Chapter 3
The Delacre Tin
You’re picking up where you left off.
Jeanne's house smells of wax, stale tobacco and apples.
I didn't know she still smoked. There's an ashtray on the kitchen windowsill, a proper one, in thick glass, with three Belga stubs stubbed out neatly, and a box of matches from the chip shop beside it, as if she were coming back. The apples are in the pantry, on slatted racks, wrinkled russets lined up by size. She arranged them by size. Of course she did.
I slept here last night, after the funeral, in the spare room where I used to sleep when I was six and where the same orange crocheted bedspread is still on the bed. I didn't close my eyes. Not because of grief. Because of the silence. In Brussels there's always a noise, a siren, a neighbour, the fridge. Here, at two in the morning, the silence is so complete you can hear your own blood, and six hundred metres away, behind three hedges and an orchard, there's a house I could draw the plan of with my eyes shut.
I left the corridor light on. There was only a twenty-five-watt bulb. I watched it until morning.
Mr Hanquet sees me on Monday at nine in his office in Walcourt, a brick town house with a brass plate and a secretary who offers me coffee in a cup and saucer.
He's a man of about sixty, thin, with tortoiseshell glasses that he takes off to read and puts back on to speak, so that he spends the entire meeting handling them. He explains that my grandmother made a handwritten will four years ago, lodged with him, and that she leaves me the house on the rue du Moulin and everything in it. There's a small savings account, which will go on the fees. There are no other heirs with a claim: my father was her only son.
“She added a rather unusual clause,” he says.
He takes off his glasses. He reads.
“‘I ask that my granddaughter Lise empty the house herself. Herself, and no one else before her. I ask that no one be let in, neither family nor anyone from the village, until she has seen everything.’”
He puts his glasses back on.
“I ought to tell you that your stepfather came by the office on Friday the tenth, the day after she died. He offered to see to the clearing of the house with his company's lorries, to spare you the trouble, since you live so far away. He seemed genuinely keen to help. I read him this clause, and he understood perfectly.”
“He understood perfectly,” I repeat.
“Perfectly. He said he respected our Jeanne's last wishes. He called her our Jeanne.”
I sign the acceptance of the estate. I sign for the keys, a bunch of seven keys of which I know two. Mr Hanquet walks me to the door, and on the step, shaking my hand, he holds on to it a second too long.
“She told me something, the day she made the will. I didn't write it down, because it wasn't a legal matter. She said: ‘She'll understand. She always understood everything, that child. That's the whole trouble.’”
He lets go of my hand.
“Good luck, Ms Dervaux.”
I spend the week emptying the house.
I've told the firm. I've taken five days' leave, the first in eighteen months, and Marc, the partner I report to, said on the phone that it was no problem, take as long as you need, in the slightly surprised voice people use when they discover a colleague has a family.
Jeanne kept everything. Not like an old woman who hoards: like a haberdasher who files. Jars of buttons by colour and by diameter. Electricity bills by year, in cardboard folders with the year written in felt tip. Photographs in shoeboxes, with everyone's names pencilled on the back. I find my father at three, at ten, at twenty, at his wedding, with my mother laughing in a white dress. I find a photo of me at four on his shoulders on the seafront at Blankenberge. I look at it for a long time. I have no memory of that day. I have almost no memories from before I was seven. It's as if my memory had been cut down to the size of a kitchen door.
I fill bags. I make piles: keep, give away, throw out. The keep pile stays very small. I pack the crockery for the Red Cross. I take the clothes down to the chip shop, where the owner, Josiane, who is seventy at least and wears the same apron she wore twenty years ago, tells me she has a niece who does car-boot sales. She studies me closely as she takes the bags.
“You're Nadine's girl.”
“Yes.”
“You've grown.”
“It tends to happen.”
She laughs. She has a gold tooth on the left side. She gives me a cone of chips I didn't ask for and won't let me pay.
“Our Jeanne, she came in every Friday. Medium cone, andalouse sauce. Forty years, every Friday. She talked about you.”
“About me?”
“All the time. She said you counted the money for big companies in Brussels. She was proud of you, you know. She used to say: my Lise, she finds the mistakes nobody else can find.”
I eat the chips in the car. They're scalding and too salty, exactly the way they were when I was nine.
I find the tin on Thursday evening.
It isn't hidden. That's the first thing that strikes me: it isn't hidden at all. It's under the kitchen sink, behind the cleaning things, at the very back, where you keep what you need but don't want to look at. A Delacre biscuit tin, the big square one, in metal, with a pattern of cherry blossom worn away by the years. I saw it a hundred times when I was little. It sat on the sideboard then, and it had biscuits in it. She gave me two, never more, one jam and one chocolate.
It's heavy. I put it on the kitchen table. The lid resists, then gives all at once with a tinny clang.
There are no biscuits inside.
There's a grey cardboard wallet held shut with an elastic band. Underneath it, an exercise book. A real one, a spiral-bound Atoma, large squares, a blue plastic cover, thick and swollen, like exercise books that have been opened too often.
I open the wallet first. Official papers. A police statement dated 2003, with the police zone letterhead. A letter from the public prosecutor's office in Dinant, also 2003, two paragraphs: case closed — insufficient evidence. And a photocopy of several pages under a paper clip, which I don't understand at first. Justice of the Peace, Florennes-Walcourt. Deliberation of the family council. March 1999. My name, as a minor under guardianship. My mother's name, as guardian. A list of six names, the members of the council, and among them, fourth on the list, Dervaux Jeanne, paternal grandmother. A sum in Belgian francs. The name of a company. Delcourt Construct. Terms I know by heart from my work, which here, on this yellowed photocopy, in this kitchen, catch on nothing: cash contribution, subscription, registered shares.
I think: Dad's estate. In those days, when a parent died, a family council was called before the justice of the peace to decide what happened to the children's money; Jeanne had sat on it, which is why she'd kept a copy. The insurance. My mother must have invested the money somewhere; that's normal, that's what you do. And she put it into her new husband's business, and the business did well, and there you are. That's where it went. I'm not surprised. I'm not even angry. I put the paper clip back. I file the photocopy under the police statement.
I won't think of it again for five weeks. It's the only mistake in this whole story I truly blame myself for: I had the key in my hand, and I took it for a receipt.
I open the exercise book.
It's filled to the last page, in a sloping, regular hand, in blue ink, sometimes black. The handwriting of a woman who learned to write with a dip pen in the forties and kept the cash book of a haberdashery for thirty years. Each entry begins with a date, underlined. Each entry is three lines, five lines, sometimes just one.
I read the first page. Then the second. Then I go and fetch a chair, because I realise I'm standing up.
21 December 1999. Two blue fingermarks on her left arm, high up. Like a hand that squeezed. I asked her. She said she bumped into the garage door. There isn't a garage door at that height.
8 February 2000. She doesn't eat my biscuits any more. She puts them in her pocket for later. I asked her who for. She said for when there aren't any.
17 March 2000. She doesn't want to go home in the evenings any more. She asked if she could sleep here. Nadine said no, mustn't give her bad habits. Roger came to fetch her himself. He brought me a bottle of port to thank me for having her.
6 November 2000. The little one walks like an old woman. She says her tummy hurts. Nadine says it's growing pains. She is eight.
I turn the pages. I'm not reading any more, I'm skimming. The dates go by. 2001. 2002. Wrist in plaster. Fell off her bike, they say. She hasn't got a bike. 2003. A whole page, cramped, no margin, the ink pressed harder: Today I went to the gendarmerie. It's called the police now. I told them everything. And three weeks later, one line: Closed. He has banned me from the house. And from then on, for pages and pages, almost the same sentence, now and then, with the tiniest variations, like a prayer:
Saw her on the bus. She looked tired.
Saw her on the bus. She was reading.
Saw her on the bus. She didn't see me.
Saw her on the bus. Red scarf. Holding her left arm against her.
I count the entries. I can't help it. It takes me an hour, with a pencil, making tally marks in the margin of an electricity bill from 2011. There are two hundred and fourteen.
Two hundred and fourteen dates. Ten years. An old woman who saw, who knew, who wrote it down, who went to the police once and was sent home, and who went on writing it down, because it was the one thing nobody could forbid her. While I, six hundred metres away, counted the rabbits on a wall.
The last entry is from October 2009. She has gone. To Thérèse's, in Namur. She's well rid of them. God keep her, I didn't know how.
Underneath, in a different ink, in a shaky hand, more recent, much more recent, perhaps from this winter:
Lise. I didn't know how. But I wrote it all down. Do something with it.
It's three in the morning when I close the book.
The kitchen is cold. I haven't put any more coal in the stove. Outside, a cat crosses the orchard. The corridor light lays a yellow stripe across the tiles, all the way to my feet.
I open the book again at the beginning. I hadn't noticed it earlier, when I first opened it: the first entry is written on the inside of the cover, top left, before the first page even begins, as if she didn't yet know she was starting a book. As if she had just wanted to write it down somewhere, anywhere, so as not to forget.
The ink has faded a little. The date is underlined twice.
14 September 1999. The little one has a bruise behind her ear. She says she fell.
She never falls.