‘I can take it from here. Thank you.’
Marion relinquished the comb and watched Hortensia. For several seconds neither spoke and there was only the noise of Hortensia’s oldest clock, which sat in the hallway just outside the guest room. It was an eighteenth-century pendulum clock, wooden, with a tortoiseshell detail that Marion had teased Hortensia about. Not one for the rights of animals, are you? Marion had said. And Hortensia thought: not one for the rights of anything, really; but said nothing.
‘Well, do you?’
‘Different how? With you and me?’
‘No, with Peter.’
‘I don’t know,’ Hortensia said. ‘Do I think things would have been different? They weren’t. I’ve tried this so many times. Look where it got me. Things weren’t different – that’s all I have.’
‘You picking her up?’
‘I couldn’t bear it. I’ve ordered a taxi, they’ll come straight to the house.’
Marion nodded.
‘I do try to remember one thing. About what you were saying before. I keep remembering how Peter and I stopped speaking – as in actually talking to each other about important things, not just the “hello, how are you, fine” things. That must be how you know it’s finished.’
Before she arrived, Esme called Hortensia one last time.
‘I thought I ought to mention this. It’s not something I can imagine any differently, but sometimes it helps to manage reactions from people.’
‘My dear, I have no idea what you are talking about.’
‘I am legally blind, Mrs James. I travel with a guide dog, his name is Toby.’
This was a gift. She knew it was cheating, but Hortensia felt relieved at the prospect of not being seen. To be excused from scrutiny. She relaxed. She waited.
‘Peter – your father – he …’ Hortensia couldn’t find any memories to share. There were some, tender, that she liked to keep for herself, and all the rest were linked to complaints, arguments. ‘I forgot what I was trying to say,’ Hortensia mumbled.
They walked side by side down a dirt lane, the vines stretching to their left and a grove of oaks to the right, between them and the rest of Katterijn. Hortensia looked to the girl on her left, studied her, assuming she could sneak as many looks as she needed.
‘Do I look like him?’
‘Well.’ The truth was she didn’t. She was her mother. She was all her mother. Except for the height maybe. ‘Peter was tall like you. You do it a lot more gracefully, though.’ Hortensia wondered why she wanted the girl to like her.
‘Thank you.’
‘So, what did you say his name was again?’
‘Toby.’ Esme slowed down and patted the neck of the brown collie as she said this, without losing hold of the specialised leash, without tripping, without missing anything. ‘A lot of squirrels about.’
Hortensia didn’t bother to ask how she knew, she preferred not to expose how inexperienced she felt, while walking with a tall beautiful forty-something-year-old who seemed, by some magic, to have retained all the really great qualities of being a toddler. As if it was the having of sight that made one grow old and jaded. She’d arrived, almost supernaturally, without bitterness, without recrimination – like an apparition taunting Hortensia, showing her up, embarrassing her and her foolish notion that sight required seeing. Esme didn’t miss much.
A sorrow worked itself through Hortensia’s body. A deep sorrow that, despite all the sadness she had already experienced, she had never encountered before. She slowed her walking, then stopped altogether and reached for Esme’s hand. The girl, the child (Hortensia couldn’t help referring to her as that, although she was evidently a very grown and mature woman), gave her hand willingly. And even though Hortensia thought she finally knew what to say, her tongue stuck in her mouth and it was the girl who said, simply: I can’t tell you how surprising all this is. But still, I am happy to be here. After holding hands for a few seconds more, they walked on in silence, to where Peter’s ashes had been spread. To the tombstone, which Hortensia described to Esme.
Esme let go of the leash and Toby stayed close to her as she put her knees to the soft ground, covered in leaves the size of a baby’s hand, and felt the slab of stone. As she watched, Hortensia’s mouth dropped open. Although she’d missed this until that very moment, the slab that Peter had commissioned was clearly a message to a child he knew he would never meet.
Esme’s fingers moved over the rough surface, expert. Hortensia took only a second to realise that the girl was reading. ‘My goodness,’ she said.
Esme moved her hand back and forth over the message her father had left her.