What Robin Keeps

Robin had made a worktable out of two trestles and a door. She was bent over it with a ruler between her teeth and a roll of acid-free paper under her arm. When Hester came into the hall, she raised a finger. First she cut the paper, put down the ruler and carefully slipped the sheet beneath a cut-out set design. Only then did she say hello.

'I thought this was bigger,' she said. 'The copy at home made it look like almost a whole set.'

The sheet was no bigger than a placemat. Three building fronts stood on it in broad areas of blue and rust-brown, with a quick sketch of a hand at one side. Brecht had added dimensions and crossed something out at the bottom. Robin pointed. 'Not for larger hall. That's what it says. At first I thought she'd crossed out her own name.'

Hester did not bend over it straight away. 'May I look?'

'That's what it's here for. Just clean hands, and not that corner. It's coming away.'

It was a working drawing, useful and untidy, meant for someone who was going to make something. Hester remembered Brecht crossing the hall with a piece of wood under her arm to show somebody what she meant. So often she had replaced that memory with the image at the foot of the stairs. The sheet on the table brought her back to Brecht on her feet, busy with her work.

'Your mother could get furious if we started painting before she'd chosen the colours,' she said.

Robin looked up. 'Quite right too.'

'Usually. Once she'd put the tins in the wrong places herself.'

'Did she admit it?'

'Not until we opened the third tin.'

Robin smiled and wrote something on a loose sheet. 'That's not going on the label. But I do want to know it.'

Beside the sketch lay an envelope with COPY written in thick letters. Hester recognised the folded letter from Brecht to Else. The original was now with the police, given directly by the people it had been meant for. She did not need to touch it again to know what it said. Brecht wanted to leave, to take her own work with her, to reach the world outside Marjan's organisation.

'I'm not displaying the letter,' Robin said. 'There's something in it about the coat Gran was supposed to buy me. That's no one else's business.'

'You don't have to.'

'Fleur asked whether we could use just one bit. About her designs. In a tasteful way, she said. But I don't want everyone standing there reading her handwriting as if it tells you what she was like.'

Hester pulled up an empty chair. She had forty minutes before her meeting with Fleur and Tessa. She said so, to let Robin know she was not offering an endless conversation she would abruptly have to cut short. Robin nodded and gave her a stack of blank labels to sort into sizes.

'My client in Utrecht needs extra hands on Monday,' Robin said. 'I told them I couldn't. Now I've asked whether I can start on Tuesday. I do want to work there.'

'You should do that, then.'

Robin locked the blade of her knife. 'I'm not asking permission. I'm telling you because I won't be here taking things down late on Sunday. That needs to go in your schedule.'

Hester gave a brief laugh, mostly at herself. 'Tuesday. And away in good time on Sunday. I'll put it down.'

They sorted the labels. Robin had chosen two sketches, a photograph of Brecht beside a freshly painted panel and a third piece whose maker had not yet been established. She particularly did not want that one attributed to her mother. She put no date of death on the front of the photograph. Anyone wanting the information could look at the back. For the hall, she preferred an account of how the work was made to a memorial notice.

'I should have written everyone a proper letter,' Robin said after a while. 'Instead of all that theatre with the eighth card. Gran said so when she found out what I'd done. I thought, if I simply ask them to talk, I'll get seven polite refusals.'

'You might have done.'

'It doesn't make the trick any better.' Robin rubbed a thumb along a label and put it aside. 'I wanted you all to be frightened for once about what you weren't telling. Then you can convince yourself it's fair, because you've spent so long being frightened you'll never find anything out.'

Hester thought of the packet that had been waiting for her at De Werf. The shock had not been only Brecht's name on an envelope. There had also been anger at being given a part without being asked whether she wanted it. She had so often called that protection herself.

'I hated it,' she said. 'And I'm glad you told us it was you. I don't know how to fit both things into one answer.'

'That's better than saying it did some good in the end.' Robin drew the stack towards her. 'Fleur keeps almost saying that.'

Hester left it there. Robin looked so young as she trimmed a piece of card, her mouth skewed with concentration. Not because twenty-four was a child. Because at twenty-two Brecht had already been the mother everyone now discussed as an unfinished life. Robin had lived more years than her mother had ever had. It did not automatically make her work a monument.

A voice came from the foyer. Marjan was asking Fleur whether she had left her umbrella. Hester looked towards the door. Robin did too, but she moved nothing off the table. Marjan came as far as the threshold of the hall and stood there with the folded umbrella in her hand.

'Here you are. I found it behind the counter.' Her eyes passed over the table. 'That blue piece is from the summer production. She'd just discovered how to suggest something huge with very little depth.'

Robin laid her hands flat on the door that formed the tabletop. 'Yes, it says so on the back.'

Marjan nodded as if they were having a pleasant chat. 'I've still got some things at home too. Possibly things you've never seen. I'll have to look. They're not all together.'

'If you've got anything of my mother's, I'd like a list or photographs. Then Gran and I can see what belongs with it.'

'You don't have to make it so businesslike. It's for you.'

'That's why.'

Hester did not get up. She wanted to head for the door and bring the conversation to an early end, but Robin had not called her. Marjan held the umbrella in both hands. One of its ribs had poked through the thin fabric.

'I'm glad you're showing her work,' she said. 'Just be careful about the stories you put round it. You can set something going that you'll regret later. There are people who write everything down.'

'I write things down too,' Robin said. 'My own name goes under what I say. And I keep copies of the documents I give people.'

Marjan's eyes moved to the envelope. Hester could not see what she was reading. The word COPY was face up, larger than the rest of the writing.

'You must do what you think best, of course,' Marjan said. 'I'd just hate to see you being used by somebody else.'

'So would I.' Robin turned the sheet with the sketch a quarter-turn. 'I need to get on now. If you have anything, you can send Fleur those photographs.'

Marjan stayed a little longer, long enough to make it clear that no one had dismissed her. Then she told Hester her bus was due in eight minutes and went into the foyer. Robin waited for the front door to close before picking up her knife again.

'That bit about people writing everything down,' she said. 'Did she mean the police?'

'I don't know exactly what she meant.' Hester checked the time. 'If it felt like pressure, you can report it as that. With her actual words. You don't have to make it more or less than it was.'

Robin took her phone, typed something and put it down again. 'I'll keep it. I'm not going to look for a hidden message in every sentence she says. I haven't got the time.'

Hester stood now. Her meeting with Fleur and Tessa was about to begin; the time she had offered was almost up. Robin asked if she could do one more thing. A rolled canvas lay behind the trestles and needed moving to the little table by the entrance. Its wooden battens made it heavy. They carried it together, so awkwardly that Robin knocked the chair holding the sketches and a corner of paper lifted in the draught.

'Hold on,' Hester said, stopping.

Robin put her end on the floor, secured the paper with a clean weight and came back. 'We don't need to rush. Your meeting's in ten minutes, not ten seconds.'

They laid the canvas on the table. Remnants of red lettering showed on it, once part of a production for which nobody had yet found the programme. Robin did not know whether she would use it. She might simply photograph a detail to show the crew in Utrecht on Tuesday how the paint had been applied. Hester did not ask what that had to do with her mother.

At the doorway to the foyer, Robin handed her a small sheet. It gave the correct dimensions for the new captions. At the bottom was a request: no photographs of people online without asking. Hester put it in her work folder. Fleur beckoned from the foyer, her laptop already open. Hester picked up her coat at the counter, draped it over her chair and sat down with her.