Short story · part 1 of 2
Part one
You’re picking up where you left off.
The message came in on a Tuesday, at 9.47 p.m. I remember because I had just switched on the dishwasher and the clock on the oven was still blinking, as it always did after a power cut, because nobody in our house ever bothers to reset it.
“Françoise — voice message — 0:38”.
Françoise is my mother-in-law. She never sends me voice messages. She sends me cards for my birthday, with a twenty-euro note inside “for a little treat”, as if I were still twelve, and she has called me “my girl” for fourteen years, ever since the day Thomas introduced me to her in her kitchen in Gembloux. She never loved me. She never hated me either. She tolerated me, with that exhausting politeness of people who have decided once and for all that you are not good enough for their son.
I thought she had pressed the wrong button. I hit play while I wiped the table.
“Thomas, darling, it’s Mum. I can’t call you, your father’s right here. Right, listen. The notary has confirmed for Friday, two o’clock. She suspects nothing. You tell her it’s for the mortgage, for the interest rate, she signs anything you put in front of her, you know that. After that the house is yours, and Laetitia can move in with the little one before Christmas. Delete this message. Love you.”
Then a small sound, a phone being put down on a table.
I stood in the middle of the kitchen with the sponge in my hand. The dishwasher began to fill. In the living room, the television was talking to itself about a football match. Thomas was in the shower upstairs. I could hear the water running above my head.
I played the message again. Once. Twice. The third time, the screen said: “This message was deleted”.
She had realised. Too late.
I need to tell you about the house.
We bought it nine years ago, in Grand-Leez: an old stone farmhouse with an orchard and a barn that Thomas wanted to turn into a workshop. It was too expensive for us. My father had just died. He left me what he had put aside all his life working at the quarry: eighty-seven thousand euros. I put all of it into the house. Thomas put his salary into the mortgage. At the notary’s that day we signed half and half, and in the corridor Thomas kissed me and said: “Your father would be proud.”
I planted the roses along the wall. I repainted the shutters, two summers running. Our two children, Lucas and Emma, learned to walk in that house.
And on Friday at two o’clock, I was supposed to give it away to a woman called Laetitia. With “the little one”.
What little one?
Thomas came downstairs in a T-shirt, hair wet, whistling. He opened the fridge, took out a beer and kissed me on the temple, the way he has for fourteen years.
“You all right? You look funny.”
“Tired.”
“By the way,” he said, flipping the cap off his bottle, “I spoke to the notary. About the mortgage, you know, the remortgage. We’ve got an appointment on Friday at two. We just both need to sign. It’ll save us nearly two hundred euros a month. Can you get the time off?”
He said it while reading the label on his beer. Perfectly natural. I looked at him, this man I had slept beside for fourteen years, and I understood that I had no idea who he was.
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll ask for the afternoon.”
“You’re the best.”
He went back to his match. I went up to the bathroom, locked the door and sat on the edge of the bath. I didn’t cry. That was what surprised me most. I was cold, that was all. A cold that started in my stomach and crept up to my shoulders.
On Wednesday, I did something I had never done in fourteen years: I went through his things.
I didn’t know the code to his phone. But I knew the password for our joint bank account, and I knew Thomas also had an account of his own, “for work”, whose statements came by post in an envelope he always took to the office. I also knew he kept his papers in the barn, in a metal cabinet he said was just for his equipment invoices.
The cabinet wasn’t locked. Why would it be? I never snooped.
There were equipment invoices, it was true. And underneath them, a blue cardboard folder.
Inside, a photocopy of our title deed. A draft deed drawn up by a notary’s office in Wavre that I had never heard of. I read it three times before I understood what I was looking at. It wasn’t a remortgage. It was a “transfer of undivided rights”. I was transferring my half of the house to Thomas. For one symbolic euro, “in settlement of joint debts”.
I didn’t have a single debt.
Under the draft deed there was a photo. A real, printed photo, the kind nobody makes any more. Thomas, on a beach I didn’t recognise, with a blonde woman with short hair and a little boy on his shoulders. The little boy was laughing, mouth wide open, both hands in Thomas’s hair.
He had Thomas’s eyes. He had Lucas’s eyes.
On the back of the photo, in blue biro, a woman’s round handwriting: “Our four years. Thank you for everything. L.”
Four years. The little boy was four, or their story was four years old. Or older. I remembered the “seminars” in Knokke, the “stocktakes” on Saturdays, the second phone he said was for work. I remembered the Christmas he turned up at my parents’ at ten at night because of “a problem on site”.
I photographed every page with my phone. I put everything back exactly where it had been, the blue folder under the invoices, the photo under the draft deed, and I closed the cabinet carefully, mindful of the little creak of the door.
Then I went to pick the children up from school, as usual. Emma showed me a drawing of the house with a smiling sun. I found it so beautiful that I had to pull over at the side of the road to breathe.
On Wednesday evening and Thursday, I played the most normal woman in the world. I made lasagne. I asked Thomas how his day had been. I laughed at one of his jokes. He noticed nothing. Fourteen years of marriage, and he noticed nothing. That taught me something too.
On Thursday at lunchtime, I made a phone call. Just one. I made it from the car, in the supermarket car park, with the engine off and the windows shut.
On Thursday evening, Françoise rang the landline. That never happened. Thomas answered and went out into the garden to talk. When he came back, he asked me, very casually:
“Mum says she sent you a voice message by mistake on Tuesday. Something for me. Did you listen to it?”
He was smiling. He was watching my hands.
“A voice message? I saw a notification, but it had gone by the time I tried to open it. What was it?”
“Nothing. Something about Dad’s birthday. A surprise.”
“Oh. Well, I didn’t hear anything, so your surprise is safe.”
He laughed, relieved. He kissed my neck. I put my hand on his arm and left it there, just long enough for him to believe me.
On Friday, at 1.55 p.m., we were sitting in the waiting room of the notary’s office in Wavre. A beige room, with a plastic plant and last year’s interiors magazines. Thomas had put on his good shirt, the blue one. He was tapping his foot.
“You’ll see, it’ll take ten minutes,” he said. “You sign, and we’ll go for a drink on the main square to celebrate our two hundred euros.”
At two o’clock sharp, the notary came to fetch us. A man of about sixty, round glasses, very courteous. In his office, on the big wooden table, the documents were already laid out in a row, with little yellow Post-its where we had to sign.
“Madam, sir,” said the notary, “we are here for the transfer of madam’s undivided rights in the property situated in Grand-Leez…”
“For the mortgage,” Thomas cut in quickly, with a wink at the notary. “That’s just the jargon, love, don’t worry. It’s only a formality for the bank.”
The notary looked at him a second too long. Then he turned the document towards me.
“If madam would care to read the deed before signing…”
“She trusts me,” said Thomas.
He picked up the pen, a fine black and gold pen lying on the desk pad, took off the cap and held it out to me. He was smiling. I had loved that smile for fourteen years.
“Sign there, sweetheart. At the bottom, next to the Post-it.”
I took the pen.
I looked at the page, the yellow Post-it, the dotted line. I looked at Thomas. I thought of my father, of his hands worn rough by the quarry stone, of his eighty-seven thousand euros saved one week at a time for thirty years.
Then I put the tip of the pen to the paper.