Marcel (2 page)

“Don’t you go ruining my tiles now, Stella,” the grandmother admonished her.

They were like a comic double act. The grandmother, tall and angular and overbearing, with an air of worldly superiority over her distant relative, and Stella, a short, sharp-edged blade of grass. To make herself taller she fashioned a bun with a hairpiece and wadding on top of her head. Most of the time she wore owlish spectacles on her nose, giving her a cross look that belied her nature.

“Turned to rock indeed!”

It was morning. Her spectacles lay idle on the dressing table among her boxes of face powder. In a corner of the room a bare-headed, shadowy figure sat on a creaking sofa, shaking uncontrollably: her husband Lucien. He would wear out three more sofas after that – one every six months, until the springs fell out of the bottom and his heart gave up for good.

He was afflicted with a strange disease that later on, once his portrait had joined the queue for dusting, would give the grandmother cause to vent her morbid pride. She would remark that he was “related by marriage, of course.” That made a difference, apparently.

“There’s nothing we can do for him,” the neurologist told Stella. “Your husband suffers from Huntington’s Chorea.”

“How do you mean, Korea?” Stella’s tears and bafflement lasted for months. “How can that be? My Lucien never, ever went to Korea.”

“The little one just shrivelled up, understand?” Stella said. “Come along now, why don’t you give me a hand. Here, hold this.”

She fixed the hairnet over the false bun, bowed her head, reached for my hands and pressed my fingers down around the net, which she proceeded to secure with hairpins plucked from the corner of her mouth. She had arranged all the false curls around the wadding and pulled her own hair up tight to form a sort of pinnacle on top.

I longed to touch her head with the palm of my hand, especially in the early morning when her hair would be hanging loose, still smelling of the night.

In the mirror I glimpsed tufts of underarm hair protruding from the short sleeves of her green summer frock, and caught a pungent whiff of armpits.

She knitted her brow and clamped her lips tightly on the hairpins. On her knees, with both hands on her head, she might have been a supplicant, or a prisoner held at gunpoint.

Stella contributed her own epitaphs to the grandmother’s weekly valedictions.

“Poor lambs, it’s been such a long time …” she would sigh as the duster slid over a delicate gilt frame of acanthus
leaves, out of which three angelic boys gazed earnestly into space.

“Our Noel, our Antoine and our Valère. My brothers,” the grandmother said.

I could see the resemblance in her jutting cheekbones, her strong chin. Their eyes in a haze of curly blonde hair glowed with an unnatural brightness.

“If they’d known about penicillin in those days,” Stella said, “they’d still be with us, poor things. The croup, ooh it was dreadful. Lucien had it too. The doctor told his mother to hold him upside down over a tub of boiling water. Did he scream!”

“Boiling water with a few drops of eucalyptus, oh yes, my mother used to do that too. Still … My father buried them at the bottom of the garden. All three of them, side by side under a white gravestone. By the beech tree. That was still allowed in those days.”

She would have turned her garden into a graveyard given the chance, so that she might sail from grave to grave among the rose-beds, day in day out, armed with scouring powder and bleach to kill the moss. Flanking the picture of the three boys were the grandmother’s father and mother – railway accident and cancer of the bone – one under each of the Virgin’s hands. The grandmother’s mother wore her hair swept into a bun on the top of her head. Her father wore a shiny pin on his necktie.

Sometimes, when Stella took my place handing over the pictures one by one, I would crawl under the table and lie
back on the bare tiled floor, breathing the fresh smell of a just-cleaned house. When boredom crept over me the floor would reveal its secret geography, complete with all the tiny ridges and ravines where the soapy water collected into miniature lakes. It was then that I discovered that every movement in the house followed a fixed pattern. Everyone traced habitual paths, skirts billowing round calves, shoes creaking with every step. I would lie there flat on my back until my muscles became rigid with cold and the space between the table legs turned into an Egyptian tomb, monumental and forbidding.

“Our Cécile, she’s so earnest-looking,” Stella said.

Cécile, Sister Marie-Cécile, was the only living person to be granted admission to the display cabinet. She wore a crown of white lilies. It was the day of her investiture as a nun. She struck a solemn pose in the convent garden, a sickly Bride of Jesus, about to be entered in the dry annals of eternity.

“A stick with a wimple,” my father grumbled sometimes. He was not much taken with her.

“Our Cécile inhabits saintly spheres,” the grandmother said, feigning reverence.

Once a year Sister Cécile received a visit from her family. The grandmother loaded the boot of my father’s Ford Anglia with jars of preserves. My mother buckled her safety belt with undisguised reluctance and whispered: “Right, let’s be off.”

The convent was a sprawling brick building on a hill. The car chugged noisily up the incline. A pull on the bell handle sent a tinkling ring down long corridors. It was several
minutes before the heavy wooden door was opened by a nun bent double with age.

There was a long walled garden with cedars and benches in the shade, occupied by a number of old biddies chewing their lips. Now and then one of them got up and did a little waltz on the flagstones, while her sisters moved their swaddled legs in three-quarter time.

Sister Cécile’s quarters were at the top of the building, right under the eaves. Tortuous flights and a succession of ever narrower corridors took us upstairs, past crowded dormitories smelling of urine. At the end of the last corridor a few steps led up to a door. The nun had heard us coming, for she came out to greet her visitors.

“Ah, there you are.”

She placed her hands devoutly on her chest. A stick with a wimple, mummified already. A sallow face, drained of expression by a life of every conceivable abstention.

“Come in, come in,” she murmured.

She had toned her voice down to a permanent whisper, mouse-grey mutterings from an anaemic rodent of the Lord.

Her narrow room was furnished with hard cane chairs. On a table stood a thermos containing watery coffee. Little hisses escaped from the lid. In the heat the tiles on the roof made a ticking sound behind the insulation panels.

The nun poured coffee. She plied me with Sacred Heart memorial cards, stale ginger biscuits and mildewed chocolates. She took a biscuit herself, which she dipped in her coffee, and I had a strong sensation in my own mouth of her tongue flattening the sugary mush against her palate.

The nun chuckled and then announced gravely: “I can’t open my mouth very wide. I’ve just had an operation on my jaw.”

My father rolled his eyes. I could see him thinking: she’ll have us operated on for our faith next, the witch, but he saved his remark for later, in the car.

“If only she’ll spare us her communion with the Holy Ghost,” he had said on the way there. “And I hope to God she shuts up about her miracles.”

Once a month it was Sister Cécile’s turn to help the elderly nuns in bath chairs into the chapel. She invoked the Holy Ghost so ecstatically that one of the old girls slid from her seat and crumpled into a dribbling heap on the floor.

“Speaking in tongues. Saw it with my own eyes.” For once her voice shot up. “Glossolalia!”

Epilepsy, according to the local GP.

The nun had her own way of honouring the dead. She saw herself as the family prayer-wheel. From her hilltop she sent a never-ending stream of invocations to heaven. Her façade of humility displayed small cracks now and then, from which oozed unspoken reproof.

“That boy,” she said, “has been lying there all alone for so many years now. I remember him in my prayers every day. He saved us from Bolshevism.”

I thought she was referring to yet another mysterious disease.

In the display cabinet at home Cécile posed next to Brother Armand, who was wearing his black Benedictine habit for
the occasion. When attending funerals he usually wore it over his civilian clothes, and more often than not he would raise a laugh.

“Someone ought to tell him to take off his bicycle clips,” the grandmother remarked with a sigh each time he swanned up to the altar for an oblation, flashing white calves and ankles.

He never missed a mass for the dead. No one could snivel the way he did. It was a brief homage, no more. After the service there would be the meal with the mourners, and the wine. One day it was his turn to be mourned. The bells in the abbey tower tolled a sonorous knell. “He brought a spirit of generosity to our monastery,” intoned the abbot, visibly relieved to be rid of the smell of alcohol.

When all the pictures had been properly dusted the grandmother closed the glass wings of her cabinet. She had reflected, reassessed and rearranged. She had piled proof upon proof, for and against Death, who was both her enemy and her most loyal ally. Death robbed her of her relatives, but he also fixed them in still poses ensuring that they would meekly undergo her domestic ministrations.

When I saw my face reflected in the glass it was a fleeting glimpse, with far less substance than the images of the dear departed. Especially when, every few months, Stella and the grandmother, in a fit of nostalgia, ransacked drawers and cupboards for still more photographs. In no time the table would be thickly carpeted with pictures in which the past jostled indiscriminately with the present. One showed a
coffin emerging from the green front door. In another, boys wearing clogs and girls with ribbons in their hair frolicked on the same doorstep. Here the season’s first asparagus was being harvested, there a trench in the war-torn orchard was being filled by a shadowy figure with a shovel.

The house, having detached itself from the world at large, became the repository of all those albums. In the midst of all the snapshots, I could easily imagine slipping out of that dark front door, down the well-worn path in the grass, past the blood-red garden fence into the orchard, where apples dropped like hand grenades from the branches, the same branches that were draped in blossomy parachutes in spring.

My own likeness cropped up regularly in that profusion of images. Me being lifted out of a baby bath by my mother. My mother holding my arms while I try to walk unsteadily across the floor – stark-naked, not yet a year old, three decades younger than the faded yellow curtains on the window overlooking the back yard. I began to read an obfuscated sadness into the palm-frond wallpaper, stained with time. Our first fridge must be humming somewhere out of the picture.

Those snapshots would have been taken by my father. Perhaps he had leaned back against the marble sill just visible under the dusty net curtains, waiting for me to look up at him and smile.

The flash used to startle me, Stella said, just as it had startled my great-grandparents. They lay at opposite ends of the table, their eyes not lowered like my mother’s, for they stared fixedly into the lens with unconcealed suspicion.

They wore their Sunday best for their respective portraits
taken when they were aged about eighteen. They did so again on the day of their engagement, when they posed together for a studio photograph against a backdrop of cardboard columns and leafy boughs. Their peasant pride sat uncomfortably with the Arcadian setting – hazier now, after a century, and dull in places.

Sixty years later and on their last legs they face the camera again, as stiffly as ever, to bear witness to their eldest great-grandchild’s first steps. Just as vulnerable, just as bereft of the underpinnings of language, they strain to assume an appropriate expression, strike the right attitude, put on the proper airs. Their dignified stance reminds me of starched bedlinen and locked wardrobes.

At some point in their lives, between the Arcadian props and the crutches, my great-grandparents pose for a picture on either side of Marcel. He is about sixteen years old, an acne-ridden teenager in plus fours. One raised hand shades his eyes from the sun, which has half obliterated him already.

ON FRIDAYS AFTER SCHOOL I USUALLY HUNG AROUND
in the attic or skulked in one of the rooms, bored stiff. Until the peal of Miss Veegaete’s laughter made me jump to my feet. Twice a year she ordered a new frock from the grandmother.

The blinds were half lowered. On Fridays the grandmother’s abode was transformed into a dimly lit palace, a dusky, formal venue for mysterious conclaves.

It was usually Stella who answered the door. She would be wearing one of her tight, unflattering blouses so as to “look nice for the clientele”, as well as sparkly earrings and high-heeled shoes. Her heels would beat a nervous tattoo from the front door down the echoing passage, taking in the kitchen on her way to the sewing room where the grandmother held court. She became a girl again, dressing up in her mother’s clothes, putting too much rouge on her cheeks. On Fridays she made her topknot even taller, like an Indian temple, but the effect was spoilt by her stern round spectacles.

The grandmother was ready to receive her callers. She had made a display of fashion magazines, pattern books and squares of soft fabric on the table by the big window facing north, for daylight cannot tell a lie. It made no difference whether it
was summer or winter. Miss Veegaete ordered her light dress in the dead of winter, and it would be midsummer when she called to discuss her autumn requirements.

The arcane manipulations that took place in the sewing room were not intended for Miss Veegaete’s eyes. She was shielded from the sight of the wasps’ nest of pins, the snakepit of limp zip fasteners in the drawer, the little boxes overflowing with enamel and mother-of-pearl buttons on the high shelves. At the end of each working day the snippets of dress material and tangled threads lying in frivolous anarchy on the floor were swept into a heap for the rag-and-bone man. Clients were admitted to the sewing room only to have their measurements taken. They would be offered magazines to leaf through, which then gave them the illusion of knowing what they wanted. But it was the grandmother who knew what they wanted. She dazzled her ladies with the sheer variety and glamour of the designs. She reeled off the names of fabrics like prayers, muttering things about the potential for pleats or the merits of cutting on the bias until the client got confused and asked: “Would that suit me, do you think?”

“We’ll see what we can do. Stella my dear, why don’t you brew us a good pot of coffee. And we’d like some cake, too.
Madame
and I have things to discuss.”

Each Friday, in a ceremony that was repeated three or four times, the expensive gold-rimmed coffee service would progress from the glass cabinet to the large tray shivering in Stella’s skinny hands, from the tray to the coffee table, and from the coffee table to the kitchen where the cups were washed before returning to the cabinet. The removal of all
the stage-props, followed by their reappearance for the benefit of a fresh audience, took place every hour or so. Each visitor in turn was made a fuss of. Stella’s occasional disparaging remarks would earn her a lecture.

“As far as I am concerned,” the grandmother said, “every single client, even the simplest farmer’s wife, is a duchess, a baroness in her own right. They all want something special. Imagine the scene if they met here by accident! They’d be bound to think I was copying the same garment, not creating custom-made fashion.”

“I’ll go and wash the dishes,” Stella said gruffly. As the afternoon wore on she kept fiddling with her earrings. “They don’t half itch when you get sweaty.”

The serving of coffee was supposed to soften the embattled client until she was putty in the hands of her hostesses. The grandmother pretended to think long and hard, although she knew exactly which bolts from Maurice’s shop she kept stored in her attic.

“I’ve got an idea,” she would say in her stage voice. “I’ve just thought of something that would be most suitable for that design I showed you a moment ago. Not too expensive, good quality, and quite distinctive.”

If, after coffee, the client was still dithering, Stella could be relied upon to get things moving. She would say something outrageous while measurements were being taken in front of the mirror. She and the grandmother made an excellent team. They homed in on the client, biding their time like cats with tails of fluttering measuring tape.

“Shouldn’t the skirt be just a little shorter?” the client asked.

“I’d leave the hem a bit lower, if I were you,” said the grandmother, glancing knowingly over the woman’s shoulders in the mirror.

“Oh. But I was thinking of something a bit shorter, just for a change.”

“Well,” sighed the grandmother, “of course it’s entirely up to you. If you’re sure. However, the problem is, if you want a short skirt, it’ll have to be really short.”

The client, retreating into silence, studied her reflection.

“Knee-length wouldn’t suit you,” Stella said, taking her cue from the grandmother. “Your knees are too plump.”

“Too plump,” echoed the grandmother, “not really, I wouldn’t call them plump. It’s the fabric,
Madame
. Look.”

She draped the material around the woman’s hips.

“If it’s a short skirt you want, and you still want pleats, it won’t look very smart.” She crumpled a handful of fabric in her fist.

“See what I mean? I can of course make a few tucks here and there, but still – I’m afraid it’ll look like some sort of school uniform. Now let’s see, if we drop the hem a bit – look! – it’ll all turn out a treat. A short skirt of this material,
Madame
, would be a dreadful waste. And you must admit the quality is excellent. It would be a shame not to use it to its best advantage.”

“I suppose you’re right …” the client faltered, struggling to reconcile the picture in her head with her plump knees.

Stella held her tongue. So did the grandmother. Cowed into
submission, the client was ready for the
coup de grâce
, which was painless, for it was expertly wrapped in layers of velvet.

“It’ll turn out wonderfully,” the grandmother promised, “I can feel it in my bones.”

Late in the evening, when peace was restored, they would let their hair down.

“God forbid that I should give in to everything they wanted, whatever would they look like! Frights! A guardian of good taste, that’s what I am. I can’t go ruining my reputation, can I?”

One day I had the temerity to ask, in the presence of a client, whether the material with splashy flowers was going to be used for kitchen curtains. She had boxed my ears on previous occasions, but this time it hurt.

Mondays were devoted to pattern drawing, design adjustments and the strategic deployment of pins so as to hide unwanted prominences.

“A good garment,” she affirmed with deeply held conviction, “both conceals and reveals.”

There was no one to hear her secret formulas, her mutterings and hummed tunes as she breathed life into one garment after another. The sewing room was transformed into a magical laboratory, and she into an alchemist. She drew lines with a stick of greasy chalk on feather-light sheets of tissue paper laid out on the table. She guided the predatory jaws of her scissors around the contours of a skirt or the lily-like outline of a bridal gown.

“Sheffield Steel,” she purred. “Sheffield Steel is the very best.”

Stella was charged with basting the cut segments. The grandmother spread a fresh length of material on the table and set about plotting new graphs.

Miss Veegaete was unlike the other clients. Miss Veegaete, the grandmother said, was what you might call a
bijou
of a client.

“It’s always plain sailing with her. You can tell right off she’s a lady. She’s got city manners.”

“She taught at a school in Brussels once,” Stella said. “A posh boarding school run by Insuline Nuns.”

“Ursuline, Stella. Ursuline.”

“Whatever. A school for rich folk. They spoke French! D’you know how they say Miss Veegaete in French? Haven’t you heard? They pronounce it
Veekàt
. They call her
Mademoiselle
Veekàt
. She’s got a piano at home, did you know?”

Miss Veegaete was well aware of her status as honoured visitor and privileged client. When she rang the bell the door flew open at once. Stella, tottering on stiletto heels, would help her out of her coat.

“Do step into the salon,” she would say, “Andrea will be right with you.”

Anything Miss Veegaete said was lapped up by the grandmother as if it were liquid gold.

“How right you are,” was her unvarying reply.

Cake was served, with cherry filling and a generous dollop of whipped cream. The fragile porcelain coffee cups seemed to gain in translucence whenever Miss Veegaete raised hers to her lips. She was a giant honey bird, large and feathered, a hummingbird-turned-woman. As she tasted the cake a
high-pitched sound rose up from the underhang of her chin. “Divine,” she churred. “Heavenly.”

On such days, when the door was ajar, I would slip into the room like a shadow. I lingered in the half-light to prolong the sensation of being unseen and all-seeing. By the sheer concentration of my gaze, I imagined, I could make Miss Veegaete turn round on the sofa padded with embroidered cushions to face me and say: “
Mais voilà. Notre petit prince. Quel surprise, mon ami
.”

“Go and shake hands now,” the grandmother instructed.

“Good afternoon Miss Veegaete.”

“
Bonjour, mon élève
.”

Her hands fluttered briefly around my chin towards my cheeks, as if she were about to lift me up by my ears. For an instant I saw her pout her lips and make to lean forward, but she changed her mind.

“Is he tongue-tied in class too?” the grandmother asked wryly.

“Not really. He can be quite a chatterbox at times, can’t he?” Her fingers hovered over the top of my head. “But we can’t complain.”

“Have a piece of cake, dear,” the grandmother said. “Off you go and eat it in the kitchen, because I know what you’re like. Always spilling things. And mind you wash your hands first. Look at you, your paws are filthy – you’re in no state to shake hands with a lady!”

“Been rummaging in the attic, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Stella. “Odd isn’t it? The way he holes up in the attic all the time.”

“Ah well, he’s a dreamer, isn’t he,” Miss Veegaete said with a wink. “Daydreaming – that’s something he and I have in common.”

Her laugh dropped like a lark from the sky and her shoes gave a little creak as she curled up her toes. She had chubby feet. In the summer she wore sturdy sandals, the kind worn by children. The strap pressed into her plump ankles and her toes lay like a row of bosoms in a black leather corset.

Nothing could be whiter than Miss Veegaete’s thighs, of which I caught an occasional fleeting glimpse in the classroom, from my seat in the front row right under her desk on the blue stone platform. The whiteness veered between milky clouds and marble with pale meandering veins.

On hot afternoons when the awnings were out over the windows, Miss Veegaete would sink onto her chair with a sigh as she abandoned herself to digesting her lunch. She lived in a house overlooking the playground. At midday I would see her sitting with her brother and elder sister Louise at the table by the dining room window, eating soup and munching thick slices of bread. No wonder Miss Veegaete dozed off in the afternoon. She would prop up her chin with her hands and let her eyelids droop. Now and then an ominous glug-glug would escape her, as if in the depths of her stomach, under the flowery skirt, a thick porridge was dripping slowly from one grotto to the next. Miss Veegaete pretended not to notice. She was ladylike.

On other afternoons Miss Veegaete would read, giving little sighs of contentment, as if she were blowing bubbles. When she was completely engrossed in her book she would
unthinkingly pass her tongue over her teeth to dislodge bits of bread, making her cheeks bulge in all directions as if she were sucking a large boiled sweet.

It was when she was reading that I had the best chance of getting a look-in. Only then her thighs might part ever so slightly, making her skirt pull taut across her knees. From there her thighs receded into darkness. At some point at the back those two massive columns were joined together. But I had to put my head all the way down with my cheek almost touching the desk to get even the smallest peek, by which time Miss Veegaete had usually glanced up from her book and smacked her knees together again.

After an hour of mounting, bleary-eyed boredom, the gurgling of her intestines subsided. Shutting the book to banish all thoughts of siesta, she drew herself up. She did so deliberately and slowly, as if her body were being inflated with some strange gas. Next minute she was tripping through the classroom on her sandals, squeezing her ample body between the desks. When she leaned forward over my shoulders the silky fabric of her blouse brushed my neck and hair. It was a thin blouse with voluptuous flowers in pastel shades and lianas snaking across her breasts. A jungle from Maurice’s stockroom.

“Only the best is good enough for Miss Veegaete,” the grandmother said.

Stella admired Miss Veegaete’s full figure.

“Everything looks good on her.
Mademoiselle Veekàt
. Even her name suits her. If I had a name like that I’d ask for a raise.”

“Indeed,” said the grandmother with a chuckle, “but your name isn’t like that. Do you know what yours sounds like in French? Pom. See how far that will get you.”

“What do you mean, Pom?”

“Apple is ‘pom’ in French. Stella Pom. Hardly a name that’ll get you a raise, eh?”

When Miss Veegaete had had her fill of cake it was time to get down to business. The three women put their heads together in the parlour, flapping their fashion magazines.

“I rather like wide sleeves,” Miss Veegaete said. “They hide my upper arms. But I’m not so keen on them being wide around the wrists.”

The grandmother spoke reassuringly.

“We can always do a large cuff, you know, with two or three buttonholes. I’ve got the perfect buttons for that style of blouse. And what do you have in mind for the skirt?”