The characters of Yael van den Wouden’s novel, The Safekeep, bring out the (very) amateur psychologist in me. Many of the scenes in this book are either one character thinking very hard about their feelings or two people in a room talking to each other about their feelings. And the people in this book are odd to me; I don’t fully understand their sudden changes in feeling toward each other. The ending of this book baffles me—though I suppose that the conclusion would make sense to a more forgiving person.
I don’t know that I can say that Isabel loves the house her family moved into during the Hunger Winter of 1944-1945. She doesn’t remember much about her life after her mother moved the family from the city to the countryside, one of the few places where it might be possible to get enough food to survive. She does remember that the house was, curiously, fully furnished. Isabel has strong memories of the way her mother treasured the house’s furnishings, especially the blue and white plates with the hares on them. She never questioned who the house belonged to before her family arrived or wondered what might have happened to them. Given how much she frets about appearances and propriety, I’m not surprised at how cloistered Isabel has made herself.
Isabel is a creature of habit. She gardens. She watches her maid like a hawk. She counts the silverware. She resents any intrusion into this routine—especially when the intrusion is her brother Louis introducing another girlfriend to his siblings. I don’t know that there was anything Eva could do to get on Isabel’s good side during their first meeting. Isabel is determined to dislike Eva. This dislike transcends into loathing when Louis asks (not really) Isabel to let Eva stay while he goes to England for work. Things do not go well between the two women. Eva does her best to befriend Isabel, while Isabel resents the hell out of every minute Eva is in the house.
The first sudden, strange change happens when Isabel’s loathing turns into attraction. Isabel’s suspicion that Eva might be trying to trap Louis into marriage completely disappears when the two women kiss for the first time. Of the two sudden changes, this one made more sense to me, given how out of touch Isabel is with her feelings. Before Isabel kisses Eva, all she knew about her sexuality was that she didn’t really care for me. (Her would-be boyfriend, Johan, makes her skin crawl.) It’s not hard to recognize Isabel’s intense feelings about Eva as misidentified lust. Eva is harder for me to understand and, to be honest, the way that she seems to switch her attentions from Louis to Isabel set off alarm bells for me.
The last quarter of The Safekeep switches from Isabel’s story to a galloping narration of Eva. The more I learned about Eva, the less I understood the second sudden, strange emotional change that happens late in the book. I don’t want to spoil things for other readers by saying much more than that a lot of the questions Isabel never asked about the house are answered. I appreciated finally learning the characters’ secrets, but I feel that the second emotional change happens far too quickly to be believable. The ending of this book, which ties everything up in a neat bow, cheapens the emotional depth and turmoil van der Wouden built up over the course of the novel.