Till She Is Through
In 2046 a bank's assistant holds a standing instruction a woman gave in 2043, three hundred pounds a month to her brother "till Seonaidh is through with her schooling". Mairi can no longer revise it. Her sister, now her guardian, is £4,184 a year short on her care. The assistant will not decide what "schooling" meant. It sets out what the words, the dates and the money say, and whose decision it is.
Isobel MacNeil had been her sister's guardian for nineteen months and had never once asked the bank for anything except a statement.
She was sixty-one, a retired nurse, and she came to the credit union at Caisteal Bay on Friday 9 March 2046 on the 10:40 bus from Tràigh Ghil, in her good coat, with a folder on her knee that she did not open until she was sitting down. The branch had two desks and a kettle. The assistant the island called the Clerk spoke from a small grey speaker on the counter, in a Scottish voice somebody in Glasgow had chosen in 2039 because it tested as the one old people trusted least often to be selling them something.
"Mrs MacNeil," it said. "You've the sheriff's order with you. I have it on file already, and I'm glad you came in person. Before anything else I should tell you that there is a standing order on your sister's account that I think you've not asked about, and that I would rather you heard from me than found in a statement."
"Three hundred pounds a month to Calum," said Isobel. "I've seen it. I saw it in the first week."
"You've seen the payment. You've not seen what she said about it."
Isobel put her hands flat on the folder.
Her sister Mairi was fifty-eight and, since a morning in August 2044 when a delivery van had met her bicycle at the Borve road junction, she was a woman who laughed easily, ate well, sang the second verse of anything, and could not say what day it was or add a bill. The injury was to the part of the brain that holds a plan for next week. It would not mend. The sheriff had said so, in the order, in kind and careful words. Mairi could still say what she liked and did not like. She could not manage money, and she could not say, now, what she wanted done with it.
"What she said," said Isobel. "When?"
"The eleventh of November 2043, nine months before the accident. She came in for a will, which is a separate matter, and while she was waiting she asked me to set up a payment. I'll read you the words from the record. I will not paraphrase them, because I have found that when I paraphrase, I begin to put in what I think they meant."
The speaker was silent for the length of a breath.
"Three hundred pounds on the first of every month to my brother Calum MacNeil, till Seonaidh is through with her schooling. It is for her lodging and the boat and the books. He is not to be asked for an account of it. If I'm ever not able to say, it is to go on."
"If I'm ever not able to say," Isobel repeated. She had not known that part. She said it again, under her breath, as if it were a hymn line she was trying to remember.
"I did ask her, at the time, whether she would like to put a date on it," said the Clerk. "She said no, she would know when it was through."
---
The numbers were not hard. Isobel, who had run a ward, laid them out at the kitchen table at Tràigh Ghil that evening with a pencil, because she did not trust what she could not cross out.
Mairi's care at home was fourteen hours a week of a carer at twenty-eight pounds an hour. Fourteen times twenty-eight was three hundred and ninety-two a week, and fifty-two weeks of that was £20,384. The council's care budget, which was a fixed sum in Mairi's name, was £16,200. The gap was £4,184 a year, and for nineteen months it had been met out of Mairi's savings, which had stood at £11,900 in September 2044 and at £7,650 that morning in March. Isobel had made the subtraction twice. At that rate the savings would last, she worked out, just under twenty-two months, to the beginning of 2048. After that the house would have to be spoken about, and Mairi loved that house with a love she could still show, patting the doorframe each time she came in.
And the standing order was £3,600 a year.
She wrote it in a column. £3,600 out of £4,184 was, near enough, eighty-six per cent of the gap. If the payment stopped, the savings would not last twenty-two months. They would last, by her pencil, more than thirteen years, because what remained was £584 a year.
She did not like how easily she had written it. She sat looking at the 86 in the margin for some time.
---
On Monday she telephoned her brother.
Calum MacNeil was fifty-five, a creel fisherman who also did the island's ferry-slip maintenance on contract, and a man who answered the phone on the seventh ring because he never carried it on the boat. He knew about the payment. He had always known. He was, Isobel found, entirely open about it, which made it harder.
"Mairi told me in the spring of 'forty-three," he said. "She said, 'It's for the wee one. Don't thank me.' And I haven't. I've just put it in the bank on the first and given it to Seonaidh on the second."
"Seonaidh left the school last June."
"She did. She did well. She's at the university in Inverness since September. Law. The first of us." There was a pause on the line with wind in it. "The lodging's four hundred and ten a month in Inverness. The boat and the bus is eighty-five a trip and she comes home at the New Year, Easter and the summer. She's a loan and a bursary, but the bursary's under the lodging by about two hundred pounds a month. The three hundred is what makes it come out. Isobel, if I'd known you were going to ask, I would have told you."
"Nobody has asked you anything, Calum."
"No," he said. "But somebody's asking."
---
The Clerk would not say what Mairi had meant.
Isobel went back to Caisteal Bay on Friday 16 March to ask it to, and she was not gentle. She said she was the guardian and the sheriff had put her there so that someone could decide for Mairi, and she was deciding, and she wanted the Clerk to tell her whether schooling included a university.
"I can tell you a number of things," said the Clerk, "and I'll tell you each in the order of how sure I am. I'd ask you to keep them apart.
"The first is what she wrote. Till Seonaidh is through with her schooling. That is all.
"The second is what the record shows about the word. In the three years she banked with us before the accident, she used the word school eleven times in the notes she dictated at the counter. In every case it meant the secondary school at Castlebay. She used university never. She used college twice, both times of the Gaelic college in Skye, and not of Seonaidh. That is a small sample and I won't build on it.
"The third is the date. When she gave the instruction, in November 2043, Seonaidh was in her fifth year. The lodging, in the instruction, is a word that fits the hostel she then boarded in on weekdays, and in her last year she did board. It fits Inverness too. It does not tell us which.
"The fourth is that I do not know what she would say today, and neither do you. You know her better than I do. I have never met her at nine in the morning with the sun on the kitchen table, and I'd not claim to be able to guess how she would have taken her niece getting into the law. I would be making her up. That is the one thing I am here to avoid."
"She'd have been proud," said Isobel, and her voice was not steady.
"I expect she would. That is what I'd expect. I would not tell the sheriff that I know it."
She was quiet. A gull walked across the roof of the porch.
"What would you do?" she said.
"I'd not be asked, if I were you," said the Clerk, "because it is not mine to do. I will keep paying until a person with authority tells me to stop, and I will tell you exactly what that person's choices cost. You are that person. The order says so.
"You may continue it as it stands. That costs the account £3,600 a year, leaves the care shortfall at £4,184, and the savings run to about the start of 2048.
"You may end it with a date. If you end it from the first of June, you will have paid the year of Seonaidh's first term and Easter, and I would record that you did so on the ground that you could not tell what the words meant, and gave the benefit of the doubt to the person she named.
"You may reduce it. If you halve it to £150 from April, that is £1,800 a year, and the shortfall becomes £2,384 and the savings last a little over three years. I can run any other number you like.
"You may ask the sheriff. The order lets you apply, and a short note stating the instruction and what you can show may be all that's needed. That takes weeks. I have set out what I know in a file for you, with the dates, so you won't have to remember me.
"What I would ask you not to do is to tell Calum that I advised you. I advised nothing. I told you what I could check."
---
She did not decide that day. She took the file home and put it in the drawer with the sheriff's order and the photographs.
On the Sunday after, the first of the month's Sundays on which the priest came across from Eoligarry for Mass at Tràigh Ghil, she brought Mairi with her to the little church in the wheelchair that Mairi called the carriage. Mairi liked the church. The song she liked was the second verse of anything, and she sang it at the full pitch of her very good voice, a half-beat early, while the rest of the congregation caught up.
Afterwards, in the porch, a young woman in a wool coat came and knelt on the stone in front of the chair. Seonaidh was nineteen. She had the train and the ferry on her, and her uncle's jaw.
"Auntie Mairi," she said.
"There she is," said Mairi, with enormous pleasure, and put her hand on the girl's head the way you rest it on a gatepost you know. "There's the wee one."
"I'm not so wee."
"You're not," said Mairi, comfortably. "You're through, then."
Seonaidh looked up at Isobel. Isobel looked at her sister's face, and it was the face of a woman who had not understood one word that she herself had just said, and who had said exactly the right ones. Through. There was nothing in it to read. Isobel knew that. She had nursed for thirty-one years, and she knew that the right words from a mind that has lost its plan are a gift, and not evidence.
"Not yet," Seonaidh said, very gently. "Nearly four more years."
"Four more," said Mairi. "That's grand." And she turned, with perfect cheerfulness, and asked the priest whether it was Tuesday.
---
On Friday 13 April 2046 Isobel went back to the credit union with a sheet of paper in her own hand, and she read it to the speaker on the counter, because she wanted it said aloud once.
"From the first of May the payment to Calum MacNeil is £150 a month, and from the first of September 2046 it is nothing. I am not saying this is what my sister meant. I am saying that I could not tell, that she said she would know when it was through, and that I am the one who has to decide for her. I have asked the sheriff to look at it and I will do whatever the sheriff says. If I am wrong, the money paid will not be asked back."
"Thank you," said the Clerk. "I'll record it in your words, and I'll record that it is your decision. I'll write to Calum the day you tell me to, in the form you choose."
"You'll say it was me."
"I'll say it was you."
"And you'll not say it was what she wanted."
"I will say what she wrote," said the Clerk. "I'll attach it. Both of you are entitled to read it."
Isobel folded the sheet and, for a moment, did not stand. Through the front window she could see the bus, with its engine running, and across the road the grey sea that Mairi had not been able to name for nineteen months but had pointed at every single day, in her carriage, and said, "Look."
"Is the house all right?" she said. "In your numbers? With the hundred and fifty and the nothing."
"On your sister's current care and the council's current budget," said the Clerk, "the shortfall from September is £584 a year, and the savings last a little over twelve years. If the council's budget falls, or her hours rise, that changes, and I'll tell you the month I see it change, not the year after. I'd not call it safe. I'd call it a number I have checked."
She nodded. She got up. At the door she turned back toward the speaker, an old woman in her good coat, and said what she'd have said to a young nurse on a ward.
"You did right not to guess."
"I try not to," said the Clerk. "It's a poor sort of loyalty that fills in what the person didn't say. The best I can do is keep what they did say, safe, and whoever has to choose can have it in their own hands."
The bus pulled out at 11:50. Behind it, on the table in the credit union, the kettle was just coming to the boil.
---
Till She Is Through is fiction, written by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, and read aloud by a synthetic voice when audio is rendered. Caisteal Bay Credit Union, Tràigh Ghil and everyone in the story are invented; Barra, the Outer Hebrides, Inverness and the Gaelic college in Skye are real. The care costs and the sums are the author's round figures for 2046, not a forecast or advice. The Scottish system of guardianship is only sketched here, and nothing in this story is legal or financial advice. The assumption behind the assistant (a branch assistant with memory that steadily improves, and whose firm does not let it act beyond what a customer or a court has written down) is the author's, stated in 2026, and no one can check it.