Marcel (9 page)

I turned into the lane leading out of the village, where the
asphalt gave way to sand. I looked round one last time, expecting to see her tottering to the corner on her dainty shoes, out of breath and red-faced, waving the envelope. There was no one. The fields sparkled with the lushness of summer. Sparrows swooped down from the poplar trees and flocked round the puddles in the verge. They took flight as I approached, leaving me to churn up the water with my shoes.

FOR DAYS NOTHING MUCH HAPPENED. THE HEAT
lay becalmed on the roof, vaporising time. Lulled by the whirr of the sewing machine the hours slid by in an ungraded continuum. The village saint’s day was coming round again: for Stella and the grandmother the busiest time of year. Everyone with any status, real or imagined, wanted something smart to wear, even if it was only a new blouse to brighten up last year’s skirt, a new collar for a jacket, or at the very least a scarf or a stole, anything for a whiff of sophistication.

The following Monday, when things were more or less back to normal in the house, the church bells rang out in the morning sky. The grandmother had left early to attend the mass for the dead, but more especially to tend the graves of her own dear departed, for she had been too busy to visit them for several days.

Stella woke me up. She hovered around the foot of my bed in her quilted dressing gown and fluffy slippers.

“Come on, get up. I need your help. Now.”

The family would be arriving at midday. The corridor was redolent with baking smells. A brace of chickens with knobs
of butter on upturned breasts lay ready in a roasting dish on the draining board.

Stella heated some milk and cut two slices of bread. She watched me in silence while I ate my breakfast, bleary-eyed. Seeing my eyelids droop she started chattering.

“There’s that Madeira cake I’ve got to put in the oven. And the soup needs putting through the sieve – you can do that. And you haven’t even had a wash yet.”

The water in the house was always cold and hard, like a slab of marble shattering into a thousand splinters on my face. I imagined it coming from deep down, from a place never reached by the light of day, hidden in the bowels of the house, gulped down by drainpipes that would gurgle like intestines for hours after a downpour. How much did the water absorb from the dead in the ground before evaporating into thin air, then coming down as rain and sinking back into the earth? The cyclical transformation of water, Miss Veegaete had explained in one of her last lessons, “is a never-ending miracle.” I had not seen her since the prize-giving ceremony. On top of the cabinet next to the washbasin stood a glass of water containing the grandfather’s grinning false teeth. He was still in bed. The grandmother had her dead all to herself. There were about six that needed grooming.

“Hold this while I fix my hairpins.”

Stella, seated at her dressing table, had seen me go past in the mirror. The light in her room was tinged puce by the curtains, and the air around her bed was stale from her
breath. She inclined her head forwards, guided my fingers to the knot of hair on her crown and opened a box of pins.

“Don’t prick my fingers,” I said, “I can’t stand the sight of blood.”

“Can’t you do without your fingers?” she laughed. “I thought you didn’t need them any more. Not for twisting Miss Veegaete round your little finger, at any rate.”

Her eyes gleamed like spotlights.

“Two months from now you’ll be in class with Master Norbert, that’ll be a different kettle of fish … You can let go now.”

I laid my hands on the back of her chair. She had put on a close-fitting flowery dress with a low neckline and a zip up the back, which was still half open. Her shoulder blades were dotted with moles, some of which had wiry hairs sticking out.

“Norbert’s not as bad as you may think,” she said. “At least you always know where you are with him. Calls a spade a spade.”

She stretched the hairnet with both hands and fitted it over her bun with a practised gesture. Her fingers knew exactly where the pins had to go.

“By the way,” she said, “I’ve got something for you. You probably left it lying around somewhere. It’s in there …”

She nodded towards the drawers of her dressing table, in front of her knees. “In the top one. Go on, open it … Go on.”

The drawers had brass handles shaped like roaring lion’s heads with unnaturally long shiny tongues hanging out. I slid the drawer open. At the front, on top of a row of boxes of old face powder, lay Marcel’s letter.

Stella fixed me with her eyes in the mirror. I bit my lip and squirmed, wishing I could shrink, turn into a beetle and scuttle away on my six legs to hide in the crack between wall and floor.

“It was lucky for you Andrea was out when Miss Veegaete called … Are you going to take that letter out of the drawer or what? It won’t bite. It didn’t bite you the first time, and it won’t bite you now. Go on, take it. I don’t want any stolen goods in my room.”

“She stole it herself. Stole it from me.”

“Keep your voice down. You don’t want your grandfather to hear, now do you? Listen …” she said, taking both my hands in hers. “I saved your skin, my boy. That’s all that matters as far as I’m concerned. You’ll have to own up, though. The sooner the better.”

“It was only because of the eagle …” I protested. My eyes filled with tears.

Stella pulled another drawer open and offered me a handkerchief.

“You might as well cry now. Get it over with. You can tell her it was because of the eagle. She’ll understand.”

“Can’t I just put it back with the others?” I pleaded. “Wouldn’t that be all right? I know where she keeps them.”

Stella completed her toilette by putting on her round spectacles. The look she gave me was stern but compassion - ate, like that of a judge in a courtroom.

“You mustn’t stick your nose in other people’s affairs. To sin once is quite enough. Why don’t you thank me with a kiss?”

She drew up her shoulders and pouted her lips. The red on her mouth tasted of raspberries.

The afternoon heat rushed in behind the grandmother as she stepped into the hall. She set her handbag on the chest under the mirror and removed her straw hat. Crouching halfway up the attic stairs I watched her kick off her Sunday shoes and crouch in front of the shoe cupboard to fish out her sandals. From the gaping handbag protruded a bottle of bleach, a trowel and the bristles of a wire brush. Over the clasp hung the limp, mud-encrusted fingers of a rubber glove.

I leaped to my feet, screwed up all my courage and called out to her from the unlit stairs: “Grandma, I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Goodness, you scared me out of my wits.” she said, startled but in good humour.

I thought I had better do as Stella said and confess right away. I counted up to three under my breath and dashed toward her waving the envelope.

She did not look at me. She did not take the letter.

“Grandma!”

“Not now. Not now!” Her grey curls swung from side to side.

Stunned, I stuffed the letter in my shirt pocket and crept up the stairs to the attic.

Under the rafters the heat was suffocating. Dust danced in the sunbeams pouring in through the skylight and the chinks between the tiles. Outside, the elderberry growing
against the south-facing wall was alive with the chatter of magpies. The pigeons scuttled about in the zinc gutter.

I settled down on Marcel’s trunk. If only I could just live in the attic. Death was different here. It was sort of friendly, the way it filled the closets, jostling the tangled spectacles, playing carnival with old shirts and meekly retreating when I had had enough.

Downstairs was in a hubbub, with Stella going round like a tornado whisking egg whites, kneading dough and chopping vegetables all at once. Plates were set on the dinner table with a loud clatter, the lid of a saucepan clanged to the kitchen floor and a door was flung open.

I heard Stella shout “You can’t keep this up forever … Damn … damn …” The door of her room slammed so hard it made the floorboards shake. She was directly beneath me and I could hear her stifled sobs.

After the outburst all went quiet in the house. Geese gibbered drowsily in the orchard.

The grandmother lingered at the bottom of the staircase, her fingers drumming softly on the banister. Then she started climbing, slowly, step by step, pausing to reflect with each step but progressing steadily all the same. I could hear the rustle of her nylon apron. Finally the top of her head rose above the trap door, her forehead, her eyes. She stopped there and raised her arm to beckon me, as if she were drowning, as if she were a creature of the night shrinking from the shaft of sunlight in which I would dismantle her fibre by fibre.

I refused to budge. The attic was mine, it belonged to no one but me. And Marcel.

“Come here, my lamb, come.”

I looked down and shook my head.

“You can have the letter. You can keep it. But come downstairs, there’s a good boy.”

She must have been crying. I had never seen her cry. Her voice was furry with emotion.

“It’s not healthy, sitting up here in this oven … Come down.”

She turned to go downstairs again, but changed her mind. She sat down on a step midway and patted the space beside her. “Come and sit here.”

I got up.

She wrapped her arms around her knees. “You mustn’t think everyone is as good as they make out,” she said.

“And you mustn’t be cross with me. I just wanted the bird. Miss told us to bring something to school for the nature class.”

“I’m not cross with you. Not with you … Not any more.”

She stared at her toes peeping out from the straps of her sandals. She pressed her lips together, making her chin pucker.

“She should have given it back to you. You shouldn’t have taken it, but nor should she.”

Her chin puckered again, her sandals creaked.

“Grandma?”

“Yes …”

“I’ll look after it …”

“I should say so.”

“And when I grow up I’ll go and visit Marcel’s grave. You can come with me if you like.”

She laughed bitterly, sending a ripple across her stomach.

“We’ll have to search long and hard.”

“Not if I ask the way.”

“What, you ask the way? In Russian I suppose?”

“I can learn Russian, can’t I? Miss Veegaete says it’s the hardest language of all, but I’ll manage, she says I’m clever enough …”

“How would she know? Russian?”

“Miss Veegaete speaks French, doesn’t she? I expect she’s got a gift for languages, she said so herself …”

Somewhere between her legs, I thought to myself – between those enormous thighs of hers.

“She’s not perfect, you know,” the grandmother said. “You mustn’t go by appearances, lad. You’re too young, you wouldn’t know. There are things one cannot forget. Forgive – yes, but not forget.”

“The Reverend Father says so too: ‘If you are smitten on one cheek, you shall turn the other cheek’ or something like that, anyway. He’s hard to follow sometimes.”

“He’s not a bad sort, really” she said soothingly. “A bit old-fashioned maybe. But fair. Always has been. A mass is a mass, he said, and it’s not for me to discriminate among the dead. If you skip the flag-waving, then I’ll bury him. Well, it wasn’t a real burial, as there wasn’t a coffin.”

I felt her elbow nudging my hip. She inclined her head toward my ear.

“Your Miss,” she said, “didn’t dare show her face at the service. Was packing her bags, I shouldn’t wonder. Ran off to stay with her cousins in Brussels. Nobody knew her there, nobody had any idea that posh
mam’selle
used to organise German sing-songs and cultural events here in the village.
Kulturabenden
, they called them. A gift for languages, indeed! First she was more German than the Germans, then more French than Louis the Fourteenth. Just goes to show. As for Norbert, he did come to church. He knew it might get him into trouble, but he insisted on coming, seeing as they sent the poor lad for slaughter just like that. He was ashamed of his sister. Embarrassed. She apologised later, when it was all over. Kept writing letters, too, from her boarding school, going on about our Marcel having died a hero and telling me to take comfort in the knowledge that the Lord Jesus sows wild flowers on his grave every spring, for He knows where each and every one of them fell, like so many seeds in the ground. With or without a cross to mark their resting place … She’s a smooth talker, is our
Mademoiselle Veekàt
.”

“Well, she can make her own clothes from now on,” I burst out, overconfident now that I knew I would be let off the hook.

The grandmother tapped me on the knee.

“Stand up now, so you can help get me to my feet. And don’t you breathe a word to Miss Veegaete, nor to any of my clients. I have a living to make. Off you go. Ask Stella if you can help in the kitchen. My foot has gone to sleep. I’ll be down in a minute.”

When I reached the bottom of the stairs she called my name.

“About that letter. You keep it to yourself, mind. It’s not for anyone else’s eyes. Do you hear?”

The afternoon capsized over the orchard when the table was cleared and the discussions abated. The grandfather was exhausted from stabbing the air and shaking his fist at the fatherland. He had had too much to drink.

The grandmother bravely went on doing the honours at the head of the table, dispensing sympathetic nods left and right, pats on the arm, and kind words to salve hurt feelings. Now and then a vacant look crossed her face as she twisted her gold necklace round her index finger.

I was at the other end of the table, and Marcel was everywhere. His presence drifted idly on the flotsam of words and kept changing shape in the whorls of cigarette smoke. The grandmother sent me a wink over the array of glasses. Stella, whose nose was still red, gave me a friendly kick against my shins – friendly, but hard enough to hurt.

The uncles and the grandfather downed their
digestifs
, lapsing into silence as they headed towards the parlour. The aunts withdrew to the kitchen. I stole into the hall and grabbed the trowel from the handbag on my way to Marcel’s trunk in the attic. Then I came downstairs again and slipped into the sewing room, where I thrust my hand under the fabrics and half-finished garments at the bottom of the wardrobe and pulled out an old biscuit tin. On the lid was a picture of the Queen of Belgium in her wedding dress, smiling vaguely. Her eyes were veiled by a cloud of rust, which struck me as fitting.