Maurice escorted the grandmother down one passage and up the next, indicating the different materials with a long pointer as if they were maps of strange continents. Every few steps he motioned to his assistants to continue the display, whereupon they swung their shafts and released yet more walls of fabric. Whenever the grandmother slowed her pace he snatched up the material in both hands and held it under her nose.
She rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, sniffed it, and came very close to taking a bite.
“Samples?” she said.
He reached under the rack for the book of swatches. Turning the pages he escorted the grandmother across his emporium back to the window, where they inspected each sample in turn.
“Daylight cannot tell a lie,” the grandmother said.
They moved closer together. Maurice’s head swung from left to right in time with his hands.
The grandmother muttered something.
Maurice shrugged and raised his eyebrows.
The grandmother shook her head, giving her hat a stern little shake in the process.
“Bon, I’ve made up my mind,” she said finally.
They crossed side by side to the long wooden counter. Maurice noted down her order on a sheet of brown paper. Each item filled him with delight.
“And I need some more of those perlefine beads,” the grandmother said. “I’ve run out again.”
He grinned.
“You know what they’re like in the country,” she said brightly. “Anything gaudy and glittery makes them feel rich.”
Maurice manoeuvred a stepladder between the counter and the wall fitment made up of countless little drawers.
“Yes,” he said, “there’s not much demand for such items around here. I always keep the country things somewhere at the top.”
They exchanged grins.
“Perlefines, perlefines.” He opened a drawer. “How many do you need?”
“A good supply.”
He filled a paper bag with the tear-shaped beads strung on glistening thread and cautiously descended the ladder.
“Voila! Finery for country lasses. Can I offer you a glass of something?”
*
A long windowless passage led to a dimly lit sitting room, where Maurice poured himself a snifter of cognac. The grandmother opted for Elixir, a colourless liquid that clung to the sides of the small glass.
“Well now,” she said, her cheeks flushing a deep pink, “that goes down a treat, I must say.”
They sat facing each other at a long table by the window. Small flowerpots with Mother-in-law’s Tongues were lined up on the sill.
I was not listening to their conversation. I had been given a glass of grass-green lemonade and a magazine with pictures of Monte Carlo to keep me occupied.
“When?” I heard Maurice moan. “When, when, when?”
With each “when” he banged his fists on the table. “The answer is: never. The licence is still in my brother’s name, dammit!”
“There, there Maurice, no need to get all excited.”
“I’ve paid my dues, haven’t I?”
He stared out of the window. It was drizzling. Women in nylon raincoats moved past the sansevierias. He topped up their glasses.
“Not so full, not so full,” the grandmother cried. “It goes down far too easily.”
The rain drew slanting stripes across the window. The stripes merged. People opened their umbrellas. Others, ghost-like, hurried by holding shopping bags over their heads.
Maurice and the grandmother talked in whispers. Their voices blended with the pattering rain, rising now and then.
“They’re the ones who took advantage,” the grandmother sniffed. “You can guess who’s taken to driving a Mercedes, can’t you Maurice? A Mercedes, no less.”
A brief silence ensued.
Then Maurice said something odd.
It sounded like: “Hee.”
Silence.
Again he said: “Hee.”
When I dared raise my head I caught a glimpse of him stuffing his handkerchief into the pocket of his dust-coat. He threw the grandmother a red-eyed, helpless look, uncorked the bottle and poured himself another drink.
The grandmother declined a refill, covering her glass with her hand. Maurice emptied his cognac in one draught and sank into silence. He inhaled through gritted teeth. A last stifled sob sent a shudder through his body.
The grandmother stood up, adjusted her hat and shook the creases out of her skirt.
“Indeed, Maurice, indeed,” she said at last. “There’s no turning the clock back, is there?”
“He still hasn’t got over it,” she declared to no one in particular as we walked back to the railway station. “Whatever would Agnes say?”
*
Agnes wore black satin; she had a white face and large eyes behind thick glasses. She smiled wanly from the display cabinet, baring brown teeth. Her son Léon, in his early twenties, stared out at the world from the shop front, where he stood arm in arm with Marcel, the grandmother’s youngest brother. They were pals, their destinies as yet undecided. They shared the same shiny black frame, at the foot of the Yser Tower.
“The war had already begun by then,” the grandmother remarked. “Léon was an only child. Maurice certainly had his share of misfortune, poor soul.”
They had wanted another son. Agnes was nearly forty at the time. Too old really, the grandmother thought, but what can you expect, she couldn’t get over her boy’s death. Things didn’t turn out well.
“It was like a donkey’s pregnancy. Thirteen, fourteen months and no contractions. Agnes said: ‘It’ll come in its own good time.’ She carried on for a year and a half, poor thing. In the end they cut her open, but it had gone rock-hard.”
They cut her open, but it had gone rock-hard. I imagined doctors and nurses letting fly with hammers and chisels in an attempt to excavate a stone foetus from Agnes’ fleshy insides. I did not dare ask if they had installed it on Agnes’ tombstone. It would not have surprised me if they had.
*
“Turned to rock indeed,” chuckled Stella, a cousin several times removed and the maid of all work. On Saturdays she swung the chairs up on the table and herded the settees into a corner, on top of which she draped the carpet. From the cupboard under the stairs she extracted floor cloths and mops and scouring brushes with ginger, military moustaches. She doused the black tiles with buckets of white suds, and set about scrubbing hard.
“Don’t you go ruining my tiles now, Stella,” the grandmother admonished her.
They were like a comic double act. The grandmother, tall and angular and overbearing, with an air of worldly superiority over her distant relative, and Stella, a short, sharp-edged blade of grass. To make herself taller she fashioned a bun with a hairpiece and wadding on top of her head. Most of the time she wore owlish spectacles on her nose, giving her a cross look that belied her nature.
*
“Turned to rock indeed!”
It was morning. Her spectacles lay idle on the dressing table among her boxes of face powder. In a corner of the room a bare-headed, shadowy figure sat on a creaking sofa, shaking uncontrollably: her husband Lucien. He would wear out three more sofas after that — one every six months, until the springs fell out of the bottom and his heart gave up for good.
He was afflicted with a strange disease that later on, once his portrait had joined the queue for dusting, would give the grandmother cause to vent her morbid pride. She would remark that he was “related by marriage, of course.” That made a difference, apparently.