Chapter 147: The Fourth Thing

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 147: The Fourth Thing

Agnes would not let them come back the next day.

"Thursday," she said, at the door, with four people on her landing. "I'm ninety-one and something moved in my head and I would like two days to sit in my own flat and find out whether anything else has."

"Agnes—"

"Thursday. Bring nothing. I'll do a cake."

They spent Wednesday in a hotel room arguing about whether Vesper should go back in at all.

"She understood a language she's never heard," Dana said. "That's not a small—"

"I was there."

"I know you were there, Vesper, I'm saying it out loud because saying it out loud is how I work." Dana had four pages on the bed. "Twice now. Anders in Tromsø and Agnes yesterday. Two people, forty years apart, no connection, and you've understood both of them."

"Three," Vesper said.

Everybody looked at her.

"Dov," she said. "In Trina's kitchen. I didn't say anything because I wanted to be sure, and I've been sure since about eleven o'clock on Tuesday."

Reeve, from the floor by the window: "What's it feel like?"

"Sorry?"

"When you understand it. Is it like — " He made a gesture that meant nothing. "Do you translate it? Is it in English in your head?"

Vesper thought about it properly, which was more than the question deserved.

"No," she said. "That's the thing I can't get anybody to understand. It doesn't arrive in English. It arrives already meaning something, and then I say it in English afterwards for you, and the English is worse."

"Worse how?"

"The door is the wrong way round isn't what he said." She had her knees up. "It's the closest I can get. What he actually said is one thing and it doesn't come apart into four words."

"Then try it on me," Reeve said.

"What?"

"You said the English is worse." He sat up. "So say the thing to me. In the — in whatever it is. And I'll tell you what I get."

"Reeve, you won't get anything."

"Yeah, probably. But nobody's checked, and we've had two days of talking about it."

Vesper looked at him for a second.

Then she said four syllables across a hotel room, flat and fast.

Reeve waited. Everybody waited.

"Nothing," he said. "Sorry. Sounded like — no. Nothing at all."

"Right."

"Was that a bad idea? That felt like a bad idea about halfway through."

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"No," Dana said, writing. "That was the first control we've run. Everybody in this room heard it and one person understood it and now that's a fact instead of a feeling. Do it again, Vesper. At me this time."

She did it at Dana. Then at Trina on the phone, who got nothing. Then, at half eleven, at Dov, who answered before she'd finished.

They went back on the Thursday and Agnes had done a cake.

She had also done something else, and she made them sit down before she showed them.

"I've had two days."

"Agnes, if you'd rather—"

"Let me get to the end." She put a hand flat on the table. "In two days I have said the name of the town nine times. Out loud, on my own, in this kitchen. I've said it to the kettle."

Nobody moved.

"It's not the right name," she said. "I want that clear. It's the word I said on Tuesday and it's not English and it isn't what's on a map, and I've been saying it for two days and it hasn't stopped coming."

"What about the others?"

"Two of them are exactly as they were. My own name before I married, that's still — " She opened her mouth, closed it. "That. And the word for what they did, that's the same, I've tried about forty times."

"And the fourth?"

Agnes Duross put her hands in her lap.

"The fourth one's moved," she said. "And I don't think you're going to like how."

Here is what she had worked out in two days on her own in a flat in Inwood.

The fourth thing was not a word.

"I've spent forty years assuming it was, because the other three are. I've been waiting for a sentence to fail and it never has." She turned her cup. "So on Tuesday night I stopped waiting and I started listening to myself, and what I found out is that it isn't a thing I can't say."

"Then what is it?"

"It's a thing I can't ask," Agnes said.

Dana had her pen out and stopped using it.

"Go on."

"There's a question. I've had it since 1985 and I have never once been able to get to it, and I didn't know that until Tuesday, because a question you can't ask doesn't feel like a gap. It feels like not having thought of it." She looked up. "Four decades of not having thought of something, and I'd have told you I was a curious woman."

"Can you get near it?"

"I got near it at about three on Wednesday morning and it took about two hours to find my way back," she said, "and I would like everybody in this kitchen to understand that I'm going to do it again in a minute, and that it's my decision, and that I'd like somebody to write that down."

Dana wrote it down.

Agnes closed her eyes.

Not theatrically. She sat in a kitchen chair in a cardigan and closed her eyes the way you do when you're trying to remember where you left something, and her hands stayed in her lap.

It took ninety seconds.

Then she said: "Who—"

And stopped.

Then: "Who was—"

And stopped.

And then she opened her eyes, and looked directly at Cole, and said, in a voice that had nothing wrong with it at all:

"Who was supposed to come back?"

Nobody in that kitchen breathed for about four seconds.

Agnes put both hands flat on the table and sat with it.

"There," she said. "That's it. That's the fourth one and I've had it for forty years and I have just heard it for the first time and I'd like a moment, please."

They gave her a moment.

"I don't know the answer," she said, eventually. "I want that said before anybody gets excited. I don't know who. I don't know when. I have a question and nothing else and it has been sitting in me like a stone since 1985."

"Agnes, that's—"

"It's a question, love. It's not information." She was very calm. "But I'll tell you what it means and then you can decide what you think.

"It means somebody told me somebody was coming back."

Dana said: "Or you asked it yourself. About somebody you lost."

Agnes turned to look at her, and there was something like approval in it.

"That's the right objection and I thought of it at about four this morning," she said. "I had a husband and I had a sister and I left both of them in 1985 and I have never found out what happened to either. So yes. It could be a woman missing her family."

"But you don't think it is."

"No." Agnes smoothed her skirt. "Because of the word supposed. You don't ask whether your husband was supposed to come back. That's a word about an arrangement. That's what you'd say about a delivery."

Cole spoke for the first time since they'd arrived.

"When?"

"I don't know."

"Not when did they come back. When were you told."

Agnes looked at him.

And then, for the first time all week, something moved in her face that was not composure.

"Before," she said. "That's — oh. Oh, that's horrible."

"Agnes—"

"I was told before." Her hands had come off the table. "That's what's in it. That's the shape of the thing. Somebody sat me down and told me that somebody would be coming back, and I understood it, and I said something back, and then whatever happened happened."

Vesper said, very quietly: "Did you agree?"

Agnes Duross, ninety-one, in a kitchen in Inwood, with a lemon cake nobody had touched, opened her mouth to answer.

Nothing came out.

[End of Chapter 147]