“Have no fear, Madam,” Willem said innocently. “He’s far too serious for girls.”
She handed over a key. Third floor, second door on the left, she told us.
The room was rather small, formerly occupied by domestic servants. The wallpaper was in the bold stripes of old-fashioned pyjamas, and you could tell by the stuffiness of the place that it would get very hot in summer. But I liked it. The window looked out on a bell tower from which a carillon pealed out every quarter hour.
There was a bathroom and a narrow kitchen which I was to share with the only other lodger, a student with greasy hair who sat like Samson between pillars of books, poring over his chemistry textbooks, and who barely raised his eyes in greeting. His room had the look of an underground lair in which he was hibernating on a permanent basis.
He wouldn’t give me any trouble, that was clear.
“So this is to be our kingdom,” Willem said.
“Is it to your liking?” a voice squeaked behind us. It was the landlady, who must have been following us the whole time in her inaudible slippers.
“It’s fine!” I stammered. “Excellent, in fact.”
She descended the stairs at a maddeningly slow pace and showed us out.
*
Willem found student lodgings in a modern residential hall situated at a busy crossroads. I couldn’t have stuck it there for more than half an hour. The interior was regulation white formica all over the place. His room had two windows, beneath which there was the constant rumble of traffic. But you could see the hospital from it. Sitting at his writing table he had a view of the pavilions, the car park teeming with visitors, the small lawns dotted about where nurses or students stretched their legs and took off their shoes during the lunch hour.
Soon afterwards he left for the seaside, where he was to spend a month helping out at a pastry shop owned by an aunt. I visited him there on one of his few days off. We wandered up and down the tideline on the beach, rolled down dunes and built childish sand castles.
Up in the loft over the bakery stood his narrow bunk. He moved over to make room for me and curled his bony body around mine. I pricked myself on one of his earrings — his aunt wouldn’t hear of him wearing “that junk” in the shop — and in the awkward entanglement that followed we tumbled off the bed. We held our breath, but the noise was followed only by silence. Clearly his aunt was not a light sleeper.
At the end of July he had to join his father and mother on a trip to Italy. “A tour of the palazzos,” he said, wrinkling his nose. His father was the kind of tourist for whom world cities are life-size illustrations of a travel guide.
A postcard arrived from Verona, saying the weather was hot, that he wished I was there, that he was overdosing on pasta. We would meet again early in September, when the annual fair was held in Ruizele.
CHAPTER 2
THE REST OF THE SUMMER was taken up with lounging about, packing my things and helping my parents to move house, which they did slowly, bit by bit. The whole place smelled of cardboard. There were boxes stacked up like sarcophagi in every room.
My father was getting on for sixty and eligible for early retirement. I think he was relieved to be spared the further decay of the house he was born in, although our new home, on a housing estate and the mirror image of the houses across the road, must secretly have dismayed him as much as it dismayed me.
At the end of August Roswita got married. I climbed up to the rood-loft for my last performance as a chorister. Swathed in raw silk, lace and tulle, she advanced towards the altar down below, where a pale young man wearing a very wide tie awaited her amid fountains of lilies.
The reception was held in her father’s garden. In the marquee she came up to me and asked how I was.
“Fine,” I said. “Great, really.”
We both glanced round, taking in the bobbing hats of the ladies, their lavish frocks, the waiters hovering over the trays of dressed lobsters on the terrace.
“History,” she echoed, with a hint of awe in her voice, when I told her I’d be going to university. “Not my style. I was never one for learning. Can’t sit still long enough.” She smiled apologetically.
The bridegroom came towards us, inquired with whom he had the pleasure. Fortified by drink, he planted a fleeting kiss behind her ear and moved away.
“And how’s Roland?” she asked.
“Haven’t seen him for ages. He’s working, and his mother’s living at home again.”
She nodded, peered down at her glass. We still felt awkward in each other’s company. Observing her as she darted looks at the crowd, greeting people she knew with a little wave, I asked myself if this was a threshold for her: would she cross it and step out into the world or would it be a barrier that she’d welcome for its reassuring finality?
Dotted about the lawn were samples of every stage of her future. Children playing. Infants sated with cereal burping blissfully on their mothers’ shoulders. Teenagers drinking themselves silly. Portly gentlemen and elderly ladies laden with jewellery, their faces bright pink from the holiday in Spain.
In forty or fifty years’ time she’d be just like all those aunts and grandmothers gossiping in the shade of a pine tree, wearing hats designed to make up for lost youthful prettiness, and like them, barely recovered from a hip replacement, she’d hobble over to her grandchildren to pat them on the head.
I smiled at her sheepishly and said the champagne was very good.
She shrugged her shoulders. “You know my Pa. It’s always nothing but the best for him.”
Looking past her I spotted him heading towards us, waving his arm. At the foot of the terrace there was a rollicking crowd from the old football club, yelling “Long live love!” and to my shame, I couldn’t help wondering how many of them had felt her up and groaned in the shadows of the castle drive. I pushed the thought away.
“Your father’s looking for you,” I said, just before he came up behind her and slipped his arm through hers.
She turned to me and waved. “See you later maybe.”
“See you,” I said. “Best of luck.”
*
This was to be the last night I slept at home. I would be going to Ghent in the morning to settle into my student lodgings, and didn’t intend to return until my parents had moved to the new house.
I took some soup bowls, cutlery, a few cups, and stacked them in a box.
Upstairs I heard the occasional argument.
“But Pa, we can’t keep everything,” my mother cried, and I could hear my father grumble in protest.
The room designated for the items of furniture that were no longer wanted filled up with heartache. Cupboards, cabinets and tables huddled together in docile anticipation of their second-hand fate.
Evening fell. The wind changed direction, and the cooling breeze made the house shrink audibly. The beech came alive as a late-summer flock of starlings settled in its branches, transforming the tree into a great music box pealing out an uninterrupted chorus of twittering and chirping. In the moonlight I could make out the birds among the foliage preening their feathers and squabbling over the prime perches. Now and then a contingent of them would detach itself soundlessly and alight in the gutter with a soft patter. Towards daybreak the concert would burst forth again, and with the first ray of sunshine the whole flock would whoosh up into the sky.
*
I drove to Ghent in my father’s car with the back seat piled high with things for my student lodgings. I put up shelves for my books, unpacked my reading lamp, placed a stack of new paper in the drawer of my work table, and surveyed my new home with contentment. The window was open. In the courtyard of an adjacent building I glimpsed a girl in a run-down conservatory modelling something in clay; she had a cigarette in her mouth and the radio turned up full blast. Pigeons swooped around the bell tower. Trams jangled past in the street.