The Box That Stayed Closed

Bente answered with a key ring in her hand. The display window was still dark. She let Anouk in first and stood between Vera and the door until it had shut. The click of the lock sounded louder than it did at the café.

‘Not to stop you leaving,’ she said. ‘We're closed on Monday mornings. Otherwise someone will turn up with a picture frame they only want me to have a quick look at.’

She went round the counter. Books with narrow paper slips on their spines, a framed group photograph leaning against the wall, a cabinet whose drawers could not be opened without lifting the little card first. The back room was smaller than Vera had imagined. One worktable, its pale surface clear. Two boxes beside it on a low cupboard.

Anouk put her bag on the empty chair and took out her ID and the commission, not the small photographs. Bente checked the name, asked to read the commission and sat down.

Vera stayed standing. It seemed rude to go straight to the boxes, but she could see the white fold in the tape. A three above the repaired corner. A four on the other box. Recognising it here felt different from recognising it in the forwarded photograph. Such a small repair. On the screen she had almost turned the corner into an entire damaged box.

‘I paid for these,’ Bente said as she read. ‘I'm not saying that to dismiss your commission. But it's where I have to start.’

‘So did I,’ Anouk said. ‘For storage and copying.’

‘I can see that.’

Bente checked the date, turned the second page and put the sheets together again. Vera felt the room fill with things each of them had said already and still needed to say here. Bente's purchase did not make Anouk's commission less real. The commission did not undo Bente's payment.

Bente took a slim folder from a drawer. The purchase note and transfer confirmation: four hundred and eighty euros, Dorus van Esch, two boxes of photographic material. Before Anouk had asked for them back. The description matched his offer. Bente had not sought a statement from every photographer represented in the lot.

‘He said he was cutting down his collection. He knew what it was. Knew about the projects, about the printing. I knew his work already.’

Anouk gave a brief nod. ‘He does know a lot about it.’

Vera would rather not have heard that acknowledgement yet. It complicated things in a way no extra line in her notebook could deal with. Bente passed the purchase note to Anouk, who read it all.

‘What did you ask about his right to sell it?’ Anouk said.

Bente did not look at the boxes. ‘Whether it was his. He said yes. I left it there.’

‘And the different names?’

‘A collection can contain other people's work.’

Anouk drew her commission closer. Bente waited in silence while she laid the two documents side by side, then asked whether they could look at the boxes and got up.

She began with three. The sleeves stood upright between supports. Bente set some on the table without taking the negative strips out. The contact sheets were behind them. Anouk found the numbers and read a few aloud. She knew the letter she had used to distinguish work sequences from domestic photographs. For the first time Vera saw the little images as a whole strip rather than a single chosen photograph on a board.

‘This sheet goes with that one,’ Anouk said.

Bente put the right contact sheet alongside. Six exposures, some so similar that Vera thought at first they had been printed twice. In one the handcart had moved; in another the door was further open. Anouk bent over them, but Bente asked whether they could establish the quantities first.

They did not take everything out at once. Anouk noted each number as Bente set down a sleeve; Vera read back the number on the matching contact sheet. After sixteen came twenty-three. Anouk's pen stopped above the paper.

‘That section has been sold on,’ Bente said.

Not carelessly, but so promptly that Vera felt a flash of anger. As though a missing sequence could be disposed of with a word already entered in a diary.

‘Which section?’ Anouk asked.

‘I'd like my sales list for that. You can see what's here. I'm not declaring a lot complete from memory again.’

‘You know what you sold, surely?’

‘Six strips. With their sheets. I need my records for the precise description and the contact details.’

Anouk put down her pen. ‘They weren't his.’

‘I'm beginning to see that.’

The first time Bente had said it without qualification. She drew her chair to the table, level with Anouk. Vera felt no relief. The gap after sixteen remained on the page, even when someone admitted it should not be there.

At the second box Anouk left her hand on the lid for a while. Bente asked whether she wanted to open it herself. Yes. Vera moved her chair back to make room, but Anouk kept the lid on.

‘There are people in here who never agreed to be in someone else's collection,’ she said.

Bente looked at her purchase note. ‘I understand.’

‘You don't need to see every face to establish that this is the box in my commission.’

‘No. We can check the numbers and quantities together. Choose one example you recognise, if you want, and we'll leave it at that.’

Anouk opened the box, looked inside and brought forward one contact sheet. The tiny image showed a birthday table. Nothing exceptional, nothing people would visit an exhibition to see. A dish, a crooked chair, an arm extending out of shot. Anouk indicated a detail Vera could not quite follow. Bente did not ask her to explain it. She put the sheet back before Anouk pointed out a second image.

They counted the eighteen sleeves, keeping the contact sheets covered as far as possible. Bente found a number she had entered as an eight. Anouk showed her the crossbars on her sevens. Bente corrected her note. Vera recorded only that the domestic sequence was here, not who had sat round a birthday table.

The lid settling back sounded like the end of a visit. But Anouk had not asked what happened next.

‘I want this back,’ she said.

Bente laid her hands flat beside the folder. ‘I understand that too. I want advice first, so I can put the arrangements in writing. And I want to speak to Dorus about my money. I'm not handing it to a visitor today on the strength of two documents I first saw an hour ago.’

‘I'm not some random visitor.’

‘No. That's why we're sitting here.’

Vera looked towards the door. She had expected a point when everyone saw the same thing and the boxes simply went into Anouk's arms. They had reached that point. The boxes were still there. Would Bente at least confirm that nothing else would be sold or moved for now? She would. She wrote it down, including the two box numbers, and let Anouk read it before sending it.

She wanted a further appointment about the six strips sold on. Bente would consult the existing sales entry and speak to her buyer first. She glanced towards the back of the shop as though the buyer might be there, listening. No names at a table before they knew what would be done with them. Anouk said she would seek advice herself and make a factual report. Bente did not retreat from that. She asked that her confirmations and the commission be represented accurately.

‘I won't say you knew then what I know now,’ Anouk said.

Bente looked at her. ‘Thank you.’

Anouk slipped the commission into her bag. ‘That still doesn't make my things yours.’

Vera expected an answer, but Bente nodded. She opened the door into the shop and led them to the front. There she took a diary from a drawer. They could come back on Thursday morning to look properly at how the remaining work sequence fitted together. Anouk would bring the small proof copies from her own folder. They would need a separate appointment about the sold section once Bente had spoken to the buyer.

Outside, Anouk dropped her bicycle key as she took it from her bag. It slid beneath Vera's wheel. Vera picked it up without saying everything would be all right.

They did not go straight home. Anouk wanted to make the call before she persuaded herself that something different had been said in that room. They wheeled their bicycles to a bench further along, out of the wind. Vera sat. Anouk stood with her back to the street.

She rang the general police contact number and asked how to have a factual report about her missing archive recorded. She explained her own actions. Five boxes handed over for storage and copying, her payment, the written claim that they had been returned, two boxes at a foundation and two located at a dealer's. She described the missing material without claiming to know where it was.

Vera could not hear every question. Anouk wrote down a reference and instructions for supplying the documents. Could she include Bente's confirmation? She listened, then repeated what she would send later that day. When she hung up she did not look triumphant.

‘I need to put the documents in order and send them. Nobody's going to tell me, here on this bench, who has to hand over what.’

She sat beside Vera and read her notes. A telephone number was incomplete. She checked the confirmation that had been sent, found the correct contact and amended the sheet. Then she used her phone to book an appointment for legal advice about getting the material back. The first slot was not today. She took it anyway.

‘Will you come?’

Vera opened her diary, as she had outside De Werf, and checked. ‘Not at that time. I can put my own account of the folder in writing. After tomorrow, when we've seen the full receipt.’

Anouk nodded. She did not seem to take it as a rejection. Describe what Vera had accepted and handed over to her, she asked, not what she imagined Dorus had been thinking.

They cycled the first stretch together. At the turn towards the station Anouk stopped to fasten her scarf. Vera looked at the rack. Only the bag, as flat as when they had set out. The box with the repaired corner was still locked inside the shop, and so was the one with the birthday table. Anouk put on her gloves and said she would bring the small folder on Thursday. Vera waited until she was outside her own café to write that appointment down.