What Remains

The tenancy ended on the thirty-first, which gave them four days. Ivo drove up on the Wednesday with a boot full of flattened boxes, and Constantin came on the train, having said on the phone that he could only stay until Friday.

Marta had lived on the second floor for thirty-four years. She had known everyone on the landing at the beginning and no one at the end, which is less a statement about the building than about thirty-four years. The flat smelled of dust and lily of the valley soap.

The bedroom was slower. Opening the wardrobe, Ivo found forty years of coats hung by season, and it took him some time to work out why this bothered him. Constantin, who notices such things later and says them sooner, remarked that she had clearly never expected to stop needing the winter ones.

A man came on the Thursday morning to give a valuation. He spent eleven minutes in the flat, said the dining table was worth having and the rest was not, and left a card. The table had been in the family for generations, and Constantin agreed to the price without looking at Ivo.

Three bags went to the charity shop on the corner, where the volunteer took them without looking up. Ivo watched a stranger consider one of his aunt's cardigans in the window an hour later, put it back, and walk on, and he found he minded much less than he had expected to.

In the bottom drawer of the desk there was a biscuit tin, and in the tin there were photographs, none of them labelled. In one, taken on a beach in the sixties, their father is nineteen and laughing, and there is a woman on the left that neither of them knows.

They looked at that photograph for longer than they looked at any other object in the flat. Constantin turned it over. On the back, in handwriting that was not Marta's, someone had written a single word and then crossed it out so thoroughly that the paper had torn.

There had been a time when they could have asked. Marta had talked, in the last few years, about her twenties, usually in the afternoons, and neither of them had written any of it down. Had one of them recorded even an hour of it, the tin would now be a different object.

Constantin left on the Friday at four, as arranged. He took the tin, the two rings and a wooden bowl, and he offered to take more, and Ivo said there was no need, and both of them understood that this was a small thing being said instead of a large one.

Alone on the Saturday, Ivo took the curtains down, which is the moment a flat stops being anybody's. Light came in across bare boards and eleven dark rectangles on the wallpaper, and the room turned out to be considerably larger than he had thought it was.

He put a folder of letters in the car at half past five, having taken it out twice. He has not read them. He has told two people that he is going to, and he has moved the folder from the boot to the hall and from the hall to the top of a cupboard.

The keys were handed in on the Monday morning. The woman in the office ticked four lines on an inventory, asked whether the meter had been read, and said that the flat would be relet from the fifteenth. She was perfectly pleasant. It took six minutes.

Some weeks later Constantin sent a photograph of the tin, open, on his kitchen table, with no message attached. Ivo looked at it on a train and did not reply that day. The woman on the left is still there, still on a beach, still not looking at the camera.