The crate was pine and we'd had it made outside, by a joiner in Botley, because the crates in the store are plywood and plywood is no good for a journey of that kind, and on the Thursday I went to fetch it with the van and loaded it on my own because Terry was on nights, and it weighed less than it looked, and on the bottom the joiner had put a strip of felt we hadn't asked him for.

Inside went the tissue and over the tissue the foam, and each piece in its own compartment, and the compartments I cut myself on the Friday, thirty-nine compartments, numbered on the outer edge with the archival marker because on the inner edge the ink touches.

And the gloves were two pairs, because the first pair gets damp by the third piece and a damp glove leaves a mark, and I learned that in two thousand and nineteen and I have worn two pairs since, and nobody ever told me to.

On a Saturday there is nobody in the store. There is me and Eleanor, and Eleanor comes because the final check belongs to the registrar and not to the technician.

The Council had decided in July and the museum said it outside in September, together with the Forum, and the delivery was November, and the exact date they were settling with them because the date is theirs to choose, and in six years of this it was the first time a date had been theirs.

Forty were the ones the museum held and thirty-nine the ones going back.

The fortieth was not going back because the provenance was not established, and it was not established because in the record of nineteen eleven the man who brought it in had not written the village, and he had not written it because that day he had done three villages.

And on Monday I was looking for a crate of glass for a loan and I opened the fourth box on the bottom shelf of the back corridor, which is not a collection of mine and I was not cataloguing it, and inside there was a loose page in a hand I know, because you come to know the hands, and on that page there was a list of four entries with a village name beside it, and the second entry was the fortieth.

It was Monday. Today is Saturday.

And in five days I told nobody, and I did not tell them because I wanted to keep it, I did not tell them because in six years of meetings I have never put my hand up, and a thing you have never done you do not do on a Monday at a quarter to five when the room is emptying.

The manifest Eleanor printed on the Thursday, with thirty-nine numbered entries, and under each entry the inventory number and the measurement. A printed manifest you redo in ten minutes. A manifest signed by the registrar you redo in February, because the provenance committee sits in February and not before.

And Eleanor began to read it out loud, entry by entry, number by number, for the final check.

Halfway through she stopped to drink, and she said the thing she always says when she reads a manifest, and she says it without malice, the way you say a rule of the trade: "What is not on the manifest does not exist. And what you write in pencil is not on the manifest."

Then she started again from eighteen.

And she reached thirty-nine and stopped, and when a voice that has been counting for eleven minutes stops the room stays full of that voice for a second, and in that second I had my hand open on the bench and under my hand the page, and the page was warm because the glove was damp and because paper under a palm takes the temperature of the palm, and I could feel the edge of it with my little finger, and the edge was torn along the long side.

"Thirty-nine," Eleanor said, "conforms."

And I pulled my hand away.

I pulled it towards me and the page came with the hand, because it was stuck to the damp glove, and it folded, and I peeled it off with the thumb of the other hand and folded it in two and put it in the pocket of my coat, the left one, where the marker lives, and I put it in with the fold facing down, and then I put both hands on the lid.

The lid was the pine one and it came down slowly because the felt slows it, and I held it with my fingertips to the end, and the line of light between the lid and the crate narrowed, and the tissue inside made a sound of air, and then there was no line.

And Eleanor said "good girl" and went to fetch the seals.

The back corridor is the one behind room three, where they keep the unattributed collections, and the light goes on with the timer switch and stays on five minutes, and when it goes off you are in the dark with the torch on your phone, and I went there at ten past six, when Eleanor had already left.

And the box was the fourth on the bottom shelf and inside are the papers of an Assam officer the museum bought in nineteen fifty-four from a widow, and they are papers with no order and no list, and the page was between a shipping receipt and a sheet of accounts, and I put it back there, in the same place, between those two, with the fold open.

Then I took the label out of the label holder on the front.

And I wrote the inventory number of the fortieth, in pencil, in the bottom right corner of the label, where the white space is, and I wrote it small, and the pencil was the 3B I keep for labels because on card the HB scratches and leaves the groove even when you rub it out.

And I put the label back in the label holder.

And I turned the light off with the switch before it went off by itself, because when it goes off by itself it makes a click you can hear in the corridor from room three.