Between the Pictures

Anouk put the small presentation folder on the table without opening it. Bente looked at the flat cover. Was this the folder the driver had delivered? Anouk nodded. Two evenings after first looking through it she had closed it and put it away with her work. Beside the two boxes on the low cupboard, Vera noticed how little space it took up.

‘The few copies we need today are at the front,’ Anouk said.

The small proof copies she had collected from the café that Tuesday. Not the old mounted prints. The same door, the same handcart, smaller and with a narrow white border. No grand title. Anouk could move them about without each image immediately becoming an exhibition piece.

Bente had the work box on the table already. A blank sheet for notes lay beside her confirmation that the material would stay where it was for now. Where did Anouk want to begin?

‘Not the missing strips. The waiting room first.’

Vera looked up. She had been about to ask whether Bente had found the records. Bente laid out sleeves from the remaining work sequence and fetched the relevant contact sheets. Anouk took the small copies showing the door and handcart, placing them in their folder order.

In the first the handcart stood at an angle against the wall. The door was half open. In the second the cart was nearer the middle of the room and a plank showed behind the doorway. Vera knew both pictures now. She had looked at their backs, their numbers, a missing annotation. It took an effort to see the front again as a room where someone had actually moved something.

Bente slid the contact sheet for the same strip alongside the copies. Six frames. Anouk held a loupe above the sheet without dragging it across the surface. To show Vera the detail, she moved out of the way and set the loupe to one side.

The plank appeared earlier than Vera expected. First along the wall, then upright by the door; it did not leave the room when the handcart moved. In one of the unselected frames, someone held the door. Half out of shot. No face to attach another question to. A hand on the door, a foot making space.

‘The cart didn't go outside,’ she said.

‘Not in these photographs,’ Anouk said.

She indicated the next sheet. The cart appeared again further along the wall, equipment on it. Part of the floor was clear. Anouk brought two small copies closer and turned one round because she had it the wrong way. The room changed without anything being made to disappear from it.

‘The text says the waiting room's being cleared,’ Vera said.

‘For the floor. Not for good.’

Anouk took the proposed publication text from her folder. Nothing newly discovered, just the description that had accompanied the work photographs. One sentence might suggest the room was being taken out of use. The picture of the empty space did the rest. She read it aloud, looking at the sequence.

‘I've let that stand far too long.’

Bente shifted the chair beside her so they could both see. ‘A single photograph can sell a bigger moment than there ever was.’

Anouk looked up. Bente held her gaze briefly, then asked whether she wanted the next sheet. The remark offered Bente no escape: she had bought the lot and sold part on. Yet Vera could see her looking at the material without immediately looking for a price.

Anouk wrote a new description. Repairs to the floor, equipment temporarily moved, the room remaining in use afterwards. She crossed out that last part. The photograph did not show it. Tine might know what happened later, but that need not be squeezed into this caption. Should the sequence stay in the same order, Bente asked. Anouk wanted it kept that way, with the references.

More than half an hour over a few sheets. Vera's initial impatience had gone. She wanted to see how the next image fitted, not how soon they could get the next buyer's name. At the same time she thought of the seven old mounted prints, absent from this table too. The little copies did not make them any less missing. These were working aids, not replacements.

At the handcart sheet Anouk held her pen above a detail. She had put a short note about that cart on the back of the old mount. It was missing at the foundation. Here on the contact sheet she could connect the photograph to the others again.

‘That's why I wrote so much on the backs,’ she said. ‘I knew someone else would take them out of the box one day.’

Vera thought of the large numbers copied across. They still said where a piece belonged in a row. The smaller writing said why it had been placed there at all. On her own list from Tuesday, at fourteen, she had recorded the missing words without the handcart now in front of her.

Bente offered coffee when they cleared the worktable. Anouk asked for water. They drank standing at the counter, away from the sheets. Passers-by looked through the front door towards the light inside. Bente kept it locked. She had set aside this morning for them, she said, but at twelve someone was bringing in a small lot of books.

‘Have you found the sales records?’ Anouk asked.

‘I have the entry and confirmation. I haven't told the buyer I want to give you his details yet. I don't want him hearing about it from somebody else.’

Anouk looked at her glass. ‘I also want to know whether that's the only section missing.’

‘We can count that now.’

Back at the table they made room to check the numbers. Bente stood the sleeves in a support and read them out. Anouk checked; Vera wrote them down in order. The first sixteen were there. Then twenty-three and twenty-four. A matching contact sheet for each. Eighteen strips, eighteen sheets. Anouk laid her original inventory beside them: twenty-four of each.

Vera drew a short line below sixteen and wrote the gap out in full. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. Six. She was not counting the tiny frames as separate strips. The six images on each strip stayed together in their sleeve. Bente read the list back and nodded.

‘That's the section sold from this box,’ she said. ‘I'll contact him myself. I've put it off because I hoped I could sort something out with Dorus first. But I can't do that before your own material is together again.’

Had the buyer been asked not to sell anything on? Bente would ask him herself, without suggesting she had already bought anything back or made arrangements for Anouk. Anouk wanted to see the request. Together they composed a short message. Questions had arisen about ownership of the named group. Would the buyer refrain from passing it on for now, until they could speak directly?

Bente sent it. She showed Anouk the text without leaving her other customer conversations open. Vera stood back from the screen. The soft sound of the message going made so little noise after all the upset that had led to it.

They finished counting the remaining work strips, checked the sheets back into order and returned everything to the box. They took nothing from the domestic box. That had been checked on Monday; Anouk had no wish to lay out another birthday table to prove the same thing.

Vera picked up the small proof copies, noticed one the wrong way round and turned it back. Anouk took them and put them in order herself. The corrected caption went at the front of her folder, separate from the photographs. The originals stayed with Bente. Vera would have liked to compare one more image with the intake photograph of its old board, but she could do that later using the working files they had.

Bente rested a hand on the work box lid. ‘If I'd known he'd only been keeping it for you, I wouldn't have bought it.’

Anouk slipped the band round her presentation folder. ‘I believe that's what you say now.’

‘I told him at the time I didn't want trouble with heirs or outstanding commissions. He said it was his.’

‘Then he needs to explain that.’

No threat in her voice. Bente seemed about to say something about trust, then swallowed it. She had used her own version of that word when she bought the boxes. Anouk need not decide here and now what that version was worth.

A man arrived at the front door carrying two bags of books. He raised them so she could see through the glass that he had not forgotten their appointment. Bente pointed at the clock. Five minutes. He set the bags down and began rolling a cigarette on the pavement.

Vera put on her coat. Anouk asked once more whether both boxes would stay here until Monday. Bente confirmed it. No move to another store because the books needed space. She said it with her next appointment visibly waiting outside.

Tobacco and wet cardboard in the air. Anouk held her folder against her chest while trying to open her bag. Vera offered to hold it. Anouk passed it over, undid the zip and took it back.

‘The description's better,’ she said.

Vera nodded. ‘The floor. Not the end of the station.’

‘Exactly.’

They walked to their bicycles. Less of a story imposed on the photograph, more of the image itself. Vera could almost see someone taking hold of the plank beyond the frame. She did not need that person to help locate a box. Perhaps Anouk needed them to look at her own work again without thinking only of its sale.

Before they set off Anouk rang a client to move another appointment. A quarter past twelve, Vera saw. Time for something to eat, then back to cover Yasmin's break. Under Monday she wrote: sales entry, confirmation, direct conversation. The next line stayed empty. Bente had promised no return yet, and the unnamed buyer had not replied to the request.