“There’s nothing we can do for him,” the neurologist told Stella. “Your husband suffers from Huntington’s Chorea.”
“How do you mean, Korea?” Stella’s tears and bafflement lasted for months. “How can that be? My Lucien never, ever went to Korea.”
*
“The little one just shrivelled up, understand?” Stella said. “Come along now, why don’t you give me a hand. Here, hold this.”
She fixed the hairnet over the false bun, bowed her head, reached for my hands and pressed my fingers down around the net, which she proceeded to secure with hairpins plucked from the corner of her mouth. She had arranged all the false curls around the wadding and pulled her own hair up tight to form a sort of pinnacle on top.
I longed to touch her head with the palm of my hand, especially in the early morning when her hair would be hanging loose, still smelling of the night.
In the mirror I glimpsed tufts of underarm hair protruding from the short sleeves of her green summer frock, and caught a pungent whiff of armpits.
She knitted her brow and clamped her lips tightly on the hairpins. On her knees, with both hands on her head, she might have been a supplicant, or a prisoner held at gunpoint.
*
Stella contributed her own epitaphs to the grandmother’s weekly valedictions.
“Poor lambs, it’s been such a long time …” she would sigh as the duster slid over a delicate gilt frame of acanthus leaves, out of which three angelic boys gazed earnestly into space.
“Our Noel, our Antoine and our Valère. My brothers,” the grandmother said.
I could see the resemblance in her jutting cheekbones, her strong chin. Their eyes in a haze of curly blonde hair glowed with an unnatural brightness.
“If they’d known about penicillin in those days,” Stella said, “they’d still be with us, poor things. The croup, ooh it was dreadful. Lucien had it too. The doctor told his mother to hold him upside down over a tub of boiling water. Did he scream!”
“Boiling water with a few drops of eucalyptus, oh yes, my mother used to do that too. Still … My father buried them at the bottom of the garden. All three of them, side by side under a white gravestone. By the beech tree. That was still allowed in those days.”
She would have turned her garden into a graveyard given the chance, so that she might sail from grave to grave among the rose-beds, day in day out, armed with scouring powder and bleach to kill the moss. Flanking the picture of the three boys were the grandmother’s father and mother — railway accident and cancer of the bone — one under each of the Virgin’s hands. The grandmother’s mother wore her hair swept into a bun on the top of her head. Her father wore a shiny pin on his necktie.
*
Sometimes, when Stella took my place handing over the pictures one by one, I would crawl under the table and lie back on the bare tiled floor, breathing the fresh smell of a just-cleaned house. When boredom crept over me the floor would reveal its secret geography, complete with all the tiny ridges and ravines where the soapy water collected into miniature lakes. It was then that I discovered that every movement in the house followed a fixed pattern. Everyone traced habitual paths, skirts billowing round calves, shoes creaking with every step. I would lie there flat on my back until my muscles became rigid with cold and the space between the table legs turned into an Egyptian tomb, monumental and forbidding.
*
“Our Cécile, she’s so earnest-looking,” Stella said.
Cécile, Sister Marie-Cécile, was the only living person to be granted admission to the display cabinet. She wore a crown of white lilies. It was the day of her investiture as a nun. She struck a solemn pose in the convent garden, a sickly Bride of Jesus, about to be entered in the dry annals of eternity.
“A stick with a wimple,” my father grumbled sometimes. He was not much taken with her.
“Our Cécile inhabits saintly spheres,” the grandmother said, feigning reverence.
Once a year Sister Cécile received a visit from her family. The grandmother loaded the boot of my father’s Ford Anglia with jars of preserves. My mother buckled her safety belt with undisguised reluctance and whispered: “Right, let’s be off.”
The convent was a sprawling brick building on a hill. The car chugged noisily up the incline. A pull on the bell handle sent a tinkling ring down long corridors. It was several minutes before the heavy wooden door was opened by a nun bent double with age.
There was a long walled garden with cedars and benches in the shade, occupied by a number of old biddies chewing their lips. Now and then one of them got up and did a little waltz on the flagstones, while her sisters moved their swaddled legs in three-quarter time.
Sister Cécile’s quarters were at the top of the building, right under the eaves. Tortuous flights and a succession of ever narrower corridors took us upstairs, past crowded dormitories smelling of urine. At the end of the last corridor a few steps led up to a door. The nun had heard us coming, for she came out to greet her visitors.
“Ah, there you are.”
She placed her hands devoutly on her chest. A stick with a wimple, mummified already. A sallow face, drained of expression by a life of every conceivable abstention.
“Come in, come in,” she murmured.
She had toned her voice down to a permanent whisper, mouse-grey mutterings from an anaemic rodent of the Lord.
Her narrow room was furnished with hard cane chairs. On a table stood a thermos containing watery coffee. Little hisses escaped from the lid. In the heat the tiles on the roof made a ticking sound behind the insulation panels.
The nun poured coffee. She plied me with Sacred Heart memorial cards, stale ginger biscuits and mildewed chocolates. She took a biscuit herself, which she dipped in her coffee, and I had a strong sensation in my own mouth of her tongue flattening the sugary mush against her palate.
The nun chuckled and then announced gravely: “I can’t open my mouth very wide. I’ve just had an operation on my jaw.”
My father rolled his eyes. I could see him thinking: she’ll have us operated on for our faith next, the witch, but he saved his remark for later, in the car.
“If only she’ll spare us her communion with the Holy Ghost,” he had said on the way there. “And I hope to God she shuts up about her miracles.”
Once a month it was Sister Cécile’s turn to help the elderly nuns in bath chairs into the chapel. She invoked the Holy Ghost so ecstatically that one of the old girls slid from her seat and crumpled into a dribbling heap on the floor.
“Speaking in tongues. Saw it with my own eyes.” For once her voice shot up. “Glossolalia!”
Epilepsy, according to the local GP.
The nun had her own way of honouring the dead. She saw herself as the family prayer-wheel. From her hilltop she sent a never-ending stream of invocations to heaven. Her façade of humility displayed small cracks now and then, from which oozed unspoken reproof.
“That boy,” she said, “has been lying there all alone for so many years now. I remember him in my prayers every day. He saved us from Bolshevism.”
I thought she was referring to yet another mysterious disease.
*
In the display cabinet at home Cécile posed next to Brother Armand, who was wearing his black Benedictine habit for the occasion. When attending funerals he usually wore it over his civilian clothes, and more often than not he would raise a laugh.
“Someone ought to tell him to take off his bicycle clips,” the grandmother remarked with a sigh each time he swanned up to the altar for an oblation, flashing white calves and ankles.
He never missed a mass for the dead. No one could snivel the way he did. It was a brief homage, no more. After the service there would be the meal with the mourners, and the wine. One day it was his turn to be mourned. The bells in the abbey tower tolled a sonorous knell. “He brought a spirit of generosity to our monastery,” intoned the abbot, visibly relieved to be rid of the smell of alcohol.