Rosalind was at the front desk with the invoices, and she looked at me the way she looked at the travellers who came in off the road asking for scrap.
“Victor’s in the back,” she said. “He’s got the harbour man coming at eleven.”
“This won’t take ten minutes.”
Victor had the filing cabinet open when I went in. He did not seem surprised. He heard me out with his hand resting on the drawer, and when I said the word pension he pulled a card out and held it up at arm’s length, the way a man holds up a fish.
VANE, T. Paint shop. 1977 to 1981. Left 1981. No reference.
“That’s the whole of him,” Victor said. “Four years, and a card. There’s no pension scheme for paint shop men, Callum. There never was. What there was, was a discretionary payment, voted by the board, year on year, because the board felt like it.”
“For forty years.”
“For as long as the board felt like it.” He put the card down and squared it with the edge, and I noticed his hands were doing what Delia’s did when she was tired. “My father’s idea. He had a soft spot for the old crew. Half of them were dead by the eighties and he was still sending money to the widows.”
“It was compassion,” Rosalind said from the doorway. I had not heard her follow me in. “You make it sound like hush money. There’s not a family in this town that hasn’t had something off this yard when they were low.”
“Then why no reference?” I asked. “If he left of his own accord, why does the card say no reference?”
“Because he wasn’t any good,” Victor said. “He was a storeman who couldn’t count drums. My father kept him on out of pity and paid him after, out of pity, and if you’d like to know what that costs a business over four decades, I can get the books.”
The book was in my jacket and I did not take it out. I have gone over that decision a hundred times since. I think if he had not said pity I might have shown him.
He came round the desk and sat on the corner of it, close to me, and dropped his voice, which was worse than the shouting.
“Eight thousand,” he said. “Sign the declaration, and the eight comes off what the yard owes you on the rails, and we forget the box and everything in it. You’re getting married in the summer. Take the money, Callum. It’s a better story than the one you’re building.”
“You know what’s in the box.”
“I know what an old man tells a boy at the end of his life.” He looked at the window and not at me. “I know what it’s worth to you and what it’s worth to me, and I’ve just told you the second number.”
I walked out through the office without answering him. Rosalind did not say goodbye. I sat in the van and photographed the card through the windscreen, and my hands were steady, which frightened me more than shaking would have.
The county record office is in a converted chapel past the retail park, and it opens late on a Wednesday. I gave the woman at the desk the date and the street and asked for the fire brigade log for March 1979. She brought the microfilm in a grey box and set me up at the machine nearest the radiator, and it took forty minutes of winding to find it.
The entry is two lines of typescript. Seat of the fire, the paint store, north wall. That is the wall behind the racking, where the drums were stacked three deep. I had worked in that store as a boy on Saturdays, moving boxes for a pound and my dinner, and I knew where the north wall was.
Then the second line.
No smoking materials found at seat of fire. One paraffin heater, badly damaged, removed to yard. Attendance: B. Harrower, director, on site 23:05.
I read it four times, the way I had read the statement. A paraffin heater. In a paint store. In March, in a building with no heating in the back half, because my grandfather had complained about it for years and been told to wear a coat. I could see the thing. The old ones with the round drum and the wick you turned up with a key, and that sweet oily smell that got into your clothes.
