Four Panels Short

The wall didn't start at the corner after all. There was a door, recessed behind a pillar, almost indistinguishable from the paintwork in the photograph. When Mara came in, it was open. Somebody had wedged a rolled-up draught strip behind it to stop it falling shut.

‘Here?’ the installer asked.

She checked the plan. The line began at the end of the hall, ran unbroken to the pillar and, on paper, straight through it. She had used the overall measurement. The photograph with the tape measure had come from the caretaker, but she had copied it into the final drawing.

‘I need to look at that corner,’ she said.

The installer stepped back. His name was Niels. He had worked on another exhibition for her for two days, and she had only paid attention to his name once, on the time sheet. Now she was glad she knew it. She crouched beside the pillar and held the tape measure. It wasn't some awkward discrepancy in the dimensions. There simply wasn't enough usable wall.

The hall in the former post office had tall windows and a wooden floor that made every cardboard corner scrape audibly. Six crates held the panels for Op straat. Twenty-four of them, numbered, with edge protectors. Through the windows people were walking towards the market with bags still folded flat. Tomorrow morning visitors had to be able to see the first photographs here.

‘How much do we lose?’ Niels asked.

Mara didn't want to say lose. She counted on the drawing: the first panel, the second, then the generous gap Hester had wanted. She could move everything closer. But then the door would have to stay shut, and behind it was a workroom the caretaker used three times a day.

‘We can’t block it,’ he said when she looked at him. ‘Not even just for tomorrow.’

‘I understand.’

It sounded as though he had forbidden her something. All he had done was explain what his door was for.

She laid the plan on an empty crate. Niels marked out the widths on the floor with tape. Four strips landed in the space that had to remain clear of the door. They walked along together, placing their feet between the marks. There seemed to be another possible place for every panel. Only on the way back did Mara see they would be separating two pieces of text that belonged with the same image.

Hester arrived at half past nine with a crate of coffee flasks and a paper bag of currant buns. Her scarf caught on the handle. She pulled it free and asked where the audio connections were.

‘We haven't got any audio,’ Mara said.

‘No. Force of habit. There were speakers here last time.’

She set down the crate and looked at the tape on the floor. ‘What's that doing there?’

Mara took a breath. ‘I copied the wall length down wrongly. With the door and that pillar, we've got room for four fewer panels than the plan shows.’

Hester stayed beside the crate. ‘Which four?’

‘We need to decide. I don't want to block—’

‘Of course not. Which four can we do without?’

She was already a decision ahead of Mara. It felt helpful and dangerous at once. Mara didn't yet know whether leaving them out was the only option. She didn't have a price for a rush job, the availability of freestanding frames, the hours of the two men here. She wanted to offer a solution in which all those questions had already been answered.

‘Give me ten minutes to look at the layout,’ she said.

Hester looked at the other wall. ‘We'll look together, then. They're my photographs.’

The first crate was unpacked. Mara read out the numbers and Niels leaned the panels against the long wall, with protective material between their backs. His colleague took the hanging fittings out of the boxes. There was other work that could simply go ahead. The introduction, the overview of the old streets, the long photograph of the market square. Mara went along them with Hester, gripping the plan in both hands because otherwise her finger kept straying to the wrong line.

Hester stopped at a shopfront.

‘This isn't the final text.’

Mara leaned closer. Beneath the photograph was a butcher's name. She didn't know for herself which name should be there. But she recognised the line below it. It credited a collection Hester had said wasn't the right source.

‘We changed this,’ Hester said. ‘All four in that sequence.’

Mara put down her plan. She went to the crate and found the other three numbers. All four had the old credit. A house number was still wrong, and one photograph still had the word probably, which had been removed from the approved text. Moving things about wouldn't fix this.

She rang Bram at Drukkerij Van Dam. He asked for the file name. Mara read it from her list of sent files. He read it back. It was the same file.

‘I'll pull up the proof,’ he said.

‘So will I.’

She opened the folder on her phone. The connection was slow. She walked to the window and raised the phone, ashamed of the gesture, as if holding it higher could make the screen do what she herself hadn't done. There was the proof. Under the email she had written: this set can go ahead. She had chosen the file after the combined versions became so confusing that she had put everything back in numerical order. Four panels had reverted to an older text.

‘That's our mistake,’ she told Bram. ‘I'll need to order those again.’

‘Same sizes?’

She looked at the wall.

‘Hold off on that for a moment.’

Hester was on the phone now. She wasn't asking for another designer, Mara heard; she was asking the archive director if he had five minutes. Niels waited beside the empty crate. His colleague had started on the overview, which could be hung without the disputed sequence. People measured, a little cap fell to the floor, somebody asked if they could bring the second ladder from the storeroom. The work didn't sound as though four panels were wrong.

Mara rang Nora. First she explained the measurement, then the printing. She heard how the two mistakes together sounded worse than the same four panels on the floor.

‘Can they reprint them?’ Nora asked.

‘Yes. But they still won't fit.’

‘What do you suggest?’

Mara looked at the glass doors at the back of the hall. There was a recess, not wide enough for the original arrangement but big enough for separate frames set at an angle. She would have to get the route past them checked. It was the first place she hadn't already made into a fixed wall in her head.

‘Either we rush through something smaller now, or we open with twenty panels and bring these four later on freestanding supports. I'll put both options to them, with the actual costs.’

‘Do that. Don't order anything until you've sent me the difference.’

It didn't sound like permission to choose the cheap option. It was permission to leave the mistake visible until somebody knew the price.

She asked Niels to look at the recess. They could fit four simple movable frames there if they kept the passage clear and supported the panels properly. He wanted to check the dimensions against the actual panels, and the caretaker wanted to know who would put the frames back after closing. Hester asked whether a wheelchair could get through. Mara didn't answer until the men had measured. There was enough space, but not with the four frames in the straight line she had drawn. Two pairs, at a slight angle, with a different reading order. Hester laid the images out by number so they could see what that did.

‘The bakery needs to be on this side,’ she said. ‘Otherwise you jump back twenty years.’

Mara noted it. It took time, but it was time spent making the solution more precise. She wasn't standing alone in a corner waiting for the phone.

Van Dam could deliver the four correct panels early the following week. The supports weren't coming from the printer; Niels's company couldn't suddenly make them today either. There were materials, a price and an earliest available afternoon. Mara put it all in an email to Nora without shaving off an hour she didn't yet know who would pay for.

Hester came over when she had the answer. The archive could open on Friday with twenty panels. The four shopfronts were attractive and mattered to the exhibition, but visitors could follow the route without that sequence. Hester wanted a short notice beside the empty recess and a confirmed date for the addition. Not a sheet telling people to find the right photographs online; she had made this for people who came out of their homes to see it.

‘We'll do that, then,’ Mara said.

‘I want to see the new texts once more.’

‘Of course.’

Hester looked up.

‘I'll send them,’ Mara said.

They went through the twenty panels together. A photograph that would have been a transition was now the final image. Hester didn't simply discard the caption; she read it aloud and decided to keep the closing sentence. Mara heard words she had only seen on screens until then. They sounded less grand in the hall.

At quarter to four she ate her currant bun. It was still in the paper bag, flattened so much that it couldn't have taken butter. Lotte rang about the new files. She was angry to have heard about the mistake through a forwarded email with three people above her. Mara said she was right and immediately began on what they needed for Monday.

‘Send me the final text, not your latest combined folder,’ Lotte said. ‘And who's checking the corrections?’

‘Hester. And I'll check the proof.’

‘A proof you actually open.’

Mara didn't want her saying that in front of other people. Lotte couldn't see that she was facing a wall by a fire exit. Mara took another two steps away.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘On the four separate panels.’

Lotte had no time to redo it that evening. The following morning would fit her schedule, provided the texts arrived in time. Mara wrote it down and didn't ask when her evening began. She sent the arrangement to Nora and Hester. Friday's opening stayed at twenty panels. The addition was scheduled for the later afternoon they had agreed.

She had meant to ring Ellen at half past three, before she actually had to cancel. Now she saw the notifications: messages from the printer and Nora, two missed calls, the diary reminder about unpacking. It was almost five. Ellen was expecting her at six.

Mara typed that she would be late, then deleted it. The installation would last until six. She had allowed for a day without problems, knowing she was responsible for the handover. Even without the misprinted sequence, she would have been too late to help Ellen unpack a cupboard on time.

She rang. Ellen answered with a slightly too cheerful hello.

‘I'm not coming tonight,’ Mara said. ‘I should have told you sooner.’

‘How much sooner did you know?’

Mara looked at the crates along the wall. ‘Soon enough.’

Ellen asked nothing about the exhibition. She said the neighbour could help with the lifting for a bit, but then he had to go. She would leave the rest. Mara offered Saturday. Ellen couldn't do Saturday. She had an arrangement and wasn't going to move that as well.

‘I'd planned on you coming,’ she said.

‘I understand.’

‘You're always so quick to say that.’

Mara closed her eyes briefly. Through the open window she heard an empty market trolley rolling past.

‘I promised two things on the same day,’ she said. ‘I thought I could get away in time. I wasn't honest with the planning.’

‘No.’

They stayed on the line for a few seconds. Mara asked how she liked the new place and heard how it sounded: something friendly squeezed into the space she had left. Ellen said she would tell her later. She wanted to eat before the neighbour arrived.

Afterwards Mara didn't immediately move Ellen's appointment into another slot. She just wrote cancelled beside today. In the hall Niels asked where the empty crates should go. She went with him to the storeroom, checked the doorway's width and helped turn a crate until it fitted through.

On Friday morning a stack of leaflets lay at the entrance. Twenty panels stood or hung in their agreed places. In the recess was a small white card about the four images still to come. Hester had changed the wording: not due to circumstances, simply the date they were expected. Mara watched a woman read it and walk on to the first photograph.

She had come to do the handover with the caretaker. Yesterday's labour had been recorded, the extra production scheduled at the agency's expense, the fittings put in the storeroom. The caretaker stopped beside the card.

‘Can I pass that date on to the volunteers?’

‘Yes,’ Mara said. This time she had checked with the people who had to make and deliver it.

Before leaving, she walked through the hall once more. Two visitors stood at the same street photograph, disagreeing about a shop long gone. One gave a name; the other pointed to a window. Mara didn't stay until one was proved right. Outside she rang the office to say the first venue was open. She told them what was still missing.