Nella pulls out of her pocket two hundred guilders from Arnoud and lays them on Pellicorne’s register. ‘If you will organize the gravestone, the coffin, the men to carry it, and the space in the church floor, I will, upon completion, double that sum,’ she says.
Pellicorne looks at the money. It is money coming from the wife of a sodomite. It is money coming from a woman. It is the deeplying root of evil, but it is a lot of money. ‘I cannot accept this,’ he says.
‘Greed is the canker we must cut out,’ Nella replies, her expression mournful.
‘Precisely.’ She can see he is pleased to have his sermon echoed.
‘You, a man of God, are surely best placed to guard the canker,’ Nella continues.
‘Once it’s been removed,’ he replies, his eyes flicking to the guilders.
‘Of course.’
‘There are many alms required for our city’s unfortunates.’
‘And something must be done for them, or the canker begins to bloom.’
They sit in silence.
‘There is a small space in the east corner of the church,’ Pellicorne says. ‘Room for a modest slab, nothing more.’
What a fool he is, Nella thinks. He is just a man like every other man, no closer to God than the next. She wonders how much will be skimmed off the four hundred before the pallbearers and the alms are paid. Would Marin like it, in the corner? She spent her life in the corner, perhaps she would prefer it in the nave. But then, in the nave, people would walk up and down on her. Some citizens probably desire such an ending, so they never are forgotten, held in memory and prayed for – but to Nella’s mind it is too undignified for Marin. It is better in the corner.
‘I am speaking the truth, Madame,’ says Pastor Pellicorne. ‘We are full up. That corner is the best that I can do.’
‘It will suit,’ she replies. ‘But I want the finest elm for the coffin.’
Pellicorne resumes his pen and opens the register once again. ‘I will see to it. The funeral could be next Tuesday evening, after the normal service?’
‘Very well.’
‘It is easier in the night. The smell that rises when you open up the floor puts people off their prayers.’
‘I see.’
‘How many people will come?’ he asks.
‘Not many,’ Nella replies. ‘Her life was quite secluded.’ She says this almost as a challenge, to see if he will contradict her, or offer some knowing aside regarding Marin’s hidden life. The bookshops she visited, he might say. The company she kept, that Negro she paraded through the streets.
But Pellicorne merely purses his lips. Seclusion is bad; Nella knows what his expression means. Civic-mindedness, neighbourly surveillance, everyone checking up on everybody else – that’s what keeps this city ticking on. Not cloistering yourself away from prying eyes. ‘It will be a brief ceremony,’ he says, putting the guilders into the register.
‘We don’t like pomp,’ she replies.
‘Precisely. And aside from her name and dates, what would you have inscribed on the gravestone?’
Nella closes her eyes and conjures Marin in her long black dress, the perfection of her cap and cuffs concealing so much turmoil underneath. Publicly rejecting sugar but sneaking candied walnuts, hiding Otto’s love notes, annotating unvisited countries on her brother’s pilfered maps. Marin, so dismissive of the miniatures, but who slept with Otto’s doll beneath her pillow. Marin, who didn’t want to be a wife, but who had Thea’s name waiting on her tongue.
Nella feels weighed down by the pointless loss of Marin’s life, the many unanswered questions. Frans, Johannes, Otto – this trio of men, did they know her sister-in-law any better than she?
‘Well?’ asks Pellicorne impatiently.
Nella clears her throat. ‘T’can vekeeren,’ she replies.
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘T’can vekeeren.’
Things can change.