Taking Stock by A.L. Lester

Author:A.L. Lester [Lester, A.L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: JMS Books LLC
Published: 2020-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13: Accounts

A couple of weeks later, Laurie sat at the dark mahogany desk in the small office, with its tooled gold and green leather writing pad and put his head in his hands in despair.

None of the papers spread out on the surface in front of him made sense. Partly because he was so tired and foggy all the time—his brain just didn’t seem to work the way it had before. And partly because there were so many bits of paper and notes on the back of envelopes and in one case, genuinely, on the back of a fag packet. He had no idea where to start. Clearly no-one had done any paperwork since he had last opened the study door six months ago, just piled things up on the dark mahogany desk in his absence.

He opened the black boards of the ledger and began to leaf through it. There was his writing, plain as the day to him, but making no sense at all once it got past his eyes and in to the roiling cloud of his brain. Neat lists of purchases and sales going back more than a decade. At the beginning of the ledger the hand was Uncle Matthew’s elegant copperplate script. Then a period where his own and Uncle Matty’s had alternated. And then just his own.

He stared at the most recent page, rubbing his hands over his face and taking a deep breath of the slightly musty air in the little-used room. He was looking at September last year, the month before he keeled over. The wages, marked down weekly. Sixteen pounds each for the men. Twelve pounds for Sally. He leafed forward and found blank pages. Who had been paying them while he’d been sick? He had no idea. Jesus. What a mess. He poked dismally at a pile of papers and a cheque from the Milk Marketing Board for three hundred and sixty pounds fell out, dated the middle of October. That needed to go to the bank, for a start. It slid to the floor and he watched it settle on the dusty faded red, blue and brown patterned carpet.

“Sally!” he called loudly, hoping she would hear him from wherever she was in the house. “Sally?”

“Coming!” she yelled back, cheerfully. She poked her head round the door, drying her hands on a tea-towel. “I was sorting out dinner,” she said, coming to stand next to him. “Are you all right in here?” She looked around, skeptically. “I just put everything on the desk as it came in, so it should be in date order for you to go through when you have time. And I took money out of the tin to pay everyone. I wrote the amounts down on a bit of paper each week and tucked it at the bottom under the money tray.” She gestured to the battered black and gold cashbox at the back of the desk. He hadn’t even touched that yet.

“Yes,” he said, swallowing. “Yes, that’s brilliant.

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