'No need, I've already done it myself. You're getting absent-minded, Maarten.'
'My memory has never been very good.'
I can tell from my voice that I am trying to defend myself against her teasing reproof. 'It's because of the snow,' I say hurriedly, 'the monotony. When everything around you is white, the distinctions fall away. I'm looking forward to spring, aren't you?'
'They've forecast more snow.'
'Goodness me.'
I fold my hands, look at the tobacco-brown spots of pigmentation between the swollen veins and before I realize I have said it once more: 'Goodness me.' It simply slips out.
She puts her hand briefly on my head, on my thin hair. When she smiles you can tell she has false teeth. Only when she smiles. Otherwise, her cheeks are still round and almost without wrinkles. In the lobes of her small ears sparkle tiny silver ear-studs, Zeeland ear-studs, from her great- grandmother in Zierikzee.
'Drink your tea.'
I drink the tea. Suddenly I feel irritated. I get up and say, 'I have to go to the washroom.' That's what I used to call it at work. At home I just say 'toilet'. Of course she immediately notices the difference in nuance.
'Then you'd better take your briefcase,' she says.
I sit here quite often — an old newspaper aimlessly in my hands — when I want to think about something. But the problem is that it is difficult to think about something you cannot remember. Impossible. The morning. Her request, if I would please fetch some wood. Maybe I didn't hear. Although she asked me twice, she said.
I always did have a poor memory. At meetings, my diary was always my indispensable companion. But a whole morning which you have simply forgotten a few hours later? Which has passed by as if it had never been? A minute ago I would have sworn it was an ordinary weekday morning. If Vera had not said anything I might still be standing there now, in the back room, my hands leaning on the window sill, like every morning, looking for the noisy schoolchildren of Eastern Point.
I could have made a better job of those tiles when I put them up. Feel those lumps of cement along the joints. I have always been left-handed, but at kindergarten that was not allowed, cutting with your left hand. The strips for plaiting mats turn out horrid, of uneven width and length. The teacher bends over me. Her dark curly hair tickles my cheek as it brushes past me. 'You'd better get the pencil box, Maarten,' she says softly, wiping my botched plait-work from the table. I look at the strips of paper at my feet on the floor. Then I get up and open the door.
It is quiet in the corridor. At the end is the store closet. On the top shelf is the pencil box with its scent of wood shavings and graphite, a smell that comes from deep down in the forest, as old as the earth itself. I have to climb on a chair to look for the box with its compartments of different lengths and widths. Behind me stands Vera, beside the washing machine. I totter and grab the shelf with both hands.
'Stop being so dangerous,' she says, 'and get down from that chair before you fall. What are you looking for?'
'A carpenter's pencil,' I mutter as I scramble down. If she asks me again I will say nothing, as if I had not heard her. She does not repeat her question. I walk down the corridor into the living room. The television is on loudly. Vera is slightly hard of hearing. I am not, but sometimes, like just then, it suits me to pretend that my hearing, too, is no longer as sharp as it used to be.
Indeed, what was I doing there? How did I get up on that chair? And so suddenly? All at once I found myself standing on a chair in the laundry room. Without anything leading up to it.
She has put on her lime-green knitted jacket.
'Are you cold?'
'A bit shivery,' she says and points out of the window.
It is snowing again. There goes Robert with his nose close to the ground. Following a scent no doubt. I see him disappear among the pine trees behind a rock that sticks slantingly out of the ground. The wind has wiped the snow from the top of the mottled dark-grey stone. The veins and cracks on its side show up like a network of fine white lines, a map that I suddenly do not wish to look at. My mouth fills up with spittle.
I swallow. And again. I swallow once more and let my tongue run along my palate. A cheerful female voice announces the four o'clock news. It will probably soon be dark now. I will wait until I see Vera and myself loom up in the blackening plate-glass of the living-room window, as in the frame of a familiar painting. Then I will get up and draw the curtains. I rub my hands together. Yes, that's what I will do, that is what I am going to do.
Vera. She has grown thinner. And even smaller, it seems. When she was in her early forties she was almost plump. And then my left hand would go all along her sleeping back and side until I held one of her breasts in the cup of my hand, gently rubbing the nipple with my thumb. Last summer there was a couple screwing down in the wood near by. She had firm young tits. I stood watching behind an ash tree. They didn't see me. Dirty old man? No, it wasn't that. The passion of their fierce movements, down there in the tall grass, the girl's curled-up toes and the summer breeze in the tall bracken among the pines behind them. I thought of the gentle, slumbering movements of Vera and me. I was looking at something that I had known but that lay for ever behind me. The excitement of the unknown has given way to recognition, the recognition of Vera as she is now, as I have seen her become in the course of the years. With most women of her age the young girl they must once have been cannot possibly be reconstructed. They look as if they have always been like that. But in Vera the features and gestures of the young girl have been preserved like a painting underneath. The reckless speed with which she sits down, even now, the exuberant hand-wave when she sees someone she knows, the outward-pointing feet, a leftover from ballet lessons, the straight neck, despite the wrinkles, still turning as proudly and inquisitively as that of an ostrich.
The house seems bigger than it did once, when Kitty and Fred were still at home. Only Robert goes upstairs now, the ground floor is enough for us. We potter. That is one difference with the past, when you still went to work. You start pottering, you walk around for the sake of walking around. Open a door or closet here and there, and shut it again. For no reason. You see the room, the familiar furniture as it is arranged, the portraits and trinkets, the gleaming glass panes of the dresser in the corner of the room which always reminds me of Grandma's and Grandpa's living room, of Grandma's secret store of candy behind a row of snowy-white canisters with their stern black lettering: 'Sugar', 'Salt', 'Cinnamon', 'Coffee'. Thin bars of chocolate she used to keep for me there, and acid drops or pear drops; words from an improbably distant past, but still with a whiff of their former flavour.
I look around me. Everything has received its own immutable place. You don't throw things away so easily any more, and if you break something you have a feeling other than the indifference of long ago. You look around you and you know that pretty well all these objects will survive you. They surround you and sometimes you feeclass="underline" They are looking at me, almost as equals.
'Look at New York!'
It is snowing on the television screen too. A mustard- coloured snow plough in Madison Avenue shoves muddy breakers of snow on to the sidewalk. Behind large, illumined showcase windows, store assistants stand watching. I must not forget to fetch wood from the shed. Those logs are really too heavy for Vera. I haven't sawn and chopped them myself for years. I buy the wood from Mark Stevens, who also supplies Tom at the lighthouse. It could do with another log now, though more for the sake of cosiness than for warmth.
I pick up a book from the low round table beside the fireplace. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. Never seen that lying here before. It doesn't come from the library either. Almost half-way through the book, a bus ticket peeps out from between the pages, a return ticket, Gloucester- Rockport. I haven't seen Vera reading it. Maybe she borrowed it from Ellen Robbins and that bus ticket is hers. (Why do I so much want this to be the case? Why does this innocent book suddenly seem an intruder?)