waiting audience the opening would be delayed while the contents were checked. Some people left. Most stayed for the sandwiches.
Inside were envelopes, a little model of the hall, a photograph in a plastic sleeve and a tin containing a pair of good sewing scissors.
Ada made a sound that was almost a laugh.
“Those were mine.”
Lenna read the label tied through the handles. For the next banner makers. These are the ones that cut straight.
“You put them in?”
“Bernard did. I said I wanted them kept for the next lot. I meant in the cupboard.”
Bernard, who had come with his granddaughter, looked at the scissors.
“You said for the future.”
“I had banners to finish in the present.”
He rubbed the loose cuff between finger and thumb. “You never spoke to me afterward.”
“I thought you let someone take them.”
The granddaughter closed her eyes. Lenna understood the feeling. Ada had her blue folder pressed against her chest. Bernard watched the scissors rather than her. Lenna realized neither of them had asked, even now, what the other had meant.
Ada reached toward the tin, then stopped.
“Do they belong to the town now?”
“They were a gift to future banner makers,” Lenna said. “Are you still making banners?”
Ada said she could be. Lenna photographed them in place, wrote a loan record and let her lift them out. Their blades opened stiffly. Bernard offered to have them serviced at the garage.
“Professionally,” Ada said.
“Yes.”
At three twenty, Lenna opened the capsule for the public. She explained the postponement, the relocated plaque and the roofing bills. The chairman stood beside her without interrupting. Ada abandoned her typed speech and described the Monday morning instead: the rain in their first hole, the trailer’s flat tyre, Bernard’s son carrying a box of sandwiches they forgot to eat.
The minister had come after all, she said, and prayed over the hole when they could not agree who should lower the box. He had been wearing borrowed boots. Someone in the audience remembered those boots and called out their owner’s name.
Lenna changed the display heading before leaving. WHAT WE ACTUALLY BURIED fitted the same space. Beside it she put a photograph of the roofing box and a note identifying the wasp as an accidental inclusion. At the kitchen table, Ada and Bernard were sharing the last corner of the clock cake. When he reached for the plate, she moved it halfway between them. Both plastic hands pointed into her piece.
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