The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (20 page)

I opened the envelope. There was more than three months of groceries in there, but then, I’m more frugal than Abby and Rachel had obviously been. “And if it turns out that Abby had something of value that isn’t in the inventory, that she didn’t even tell you about…?”

“It wouldn’t be illegal to withhold that from her brother,” Rachel said, and then she laughed grimly. “Listen to me. I’m worried about doing something illegal. After what the Belgian state has done to me.”

Brussels is a city on a grand scale. Boulevards and parks, an enormous palace, a beautifully restored central square, nineteenth-century shopping arcades of glass and wrought iron. In spite of all this grandeur, it used to have a kind of blackened shabbiness that I once found appealing. Now, except in pockets, like around the Gare Midi, for instance, all that sad grit and glamour was giving way to the gleam of corporate headquarters and European Community buildings.

Amsterdam may have as much big business as Brussels, but you don’t feel it so strongly. The scale is small, the streets and buildings human-sized. You can walk it easily, and it never seems overwhelming. It had begun to rain on my trip back to Amsterdam that afternoon, a thick marine downpour. But it let up as the train pulled into the Central Station, and I decided to head for one of the inner canals, the Keizersgracht, on foot.

The Antikvaariat Sophie was a shop I’d noticed and forgotten on my strolls around the canals. Some of the other bookstores, just as small, had more lively and inviting shopfronts, often with painted wooden signs and bikes out front, often clustered together, in neighborly fashion. The Antikvaariat Sophie had a more solitary look to it, squeezed as it was between tall, narrow residences. It was that solitude more than any shabbiness, any dustiness that gave the bookstore its closed in, secret look.

Not secret perhaps. Private. I remembered Abby, with a force I didn’t usually see in her, saying at our last meeting: “Americans don’t believe in privacy. If you don’t respond to the most prying question, they believe you’re holding out on them.”

At the time I’d agreed. Long years abroad had given me a great reluctance to discuss my personal affairs with acquaintances, much less on television. But I never made a big deal of it; when effusive Americans demanded to know whom I was seeing and what my plans were, I simply lied. Now I wondered what Abby might have meant when she’d talked about privacy. Who was asking her questions? What secrets had she kept, even from Rachel?

A tiny bell jingled when I opened the door to the Antikvaariat Sophie, and a woman looked up, neither friendly nor unfriendly, from behind a desk piled with papers and books. There were piles of books everywhere, on tables, alongside the shelves, in boxes. Most of them were books by women, everything from battered old copies of
Sisterhood is Powerful
to
The Life of Hildegard von Bingen
. It was a narrow room, with a cozy look. A few framed black-and-white photographs on the wall—I recognized Vita Sackville-West—and a well-worn armchair with a table next to it.

I would have loved to spend an hour or two looking through the shelves, where Audre Lorde’s poetry rubbed challengingly up against that of Elizabeth Bishop’s, where Lillian Hellman duked it out with Diana Trilling, and Simone de Beauvoir reminisced in fat volumes and Colette in slender ones. Shelves where women at first shyly and then more and more vehemently confessed their deepest feelings. Shelves of political tracts and shelves of oddities. Shelves where I might find first editions of Tommy Price’s wonderful old travel books. However, I remembered that I’d told Rachel I’d try to call her this evening with news.

I took out a few receipts and placed them on the cluttered desk in front of the bookseller. She was a compact, solid woman in her forties, dressed in a striped shirt and khaki trousers. She had a shrewd, amused look that was not particular to her but to her countrymen and women. I had often felt the Dutch were having a quiet joke at my expense.

“Ah,” she said. “Then something has happened to Abby.”

“You knew her then?”

“Knew…yes. Oh, yes.”

“I’m sorry to tell you—she was killed in a car accident.”

“A car accident?”

“Someone in a Fiat hit her outside the Gare Midi two days ago, around five in the afternoon. They didn’t stick around.”

The solid woman looked down. I couldn’t see her expression. “And these?”

“It looks like she had recently been buying books or something from you.”

“Books? From me?”

“It says Antikvaariat Sophie at the top of these receipts, doesn’t it? And you do sell books, as anyone can see.”

“Well, I try to sell books. Sometimes I do; very often I don’t.”

I was finding this frustrating. “Look, did Abby buy things from you, things that were valuable? Things that would be worth a lot to her partner Rachel? Because everything is going to go to Abby’s brother otherwise. Rachel isn’t family; she can’t inherit Abby’s estate in Belgium.”

“Shall we start over?” the woman asked when I ran out of steam. She got up and went to the street door, locked it, and pulled down the Closed sign. “My name is Anja,” she said, coming back toward me with her hand stretched out. “And your news is nothing I like to hear.”

I saw that there were tears in her eyes.

Anja said they had been acquaintances for about a year, ever since Abby had walked into her shop one rainy day and started talking books. They both had a passion for them, especially the work of the underrecognized women modernists of the early twentieth century.

“But these couldn’t have been what Abby bought from you. She had a complete collection. She’d been building it for years.”

“You keep assuming that Abby bought from me,” said Anja. “And she did, a bit, but just to show that she appreciated what I was doing. She’d been in bookselling, so she knew its difficulties. Mostly,” Anja looked down at the papers on the desk, “I bought from her. That’s what those receipts mean.”

“But the receipts are for the equivalent of hundreds of dollars.” I looked around. “I don’t mean to be offensive, but you look like you’re barely hanging on.”

“Women’s literature doesn’t sell the way one would wish,” Anja agreed.

“Then how…”

“I was the middleman. I bought on behalf of someone else.”

“A library, a private collector?”

“Look,” said Anja. “It wasn’t quite on the up-and-up—as you say—what we were doing.”

I waited.

“You know, I didn’t have lunch today,” said Anja. “Just forgot about it. I was going to close early anyway and get a bite. Perhaps you’ll join me?” said Anja.

She locked the shop behind us and we walked to a place a block or two away. Anja had recovered from the shock of hearing about Abby, and we let the conversation slip to lighter subjects, to Anja taking up karate again after some years respite, and to my friend Eloise, whom she knew. The disloyal thought went through my head that I could see why Abby might come to Amsterdam to see Anja. She didn’t have the beauty of Rachel, but she didn’t have her dependency either. Not that Abby had ever said in so many words that Rachel was too much for her; the nearest she’d come during a recent visit was to say that both of them had had a hard time adjusting to Belgium, and that Rachel especially seemed lonely.

We ordered sandwiches. I had a coffee, Anja a small glass of Dutch gin,
genever
, and a beer. It had begun to rain, and the afternoon had become dark and drawn-in. The little bar itself was dark too, one of those places the Dutch call the brown cafes. We could have been in the eighteenth century, looking through the small-paned windows onto the canal, the carpeted table between us.

It wasn’t until we were settled that Anja began to speak again. “How much do you know about her aunt? The one she inherited from?”

“Almost nothing. One day Abby was living an ordinary life in London, working in a bookstore, scrabbling to make the rent, and the next she was living in Brussels in an expensive flat with no visible means of support.”

“Her aunt was named Amanda Lowe. She came over to Europe as a nurse during the last war and married one of her patients, a rich Belgian. This aunt made over her flat to Abby before she died, with the provision that Abby live there and keep it up. But she didn’t leave Abby any money. Perhaps she meant to, but died before she could manage it. The money went automatically to Abby’s brother.”

“A beautiful flat but no money to live there. Is that why Abby was selling off her books and manuscripts?”

“Yes. Although I believe she was trying to work out some agreement with her brother, and he was being difficult. I don’t know exactly. We didn’t discuss that.”

“And meanwhile Abby still had to live,” I said and, guessing, “Was there something that her aunt had that was a secret, that was valuable, that could be sold?”

“Exactly.”

“But what was it?”

There was another pause, while Anja took a bite of the sandwich in front of her.

“This aunt,” she finally said. “Amanda Lowe. Later Madame Leconte. She was an interesting woman. Before she came to Europe and all that, before she was in the war and married this Belgian man, she had led a different life. Almost been another person, so to speak.”

“Go on.” It was raining harder now, and I could see people scuttling down the street and across the bridge with umbrellas pulled down over their heads like black crows’ wings.

“She lived in Greenwich Village for a time. She had some friends, all girls. Girls she had been to college with in the 1920s. I think Amanda fancied herself something of a writer. She wrote stories and reviews in the 1930s for several journals, and she started novels that she didn’t finish. They’re about love between women. Very interesting. But unfortunately not very good.”

“Manuscripts?” I said. “Abby was selling her aunt’s manuscripts?”

“Not quite. I’m afraid they would be worth very little, though gay scholars would find them interesting. However there was also some correspondence with several of her past lovers, and that correspondence is worth a great deal, because some of it is with…” and here Anja, in a lowered voice, mentioned one of the best known writers of the twentieth century.

“But she’s not a…”

“Precisely.”

We sat in silence for a while. Anja had another beer. I had another coffee. The rain came down.

I finally asked. “Why did you ask immediately if something had happened to Abby.”

“Did I?”

“Why should you have thought that something had happened to her?”

“I don’t know. You looked so serious I guess. That’s all. I thought the worst. Most people think the worst, don’t they?”

I thought about this. “The Dutch often do, I’ve noticed.”

Anja smiled, but in something of a strained manner. “Did Rachel send you to Amsterdam to find me?”

“Yes.”

Anja nodded. “I thought Abby must have mentioned something, though she said she wanted to keep it all confidential.”

I was about to say, Rachel doesn’t seem to know anything, but I held my tongue. All of a sudden I didn’t know what Rachel had known or hadn’t known. I was equally unsure about Anja. Had there been something more between Anja and Abby than it appeared? Had they been lovers?

Anja drank her beer and seemed thoughtful, “It was a sweet tale, wasn’t it? Rachel leaving her husband the doctor for Abby, leaving her beautiful home, her friends. Rachel was one of those women who haven’t a clue they’re lesbian and then suddenly, it hits them and they’re completely changed.”

I sat listening to Anja tell the story I’d heard before from Abby. How Rachel had come to London with her husband and had stopped at a crowded pub across from the British Museum. How Abby happened to be there too and offered Rachel a chair. How the next thing they knew they were wandering the streets at midnight and fireworks were going off somewhere. I was listening, thinking, and staring absently through the cafe’s windows when I imagined that I saw a familiar figure—something in the flicker of cloth beneath a raincoat, the set of the head—slip around the corner opposite us.

But why would Rachel, if it were Rachel, have followed us to this cafe? Why would she have sent me to Amsterdam and then followed me herself?

“A sweet tale,” Anja repeated. “But they had to live in the real world. It was Rachel who insisted that they move to Brussels. A beautiful flat full of antiques, no rent to pay; it must have seemed ideal compared to their one-bedroom flat in Stoke Newington. But neither of them liked Brussels, and it was Abby who had to figure out how to support Rachel.”

The figure was gone. I was sure I’d imagined it. On a dark afternoon, one raincoat looked pretty much like another. I turned my attention back to Anja, who was finishing up with, “She loved Rachel, it wasn’t that, but Abby was never a one-woman woman. It didn’t suit her. Rachel was jealous. I think Abby may have had someone in London. She was always going over to London to see her.”

“And you and Abby…?”

“Oh heavens, no.” But Anja blushed.

“Why did she tell you so much?”

For the first time, Anja looked abashed. “I suppose I’ve been talking too much. The shock and everything.”

“She must have trusted you to tell you about her aunt and Rachel and everything,” I said. But I thought, with pain now that Abby was dead, Why didn’t Abby ever tell me this?

“That’s strange,” said Anja, when we got back to the shop. “I could swear I locked the door when we left.”

For there were two customers inside, browsing around the shelves. Anja gave a quick look at her desk and cash box. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Her face returned to its equable expression, and she spoke pleasantly in Dutch to her customers, who answered her in German.

But I remembered the figure in the raincoat outside the brown cafe, and for the first time a little shiver of doubt passed through my mind about Rachel. A hit-and-run outside the Gare Midi. Happens all the time. Who had been running and why?

When I called Rachel in Brussels, she wasn’t there, but I left a message that I needed a little more time in Amsterdam and that I would see her tomorrow. I wasn’t sure why, but the idea of spending the night in that luxurious flat with Rachel seemed less than appealing.