The Earlier Selection

Tine de Waal answered the door with a vacuum-cleaner hose over her shoulder. Almost finished, she said, disappearing through a doorway to turn it off. In the sudden quiet Vera heard a kitchen clock. Anouk was still on the doormat, the folder under her arm. She looked at the coat rack as though something might still be hanging there from years ago.

‘Same house,’ Tine said when she came back. ‘Same husband, too. I've kept him.’

Anouk laughed. Vera could not tell whether Tine had caught her look or said that to every old acquaintance. They were offered slippers and both declined. Tine took them into a sitting room with two very different armchairs. On the dining table lay a hardback notebook with a blue cover. Beside it was a biscuit tin with a dent in the lid. For a moment Vera thought of Ria's tin, but this one held ginger biscuits.

‘The list,’ Tine said. ‘I found it behind the holiday papers. Turned the whole cupboard upside down first. Only then did I try the shelf it belonged on.’

She did not pull out a box of jumbled memories. Inside the notebook was a thin sheaf of papers, creased across the text. Tine laid it on the clear half of the table. Vera looked at Anouk before moving closer.

‘You're allowed to look,’ Tine said. ‘I wouldn't have sat you at the table otherwise.’

‘She's asking because of me,’ Anouk said.

‘Well, that makes a change.’

There was an ease between them that Vera had not encountered in the past few weeks. Tine poured coffee and directed Anouk to the chair where the light would not be in her eyes. She remembered Anouk tilting her head to look at photographs, she said. As if it were the picture hanging crooked. Anouk said she still did it when something was wrong.

The top sheet listed the selection for public display. Not everything Anouk had photographed at the time, nor the contents of the boxes now. Tine had kept her own copy because she had checked the descriptions of the work. Eighteen numbered entries. They were not simply photographs one to eighteen; beside each entry were references to images from different sequences. A few had been crossed out and replaced.

Anouk put on her reading glasses. She followed the left-hand column down, went back to the top, then checked the date.

‘Eighteen,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘I said there were twenty-eight.’

Tine moved the biscuit tin to make room for the second page. ‘Not then. Apparently you've got more now.’

Anouk took her glasses off for a moment. She had said twenty-eight so firmly that Vera had carried the number into every conversation since. Looking back, she could almost see the certainty: Anouk sitting straight at her table, tapping the inventory. Vera had never asked how she knew.

‘I've muddled that old selection with the set we have now,’ Anouk said.

She did not try to make it sound less of a mistake. Even so, Vera heard herself saying, ‘But you did give Dorus twenty-eight.’

‘Yes. That's in the commission. They're two separate things.’

Tine looked from one to the other. Only now did Anouk tell her about the seven different pieces. Not the whole story from the beginning: the intake photographs, the boards they had now, the missing annotations and the ring. Tine listened with her cup in her hands. Were the old pieces gone, she asked, or simply not found yet?

‘We know they haven't been found,’ Anouk said. ‘We don't know they're gone.’

Vera did not start turning pages in the notebook. Tine took a small sheet from between two of them and laid it beside the selection list. A working note about the staff-room photographs. An afternoon, a task and two names. No precise time. Tine had wanted to prevent a caption about night staff being attached to people who had come back on a free afternoon to finish a job.

‘Things were dressed up then, too,’ she said. ‘It usually starts with the best of intentions. Everybody wants a good story to go with a photograph.’

She tapped an entry. Cleaning and putting equipment back along the edge of the canteen. Vera knew the photograph of an arm and a bucket, a table in the background. She had taken it for routine cleaning during a shift. The caption she had seen at the foundation called it a night-time task.

‘How do you remember it was an afternoon?’ she asked.

‘I don't have to rely on remembering.’ Tine pointed to her note. ‘I wrote it down then because someone wanted to call it something else. And I was there. Not in every photograph. But there for the work.’

Anouk bent over the entry. ‘That bucket wasn't the cleaners'. We brought it ourselves.’

‘And had to take it back,’ Tine said. ‘Someone went on about that until the next morning.’

She smiled, but hesitated when asked who. A name came to her, then slipped away. She would ask Bas, she said. He had been sent to fetch the bucket, or had refused to fetch it; she was getting the two muddled. Vera wanted to settle the uncertainty by choosing one. Instead she reached for her notebook.

‘May I photograph the list?’ Anouk asked. ‘And this sheet. Just to get the description of the work right.’

Tine checked the back of the small sheet, folded in the edge with a private note on it and put it down again. ‘This side. There's a telephone number here you don't need.’

Anouk took the photographs. Vera did not hold the papers flat; Tine slipped a blank book underneath to ease the fold. Afterwards Anouk checked her pictures and showed Tine. The full column of numbers, the date, the little sheet without its folded edge. Tine wanted copies too, in case her papers ended up behind another lot of holiday things.

They began talking about Anouk's small studio. Did she still have a worktable? The table was there, Anouk said, but she could no longer leave everything out. Tine asked whether that bothered her. Vera expected yes; Anouk said she did not know yet. She missed the space, but not the evenings spent worrying about its rent.

‘I was relieved when I handed back the key,’ she said. ‘Apparently I'm not allowed to be pleased about that now, because of what happened afterwards.’

Tine pushed the biscuit tin towards her. ‘You are as far as I'm concerned.’

Vera took one rather than say again that she did not want anything. It was harder than she expected. As she chewed, she looked at the eighteen entries. Anouk could be mistaken and still be missing her twenty-eight mounted prints. Sanne could have been careless and still not have known what Dorus was offering. Until now Vera had mostly found such combinations difficult when somebody else pointed them out.

She had to leave at a quarter past eleven to see Sanne. Anouk stayed a little longer. At the front door Vera asked whether she should ring Bas about Thursday. Tine would rather ask him first whether he wanted their questions at all. ‘Don't turn up with a whole committee.’ Anouk would send the few relevant pictures; Tine would join them only if Bas wanted her there.

Vera was early at De Werf. In the corridor a woman was trying to take a child's coat from a rack a few centimetres beyond her reach. Vera lifted it off the hook and handed it down. Then she stood empty-handed outside the foundation's room. On her bicycle she had worked out an opening sentence. Now it sounded like something she wanted to hand in and forget.

Sanne had little time. There was an application on her desk that needed an answer before noon. She did not offer Vera a seat, but when Vera asked for five minutes she moved a pile of papers off one.

‘I haven't found anything new,’ Vera said.

Sanne waited.

‘Last week I asked why the boxes were here if Dorus said I'd taken them back. I said you must know who they belonged to. I made it sound as though you'd knowingly accepted something you knew he had no right to give you.’

Longer than the opening she had rehearsed on her bicycle. She had to take a breath.

‘I didn't know that. I shouldn't have said it.’

‘No,’ Sanne said.

Vera looked at her hands. A dried rim of washing-up liquid on her thumb had escaped her notice that morning. She wanted to add another sentence: how hard it had been for Anouk, how real the signature on that receipt looked. She kept her hands still.

‘Hugo heard it too,’ she said. ‘I'll speak to him.’

Sanne drew a slow breath through her nose. ‘I didn't check enough. I know that. It still isn't pleasant being told I must have known everything.’

‘I understand.’

‘You understand now.’

Vera nodded. She was tempted to say she had understood before, but that was not why she had come.

Sanne glanced at the application. She was still holding her uncapped pen. Vera stood up, remembered the list and stayed beside the chair.

‘Anouk was wrong about the old selection. Eighteen photographs were shown then. Tine has the list.’

Sanne looked up. ‘Does that change the twenty-eight that came here?’

‘No. Those are in the recent commission. I wanted you to hear it before somebody else mentioned it.’

There was no agreement that this made everything right between them. Sanne did not thank her. She did ask whether Anouk would send the old list for the captions. Vera said she would ask, took her coat and went to find Hugo.

He was working on a drain in the little kitchen, a bowl beneath the open cupboard. Vera waited until he had turned the tap off. He listened to the same explanation, shorter this time, then handed her the bowl while he reached for a cloth.

‘Put that down there.’

She set it on the floor, clear of his feet. Dirty water slopped against the rim. Hugo knelt in front of the cupboard again. He did not ask whether she now thought he had done it. She was grateful he spared her the joke.

At the café Yasmin was dividing the soup between smaller containers. She asked Vera to start slicing a loaf. Vera hung up her coat and washed her hands. She was back well before the agreed break. The knife went through the crust, then slipped into an air pocket halfway down.

Her phone lit up beside the till. Anouk: Bas was willing to look on Thursday afternoon. A few pictures, not the whole collection. Ria would tell her where to come. Tine could be there for the beginning, provided nobody expected her to know everything.

Vera read the message with the knife still in her hand. Yasmin nudged the bread basket towards her.

‘This first?’

Vera put the phone face down and straightened the loaf for the next slice.