An Address That Does Not Exist

The notary had the voice of a man who has been repeating the same thing for thirty years.

— The property is situated at Sainte-Adresse, at a place known as Les Fagnes Hautes. Land registry parcel B-417. The deceased had owned it since nineteen seventy-three.

Margot looked up.

— Seventy-three?

— That is correct.

— My grandmother had a house for fifty-two years and nobody knew?

Maître Colson adjusted his glasses with the patience of somebody who has lived through this scene before.

— Mademoiselle Devroye, I can only tell you what appears in the deeds. What your family knew or did not know is not my affair.

The office smelled of paper and floor polish. On the wall hung an aerial photograph of Verviers from before the factories closed, and on the desk lay a leather blotter worn into a half-moon at the exact spot where thirty years of jacket sleeves had rubbed.

Margot looked at the deed. A typed page, with characters that rose and fell slightly, the way old machines made them.

Sale of a dwelling house with garden, situated at Les Fagnes Hautes.

Her grandmother had died in May, at ninety-one, at the hospital in Verviers, on a Tuesday afternoon, with her daughter and her granddaughter in the room. Forty-one people had come to the funeral. Nobody, that day, had mentioned a house.

He pushed a brown envelope across the desk.

— The keys. Three of them. Your grandmother specified that they went together.

— That they went together?

— That is the term she used. I noted it down because it struck me as odd.

Margot opened the envelope. A modern door key, an older key with a wide bit, and a small flat furniture key, the kind that opens a chest of drawers or a clock.

In the car, Margot rang her mother.

— Maman. The notary says Gran had a house in the Ardennes.

A silence. Not a silence of surprise. The silence of somebody deciding what to answer.

— It's a mistake.

— He has the land registry parcel, Maman. He has the deed from seventy-three.

— Margot, your grandmother was ninety-one and she wasn't all there at the end. She must have signed anything put in front of her.

— She bought it when she was forty.

Another silence. Longer.

She heard, behind her mother, the sound of a tap being turned off. Then nothing at all, which meant her mother had dried her hands and gone through to the living room.

Then, in a voice that did not match the words at all:

— Don't go there.

Margot looked at the phone. Her mother's name on the screen, the call in progress, the seconds ticking on.

— Why?

— Because I'm asking you not to.

— That isn't a reason.

— In this family it is.

She hung up first, which she had never done in her life.

Margot is thirty-four and a physiotherapist in Namur, in a three-person practice on the second floor of a townhouse with a staircase that her patients over seventy climb breathing hard.

She works a great deal. She has lived alone for two years, since Bastien left saying a sentence she did not understand at the time and understands better and better: you never ask for anything.

She rescheduled four patients and went that Saturday.

Two and a half hours' drive, the last three on a country road that narrowed at every bend. After Baelen the landscape changed all at once: the hedges disappeared, the trees all leaned the same way, and the brown moorland opened on both sides to a horizon that did not end.

The satnav gave up eight kilometres from the destination. She finished with a paper map bought at a petrol station, as in another age, unfolded on the steering wheel at a crossroads with no sign.

Les Fagnes Hautes was not a village. It was four houses and a chapel, set on a plateau where the wind never stopped.

It was two in the afternoon and there was mist three hundred metres off, a low slow mist that dragged across the peat as though looking for something.

Her grandmother's house was the last one. Grey stone, slate roof, shutters closed. In front, a garden overrun but not wild: somebody had tended it, and not so long ago. The grass was high but cut clean along the path, and against the wall there was a woodpile stacked in regular rows.

She got out. The wind took her from the side and blew her hair across her face.

There was no sound at all. That is what struck her first: no traffic, no dog, no aircraft. The wind passed over the moor and made a continuous, very low noise that after a few seconds resembled silence.

At the house opposite, a curtain was drawn. In the third, a thread of smoke came from the chimney and flattened at once.

Margot got back into the car, engine off, for two or three minutes.

She thought of her grandmother coming here, alone, by train and then taxi, or by car in the days when she drove. She tried to picture the woman she had known in an apron, in a kitchen in Verviers, with her biscuits in a tin and her clock that struck the half-hours.

She could not manage it at all.

Then she saw the curtain move at the upstairs window.