What She Had Said

Merel put her shopping bag on the worktop and took out an empty glass container. 'Yours. From the last time you brought food round.'

'You needn't have bothered.'

'I know. But it was in the way.'

She had not come straight from work. Under her coat she wore a blue jumper printed with a crane. A pencil secured her hair above the nape of her neck. She had brought a punnet of grapes and pushed it open, as though giving her visit an everyday purpose. Hester put the envelopes in her bag and laid her notebook on the worktop.

'Want to see the kitchen first?'

'I'm in it, aren't I?'

They looked at the cooker together. Hester explained what the caterer needed: two sockets, enough worktop space, no other food in the fridge. Merel asked whether the coffee machine was on the same circuit as the dishwasher. Hester did not yet know. She wrote it down, and her sister opened the fridge to check the height of the shelves. Talking like this was easy. They could have filled years of family visits by inspecting kitchens and discussing ill-advised household purchases.

'We're not supplying anything,' Merel said. 'I've talked to my colleague. We've got our own evening on Thursday, and the participants are participants. Not spare volunteers.'

'Fine.'

'You look relieved.'

'I've got a quote. Now I don't have to reopen it.'

Merel picked a grape off its stalk. 'You can just say you don't want the hassle.'

'Nobody does.'

'You just think you can prevent it.'

Hester closed her book. There were other things to arrange; she did not have to argue every point. She showed Merel the invitation. Her sister read it standing up, a thumb in the middle of the paper. She held on to the loose card with the question for longer.

'Has anybody responded?' she asked.

'Not yet. Fleur's ringing round.'

'Not Mum, I hope.'

'She rang me already.'

'Of course.' Merel slid back the card. 'And?'

'She thinks it's a nasty joke.'

'What do you think?'

Hester looked towards the back door. A flake of paint in the corridor had survived beneath the latest coat. She knew precisely which part belonged to the past and which she was only persuading herself she recognised. There used to be a plastic crate of empty bottles in front of the kitchen window. That evening they had been cutting and pasting at the little table. Merel had been upstairs or in the hall. Hester had not seen where.

Her sister had come into the kitchen after the impact. That was where it began, however often Hester had wondered what must have come before. Merel had entered after something fell. There was dried glue on her sleeve. She was crying without making a sound, one hand against the doorframe. Hester had not let her go back to the hall. She had given her a chair and set down a glass of water.

Later, Hester had told a policeman that Merel had been with her in the kitchen. No approximation, no time that could have been understood another way. She had said: my sister was with me when it happened. We were making sandwiches. It was untrue. She had only seen Merel after the crash sounded through the building.

She had been twenty-two, her sister nineteen. That explained their roles that night; it changed nothing about the sentence she had spoken. She had wanted to protect Merel. Not because she had seen anything. Because her sister came in as though something lay behind her for which she had no words, and because Ruben had argued with Brecht shortly before. Hester had thought one of them would otherwise be blamed. She had chosen before anyone asked her to choose.

'I think we need to know who sent it,' she said.

Merel pushed away the grapes. 'So we can do what?'

'Talk. Ask what they mean by it.'

'That's what you want. Perhaps they don't want to talk at all.'

'Then I'll know that too.'

Her sister went to the window and tried the handle. It opened a little. Outside, Amir was pushing a wheelbarrow of loose battens through the yard. He raised a hand; Merel waved back and shut the window. The way she used things here, as though the only permission she needed came from a catch or a hinge, unexpectedly irritated Hester. Since arriving, she had kept her job between herself and the building.

'I've been thinking about that evening,' she said.

Merel looked at the dishwasher. 'Fairly normal, I'd say, if you're working here again.'

'About what I said.'

'I remember.'

She said it without visible effort. Hester realised she had been waiting for that: a shudder, an evasive glance, a reason to take over the conversation. Merel gave her none.

'We've never properly talked about it.'

'You said we didn't have to any more.'

Hester had indeed said that. Not immediately, not in those same definite words, but often enough. Merel needed to move on. Think about her course. Stop repeating how badly she had been frightened. Their mother had said similar things, with more patience and a better-filled sandwich. Years later, such sentences were still the practical care Hester knew how to offer.

'I thought I was helping.'

'I know what you thought.'

Merel pulled the pencil out of her hair and put it back. A small, familiar movement. Hester had often watched her sister cook for fifteen people, but rarely watched her stand somewhere without first finding her a task. Even now she had asked her to assess the kitchen.

'What should I have done, then?' she asked.

'I can't answer that for you.'

'Merel.'

'No. You ask as though I could have given you instructions. I didn't have any. And I don't suddenly have to explain how you ought to have behaved back then.'

Ruben's voice came from the hall, followed by Fleur's. Someone dragged a table across the floor. Hester glanced at her watch without registering the time. She did that when a conversation seemed to be going nowhere: looked at something that was moving forward.

'I don't want to decide for you again,' she said.

'Then start by not asking what's wrong with me because I don't feel like discussing this straight away.'

'I haven't asked that.'

'Not yet.'

Hester pulled out a chair at the kitchen table. The crate was gone from the corner, the table was different, and her sister was a forty-one-year-old woman who had bought a house with her partner without needing Hester's advice. She sat. Merel remained standing.

'What do you want me to do with the invitation?' Hester asked.

'Your invitation? Up to you.'

'Brecht's.'

'Why should I decide that?'

It sounded sharp, but now Hester heard the tiredness too. Not a frightened child: a woman annoyed at being handed responsibility by means of a nicely phrased question.

'You're right,' Hester said. 'I'll keep it. If somebody gets in touch, I want to know what's in it. I won't explain anything on your behalf tonight.'

Merel pulled the grapes towards her. She ate two in succession and eventually nodded. She was not granting permission, Hester realised. Only showing she had heard.

'Are you coming tonight?'

'Yes. But I'm leaving at nine. Bram's picking me up.'

'You could come with me—'

Hester stopped. Merel raised an eyebrow. For a moment they both resembled their father in the few photographs of him without a cap. He had been dead for years; he had never lasted long in conversations like this, and would go and sweep the garden. Hester used to judge him for it. Sweeping now seemed exceptionally appealing.

'Bram's picking you up,' she repeated.

'Thank you.'

At the door Merel stopped because the cooker was beeping softly. A red indicator still glowed, though nobody had cooked. Hester went back to inspect the controls. Her sister pointed to a digital timer hidden behind a tin of wooden spoons.

'It just wants somebody to set the time. Our oven does that after a power cut.'

Hester took the instruction book from a drawer. Merel waited for her to find the page. She did not take over, even when Hester pressed the wrong button first. A minute later the display was showing the time.

'So you can keep out of things,' Hester said.

'Oh yes. I've got a whole world besides your jobs.'

She said it lightly, but Hester heard how literally she meant it. She asked what the evening at the community centre would involve. Merel told her about a man cooking for the first time since his wife died who kept weighing out enough for four, although he ate alone. She had asked him to take a portion for someone else. Rather than have him cook less, she had found a use for what he made. Hester did not ask whether it worked. Her sister's face told her she was still trying it out, and she did not want to start assessing her again.

Merel picked up her bag and asked where to put the empty container. Hester pointed to her own bag. Her sister bent, slid it inside and saw Brecht's envelope. She did not touch it.

'Want to know what else Mum said?' Hester asked.

'Will it help me?'

Hester thought of the railing. It was not necessarily a secret. The old papers had reported a fall. Everybody had talked about it. Her mother had always known more about the renovation than she did. One word could not become an explanation just because it felt wrong at the right moment.

'She wants me to bring you tomorrow. I said I'd be there at six.'

'I'm cycling.'

'Fine.'

They went into the foyer. Fleur stood by a stack of boxes, a phone wedged against her shoulder. She beckoned to Merel and pointed at a leaflet. Merel shook her head, said her programme would not be providing food, and went out. Fleur nodded as though that was precisely the answer she had expected. Only once her sister was outside did Hester see the surprise.

'I thought it would be nice for her to do something,' Fleur said.

'She's got other work.'

'We all have.'

'Yes.' Hester picked up the top box. 'Where do these go?'

Later, when Fleur had an appointment elsewhere and Jasper was on the phone upstairs, Hester photographed the card with the question on her own phone. The whole card, not just the words. She did not forward it. On her laptop she made a folder for correspondence about the event and saved the picture there, with the date and a note that the sender was unknown.

She examined the names again. Someone had chosen them deliberately. Not their mother, though she had been the public face of De Werf. Not the dozens of other volunteers from those years. Seven young people as they had been then, all now with work, a mortgage or a divorce. Brecht had belonged among them. Hester did not need to be told that.

She thought again of the policeman, his notebook, the way he had asked whether she was sure. She had nodded. This was no memory suddenly becoming uncertain. She had known for twenty-two years. She had merely given it a useful name: protection.

Hester closed the folder containing the photograph and opened her draft event plan. Under tonight's meeting she deleted reminiscing. In its place she put the actual purpose: agreeing contributions, attendance and responsibilities. Then she slid Merel's envelope among the other invitations and kept Brecht's apart. A practical conversation lay ahead of her, but it would not be the only one.