Chapter 4
The Strawberry House
You’re picking up where you left off.
They let me go home on the Sunday.
Dr Tasiaux came to say goodbye at nine, in her woollen cardigan, with an appointment sheet that she put down on my bag. Every Tuesday, at Godinne, as an outpatient. And a neurology check-up in three weeks.
“You'll be better off at home,” she said. “Familiar places, objects, smells. That's often the way it comes back. Through the body, before the head.”
“And if it doesn't come back?”
“Then you'll live with what you have. Plenty of people live very well with less.”
Antoine came to fetch me at eleven in the pick-up. A big black pick-up, high off the ground, with a tarpaulin over the load bed and a smell of potting compost in the cab. He helped me up, one hand under my elbow, the other holding the door, because the step was high and my whole left side still hurt. He put my bag at my feet. He fastened my seat belt himself, leaning across me without touching me, with the concentration of a surgeon.
When the belt clicked, I closed my eyes for a second. He pretended not to notice.
He drove very slowly. He took the plateau road, then went down as far as the Lustin bridge, and instead of crossing it to get onto the N92, he stayed on the far bank, through Tailfer, and didn't cross the Meuse until the Wépion bridge. It was a detour of at least ten minutes.
I didn't ask why. He didn't explain.
The farmhouse looked like the photo, except that a photo has no smell and no wind.
It sat on the hillside above the Chaussée de Dinant, long and low, grey stone, with dark green shutters and a slate roof still gleaming from the night's rain. Below it, the greenhouses: six long tunnels of glass and plastic lined up down the slope, half of them with misted panes and the other half dark, empty, with rows of hanging gutters where nothing grew any more. At the far end, right at the bottom of the greenhouses, a small white house with a vegetable patch. And beyond all that, down below, the Meuse.
It was wide at that point, and slow, the colour of pewter. A barge was going downstream, loaded with sand, so low in the water it looked about to sink. On the far bank, the limestone cliffs of Tailfer, grey and white, with trees clinging to the cracks, and the railway line at their foot, and a goods train passing in silence, too far away to hear.
“My mother's house,” said Antoine, pointing to the small white house. “Françoise. She'll come up later. Or not.”
He said “or not” without explaining that either.
I followed Antoine from room to room. He named things.
“The kitchen.”
A big room with red terracotta floor tiles, a wood-burning range and an electric cooker side by side, and in the middle a massive oak table, long enough for twelve, scarred with pan burns and knife marks.
“My grandmother's table.”
“The sitting room.”
A sagging leather sofa, a fireplace, shelves full of books in three languages, half of them mine, in Italian and Dutch, with my pencil notes in the margins.
“Your books.”
“The office. There's a lot of paperwork. It's mostly mine.”
“The bathroom. The hot water takes a while.”
I let him do it. He walked ahead of me, slowly, turning round now and then to see if I was following, and opened the doors one by one, like an estate agent who didn't want to sell. He didn't show me upstairs. He stopped at the foot of the wooden staircase, looked up at the landing, and opened a door on the ground floor, at the end of the corridor.
“I've made up the spare room. So you can have some peace.”
It was a small white room, with a painted iron bedstead, a yellow eiderdown, a chest of drawers and a window onto the greenhouses. He had put on clean sheets that still smelled of the iron. He had put a glass on the bedside table, a carafe of water, my tablets, a lamp. He had put a bunch of dried lavender in a jam jar. He had thought of everything, and he stood in the doorway looking as if he were apologising for having thought of everything.
“Thank you,” I said.
“If you need anything, I'm upstairs. Or in the greenhouse.”
He hesitated.
“The back door's never locked. We never lock up round here. The seasonal workers come through.”
“Even at night?”
“Especially at night. Some of them start at four.”
He stayed on the threshold a moment longer, as if he were waiting for something, a question, a word. Then he patted the door frame twice with the flat of his hand, the way a farmer pats a horse's neck, and left. I heard him cross the kitchen, open and close the back door, and go down towards the greenhouses. His boots on the gravel. Then nothing.
In the afternoon I slept. In the evening he made a potato omelette, which we ate facing each other, at the two ends of the oak table, with ten empty places between us. It was still raining, a fine rain that made a sound like crumpled paper on the greenhouse glass. He opened a bottle of sparkling water. He looked at it unhappily.
“Are you allowed a glass of wine?” he asked.
“The neurologist said half a glass. And not every day.”
“There's wine in the cellar. I'll…”
“I'll go,” I said. “I need to walk.”
He half rose. He sat back down.
“The door under the stairs,” he said. “Be careful, it's steep. The light switch is at the bottom, on the right. I've never understood who thought of putting it at the bottom.”
I opened the door under the stairs. A smell came up of cold stone, apples and wine. It was dark, completely dark, a thick darkness, the kind you feel on your skin. The light from the kitchen lit the first two steps, barely, and after that, nothing.
I put my right hand on the wall. It was damp and rough under my fingers. I went down one step. Then another.
The third step moved. I stepped over it.
I carried on to the bottom, in the dark, my hand on the wall, and found the switch on the right, an old porcelain knob that you turn. A bare bulb came on in the ceiling. There were wooden shelves loaded with bottles lying on their sides, crates of apples, a rusty child's bicycle, jars of jam lined up with handwritten labels. I took a bottle of Bordeaux at random. I turned off the light. I went back up the stairs in the dark.
Antoine was at the top.
He was standing at the cellar door, in the light from the kitchen, one hand on the handle. I hadn't heard him get up. He said nothing. He watched me climb, and when I drew level with him, he didn't move aside straight away. He looked at the bottle in my hand, then at the stairs behind me, then at my face, for a very long time, so long that in the end I held the bottle out for him to take.
He took it.
“All right?” he said. “Are you sure?”
It's the only time, in three months, that I heard him ask two questions in a row.
“Yes,” I said. “It's steep, but I'm fine.”
He nodded. He went back to the table. He opened the bottle with a waiter's friend, without a word, poured me half a glass, and didn't pour any for himself. He watched the rain on the windows for the rest of the meal.
Later, when he had gone down to the greenhouse, I wanted to go out onto the terrace. I needed air. The rain had stopped, but it was cold, that damp valley cold that rises off the water at nightfall and goes straight through your clothes.
There were coats hanging on the pegs in the hall. A heavy khaki work jacket, a rain parka, a yellow fisherman's oilskin. And a bottle-green wool coat, fitted, with horn buttons.
I took it off its peg and put it on.
I stayed out on the terrace for a long while, hands in my pockets, looking at the lit greenhouses below. In one of them, the oldest, the one at the end, a lamp glowed behind the condensation. You could make out a figure that didn't move, sitting, elbows on a table. Further off, the Meuse had turned black, with the lights of the railway trembling on it.
In the right-hand pocket of the coat there was a piece of paper folded in four.
I took it out. It was a till receipt, a little limp from the damp. I unfolded it in the light from the kitchen that fell through the window.
At the top, a logo: a small stylised boat, and a name in cursive letters. La Halée. Restaurant barge. Quai de Jambes. Friday 18 September 2026, nine forty p.m. Table 4. Two covers. Two market menus, a bottle of white wine from the Meuse hillsides, two coffees.
I turned the receipt over.
On the back, slantwise, in blue biro, there were four words in a hurried, sloping hand, with a capital T that looped at the top and a dot on the i that was a little dash.
My handwriting.
Tomorrow I tell him.