The Next Morning

Merel still had her coat on when Hester opened the front door. She was carrying the red bag she always took to her cooking group. A leek stuck out of the outer pocket, white and ragged at the end. Hester stared at it for so long that Merel took it out and put it on the hall table.

'That's for Bram. I went to the shop first.' She tucked a damp strand of hair behind her ear. 'Otherwise I'd have stayed at home until you came to fetch me.'

Hester stepped aside. Last night Merel had said she had seen their mother push Brecht. She had been at the bottom of the stairs, already on the lowest treads, with the office doorway in view. Hester had listened at the table in the community room. Now it was morning, and there was an appointment to make, a message to send to her client, a route to the police station to check. The ordinary business of a day for which there was no ordinary name.

'I want to ring Ellen,' Merel said. She took her own phone out of her bag. 'I've still got her number.'

Hester picked up her phone from the windowsill. Her thumb was already moving towards the messaging app; she wanted to explain to Ellen first, warn her that Merel might get frightened, ask what questions there would be. She put the phone down again. Merel had saved the number herself yesterday. She did not need someone to announce her.

Merel did not sit down. She went to the window with her phone and waited to be put through. Hester cleared a space on the table for a possible cup of tea, put the glass back and wiped a stain that had been there for days. She heard her sister give her name, then say, 'I saw something when she fell. I want to tell you myself.' That was all she caught. She turned on the kitchen tap, realised how ridiculous she was being and turned it off again.

When Merel came back, she slipped the phone into her coat pocket. 'Three o'clock. Today. Ellen's made time. She'll ring if the place changes, but otherwise it's the station you went to.'

'Would you like me to come?'

'As far as the door. I'll see after that.'

Hester nodded. She found a pen and wrote three o'clock on a receipt. There was no need; the appointment was already in Merel's diary. Still, it helped to see how little that time could contain. It did not say what Ellen would think, what their mother would do or how they were supposed to explain twenty-two years. Just a time and a place.

Merel took off her coat. Underneath she had a striped top with a tomato-sauce stain on the hem. 'I still have to drop off the key to the community room. Anouk's covering this afternoon. I told her it was a private appointment.'

'It is.'

'She didn't ask what was wrong. She asked whether Wednesday's receipts were in the drawer. It almost felt cruel.' A brief smile appeared. 'Then I was glad someone could still talk about receipts.'

Hester put the kettle on. She was not trying to put the past out of her mind; she had a hundred more questions for Merel. How far she had been from the stairs. Whether she had seen Brecht's face. Whether their mother had come straight down. Questions with which she would quietly begin constructing an account to fit her own fears. Merel had seen what she had seen, without Hester's floor plan, her professional experience, her skill at turning separate pieces into a presentation.

'I won't ask you to tell it all again today,' she said.

Merel looked up. 'You can ask if you don't understand something. Just don't keep asking whether I'm sure. She used to ask that too.'

The kettle clicked off. Hester set out two mugs and poured the water into her own first, so Merel would not see her waiting for permission to make every move. She was not good at this new distance. Often she felt most useful when someone else did not quite know what to do. It was an unlovely thought, but she let it stand.

'All those years I thought you might have touched her,' she said. 'That that was why I had to go on lying.'

'I know.' Merel wound the teabag string once round her spoon. 'I just didn't know whether you'd believe me if I told you who had. Later I thought you'd ask why I hadn't said so before. I couldn't face that question.'

Hester pulled out the chair beside her, but Merel chose the one opposite. 'I didn’t ask the right questions for a long time, either.'

'No.' Her sister drank, burnt her tongue and swore. That one word let them both laugh for a moment. Then Merel asked if there was any bread. She had eaten nothing since last night, and she did not want anyone at the station mistaking the shakes for anything but an empty stomach.

Hester took the last slices from the freezer and laid them in a dry frying pan. While she waited for the bread, her phone rang. The screen said Mum, above an old restaurant photograph of Marjan pointing her fork at whoever was behind the camera. Hester had never changed it. She noticed Merel's instant glance at the phone and laid it face up on the table.

'You don't have to switch it off,' Merel said.

Hester answered. 'Hello, Mum.'

'Oh, good. I was beginning to think you were still asleep. Could you collect the big car at twelve? There are two boxes in the storeroom that need to go to De Werf. I'll take the bus. Parking there is hopeless now.'

It was a request that had not been a request for twenty years. Hester could already see the black crates, Marjan's hand on the doorframe, her own day obligingly folding itself round two boxes. 'Not today.'

'They're not heavy. The car's outside. The key's here ready.'

'I have appointments. If you've got things for the programme, Fleur needs to know what's in them. We're closing the list today.'

'I'm asking my daughter for a favour, Hester. Not the catering department.' Something knocked against a worktop in the background. 'We've little enough left to show on Sunday as it is.'

Merel drew the plate of bread towards her. Hester had expected her to go into the other room. Her sister stayed where she was, spreading butter right into the corners.

'I'm not collecting the car,' Hester said. 'Send Fleur a list of what you want to bring.'

There was a brief hesitation, too short to know what it meant. Then Marjan asked, 'Is Merel with you?'

Hester did not look at her sister. 'I'm not discussing her arrangements. And I want to hang up now.'

'I'd like to know whether my children still speak to me normally.'

'I'm speaking to you now. I'm telling you I'm not coming.' Hester did not wait for her reply. She ended the call and put down the phone. Not under a cloth, not face down. There would be more calls.

'That was quick,' Merel said.

'It lasted an hour in my head.'

Merel offered her a slice. They ate at a table too small for two plates, a laptop and Hester's folder of invoices for Sunday. Hester slid the folder onto the floor. Yesterday she had thought her work might now seem insignificant for good. But someone had to pay the suppliers, and tomorrow's visitors had to be kept from an unsafe or misleading display. She simply could not confuse those duties with authority over her sister any more.

She messaged Fleur to say she would be unavailable from half past one until the end of the afternoon, and asked to have the chairs delivered in the morning. A reply came almost at once: the hire company could do eleven. Hester would have to keep track of the changed hours. She entered them on her timesheet, including the half-hour she would need later that evening. Charging nothing would not erase this week.

Meanwhile Merel read a message from Bram. 'He's asking if we want to eat at his afterwards. Or at home. Either's fine, he says.' She typed a reply. 'I've said home. I want to decide for myself whether I close the curtains.'

'Would you like me to come afterwards too?'

'I can go home with Bram. I'll ring if I need you.'

It was not a rejection, but Hester had to swallow her first response: that it was no distance, that she was in no hurry, that going together would be easier. She put the plates in the sink. 'All right.'

Before leaving, Merel searched her bag for her keys. She brought out a folded list of ingredients, a hairbrush and two empty stock sachets. The leek was still in the hall. Hester pointed to it without picking it up. Merel put it back and fastened the zip halfway up the green leaves.

'I'll drop the key off,' she said. 'Then I'll collect you here at half past one. That gives me another chance to decide I'm really going.'

Hester went with her to the front door. In the street someone was pushing an empty pram into an entrance; a delivery driver was asking for number eighteen. Merel set off the wrong way, noticed and turned back with a curse. She raised a hand without looking at Hester again.

Inside, Hester checked the route to the station. She already knew it. She closed the map and opened the suppliers' list instead. At eleven the chairs were coming; at three Merel would speak. She made two separate entries in her diary, with enough blank space between them to avoid turning everything into a task. Then she rang the hire company about the width of the rear doorway.