In the end, disaster nearly did befall the planned expedition, because Geert nearly did go away on business, and he talked quite seriously about Veerle skipping the trip to the Rijksmuseum to stay with Anneke.
Anneke came home from the hospital and Veerle had her first glimpse of her half-brother, a tiny wizened-looking face so muffled up in cap and blankets and the padding of his brand-new car seat that he looked like a small pinkish cameo lying on an overstuffed cushion. She waited to see whether she would feel a sudden rush of sisterly affection. Mostly she felt curiosity. She had lived through her entire childhood without a sibling, and now, just as she was checking out, here was her half-brother checking in. And then there was the fact that they had so very nearly not been in each other’s lives at all.
I wasn’t supposed to be here, in Ghent, in Geert’s house.
Perhaps Anneke sensed that Veerle’s feelings towards Adam, while friendly, were more curious than enthusiastic. At any rate, she flatly refused to be left with Veerle for company.
Veerle listened to Anneke shouting at Geert through the closed living-room door. Anneke was worn down by hormones and lack of sleep, the bedrock of her feelings breaking through the thin topsoil of convention. She didn’t bother to pretend that she was concerned about Veerle missing an educational opportunity, or that she regretted asking Geert to stay at home. She shouted at him that he had to stay, that she wasn’t being left with Veerle, who shouldn’t have been here anyway, who was in Adam’s room, and that, Verdomme, she had been looking forward to a couple of days with Geert and Adam without Veerle hanging around.
Veerle listened to this not because she liked eavesdropping but because she wanted to know whether Geert was going to cancel her school trip or not. She found that she did not care very much what Anneke said or thought about her, so long as she could get away. She wanted to stand at the top of the Gravensteen at midnight, with the chill night breeze stinging her face, and see the contours of the city laid out before her, a kingdom that belonged to her and a few others.
When Geert said, ‘All right, Anneke,’ his gruff voice weary and resigned, she could have cheered.
The Amsterdam trip was on a Thursday and Friday. All the previous week Veerle waited for Geert to say that the school secretary had telephoned, or perhaps the directeur himself, to discuss the fact that Veerle was missing an important cultural milestone in the syllabus. He never did. Nor did he offer to accompany Veerle to the school in the mornings, not even on the day when Veerle was supposedly departing for Holland. In truth, Geert was looking haggard and preoccupied. He still reminded Veerle a little of a bear, but no longer a bluff, slowmoving droll kind of bear; now he looked like a bear that has had a ring inserted into the tender part of its nose and been made to dance to the point of exhaustion. Broken nights, and days spent trying to catch up with work he had missed were taking their toll on her father.
Veerle packed a small rucksack and walked to school by herself. She stood at an upstairs front window and watched her classmates milling around the bus that was to take them to Amsterdam. Suki stood a little apart from the rest, leaning against the side of the bus with a bored expression and chewing gum. Once she glanced up at the school building, but if she spotted Veerle looking down she gave no sign of it.
After the bus had gone Veerle went to spend the rest of the day in quiet study along with two other students who had been unable to take the trip.
Tonight, she kept thinking. It was all she could do to stay in her seat, calmly leafing through her textbooks and making notes. She kept glancing at her watch, marking off the hours, the half-hours.
Twelve o’clock. In twelve hours I shall be locked inside the Gravensteen. Her heart raced at the thought of it. Or if we mess up, maybe we’ll both be at the police station trying to explain ourselves. She didn’t think that was going to happen – she hoped it wasn’t going to happen – but she wished it was six p.m. already. She wanted to be safely tucked away in whatever hideout Bram had in mind for them, listening to the staff locking the doors, the sound of iron keys jangling and heavy antiquated tumblers falling into place, footsteps retreating down stone stairs and fading into the distance.
When the final bell rang she was out of her chair with indecent haste, sweeping her books and pens up into her arms. She dumped everything in her locker and then she ran out of school, taking the stairs two at a time, the rucksack thumping on her back.
She’d arranged to meet Bram at Sint-Veerleplein. When she got there she couldn’t see him at first; it wasn’t until he came right up to her that she recognized him. He had put on a peaked cap that shaded the upper part of his face.
Smart, thought Veerle. Why didn’t I think of that?
By comparison, she felt naked and exposed.
Better hope no one gets suspicious, because I’ll be the one they remember.
‘Ready?’ Bram asked her. He seemed different somehow; Veerle realized that it was because he was not smiling at her as he normally did. There was a grim tension in his manner. He was just as keyed up as she was.
Bram nodded towards the front gate of the castle. ‘We’re just in time. There’s a tour group about to go in.’
He was right: when they got to the gate it was almost completely blocked by a group of perhaps twenty-five elderly Germans, who were listening impassively to something their tour guide was explaining to them. Veerle and Bram pushed their way carefully through the crowd and went into the glass-fronted ticket office. Bram had barely scooped up his change and the tickets from the desk when the tourists began to crowd into the office behind them.
Veerle saw the heads of both the ticket sellers turn towards the press of elderly tourists. One of them stood up and began to advise them that if they were in a tour group they should wait outside; their tour guide would buy the tickets. When this advice got no response he switched from Flemish to English. Meanwhile the tour guide herself was calling out something ineffectual from the back of the crush. Elderly men and women milled about in the enclosed space, their shoulders rubbing the glass, the air crackling with their voices.
Veerle and Bram walked out of the other door into the castle precinct.
‘Perfect,’ said Bram under his breath.
Veerle said nothing. She was too busy looking around. Bram had been right when he told her that nobody broke into the Gravensteen. From the outside it presented an impregnable mass of towering walls and turrets. Here, inside, there were open spaces and even grass, but the defences of the castle were constructed on such an enormous scale that she felt like a mouse running along a skirting board. To their left was a mighty wall studded with lookout points, as though anyone might have been able to cross the moat and assail the walls. To their right the imposing grey bulk of the keep loomed above them, its crenulated corner turrets like bunched knuckles thrusting brutally into the autumn sky. Veerle gazed up at it, her hand shielding her eyes. She was impressed, and not entirely pleasantly. She thought that spending the night up there would be like spending it on the exposed face of a mountain. Like ascending a mountain, it required commitment; it was very clear that once the main gate was locked for the night, there was no getting out until it was unlocked the following morning, no matter what happened. They would be sealed inside as effectively as if the gate were the steel door of a bank vault, with a timer set to open it in sixteen hours’ time.
Assuming we don’t get caught before they close up, she reminded herself.
Bram took her hand and began to pull her towards a doorway at the bottom of the keep. Veerle glanced back and saw that elderly German tourists were starting to spill out of the glass-fronted ticket office, like a swarm of wasps crawling from their nest. Then she and Bram passed through the doorway and the Gravensteen swallowed them up.