Isabel lives alone in the family home, in the provincial Dutch quiet of Overijssel. She is nearly 30, though, and unmarried, and in this 1960s backwater a woman cannot live this way indefinitely. Her younger brother Hendrik holds no claim over the house, but their older brother does: it will fall to Louis as soon as he brings home a bride. Their Uncle Karel has willed this, and since he is the one who secured the house for the family in the first place, Isa lives there only as custodian – that is to say, only on sufferance.
Isa suffers, too, under terrible loneliness. This expresses itself through a cramping kind of possessiveness. Covetous of the patterned plates and curtains that came with the house when the family acquired it, Isa insists all is tended and dusted and polished as her late mother would have wanted – and all the while she suspects the maid, Neelke, of cutting corners and pocketing teaspoons.
