While Erica is out there among the noise, talking to those who remain of Vee’s contemporaries, hearing from the people who claim to be influenced by her, Vee sits quietly, in the relative silence of this meeting room, surrounded by boxes filled with exhibition catalogues, and thinks about how, after tonight, she will never, ever speak to anyone that she doesn’t absolutely have to speak to, ever again. She’ll talk to doctors and to Marja. She will lie with her eyes open, when she’s awake, making sure that she can still see. And she will sleep, and she will take painkillers, more and more of them. If her sight goes, she’ll take too many. She’s already started to squirrel them away, getting prescriptions at every hospital appointment, popping the extras out of their foil and into a jar that she keeps in her bedside drawer. She can find it, and open it, with her eyes closed. She has practised. Because if she can’t have her sight, she won’t be stoic. She won’t endure. She’ll reach for silence, through the dark.

When Erica starts to talk, she’ll go and stand at the back of the gallery. She might be proud of herself, a little, but she is proud of Erica too, and sure she’s done the right thing in leaving all of her papers to her. (She still hasn’t opened the boxes, but there are bound to be things in there she can use. Leonie’s letters, maybe some manuscripts. She can’t face looking, doesn’t trust her judgement, either, about what should stay and what should go.)

She’s not sure about giving Erica the envelope, yet.

Tik-tik-tik.

The fork against the edge of the champagne flute goes through the sound in the gallery, taking the conversation level from din down to hubbub down to the closest you will ever get to silence at an event like this.

Veronica stands. She will listen to Erica’s speech. She will say goodbye to the people she remembers, she will talk to Erica one last time, and then she will go home. And that will be the end of it.

Vee, in the lost place, 1984

Vee, in the lost place, 1984

IT HAD BEEN SUCH A TINY act of forgetting, and under the circumstances an entirely understandable one. Instead of including a note to the lab with her requirements, as she would have done with a more everyday roll of film, she had decided to call. She had wanted to say that the last five shots on the film were not to be used, to explain why, and to make absolutely sure she was heard, understood.