The Register

I left Jambes at 9.20, with the death notice in the glove compartment and a black coat I hadn't worn since my mother's funeral.

An hour and twenty minutes' drive. The motorway to Liège, then Verviers, then the exit for Spa and the main road that drops into the valley between the fir trees. It was raining half-heartedly, a fine rain that didn't justify the wipers and didn't let you do without them. I hadn't put the radio on. I rehearsed in my head what I would say if anyone asked who I was. I couldn't come up with anything better than the truth, and the truth fitted into one sentence that meant nothing: I have the same name as her.

I parked at 10.41, behind the thermal baths, and walked.

I hadn't been to Spa for more than ten years. The town was the same: Belle Époque façades with cast-iron balconies, cream, ochre, eau-de-Nil, all of them wet, hotels with English names, gleaming cobbles. Near the Pierre-le-Grand pouhon the air smelled of iron. On Rue Royale I walked past the casino. It was about to open. Through the glass doors you could see empty rooms, chandeliers lit for nobody and tables still under their covers. A man in a waistcoat was hoovering between the machines.

I took Rue du Marché to get to the church. Halfway along there was a window with three shelves of jam jars and, over the door, a sign painted in cream letters on a green ground: Chez Claire. The shutter was half down. On the door, a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve said: “Closed due to bereavement”. It was handwritten, in black felt tip.

I didn't stop. I only counted the jars on the middle shelf as I went by. Twenty-two.

The church of Notre-Dame-et-Saint-Remacle stands on Place Achille Salée, a big grey stone church with a massive tower and doors too tall for the people who walk through them. At 10.50 there were already people on the forecourt, furled umbrellas, cigarettes being finished quickly.

Under the porch, on a table covered with a white cloth, someone had placed a book of condolences, open, with a ballpoint pen tied to it by a piece of string. People were queuing to sign. I queued too. It's what you do.

I read the pages while I waited. “Thank you for twenty years of scones.” “We miss you already, our Claire.” “From all of class 5B, for Emma.” “I'll still come for my tea, I promise you.” Names from Spa, from Theux, from Jalhay. Old people's handwriting, shaky, and schoolchildren's, very upright.

When my turn came, I took the pen and signed the way I sign everything: surname, first name, town. I wrote “Claire Mathy, Namur”, let go of the pen, and it was only as I straightened up that I saw what I had just written, in the register of a dead woman who bore the same name.

I didn't cross it out. You don't cross things out in a register.

Behind the table, near the door, stood the people who don't sign. An elderly lady looking for her glasses in her handbag. Two teenagers who didn't know what to do with their hands. A man with a short grey beard, a tweed cap on his head and brown leather gloves, leaning against the pillar, who watched me sign and let me go past with a small gesture when I went in.

The church was full. I counted the pews out of habit: twenty-eight on each side, six to eight people to a pew. More than three hundred people, not counting those who stayed standing at the back, against the confessionals, in wet coats. The whole of Spa was there, or the part of Spa that had had tea on Rue du Marché at one time or another.

There was no coffin.

In front of the altar, on a wooden easel, an enlarged photo: the same one as in the missing-person appeal. The woman laughing as she turned her head, in front of a hedge, in autumn. Around it, candles, a dozen or so, and at their foot something I had never seen at a funeral: jars of jam. Dozens of jars, lined up on the steps, pressed close together. The customers had brought them. I moved a few steps closer, along the side aisle, and read some of the labels: “Rhubarb and ginger, June 2025”. “Quince, October 2024”. “Seville orange”. They were handwritten, in a small, slanting, pointed hand.

I stayed at the back, by the holy-water stoup, standing. It was the only place where I could see without being seen, and leave without disturbing anyone.

In the front row there was a man of about fifty, tall, broad-shouldered, in a dark wool jacket. He had short grey hair and a back that had given up. Throughout the service he never raised his head. Next to him, a tiny old lady in a black coat and a felt hat, holding his arm with both hands. And on his other side, a teenage girl.

She stood bolt upright. Not a movement. A black coat too big for her, chestnut hair tied low at the nape. She wasn't crying. She wasn't looking at the photo. Every time the great door opened behind me and let in a latecomer and a little rain, she turned her head towards the back of the church, looked at who was arriving, then faced the altar again.

The third time she turned round, the light from a stained-glass window fell across her face, and I saw it.

At her left temple, a white streak two fingers wide.

I gripped the back of the pew in front of me. A woman turned round, saw how pale I was and made room for me. I sat down.

Sixteen, perhaps. Emma, according to the death notice. Her mother's streak at sixteen. I got mine at thirty. My father, I can't remember; I never knew his hair without it.

The priest was a young man with a clear voice. He didn't say “the deceased”. He said “Claire, whom we have not found”. He spoke of hope, of the fagne, of the mist that takes people and of the families who wait. He said that this was not a funeral but a farewell, and that a farewell ruled nothing out.

Then an old gentleman stood up in the third row. He had come to her place every morning at 8.30 since the tea room opened, in 2011. He told us that she kept the paper for him, that she knew the name of every dog in the street and that she had never taken a holiday. “I asked her once why she never went anywhere,” he said. “She answered: 'But I'm in Spa, Monsieur Hubert. Where would you have me go?'” People laughed, through their tears.

The priest beckoned to the front row. The broad-shouldered man stood up. He walked to the microphone. He unfolded a sheet of paper. He looked at it for ten seconds or so, opened his mouth, and nothing came out. He folded the sheet again, shook his head and went back to his seat. The old lady took his arm again. The girl didn't move.

Vincent, I thought. The partner.

There was singing. I didn't know the words. I looked at the people, row by row, without knowing what I was looking for: a familiar face, a resemblance, someone who would look at me too much. Nobody was looking at me. Everybody was looking at the photo.

So I did the other sum, the one that had brought me there. A hundred and fifty death notices printed. Three hundred people in the church. At least half had come without a card, because in Spa people know these things without being written to. Of the hundred and fifty cards, only one had been sent to Jambes, to a woman nobody here knew. Someone, in this church or elsewhere, had looked up my address, copied it out in purple ink, stuck on a stamp and walked to a postbox. You don't do that by mistake. You do it so that someone will come.

I've come, I thought. Now what?

The service ended at 11.52. People came out slowly, in clusters, holding the door for one another. I was among the first out and stopped on the forecourt, a little apart, under the awning of a house.

The rain had started again. Umbrellas opened one after another on the steps, black, blue, one red. People lingered, not knowing whether they ought to leave. There was no coffin to follow.

I took out my phone and photographed the crowd.

I hadn't planned to. It's a reflex from my job, and it has never left me: when something happens and you don't yet understand what it is, you keep a record. An invoice, a statement, a trace. You'll understand later. I took the photo in landscape, the whole façade, the open door, the steps, three hundred people in black in the rain. It was a little blurred at the edges. I didn't look at it. I put it away.

It was as I put the phone away that I saw Vincent.

He had come back to the porch, alone, by the table with the register. The old lady and the girl were waiting for him at the bottom of the steps, under an umbrella. He was leaning with one hand on the white cloth. He had opened the register and was leafing through it. Slowly, one page after another, reading every name. He stopped at one page. He read it again. He put his finger on a line.

I was twenty metres away. I didn't need to go closer to know which line.

He looked up from the register and looked at the crowd, the steps, the forecourt, the umbrellas, one face after another, like someone searching three hundred people for the woman who has just signed his partner's name.