The Row of Houses

Ria had put four chairs on the pavement. Two held cushions, the other two piles of letters. The folding table between them was too narrow for her coffee pot and tub of biscuits. Whenever someone pointed to a letter, the pot had to move. Lena leant her bicycle against the fence and asked if she could carry anything.

‘It's not my table,’ Ria said. ‘Move it and it folds up. There's one place it'll stand, and it's standing there.’

It was Saturday morning. Further along, somebody was vacuuming a car, an extension lead trailing from an upstairs window. A boy crouched beside a punctured ball in a front garden. The ordinary life of the street made it harder to see the houses simply as numbers on a list. People here would be washing their curtains today, finding out whether they could fit a little dog flap. For the past week Lena had looked almost exclusively at back doors and traces of damp.

Amir was talking to a man in an apron across the road. He raised a hand when he saw her, but finished the conversation first. Ria took a letter from the top of a pile.

‘This one's mine. You don't need to ask permission to look.’

‘I'd still like to know what you want to do with it.’

‘Find out if it's right.’

The letter offered a payment for handing over the property on time. The second page said the resident confirmed they would leave it empty. A date had been printed in advance. Ria had circled it in red.

‘I never said I could leave that day. They said the form was just to keep our options open.’

‘Did you sign?’

‘No. Henk said to speak to someone who wasn't getting money out of it first.’

She put the letter back. The red circle had been drawn carefully, but strayed off course at the end.

A woman approached from one of the houses with two sealed envelopes. Seeing Amir cross the road, she clutched them to her chest.

‘I don't want to be in the paper.’

‘Then you don't have to speak to me,’ Amir said. ‘You can talk to Lena or your adviser. And I won't photograph any papers just because they're out here.’

She looked at Ria, who moved a pile of letters to the other chair and pointed to the space. The woman sat, still holding her envelopes. Lena did not need her name for this conversation. She said somebody had visited and told her the house must be empty before they could examine the roof. Two days later, a form arrived describing the visit as an agreement.

‘Did they come inside?’ Lena asked.

‘Only the hall. I had to go to my sister's. She'd had an operation. He saw my bag and said that worked out well.’

‘Did you agree to move out?’

‘I was going to my sister's for four nights.’

Lena asked if Mieke could ring her. She thought about it for a long time, sliding one envelope a little way out from behind the other, then back again.

‘I don't want them thinking I'm making trouble.’

‘You're allowed to ask what a form means before you sign. Mieke works for you. She can talk through how you want contact handled.’

‘You work for them.’

There was no reproach in it, just a reminder of something Lena might have forgotten.

‘I carried out an inspection for them. The report they're using in my name isn't what I wrote. I've reported that. It doesn't mean you have to trust me straight away.’

The woman looked at the two piles. ‘But you can tell whether a roof's bad, can't you?’

‘After the right inspection, I can give an opinion. I haven't looked at your roof. Mieke knows more about that letter than I do.’

Eventually the woman wrote her own phone number on a page from Ria's shopping pad. She folded it before handing it over. She kept her letters. As she walked away, her front door was already open. Somebody had waited behind it through the whole conversation without coming out.

Amir asked whether Ria would discuss her own offer with him. When she agreed, he did not switch on his recorder. First he asked how he could use her name and what details must stay out of the story. Lena took her folder to the fence. She heard no outraged interview, just the slow work of two people who did not immediately understand a question in the same way.

At the next house, a man brought a stool into the doorway and sat down. He had seen Lena arrive and wanted to know if she could get the utilities reconnected. The electricity was on, he said, but a letter warned that services might be interrupted during the work. He did not want to throw out all his food again.

‘Again?’ Lena asked.

‘Years ago. A fault. At least this time they promise to let you know when they're coming. Only they haven't given a day.’

How easily she might have recorded a second recent disconnection. The letter announced a possibility; the ruined freezer contents belonged to an old fault. She asked permission to read the page and pointed out the number for enquiries. He had rung it. The person answering had not known when anything would happen at his house either.

‘Ask your adviser to put the question in writing,’ Lena said. ‘I'm not going to guess what they'll disconnect here.’

The man took his stool inside and asked her to hold the door. A large pot of basil stood on the stairs, with scarcely any leaves left. His granddaughter had given it to him, he said, and kept asking if he watered it. Every day he watered it. Lena could hear him beginning to suspect that might be the problem.

When she came back, Amir had finished with Ria. He had written only a few lines. Ria poured Lena a cup of coffee she had not asked for.

‘You look like someone who's forgotten people need feeding today too.’

‘I've had breakfast.’

‘My daughter says that when all she's had is an apple.’

A woman came round the corner carrying a cardboard box. She kept hold of it as Ria got up and asked whether she had had to sort everything alone. She shook her head, a small, tired movement.

‘Not everything. I've decided I don't have to do it all this weekend.’

Lena knew who she must be before Ria introduced her. Nora Roos looked at Amir, then at the papers.

‘I don't want my father turned into the man who knew everything.’

‘Neither do I,’ Amir said. ‘If you'd like to talk, we can arrange a separate time.’

‘Not today.’

He stepped back. Nora turned to Lena.

‘You've been asking about him.’

‘I'm trying to understand what was happening to the residents. I've heard he helped Sofie with letters. I don't know anything beyond that first-hand.’

Nora shifted the box. Its bottom had begun to come loose on one side. Lena asked if she could take it, and at Nora's nod set it on the empty chair. No secret files inside. A vase, two mugs and an unopened packet of coffee.

‘I'm taking things that would otherwise sit there until I stopped wanting them,’ Nora said. ‘He bought that coffee specially for my visit. Then complained how expensive the brand had got.’

Ria gave a quiet laugh. ‘He always made too much.’

‘And then you had to have another cup, because he couldn't bear to waste it.’

Nora did not sit down. She rested her hands on the box and looked across the road, where the vacuum cleaner was still going. Lena asked whether Henk ever kept his appointment notes away from home.

‘You mean his notebooks?’

‘Cor mentioned them.’

‘He could never find them at home. One in his inside coat pocket, one by the phone. He used the one by the phone for shopping too. Then he'd come home with washing powder because he couldn't remember which page the bread was on.’

Ria pointed down the street. ‘Sometimes he left things at Cor's before going to the market. Your dad thought taking a bag was silly, then went and bought potatoes anyway.’

‘Cor said he still has something of Dad's,’ Nora said. ‘I told him there's no rush. I don't want people gathering up his things from everywhere to make a story.’

‘That's for you to decide,’ Lena said. ‘I won't ask Cor to give it to me.’

Nora looked at her a moment longer. ‘He could be irritating too. You can remember that. If someone didn't want to discuss a letter, he'd turn up again the next day. Same letter.’

Ria picked up the coffee pot. ‘Yes. Once he followed me all the way to the bottle bank.’

Nora straightened the top of the box, looked round and asked if anyone had tape. Lena kept a roll in her pannier for temporary markings. She fetched it and held the bottom while Nora taped the split. The tape was bright yellow. Nora smoothed down its ends with her thumb.

‘At least I'll know which box it is.’

A brief silence settled round the table after she left. Amir shut his notebook and asked Lena to walk with him. Ria kept her papers. Lena put the number for Mieke in the closed compartment of her folder.

At the corner, a Noordhuis sign stood behind the window of an empty property. A white scratch cut through the printed promise of space for the neighbourhood. Amir did not ask Lena to stop for a photograph.

‘I've seen your correction,’ he said. ‘You don't just want me to write that someone's misused your name, do you?’

‘No.’

‘You didn't check the final version.’

‘That's right.’

‘I can't say you objected from the start. You didn't until you went back.’

‘I haven't asked you to.’

He nodded. A tree root narrowed the pavement ahead, and Lena dropped behind him to get past. In her work she had always examined the street one piece at a time. One roof, one wall, one request. Now she saw the same movement in the forms: something provisional became, without discussion, a decision a resident was supposed to have made already.

Amir asked which documents he could use to check her account. She agreed to show him her original report and the relevant export, with personal details concealed. He would give the other parties an opportunity to respond before publication. Her words would appear under her own name. She could not release residents' statements on their behalf.

‘It'll probably get you an unpleasant call,’ he said.

‘I've had those already.’

‘From people who've just given you work until now, too.’

Lena looked at the sign behind the glass. Her name did not have to be on the frontage for her to be implicated in what went on behind it.

‘Check my account,’ she said. ‘Be precise about what you can establish. There's a woman I can't reach who lives here. That's no excuse for a headline we'll regret.’

Amir put the notebook in his bag. ‘I don't need a headline before I've heard from her.’

Ria called them back. She stood beside the table with her phone and wanted to correct one thing. She had said the work van was in the street on Monday. Now her calendar showed that her appointment elsewhere was on Tuesday. It was that morning she had seen the van on returning home. What she knew about Monday had come from somebody else.

Lena added the correction to her earlier note. Ria looked awkwardly at the papers.

‘So many people came round that week.’

‘That's why I'm asking again,’ Lena said.

They carried the table indoors before it could fold up: Ria holding the top, Lena the loose leg. In the hall it stayed open. Ria pointed to a place beside the coat rack where it was apparently allowed to wobble. One chair with a cushion had been left outside. Lena set it against the house, then retrieved her yellow tape from the coffee pot and put it in her pannier.