Shutterspeed (10 page)

Miss van Vooren’s eyebrow raised itself over the rim of her sunglasses.

Hélène ushered us up the steps.

‘Monsieur said we were free to use the terrace. Enjoy the fine weather, he said, because you never know how long it will last. Especially at his age. Après la pluie vient la pluie – that’s what he says nowadays.’

On the terrace beneath the awning stood a table laden with a mass of china and silver; the sight of it caused Aunt to catch her breath. The girl was sitting a little way along, playing with her dolls. She had laid her own table, much lower than the other and surrounded by all her favourites
propped on miniature wicker chairs. Halfway down the plastic ears of the largest of her dolls, a fair-haired beauty in a satin dress, sat the crown which the clairvoyant had presented to her at the circus.

‘Isabeau, nos invités sont arrivés,’ said Hélène Vuylsteke.

The girl sauntered over the terrace towards Aunt, shook her hand and curtsyed prettily. She repeated the ritual with Miss van Vooren, but when it was my turn she merely said ‘Oh, bonjour’ with an almost imperceptible nod at me, and returned to her dolls.

‘Sa propre famille,’ Hélène Vuylsteke said in a placatory tone. ‘They won’t let her out of their sight …’

She invited us to sit down, and proceeded to pour coffee. I could see my face idiotically distorted in the silver coffeepot when she filled my cup. In the centre of the table glistened two strawberry cakes layered with transparent jelly.

‘Cut the cake for us, will you, Rosa,’ said Hélène.

The girl was served her portion on a separate platter which she carried to her assembly of dolls, where she divided it among four toy plates.

A lively conversation ensued on that side of the terrace, in the course of which the girl put on a different voice for each of her playmates.

At our table Hélène conversed primarily with Miss van Vooren, rattling away in a French that I could tell Aunt was at pains to follow. She was not at ease.

‘Enjoy your cake did you, Joris?’ she asked, in an attempt to feel she was part of it all.

‘Yes, Aunt. I’m mad about strawberries.’

I looked out over the lawn stretching towards the pond. A peacock with fanned tail-feathers stepped out from the undergrowth and went in pursuit of a hen. Further off, among the stands of trees, the dew of the past night lingered in damp veils between the bundles of hay, swathing the view in a bluish haze that brought the world to a standstill. Even the swans gliding almost imperceptibly on the pond settled their long necks back to rest between their wings.

At the end of the alleyway the tower clock struck three, followed almost immediately at our backs by a low rumble of mechanisms gearing up all over the house, as if an immense swarm of butterflies were fluttering up from the cellars. Above the rumble, at intervals of a few seconds, clocks began to chime with neurotic urgency in one room after another. There were tinkly tunes, and also a grandfather clock conducting the orchestra, which seemed to be moving through the premises from south to north for a full half-minute before dying away in the distance.

‘Our Marie,’ said Hélène, smiling. She must have noted the surprise on our faces. ‘She’s getting on in years. When she adjusts the clocks in the house she forgets she’s not quite as nimble on her feet as she used to be. There’s at least a minute’s difference between one end of the house and the other.’

She gazed out over the park. ‘Time passes, passes,’ she sighed. ‘Je trouve ces bois d’une tristesse …’

‘Oh yes, trees can make one very sad,’ said Aunt, determined to contribute to the conversation.

‘Tous ces arbres que nous avons vus si petits …’ mused Hélène. She took a sip of her coffee and seemed lost in thought.

Miss van Vooren coughed. ‘I’ve caught a summer cold,’ she said, clearing her throat. ‘They’re the worst.’

Hélène Vuylsteke noticed my boredom.

‘I’ll ask Isabella to show you the library,’ she said. ‘You like reading, do you?’

‘Reading?’ echoed Aunt. ‘He likes nothing better.’

Hélène called the girl and asked her to take me into the house. Isabella gave a distracted sigh. She put down her napkin, stood up and crossed to the french windows of the adjoining salon, which were open. ‘En avant, venez avec moi.’

I trailed after her as she crossed the salon to the door opening on to the hall, where a staircase with cool marble steps curved upwards beside concave walls. Above the plaster mouldings a host of Van Callants gazed down at me, row upon row of them in gilt picture frames reaching all the way up to the ceiling. They were dressed according to the fashions of their day, and had taken on a spun-sugar look where the varnish had yellowed.

The girl was already at the top of the stairs. ‘Viens, dépêche-toi, ils sont tous morts et pas intéressants …’

She ran down the long hallway and stopped at a door at the far end. A dry smell of leather and wood wafted towards me as she pushed it open.

Looking past her I saw books with brown, ridged spines. The light in the room was tempered by partially lowered blinds.

‘Entre,’ said the girl.

I did so, and the door fell to behind me. She had left me on my own.

I clumped over the floorboards until my footsteps were smothered in ankle-deep carpet. There were two leather armchairs by the hearth, and a half-smoked cigar lay dead in an ashtray on a salver.

All about the room were tables on which rested open books as long as my arm. I went over to look.

On one frontispiece the inscription read ‘
The Glory of Flanders
’, beneath a lion holding the Van Callant escutcheon aloft. I turned the page gingerly, using both hands, and found myself looking at a map upon which, after a moment’s scrutiny, I discovered the village, half obscured by a circle of damp. Its name was written as ‘Stuvenberga’, and I could make out the church, and slightly further up, in a bend of the stream, the original castle with ramparts and gardens laid out in a grid.

On the other side of the table lay a volume even bigger than all the others. It was an atlas open at a page showing a map of the world with continents in many colours, as garish as a parrot’s feathers, and an inscription in fancy lettering:
Recens et Integra – Orbit Descriptio
.

I recognised France and Spain. The shapes were familiar, but here their coastlines jutted far more raggedly into the ocean than on the wall maps in Mr Snellaert’s classroom,
as if they had been drawn by a child’s unsteady hand, and also the world itself looked more like an apple than a globe. It was flanked by seraphim holding back draperies, which, it seemed, they would let fall when there were no spectators, so as to keep the earth from fading.

I was so engrossed in the map that I was taken completely by surprise when the tabletop juddered. I looked up to find Isabella Van Callant staring into my eyes.

She had climbed on to the table without a thought for the books, and was on her knees facing me. She said nothing, but wore a beatific smile which made me very nervous.

I dropped my eyes and, for want of something to do, made to turn the page with the map of the world. Just as I placed my other hand on the facing page to avoid all risk of dog-earing, the girl quickly raised the back cover of the atlas, clapped it shut on my hands and brought both her knees down on top.

My hands were imprisoned.

‘Let me go!’ I cried.

‘Quoi?’ she sneered.

She reached out and pulled the hair on my forehead, then grabbed me roughly by the chin.

‘Regarde-moi, fermier …’ she said, bringing her face close to my mine. So close that I could see the brown of her irises flecked with blue and grey and green, shards from all those varnished eyes looking out from the portraits in the stairwell. There were freckles on her nose and on her cheeks.

‘Petit de Stuyvenberghe,’ she hissed, ‘tu es mon prisonnier.’

‘Laissez-moi,’ I wailed. My hands were turning numb and the edges of the atlas cut painfully into my forearms under her weight.

She grinned and came even closer. I could feel her breath on my cheeks.

Suddenly she seized the back of my head with both hands and pulled me to her.

Her lips squelched against mine. It was utterly revolting, and I nearly gagged at the sourish taste of her darting tongue while her breath howled in my ears.

She let go of me, drew back a little and regarded me with grim triumph in her brown eyes.

My chin was wet with her saliva and I couldn’t wipe it off.

The girl leaned forward again. I tried to duck my head.

‘Et maintenant,’ she said hoarsely, ‘une petite excursion aux forêts de l’équateur …’

Her right hand slid down over my shirt to my stomach, then groped under my clothes for my navel, which she fondled. Fixing me with her eyes, she wriggled her fingers under the waistband of my trousers.

‘Stop it, please,’ I squeaked.

I was even more terrified when she stirred her hand around my groin.

‘Ton petit bâtiment n’est pas très fort,’ she said. She sounded surprised.

I tried to wrench myself free, but she was gripping my
shirt with her other hand. When she shifted her buttocks slightly to steady her position, I was able to work one of my hands loose from the book.

The girl wobbled precariously, her knees still pressing down on the book, while I flailed my arm. I caught hold of her hair, tightened my fist, yanked her head down as far as it would go.

Yelping with pain, she snatched her hand out of my trousers, grabbed my arm and sank her teeth into my wrist, using her other hand to claw my cheek.

I screwed up my eyes so hard that the tears beaded out at the corners. Neither of us would let go.

I don’t know how long we were locked together like that, spluttering to stifle our pain. Suddenly the pressure of her knees on my pinioned hand lifted. There was a loud crack and then a thud.

The binding of the book had split open along the spine, causing the girl to slide off the table on to the carpet amid a flurry of loose sheets.

She scrambled to her feet, looking dazed. For a moment we stood there glaring at each other, speechless, she with her hair dishevelled, me with my shirt tails out of my trousers.

Then she started screaming: ‘Tu es horrible, et toute ta famille! Your father drank himself to death! The whole world knows about it, except you, you’re a cretin …’

Knees shaking, I stuffed my shirt into my trousers, gathered up the pages from the carpet and stacked them as neatly as I could on the table. Then I put them back
between the covers, to hide the damage. The girl ranted on.

‘He ruined his liver. He stank to high hell, and so do you. He’s so full of alcohol that he can’t even rot in his tomb … Ma bonne m’a dit. C’est déguelasse.’

‘Non!’ I burst out. And before I knew it I had taken a swipe at her.

She was astounded.

‘T’es maigre comme un clou,’ she scoffed.

A moment later the door opened and in came Hélène Vuylsteke. Directing her gaze from me to the girl and back again, she padded across the carpet towards us with icy calm.

Still fixing me with her eyes, but clearly addressing the girl, she said: ‘Ma chère, ne cherchez pas les oranges sous les pommiers … Go to the bathroom and comb your hair.’

The girl sauntered past Hélène out of the room.

‘Pull yourself together,’ said Hélène. She waited for me to straighten my clothes and then marched ahead of me down the stairs to the terrace, where Aunt was chatting to Miss van Vooren.

‘Were the books nice?’ she asked.

‘I had to drag him away by force,’ said Hélène, with a smile in which only I recognised the venom.

We left at about five.

‘Till next time,’ said Hélène, all smiles as she shook my hand. ‘I’ll give Isabella your regards then, shall I?’

‘You’re shaking,’ said Aunt as we reached the end of the alleyway.

‘I think I’m coming down with something,’ I said.

‘A summer cold, probably,’ said Miss van Vooren. ‘It’s the time of year, I expect. You want to be careful, it can turn into bronchitis …’

‘It’ll pass,’ I said.

I ran home ahead of them, down the church lane. I slipped past Uncle serving customers in the shop and shut myself up in my room for the rest of the evening.

AUGUST WAS UPON US. AT HOME NO ONE SPOKE OF MY
impending departure. It was as if there were sheets hanging to dry from all the rafters, blotting every sound in the house.

‘It’s not as bad as you think,’ said Aunt, noticing my troubled look. ‘You can come over every weekend if you like. We’ve agreed on that.’

I looked at Uncle. He hunched his shoulders and gave me a soothing smile.

‘There’s not much we can do about it,’ he said, adding, ‘and even if there were, we mightn’t want to.’

He could see I was confused by his remark. He took a deep breath and glanced at Aunt, who was snipping the football forecast out of the newspaper. She always taped it to the pane in the shop door.

‘We’ll be right here,’ she said. ‘We’re not going anywhere. Where would we go, anyway? We’ll always be here. It’ll do you good, you know. More than you think.’

I tried protesting in the only way I could think of. Several days before the fifteenth of the month, the date I was to be fetched, I got the suitcase out from under my bed and put it on my table.

First I just left it there, wide open. Perhaps I hoped the accusatory sight of it would be enough to give Aunt a stab of guilt each time she went past my room.

In the next day or two I began to empty it out, trying to make up my mind what to take with me and what to leave behind. It was important to leave sufficient items behind for me to feel homesick about. There were plenty of photos that I slipped like so many banknotes between the pages of Aunt’s album, as if I were entrusting my father to a foster family. But I did set aside a handful, which I tied with an elastic band, to take with me, along with my father’s school exercise book which Uncle had given me ages ago and which I treasured because I was modelling my handwriting and my signature on his at the time.

I tipped all my mother’s letters into a drawer and left them there, because I knew Aunt would be annoyed when she found them.

There was no need to pack any clothes. ‘You’ll be needing smart outfits for that new school of yours. From now on she can buy them herself,’ Aunt said tartly. There was a sharp edge to her voice whenever she mentioned my mother which always made me feel awkward.

I tried not to count off the remaining days. In those final weeks I felt I was sleepwalking, quite devoid of any sense of volition, and that there were hands in the dead of night untying my shoelaces, grabbing my ankles, wrenching the shoes from my feet, undoing the buttons on my shirt, shaking my limp arms out of my sleeves and scattering flowers on my pillow.

Outside, August was rounding off the summer, allowing the first inklings of winter to rise from the ground as the evenings wore on. In the weeks following the annual fair the churchyard had begun to sprout wooden posts next to some of the gravestones, with notices stapled to them furnished with impressive stamps and signatures not half as neat as my father’s, and puzzling phrases like ‘legislation enforceable under section such and such’ and ‘in compliance with regulations governing groundwater levels’, as if the dead were in danger of drowning down there, and these were distress signals in their hour of peril.

Someone had marked several of the graves, including my father’s, with a bright red dot. I didn’t dare take a closer look. I was afraid I would get all emotional and start kicking the side of the bluestone slab or hammering my fists on that inane grin curving his lips in the oval portrait screwed above his name.

I managed to keep my mouth shut for about five days. Then one evening, when Aunt resolutely ignored my long face, I finally burst out with: ‘I know.’

They both stopped eating. ‘What do you know?’ Uncle asked.

‘I just know, that’s all,’ I replied.

Aunt put down her spoon, pushed back her chair and clapped her hands on her thighs. She looked at Uncle. He looked back.

‘People talk a lot of rubbish,’ he said.

I cut up my slice of bread as reproachfully as I could.

‘Just like your father,’ he growled. ‘If you’ve got something on your mind, kiddo, you could at least open your mouth and say so. Can’t tell what’s wrong by the smell, can we?’

I scraped the bottom of my bowl of buttermilk pudding over and over with my spoon. I knew exactly how to wind them up.

‘Can I have some more sugar?’ I asked casually.

‘You know where it’s kept,’ snapped Aunt.

I got up and went through to the scullery.

‘It was his stomach that killed him, Joris,’ said Aunt when I sat down again. ‘That’s all you need to know. They saw no point in an operation. He couldn’t keep anything down at the end. Had his bed in there.’ She pointed to the front room.

‘She couldn’t handle it, your mamma couldn’t. You should have seen the state of you when you first got here …’

‘Laura,’ said Uncle Werner. ‘Please, don’t …’

There was no stopping her.

‘Dammit, your hair was full of stale breadcrumbs, three days old at least.’

She picked up her spoon. ‘I was the one changing his sheets, nobody else. Me and Werner, that is. Three times a day, sometimes, when he spat blood. Spat out all his insides in the end.’

She bent over her bowl and ate. Then she put down her spoon again. ‘So now you know.’

I got up and made for the door.

‘Joris,’ Uncle called after me.

‘Leave me alone.’

‘They never liked us,’ I overheard Aunt say.

‘Nor we them, Laura,’ said Uncle.

A short time afterwards he came upstairs and sat down on the edge of my bed.

‘Yes, my boy,’ he sighed. ‘She’s going through the change. So are you, in a way … And then there’s me, the dumbo in between.’

His chest shook with rueful laughter. Me going through a change, what could he mean? He could have been my father. What if, in the days before I was born, he had gone to one of those parties now fossilised in the stiff pages of the albums, and had asked my mother to dance? If that had happened, my real father would simply have been some strange uncle, the kind of relation who was remembered at family gatherings with shakes of the head and remarks about what a shame it was to go so young.

In photos dating from before my birth, my absence from them felt like an unforgivable oversight. There was something wrong about the sunlight, and about the smiling faces at dinners from which I was excluded. Not only was it impossible to imagine the world without me in it, the question whether I would still be me if my mother had married someone else kept preying on my mind. Who was I? Which part of me came from where?

When I took a good look at Uncle I saw a sort of mirror
image of myself, a portrait that the artist had taken a lot of liberties with, so that I could see the likeness in the features while the eyes were those of a complete stranger. I hated his complacency, because I knew I had it in me too, deep down. The boys I jostled when we stood in line at school always made me pity them for one reason or another: their trousers were too short or their pullovers were their brothers’ cast-offs or they were hopeless at arithmetic, or just because I happened to be me and there was nothing, nothing at all, to be done about it.

‘There is so much we don’t know,’ said Uncle, as if he could read my thoughts. ‘Your pa, my brother, Joris … Don’t forget I slept in the same bed with him for eighteen years in this very house …’

He paused, letting his shoulders sag.

‘She thought she could wean him off it, I suppose … Perhaps I thought so too … He was headstrong, you know. A bit bashful at first perhaps …Once he got going, though … always first in line. Charging ahead … And then …’

He put his arm around my shoulders. I wanted to snuggle up to him, but thought that would be childish.

‘I don’t know why … But so it goes, that’s all I can say. So it goes. The older I get, the less I understand … But perhaps you’ll be able to explain it to me, later on, when you’re grown up and have read many more books.’

He slapped his hand on my knee and stood up. At the door he turned round.

‘Our ma made us go out to work at seventeen. Work
and save money, that was what we were supposed to do. When I get too old for hard graft, she used to say, you two can have the shop.’

He stepped into the corridor, leaving my door open. ‘A good woman … far too good,’ he muttered. The rest of the evening passed in a silence so fragile that the slightest disturbance made a din. In the scullery Aunt emptied the cupboards so as to clean the insides, which gave her ample opportunity to rattle pots and pans and jam jars by way of Morse signals of reproach to the rest of the house. Finally the whistle of the boiling kettle brought salvation.

‘Anyone for tea?’ she called, in token of truce.

I returned the book to Mr Snellaert on my last day. I had spotted his bicycle in the school playground, and the steel door to the hallway and the classrooms beyond was open.

There was no reply when I knocked. It was some time before he called for me to come in.

It was dark in the room. He had lowered the blinds over the big south-facing window. The sun coming in through the slits cast thin horizontal stripes across the desks, lighting up the triangles and protractors which were normally kept on top of the blackboard but which had been washed and now lay drying amid the sharp smell of detergent.

From the far end of the classroom, next to the stove, came the whirr of a film projector.

‘Mr Snellaert?’ I said.

A cupboard door closed.

‘Ah it’s you, Alderweireldt …’

Something stirred at the back of the room. The blinds rattled softly and the stripes of sunlight widened. There he stood, in the corner at the back, by what had been my desk for the entire school year. Over the noticeboard hung long ribbons made of something resembling dark plastic.

‘I was busy with my cine films,’ he said, not seeming to mind being disturbed.

Mr Snellaert’s hobby was common knowledge. He would turn up with his film camera on special occasions such as friendly football matches or village fairs, and it was funny how everyone gave their hair a quick pat or straightened their collar as soon as the lens swung in their direction.

‘That’s the trouble,’ I had heard him remark one day. ‘The moment they know they’re being filmed, half of it’s ruined.’

He showed his films as entertainment during village festivities, and gave his compilations titles like ‘Customs and Crafts of Yore’, or ‘Forgotten Characters’. The volleys of laughter and cries of recognition from behind the drawn curtains of the parish hall would be audible in the road outside. He always addressed his audience as Dear Friends.

‘I’ve come to return the book,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow.’

He made his way among the desks towards me.

‘So I’ve heard. I hope you’ll keep your nose a bit cleaner over there. You’ll find life in the city very different.’

My last school report had not been brilliant, just average.

‘Could do very much better if he tried,’ had been his final comment under the heading ‘General Attitude’.

‘Oh well, perhaps you’ve learned a thing or two from that book.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He took the book from me and tapped the spine with his fingers as he walked to the cupboard at the back of the classroom to put it back with the others.

‘Perhaps it’s a good thing you’re going away. Things seem to be going downhill faster than ever …’ he said, more to himself than to me.

He slipped the book in where it belonged. ‘There’s a sequel.
Mysteries of Civilisation
. Would you care to read it?’

‘I don’t know when I can bring it back,’ I replied.

He had already taken the hefty volume from the shelf. ‘You’ll come over from time to time, won’t you? Besides, if you promise it’ll be in good hands,’ he said, handing me the book, ‘I might turn forgetful.’

I could not see his face clearly in the dimness, but I knew he was grinning.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Shame I didn’t bring my camera to the procession the other Sunday,’ he said, crossing to the projector. ‘I did have it with me later on, for the bicycle race, but by then I’d missed the high point of the day …’

I felt the blood rush to my cheeks, and hoped he didn’t notice.

‘Otherwise I could have spliced you in after your father. That would have been capital. One acrobat after another.’

He noted my baffled expression.

‘Get a chair,’ he said, smiling.

I pulled up a chair between the stove and the projector and sat down. Mr Snellaert took some round, flat tins from the table beside him and studied the labels.

‘I store my films the way women store jam,’ he said. ‘Summer 68 … Summer 52 … Summer …Yes, that should be the one.’

He opened the tin and took out something resembling a wheel, which he clicked on to the projector.

‘Must take care not to break it, the stuff gets brittle with age.’ The wheel was wound round with the same sort of strip that was hanging from the noticeboard.

‘What I need is a proper cutting table, really, but the expense …’ He appeared to be talking to himself, so I held my tongue.

‘Right, all set.’

The stripes of sunlight narrowed as the blinds were lowered again. Mr Snellaert pressed a button. The projector threw a beam of light on to the blackboard, over which he had draped a sheet kept in place by three board wipers along the top.

‘Now for the show,’ said the master, rubbing his hands.

First I saw the stream in black and white, winding among back gardens, some with hedges that were no
longer there, and I saw a cow charging across a field to the water’s edge, where she dropped to her knees in the grass with a curiously determined air. Abruptly, the screen went dark.

‘It still needs a title,’ said Mr Snellaert. ‘Something like “Wartime Memories”, perhaps.’

The screen lit up again and a troupe of boys wearing gumboots stood in the water by the railway embankment, near where the stream discharged from a brick-lined tunnel. They waved. Laughed. The camera zoomed in. Faces were pulled in close-up, and among the jostle of heads and caps I could make out the long handle of a rake or hoe.