Monday 24th Fragment

This, she recalls, was Aunt Mariette’s workroom: a shallow room that runs the width of the house, painted in a soft, warm peach colour. Mariette used to have a big sewing machine in there, and a special ironing board with thickly upholstered attachments shaped like padded limbs or fat diving boards. Mariette came from that generation of women that made and adjusted their own clothes, and there stacks of fabric and boxes of dressmaker’s tools and materials. There were also big bags full of different coloured wools, and stacks of vinyl (shellac ?) records beside a boxy record player with a hinged lid. Under one of the windows, on a sparse desk that looked like it came from a military institution, there was a big metal typewriter with a heavy cloth cover.

When she turns on the light, Mathilde can see immediately that all traces of Aunt Mariette have been erased: the walls are now painted a bare white, and a waist-high worktop runs the entire length of the facing wall, overhung with shelves full of books and neatly-labelled boxes, and underslung with cupboards and drawers. There are more boxes stacked on the worktop, along with glass jars full of pens, some pads of paper, and framed black and white photographs, mainly of groups of men in military uniform; there are a few of Mariette, too, including a beautiful one where her face is haloed with dazzling light that bleeds towards the edge of the frame. Her teeth are white, she’s maybe twenty five, and so slim and beautiful that it makes Mathilde’s heart ache to look at it.

Uncle Jan’s tall stool sits dead centre in front of the worktop, where the pens and papers are concentrated. She pulls it away from the worktop and makes a closer examination of the books, papers and boxes. She’s surprised to find that the boxes are all marked with dates, and with single surnames or with lists of names. Many of the names have military ranks appended in brackets. Among the multicoloured and multistyled cardboard boxes there are some of more uniform type: pale green, with leather edging and riveted panels and lids; these are marked ‘War Office’, and they dominate the space with their weight and uniformity.

The swings open a couple of the cupboards under the worktop: there are plastic model kit boxes in there, and some made up models on diorama bases: wartime trucks and tanks, and soldiers in the drab camouflage uniforms of the Eastern war. The cupboards smell of the glue, paint and brush cleaner that Jan’s used in constructing the models. She lifts one of the dioramas gently out of the cupboard: a motorbike and sidecar at a muddy crossroads, the sidecar’s wheel embedded in the shiny goo of a puddle; the two crewman stand by stiffly, there arms and legs clumsily posed. Apart from the inanimate figures, though, Mathilde thinks that the model is pretty good: the ground and mud is well-rendered, with grass that looks like it’s made out of dried tealeaves painted browny green; and the motorbike is well constructed, with a neat paint job that suggests mud and wear and tear.

Her watch alarm beeps: eight o’clock. She need s to get back to the hospital, but she’s conscious that she’d like to stay here and explore these boxes and papers some more; not just as a curious amateur historian, but as a way of getting to know Uncle Jan some more, and of getting closer to him. She promises herself that she’ll come back again if she gets the chance, hopefully with Uncle Jan.

She checks all of the other rooms again, upstairs first, then downstairs, to make sure that everything is secure. The last room she looks in is the sitting room, with its heavy sofa, coffee tables and sideboard. It’s there that she finds the six white envelopes propped against the casing of the big valve radio. The ultra neat tidiness of the house starts to make even more sense.

16. Pieter’s House

Now that the light rain’s stopped and a lot of beer’s been drunk people are starting to spill out of the big kitchen and into the yard. All the house lights are switched on, and the stone-flagged yard is well-lit with warm yellow light. It could almost be a summer celebration party, especially now that the alcohol has taken most people from their initial states of numbness, or shock, or disbelief, to a more accepting, bemused, or forgetful place: for many, the inexorable logic of intoxication, familiarity, habit and shared history facilitates a rapid transition to laughter, profanity, horseplay and crude sexist and racist jokes – still the stock in trade of this cultural milieu.

Pieter sits at the head of the massive wooden table in the kitchen, a fluted half-litre glass in his big red fist. His wife [Angela?] makes endless rounds of sandwiches and boils kettle after kettle of water as waves of relatives and friends arrive to offer sympathy and support. The men hang around the kitchen for a while before drifting off to where the beer glasses congregate most densely, but the women tend to stay on, talking in quiet groups and looking solicitously at Jan’s immediate family. Everyone knows that Jan was the one who made good, who broke out of the family’s traditional straitjacket of expectation, but everyone respects Pieter just as strongly: he’s been the one who’s kept the family tradition of working the waterways, and who’s maintained the family home through another generation, perpetuating the legacy that’s been in the family since the 17th century; since that time, there’s always been a boat and a waterman in the family.

In fact, there are some people – family, even – who think that Jan somehow betrayed the family: after he came back from all that foreign travel and overseas service, he and Mariette had never had children, reducing the chances of an heir to carry on the waterman’s tradition. Pieter and [Angela] had had their two girls, but what was really needed was a boy. And Jan had sacrificed those chances for a career. Aunt Iris is particularly bitter about this, and gives vent to her feelings once her second brandy and crème de menthe loosens up her brain’s inhibition centres…

(c. 1040 words)