*
The attic — where the raincoats of the dead in their mahogany wardrobe would have melted into the inky blackness by now. So would the great-grandmother’s astrakhan coat, which Stella slipped off its hanger when she thought she was alone. It reached almost to her ankles, and the sleeves were far too long for her short arms. She wrapped it tightly around her body, turned her back to the wardrobe mirror and twisted round to see how it looked, gauging how much she would have to take it in at the waist for it to fit snugly around the hips. She studied the angle of the collar on her chest, shook the lapels, did up buttons and undid them again, judging the effect all the while with darting, beady eyes.
“Stella puts Oda’s coat on sometimes,” I tittle-tattled one day, when she and the grandmother were standing at the kitchen table sifting flour. I felt guilty immediately.
Stella blushed bright red and shot me a searing look. For a time the only sound was the soft slap of her hands on the dough.
The grandmother stood with her back to us rinsing a saucer under the tap.
She was taking her time. She placed the saucer in the rack, dried her hands on her apron, sat down, rolled up a sheet of kitchen foil with a nonchalant air and then said sharply: “She’s not the only one …”
Her words plunged a dagger in my ribs. I cringed.
“What grown-ups do is their own business,” she went on. “If they want to act the madame, it’s entirely up to them.”
Stella stopped kneading abruptly, her hands lay still in the bowl with dough as though she had suddenly decided to become a house plant.
“But every self-respecting housewife knows she ought to dust her paws with flour first. Stops the dough from sticking.”
All three of us seemed to freeze into a tableau vivant, until a moment later the grandmother turned to the sink again and Stella went back to slapping her dough. I was reminded of a herd of elephants sloshing across a muddy pool.
*
It was only by magic that she could have found me out. I had put everything back in the old travelling trunk exactly as I had found it. Socks on top, in bundled pairs. Underneath were the trousers with their sickly-sweet smell of camphor and dust. Under the trousers were the three shirts. Two grey, one checked. At the bottom lay school textbooks and exercise books, with much-thumbed labels. Marcel Ornelis. Class C. Saint Laurens. Inside were stock-raising techniques, domestic fowl and cattle breeds, irrigation methods, with pencilled scribbles in the margin, faint from being erased: Fly Bluefoot fly!! All hail to Flanders!
The shirts did not match the picture in my mind’s eye, which was of a slim figure, military, clean-cut. A dark shape scissored out of the night. The check shirt had a peasant collar. He must have worn it buttoned up to the top, the same way it now lay folded in the trunk. He may have rolled up the sleeves on hot days. Up to the elbows, or over them. Probably over.
Glory to our Flemish Heroes!
He would have pencilled his slogans in secret, hiding behind the boys in the row in front. Perhaps he had shielded what he was writing with his left hand. He would have rubbed them out himself, later on. Possibly at the behest of a teacher. Or he might have been afraid, or ashamed, as if he had scrawled an obscenity on the wall of one of the lavatories. The older boys sometimes did this, even in Miss Veegaete’s lavatory. She would sweep out of her palatial privy seething with indignation, an empress stepping onto her balcony to face the rebellious rabble below.
Every single item had been replaced in the trunk in the correct sequence, for hadn’t I had plenty of practice observing the strictest order each Friday anew, portrait after portrait? I had even dusted the lid with my handkerchief so as to remove any fingerprints. Perhaps I had been too fastidious. Perhaps I had made the trunk look suspiciously spic and span. Now, in the early hours of the night, it would be filling up with black water, up to the brim and over, like an overflowing bathtub.
*
The grandfather switched the light off over the sofa. The grandmother folded her glasses and put them in their case. I sloped back to my room and drew the cold sheets up to my chin.
The familiar sounds of their nightly ritual wafted towards me. A Steradent tablet fizzing in a glass on the bathroom shelf. The splash of water on their faces, hands, wrists, while they grinned toothlessly in the stillness. The creaking of their joints, or it could have been the lining of their slippers, as they shambled down the corridor. The grandfather checked all the rooms, opening doors, glancing inside, and shutting them again. By the time he reached my door I was lying on my side, breathing through parted lips with studied regularity.
I knew without opening my eyes that he was standing in the doorway with his hand on the doorknob and his mouth twisted into an involuntary rictus. His flabby lips made soft smacking sounds. Finally he shut the door. A moment later their bedsprings groaned weakly under their combined weight.
*
I had learned to keep my mouth shut about the footsteps in the dead of night. I had mentioned them only once.
“You’ve got too much imagination, you have,” she had said. “You’ve got so much imagination it doesn’t fit inside your head. It’ll be the pigeons you can hear. Or your grandfather, when he goes to the lavatory.”
His footfall was familiar to me. He favoured his left foot to spare his bad knee. Hard-soft, hard-soft came the creak of his slippers, or was it his joints, as he headed to the bathroom and back again.
Perhaps she was right. It would be the pigeons — they certainly behaved as if they carried on until late at night. All the other birds would be up and about by sunrise, while the pigeons spent half the morning perching side by side on the gutter, a row of befuddled feathery balls on little legs. All that was missing were ice packs on their heads. They were the culprits — but then again maybe they were not. The veils of the night were more than a match for commonsense explanations.
*
Moonlight seeped through the slit under the door toward the bedstead. From the sewing room it inched across the corridor as the night took its course. First it cast a long sliver of light on the floor, then receded slowly, blurring the space.
Miss Veegaete’s dress dangling against the wardrobe door would be all silvery by now, but I did not dare sneak inside to take a look. The attic had come alive. The rafters creaked from one end of the house to the other. I told myself it was the pigeons.
Outside, the neighbours’ dog barked at the stars and rattled its bowl. It was a bad-tempered, ugly creature, but I was grateful for the noise.
The night wore on. The cold rose up from the ground, penetrating the walls. The atmosphere was rife with little ticks and sighs; the kitchen utensils seemed to be vying for space, clicking and rattling like so many blackbirds singing to claim their territory. The moon was setting, and in the attic an inky blackness started pouring from all the cupboards and chests, cascading down the stairs. I couldn’t see a thing. All around me the dark pressed up against the walls, rustling behind cupboards and nibbling at the woodwork. Rats or mice behind the skirting boards. Perhaps.
I considered my options: count up to ten thousand, say, or do some more praying, or pretend that fairies really existed and I could make any wish I pleased. What if it worked? What if all the stuff that fell off the table were to band together? A strip of suede. A tuft of fur. What if all the snippets of serge joined forces with a couple of buttons? They could enlist the tangle of basting threads on the floor, and bribe a dozen thimbles while they were at it. They could invade the table drawer and conspire with the lame zippers. Murder in reverse. A new perspective. A more bearable tomb. So he would stop roaming the house in his stockinged feet, all the way from attic to basement, pausing at my door, deathly quiet, jealous of me — Marcel to a tee but for the eyes which I got from my mother. Until finally I was numbed by sleep and my head dropped like the lid on the travelling trunk.