“No indeed,” the grandmother said tartly. “But it didn’t do us Flemings any good, that’s all I can say.”
“We’ll get there in the end,” Miss Veegaete said soothingly. “Of course we will. We do our best. Which of us knows French better than Flemish, anyway?”
“Not me!” barked Stella.
“You mind your own business,” hissed the grandmother.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Miss Veegaete went on. “I have always spoken my mind. Everywhere. Even in Brussels. Even in the classroom with my girls from good families. Fair and square, I always used to say.”
She stepped into her shoes, dragging the heels over the tiled floor.
“Now then, let’s measure your waist,” the grandmother said.
*
There was nothing square about Miss Veegaete. She was all curves and hollows. Sometimes, when she was reading in class and thought no one was watching, she would slip off her shoes. Crossing one leg over the other and holding her book with one hand, she reached under the desk with the other and gave her ankle-strap a firm tug to undo the buckle. Without raising her eyes from her book she clapped her knees together again, placed the point of one shoe against the heel of the other, and released each foot from its prison with a soft, squelching sound.
When the postprandial torpor wore off and the fidgeting in the classroom mounted, her stockinged feet felt around for her shoes. She balanced them on her toes and gave them a little shake before slipping them on and fastening the straps. She smoothed the shoulders of her blouse and clapped her hands for attention.
“Put down your pencils, now!’ she commanded.
She went round the classroom collecting sheets of paper, pausing here and there to bestow praise on a drawing: boxy houses, stiff-legged figures in gardens full of trees with huge fruits, under blazing suns with straw-coloured rays.
I hated colour, so I did every thing in black. I had made a drawing of the grandmother’s house, but without the front so you could see all the rooms and what was in them. I had put Marcel into the picture, too: Marcel in the attic wearing a helmet and scary bat’s wings.
“Er …” murmured Miss Veegaete, “it is, how shall I put it, artistic.”
When she had finished pinning all the drawings to a board at the back of the classroom she swept to the door and flung it open.
She clapped her hands again: “Time to be excused!”
The boys poured from their desks towards the door, where the jostling throng assembled into a double file.
“Forward march!”
She drove her flock down the corridor, along the windowsills with potted geraniums and discarded lunch boxes, past the coat racks with mackintoshes dangling from the pegs like hooded cassocks. Talking was not allowed.
We trooped down the stairs and turned into another corridor past a classroom full of boys reciting tables in voices that were already breaking.
Halfway down the final corridor I sniffed the reek of the latrines: a sickly smell of urine masked by clouds of jasmine spray. I clenched my buttocks instinctively.
Miss Veegaete lined up her class in front of six cubicles with short doors. Adjoining them was her own private lavatory, with a door that reached down to the floor. She clapped her hands a third time, whereupon the front ranks vanished into the cubicles. Six pairs of shoes were draped first in corduroy or denim, then in underpants of all colours, after which six little streams splashed into the pans.
“And what do we do when we’ve finished?”
Six waterfalls cascaded in chorus.
Miss Veegaete always waited for the last pupils to take their turn in the cubicles before locking herself in the mother of all lavatories, which had a toilet higher than the others. I was fumbling with my flies in the cubicle next to hers, with only a flimsy partition between us.
I could hear Miss Veegaete hitch up her skirt, then her petticoat. She was having trouble pulling down her underwear; the material kept getting twisted in the elastic.
I heard a grunt in the cubicle on the other side, signalling a Number Two, then a heavy plop and a sigh of relief.
I waited, elbows on knees, counting the specks in the tiles at my feet. Miss Veegaete would be lowering herself onto the toilet. I pictured her thighs spreading over the seat. A hen sitting on her brood.
Elsewhere I heard belts being buckled.
It seemed an eternity before it came: a wide, motherly stream issuing from a cleft in the rocks, splashing into the pan, tinkling like her laughter.
The world stood still. The hot ache in my groin became a whirlpool, a funnel. The blood rushed to my cheeks, tears stung my eyes. My own water joined Miss Veegaete’s finale in a plashing duet.
At the end I waited.
A drop of mine.
A drop of hers.
Then came the rasp of paper in the depths of her thighs, against hairs that did not bear thinking about.
CHAPTER 3
POTATOES KEPT SHOOTING UP ALL OVER THE GARDEN, year after year. They sprouted in the most unexpected places, under the trees and among the dahlias, even in the rock garden surrounding the Virgin’s grotto, where the purplish shoots grew spindly, craning upwards to the light.
The grandmother hacked at them with her trowel. “Goodness knows where the brutes keep coming from.”
She poked around until she found the tuber, which she trampled fiercely to a pulp. “At least that makes one less.”
I wondered if there had ever been a potato age, the way there had been ice ages. An age when the land was carpeted with potato plants as far as the eye could see, all of them with tubers slumbering in the soil. Perhaps they were trying, from their base in the vegetable patch, their last stronghold, to reconquer the garden.
All year round the grandmother observed a strict segregation between two domains. The sewing room with its garments on hangers and dressmaker’s dummies extended beyond the big window into the garden, where leafy crowns dipped and swayed like hooped petticoats in the wind. A tracery of paths skirting the trees led to the gate in the hedge. Further away, in the full sun, lay a straight-lined configuration of plots.
The vegetable patch was the grandfather’s domain — or rather, his codicil. When they were married the grandmother grudgingly accorded him the use of the old bleaching field. He dug it all up, raised the beds, deposited barrowfuls of stable manure and planted his potatoes. He also brought his entire family with him. The Eggermonts. Desperados, loafers and adventurers they were. Interlopers in the garden of the grandfather’s wife and the other members of her tough tribe, the Ornelises.
In the summer the two families gathered uneasily around the long table in the orchard. Fingers shot up in the air, fists thumped the table top. The Ornelises crossed their arms and gritted their teeth. They fretted and ground their heels in the grass. The Eggermonts stamped their feet and jiggled their knees against the underside of the table, their eyes smouldering with self-righteousness. In the background loomed the debris of shattered illusions.
The arguments were always about politics, of which I knew nothing as yet. My father took a picture with his new Kodak, but it was not until much later that I understood its portent. One side of the table under the cherry blossom is a forest of flailing arms and flushed heads. The other side is occupied by the Ornelises, holding their tongues, eyes narrowed to slits in lined, weather-beaten faces. The two camps are divided by a wavering frontier of plates and glasses running from one end of the checked tablecloth to the other. Presiding at the head is the grandmother, darkly aloof like the trees in her garden. Her genteel manners are being furtively mocked along one side of the table, while the other side bridles with reproach at her having married beneath her. Her elbows are propped on the table, her mouth is hidden behind her clasped hands.