The Inside Pocket

My father came to lunch at half past one.

He came in with his overcoat off and his sleeves still buttoned, and stood in the doorway of the servants’ hall and looked at the long table as if it were the best restaurant in Europe and he had been lucky to get in. Duncan pointed at a chair. My father took it. He was put between Rab and Mrs Imrie, and he asked Rab about the generator, and listened to all of the answer, which was long, and asked a second question at the end of it that showed he had listened. Mrs Imrie did not pass him the butter. He did not ask for it. Morven, from the far end, asked him whether he still took his tea without milk, and he said, after a moment, that he did, and that he was touched she remembered, and she said she remembered a great many things, and passed him the pot.

I watched him be charming to a room that had been in the chapel. It was very good. It did not work, and he knew it did not work, and he kept doing it anyway, because it was the only thing he had ever known how to do in a room, and I found that I could not hate him for it. I had done it for ten years. I had done it at this table on Sunday night.

At two he went back to the library, where Priscilla had been on the phone to New York since five to one without once raising her voice. I did not go with him. I had resigned.

· · ·Scene break

At eight minutes to six Priscilla opened the library door and looked out into the hall and found me, and held up one finger.

I went and stood in the doorway. I did not go in.

The partner’s revised heads were on the library table, printed on the estate office machine, forty-one pages, with the ink still warm. The group, sixteen hotels with the Edinburgh one as its flagship, at a price a little more than a fifth below the number my father had spent the spring defending. The banks’ standstill extended to completion. The three hotels closed in the first year, as they always would have been, with six months’ notice instead of three, redundancy at twice the statutory terms, and an obligation on the partner to offer every one of the six hundred a place in the group where a place existed, and to report the number to the unions every quarter until it stopped changing. Priscilla had told me the number she expected, in the hall at four, very quietly. It was about a third. That was the most she could get. It was more than anyone had asked her for.

Kerrow was not in it. Kerrow was not on page one. There was a photograph of the Edinburgh ballroom there instead, with its chandeliers, and a line in the brand people’s margin I could read upside down from the door. The city is the product.

My father sat down at the library table and took the pen Priscilla held out, and signed.

He signed on his own. There was nobody beside him and nobody standing at his shoulder. He did it in the same hand he had signed everything in for forty years, large and fast, and put the pen down, and sat looking at his own name for a moment as if it belonged to someone he had met once at a party.

Then he looked up at me in the doorway.

“On my own,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You said I would. On the call.”

“I did.”

He capped the pen and gave it back to Priscilla, and got up, and came to the door, and stood in front of me. He is a head taller than I am. He has been a head taller my whole life, and I had never noticed until that moment that he stoops, very slightly, when he is tired.

“You were the calmest person in that room today,” he said.

“I wasn’t. I just wasn’t trying to win it.”

He considered that the way he considers a number he has not been offered before. He did not agree with it. He did not argue with it either. He put his hand on my shoulder, briefly, and took it away.

“I’m going to go and find my coat,” he said.

· · ·Scene break

He left at ten past six.

Priscilla went with him, in the long black car, because she had a partner to meet in Edinburgh at eight and sixteen hotels to begin being responsible for in the morning. She stopped on the gravel with her bag on her shoulder and looked at me on the steps.

“Where will you go?”

“Leith, in the morning. Then New York, to clear my desk.”

“You haven’t got a desk,” said Priscilla. “I’ve got it.” She did not smile. Then she did. “Ring me on Friday. Every Friday. I’ll want to know what you’re like when you believe what you’re saying.”

She got into the car.

My father did not, yet. He stood at the bottom of the steps with his overcoat over his arm, and Duncan came out of the green door past me and down the steps to him, all the way down, as he had at a quarter past twelve.

“Duncan,” my father said. “The money. Munro’s money.” He said it quietly, not for the driver. “I’ll have it sent back to you. All of it. It should never have—“

“No.”

“Let me do this.”

“It’s paid,” Duncan said. “Leave it paid.”

My father looked at him. I had seen my father look at a great many men across a great many tables, and I had never once seen him look at one as if he did not know what the man was going to say next.

“You kept a roof on my grandfather for a summer,” Duncan said. “He should have told me. You should have told her. I should have asked.” He held out his hand. “That’s three of us. We’re square.”

My father looked at the hand.

“Hector used to say that,” he said.

“I know,” said Duncan. “He was wrong when he said it. I’m not.”

They shook hands on the gravel. It did not take long. Then my father got into the car and the driver shut the door on him, and the car went away down the drive under the beech trees, past the lodge where Morven would be at her window, and was gone, and the gravel settled.

Duncan did not come back up the steps at once. He stood at the bottom of them with his hands in his pockets and looked down the empty drive, and I stood at the top by the green door and looked at the back of his head, and neither of us said anything at all.

· · ·Scene break

I packed the way I had unpacked, because it gave my hands a job.

Suits folded, knitwear folded, laptop wound in its cable. The kettle I left on the desk by the window, with its flex wound the way he winds things. It belonged to the flat, and the flat was in the loft, and I was not going to carry it through an airport. The navy jumper I folded in squares and put on the end of the four-poster. It was his. It had always been his. He had put it in with my things once, and I was not going to make him wonder for another ten years which room it went in.

The Reverend went into my coat pocket. The pound coin stayed in my jacket, where it had been since Friday. I wrote to the company secretary, three lines, the date and the job and my name, and sent it before I could make it four.

Then I sat down at the desk beside the kettle and took a sheet of Kerrow notepaper from the folder, the same paper, the same crest at the top, and a pen.

The last time I had written on this paper I had written a sentence that said nothing true, and it had taken me four minutes and ten years. I sat with the pen over the page for a long time. I thought of the gas bill. D. Ring the chandler about the damp. Also I love you. Also it’s bin day. I had put the true thing in the middle of a list at twenty-two, because it was true every day and did not need a paragraph of its own. I had not written a sentence like it since.

I wrote one.

D. I love you. I did the whole time. W.

I did not read it again. If I had read it again I would have drafted it. I folded it in four, the way the other one had been folded, and put it in my pocket, and went down.

· · ·Scene break

He was in the estate office, at the long table, not at his grandfather’s desk. He had the bank’s letters in front of him, the ones in capitals, and a pad, and Isla’s seven years of events figures in a box file beside his elbow, and he was writing a list of questions in his hand. His coat was on the back of the door.

I put the note into its inside pocket on my way past, beside the other one, and did up the button. He watched me do it and said nothing.

Then I took the ring box out of my jacket and put it on the table in front of him, on the bank’s letter, and took my hand away.

“I’m not giving it back,” I said. “I want to be clear about that, because the last time I left you to work out what I meant, you worked it out wrong for nine years. This isn’t an ending. I’m leaving it with you. It’s been in a drawer with a torch all week. It ought to be somewhere it’s known.”

He looked at the box. He did not touch it.

“Keeping it for what?”

“I don’t know.” I made myself stay where I was. “That’s the honest answer. I’d rather give you an honest one than a good one.”

He picked it up then. He did not open it. He held it the way he had held it on Friday night, with his thumb on the worn corner.

“There’s a note in your coat,” I said. “It’s shorter than the last one. Read it when I’ve gone.”

“Why when you’ve gone?”

“Because it’s true, and I don’t want to stand here and watch you decide what to do with it.”

He turned the box over in his hand, once.

“I’m going to Leith in the morning,” I said. “To the Shore. I want to see the flat. I’ve not been back. I’m flying to New York tomorrow night.” I heard how it sounded and went on anyway. “I’m not telling you so you’ll come. I’m telling you because I’m done not telling you where I am.”

He was quiet for a long time. Outside, in the yard, the hire firm’s lorry was being shut up for the night, a long rattle and then a bang.

“You know where I am,” he said.

I heard it. I heard it the way you hear a door you have heard before. Isla, on the road back from Haddington, with the Forth in the windscreen: She knows where I am. That’s all he’s ever said about it. Ten years.

He had said it through a door to his sister, and on a staircase above a chandler’s with a roll of tape in his hand, and he was saying it to me now, across his own table, with my ring in his fist and my note in his coat, and he did not hear himself say it. I watched him not hear it.

“I do,” I said. “I always have.”

· · ·Scene break

The taxi came at twenty to seven.

It was still light. That was the thing I noticed, going down the stairs with my bag: that it was light, the long pale September light that lies along the Forth at that hour, and there was nobody in the house pretending not to watch. The hall was empty and the fire was low, and the portraits hung at the height somebody had thought about.

Isla was at the green door.

She had her radio on her belt and her arms folded and her face was still what the morning had made it. She did not say goodbye. She looked at my bag, and at me, and then she took hold of the big iron handle and pulled the door wide, all the way, until it stood open to the steps and the gravel and the evening.

“Front door,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Good,” said Isla. “I’d have minded the gate.”

I went out.

He was on the steps. Of course he was on the steps. He stood on the top one, alone, with his hands in his pockets, where he had stood a week ago, and his weight was even and his face was shut, and he was waiting for weather.

I stopped beside him. Not below him. Beside.

He did not take his hands out of his pockets. He did not say my name. He looked at me, once, and I saw everything he was not going to do go across his face and settle there, and I understood that it was not that he did not want to. It was that in thirty-five years nobody had ever taught him how you go after a thing. You stand at the door. You shake their hands. You mind the step. You let them know where you are.

“Mind the step,” he said.

I went down the steps with my bag in my hand, in daylight, by the front door, which is how you leave a house when you mean to be seen leaving it. The driver put my bag in the boot. I got in before he could come round.

I looked back once, through the rear window, as the car turned on the gravel. The green door was open. Isla had gone in. He was still on the top step, with his hands in his pockets, and he did not come down.