Chapter Seven: The Folder
"Morning."
"No," Yui said.
She got the binder off her chest and opened it against the top of the gate, one hand flat on the page to stop the wind taking it, and turned it round so it faced him through the bars. The hand on the page had black polish on the nails, chipped at two of them, and two silver rings on it that he had not seen at Halvers because at Halvers her hands had never been still long enough.
Five tabs. He could read four of them from where he stood. ARDMORE. PAYMENTS. GUARANTEE. CALLOW.
The fifth said JULES.
"How much?"
"Seventeen thousand five hundred."
She wrote it down. She had the pen already in her hand, and she wrote the figure in the top right of a ruled page under the last tab, in the same hand he'd seen through the glass at Halvers, and did not look up while she did it.
"Interest."
"None."
"Fees."
"None."
"Due date."
"There isn't one."
"Repayment schedule."
"No."
"What did you get for it?"
"Nothing," Sebastian said. "There's nothing to collect. That was the whole point of doing it that way."
Yui stopped writing.
"That's worse."
"It's what you asked for."
"It is not remotely what I asked for. I asked for eighty thousand dollars to stop being a sentence people could say to my mother." She turned the pen around and tapped the blunt end on the page. "Now there's a number with no terms attached to it, and one person who gets to decide whether it ever comes due, and that person is you. Seventeen thousand five hundred dollars. No interest, no schedule, no receipt from you. What did you think I was supposed to do with that?"
"Nothing."
"Right."
"You don't owe me anything."
"Say that again in four years," Yui said. "When you want something."
"I won't."
"You don't know that. Nobody knows that." She turned the page. "I don't know it either, which is the part you keep missing. Every time you're in a room with me for the rest of my life I get to wonder whether it's the one where it comes up."
She took an envelope out of her coat pocket and pushed it through the bars at him. It was a brown pay envelope, folded over once, and he could see the shape of notes in it.
"That's six hundred," she said. "I had it for Friday."
"No."
"Take it."
"No."
Yui put the envelope back in her pocket without any particular reaction, and wrote something in the margin, and turned the binder round so he could see it again.
Under 17,500 she had written DISPUTED.
"That's not a real balance," Sebastian said.
"It's real to me. That's the only ledger it's in."
He looked at the tab again. Four of them were the debt. The fifth had his family's name on it and three pages behind it already, and he could see the top line of the first page through the plastic, and it was a date.
"When did you make that one?"
"Thursday."
"You didn't know on Thursday."
"I knew somebody had asked Ardmore a question," Yui said. "Their servicer stopped calling me on Thursday afternoon, and nobody stops calling. So I started a page." She turned it face down against her chest. "You're in it because you told me your name. Don't look at me like that's unfair."
He opened the gate.
She did not walk through it. She stood on her side with her hand on the binder and looked at the gap for long enough that he stepped back a pace to make it clear he wasn't going to close it on her.
"If I come in," she said, "does that count as anything?"
"No."
"Is that a real answer or a polite one?"
"I don't do polite ones."
She came in. She had heavy black boots on under the coat, the kind with a sole you could hear on gravel, and he heard them the whole way up.
The drive went up under trees that hadn't been cut back in two years. She looked at that, and at the lodge with one window boarded from the inside, and at the four cars in the coach house, two of them on flat tyres and one with no plates. He watched her not look at the house.
"How many people work here?"
"Nine. I think nine."
"You think."
"I've been here six days."
She let that go. Then he saw her write it down, so she hadn't.
Halfway up she stopped at the point where the gravel gave out into weeds and looked back down the length of it.
"That's a two-man job for a day. Maybe two days."
"The drive?"
"The drive's fine. The drive's gravel, it doesn't care." She pointed at the gutter line along the stable block, where a run of it had come away and was hanging at an angle over the doors. "That's water going into a roof for however long it's been doing it. You paid a man to fix one downpipe on Monday and left the other eleven."
"I didn't know about the other eleven."
"No," Yui agreed. "You wouldn't."
Aldric was at the door with the morning's post in his hand.
"Miss."
"Nakamura. Yui." She looked past him into the hall, at the two lamps with no bulbs in them and the pale rectangles up the stairwell. "Who does the household accounts?"
"Miss Lucia does the family accounts. I keep the household."
"Are they the same accounts?"
"They are not," Aldric said, "and I have been saying so for three years."
"Can I see yours?"
Aldric looked at Sebastian.
Sebastian nodded.
Aldric handed him the post and went into the passage by the stairs. He came back with a hardback ledger and a shoebox, and put both on the hall table without being asked twice.
Sebastian stood there with three envelopes in his hand and worked out that he was no longer the person this conversation was happening between.
"Sir," Aldric said, on the way past. "The ledger came back from Mr Pell on Thursday."
Sebastian stopped.
"Thursday."
"Thursday morning. You were in town." Aldric set the shoebox down. "I looked for you again in the evening. You were in the yard on the telephone and did not appear to want interrupting. Friday you were out from before eight."
"Right."
"It's in the pantry. It will keep until you've time to sit down with it."
"Aldric —"
"It has kept four months, sir," Aldric said. "It will keep until Miss Nakamura has gone."
He went.
Sebastian left the notebook on the hall table under the post. At twenty past eleven Yui picked it up and looked at him.
He didn't stop her.
She got to the last written page.
THINGS THAT COST TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS
"Why are there two boats on this."
"There aren't three."
"There's a horse."
"There is."
"Do you own a horse?"
"No."
"Do you want a horse?"
"No."
Yui put the notebook down on the table, closed, with her hand still on it.
"Explain the page."
"I need to spend ten thousand dollars today."
"On what?"
"Anything that qualifies."
"Qualifies for what?"
"That's the part you're not getting," Sebastian said.
"Then get me to it."
"I can't explain it. I'm not being coy and I'm not protecting you and there isn't a story I'm going to tell you instead. I can tell you the rules I've worked out. I can't tell you where they come from."
Yui closed the notebook and put it square with the edge of the table.
"Is this a legal thing?"
"No."
"Tax."
"No."
"A condition. Somebody's will, a trust, you have to spend it or lose it."
"No."
"Is it illegal?"
"No."
"Are you unwell?"
"No."
"You understand those were the good options," she said.
She turned to the back of the binder, past the tabs, to the blank ruled pages, and wrote a date at the top.
"Rules. Say them in order."
"The money has to actually leave me," Sebastian said. "If I still have something worth selling afterwards, it doesn't count. Services work. Food works. Paying somebody else's bill has worked twice. Going back to the same place too soon gets me less. New places have been fine. Everything has to happen before midnight."
"How much less?"
"Half, once."
"Once. So you've had one data point on the most expensive rule and you're building around it."
"Yes."
"How recent is recent?"
"I don't know."
"Same shop or the same kind of thing?"
"I don't know."
"Does a deposit count, or does it have to be the whole job?"
"I don't know."
"If you buy something and give it away, does that work?"
"Probably. I haven't."
"If somebody gives it back?"
Sebastian opened his mouth and shut it.
"Write that one down," he said.
"Does an old bill count the same as a new one?"
"An eleven-month-old wage packet counted."
"Then does it matter whose it is. Yours, the house's, a stranger's."
"A stranger's counted."
"That's a very large door to leave open," Yui said, and wrote it down without asking what he meant by it.
She wrote nine questions in a column with a wide gap under each and put a heavy line under the last. Then she turned back a page, started a table with five headings, and made him talk her through six days.
It went badly.
"You tipped a hundred dollars in a restaurant on Sunday and you didn't write down which restaurant."
"It was on Chandler Street. Six tables, a chalkboard."
"That's not a name."
"I know it isn't a name."
"And you went back on Monday."
"Yes."
"To the same one."
"That's the one that paid half."
Yui put the pen down.
"You bought a gold coin," she said, "to test this. Nine hundred and eighty dollars. Do you have the receipt?"
"No."
"Do you have the coin?"
"It's upstairs."
"Do you know the dealer's name?"
"There was a buzzer and a camera with the cable hanging off it."
"That's a description of a door," Yui said. "That's not a supplier."
By half twelve she had eleven merchants, four of them with no name against them, and a column headed RESULT with three entries she'd marked with a question mark because Sebastian could not tell her whether a thing had paid or not.
She put a line under the last row and said the thing he had been waiting for since the gate.
"I'll do today."
"No."
"You didn't hear the terms."
"I heard the shape."
"Then hear the terms." She squared the binder against the edge of the table. "I keep the records. You approve every payment, because it's your money and I'm not signing anything. At the end of the day I write down what my time was worth and it comes off the seventeen five."
"There is no seventeen five."
"There's a page that says there is."
"Yui —"
"I'm not your employee," she said. "I'm working off a debt. There's a difference and I'd like you to keep using it."
Sebastian stood in the hall of a house with no bulbs in two of its lamps and thought about that for four seconds, and then he pushed the notebook across the table to her and did not watch what she did with it.
"Ten thousand," he said. "Before midnight."
By one she had eleven things on a list and no order to them.
"Glass first," she said. "The glazier's booked out from Monday and the forecast's bad."
"Wages first."
"The wages will still be owed at four o'clock."
"That's the reason." Sebastian pulled the list round. "If something falls over today, or a number's wrong, or I've got the rule wrong and half of this doesn't count, then whatever's already gone out is what got done. Three people have been waiting since March. The orangery has been broken since last winter and it will survive another week."
Yui looked at the list, and then at him, and then renumbered it.
"Wages first," she said.
She started with Aldric's shoebox.
"Three of them haven't been paid."
"Four," Aldric said. "Mr Coombes was settled on Monday."
"Then three. Thomas, fourteen sixty. Mrs Ivers, thirteen twenty. Tess, four hundred." Yui ran a finger down the column and stopped. "Whose is the fourth line?"
"That one is not outstanding."
"It's got a figure next to it."
"It is not outstanding," Aldric said again, in exactly the same voice, and went to fetch the boiler man's number.
Sebastian looked at the page over her shoulder before she turned it.
Four lines. Three of them had names against them and a date and a running figure. The fourth had a figure and a date going back further than any of the others, and no name at all, in the same hand as everything else on the page. The man who kept the book had left himself off it and had gone on updating the number anyway.
He didn't say anything about it.
Three thousand one hundred and eighty dollars went out in twenty minutes, in three transfers, with Aldric standing at the table reading account numbers off a card and Yui checking each one back to him twice. Tess did not have an account, so hers went to her mother's, and Aldric knew the mother's number without looking it up.
Daily Spending Limit: $6,820 remaining
"Renwick's next," Yui said.
"That's the grocer."
"That's the grocer you owe two thousand four hundred and ten dollars to, which is why they won't deliver, which is why a seventeen-year-old carries flour on a bus." She had the invoice out of the shoebox and flat on the table. "It's eleven months old. Pay it and they'll open the account again on Monday."
"Does that count? It's the house's bill, not mine."
"You paid the groundskeeper's wages and you told me that counted."
"That's true."
"Then it's the same shape," she said, "and if it isn't, you've learned something and it's cost you two thousand four hundred and ten dollars, which appears to be a normal day for you."
He paid it. The counter moved.
"The estate needs a van," Sebastian said.
Yui did not look up.
"How much is a van?"
"Nine thousand. Eight, used."
"And how much is left today?"
"Four thousand four hundred and ten."
"So you'd buy half a van, and then tomorrow you'd buy the other half, and then you'd own a van." She turned the page over. "Which you could sell."
"It would be used."
"It would be a van. On your own rule." She capped the pen. "Ask me again when you understand the rule better than I do, and I'll tell you the same thing, but you'll have wasted less of my time getting there."
The boiler man came at two. He was in the cellar for fifty minutes and came up saying a number of things about the flue that Sebastian did not follow and Yui wrote down verbatim, and did the chimney in the same visit because he was already there, and charged eight hundred and sixty for a Saturday.
The glazier came at three. Eleven panes had been out of the orangery since a storm the winter before and somebody had taped plastic sheet over the frames and screwed batten across it, and the batten had been there long enough to have gone green. He wanted until Wednesday. Yui asked what same-day cost. Same-day cost twelve hundred and ninety and he had a man in the van. He was gone by six with the old putty in a bucket.
At four a cleaning firm arrived with six people and a machine, and worked through the ground floor until eight, and charged fourteen hundred and twenty. Tess stood in the kitchen doorway for a minute watching two of them do the flags in the passage and then went back to what she was doing.
Daily Spending Limit: $840 remaining
Lucia came out of the study at six because the cleaners had moved a chair.
She stopped in the doorway and took in the hall — two strangers with a mop and bucket going past, a woman she had never seen sitting at the hall table with a binder and a fan of receipts, and her brother standing next to her holding a phone.
"Who is this."
"Yui."
Lucia waited. When nothing else came, she looked at Yui directly.
"And what are you doing in my house?"
"Helping him spend money," Yui said.
Sebastian considered several things to say and said none of them.
"Renwick's telephoned," Lucia said. "They said the balance was cleared this afternoon and asked whether we wanted the Tuesday delivery reinstated. I told them they had the wrong house. Then I checked, and they don't."
"No."
"Two thousand four hundred and ten dollars."
"Yes."
Lucia looked at him, and then at Yui's binder, and then at him again.
"I'm not doing this in front of a guest," she said, and went back into the study, and the door did not slam, because it never did.
Yui wrote something down.
"Don't," Sebastian said.
"I'm writing Renwick's — confirmed received. That's the only reason I know it went through." She underlined it. "Sister?"
"Yes."
She wrote that down too. "She does the arithmetic faster than you do."
"I know."
The last one was his.
She had been through the shoebox twice by then, and at nine o'clock she put a slip of paper in front of him without comment.
It was an account from a Dr Weiss. Itemised, twelve visits, seventy dollars a visit, unpaid since the fourth week of the fever. The dates ran from a Tuesday in the middle of the month to the day before Sebastian had opened his eyes in a bed the size of his old kitchen, and the last two entries said attendance, no change.
Sebastian read it twice. He had not done that with any of the others.
"Eight hundred and forty," he said.
"Do you want to leave it?"
"No."
He paid it off the phone, standing up, and did not sit down again afterwards. Aldric came through the hall while he was doing it, saw what was on the table, and went past without saying anything.
Daily Spending Limit: $0 remaining
"That's ten," Yui said.
By nine she had the receipts in date order in a bulldog clip, the boiler man's flue comments copied onto their own page, Renwick's invoice marked and initialled, and eleven merchants in the table with names against nine of them. The two blanks were both Sebastian's.
She got her coat at twenty past nine because the last bus east went at ten.
Before she put it on she wrote a figure at the bottom of the page under the disputed number, and turned the binder so he could see it, and it said 242.
"That's the day," she said. "Eleven hours at what a purchasing clerk gets."
"That's too low."
"It's not yours to price."
"You cleared ten thousand dollars of other people's problems in a day and got a supplier back."
"And a purchasing clerk gets twenty-two an hour," Yui said, "and if I let you decide what my time is worth we are straight back where we started this morning, except that now you'd be doing it in writing."
She subtracted it. 17,258.
"There is no balance," Sebastian said.
"There's a page."
She put the pen through the rings. Then she got out one of the blank dividers from the back of the binder, wrote on the tab, and slid it into place three pages from the end.
She was at the top of the drive before he looked at what she'd left on the table, because she'd left it on the table.
The house went quiet by eleven. The boiler was making a sound it had not made in six days.
Sebastian sat in the hall with the binder in front of him and the last of the day's receipts in a bulldog clip, and waited for midnight, because he wanted the number before he did anything else with the evening.
[Settlement — 00:00]
Qualifying expenditure: $10,000
Return applied: $100,000
Account balance: $117,947.06
He looked at the third line for longer than the other two.
A week ago he'd been on a bus with a gold coin in his pocket and ninety-nine dollars to his name.
He opened the binder. The tab three pages from the end had a date on it and one word.
SUNDAY