The Teller's Last Week

The letter from head office had arrived in September, and Philippa had read it so many times that she could have recited it. The branch on Market Street would close for good on the last Friday of October, and all its services would be "transferred to our convenient mobile app." By then, she calculated, she would have spent thirty-four years behind the same counter, and she would have counted, at a rough estimate, more banknotes than there were people in the country. What she had not yet done was tell her customers, and she had promised herself that she would do it face to face, one at a time, before the week was out.

On Monday it was the woman from the flower shop, who deposited the weekend's takings every week in a paper bag that smelled of chrysanthemums. She took the news briskly, as she took everything, and asked whether the app could count damp coins. Philippa admitted that it could not.

On Tuesday it was the young father who brought his twins to watch the money machine whirr. On Wednesday it was the schoolboy who had been emptying a jar of coins into his savings account every month since he was seven, and who, to her surprise, already had the app and offered to show her how it worked. Each conversation was shorter than the one she had rehearsed in the car, and each left her more tired than she had expected.

Thursday was the hardest, because there was nobody to tell. She spent it packing the drawers into labeled boxes, peeling the faded opening hours from the glass door and deciding, after some hesitation, to leave the dish of mints on the counter until the very end.

On Friday, at ten o'clock exactly, the bell above the door rang, and in came the old man who had withdrawn his pension in cash every Friday morning for as long as she had worked there. He did not own a smartphone, and he had once told her, with great dignity, that he never intended to. She had dreaded this moment more than any other. Before she could find the words, he set his hat on the counter and said, gently, that he had read about the closure in the local paper. He had come, he said, to make sure he said goodbye properly.

Philippa nodded, because she did not trust her voice. Then she took his envelope, opened it and began to count his banknotes onto the counter, one at a time, more slowly than she had ever counted anything, so that it would last.