Julia looked at her. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“We should get you a doctor.”

“Yeah.”

They rode back to Vautravers in silence. “You want to look at that web site?” Julia asked as they let themselves into the flat.

“No,” said Valentina. “Never mind.”

The Diaries of Elspeth Noblin

VALENTINA AND JULIA were puzzled by an empty shelf in Elspeth’s office. Since the office was jam-crammed with every conceivable kind of book, knickknack, writing implement and other things useful and useless, space was in short supply-therefore the existence of a pristine, thoroughly empty shelf was a conundrum. It must have held something once. But what? And who had removed it? The shelf was twelve inches deep and eighteen inches wide. It was the third shelf from the bottom in the bookcase next to Elspeth’s desk. Unlike the rest of the office, it had been somewhat recently dusted. There was also a locked drawer in the desk, for which they could find no key.

The former contents of the shelf were now sitting in Robert’s flat, along with all the other things he’d removed from Elspeth’s, in boxes on the floor next to his bed. He had not touched anything in the boxes except Elspeth’s jumper and shoes, which he had placed in their own drawer in his desk. Now and then he would open the drawer and pet them, then close it and go back to his work.

He had placed the boxes on the side of his bed away from the door, so it was possible for him not to look at them for days. He considered putting the boxes in the spare bedroom, but that seemed unfriendly. Eventually he would have to explore the contents. Before Elspeth died he had thought he wanted to read her diaries. He thought he wanted to know everything, be privy to all her secrets. Yet for quite a long time he put off touching the diaries or bringing them into his flat. Now they were here, and still he did not open them. He had his memories, and he did not want them altered or disproved. As a historian he knew that any trove of documents has incendiary potential. So the boxes sat like unexploded ordnance on the floor of his bedroom and Robert did his best to ignore them.

Birthday Greetings

IT WAS 12 MARCH, a grey, lowering Saturday; Marijke’s fifty-fourth birthday. Martin woke up at six and lay in bed, his mind flitting from happy anticipation (she would expect him to call and must surely answer the phone) to anxious consideration of his birthday tribute to her (a dauntingly complex cryptic crossword in which the first and last letters of each clue made multiple anagrams of her full name and the solution was an anagram of a line from John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”). He had given the crossword and her present to Robert, who had promised to send it express. Martin had decided to wait until two to call. It would be three o’clock in Amsterdam; she would have had her lunch and would be in a relaxed, Saturday-afternoon mood. He got out of bed and began to make his way through his morning routine, feeling like an only child waiting for his parents to wake on Christmas morning.

Marijke woke up confused, late in the morning, in weak sunlight that came through the shutters and onto her pillow. It’s my birthday. Lang zal ze leven, hieperderpiep, hoera. She had no plan for the day, beyond coffee and cake with some friends that evening. She knew Martin would call, and hoped that Theo would-sometimes Theo forgot; he seemed to deliberately cultivate a protective layer of obliviousness. She always called Theo to remind him of Martin’s birthday; perhaps Martin did the same for her? She had dreamed about Martin, a very aangename dream of their old gezellig flat in St. John’s Wood. She had been washing dishes and he had come up behind her and kissed the nape of her neck. Memory or dream? She imagined his hands on her shoulders, his lips brushing her neck. Mmm. Marijke had been policing her erotic imagination since she’d left Martin. Usually she was quick to boot him out of her mind when he tried to sneak in, but this morning, for a birthday treat, she let the dream-memory unfurl.

The package arrived around noon. Marijke put it on her kitchen table and spent some minutes hunting for a Stanley knife as the package was almost completely covered with tape and beseechments to HANDLE WITH CARE. It looks like it’s from an insane person. But he’s my insane person, my very own. She ferreted through the plastic packing and pulled out a fat envelope and a pink box. The pink box contained a pair of cerulean-blue leather gloves. Marijke slipped them on. They fitted perfectly; they were soft as breath. She ran her gloved fingers over the invisible hairs on her arm. The gloves disguised her knobbly knuckles and age spots. She felt as though she’d been given new hands.

The envelope contained a letter and a crossword, with the solution in another, smaller envelope. Marijke opened the smaller envelope straightaway; she had no talent for crosswords, and Martin knew this. She could never have begun to solve the masterpieces he made for her each year, and they both understood these birthday crosswords for what they were: a demonstration of devotion, the equivalent of the intricate, eye-popping jumpers Marijke knitted for Martin on his birthdays. Inside the envelope were two stanzas of the Donne poem:

Marijke smiled. She opened the letter and a tiny package fell into her blue-gloved hand. She had to take the gloves off to open it. At first she thought it was empty-she shook the package and nothing came out. She probed with a finger, and found two bits of metal and pearl clinging inside. They spilled onto her palm. Oh, oh! My earrings. Marijke carried them to the window. She imagined Martin hunting among the boxes for days, excavating layers of plastic-embalmed possessions, just to find her earrings. Lieve Martin. She closed her hand around the earrings, closed her eyes and let herself miss him. All this distance…

She raised her head, looked at her one-room flat. It had been the hayloft of a livery stable in the seventeenth century. It had pitched ceilings, heavy beams, whitewashed walls. Her futon occupied one corner, her clothes hung in another corner behind a curtain. She had a table with two chairs, a tiny kitchen, a window that overlooked the little crooked street, a vase of freesias on the windowsill. She had a comfortable chair and a lamp. For more than a year now this room had been her haven, fortress, retreat, her triumphant, undiscoverable gambit in her marital game of hide-and-seek. Standing there, clasping the earrings in her hand, Marijke saw her snug room as a lonely place. Apartment. A place to be apart. She shook her head to change her thoughts and opened Martin’s letter.

Lieve Marijke,

Happy Birthday, Mistress of my heart. I wish I could see youtoday; I wish I could embrace you. But since that isn’t possible, I send you surrogate hands to slip over your own hands, to lurk in your pockets as you walk through your city, to warm you, to remind you of blue skies (it’s grey here too).