What He Wrote Down
She had her hand in the front of Wren’s coat and could not have said when she put it there.
The flat was dark. The corridor light was on the other side of the door, and neither of them had said anything for a while, and Wren’s hand was flat between her shoulder blades and shaking slightly.
June kissed her, and let herself have it, and had it for a while.
Then Wren’s other hand moved to the front of her shirt.
June put her palm on Wren’s chest and pushed — hardly a push at all, a few inches of space.
“No,” she said. “Not like this.”
Wren stood there with her eyes shut and her hand still fisted in June’s coat.
“Right,” she said. “Yeah. Course.”
“Look at me. I’m not saying no to you.”
“You don’t have to—“
“I’m not leaving you a way out. You told me to stop doing that.”
Down on the street a tram went past, and the window did the thing it always did.
Eleven weeks earlier.
The house on Halden Road, Zurenborg, Antwerp
There were about forty people in her mother’s house, and June knew what every single one of them wanted. Nobody hides at a wake. They come in, they take the sandwich, and within a minute they have told you what they came for.
Mrs Oyelaran from two doors down had liked her mother for most of her life and was sorry she was dead. That was the only earnest reason in the building. The two women from the choir had come to see the inside of the house before the new people moved in.
And a good third of the room had worked for her father.
They were by the window with their hands behind their backs: the men who had run his depots, his night shifts, his accounts. A couple of them had been at June’s christening. Most of them had been paid off within a month of the photograph.
That was how everyone in the region said it now. The photograph. A newspaper had printed one of her father, Diego Alcántara, coming out of a hotel car park with the man who ran Kestrel Freight, and eleven days later the board had asked for his resignation, and he had given it.
He had a stroke six weeks after that, in the study, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. He died in the ambulance.
Her mother lasted a year. She died on a Tuesday morning with the radio on.
Some of them had come today anyway. Some had come because it would have been noticed if they hadn’t, and June could tell which was which from the doorway.
“You should eat something,” Theo said, at her elbow, holding a plate she had not asked for.
June lifted the one already in her hand — a sandwich with a bite out of it, taken an hour ago and carried around since, the way you carry a prop.
“I’ve eaten.”
“You’ve held. There’s a difference.” He put the plate on the side table anyway, then looked at it, then moved it an inch, which was what he did with his hands when he was worried. “Sorry. I’ll stop.”
“Don’t stop. Just aim lower. Bring me a chair and I’ll sit in it.”
“That I can do.”
Roland Haas arrived late enough to be noticed and early enough not to be rude.
He was the biggest shareholder on the register, and what was left of the group answered to him now. The photograph had been in his hands three days before it was in a newspaper, which nobody had thought strange: a shareholder is given something troubling about his chairman and takes it to the board.
June had been over that part more often than any other, looking for the place where it stopped being reasonable. She had not found it yet.
She watched the room reorganise itself around him. It was like watching water find a drain.
“June.” He took her hand in both of his. His were warm and dry and there was nothing at all wrong with the way he did it. “I’m not going to say anything useful, so I won’t try.”
“Thank you for coming.”
She got it out in the voice she had been using all afternoon, and was pleased with herself for about a second, until she noticed her other hand had made a fist down by her leg.
“Your mother was extremely kind to me once, at a dinner where I deserved the opposite.”
He let go.
It was a good line, and June could do nothing with it. She could not ask what he had done, not today, and she could not say that her mother had never once mentioned him. All she could do was take it — which meant agreeing that her family had forgiven him something, and that being cold to him now would be a small thing to be.
“How are you fixed? Practically. The house, the estate, all of that.”
“It’s in hand.”
It came out faster than the sentence needed and a shade too flat, and she heard both.
“It’s never in hand.” He smiled, and it was a good smile, and it reached his eyes and everything. “Let me put someone on it. A man in my office does nothing but this. It would save you six months.”
“That’s kind. I’m all right.”
Kind. She had reached for the word because it was the one that ended conversations — and standing in her mother’s hall she was aware of exactly what she had just done. She had thanked the man who took her father’s chair for offering to sort out her father’s papers.
“You’ll say that a few more times and then you’ll ring me.” Roland took a card out of his inside pocket and put it on the side table next to Theo’s plate, face up, without any pressure at all. “And that’s fine. That’s what it’s for.”
He moved off towards the choir women.
June looked at the card lying there next to the untouched sandwich.
She did not pick it up. She did not put it in the bin either, and she noticed herself not doing that.
Milan Kovač didn’t come inside.
He had driven her father for nineteen years. One car, one driver, five days a week and most Saturdays, from the year June turned five until the week the board asked for a resignation.
He knew how every man in this room took his coffee. Not one of them knew his wife was ill.
She found him in the hall by the door with his coat still on, holding a cup of tea he clearly had no intention of drinking.
“Milan.”
“Miss June.” He straightened. That was new. He’d called her June since she was six. “I’m very sorry. Your mother was a good woman.”
“You can come in. There’s more food in there than anyone can eat.”
“I’ll stop here.”
He said it to the wall above her shoulder, the way he had said things to her father for all those years.
“There’s nobody here who—“
“I’ll stop here,” he said, and smiled, and the smile came and went and left his face exactly where it had been. He looked past her shoulder into the room. “They’ve kept the cars in the garage?”
“For now. They’re going with the house.”
“Ah.” He looked at his tea. “Good cars.”
He was going to say something else. June was sure of it afterwards, and could never work out what she’d based that on, except that his jaw moved slightly and then he drank the tea he didn’t want.
Wren was in the kitchen with a tea towel.
Of course she was. There were caterers, and a woman in from the village to do the glasses, and Wren Kovač was standing at the sink drying a serving dish nobody had asked her to touch, in black trousers and a plain black shirt with the sleeves pushed back.
June stopped in the doorway.
They were the same age. Not a friend of the family, not somebody’s cousin — Milan’s daughter, born the same year as June.
She had been in this house most weeks of both their childhoods because her father was outside in the car. She had never once been in it as a guest.
June had watched her get taller. Wren had watched June get engaged. Between them was a line neither of them had ever put a name to, and being careful with it had not stopped them being what they were.
Then her father died. Wren had stood at the back of the crematorium in a coat that was too thin for the day, and June had not seen her since.
“Thank you for coming,” June said. “And for doing that, which nobody asked you to do.”
Wren turned round and pulled her sleeves down when she saw who it was. Something went across her face on the way — gone before it finished — that on any other day would have been a smile.
She did not say anything back.
June came in and leaned against the counter, because her legs had been going all afternoon.
She had been saying the same four sentences since two o’clock. Thank you for coming. She’d have been glad you were here. No, we’re all right. Yes, Friday. She heard herself start on them again, and stop.
There was nobody in this kitchen to be careful with.
“You look tired,” Wren said.
She said it the way she said everything, flatly, and it was the first time all day that anybody had told June something true instead of asking her how she was.
Wren folded the tea towel over the rail, squared it up, and stopped with her hand on it.
“June.”
“Yes.”
“If there’s anything — anything at all, I don’t mean flowers—“
She stopped, and looked annoyed with herself for stopping.
“I know.”
“Right.” Wren took her hand off the rail. “Right. That’s all I was going to say.”
June said something about the sandwiches and went, because if she stayed another minute she was going to sit down on the kitchen floor in front of somebody.
She got as far as the hall before she understood that Wren had not gone back to the sink. She could feel it on her back, the way you can — somebody watching you leave a room and deciding not to say the thing.
June did not turn round, and kept the feeling that she had let something go past without catching it.
By the evening they had all gone.
The garage, later
The last of the cars went out onto the avenue and the street went quiet. You could see the cathedral spire from the end of it, small and grey between the roofs, and nothing else of the city at all.
The garage smelled the same as it had when she was a child. Concrete, cold rubber, car polish. The clearance people had put the boxes from the study out here in a neat square in the middle of the floor, which was somehow the worst thing anyone had done all day.
June sat down on the step in her funeral dress and started opening them. One was her mother’s — scarves, a hairdryer, a folder of recipes cut out of magazines — and she closed it again and pushed it away with her foot.
The notebook was near the bottom of the last box, under an inhaler years out of date.
She knew what it was before she got the rubber band off. Milan kept one in the glovebox of every car he drove. Date, time out, destination, time back, mileage.
Everything anyone does, somebody writes it down, he’d said. Even the boring stuff. Especially the boring stuff.
She turned the pages. Page after page of a man being driven to rooms.
She was looking for one week. She was always looking for one week.
The article had run on a Tuesday. She turned back and found the Saturday before it.
Out at quarter past six. Back mid-afternoon.
No destination.
June read it again. Then she pulled up her father’s calendar, which she still had access to because nobody had thought to close the account, and found that Saturday.
Clear. He’d been at home. A whole day out that officially did not happen, on a morning when Diego Alcántara was officially in his study.
He went to that car park. He said nothing about it to anybody, before or after, and there was no version of that where he came out clean.
The question was a different one, and it was the only one that mattered.
Four people knew where her father would be that Saturday, before he got there.
One. Diego Alcántara, who told nobody in his own house. Not the board, not his wife, not her.
Two. Anton Reyes, who was in the photograph with him.
Three. Whoever had put the two of them in that room.
Four. Milan Kovač, who drove him there.
Anyone can be caught. But somebody had known exactly where to send a man with a camera, on a morning that existed in no diary and no expense claim.
She had crossed them off over fourteen months. Her father had not photographed himself. Reyes went down in the same week and was out of Kestrel by the spring, and a man does not burn himself to reach a rival. The third one she had hunted longest, and neither company had a record of the booking, and no secretary remembered making it.
That left Milan.
She had never told anyone about the week her mother stopped eating.
About standing in the kitchen doorway and looking at food nobody had touched. She had understood exactly what she was looking at. Then she’d gone upstairs and shut her own door, because she could not work out how to start the sentence.
June never found the sentence.
She turned forward, past the Saturday, to see how far the book ran.
It stopped the week the company changed hands. And it stopped because three pages had been torn out, close to the binding, leaving a thin ragged edge where they’d been.
June sat very still in the cold garage.
Milan kept the notebooks. One per car, per year, for nineteen years, and she had never once seen him tear a page out of anything.
Somebody had taken three days.
She thought about a man in a hall in his coat, holding a cup of tea he didn’t want, asking whether the cars were still in the garage.
The rest of the notebooks were in a flat on the east side of the city. And the access logs — the ones that would say who had opened her father’s calendar, and when — sat behind a system she had no password for, in a building she wasn’t allowed into, in a department of a handful of people.
One of whom had stood at her sink this afternoon drying a dish nobody asked her to touch.
She’ll say yes.
The thought arrived complete, the way a fact does, and June understood in the same second that she hadn’t wondered whether Wren would say yes.
She’d only wondered how to ask.
She picked up her phone. The number was still second in her favourites, because she’d never got round to changing the order.
She pressed it before she could talk herself out of it.