Chapter 2

The Woman Who Kept the Garden

Her name was Yvette and she was seventy-nine.

— I saw you arrive. I said to myself: that's the girl.

She said it as a plain fact, standing in the doorway, hands in the pockets of an apron, a dark corridor behind her and the smell of a house where somebody cooks every day.

— You know me?

— I've seen your photographs. All your photographs. The one from your exams, the one from your brother's wedding, the one where your hair is short.

Margot felt the ground shift slightly.

— My grandmother had photographs of me. Here.

— She had photographs of everybody. Come in, it's freezing.

They crossed the road — eight metres — and Yvette opened Marthe's house with her own key, without asking, with the movement of somebody who has been doing it for forty years.

— You have a key.

— Of course I have a key. Who else would have aired the place?

The kitchen smelled of wood and old coffee.

It was a room from another age and not ashamed of it: a cast-iron Godin stove, a stoneware sink, a two-part dresser, a small-checked oilcloth, and beams so low that Margot, who is one metre seventy-two, instinctively ducked as she came in.

Yvette turned on the tap, let it run for thirty seconds, and filled a stovetop coffee pot.

— The water is still good, she said. It comes from the spring.

On the dresser, lined up, there were indeed photographs — a dozen, in mismatched frames.

Margot at six, on a sledge, at Spa. Margot at seventeen, in Guide uniform, looking furious. Her brother Nicolas on his wedding day. Her mother, young, before — twenty perhaps, on a station platform, in a coat too big for her.

And a photograph she had never seen in her life.

Her grandmother at thirty or thirty-five, laughing, her arm round another woman's shoulders.

A dark-haired woman, about the same age, laughing too. They were outside, in front of a low wall, with something behind them that looked like a pond or a piece of low sky.

Margot picked up the frame.

She had never seen her grandmother laugh like that. She had never seen her laugh at all, in fact: her grandmother smiled, politely, often, and that is not the same thing. Here her mouth was open and her eyes almost shut, and her head tipped slightly back.

— Who is that?

Yvette put the coffee pot on the table.

— I don't think it's for me to tell you.

— Yvette.

The old woman sat down, slowly, the way you sit when your knees hurt.

— Your grandmother came here three times a year. Always alone. She would stay eight or ten days, open the shutters, walk, and go back. That went on for fifty years.

— Three times a year.

— Three. November, June, and February.

Margot noted the months without knowing why.

— I started cutting her grass in nineteen eighty-six, when my husband died and she told me it would get me out of the house. — Yvette raised one shoulder. — She was right. It got me out for thirty-nine years.

— Were you friends?

The question floated for a moment above the oilcloth.

— We knew each other, said Yvette. That is something else and it is a great deal.

She poured the coffee, very black, into two cups that did not match.

— She never told me. And I never asked. We don't ask, here.

— Why?

— Because there are four houses on a plateau, Mademoiselle Devroye. If you start asking, you then have to live with the answers all winter, and the winter lasts five months.

Margot took a sip. The coffee was too strong and exactly right.

— Yvette, my mother told me not to come.

The old woman looked up.

— That doesn't surprise me.

— You know her?

— I saw her once. — Yvette put down her cup. — A very long time ago. She must have been seventeen, eighteen. She came one Sunday morning on the bus from Verviers, stood in front of the house without going in, and left on the afternoon bus.

— She didn't go in?

— She stood at the gate for four hours, said Yvette. I watched her from my window. I thought: that one is checking something.

Margot put her cup down a little too fast.

— Was my grandmother here?

— No. That was the odd part.

They talked a while longer, about ordinary things: the roof that would last another ten years, the heating that would need bleeding, the electricity supplier who would have to be told.

Then Yvette looked at the window, the one facing the plateau, and said in a different voice:

— She said something to me, the last time. In March. She knew she wouldn't be coming back.

— What do you mean, she knew?

— You know, said Yvette. At a certain age you know perfectly well, and the people around you pretend not to understand, which is tiring.

She stirred her coffee without having put sugar in it.

— She said: “Yvette, if the girl comes, let her open the chest of drawers herself.”