The Fourth Year

I found it at twenty past eleven, in the fourth year, because it was the kind of number I am paid to find.

By then I had moved down to the estate office, because East Two had no table big enough for what I was doing and I had wanted a printer. The house was asleep round me, or pretending. The long table under the window was covered in paper I had printed and laid out year by year, left to right, the way I lay out any business I am trying to understand: income on top, costs under it, the bank below. I was wearing the navy jumper. The tower’s walls kept the day’s warmth for about two hours after dark and then gave it all back to the sea, and nobody was there to see me in it.

The estate made money. That was the first thing, and it was not what I had expected. Ninety-one dates at Kerrow’s prices, a kitchen that ran at a margin Neil should have been proud of, a staff bill that was high because he paid people properly, and a house that had been rebuilt, room by room, on a loan from the bank that was the one now writing in capitals. It should have been comfortable. Not rich. Comfortable. A house like that, run like that, puts something by.

It had not put anything by. Every month, for seven years, a sum had gone out of the estate’s main account to the client account of Munro & Co, Solicitors, Haddington, and it was the same sum every time.

£16,666.66.

It was booked in the management accounts as Loan repayment — private. There was no loan agreement behind it in the eleven attachments. There was no lender named. There was only the line, month after month, in the column under the bank, where an estate puts the things it cannot avoid.

I went back to the first year and found where it started: the September after Hector died. I went forward to the seventh and found where it stopped, two summers ago; the two years after it were clean. I counted the payments. Eighty-four. Eighty-three of them were £16,666.66. The last one was £16,667.22, fifty-six pence more, so that it came out to the penny.

I did not need a calculator. I have not needed a calculator for that particular number for ten years.

One million four hundred thousand pounds.

· · ·Scene break

I sat back in the chair.

It would have been enough, by itself. It was more than enough. But I had seen that line before. Not this one, the other side of it.

I have been chief operating officer of Halloway Hotels for five years, and every quarter I sign off the group management accounts. For the first three of those years, until the line stopped two summers ago, somewhere in the notes, under other income, there had been a line that our finance people carried forward with a small asterisk: Receipts, unidentified: Munro & Co (Haddington), client account. They had written to the firm twice. The firm had replied, twice, in four lines, that its client wished to remain anonymous and that the payments were made in settlement of an obligation. Our finance director had called it the most polite money we had ever been sent. After the second reply he had taken it to the chairman, and come back and told us the chairman was content and we were to stop spending the firm’s time on it. I had initialled it. I had read it every three months and never once asked what obligation, or whose, because the chairman was content, and it was going the right way, and it was small, as our numbers went, and I was busy, and Haddington was the one town in Scotland I had trained myself not to read.

I had seen it. I had never known it.

I put my hands flat on the paper, on either side of the fourth year. They were not shaking. I noticed that they were not shaking, and did not trust it.

· · ·Scene break

He came in at ten to midnight, to turn the lights off. I heard him in the hall first, and then the door, and then he stopped in it.

He looked at the jumper. It was a short look and it took in all of it: the thumb hole at the left cuff, and me in it, at his table, at midnight. His face did nothing at all.

Then he looked at the paper, laid out left to right, and I watched him read it from the door the way he had read the forecast, and I watched him get to the fourth year, and understand what I had done, and stand there.

“Eighty-four,” I said.

He shut the door behind him.

“The last one was fifty-six pence more,” I said. “So it came out right.”

“It had to come out right.”

“Duncan.”

“I’d have had to write to him again, otherwise. For fifty-six pence.” He came to the table. He did not sit. He stood across it from me with his hands at his sides, looking down at seven years of his own money in rows. “Lachlan told me it didn’t matter. I said it did.”

“You paid him back.”

“I paid Halloway Hotels back. Not him. The company that had paid. It was the company’s money on the discharge; I paid it to the company.” He said it as if it were a point of accounting, which it was, and as if it made a difference, which, to him, it did. “Every penny.”

“Out of what?”

“Out of that.” He nodded at the income, top row, seven years. “I borrowed to fix the house. The bank thought it was all going on the house. Some of it was. What the house made, I paid out. Seventeen thousand a month, near enough, for seven years.”

“That’s why there’s a spring.”

“That’s why there’s a spring.”

“Isla asked me,” I said, “where the money goes. This morning. In the van. She said the roof’s paid for.”

“The roof is paid for.”

“She doesn’t know.”

“Nobody knows.” He looked at me then. “Lachlan. Me. Now you.”

“Not your mother.”

“No.”

“Not Isla. She runs your events. She sees every invoice in this house and you’ve let her think it’s the roof for seven years.”

“She’d have wanted to help.” He said it flatly, a fact against himself. “She’d have taken less. She’d have taken nothing, if I’d let her, and I wasn’t going to let anybody in this house pay one penny of it who hadn’t been—“ He stopped.

“Bought,” I said.

He did not answer. He did not need to.

· · ·Scene break

“Why anonymous?”

“If my name was on it, he’d have written back.”

“And?”

“And I didn’t want anything back.” He looked at the fourth year. “Not his thanks. Not a letter saying there’d been no need. Not the money sent back to make a point. Not you hearing about it at a dinner and thinking I’d done it to—“ He stopped again. It was the second time in five minutes. I had never, when I knew him, heard him stop twice in a conversation. “It wasn’t a message. It wasn’t for anybody.”

“It was for somebody. You don’t pay a million four hundred thousand pounds over seven years for nobody.”

He was quiet for a long time. Outside, far down, the sea was going in and out of the rocks under the headland.

“My grandfather let me marry you on it,” he said at last. “He’d have let me stand up there and never known. He died with it in a drawer.” He looked at the old desk against the wall, the green leather, the brass handles, the bottom drawer on the left. “So I paid it. So that it hadn’t happened. So nobody in this family had been bought. Not him, not me.” A pause. “Not you. Whatever you’d been.”

I had nothing to say to that. I had nothing in me at all, for a moment, but the sound of the sea and the knowledge that I had signed his money off every three months with my initials.

“I read it,” I said. “Every quarter. For three years. Receipts, unidentified. I signed it.”

He looked up.

“You saw it.”

“I read it. I didn’t know.” I heard the difference, saying it, and so did he. It was the whole week in four words. “I never asked. It was going the right way.”

Something happened in his face that I had not seen in ten years and did not have a name for. It was not anger. I think it was the end of some. He put one hand down on the table, on the seventh year, and leant on it.

“And Stellan,” I said, because I could not stand still inside the other thing any longer. “Kirsty Dalgleish rang Priscilla.”

“I thought she might.”

“It’s double.”

“I can count.”

“You had it at eleven and you sat across from me at half past two and didn’t say a word. Any vendor alive would have put it on the table.”

“I haven’t answered it.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

He looked at me steadily.

“If I’d put it on the table,” he said, “you’d have had to match it. And you’d have tried.”

· · ·Scene break

“Wait,” I said. “Please. Wait here.”

I went up the back stair in his jumper and my socks and along the putty-coloured corridor past the Bride’s Room, where Catriona Guthrie was asleep behind the door on the night before her wedding, and into East Two, and opened the bedside drawer. The torch, and beside it the box.

When I came back down he had not sat at the long table. He was standing by the old desk, the one nobody used, with one hand resting on the green leather as if it were the shoulder of someone he had not seen in a while.

I put the ring box down on the desk, within his reach, and took my hand away.

Dark blue leather. One corner worn pale.

He did not pick it up. He looked at it for a long time, the way he had looked at the note in the chapel, and then he put his hand on it. Not to open it. His palm came down over the whole of the lid, and his fingers curled round the sides, and his thumb found the worn corner and stopped on it, where mine had been going for ten years.

I had my own fingertips on the edge of the desk, an inch from his. I did not move them. Neither did he.

“You kept it,” he said.

“I meant to send it back every June.”

“Why didn’t you?”

I had a version. I felt it arrive, polished, with its small turn at the end. Because I never walk into a negotiation without every asset in the room. It was true in the way most of what I said was true.

“I don’t know,” I said instead. “I know that isn’t an answer. It’s the only one I’ve got that isn’t a draft.”

His thumb moved on the pale corner, once, the way you would test a thing to see if it was worn right through.

“You’ve worn it.”

“Ten years.”

We stood with our hands on and beside that box on his grandfather’s desk, in the room where he had found the letter, in the middle of the night, with seven years of what it had cost him laid out behind us in rows. I could feel the warmth coming off his hand, an inch away. I could have closed that inch. I think he could have. Neither of us did, and I understood, standing there, that it was the same reason for both of us: that nothing done tonight, with those numbers on the table, could be anything but a payment.

“Don’t give me it,” he said quietly. “Not tonight.”

“I wasn’t—“

“You were going to.” He took his hand off the box. He did it slowly, as if the lid might lift. “Not because of that.” He tipped his head at the long table without looking at it. “I’ll not be paid back either.”

He pushed the box an inch across the green leather, towards me. Then he went to the door, and stopped in it, with his back to me.

“Lachlan acted for my grandfather,” he said. “On the discharge. It was his firm’s name on it.”

He went out. I heard him cross the hall, and the green door, and then his feet on the gravel going away towards the garden, and the chapel, where four hundred candles were waiting for the morning.

· · ·Scene break

I sat down at the old desk. It was the first time anyone had, in my sight.

It was his firm’s name on it. Munro & Co, Haddington, on the discharge my father had paid, ten years ago, the week before the wedding. My father’s lawyers would have written to that firm. My father would have signed on that firm’s paper.

And every year since, in the notes to the group accounts that my father signed as chairman, above my initials, a line: Receipts, unidentified: Munro & Co (Haddington).

He did not forget names. He had talked nineteen hotels into existence by never once forgetting a name.

I held the ring box in both hands, with my thumb on the corner where Duncan’s had been, and thought about my father on the telephone on Tuesday, fond and certain. Don’t let him make it about the past. The past is settled.

He would have known who had settled it.