A Mother Who Helps

The chairs arrived in a van whose tailgate would not open all the way. Hester stood with the driver in the side street counting stacks, while another van behind them kept sounding its horn. The total was right only when she included the six chairs in the cab. She signed on a screen covered in old signatures and let the driver go ahead of her through De Werf's door. Inside, Fleur had propped two painted panels against the wall. One stood exactly where the first stack needed to go.

'We'll need to look at those together later,' Fleur said. 'I don't know who made them.'

'I won't put them on stands yet, then.' Hester slid the panels along to an empty wall and checked that the rear door swung freely. The yard outside was wet. The towpath gate was shut, the way to it clear. She noted in her folder that the doormat needed replacing when it rained. Writing something so ordinary helped her see what she was doing again.

Marjan was at the counter when she returned. She wore a beige raincoat with her scarf tucked into a sleeve. There was a cardboard box at her feet. No heavy files stuck out of it, only a roll of wrapping paper and a few frames. Fleur greeted her as she greeted anyone who arrived unexpectedly with useful materials: a smile first, then a glance at Hester.

'I brought it myself in the end,' Marjan said. 'That settles all that business about the car.'

Hester put down her folder. 'Fleur decides what can go in the programme.'

'Of course. I've already told her she can keep anything useful. I'll recycle the rest at home.' Marjan rested a hand briefly on Fleur's forearm. 'I'm trying to make things easier for you.'

Fleur took the box over to the table with the panels. She remained within earshot, although she pretended to be deciphering a price label. Hester was grateful to her, and irritated by her own gratitude. She did not want everyone having to watch her mother from now on because she had never done it in the past.

'You look tired,' Marjan said. 'Shall we have a little walk? Just five minutes, then I'll be off.'

'I've still got work here.'

'I'll stay here, then. You don't have to send me out.' She sat on one of the delivered chairs without asking whether the floor was dry yet. The plastic creaked beneath her. 'I don't want another phone conversation where you hang up halfway through.'

Hester remained standing. She could feel her posture already turning the conversation into a scene: the daughter refusing to sit with her elderly mother. So she pulled up a chair, far enough away not to have to tuck her legs under Marjan's. People passed the foyer window; they would not have to come inside to know the two of them were here.

'I hung up because I'd finished that conversation.'

'And I still had something to say. I think you should scale back Sunday. No grand account of the old days. A few pieces, a short reception. Nobody having to stand at a microphone.'

'We're already discussing that.'

Marjan almost smiled. 'You see. We're thinking alike. I understand those invitations have stirred things up. That girl would have done better to ask first what it was like for the people here.'

Hester looked at her mother's shoes. Half of one sole had been repaired with a different-coloured glue; she knew the cobbler who did it. Everything about Marjan remained familiar. That was the hardest part. She was not facing a stranger on whom she could concentrate her horror. This was the woman who had helped her with a made-to-measure bed when Finn got a room of his own.

'Robin has a name,' she said. 'And she's explained why she sent those cards.'

'I know. But a daughter hears different things in a story like that. Else brought her up. Else has never accepted anything good from me.'

'Brecht wanted to leave De Werf.'

Marjan drew her coat across her knee. 'Everyone wanted to leave at some point. You did. Sometimes they came back a fortnight later and asked if I might have a job for them after all.'

'She wanted to carry on with her own designs.'

'I never forbade her.' Her mother looked past her at Fleur. 'I helped with materials, with people who could pay. That's easily forgotten when someone dies young. You're left with one lovely name, and suddenly everything everyone else did is suspect.'

Fleur lifted a frame out of the box and put it back. Hester wondered how much of this conversation would later become a well-meant account: Marjan had only been helping, she had even brought things along. It would not even be a lie. She had helped. She had also pushed, had seen her younger daughter and let her spend twenty-two years believing that speaking was the worst thing she could do.

'What were you doing upstairs when Brecht fell?' Hester asked.

Marjan looked straight at her now. 'I told them at the time.'

'You keep telling me what other people did. What did you do?'

'I was in the office. We were having a conversation that wasn't going well. I've never made a secret of that.' Her fingers bunched the lining of her coat. 'If you're asking whether I should have been more careful: yes. I was responsible for a building full of half-finished work. I was only human too.'

Hester felt the lure of those words. A human being, a mistake, an accident. A version in which her mother could remain who she was and Merel had seen it wrongly. That version would give her an evening when she could answer the phone without weighing anything up. She edged her chair back a few centimetres.

'I'm not asking about responsibility in general. There are going to be conversations with the police. About what happened before the fall and afterwards too.'

'So Jasper's told you.'

Hester did not answer straight away. She did not know what her mother thought Jasper had told her. There was no point filling the gap with a fresh accusation. 'People who know something need to tell it themselves.'

'That boy's always been worried about what it would cost him. He worked on that railing. And Ruben had a row with her. Has all of that suddenly disappeared because someone's found an old photograph?'

'A photograph doesn't prove how Brecht fell. Neither does an argument.' She left her hands on her knees.

Marjan scarcely moved her head. 'How she fell.'

'They're looking into it.'

'You?'

'The people whose job it is to investigate.'

Her mother looked towards the entrance, then back at Hester. 'You need to be careful what you take on trust. Especially with Merel. You know how she used to tie herself in knots over what people expected of her. She wants to keep everyone happy. Bram, you, Brecht's daughter.'

Hester pushed her chair back further and stood. It knocked against another chair, a hard, trivial sound. 'You don't get to use her to explain away the questions you won't answer.'

'So I'm not allowed to say anything about my own child now.'

'You can speak to her if she wants to. You're not going to belittle her through me.'

Marjan stood too, more slowly. She rested a hand on the seat for a moment to straighten her knee. Hester saw and stayed where she was. She knew the movement from their walks, the brief pause before her mother could go on.

'You'll find it gets very lonely deciding who's still a decent person,' Marjan said. 'I tried that once. It's why I've become more forgiving.'

Fleur came over, holding a folder of yellowing bills. 'Thank you, Marjan. I don't think there's anything here that we need for tomorrow. I'll let you know next week what we're keeping. If you've got more work at home, I'd like photographs and a list first, otherwise we can't take it.'

'That's fine, Fleur.' The bright tone returned at once. 'Hester and I had finished anyway.'

She picked up her bag and took a glove from one coat pocket, then the other. At the door she turned back. 'If Merel wants dinner tonight, she can ring. At least tell her that.'

'I'm not passing on messages.'

Marjan straightened her collar and went outside. She did not wait for a nod. Hester watched until she disappeared among the parked bicycles. Only then did she notice Fleur still standing there with the folder.

'Do I need to know what that was?' Fleur asked.

Hester fetched her own folder from the counter. She had no right to all the details of Merel's appointment, but Fleur did have a right to a workable programme and an honest assessment of the risks. 'There's another conversation with the police today. I'm not going to tell you what someone else needs to say. But I want it in writing that my mother can't change arrangements for this event, bring materials without asking or take visitors upstairs.'

'Nobody can do that last one.'

'Exactly. Including her.'

Fleur put down the bills. 'I'll add it to the instructions. But Hester, if there's a reason to stop the gathering, I need to know now. No dutiful daughter telling me everything will be fine.'

Hester met her eyes. The demand was not kindly put, which made it possible to accept. 'For tomorrow we'll plan limited access and enough people. If the situation changes, we stop. You and the co-owner will have it in writing.'

They went over to the chairs together. Twenty needed to go back to the hire van; its driver was still round the corner eating his lunch. Hester held the door as Fleur lifted the first stack. They cost too much to leave unused. They counted them together, one by one, and Fleur corrected her when she missed one.