What Ruben Won't Get Back

The sack truck stood behind a crate of new glasses. Hester moved the crate aside and saw a broken wheel on the venue's own trolley. Ruben saw it too. He asked who would be using that thing on Saturday. She said it was coming out of service and took a card from the arrivals book to hang on it.

'A clear one,' he said.

She wrote DO NOT USE and tied the card to the handle. Then she pulled the trolley towards the storeroom, apart from the equipment ready to use. Ruben did not have to tell her how to keep something faulty out of reach. Still, she was glad he had asked while there was not yet half a hall of people round it.

'Mine can stay until Sunday,' he said. 'I don't need it this weekend.'

'You came to collect it.'

'I thought there was a working one here too.'

'I'll bring it back on Monday, then.'

'We'll see on Monday.'

He put the handle back and checked his watch. His appointment had been cancelled. A colleague had to go out with an engineer and could not call until tomorrow. He had another half-hour before going to his mother's. They often ate together on Thursdays, he said, since she had become less able to cook for herself.

'Not that she'll admit it,' he said. 'She talks about food left over. Apparently my mother consistently cooks for three people who don't exist.'

'Can I call on her services on Sunday?'

'She'll want names. And to know whether she'll get her oven dish back.'

Hester thought of Marjan's withdrawn contribution and let the joke go. She asked whether he wanted a short walk. She had to get two missing cloakroom cards from the stationer's. She could also just give him the address if he wanted to leave.

'You don't have to supply an escape route with everything,' he said.

She locked the venue. The usual keys were on a blue ring she now held in her hand. She had put the spare in the cupboard for Fleur. She would go through that with the staff again on Friday. Ruben waited on the pavement, hands in his coat pockets, watching a man try to argue a dog away from the flower bed.

They passed the baker's and the bus stand, heading for the short shopping street where the stationer's had downsized three years earlier. Hester knew that because the owner had written on the window: everything you need in less space. Ruben stopped to read it.

'A dangerous promise,' he said.

'Especially if you need a table.'

In the shop she bought cards, a thick marker and a box of drawing pins that had to be fetched from behind the counter. The owner recognised her as the woman from De Werf and asked whether it was going ahead or not. She said the programme was being reduced and confirmed information would be available on Friday. She did not repeat the word unauthorised, because he was not asking about an investigation.

Ruben stood by a rack of diaries. One had a river on its cover. He picked it up, saw the price and put it back. At the till Hester paid from her business account and asked for a receipt. The owner smoothed the strip of paper carefully, as though that could be his contribution to the gathering.

Outside, Ruben asked whether she minded everyone speaking to her. She said it was part of the job, although the balance between organising and explaining was getting stranger. He nodded. In his current job he had once taken over a schedule and found everyone assumed its mistakes were his. Months had passed before people asked where an arrangement had come from, instead of beating him over the head with it.

'And you stayed?' she asked.

'Yes. That's the difference from then.'

Hester stopped at a bench in the square to take the cards out of their packaging. The box would not fit in her bag and she did not want to carry it all the way back. She put the marker beside her and saw Ruben watching her hands.

'I've spoken to Daan,' he said.

She stopped picking at the plastic. 'Do you want to tell me how it went?'

'Not nice. Useful. He didn't try to tell me why I should believe him now. That helped.'

Hester pulled the plastic free. 'He told me he wants to say what he saw himself.'

'He said that too. And that he wanted me to lose something. He didn't even know what at the time.'

Ruben looked across the square. A courier rode slowly through the pedestrians and leaned his bicycle against the bench beside them without asking whether they minded. Hester moved her bag to her feet. She wanted to ask about the loss, but he began himself.

'My father asked me then whether I knew more than I was saying. Not just once. He kept asking whether I was certain I hadn't gone upstairs again. He thought he was helping. That I needed to get something off my chest. In the end I just told him I'd had enough.'

'When?'

'Six months later. He'd kept a cutting. I found it in his desk when he downsized his house. He'd written my name underneath, as though otherwise it was just an accident with no connection to anything.'

Hester knew Ruben's father was still alive. She did not want to assume he had never believed his son again. She asked whether they had discussed it later.

'Once. He said he wanted to know how to defend himself if people asked. I said he didn't need to defend me, he needed to listen. A splendid conversation for Christmas.'

Hester looked at the marker. She had laid it on her lap with its cap half loose. She pushed it shut before it stained her trousers.

'My mother told people you had a temper,' she said. 'I did nothing to stop it.'

'I know.'

'I wanted to say it anyway.'

'You can. But you don't have to put everything your mother did on your own list. Then you're still the one clearing up for her.'

It was exactly the sort of sentence he could not say casually, but he did not look self-important. He tugged down his sleeve because the wind was reaching his wrist. Hester let the words stand.

He told her he had taken a job in another town after they split up. Not entirely because of Vlietdam, though he had once liked to tell it that way. The job paid better. He could study alongside it. He had made friends who had never been to De Werf, people he could eat with and talk about nothing in particular.

'So you had a life as well,' Hester said.

'Mostly a life. Not just a waiting room until you called me back.'

'I didn't think that.'

He looked at her with an almost cheerful severity. She thought of the version in which she had been the central mistake and could therefore become the central person who put it right. Perhaps she had thought it after all, in an unspoken way that made his other years less real.

'Perhaps a little,' she said.

'That's more honest.'

A woman across the street waved to Ruben. He waved back and said they used to belong to the same sports club. He left it there. Hester did not need an account of the women he had known in her absence.

She stood to put the packaging in the bin. As she came back, Ruben shifted his bag so she could sit a little longer. The gesture pleased her unexpectedly. She could accept it without asking what it meant for later.

'I don't want you asking me to stand at the front on Sunday,' he said. 'Not because my name's on the list of seven. If I come, I choose where to sit. If I don't, the programme still works.'

'I said the same to Robin this afternoon.'

'Then all you have to do is do it.'

Hester nodded. She knew how often an intention in her work vanished as soon as a photographer arrived and someone shouted that otherwise it would not make a good picture. This time the empty bit of the frame would be the photographer's problem.

'And Monday?' she asked.

'What about Monday?'

'The sack truck.'

He laughed. She was glad he let himself. He said he might be home on Monday afternoon, but would not set time aside especially. She could leave the sack truck in his shed; they would message about the key.

'I'll send you a message on Sunday, then,' she said.

'Good.'

His phone rang. His mother wanted to know whether he could bring potatoes. Hester heard her voice from the handset. Ruben said he would pass the shop on his way. Then he asked whether she did not already have a bag, because they had discussed it last week too. She had potatoes, he said after hanging up, but the wrong ones.

'Is there such a thing?'

'Apparently, today.'

They walked back to De Werf. At the entrance Hester looked at the new flyer before putting the key in the lock. Nothing was hanging over it. She noticed how quickly the cancellation sheet had changed her ordinary way of looking. Ruben stood beside her, waiting without asking what she was searching for.

Inside, she put the cards and marker in a tray. Ruben went back into the hall to check the borrowed sack truck was out of the way. He found a clip in its base and brought it to the table. 'Everything in one place at last,' he said.

At the door he turned to her. 'What will you do if your mother keeps denying anything was wrong?'

Hester looked at the edge of the new paper on the counter. 'I can't force her. I can stop adjusting my own account to make it fit hers.'

'That's not quite what I asked.'

'No. I don't know the rest yet.'

He nodded. For a moment she thought he would touch her. Perhaps she moved a little towards him herself; perhaps she was simply standing in the way. He took the handle and held the door open for them both. There was no missed moment she had to rescue.

Outside he wished her a good evening with Merel. She had not said what she expected of it, so he did not add good luck. He went to his car. Hester watched until he drove out of the street, then went back inside.

A message from Merel was waiting on her phone. Don't come early, there's still a debrief with the volunteers. The street door will be open; don't go round the back. Hester replied that she would come at half past seven and bring nothing. She deleted the question asking whether Merel wanted to tell her what they would be talking about.

She made two cloakroom cards for Saturday and wrote the ordinary division of roles in large letters on the back. Neither card was for Marjan. Then she put away the marker and laid her own coat ready on the chair by the front door. There was still time to eat before she went to her sister, and for the first time that day no one would call to ask whether the potatoes were the right ones.