Old Accounts

Ash found the mistake in a column he had created himself.

It was Monday morning. The weekend had left an unfamiliar ease in his rooms: Delilah’s laughter remembered beside the kettle, the chair she had finally sat in on Sunday, a book she had lent him lying on the table without a deadline attached. He had opened his working record intending to answer Leonie’s request about the script. He had not expected the first difficult answer to concern something he had done before writing it.

Leonie had asked what he could properly account for, not for his whole Sable file. He had replied that he would take advice on what could be supplied. No customer records had arrived with her question. He could not fill in the gap by asking Delilah what her clients possessed.

His own opening index was enough to show him what he needed to examine.

On his first morning Harvey had provided an account of disputed charges alongside the process brief. Ash had made headings to organise the work: correspondence, contact preferences, payment disputes. Under the last he had placed a repeated claim reference with two different fee descriptions beside it. He had called the second item possible duplicate query.

The word query had done the damage. It made a second demand for money look like the customer’s difficulty understanding the first.

He opened his original note. There was the qualification he remembered adding: Underlying payments not reconciled. Classification provisional. He had kept it out of the final process findings because he had not reconciled it. That part was defensible. What he had not done was ask Harvey to substantiate the second charge before treating the whole item as outside the immediate process work.

He had asked about the wording of calls. He had changed the way people could decline contact. He had left this question in a category that made it easy to return to later.

Ash sat back. Across the table was the chair Delilah had chosen yesterday. She had lowered herself into it with comic caution, looked him in the eye and said she was prepared to remain seated. He had enjoyed the extravagant confidence of that declaration. Now he wanted to hear her make some exact distinction that would let him keep it.

He put his phone face down.

The record did not prove two payments had been received, where money had gone or whether the underlying loss could be recovered. He must not turn his shame into a larger claim than the evidence allowed. It did show two requests under the same reference and his choice to file them as a dispute rather than a question about a second fee.

Delilah had said courtesy review to him on Monday. By Tuesday they had been laughing about it. He could no longer tell himself that the opening index was merely a harmless starting point which nothing had required him to revisit.

He wrote a new note beside it, preserving the old wording. Then he telephoned the independent solicitor whose advice he had sought about the request. He described the problem without sending the file and asked for an appointment about the scope of a factual account, including his own misclassification. There would be a fee. He accepted it. His returned retainer had not purchased a clean end to this work.

After the call he wrote to Leonie: he had identified an error in his own initial classification which any account of the script would need to include; he was seeking advice before supplying material; he would give her a date for his response after that consultation. He did not promise that the error would help her clients. He had spent enough time making other people’s hope carry his uncertainty.

By noon he had done the things he could do alone. That left the one he most wanted to postpone.

I found something in my own work I need to tell you about, he wrote to Delilah. It isn’t a request for your records or your help with mine. Could we talk this evening?

She answered after an hour. Come to the square at six. I have something before then.

He read no judgement into the delay. He tried, at least. He went out and bought lunch instead of revising the message he had already sent.

· · ·Scene break

Delilah was sitting on the low wall beside the square’s flower beds when he arrived. She had her coat folded beside her and a paper cup between her hands. Ash could remember those hands on his shoulders on Friday night with an accuracy that made it hard to begin.

She looked up, then shifted her coat so he could sit.

“Tell me,” she said.

He told her about the opening index. He used no claim number, name or amount. He told her what his record established and what it didn’t, the way he had labelled the repeated reference, and why the phrase they had discussed on Tuesday should have sent him back to it sooner.

Delilah did not interrupt. A dog investigated the empty cup beneath a nearby bench. Its owner apologised to nobody in particular and pulled it away.

“Did Harvey see your classification?” she asked.

“It was in my working index. I haven’t found evidence that I sent it to him, and I’m not going to turn remembering into proof. It wasn’t in the process finding I gave him.”

“So you aren’t saying he used your words to charge anyone.”

“No. I’m saying I used his description to decide where not to look yet.”

She stared at the lid of her cup. “You knew the promises were wrong.”

“I knew the script promised more than we could substantiate. I made it possible to say that on a call. I didn’t follow through on whether the next fee was being sold on the same unsupported promise.”

“Why?”

He had spent the afternoon preparing an answer about scope. It was true, as far as it went. He had accepted a defined inquiry and kept records of what fell outside it. She deserved the part that went further.

“Because the script was something I could fix in front of me. The fee question would mean telling Harvey that his explanation of the complaints was inadequate before I’d finished the inquiry he’d hired me for. I called that waiting for enough information.”

“You wanted to finish the job you could still imagine finishing.”

“Yes.”

She looked at him then. He could bear her anger better than the recognition on her face. She knew the satisfaction of an assignment made coherent. She had recently paid to give one up.

“Did you know this on Friday?”

He heard which Friday she meant. Her kitchen, her bed. He answered the question before it could grow into another.

“No. I opened the initial index this morning while working out what I could say in response to Leonie. I should have opened it before. I didn’t remember the wording until I saw it.”

“You haven’t waited for us to have another good evening before telling me.”

“No.”

She took a breath. “I’m glad of that. I’m also very tired of being glad about when I hear something bad.”

He had no answer that would help. He let her have the sentence without making her soften it.

For a while they watched people cross the square. Ash wanted to take her hand. He could ask, but even asking felt like a way to obtain a small verdict about whether he was still welcome. He kept his hands loose on his knees.

“I’ve told Leonie there’s an error,” he said. “Not the customer detail. I’m getting advice about what I can properly provide.”

“Good.”

“I wanted you to hear it from me.”

“That isn’t the same as needing my agreement before you tell her.”

“I know.”

“Do you want me to read your account?”

The invitation seemed to open in front of him. Her precision, her instinct for the protective sentence, her knowledge of how his better intentions became excuses. She could help him make the record accurate. She could also make it easier for him to sign.

“I want that,” he said. “I shouldn’t ask it.”

“You haven’t. I’m telling you I won’t.”

He nodded. She set the empty cup beside her.

“I can’t be the person who finds the right words for this and then the person who tells you she trusts them. Somebody else has to do the first part with you. You have to bear the second.”

“Yes.”

“And whatever I remember you telling me about your former job, that isn’t evidence about these charges. I won’t pass your private story around to make your mistake look like a pattern I can diagnose.”

The care in that hurt him. She was angry and still careful with something he had given her.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I am going to tell Leonie that you’ve told me about an error in your classification. I’ll keep out of assessing it. That matters to the work I still have.”

“I understand.”

She stood and picked up the cup. He thought she was leaving until she pointed to the bin beyond him.

“You don’t have to stand up every time I do.”

He sat back down. “I was halfway.”

“I noticed.”

She returned without the cup, but remained standing. He looked up at her. It was the same face that had turned toward him in her bedroom, delighted and unguarded. She had not become a different person because she had a reason to be displeased with him. He must stop behaving as though affection survived only when it looked pleased.

“I don’t want to spend tonight going over it,” she said. “I have my own work tomorrow, and you have somewhere else to take yours.”

“All right.”

“I wanted dinner with you before your message. I don’t know whether I want it now.”

“You don’t have to decide for my benefit.”

She almost smiled. “I’m trying to decide for mine.”

He moved his coat off the wall. She sat again, leaving a little space between them. It was not the closeness of the weekend. It was still a place she had chosen beside him.

“Ask me something else,” she said at last.

“About your day?”

“Something you actually want to know.”

Ash looked at the tree beyond the path, its leaves beginning to thin. “Did you finish the book you were reading before you lent me this one?”

“No. I gave up.”

“Properly?”

“I put it in the box for the charity shop.”

“That’s quite final.”

“I may be capable of it.”

Her mouth softened, though she did not laugh. He told her that he had read thirty pages of the new one and distrusted the narrator. She said that was an improvement on distrusting the author. They spoke for another ten minutes, and the fact that neither was made innocent by the conversation became less of an obstacle to having it.

At the corner she decided to go home. She touched his sleeve before they parted.

“Sunday,” she said. “I still want a day with you.”

“So do I.”

“Not a report about how well your appointment went.”

“A day.”

He walked home with that much promised. On the table his index waited beside the borrowed book. Ash put the book on the arm of the chair and sat down to record exactly where his own questions had stopped. This time he did not mistake a stopping place for an answer.