The baker picks up the second photo with Jan Kaan in it off the table. Standing next to him is Dinie’s son. Teun, he thinks. What’s happened to him anyway? Dinie never says a word about her son. It’s actually a bit strange: Teun is a few years older than Jan Kaan, what’s he doing lined up there? They’re standing hand in hand. Wherever the Queen might have been in the instant he took the photo, Teun is definitely not looking at her. He’s looking slightly sideways, at Jan Kaan. The baker takes another mouthful, tipping the lemon brandy down his throat in one go. Teun Grint looks like someone who can’t keep his eyes off a deformed leg, even though he knows it’s not polite to stare. This evening he’ll have to ask Dinie what’s become of her son. His head starts to spin.
In one movement he slides all the photos together and dumps them into the album. He crumples up the envelope and tosses the ball into the bin. Then he takes the ashtray, the plant and the table lighter from the windowsill and puts them back on the coffee table. He pours himself another glass of lemon brandy and knocks it back in two gulps. After a couple of drinks, an old body doesn’t feel as old; it feels looser, freer.
Hanging on a wall in the empty shop is a large picture in a black frame with non-reflective glass. The light-grey VW van. Parked in front of the bakery. Blom’s Breadery. Him, his wife and their daughter at the rear of van. Beaming. With his left hand he carefully pulls the bottom of the picture away from the wall while holding out his right hand, but the photo that was wedged in behind the frame still floats down to the floor. He bends over — which really is a little easier after two glasses than it was earlier when he was doing the watering — and picks up the photo. This one is very special. But also unbearable to look at. And what good is hiding something if you know exactly where you’ve hidden it?
He’d made the delivery to the Polder House early that morning. ‘Nothing fancy,’ they’d told him. ‘Just plain loaves, bread rolls, fruit loaf. The Queen needs to eat and drink like everyone else. Just as long as it’s fresh out of the oven.’ He dropped the order off in the new van, wanting as many people as possible to get used to the name Blom’s Breadery painted on the side. The van was actually meant for the surrounding area. His elderly father did the village round on an equally elderly tricycle with a walnut box with the old name on it: Blom’s Bread & Pastries. He’d joked to his wife that they could, in all honesty, now add by appointment to Her Majesty the Queen under the shiny new letters on the window.
Later that morning he dropped a large quantity of white rolls off at the notary’s, from which he deduced that he hadn’t been invited to dine with the Queen and decided to organise a festive lunch of his own. He hadn’t looked in the wing mirror before opening the door and a boy shouted out ‘Hey!’ as he whizzed past on a bike. Startled, he jerked the door shut again. The boy straightened up and looked back over his shoulder as he rode off. It was Jan Kaan, the second son of Zeeger and Anna Kaan. The baker raised a hand in apology just before Johan Kaan raced past on a scooter, trying to catch up with his brother. Driving back very slowly to the bakery after carrying in the bread rolls, it took him a while to get over the fright: his knees were weak and changing gears wasn’t going very smoothly either. The farm run would have to wait until later in the afternoon, the Queen was about to arrive. He parked the light-grey van at an angle in front of the bakery, and admired it from across the road: the Queen couldn’t miss it. There were already quite a few people in front of the Polder House and he could hear excited children in the distance. Half the village could think of nothing but the lunch. He went into the shop, said hello to his wife and fetched his camera from the living room.
He followed his daughter, one of the two chosen children, and pressed the shutter in the instant that she, completely overcome by nerves, handed the Queen the flowers. And again when she, relieved, stepped back into line. Jan Kaan was there too, a scowl on his face. The Grint boy was standing next to him, holding his hand. The West Frisian dance group started up, and he took photos of them too, and of a friendly-looking Queen watching the folk dancing, and of old Van der Hoes with his violin, eyes and mouth screwed up in concentration. That’ll be a good one, he’d thought. Afterwards he spoke to people, shook hands and enjoyed the beautiful June weather. People complimented him on his new van, and Blauwboer told him that the Queen’s secretary really had made an arrangement about when to pick up the goats. He kissed his daughter. There were less and less people in front of the Polder House; he stayed on. And because he stayed, he managed to take the most beautiful photo he could have hoped for.
‘What are you beaming about?’ his wife asked, when he was finally eating his own lunch before setting out on the postponed delivery round.
‘I’m happy,’ he said. He had never said anything remotely like that before.
His wife sniffed and walked through to the shop; the bell had rung.
Bread and leather. The baker had installed a radio in the van and it was playing. Music, window down, the smell of fresh bread and new leather. A west wind, he thought, looking at the elms along the long road. Always a west wind. He drove past the labourer’s cottage next to the Kaan farm. There was nobody there, they were on holiday. RC too, and maybe not even interested in the Queen because of it? For his part, the baker never felt much need of a holiday; the village was lively enough for him and, anyway, how could he relax in a holiday home in Overijssel or Drenthe while somebody else baked and sold the bread? Even if that somebody was his father? He turned into Kaan’s yard, parked the van in front of the new milking parlour, hopped out and slid open the side door. A loaf of brown and half a loaf of white. Behind him, something made a thwacking sound. He jumped and looked around. A wet sheet on the clothes line. He went into the milking parlour and walked through to the kitchen door. He didn’t close the door behind him, he wouldn’t be long. He laid the one and a half loaves on the table with a flourish. ‘Here they are again,’ he said.