Condition

My brother had put a price on the dining table before our mother was in the ground.

I didn’t hold that against him. I had put prices on worse things: a boy’s railway set, still laid out for a birthday he hadn’t reached; a wedding service with one place setting missing; a dialysis chair nobody wanted to touch. When people asked what my job was, I said I valued the contents of houses. Usually they heard houses.

Ben met me on the drive carrying two mugs.

“You’ve cut your hair.”

“Six months ago.”

“Looks good.”

He gave me the mug with a chip in the handle. In any other house I would have photographed the damage and moved on. Here I knew the chip had been made by our father, tapping the handle against the sink to get Mother’s attention.

The house stood behind Ben, red brick darkened by rain. One upstairs curtain had caught on its hook. Mother would never have left it like that. She had been dead for twenty-three days and already the house was developing habits of its own.

“You don’t have to do the whole thing,” Ben said. “Just tell me what’s worth keeping.”

“That isn’t what you asked for.”

“Anna.”

He said it gently, which was his way of letting me know I had started being difficult before I’d even taken off my coat.

“You asked for an inventory for the estate. You’ll get an inventory.”

“All right. Fine.” He smiled, making room for me to be tiresome. “Come in before that goes cold.”

The hall smelled of furniture polish and the sweet, stale flowers people had sent instead of visiting. On the console table was a neat stack of condolence cards. Ben’s daughter had made one with a rabbit on it. The rabbit was smiling. Kit was eight and still thought a picture should improve the thing it depicted.

I put my case down by the stairs.

“What did you tell her?” I asked.

“About Gran?”

“Yes.”

“That she died.”

“I meant about her room.”

Mother had kept a bedroom for Kit, although Ben brought her over only at Christmas. I had come down for the funeral and found it full of presents, some already too young for her.

“She chose the lamp,” he said. “The rabbit one. Everything else can go.”

On the back of the hall door, the old brass bolts were polished around their edges. Our father used to slide them shut at ten each night. He had called it putting the house to bed.

I opened my case.

There is a method to making an inventory. You stand at the door and work clockwise. You record the object, the material, the maker if you can identify one, and the condition. You do not write beautiful. You do not write treasured. You do not write that the person who owned it waited all her life for somebody to notice.

Dining room. One mahogany extending table. Surface scratched. One leaf missing.

“It’s not mahogany,” Ben said. “Dad always said it was rosewood.”

“Dad was wrong.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

He said this with the easy ruefulness allowed to us now our father was dead. For most of my childhood, Ben had agreed with him about everything.

I measured the table. Under one corner, a folded square of cardboard kept it steady.

“Is someone starting work outside?” I asked.

There was fresh gravel beside the garage. A small digger stood beneath a tarpaulin.

“Drainage. Survey found water getting into the old cellar.”

“What old cellar?”

“The bit under the washhouse. Dad had it closed off. You must remember.”

I remembered a green door. A smell of wet coal. Being told not to go down there because the steps had rotted.

“Work’s supposed to start Friday,” he said. “Before we put it on the market.”

Today was Wednesday.

“I’ll need longer than two days.”

“They’re not working in here.”

“Still.”

He lifted both hands. “Whatever you need.”

That should have reassured me. It had reassured me for thirty-five years.

At eleven he left for work. He ran a building-supplies business now, a modestly successful one, and liked people to know that being self-employed didn’t mean being free. At the door he asked whether I would be all right staying in the house.

“It’s a house, Ben.”

“Of course it is.”

I watched him reverse around the digger. Then I went upstairs.

Mother’s bedroom had not been disturbed. There were still two pillows, although our father had died six years ago. Her slippers were under the dressing-table stool. A strip of tissue lay over the bristles of her hairbrush.

I opened the wardrobe and counted coats.

Five wool. Two raincoats. One blue quilted jacket. Behind them, in a zipped garment bag, something green.

I knew the colour before I unzipped the bag. Not forest green, which is what the missing-person posters had called it. Bottle green. A colour Evie had chosen because she said it made her look expensive.

The coat had three large buttons and one small one at the cuff. A fourth large button was missing. Evie had asked me to sew it back on, and I had said I wasn’t her servant.

That had been the last ordinary conversation we ever had.

Eighteen years later, the button was still missing.

I sat on Mother’s bed with the coat across my knees. It weighed more than I remembered. A winter coat, a cheap one, the lining shiny at the elbows.

When my sister disappeared, I told a policeman I had seen her wearing it as she walked towards the bus stop.

This was not true.

It wasn’t a misunderstanding, or a child’s frightened guess. I was seventeen. I understood what a statement was.

I had written it down and signed my name.