Shutterspeed (4 page)

In the meantime Aunt fished out the soggy remains of her biscuit with her teaspoon. She always left the biscuit in for far too long.

‘What do we need a new vault for?’ I asked as casually as I could. ‘Seeing as we’ve got two cellars already.’

It was true. In one of them stood several empty oil drums, and in the other were endless rows of bottled fruit which had been gathering dust for years along with a stack of Aunt’s unsold goods from the shop.

‘What did I tell you?’ said Uncle, looking hard at Aunt. He took a sip of his tea.

‘Not a vault like a cellar,’ said Aunt. ‘It’s for your uncle and me. And for your dad.’

‘My dad?’

‘He’s got to move,’ said Uncle. ‘They’ve all got to move. Don’t know why. They say it’s not healthy, a churchyard in the middle of the village. They’re going to make a new one, out in the fields by the lane.’

‘It’s only because of the Freemasons, if you ask me,’ said Aunt. ‘They don’t like being buried in the shadow of the church. That’s the reason, I’m sure. Simple as that.’

‘There there, Laura,’ soothed Uncle. ‘There’s not much we can do about it anyway.’

A loud thunderclap rattled the windows. It was as if a mighty block of ice had shattered in the air, right over the roof.

‘Well that was close,’ said Aunt. Shortly afterwards we heard the wail of sirens out in the street.

Uncle sat down with us again, around the table. He pushed his cup towards me.

‘Our pa used to get us out of bed at night when there was a thunderstorm,’ he mused as I poured him more tea.
‘He’d make all three of us – our ma, your dad and me – keep watch at separate windows in case the barn was struck by lightning. We thought that was stupid. We laughed at him, and he flew into a rage. But the only time he gave us a hiding was when he caught your dad and me lying down on the bleach field during a thunderstorm so we could watch the lightning. I can still see our pa in the doorway, giving us what for. Shaking his fists, swearing and yelling for us to come inside. And we just laughed. Until the nut tree about ten metres away from us split in two with a deafening crack. We ran back to the house as fast as we could. Worst hiding I ever had in my life.’

He dipped a lump of sugar in his tea and held it between his lips to suck the sweetness.

‘Dead scared, he was. You don’t realise these things till later.’

The whole time he was speaking I was stirring my spoon around in my empty cup.

‘Joris,’ Aunt sighed, ‘stop that please, it’s getting on my nerves.’

‘I want to go in the vault too,’ I said. ‘It’s not fair to leave me out.’

They exchanged looks.

Uncle Werner broke the silence. ‘Joris, my boy,’ he said with a smile, ‘whatever’s got into you? No sense in you worrying your head about that, you’ve got a while to go yet.’

Even Aunt brightened at this. ‘He’s jealous,’ she chortled. ‘Did you hear that, Werner? The lad’s jealous.’

‘I’ve reason to be,’ I replied gruffly, although I was close to laughing myself. ‘I always have to sleep on my own, anyway.’

‘Your turn will come,’ said Aunt. ‘Just you wait, there’ll be plenty of times when you wish you could sleep alone.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ cried Uncle in feigned indignation. He leaned over the corner of the table to kiss her on the neck.

She pushed him away, giggling. ‘Get off, you silly old goat.’

Then, turning to me, she smiled and ran her fingers through my hair.

For once I did not shrink away.

THE COBBLED STREET WAS STREWN WITH BROKEN BRANCHES
. Workmen disentangled a wayward sheet of plastic from a tree near the church and swept up the fallen leaves.

Not a minute went by without the bell tinkling. It was Saturday, the busiest day of the week, because the shop would be closed on Monday, too.

Uncle and Aunt were run off their feet. The breakfast table had not yet been cleared, the newspaper was spread out among the breadcrumbs.

Aunt had left the breadbasket next to my plate, with a clean tea towel folded over it because of the flies, and a note for me: ‘Joris, you must call at Miss van Vooren’s before 11. Like I said. Remember to comb your hair.’

‘Like I said’ meant there was no point in trying to skive off. Trifling with Miss van Vooren would not go unpunished.

‘Ah, Miss van Vooren,’ Uncle used to say, ‘a spinster if ever there was one. Looks it too. To tell you the truth, I have never known anyone as spinsterish as her. Sour as a lemon, she is.’

He never made such remarks in his wife’s hearing. Aunt was rather impressed by Miss van Vooren.

Miss van Vooren lived on the outskirts of the village, near the dairy and the stream. Her house was surrounded by cedars which had shot up taller than the roof over the years, and which now plunged the paths at their feet into deep shade. It was a sturdy, brick building with narrow bay windows on either side, a dilapidated south-facing veranda and, over the front door, a wrought-iron balcony that had seen better days.

Even in the freshness of that morning, the air above the garden path seemed to turn viscous as I approached the house. The sounds from the road were muffled by the trees, and the farther I walked the eerier I found the silence and the more ominous the crunch of my shoes on the gravel.

When I pressed the brass doorbell, ornate but somewhat tarnished, the tinkle took some time to die away in the hallway, suggesting spacious, gracious living quarters. Once upon a time there must have been a maid, and even a manservant according to Aunt, but the current mistress of the house had been its sole occupant for years.

It was a long while before she answered the door. Perhaps she had paused in front of the mirror above the umbrella stand to pat her hair into shape or to straighten the lapels of her slate-grey two-piece suit.

‘Ah there you are, Joris,’ Miss van Vooren said drily,
checking to see whether I was wiping my feet properly on the coconut doormat. ‘Come in.’

She did not extend her hand. She never did. I don’t know that she ever really noticed me. In her eyes I was probably little more than a glorified lackey, a shopping bag on legs, something serviceable that only merited attention when failing to respond, which did not happen often.

I followed her into the hallway. The sound of her clunky heels on the white marble floor tiles drifted up the formal staircase, which seemed all the grander for the landing with a flower arrangement from which protruded long, plumed grasses so delicate as to be pulverised at the least current of air.

A second door opened, and Miss van Vooren ushered me into the parlour. The dark wooden cabinets and crochet doilies resembling ropy cobwebs were always bathed in a muddy sort of light, as if the sunbeams, having infiltrated the room through the lace-edged net curtains, were imprisoned there, glancing from lampshade to table leg to the plates on display and back again, growing old and stale in the smell of snuff tobacco that billowed towards me each time I entered.

I found it hard to imagine that Miss van Vooren would indulge in such an eccentric habit as taking snuff. She was generally considered a beacon of rectitude and virtue, which in her case amounted to being incredibly stingy. Uncle Werner used to say she’d sooner lick the floor of the church clean with her own tongue than stump up for a floor-cloth.

Perhaps she took a pinch now and then as a kill-or-cure remedy for her chronically congested nose, a topic which, when she was feeling brighter than usual, warranted several minutes of conversation with Uncle.

For some reason he always referred to her as ‘the skinny woodpecker’. But to me she was more like a dried flower in a botanical album, a flattened, faded buttercup or a poppy with vestiges of colour still in the stamens, but almost transparent and powder-dry.

Aunt pressed me to be polite to Miss van Vooren at all times. ‘She’s had more than her share of troubles, poor thing. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy, what she’s been through.’

There were rumours, which seemed all the more plausible for the hushed tones in which they were passed on, that she had been jilted at the altar, that she had waited in vain at the church, where the pillars and candelabras had been decked with roses and carnations at considerable expense by her father, a man reputed to prefer sleeping with his money than his wife.

He had also paid for the crêpe de Chine gown worn by the bride, his only daughter: a shockingly expensive garment according to Aunt, though in my mind it was just as dingy and drab as the old bedspread draped over the sofa on which she now motioned me to sit. She sat down on a straight-backed chair, clasping her hands on the tabletop in front of her in a pose of authority.

‘Joris, my boy,’ she said, sounding unusually friendly, ‘we’re one bearer short for the canopy …’

I was baffled.

‘The canopy?’

‘Yes, the canopy of the heavens,’ she said, ‘for the procession. We are short of one bearer. Normally the eldest Dobbelaere boy does it, but he’s staying with relatives down south. You’re a bit young, I suppose, but on the other hand I think you’re quite tall for your age, and your dad, God rest his soul, was a good bearer in his time. The priest always used to say: with an Alderweireldt on the team the heavens will be all right. What do you say, Joris, do you think you could do it?’

I hunched my shoulders. Miss van Vooren’s wheedling tone put me on my guard. I had expected to be made to wait while she took a scrap of paper and made a list of what she needed from the shop. This invariably meant thinking long and hard over each item.

She would suddenly look up from her list and tell me rather sharply not to forget the tomato sauce. She always needed one tin of concentrated tomato purée, which was such a staple ingredient among all the various others – limp fillets of chicken breast, tiny portions of pale liver pâté or smidgins of low-fat cheese at which, Uncle said, even a mouse would turn up its nose – that I often simply forgot to add it to her shopping basket.

What on earth did she need it for? I pictured her sitting in the burble of the television in the evening, where, instead of having a biscuit or a slice of cake with her mug of weak tea, she would be spooning the tomato purée into her mouth straight from the tin, looking just as gleeful
as I caught Aunt looking at breakfast sometimes, when she licked her finger after scraping it around a practically empty pear treacle jar.

‘It’s far too good, and too dear, to let it go to waste,’ she would say to excuse her weakness, but that was nothing compared to Miss van Vooren’s celebration of the joys of scrimping.

Miss van Vooren hoarded insufficiency. She bought minute quantities of food, regardless of type. She seemed determined to supply herself with a never-ending reservoir of disappointment, an unremitting hunger for more, and as a result of this subtle form of self-chastisement her tough, bony frame was visited by an incredible number of maladies. It was as though the different parts of her body were constantly engaged in getting their own back on the purity of her soul. But all this suffering only contributed to Miss van Vooren’s complacency and pride.

There were times when she was incapable of keeping her wealth of afflictions to herself. Then she would sail into the shop, one of her famous migraines ablaze like a swarm of fireflies around the flossy hair at her temples. Everyone knew what was up immediately.

At such times she usually wore very dark sunglasses, which magically transformed her into a wasp or a horsefly. Even before she had shut the shop door behind her she would be giving stiff little waves of the hand to say that she was in no mood for any palaver.

Uncle Werner knew exactly what to do. He put on a serious face like a mask tied with elastic round his ears,
leaned over the counter and enquired: ‘Had a bad night then, Rosa?’

‘Oooh, dreadful,’ was the likely answer. If there had been a hailstorm overnight she would be sure to add: ‘It was just as if I could feel the stones pelting right through my forehead.’

I was expecting her to have had one of her bad nights, spent in hellish pain as per usual, but that morning she looked remarkably brisk. She repeated her question about me helping to carry the canopy, making it sound like a great privilege.

‘There is one condition, though,’ she added, crinkling her cheeks: ‘you have to be a virgin. I’m sure you know what I mean. But that won’t be a problem, will it now?’

‘I don’t know,’ I stammered. ‘I’ll ask at home.’

‘Right then, no problems on that score,’ she said with a secretive chuckle. ‘You’ll earn ten francs for your trouble, but I wouldn’t go wasting all that nice money at the fair if I were you.’

When I returned home Aunt asked me how I had got on.

‘She asked if I was a virgin,’ I replied.

Uncle Werner ducked beneath the counter to hide his laughter, but I was left with a tight feeling in my stomach for the rest of the day.

I was drawn to Miss van Vooren as to the cool blackness of a long-dead star whose gravity is impossible to resist. The light that so unmistakably beamed from her face in the photos of the Catholic Girls’ Circle, of which
Aunt too had been a member before she married, had obviously been extinguished at some point in her life.

Shortly after stowing away her useless wedding dress for evermore, she must have resolved to spend the rest of her days casting shade instead, as a sort of antidote to that old sparkle which still made me blink when I stared into her dimness for too long.

As fussily as she specified the meagre purchases which drove every shopkeeper in Stuyvenberghe to despair, so meticulously did she weigh her innumerable invisible ailments on the scales of her words. She was at pains to describe with forensic accuracy the ache in her left hip, which was neither really acute nor dull, and not so much in her muscles as in the bone, although she was certain it wasn’t rheumatism … maybe it was just that she had a cold, or an infection, it could be a boil, since boils ran in the family.

I asked myself how Uncle Werner could bear to listen to her litanies without feeling terminally ill himself. Miss van Vooren had only to mention her varicose veins, something she was particularly prone to doing when the shop was crowded with customers, for me to feel a blue Nile delta slithering down my own shins towards my heels.

Her lamentations resonated in my limbs, charting every blind spot in my body and shunting me into an endless universe of pain from which I had previously been excluded. Until then I had known only the tropical heat-waves of influenza which, in the dead of winter or early
spring, had made me lose myself in deliriously dense rain forests and released me from school.

Wrapped in blankets, I would recline on the sofa in the front room like an oriental deity in the half-light of his sanctuary, roused from his slumber only by the tinkle of the silver spoon in the glass of lemon squash on the tray Aunt brought me several times a day. I would take the glass from her hands like a cup of poison and bravely drink it down in one go, despite the bitterness that made the roots of my hair tingle.

Fever liquefied the days. I fancied I could smell ether or carbolic acid. I fancied I heard wheelchairs rolling squeakily down a hallway long ago, in some castle or other full of nymphs in winged head-dresses and wards with row upon row of dazzling white beds in which the sick lay wrapped in their sheets like caterpillars in silken cocoons.

I heard the whoosh of curtain rails and a voice, possibly Aunt’s, calling out: ‘Quick, Werner, quick, he’s going to be sick again. Hold the basin under his chin.’

Towards evening the wind died. Summer dusk draped itself over the village like a clammy sheet, and at half-past six the church bells set about coaxing the world back into its old routine.

The shop filled up after vespers, which was less than an hour before Aunt’s closing time. She called for me to come from the kitchen and lend a hand. Uncle Werner was out, taking his weekly drink at the café.

‘The lad’s been asked to help carry the canopy,’ she remarked while I climbed up the ladder to fetch her a packet of chicory powder from the shelf.

‘Really? Isn’t he rather young?’ said a customer, and someone else remarked on how time flew nowadays.

I handed Aunt the chicory powder and sat on the bottom rung of the ladder, waiting for her next summons.

I had brought the schoolmaster’s book, which lay open on my lap. By then I had got to the chapter entitled ‘Man Revealed’. Aunt would have hated the pictures.

As early as 1628
, read the caption to a diagram of a human heart sprouting antlers of blood vessels,
William Harvey, an English physician, discovered the circulation system in which the blood mass is pumped through the veins by the action of the heart
.

‘Quite the little bookworm, that boy,’ someone said. ‘Nose permanently buried in a book.’

I pretended not to hear.

Not long afterwards, Albrecht von Heller, Swiss biologist and universal genius, described the irritability of muscles and the action of nerve tissue. On the heights of Parnassus, the pioneers of Medicine, Herophilus and Erasistratos, drank a toast of Ambrosia in celebration of the transcendence of the flesh by means of the Electricity of Animation. A great stride forward in the domain of nervous activity!

‘He’s such a good reader,’ said Aunt. ‘It’s all Greek to me, but he speaks so nice and proper, just like they do on the radio. Go on, Joris, read us something.’

‘You won’t like it,’ I replied, glad of an excuse. ‘There, have a look.’

I turned the book around so that everyone in the shop
could see the picture of the atlas vertebra captioned
An appropriate name for the Heroic Bone that supports the Skull
.