Shutterspeed (5 page)

‘Very complicated, I’m sure,’ muttered one of the customers, a farmer’s wife who twitched her shoulders and pressed her shopping bag to her stomach every time she opened her mouth.

‘Oh, that’s what he likes best,’ said Aunt. Despite her queasiness she sounded proud. ‘But put away that book now, dear, and get me a tin of apricots from up there.’

‘Don’t want the young folk to get too full of themselves, do we?’ she smiled, winking at her clientele.

When I was halfway up the ladder, reaching for the tinned fruit, my attention was caught by two figures on the pavement shielding their eyes against the glare as they peered through the plate glass: a woman who struck me as a bit older than Aunt Laura, and beside her a girl with jet black hair. They both wore wide-brimmed straw hats, and made to step into the shop. I had never seen them before.

The shop bell tinkled. The last customers to have come in twisted round to look, and appeared to recognise the woman. There was a ripple of curiosity and surprise, but the newcomer put her gloved, right-hand forefinger to her lips to silence them. Taking the girl by the hand, and unnoticed by Aunt at the counter, she squeezed past the customers at the back to examine the merchandise in the windows. She ran the tip of her forefinger over the fly swatters, which Uncle had tied in bunches on either side of the displays because there was so much demand for
them at this time of year, especially among farmers’ wives. The woman apparently found them dusty, for she rubbed her forefinger over her thumb several times.

The girl gave a little neigh of laughter, at which her companion murmured ‘Shush’.

They emanated the sort of elegance I had only seen before in photos of my mother’s childhood, and in the old fashion magazines on the bottom shelf of the landing cupboard, where Aunt kept a variety of lumber. It was as if there had been a tornado in the night that had scooped up the pair of them, blown them halfway across the country and dropped them in the field just outside the village once the storm subsided.

The woman’s gaze wandered over the shelves and the rack of apothecary jars – empty but kept by Uncle for appearance’s sake – and stopped at my knees. I was halfway up the ladder holding a tin of apricots.

Then the woman’s eyes met mine. Hers were bright blue.

‘Monsieur,’ she said, inclining her head graciously.

‘Monsieur,’ echoed the girl, who was standing beside her.

The shop was almost empty when Aunt looked up from her work at last and noticed the newcomers.

‘Well I never …’ she said, coming out from behind the counter to greet them.

‘Laure,’ said the woman.

‘Hélène,’ stammered Aunt, untying her apron. ‘Quelle surprise!’

She put her apron on the counter and shook hands with the woman, after which they touched their cheeks to each other while pursing their lips.

‘Nous sommes arrivées hier soir, pendant l’orage,’ said the woman. ‘Nous venons de Bruxelles. This young lady has expressed the desire to pay her uncle a visit. Her parents are away in France for a week or two, aren’t they, Isabella? Come now, say bonjour to Madame Laure.’

The girl shook hands with Aunt Laura and curtsyed prettily.

‘How nice that you have come to pay your dear uncle a visit,’ Aunt retorted in a French that sounded a bit halting to my ears, but I felt a stab of envy nevertheless because I could understand only half of what she was saying.

‘I think your uncle must feel quite lonely here at times, all alone in the old house,’ Aunt went on. ‘I’m sure he is very pleased to have visitors.’

The girl seemed unimpressed by the compliment. She spoke French, too. ‘He always tells me to be careful and not to tread on the lettuce when I’m playing in the vegetable garden,’ she said. ‘He says little girls get up to mischief.’

She paused. ‘But I’m not a little girl. I’m a young lady, and I have manners.’

‘Well well,’ Aunt smiled, reverting to Flemish. ‘She can stand up for herself all right, that’s for sure. A real Van Callant, I do believe. And how is the dear Baron? We haven’t seen very much of him lately.’

‘He can’t wait for the hunting season to begin,’ said Hélène. ‘It was such a relief for all of us when old Marie agreed to stay on in Monsieur’s service after poor Jerome died.’

She turned to me. ‘And who is this brave young man on the ladder?’

‘Tell Madame your name,’ instructed Aunt.

I came down the ladder. ‘Joris, Madame. Joris Alderweireldt.’

‘Werner’s brother’s boy,’ explained Aunt. ‘You remember …’

‘Oui, je sais …’ replied Hélène. She turned to the girl, saying: ‘The young man’s father is deceased. His mother lives in Spain for most of the year.’

‘Ah, je comprends,’ said the girl, without deigning to look at me.

‘Yes indeed,’ said Aunt, crossing to the window to let down the blinds. ‘Found herself some Juan over there, a bullfighter I shouldn’t wonder. Not really in our league, of course …’

‘Une histoire malheureuse, toute cette affaire,’ said Hélène.

Aunt Laura hung the Closed sign on the shop door. ‘No doubt about it,’ she concurred, ‘a very sad business.’

ACCORDING TO MR SNELLAERT, THE VAN CALLANTS WERE
of great and glorious lineage, though they had come down in the world of late. It was true that Master Theodore, the last Baron of Stuyvenberghe, did not show his face much nowadays, but we were not to forget that his ancestors had written important chapters of our history with their own blood.

‘What does it say on the saints’ pedestals in church?’ he asked one day during our history lesson. ‘What does it say beneath the coat of arms with three golden hinds on an azure ground?’

He waited a while in stern silence to emphasise our ignorance, after which he supplied the answer himself with a wag of his finger: ‘Groeninghe Velt! Groeninghe Velt! That’s what it says. And what does it mean?’

Despite the fact that the Van Callants spoke better French than Flemish these days, back in 1302, on 11 July to be exact, one of their kin, by the name of Jean, had been a noble warrior thrusting his sword into the bowels of French horses in the mud of the Groeningen Creek
and, as the master put it, had made mincemeat of Philip’s army between the soup and the spuds.

‘Such derring-do, that was,’ he continued, as if he had observed the battle from a ringside seat.

‘Picture this. All those horses keeling over, kicking like mad, while the lords riding them in heavy armour were deadweights, they just sank. But our Jean didn’t stop there. No indeed! Less than two years later, during the battle of Pevelenberg, he fought his way right up to the French king’s tent. They say he even drank wine from the king’s goblet. Talk about being brave …’

In later centuries the Van Callants gradually withdrew to the seclusion of their ancestral home. I myself had seen Master Theodore, Jean’s distant descendant, only once in the flesh, and only from afar, sitting doll-like in a wicker chair with a rug over his knees on the front porch of his manor. It was early autumn. My curiosity had got the better of me, so I ignored the
PROPRIETÉ PRIVÉ
sign at the entrance to the tree-lined alleyway at the back.

It was a becalmed, sun-drenched afternoon, turning chilly towards the end. An orange awning had been extended over the terrace. I heard the sound of a radio, a man’s voice speaking a jerky sort of French, followed by piano music.

The breeze battened down the grass on the rise between the pond and the house, and pried the first autumn leaves off the ancient beeches on either side. Looking between the trunks of the trees I could make out the wall of the orchard and overhanging branches laden with ripe pears,
then on the other side, protruding above an equally weathered wall, the tips of willow stakes drooping with runner beans.

Half submerged in the stream along the perimeter of the estate there still remained vestiges of the ancient fortress: blocks of yellow stone, bluestone doorsteps, chunks of foundations of the edifice which, as our master would have it, had once dominated the landscape for miles around. One of Master Theodore’s ancestors pulled it down and built himself a less grim-looking residence on the same site. Later still another Van Callant dug the pond, thereby modifying the course of the stream, after which the spoil was turned into mounds topped with artfully designed ruins.

Since then the parkland had been left to go to seed, the undergrowth taking over, the pond choked with reeds and silted up by the stream emerging from the backwoods, where there was a statue of a hunting goddess with a beard of moss. The big house itself, the mossy slates on the roof, the flaking blinds over the top-floor windows, the thickly ivied west wing, seemed equally resigned to nature’s might. And yet, according to Mr Snellaert, one could not but admire what he called a chapter of living history.

Uncle Werner was less appreciative. ‘Sitting on their backsides lining their pockets and checking the state of their stocks and shares, that’s all those fat cats ever did,’ he would say. ‘Haven’t hefted a sword in a hundred years.’

Aunt would always protest. Hélène Vuylsteke, for that
was her friend’s full name, had been in service at the manor all her life, and the two of them went back a very long way. Aunt always prided herself on the years she had spent with the Sisters of Saint Esprit, at a Walloon boarding-school for girls from good families where it was forbidden to speak a word of Flemish. A posh school, she insisted. She was eternally grateful to Mr Vuylsteke for not only persuading her father to let her accompany his daughter Hélène but also offering to pay more than half of her school fees.

She and her friend pose for the camera in the convent courtyard, either side of a towering nun in a black habit and a close-fitting head-dress like a periscope framing the bulge of her face. In the background roses straggle up the arches of a pergola and a stone heron stoops over water lilies in a pond.

Aunt almost looks as if she wants to hide behind the nun’s habit, but Hélène confronts the camera with lifted chin. I recognise the arctic clarity of her gaze, in which a hint of condescension is already to be seen, even though she is barely out of her teens.

‘We are not in a hurry,’ she had replied that day, when asked whether she would like some coffee, whereupon Aunt had escorted her unexpected visitors to the back.

They would have noticed the flies circling round the ceiling lamp, the oilcloth on the table that gave off a faintly rubbery smell in hot weather, the dresser stacked with cheap crockery and propped-up postcards, and the statue of the Virgin under a dusty bell jar on the mantelpiece
between two brass shell cases that served as vases.

I heard Aunt clattering about with the kettle, spoons, sugar tongs, saucers. Perhaps she felt ill at ease with the two pairs of eyes, one steel blue, the other auburn, following her every movement with idle curiosity and amusement.

‘I’m still quite happy where I am, living here at Stuyvenberghe,’ I heard her call from the scullery where the kettle had just begun to sing, and it sounded almost like an apology.

Hélène Vuylsteke retorted that life was still simple in these parts, and that people in the countryside still knew their place, thank goodness. I don’t know if she was being sarcastic.

‘I was just thinking of retiring,’ she said, ‘going to live in my Brussels apartment near the Elsene lakes, but when la petite Isabeau arrived Monsieur Wauthier asked me to take charge of his daughter. He had such good memories of his old bonne …’ she lowered her voice. ‘Between you and me, I am beginning to feel my age rather. Quite a handful, that child.’

‘Yes,’ said Aunt, coming in with the coffee. ‘Runs in the family, doesn’t it?’

Hélène nodded. ‘Quite the image of her grandmère. A real little chip off the old block.’

The girl was not listening. She had set her hat on the corner of the table and unbuttoned her light raincoat, and her gaze was now sliding over every object in the room with the same aloofness she had shown Aunt and me.
Only when Hélène spoke did she prick up her ears, apparently surprised to hear her governess lapsing into Flemish.

‘I can’t remember when I was here last,’ said Hélène.

‘It’s been twelve years at least,’ Aunt replied. ‘Maybe longer.’

The conversation was stilted. I noticed Aunt clenching and unclenching her fingers around her teaspoon.

‘I’ve heard the news about the churchyard,’ said Hélène. ‘A shame. But the chapel won’t have to go, it seems. Monsieur was so pleased.’

In the churchyard the Van Callants had their own abode, a vault against the north transept. All their names were there, chiselled in white marble on either side of a life-size
pièta
, all the knights, ladies, barons and gentlefolk they had ever sired. At some time a plaster scroll had been added at the base of the weeping Virgin, inscribed with the words ‘And all Other Members of our Family, scattered across the Face of the Earth, awaiting the Resurrection.’

The lacy carvings on the stone lintels and hefty wrought-iron chains enclosing the steps made their final resting place the most ostentatious structure of all, while the cemetery itself, with its pinnacled tombs of granite on which no expense had been spared, its separate corner for cot deaths and the outlying ranges of sagging headstones in reinforced cement, seemed as status conscious as the village of the living, itself reflected in the churchyard like a willow in a pond.

‘Monsieur was not very keen to move his beloved
mother and all his family to a new concession,’ observed Hélène. ‘Their rightful place, he says, is in the lee of the church.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Aunt, ‘though we won’t be so lucky, will we?’

Hélène ignored the hint of resentment in Aunt’s reply. ‘It’s because they rest in lead coffins, I believe,’ she said. ‘It seems they can’t take anything in or out, not out of lead.’

‘Still, it’s a bit odd,’ said Aunt. ‘You’d have thought a person had the right to rest in peace until …’ she paused, raising her cup to her lips, ‘until there’s practically nothing left.’

I wondered how much was left of my father. In my imagination the earth under my feet was no more than a thin skin, barely thicker than the ice on the ground during a severe winter. The dead were beneath, drifting like fish in a netherworld of sandy soil and debris, leading an existence devoid of oxygen or hunger. My father was there too, lying on his back with his hands behind his head while he counted the strokes of the church bell, which must have sounded to him like music that had ceased to hold any interest. Perhaps he peered through the chinks between the slabs of the Van Callant vault with the same curiosity that filled me when I peered through the bars of the gate to their ancestral home.

Mr Snellaert, who never missed an opportunity to speechify, assured us that when someone departed this earth he was subsumed into Eternity. The Incandescent Glory of God, he called it. A light so harsh that the wicked
would all cover their faces with their hands because they couldn’t stand the glare. Only the righteous would approach the Almighty with an open, steady gaze, and they were pretty thin on the ground.

‘I can think of some among our number who’ll be needing very dark glasses indeed,’ he had concluded, without looking at anyone in particular, although we all felt accused.

‘Another drop?’ offered Aunt Laura, bending over the table with the coffeepot in her hand. ‘Such a shame to let it go cold.’

Hélène nodded. The girl was growing restless, pushing her cup away and jiggling her knees.

‘Je me sens un peu fatiguée,’ I heard her say. ‘Can I go out into the garden?’

Hélène glanced at Aunt Laura.

‘Mais bien sûr,’ said Aunt in a honeyed tone. ‘But p’raps the young lady fancies taking a look around the shop. If she’s careful not to break anything, I mean.’

I could sense that Hélène Vuylsteke did not appreciate the afterthought.

‘Que pensez-vous, Isabeau?’ she asked. ‘The garden or the shop?’

The girl stood up. She folded the raincoat she had kept on her lap all this time, laid it on the seat of her chair and went out into the passage.

‘You run along and keep an eye on her, Joris,’ said Aunt.

I stalled for a bit, although I could tell by the nervous tic in her eyelid that she was eager to have a word with Hélène in private.

‘Joris!’ she repeated, with urgency in her voice.

I moved towards the door exasperatingly slowly.

‘What a slowcoach,’ I heard Hélène say as I stepped into the passage.

A sigh escaped from Aunt, which I did not know how to interpret. Her fingers drummed on the tabletop.

‘I’ve no idea what he’s thinking half the time,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it’s as if the lad lives in a glass box.’

‘What about his mother?’ Hélène asked.

‘I sent her a letter about the headstone. Her brother phoned …’ Their voices dropped.

I didn’t like it when people talked about me behind my back, and it was even worse when they spoke French, which I could more or less follow thanks to Mr Snellaert’s lessons but which made my mouth feel as dry as soft sand. It was worse than ever that afternoon, because as I reluctantly moved down the passage I could hear a high-pitched singsong coming from the shop.

Once my eyes became accustomed to the half-light I saw the girl prancing about in the middle of the shop.

‘Dolly, jamais je t’oublierai,’ she carolled, ‘Dolly, toujours je t’aimerai.’ She had taken a hairbrush from one of the baskets by the door and was holding it upright in front of her mouth.

She waved her free hand up and down in time to the melody, but now and then, when she lost track of
the words and hummed uncertainly, it just hung in the air.

She stopped still in mid-performance, made a little bow towards the shop door and spun round. She was looking in my direction, but I wasn’t sure she could see me. Perhaps she just saw my silhouette.

She turned about to face the door again.

‘And now for one of my favourite chansons,’ she announced. ‘Quand le téléphone sonne sonne sonne.’

She seemed neither startled nor in the least embarrassed when I emerged from the gloom of the passage. I don’t know how old she was. Not much older than me, at any rate, perhaps even slightly younger. Girls older than me, I believed, had given up dreaming of stardom long ago, so I found it very odd to see someone like her, who had history running in her veins and the clink of chain mail following her around, pretending to be a pop star.

Perhaps she was still too young to sit at her mother’s dressing table and smear a still foreign femininity on her cheeks, the way the older girls at the convent school suddenly stopped wearing their hair in plaits and started giggling uncontrollably, as though the first stage of growing up was like being tickled.

They always made me feel as if my knees were abnormally big when I strode past the gate, where they would hang around in clusters, sticking out their tongues or taunting me for having freckles and smelling bad.

I felt a pat on my shoulder and air wafting against my cheek as the girl flounced past.

‘We saw the circus arrive,’ she said, trailing her fingers along the edges of the shelves behind the counter.

‘There was an awfully loud noise, and I was scared … It was a lion roaring.’ I could hear her skirt brushing against the large bins of un-roasted coffee.