Marcel (3 page)

More riffling of pages. The grandmother snapped her fingers for Stella to bring her the samples. The different fabrics were held up to the light in the narrow parting between the curtains, they were draped on Miss Veegaete’s shoulders, held against her legs, laid across her stomach and chest. Wearing all these patches Miss Veegaete turned into a tortoiseshell cat.

“I’ll leave it to you to select the material, Andrea,” she said weakly.

The grandmother hid her satisfaction by plunging her hands into the pockets of her apron.

Miss Veegaete was finding it hard to make up her mind.

“Tartan is lovely, but it doesn’t suit me.”

“I’ll find you a tartan that does suit you,” the grandmother said firmly. “There are tartans and tartans.”

The fabrics passed through all three pairs of hands while the grandmother gave a running commentary. The pinafore she wore over her best dress clinked with the regalia of her trade: thimbles, scissors and the little clothes-brush that had velvet pile instead of bristles, with which she gave the garments a final stroke before they left the premises.

“We’ll make a tuck right here,” I heard her mutter. “We’ll line it, too, that’ll do a world of good …” “A well-made
plissé
is a gem …” “If we have a flat yoke, the front can be shirred.”

Stella grew impatient.

“It’s time we took your measurements. You’re not planning on going on a diet or anything?”

“A diet?” Miss Veegaete giggled.

Rising from the sofa she seemed to be preparing a curtsey, with her arms describing arcs in the air.

“Lose weight?
Moi
? How can I if you keep offering me all those goodies?”

They moved to the sewing room, where a great many more samples were met with twitters of approval.

“Ah, cashmere. If I had the money I’d wear cashmere all the time.”

“You want to watch out with cashmere,” the grandmother said. “A lot of inferior stuff goes by that name nowadays. So-called cashmere.”

Miss Veegaete peeled off her cardigan. I prayed they would
forget about me for once. I slunk to the corner between the wardrobe and the wall, sank to my knees and vanished under the sewing table.

“Do you still buy from Maurice?” Miss Veegaete asked.

She bent down, undid the buckles of her shoes and pinched her stockings out from between her toes. “And how is Maurice these days?”

“Ups and downs, you know how it is. Nothing much has changed. What do you expect?”

“Poor Maurice,” Miss Veegaete said dreamily. “Such a flourishing business, and yet he still hasn’t got his licence back.”

She drew herself up again.

“It’s …” she tried to think of a suitable word while she unbuttoned her sleeves,

“… odious, that’s what it is. Odious!”

“It is indeed,” Stella echoed.

“And you’re rather odious too, young man.”

The grandmother lifted a corner of the tablecloth and gave me an icy stare.

“Off you go and play in the garden, now. No need for menfolk here. Besides, you’re far too young to care about skirts.”

“Heavens above,” Miss Veegaete cried. “I hadn’t even noticed he was there.”

I sloped off, hanging my head.

“You don’t mean to say you take an interest in ladies already? At your age!”

She turned to the grandmother.

“He’s very forward – and not only with his reading either, I see. The boy is a genius.”

“When all is said and done,” the grandmother remarked, “they’re all geniuses.”

“Polite boys leave the room without being told,” hissed Stella, shutting the door behind me with a bang.

I pressed my ear against the door to hear what they were saying, without much success. The doors in the house were solid, pre-war quality, and although Stella was quite thin her back almost completely blocked my view through the keyhole. All I could hear were whispers, the rustle of Miss Veegaete shedding her clothes, the swish of her satin slip, which would be white or
vieux rose
.

“My brother was lucky,” I heard her say. “He was only seventeen at the time.”

“There were plenty of others they didn’t let off so lightly,” the grandmother retorted. “They picked on Maurice just to make themselves look better. Every single textile firm made money off the Germans. Good money, too.”

“All those little men in the camps on television,” Stella blurted, “where d’you suppose the material for all those striped pyjamas came from? Am I right, Andrea?”

“Whenever I see those old films,” the grandmother said, “I think: there goes the Flanders rag trade. And who gets the blame? Maurice. Or me.”

“They always blame the ordinary folk,” Miss Veegaete chimed in. “Nothing new there. Anyway, it’s not a question of blame, is it?”

I didn’t catch what the grandmother said. Her voice was drowned in the clatter of buttons spilling from a box.

“Stella! What a butterfingers you are! That’s the second time you’ve sent those buttons flying.”

“I can’t think straight today,” Stella moaned. “It’s the heat. I’m sweating my heart out.”

She bent down to collect the buttons off the floor.

Miss Veegaete stood in front of the mirror, stroking her neck with both hands. Her bosom burgeoned inside her satin bodice. “Marcel was old enough to know what he was doing, Andrea. He was twenty-four. Not a youngster anymore.”

“No indeed,” the grandmother said tartly. “But it didn’t do us Flemings any good, that’s all I can say.”

“We’ll get there in the end,” Miss Veegaete said soothingly. “Of course we will. We do our best. Which of us knows French better than Flemish, anyway?”

“Not me!” barked Stella.

“You mind your own business,” hissed the grandmother.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Miss Veegaete went on. “I have always spoken my mind. Everywhere. Even in Brussels. Even in the classroom with my girls from good families. Fair and square, I always used to say.”

She stepped into her shoes, dragging the heels over the tiled floor.

“Now then, let’s measure your waist,” the grandmother said.

There was nothing square about Miss Veegaete. She was all curves and hollows. Sometimes, when she was reading in class and thought no one was watching, she would slip off her shoes. Crossing one leg over the other and holding her book with one hand, she reached under the desk with the
other and gave her ankle-strap a firm tug to undo the buckle. Without raising her eyes from her book she clapped her knees together again, placed the point of one shoe against the heel of the other, and released each foot from its prison with a soft, squelching sound.

When the postprandial torpor wore off and the fidgeting in the classroom mounted, her stockinged feet felt around for her shoes. She balanced them on her toes and gave them a little shake before slipping them on and fastening the straps. She smoothed the shoulders of her blouse and clapped her hands for attention.

“Put down your pencils, now!’ she commanded.

She went round the classroom collecting sheets of paper, pausing here and there to bestow praise on a drawing: boxy houses, stiff-legged figures in gardens full of trees with huge fruits, under blazing suns with straw-coloured rays.

I hated colour, so I did every thing in black. I had made a drawing of the grandmother’s house, but without the front so you could see all the rooms and what was in them. I had put Marcel into the picture, too: Marcel in the attic wearing a helmet and scary bat’s wings.

“Er …” murmured Miss Veegaete, “it is, how shall I put it, artistic.”

When she had finished pinning all the drawings to a board at the back of the classroom she swept to the door and flung it open.

She clapped her hands again: “Time to be excused!”

The boys poured from their desks towards the door, where the jostling throng assembled into a double file.

“Forward march!”

She drove her flock down the corridor, along the windowsills with potted geraniums and discarded lunch boxes, past the coat racks with mackintoshes dangling from the pegs like hooded cassocks. Talking was not allowed.

We trooped down the stairs and turned into another corridor past a classroom full of boys reciting tables in voices that were already breaking.

Halfway down the final corridor I sniffed the reek of the latrines: a sickly smell of urine masked by clouds of jasmine spray. I clenched my buttocks instinctively.

Miss Veegaete lined up her class in front of six cubicles with short doors. Adjoining them was her own private lavatory, with a door that reached down to the floor. She clapped her hands a third time, whereupon the front ranks vanished into the cubicles. Six pairs of shoes were draped first in corduroy or denim, then in underpants of all colours, after which six little streams splashed into the pans.

“And what do we do when we’ve finished?”

Six waterfalls cascaded in chorus.

Miss Veegaete always waited for the last pupils to take their turn in the cubicles before locking herself in the mother of all lavatories, which had a toilet higher than the others. I was fumbling with my flies in the cubicle next to hers, with only a flimsy partition between us.

I could hear Miss Veegaete hitch up her skirt, then her petticoat. She was having trouble pulling down her underwear; the material kept getting twisted in the elastic.

I heard a grunt in the cubicle on the other side, signalling
a Number Two, then a heavy plop and a sigh of relief.

I waited, elbows on knees, counting the specks in the tiles at my feet. Miss Veegaete would be lowering herself onto the toilet. I pictured her thighs spreading over the seat. A hen sitting on her brood.

Elsewhere I heard belts being buckled.

It seemed an eternity before it came: a wide, motherly stream issuing from a cleft in the rocks, splashing into the pan, tinkling like her laughter.

The world stood still. The hot ache in my groin became a whirlpool, a funnel. The blood rushed to my cheeks, tears stung my eyes. My own water joined Miss Veegaete’s finale in a plashing duet.

At the end I waited.

A drop of mine.

A drop of hers.

Then came the rasp of paper in the depths of her thighs, against hairs that did not bear thinking about.

POTATOES KEPT SHOOTING UP ALL OVER THE GARDEN
, year after year. They sprouted in the most unexpected places, under the trees and among the dahlias, even in the rock garden surrounding the Virgin’s grotto, where the purplish shoots grew spindly, craning upwards to the light.

The grandmother hacked at them with her trowel. “Goodness knows where the brutes keep coming from.”

She poked around until she found the tuber, which she trampled fiercely to a pulp. “At least that makes one less.”

I wondered if there had ever been a potato age, the way there had been ice ages. An age when the land was carpeted with potato plants as far as the eye could see, all of them with tubers slumbering in the soil. Perhaps they were trying, from their base in the vegetable patch, their last stronghold, to reconquer the garden.

All year round the grandmother observed a strict segregation between two domains. The sewing room with its garments on hangers and dressmaker’s dummies extended beyond the big window into the garden, where leafy crowns dipped and swayed like hooped petticoats in the wind. A tracery of paths skirting the trees led to the gate in the
hedge. Further away, in the full sun, lay a straight-lined configuration of plots.

The vegetable patch was the grandfather’s domain – or rather, his codicil. When they were married the grandmother grudgingly accorded him the use of the old bleaching field. He dug it all up, raised the beds, deposited barrowfuls of stable manure and planted his potatoes. He also brought his entire family with him. The Eggermonts. Desperados, loafers and adventurers they were. Interlopers in the garden of the grandfather’s wife and the other members of her tough tribe, the Ornelises.

In the summer the two families gathered uneasily around the long table in the orchard. Fingers shot up in the air, fists thumped the table top. The Ornelises crossed their arms and gritted their teeth. They fretted and ground their heels in the grass. The Eggermonts stamped their feet and jiggled their knees against the underside of the table, their eyes smouldering with self-righteousness. In the background loomed the debris of shattered illusions.

The arguments were always about politics, of which I knew nothing as yet. My father took a picture with his new Kodak, but it was not until much later that I understood its portent. One side of the table under the cherry blossom is a forest of flailing arms and flushed heads. The other side is occupied by the Ornelises, holding their tongues, eyes narrowed to slits in lined, weather-beaten faces. The two camps are divided by a wavering frontier of plates and glasses running from one end of the checked tablecloth to the other. Presiding at the head is the grandmother, darkly aloof like the trees in her
garden. Her genteel manners are being furtively mocked along one side of the table, while the other side bridles with reproach at her having married beneath her. Her elbows are propped on the table, her mouth is hidden behind her clasped hands.

The grandmother saw me as one of hers, as an Ornelis. She would set things right. She taught me to weed. I trailed after her down the garden paths. She moved with the majesty of an ancient galleon, veering from port to starboard and back again, pointing out herbs and plants in the border.

“House-leek wards off lightning. Let it stand …” “Our Lady’s Bedstraw – stuff your pillow with it and you’ll sleep like a log. Remember that. When people get old they have trouble sleeping …” “Feverfew brings down fever. Boil the flowers in milk and let it stand for half an hour.”

She seldom ventured into the vegetable patch. On Sundays after lunch the men and the women drifted apart, blurring the division between the families. Full-skirted aunts and cousins strolled about the paths, pausing now and then to sniff the sweet-smelling pelargoniums along the way. They asked for cuttings and the grandmother was munificent. Twigs and shoots were snipped off with secateurs. Elsewhere in the garden, well hidden behind a row of bushes, she already had a bed of seedlings ready for pricking out next year, when she would impress her relatives all over again.

Over the hedge the uncles sauntered past the rows of vegetables, caps pushed back on their heads, hands in their pockets, rolled-up sleeves baring pale biceps.

“Your leeks are looking good,” one of them called out, “but my peas are doing better.”

“There’s a fair amount of blight, Henri,” another commented.

“Weak strain,” he mumbled.

“Why don’t you spray them?”

“No poisonous sprays in my garden!” the grandmother shouted triumphantly from among the aunts on the other side of the hedge.

“No point in spraying. A weak variety, I tell you.”

One time he tried to get in her good books by sowing her name in cress along the hedge. Before the week was out the seeds had written “Andrea” in the soil. She was not overly impressed.

At the far end of the vegetable garden, which the grandfather had screened off from prying eyes with a row of beanstalks, rose an overgrown tangle of greenery.

“Aye-aye, what have we got here?” hooted one of the uncles. “What sort of wilderness is this?” They nudged each other. “Look, it’s a right jungle …”

Their stomachs heaved with suppressed laughter.

The jungle was mine. One day the grandfather had given me a patch to call my own. It was the size of the dining table, partly shaded by the hedge and the rowan tree.

“We’re going to do some sowing and planting, you and me,” he said firmly. “I will teach you.”

He raked one of the beds.

“Like so. Nice and level, like coconut matting. Watch.”

He drew himself up, hugged his arms to his chest, pressed his knees together and advanced rapidly across the turned-over earth with small precise stamps of his green rubber boots, like a human steamroller.

“Our own private path,” he said.

The smile he threw me then was the same routine smile he wore in the small, underexposed snapshot taken by Marcel thirty-odd years earlier. He is holding the rake upside down to draw a little furrow in the loose earth with the tip of the handle, working with the grace and concentration of a billiard player or a gondolier. He is kneeling on the loamy soil, not on the piece of old sacking he took to using in later years “against the damp”. In the old days he would not have sworn as he sank to his knees, nor would he have groaned between clenched teeth: “My bones have packed up completely.”

I knew the story. Bits of it had been fluttering around in my head for years. How they had beaten his kneecaps with iron pipes. How they had made him and the others hold wash tubs filled to the brim with water high over their heads, arms stretched, for hours on end. Whoever spilt a drop was whipped.

“They had it in for me, lad,” he always concluded. “They had it in for me, the swine.”

He fumbled in the wide pockets of his faded blue overall for a packet of seeds and tore it open. He placed one hand on the soil next to the furrow and peered in with his head close to the ground, frowning as if he were trying to read the newspaper without his glasses.

“If you just shake it gently it’ll trickle out nice and even. Watch. Watch carefully now.”

He grabbed me by the nape of the neck and pulled my head down until it was next to his. “See?”

I caught a whiff of old-man’s breath and unshaven skin. He did not release his grasp. One hand sprinkled the seed in the furrow, the other pressed me into the line of his expectations. He drew furrows in my soul and sowed hope for something vague, not for me, but for himself.

“Those big white bell-flowers, Andrea,” chirruped the aunts, hidden from view on the other side of the hedge, “what are they called?”

“Cape hyacinths. I can’t give you cuttings. You have to grow them from seed. It takes a lot of patience, and a lot of luck. They don’t normally do so well here. Too cold in winter.”

The aunts nodded admiringly. The grandmother did not mention that she used seed trays in the conservatory for them to germinate during winter. Some of the aunts had conservatories, too.

“The boy will be a great gardener one day,” joked the uncles. I joined in their laughter uneasily.

Ignoring me, the grandfather ushered the men towards the house.

I had planted my garden with irises and hibiscus, and had sown sunflowers. From the wet meadow verges I took wild spirea, and I bordered my allotment with tufts of lady’s cushion. I laid a curving gravelled path, over which I, reduced
to thumb-size in my imagination, roved through my homemade jungle.

“You ought to sow some radish seed,” he said breezily, “for the kitchen. And chervil to put in the soup.”

The radish I sowed was lost amid the plants already thriving. Amid the young shepherd’s purse.

“Weeds!”

Amid angelica and foxglove.

“But they’re flowers …”

He pinched the flower out of the shepherd’s purse. “This stuff seeds itself all over the place.”

He glanced ruefully at the rampant water-mint along the hedge.

In no time my garden acquired the shape of a horseshoe, a bastion of wild leafy growth. In that wilderness I would crouch unseen, on hot days, when my mother called my name and I wanted to be impossible to find.

“Some gardener you are,” was his verdict.

The grandmother was amused by all this. A bitter contest was being fought over my head. Between his garden and hers. Between potatoes and hyacinths. The hyacinths won.

“My in-laws,” the grandmother sometimes remarked to Stella in the sewing room, “are the kind of people who think small. Us Ornelises, we think in terms of hectares.”

On Sundays she would destroy every potato shoot in sight with a jab of her heel or toe, as soon as the aunts’ backs were turned. And if anyone did notice she would smile archly, saying: “Ah well, better a stray spud than a stray grenade.”

Some days she was to be seen conducting a solitary inspection along the paths, her fingers black with soil. She would wipe the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. Crouching by the water-mint I would watch her through a gap in the hedge as she took her final turn around the garden with her bucket and trowel.

Years later an old photograph tumbled from the pages of a recipe book I had claimed when the house was being cleared. It shows her bending over the soil with her legs apart. Her hair is pinned back behind her ears, a few stray curls fall over her eyes. Her skirt curves up at the back, offering an unintentionally frivolous glimpse of the lace trim on a petticoat.

She glowers at the unknown person taking the picture. A stand of beech and rowan rises behind her, and I can also make out the cypress tree, still a soft-needled sapling in those days. No rose-beds. No dahlias or Cape hyacinths. Just a vast potato patch. Propped against her hip she has a wire basket full of fist-sized tubers. Her first potato crop. She had six mouths to feed while the grandfather was away in the prison camp.