Annelies's Study

The key had lived in the same drawer for three years, nudged aside whenever Anselm needed room for a receipt. He opened it perhaps once a month since the funeral, closed it again without lifting the key free, and told himself the delay was respect rather than a decision he kept declining to make.

This morning it sat in his palm instead, cold, heavier than a key that size had any right to be. Jo stood a step behind him on the landing, coat buttoned, saying nothing. One broken rule; one key handed over the day before. She knew when his silence wanted company, and when it wanted to be left alone.

The door itself was plain and white, like every other door on this floor, which had always struck him as the cruellest thing about it.

He put the key into the lock at last, and slowly turned it.

· · ·Scene break

The room exhaled at him the way sealed rooms did — dust and old paper, and beneath it, unmistakably hers, the soap she had used for fifteen years and that no one had thought to replace on the shelf by the basin, because no one had come in to notice it needed replacing.

Nothing had been moved. That was the thing that undid him before he had taken three steps inside: not what was there, but that all of it sat where she had left it, mid-sentence, mid-list, a life interrupted rather than concluded. A cardigan over the back of her chair. A cup, long dry, with a ring at the bottom the colour of the coffee it had once held. Her reading glasses, folded, on top of a stack of auction catalogues she had never got round to filing.

Her handwriting was everywhere else in the room too, once he made himself look for it rather than around it. A wall calendar, turned to a month four years gone, with a Rijksmuseum lecture circled twice. A stack of index cards for a cataloguing project she had never finished, the corners softened from handling. Marginal notes in the spines of books he had never once opened, initials and dates and the private shorthand he had watched her use for eighteen years without ever quite learning to read it himself.

“You don’t have to stay for this part,” he said, not looking at Jo, because looking at her while he said it would have made it a request rather than what it actually was, which was permission to leave if the room turned out to be more than either of them had bargained for.

“I’m not going anywhere.” She said it the way she said everything true, without any weight added to make it sound like more than a fact. “You don’t have to watch me do this either, if it’s easier not to.”

“I’d rather watch.” He meant it, and heard, saying it aloud, how strange a thing it was to admit wanting company in the one room in the house he had spent three years keeping entirely to himself.

She set her bag down just inside the door and touched nothing yet, standing still in the middle of the room the way she had stood still in front of the painting on the first day, letting a thing be only itself before she started taking it apart.

He watched her look rather than search — there was a difference, he was learning, between a person hunting for something and a person actually seeing what was in front of them — and thought, not for the first time, that grief had never once been handed to him by anyone with this much patience.

Jo began with the shallow boxes stacked beneath the desk rather than the ledgers themselves, starting at the edge of a thing rather than its centre, the way she always did. Correspondence first — gallery business, mostly, insurance renewals, a restorer’s invoice from Els with a note in the margin thanking her for a rush job — read and set aside in the order she’d found it, nothing skipped, nothing assumed unimportant because it looked ordinary. Anselm watched her do it and understood, for the first time, that this was not delay. It was the only way she knew to be sure she hadn’t missed the one page that mattered, buried among a hundred that didn’t.

The desk by the window held Annelies’s ledgers in a row, spines out, dated along the top edge in ink gone the same brown as the initials in the gallery corridor downstairs. He had catalogued paintings beside her for eighteen years and never once opened one of them, on the theory — thin, he saw now, standing in front of them — that a cataloguer’s private notebook belonged to her in a way the gallery’s public ledgers never had.

“May I?” Jo asked, one hand hovering over the first spine.

“You have the key. I think we’re past may I.”

She worked the way she had worked at the trestle downstairs, one volume at a time, reading each page rather than skimming for a name, and he made himself sit in the chair by the window rather than stand at her shoulder, because hovering was what he did when he wanted an outcome he could not actually control, and he had promised himself, climbing the stairs, that this room would not get that from him.

Through the gap in the curtain he could see the gallery’s front window three floors below, and the single spotlit chair in it that half of Amsterdam had probably decided, by now, was some kind of statement.

It wasn’t. Annelies had sat in that chair for the last eight months of her life, on the days the desk upstairs was too much and the stairs down were more than she could manage twice, watching the canal because the study window faced the wrong way for it and she had refused, on principle, to spend her good hours facing a wall. He had never told anyone that. He had left the chair where she’d left it and put a light on it, because an empty chair with nothing on it looked, eventually, like carelessness, and he had not had it in him to explain to a stream of well-meaning visitors that it was the opposite of that.

Jo’s phone was on silent; his was not, and it rang twice before he silenced it without looking, then rang again almost at once, insistent in the way that meant Sanne had already tried once and had no intention of being put off a second time.

“I need to take this,” he said, and stepped out onto the landing rather than answer it in the room, because whatever else this hour was, it was not somewhere he wanted his daughter’s voice arriving uninvited.

“Papa. Els says you’ve had the study open since this morning.” Sanne’s voice had the flatness she used when she had already decided how a conversation would go before starting it. “Is that true?”

“It’s paperwork, Sanne. Nothing you need to worry about.”

“You said that about the export licence too, and then it turned out to be a gap ending with somebody investigating Mama’s work for fraud.” A pause, and behind it he could hear a corridor, machines, someone else’s voice on a tannoy. “I’m not asking you to tell me everything today. I know you won’t. I’m asking you to stop deciding, on my behalf, which parts of my own mother I get to find out about, and when.”

“I’m not deciding that.”

“You are. You’ve been deciding it since the funeral, and mostly I’ve let you, because it was easier than fighting you for it, and because some weeks I genuinely didn’t want to know.” Her voice didn’t rise; it went very level, the way his own did when he meant something completely. “I don’t get a vote on whether you tell me things about her, Papa. I never have. I’m telling you I’d like one.”

He stood on the landing with the phone against his ear and no ready answer, because every answer he reached for was a version of the same reassurance he had been giving her for three years, and it occurred to him, for the first time, that reassurance had never once been what she actually wanted from him.

“I’ll call you tonight,” he said, which was not an answer either, and she let him have it, which told him she had noticed that too and had decided, for now, to let it stand.

He went back into the study to find Jo sitting on the floor beside the desk, one ledger open across her knees, her face doing the particular kind of nothing it did when she had found something and was still deciding how to say it.

“What is it.”

“Two things.” She turned the ledger so he could see it without taking it from her. “This page.” A single sheet, torn out cleanly along the gutter, close enough to the binding that only someone looking for it would have noticed the ledger’s rhythm was broken there — every other page numbered in Annelies’s hand, this one gap unmarked and uncounted, as though whoever had removed it had gone back afterwards and made sure the absence wouldn’t announce itself. “And this.”

She held up a slim bundle of cheque stubs, rubber-banded at the back of the same drawer, a dozen of them across eighteen months, each one made out to the same three letters — HKB — with no company name written anywhere, no explanation, only a date and a sum in Annelies’s own hand, growing smaller and more hurried in the later ones, as though the writing itself had been trying to take up less room in the world.

“I don’t know it,” Anselm said, before she’d asked. “HKB. I’ve never seen it on an invoice, a gallery account, anything. I’d remember.”

“You’re sure.”

“I ran this gallery’s books beside her for eighteen years. I’d remember three letters that came up a dozen times.” He said it and heard, saying it, how much less sure he actually was than he wanted to sound, because eighteen years of running books beside someone was not the same as having read every page she had ever written — a distinction he had apparently needed a locked room to teach him.

Jo didn’t press it. She set the stubs down where she’d found them, photographed the torn page from three angles before touching it again, and said nothing further, which he had learned by now meant she was thinking rather than finished.

He sat back down in the chair by the window, the one that faced away from the gallery and its own spotlit twin three floors below, and made himself say the thing he had not said since the day he handed her the key.

“I told you I found an irregularity a year ago. I didn’t tell you what it was, because I hadn’t looked at it properly even then — only well enough to know I didn’t want to.” He nodded at the ledger still open across her knees. “It was that page. Not what was on it — I never got that far. Only that it was gone, that the tear was too clean to be an accident, and that I closed the ledger and put it back on the shelf and told myself it was nothing, because Annelies had been dead eleven months and I didn’t have room in me yet for it to be something.”

“And now?”

“Now I have a name I don’t recognise, in her handwriting, paid a dozen times over a year and a half I can’t account for, and no idea what it means.” He looked at her properly, for the first time since she’d come up the stairs, and let the rest of it come out unmanaged. “I’ve spent three years telling myself I was protecting people from a story I hadn’t actually looked at. I think I was protecting myself from finding out I might not like how it ends.”

Jo held his gaze a moment longer than either of them was used to, and offered him nothing to make it easier, which he was beginning to understand was the truest kind of company she knew how to give.

“Then we’ll look at it properly,” she said. “Both of it. Today.”

He nodded, with nothing further to add, and for a moment the room simply held the two of them, the torn page, the three letters neither could place — a quiet that felt, for the first time since the funeral, like a room he was standing in rather than one he was managing from a careful distance.

Jo was already reaching for the next volume on the shelf when something slid loose from between its back pages and dropped to the floorboards between them, face down. Neither of them moved. Then she picked it up by the corner, the way she picked up everything now, and turned it over.

It was a receipt, foxed at the edges, older than anything else in the drawer, carrying the same three letters as the bundle she’d already found. HKB. Underneath, in a hand that was not Annelies’s — smaller, harder, a stranger’s hand entirely — someone had written a single word and then crossed it out so thoroughly that only its shape remained, not quite legible and not quite gone.

Anselm looked at it a long moment and did not reach for anything to make it easier, for himself or for her. “That’s not her writing.”

“No.” Jo photographed it from three angles, the way she photographed everything, and did not tell him yet that a second hand in Annelies’s private ledger frightened her more than anything else they had found in that room.