Chapter 3

Forty-Three Letters

The chest of drawers was in the upstairs bedroom, the one whose curtain had moved — because the window did not close properly, Yvette had explained, and the wind came under it.

It was a ten-square-metre room with an iron bedstead, a red eiderdown, a chair, and a mirrored wardrobe whose glass had lost its silvering in places.

On the bedside table, a book. Margot picked it up: a library novel, the borrowing card still glued inside the cover, due back at the Verviers library forty-eight years ago.

The chest of drawers stood under the window. Three drawers.

The third key was the right one.

The first drawer held linen: two folded nightdresses, handkerchiefs, a cardigan. The second, ordinary papers — electricity receipts, a boiler service book, two postcards from Nicolas dated from the nineties.

The bottom drawer was full of letters.

They were tied in bundles with butcher's string. Margot took them out one by one and laid them on the bed, and realised at the third bundle that she was holding her breath.

Forty-three envelopes, stamped, addressed — and sealed.

None had ever been posted.

No postmark. No crease. Not a trace of post-office ink. The stamps were stuck on straight, in the corner, the way you stick them when you intend to send.

They all bore the same name.

Madame Irène Sarlet
12, rue des Combattants
Verviers

Margot sat down on the floor, her back against the bed, the letters on her knees.

The postmarks were missing but the stamps told the time: the first were stamps from nineteen seventy, with the young King Baudouin. The last were modern ones, from three or four years ago, with flowers and the word prior.

Fifty years of letters written to the same woman, and never sent.

She sorted them by stamp, which took her twenty minutes, kneeling on the floorboards, with the wind coming under the window.

Then she opened the oldest.

Her hands were not very steady. She had to try twice with her fingernail, because she did not want to tear it.

4 November 1973

Irène,

I have bought the house. The one on the plateau, you know the one. The one we stopped at in June because you said that here, you cannot lie to anyone, there is no one.

I paid for it with my mother's money. Guy thinks I invested the sum. He never checks anything, as you know.

There are four rooms and a garden. The roof is sound. The stove smokes but the mason says it is the chimney and that he will come back in the spring. I slept there on Saturday, quite alone, in an empty house, on a mattress on the floor, and I was not frightened for a second, I who am frightened of everything.

I do not yet know what I shall do with it. I know only that I wanted a place whose key belonged to nobody but me.

I think of you every day. It is silly to write it and I shall write it anyway, since you will not read it.

Margot read the last line three times.

Since you will not read it.

She knew. From the very first letter, she knew she would not send them.

And yet she had put a stamp on it.

Margot looked at the stamp — one franc fifty, the king in profile, slightly yellowed — and something began turning in her head without finding anywhere to settle.

You do not put postage on a letter to yourself. A letter to yourself you keep in a notebook. The stamp is the gesture of sending; it is even the only moment at which you truly decide.

She got up, her legs numb, and went to the window.

The plateau was black. No street lighting, no headlights, nothing. Only, far off to the left, three orange lights that must have been Baelen or Membach.

Her grandmother had looked at exactly that, three times a year for fifty years, holding a letter she would not send.

Margot picked up the next one, from the 1974 bundle, and saw that it was stamped as well.

And the one after.

And the one after that.

Forty-three times, a woman had written a letter, folded it, put it in an envelope, written an address, stuck on a stamp — and had not gone to the postbox.

Margot counted the stamps by decade, because she needed to do something with her hands.

Eleven letters in the seventies. Nine in the eighties. Seven in the nineties. Six in the two thousands. Five in the twenty-tens. And five for the last five years.

It fell away, then rose again. A woman of eighty-five was writing as much as a woman of forty-five.

This was not a grief burning out. It was something else, which had started burning again towards the end.

Downstairs, the door creaked.

Margot thought first of Yvette and nearly called out. Then she heard the steps in the hall, then on the stairs — not Yvette's, too fast, too heavy, without the pause on the fourth tread.

She gathered the letters against her in an instinctive movement, and hated herself for doing it.

The bedroom door opened.

Her mother stood in the doorway, coat still buttoned, car keys in her hand, out of breath from climbing the stairs too fast.

They looked at each other.

Margot had time to think, very clearly, something absurd: she knows where the bedroom is. She didn't look for it. She came straight up.

Her mother looked at the letters. Then at her daughter. Then at the letters again.

And she said, in a voice Margot had never heard from her:

— How many are there?