SHE SPENDS THE best part of Friday morning rewriting that hateful letter to Walter and Lily – with various expurgations of passages she’d scrawled the previous night, after a bottle of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo and some Calvados – and pausing every so often to picture life at the office, enviously almost. Her first twinge of regret at not being back at work.
Fridays are the best days at Eric Krüger’s – lazy, chatty and sweet. Lazy and chatty because everyone’s there: Angelina, Handsome Henry and Martin, their salesman. Martin is always keen to help with anything as long as he can talk about his ‘week on the road’, especially the male staff at his favourite motorway restaurants and hotel bars (though he never mentions the jewellers and goldsmiths, Celia has noticed, not even famous Herr Q in Zurich. At fifty, Martin studiously avoids mixing business with pleasure, it appears). And Fridays are sweet. Not just for their delicious proximity to the weekend ahead, but for the more immediate gratification provided by the cartons of meringues, cream cakes and fresh fruit tartlets which Eric never fails to order – ‘as a little treat’ – from the Confiserie three doors up.
Still, the office will have to wait. She needs more time to sort out her mother’s possessions.
At midday, the house her own again for the short hour and a quarter of the decorators’ lunch break, Celia clatters about in the kitchen, chopping an onion and peeling some boiled potatoes for a Rösti. The noise from the side street has died down; the last of the employees at the electronics plant must have driven and biked off, or hurried past in their boots, winter coats, gloves, scarves and hats towards the bus stop. Deli-Doris, the young shop assistant and dedicated cyclist at Bänninger’s, the delicatessen on the corner, had told Celia how the plant’s management had introduced a ‘green programme’ that subsidised car-sharing, bus passes and the use of bicycles among the workforce. Celia had smiled and nodded, as required, and wrily thought of the large tax rebates promised, by the cantonal government to businesses which adopted environmentally friendly policies.
She’s just begun to grate the potatoes into a bowl when the growling starts, far down the main street out of town: a low knocking and thumping and booming, swelling steadily, inexorably, until it becomes a deafening racket of crashings and clashings as the caterpillar tracks roll nearer like thunder made metal, to encroach on the buildings, shaking their foundations, reverberating even in the ice-toughened earth.
Celia stands petrified. A half-grated potato disintegrates in her hand.
Not that the column of tanks particularly surprises her. Anders, with its ancient castle complex on the mound, has always been a garrison town, a centre for the country’s artillery; and Walter had been a tank driver in the army. But for a moment she’s had a vision of everything around her falling apart.
Then she dashes off, potato and all, into the dustsheeted lounge, straight up to the window. The tanks are still rolling by, back from yet another military exercise. They’re monsters, beautiful terrifying monsters, practising to do violence. Compliant for the present, they return to their headquarters on the common, between the canal and the River Thur. Biding their time.
The floorboards are creaking, the glass panes juddering, close to shattering. Some of the putty is lying in thin grey worms on the sill. If the decorators hadn’t already re-papered the walls and ceiling and given the cornice and rosette a first lick of paint, the plaster dust would be clouding the room by now.
Celia feels the floor shift imperceptively under her feet. Her whole body is vibrating, her lips are in a tingle.
The tanks’ gun barrels have been lowered to an almost level position, like the strained necks of big cats scenting prey. Some of the soldiers are showing themselves in the open hatches of the turrets, revelling in the cold rush of air and their sense of power. Celia remembers Walter’s words, reported to her by Lily, that ‘there’s nothing more exhilarating than racing across rough terrain in a tank – nothing, except sex, perhaps.’
She watches the helmeted heads swivelling about like target seekers. Several of the men see her and wave. She hesitates before raising a hand in reply, sending bits of potato crumbling down on herself.
Later that day, after a long nap to soothe her battered nerves, Celia swings open her mother’s shiny walnut wardrobe. And it’s like a wave of snakes rearing up. Live snakes hurling themselves at her chest, tails rattling against the inside of the door, vicious and unforgiving. She flinches away covering her eyes. But there’s only a faint flapping noise now so she lowers her arms. Blinks. Then bursts into laughter that ripples way beyond her, into the past and the future, and seems to make the waxplant rustle in its corner.
She reaches out and yanks the belts off the rail in a quick succession of slaps, flinging them on to the bed where they straddle each other messily: plain-cloth and patterned-cloth belts, a few cracked and cloud-ringed patent leather ones, all of them bent double as if from constant stomach ache, their colours pale and sickly, drained-looking, down to the very buckles even whose metal is hidden under layers of material, bony to the touch.
Staring at the straggly heap on the coverlet, Celia recalls her mother as she used to be, slim and vain, and how she’d hold her breath for a whole minute if necessary, so the fastener could be forced into the very last hole. In winter the corsets helped; several of the belts were too loose and Walter, the ‘man of the house’, had to punch additional holes into them. Summer with its flesh-bloating simmering heat caused the past-her-bloom beauty no end of twisting and pulling. And violating. Though Celia wasn’t aware of that, not really. Not until a certain Sunday in August a lifetime ago.
The sun had been fierce that day, even at nearly five o’clock. The air nuzzled and clung to her skin like a hot damp furriness. Heat was bubbling up from the street surfaces and pavements, ready to tar her bare feet. She and her mother were walking home from Anders Station – no bus service in those days.
They’d had lunch at Uncle Godfrey’s trout farm three stops out of town. Walter had stayed on, eager to lend a hand with stripping the fish of their spawn. Encouraged by their uncle, he’d taken to spending most of his free Wednesday afternoons and weekends there, and was paid a little pocket money because he was ‘such an excellent assistant’. But then Uncle was Walter’s godfather, and a bachelor at that.
‘A boy his age needs the company of a man,’ Celia’s mother would say to her, repeating the words over and over, like a mantra. Maybe to convince herself and feel less bereft.
The barriers were down at the level crossing. As her mother proceeded down the pedestrian underpass, Celia loitered by the keeper’s hut in the blinding sunlight, waiting for the fast train from Zurich to come hurtling round the corner in all its twelve-carriage glory, brakes screaming, the slipstream playing havoc with her hair. She’d have much preferred staying with Lily today. They could have cycled down to the common and chased the hares out of the vast maize field by the canal, then had a swim in the Thur, perhaps picked some buttercups and daisies for weaving into gold earrings, necklaces and bracelets.
The barriers had hardly lifted when Celia felt herself being grabbed by the shoulder. Her mother’s face was shining with perspiration, her eye make-up dissolving. ‘God, what a nuisance you are, Celia!’ she exclaimed and dragged her off down the shadowless empty street. Past the linden tree at the canal bridge where Celia wanted to float some twigs; past the kiosk that sold chilled soft drinks; and past the Frohsinn’s garden restaurant which was full of children having sundaes with their parents, laughing and clinking their spoons and twiddling the tiny paper parasols.
Yes, Uncle Godfrey used to dote on Walter. Referred to him as ‘the spitting image of dear lost Peter’ if he was in a sentimental enough mood. And instructed his elderly housekeeper, who was fond of children and loved cooking, to prepare Walter’s favourite dishes.
‘Poor Uncle,’ Celia whispers now, seizing the broad black patent-leather belt that’s hanging over the side of the bed, ‘how times have changed.’ She must go and visit him again. He had looked so miserable at the funeral. Clomping along on his crutches, with that unfriendly new home-help gripping his arm.
‘The woman’s the worst cook in the world, Celia dear. I couldn’t possibly ask you here for a meal. You should have seen today’s chicken fricassee: a mushy swamp of peas, mostly. And yesterday she fried my breakfast egg so long it crackled all the way down my throat.’
These were his most recent ‘horror stories’. Celia suspects he invents whole catalogues during the boredom of his aimless days, to liven up their Sunday telephone calls. He always chuckles with glee when she responds by ugh-ing and mygoodness-ing and generally clucking in disgust. Poor old Uncle. The fish farm had been his life. Especially after her father disappeared. And then Walter emigrated …
It suddenly occurs to her that Uncle Godfrey hasn’t once commented on Walter’s absence from the funeral. Hasn’t, in fact, mentioned Walter at all in their last few conversations. He must know about the row they had, that’s the only explanation. Walter is sure to have rung him, moaning and complaining. But not too much either because he wouldn’t want to jeopardise his share of Uncle’s property.
Celia sinks down on the bed. She almost wishes for another onslaught of those snakes. The length of black patent leather has come to rest across her knees.
Her mother had been wearing a belt rather like it that hot and cruel August Sunday. As soon as they got in the door of their flat she’d sighed, ‘Mm, this feels good,’ and unbuckled it. Then her fingers played a silent tune all the way down the front of her sleeveless pale-yellow dress, pressing and releasing buttons. The smooth fabric slid off as if by itself. And revealed a deep five- centimetre-wide red mark, wetly glistening, which seemed to split her body in two. Celia had stood rooted. Tentatively, she’d stretched out a forefinger and ran it along the edges, wincing at their knife-sharpness. ‘Mum,’ she said in a hushed voice, ‘have you got a skin belt now?’
In the coolness of the corridor her mother’s face opened up, the worry lines on her forehead and about her mouth filled out like the petals of a desert flower unfurling to the first glitterings of rain. Celia made her hands all narrow to fit into the groove of weeping flesh, then laid them one on either flank and began stroking, gently, to and fro. To and fro. Ever so gently. Gazing at her, still smiling, in just her bra and panties and high-heeled sandals, her mother took a step closer … and, moments later, started to shiver and shake, her skin covered in goose pimples. The smile had vanished, the petals were sealed dry and papery again, tightly into place.
Celia’s hands had been paralysed; she couldn’t lift, couldn’t tear them away from the glass-brittle belly underneath. As if they’d become part of her mother once more, bonded now not by blood and oxygen but by a filigree tracery of ice crystals.
‘Don’t be LIBIDINOUS!’
There wasn’t time to inquire about the new word which had exploded in such a tight fury of syllables. Her hands were ripped away – it felt like patches of skin and half her heart line were left behind. Then something swished. Her arm stung. A door crashed shut, and a key grated in a lock.
When her mother walked into the lounge a little later, she was wearing a sacklike dress and her house shoes with the surgical footbed. Her voice was steady, controlled even to the last quavers and quarter-tones: ‘Well, Celia, reading again? I wish I still had the patience for that, or the leisure. How about a bite of supper? Some rice salad à la créole, perhaps?’
Celia knew what that meant, of course. Yesterday’s leftovers chopped and mixed and bashed up together, with a fresh-fried egg thrown in for good measure, the yolk ruptured and bleeding thick drops all over. It must have been the sound of the phrase à la créole that appealed to her mother and the glibly exotic chaos it suggested, certainly not any experience of the real thing. Her mother had never travelled far from Anders: the Black Forest to the north, Lake Constance to the east, the beaches of Italy to the south, and Lake Geneva to the west – after her apprenticeship she’d briefly worked in Lausanne, brushing up on her French and developing a more refined taste for beauty and extravagance, – before being summoned back to start work at her father’s antiques shop, which to all accounts she had hated; hated so much she’d snatched at the first offer of marriage, no matter that the man, an archivist for the council, was ten years older than her and spent most of his spare time down caves.
In bed that night Celia overheard her mother on the phone: ‘Innocent, you’re saying?’ A pause. ‘My God, that’s rich coming from you!’ Another pause. ‘Don’t laugh. It isn’t funny, Margaret. Not funny at all.’ Then, after another much longer pause, the voice had dropped to a murmur and Celia, exhausted by the heat, had fallen uneasily asleep.
Celia’s palm hurts; she has been clutching the strip of black patent leather as if her life depended on it. Not much of a snake, is it? Dead and fangless. When she lets go, the belt slithers to the floor. But it doesn’t keep still. The end that’s not weighted down by the buckle has curled back on itself to where the wardrobe rail has left its pinch, and now it’s bobbing up and down. Up and down. Slowly. Obscenely almost.
She crosses her legs. From the lounge come faint frantic scrabblings. More like the patter of mice inside a food cupboard than Lehmann and his assistant rushing to get the ceiling finished.
Mice, yes …
Celia had been told that during her mother’s last night, she’d rung for the nurse on duty and said, fully conscious: ‘Oh, I’m glad it’s you, Thommy. I dreamt there was a mouse in my bed. But there isn’t, is there?’ She’d even managed a smile apparently, while dabbing at the blood from her nose with a paper tissue.
The nurse pretended to check under the covers and pillows, then he put the drinking straw between her lips so she could sip some tea, and said not to worry, he couldn’t find a thing – not a whisker. And anyway, didn’t she think mice were really very nice creatures, all soft and bright and lively?
How peaceful to die after hearing words like these, uttered by a hunky male nurse – Celia feels she herself couldn’t ask for more when her own time comes.
Thommy had been dressed in white, spotless white. Unlike the decorators. Celia idly wonders whether underneath their overalls Lehmann and his assistant wear belts at all. Indulging herself she imagines them in shirts, washed-out blue jeans and heavy silver-studded leather belts – the buckles loose, enticingly loose, pulled down a little by the weight of the metal, and almost level with her face. A bit more daring now, she gets the men to unstrap their belts, slip them from their hips and try on an even broader more substantial variety, the kind that has to be slung a lot lower, with the buckle right over the groin. She has just allowed herself to give Lehmann’s buckle an appreciative final tug, remarking, ‘Great build,’ when his voice shouts from the front door:
‘Okay, Frau Roth, we’re off! Have a nice weekend!’
Then the door closes, and she’s alone.
No, not alone, she corrects herself, not exactly. She’s free. And in her superior-secretary voice she declaims:
‘Celia, hey, you’re free! I am free. Free. Free. Free. Like in “trouble-free”, “duty-free”, “childfree”.’
Autosuggestion even works for dogs. Tell a mongrel he’s beautiful often enough, and he’ll start strutting around on bandy legs, pig’s tail and foxy old head held high. So, she decides, she’ll go out tonight. Not only go out, but go to the Métropole.
The Métropole. She knows she’ll have to return there some day, she can’t delay it forever, and now is as good as tomorrow, next week or next month. Another decision made, she says to herself with almost awe and a sense of deep heartaching relief. Life’s getting easier and easier.
Then, swiftly, unceremoniously, she stuffs the tangle of belts on the bed into one of the binbags she has brought for her mother’s clothes.
The Métropole, on the fringes of the pedestrian precinct between the castle and St Nikolaus’s Church, is the café where she and Lily used to hang out after school, watching and gossiping about the passers-by, boys especially, over an ice cream. It’s also where Celia first met bearded Franz, her scrawny brawny mountaineer, smitten with him even before she’d seen more than half his face and ponytail. He’d never been quite so smitten with her, she doesn’t think. On bad days it had felt like he preferred the lichen on rocks and boulders to her freshly bathed and perfumed skin. After his accident she’d avoided the Métropole. But that didn’t stop the nightmares. Not for years.
As she stoops to pick up the patent-leather belt at her feet, Celia’s eyes are drawn towards the open wardrobe. The clothes on their hangers are pushed up tight against each other, rubbing shoulders and sleeves in atrophied stillness. For a moment she scans the folds of lilac and light beige, of faded eggshell blue, parched yellow and watery green, of twill and tweed, peau de soie, crêpe de Chine, unbleached linen, Italian cotton. Then she shakes her head. No, she won’t be a caring citizen just yet – no Salvation Army for that lot. No salvation at all. They’ll have to go the way of the shoes, sorry m’loves.
She pictures them flying off into space, doing a lap of honour at the roundabout by the Co-op maybe, piece after tailored piece: the eggshell-blue skirt with the beige blouse hovering above it untidily, hastening to keep pace, the lilac trouser suit next, girdle aflutter, then the stubble-yellow dress with its buttons down the front stained a darker smellier shade, and all the dull-drab rest of them flitting behind like so many ghosts or angels in disguise, hard on the heels of those bunioned old suede shoes.
Celia laughs softly to herself – she’s just seen a pair of oyster-grey trousers overtake a pleated skirt – and strokes her satin-sheathed thighs till she feels the heat on her skin. How she’ll enjoy the screech of the hinges when she raises the container lid, the dead-earth thud-thud-thud as each bag drops into oblivion, and the metal clanking shut!