The Chair by the Fire Door
A short story set in England, 1990
The Story
The chair had been there as long as anyone could remember.
It sat in the corner of the staffroom at Redmoor Secondary School — a high-backed, green-cushioned thing with wooden arms worn pale where hundreds of hands had gripped them over the decades. Nobody sat in it. That was simply understood. New teachers learned quickly: the chair by the fire door was not for sitting in.
Margaret Holt had taught English at Redmoor for twenty-two years. She had seen the chair outlast two headmasters, three deputy heads, and one rather spectacular flood in 1983 that had ruined everything else on the ground floor. The chair survived. Of course it did.
"Who does it belong to?" asked the new geography teacher, a young man named Daniel Webb, on his first day in September.
Margaret looked up from her marking. "No one," she said.
"Then why doesn't anyone sit in it?"
She considered the question. "It belonged to Gerald Fry," she said at last. "He taught history here for thirty-one years. He died in that chair, actually. Heart attack, during the lunch break in 1979. The caretaker found him at half past two with a ham sandwich on his knee."
Daniel looked at the chair. "That's a bit grim."
"Not really," said Margaret. "He loved that chair. Said it was the most comfortable thing he'd ever sat in. I think it was rather fitting."
Daniel nodded slowly and returned to his lesson plans. But he kept glancing at the chair.
Over the following weeks, he began to notice things. The chair seemed to shift slightly between visits — never dramatically, just a degree or two, as though someone had recently stood up from it. Sometimes there was a faint indentation in the cushion, though he could never be certain whether he was imagining it. Once, in late October, he arrived early and found a half-drunk cup of tea on the arm. He asked Margaret about it.
"The caretaker, perhaps," she said, without looking up.
"The caretaker doesn't drink tea."
"Doesn't he?" She turned a page. "I didn't know that."
In November, the school had its annual inspection. Ofsted had not yet become the fearsome institution it would later be known as, but there was still considerable tension in the staffroom that week. Teachers came and went in anxious clusters. On the Thursday afternoon, one of the inspectors — a tall woman in a grey suit — came into the staffroom and looked around for somewhere to sit. Every chair was taken.
Every chair except one.
She moved towards the chair by the fire door.
"I wouldn't," said Margaret, quietly.
The inspector paused. "I beg your pardon?"
"That chair has a broken strut at the back," Margaret said, not unkindly. "Maintenance have been meaning to fix it for months. I'd hate for you to have an accident."
The inspector thanked her and stood until another seat became available.
Daniel caught Margaret's eye across the room. She gave him a small, neutral look and returned to her work.
Later, as the staffroom emptied, he walked over to the chair and examined it carefully. The struts were perfectly intact. All four of them, solid as ever.
"Margaret," he said.
"Yes?"
"The strut isn't broken."
She gathered her papers into a pile. "No," she agreed. "It isn't."
"So why did you—"
"Gerald Fry," she said simply, pulling on her coat, "was a very private man. He wouldn't have wanted a stranger sitting in his chair."
She left before Daniel could think of a response.
He stood alone in the staffroom, looking at the chair. The late afternoon light came in grey and flat through the high windows. The school had gone quiet around him — the particular silence of a building that has just emptied of children.
He pulled up another chair and sat down beside the old green one. Not in it. Beside it.
"I'm Daniel," he said aloud, feeling slightly foolish. "Geography. I'm taking over from Mr. Ashworth."
The chair said nothing, of course.
But the room felt, somehow, a little less empty than it had before.
He sat there for a few minutes, listening to the building settle around him — the tick of pipes, the distant clank of the caretaker's keys — and then he picked up his bag and went home.
He left the chair exactly as he found it: slightly angled, as though its occupant had just stepped out for a moment and would be back presently.
Margaret noticed, the next morning. She said nothing. But when she made her cup of tea, she made two, and left one on the arm of the chair by the fire door.
It was cold by the time she looked again.
It always was.