He looked at me then, and the clarity was going, sliding back off his face like water off a plate.
“It wasn’t a pension,” he said again. “It was a price.”
I did not tell him that the price had gone on being paid, month after month, into an account with my name on it, and that I had let it, and that some of it was gone.
I should have told him then.
Delia was on the kitchen floor with a cardboard box open beside her when she found the letter, and she read it standing up, which is how I knew she had not meant to.
The bank had written to the estate at my address, because for the last year I had been the one answering my grandfather’s post. She had opened it thinking it was a bill.
Standing order: Kestrel Marine Ltd. Payments continued to 14 May, thirteen months after the date of death. Overpayment £4,420. Please contact the branch.
She read it twice. Then she held it out at arm’s length, the way her father held up the payroll card.
“Thirteen months,” she said.
“I know.”
“You told me the pension stopped when he died.”
“I told you it should have.” I sat down on the chair by the door because my legs had gone unhelpful. “The clerk was never told. It kept coming. Three hundred and forty a month, into the account I was closing for him, and I let it come.”
“Why?”
“The first one was the month of the funeral. I told myself I’d ring the yard and stop it.” I looked at the box, at her folded jumpers, at anything but her. “Then the rent was due, and I paid it with their money, and after that I was a man who had spent it, and a man who has spent it does not ring up and announce the fact.”
“How much of it is gone?”
“All of it. Rent, and steel when the pontoon invoice was late. Four thousand four hundred and twenty pounds.”
She put the letter down on the table and squared it with the edge, and I saw her father’s hands do that, and her grandfather’s, and I understood it was a thing this family did when they were deciding what to say.
“And the file?” she said. “The statement, the log, the initials. Was that sitting in an envelope too?”
I did not answer.
“Callum.”
“There’s an envelope in the van,” I said. “The probity office, harbour authority. It’s been addressed since the night I opened the box.”
She laughed once, without any humour in it. “So while I was asking you to wait, you were already loaded.”
“I was waiting for a reason not to send it.”
“And my grandfather gave you one yesterday.” She stood up. “Get your coat. You’re coming to the house, and he’s going to say it in front of me, and he’s going to sign it.”
Rosalind met us in the hall and put herself between us and the front room, which she had never done in fourteen months.
“He’s tired,” she said. “He’s had a bad morning. Whatever this is, it can wait until after the twenty-second.”
“No,” Delia said. “It can’t.”
“Delia. Think about what you’re doing.”
“I’ve thought about it since Tuesday.” Delia’s voice was flat and reasonable, and that frightened me more than shouting. “Move, Mum.”
Bernard was in the chair with the blanket and a biro Delia put into his hand. She sat on the footstool with a pad on her knee and took it down slowly, sentence by sentence, and he gave it to her in the same plain voice he had used with me: the heater out at the north wall because the men were frozen and he would not pay for a flue, the £64,000, the typist crying, the statement read aloud to a half-blind man who trusted him, the monthly price.
Rosalind stood by the window with her arms folded. Halfway through she said, “Dad, that’s enough now,” and he kept going. When he finished, she said, quietly, “I found that letter in his desk in 1998. I was looking for the deeds.”
Delia’s pen stopped. “You knew.”
“I put it back and I shut the drawer and I never opened it again.”
“For twenty-eight years.”
