Chapter 37: Fifteen Minutes
The letter came to Kestrel House on the twenty-second of January, from Renwick and Voss.
They act for the family. I had met Mr. Voss twice, at dinners. He complimented the soup both times.
The letter was one page and it was perfectly courteous.
It offered supervised collection of my personal effects from the East House.
Tuesday the third of February. Eleven o'clock. Fifteen minutes.
A representative of this firm will be present to record an inventory.
Items jointly owned, or forming part of the household, are excluded.
Mrs. Ashford will not be present during the collection.
Ruth read it twice and said take it. It was the best offer I would get.
Then the thing that mattered. “Make a list before you go. You will not think clearly in there.”
I made the list on the back of an envelope on Sunday night, in a bunk.
Passport. Birth certificate. Tax papers from before the marriage. The MRI report from twelve years ago.
A coat. Boots. Three jumpers. Socks. Underwear. Two pairs of trousers.
The charger for a phone I no longer had.
Fifteen items on an envelope.
There was a sixteenth line. I wrote it, and then looked at it for a long time.
The box.
On the third of February a patrol car took me up the drive at Fenwold. Four hundred metres of gravel, limes down both sides.
I have walked that drive perhaps two thousand times.
They had gritted it. The grit stopped forty metres short of the East House, which is where the main house stops caring.
The officers were Nairn and Brooks. Nairn set a timer in the hallway. “Fifteen from now.”
The clerk from Renwick and Voss was about twenty-five, with a clipboard and a form ruled into columns.
“I'll write down each item as you take it. Show me each one.”
The house was exactly as I left it on the twenty-fifth, apart from two things.
My side of the wardrobe was in four cardboard boxes, taped shut, standing against the wall.
Somebody had done that carefully. Whoever it was had folded things.
That was the worst thing in the house and I have never worked out who to blame.
Julian was standing in the kitchen doorway with a cup.
He was not required to be there. Nobody mentioned it. He is not a protected party and it is his house.
He said one sentence to me in fifteen minutes.
“There's a bag in the hall you can use.”
There was. A blue holdall from a hotel gym.
I did the documents first, because Ruth had said to.
The papers were in the second drawer of the desk in the small room. Four minutes.
The passport went straight to Nairn, who bagged it, because I was under an order to surrender it.
I collected my passport from my own house and handed it to a policeman in my own hallway.
Then the clothes. I cut the tape with a kitchen knife and said each item out loud.
Grey jumper. Navy jumper. Black jumper. Six pairs of socks. Boots. Coat.
Eleven minutes gone.
The box is on the top shelf of the wardrobe in the back bedroom, at about six foot two.
It is a shoebox. There is a black belt in it, worn white where the knot sits.
A medal. Silver, eighty-one kilograms, on a ribbon gone the colour of tea.
One photograph. Eleven people on a mat in a hall four hundred kilometres north, and a man at the end of the row with a whistle.
To get it down I must reach above my head with the right arm, or carry a chair in from the landing.
The chair takes forty seconds. The reach takes two, and costs about four days.
I stood under that shelf for what the clerk afterwards recorded as approximately one minute.
Then I went back down and took the physiotherapy notes out of the desk instead. They are the only proof my shoulder is what I say it is.
Nairn said, “Three minutes.”
I zipped the bag. It was not full.
The clerk read the inventory back in the hallway, item by item, and asked me to sign at the bottom.
Nineteen items.
I was thirty-four, married three years, and I signed for nineteen items in the hall of the house I lived in.
Julian was still in the doorway with the same cup.
On the way out I passed under the door frame between hall and kitchen. There is a strip of moulding along the top of it, three inches deep, fitted in March two years ago.
I did not look up at it. I never have, in front of him.
The car went back down the gravel and I watched the grit start again forty metres away.
The box is still on that shelf, and it will stay there until somebody who does not know what it is throws it out.