The Safekeep

“It wasn’t the same voice she’d used before, not the same voice that laughed nervously over every exchange, not the same voice that apologized—oh sorry, oh I’m so silly I’m sorry—when knocking over a glass, scraping a knife too loudly on the plate. Isabel looked at her and caught a flash of something in her expression—a fissure, something, but it was gone very quickly and immediately Isabel couldn’t say whether she’d imagined it. If it had been there at all.”

This moment in the bathroom is the first piece of foreshadowing that indicates that Eva is not exactly who she says she is. Since Isabel has already been characterized as an anxious, judgmental person, however, it is initially left ambiguous as to whether her perspective is trustworthy or not. Isabel’s mistrust of Eva creates narrative tension, with her initial resistance toward Eva contrasting with The Transformative Power of Unexpected Relationships that she will later experience.

“Isabel had developed a thought over the years and the thought was: They would allow her to stay here, her brothers. Her uncle. They had to, where else could she go? She had nothing else in this world. Nothing but these clean floors and neatly made beds. It was enough. If she could keep it, it would be enough.”

The gendered power that men wield over Isabel is exemplified by their control over the house and its future—the one thing that Isabel holds dear. Eventually, this struggle over The Nature of Home will become something that she shares with Eva, who also lost the house because of unfair power dynamics. In this way, van der Wouden establishes a parallelism between the two women, despite their enmity, in the earliest parts of the book.

“It was 1946 and the war was over but Isabel’s mother closed all the windows in a hurry and said Go upstairs […] They watched from the bedroom window as outside an upset woman banged on their doors and windows and screamed and screamed. Her shouts were unintelligible, desperate. She had a young woman with her who did nothing, who stood to the side, arms crossed, head down.”

This brief memory, nestled amid a series of other recollections from Isabel’s time in the early postwar period, will prove to be a crucial detail by the end of the book.