HIS LATTE WAS tepid when it arrived, grease marbling on its surface; but Louis wasn’t going to make a fuss.
When the phone trilled he was standing by the penthouse window looking down on Galway Bay, rolling the wiry tassels of his moustache between thumb and forefinger. His face felt tight and sore, as though exposed too long to the elements. Lola wanted to walk on the beach today, and his skin had already registered the drudgery of it – the heavy sand; the salt-sharpened wind; the scribbles of crusty bladderwrack before the tide. And she would want to drink in a typical Irish pub. It was all such a waste of time, barely worth the pleasure of her unzippable pencil skirts and long, callow throat.
‘Your phone,’ said Lola.
She laid her fruit salad in a nest of bedsheets and unfolded her legs, curling her tongue over a bloated grape as she reached towards the bedside table. She brought the phone to him and rubbed his back too softly, pressed her lips to his shoulder. The girl was as clingy after sex as he was squeamish.
Louis held the phone to his ear and took a quiet mouthful of the latte. He always let the caller speak first. It was a technique he had learned at a seminar once. It was called ‘Keeping the Reins’.
‘Louis,’ said his sister. He pinched the milk scum from his moustache and stepped away from Lola, lowering his head. Mammy, he thought, and in an instant he could see his mother’s cheeks fall and flush with shame for him, the disappointment in her voice, Are you not ashamed?
‘Bertha.’
‘How are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘You haven’t seen the paper then.’
*
It was a Sunday. Dine woke late to find eight missed calls on her phone. Sitting up in bed, her head knocking for caffeine, she rang back.
‘Bomama did you call me?’
‘Dine,’ said her grandmother. ‘Darling. When can you come?’
Her grandmother was never good on the phone. Her calls were generally just a summons, or a transfer of information, and she shouted down the receiver as though to cross the great distance between them. Before her husband’s final stroke, she often made calls like this, with no greeting, just ‘When can you come?’ For there were days when he was ‘very down’, and ‘it would do him good to see you.’ But by now Dine’s grandfather was two years dead.
‘Are you alright Bomama?’
‘Just come darling will you please? When can you come?’
‘I’m getting dressed now. I’ll get the next bus.’
‘Take a taxi.’ Her accent was agitated, clipping her English into a succession of hard, quick taps; tickataxi.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘They are saying things about Bompa. Disgusting things.’
*
They should have known him. If they could have known him they would be ashamed to say these disgusting things about her husband.
Where did they get that photo? Well he was handsome there: his lovely mouth with the lower lip that brimmed to a cliff before the swoop of his chin; his fine neck; his freshly razored jaw. She knew what his skin must have smelled like when that photo was taken – sandalwood shaving soap spiced with morning perspiration, scent of his blood running close beneath. Where did they get that photo of her beautiful husband, and what did they think they were proving, the newspaper men, by overlaying the picture with a grey swastika? ‘Shadow from the past,’ said the headline, and the swastika was cast clumsily over her husband’s face. They would fool no one with a trick like that.
She had been there – this past they thought they could assemble from murmurs and frigid scraps. They could ask her how it was. She could tell them how it was, if they wanted to know.
In school she sat beside a friendly girl called Livina, who holidayed in Germany every break and made fat whirling swastikas all over her copy book. To save water, Livina used a powder that her mother bought in Germany, sprinkled it on her feet, patted it under her arms and worked it through her hair. ‘As effective as a good scrub,’ she claimed, but she smelled like flour and like bone broth.
They were all Flemish girls in her class, and most had families in the Legion. Grietje remembered the thrill of the Easter play. They went to the school that evening to dress. The nuns had kept the fire in, and the girls huddled at the back of the class, shoulders and hips prickling with cold, tang of warming wool and unwashed feet, and Livina offering around her German powder.
As a child, Grietje was stout with dark brows that met in the middle, and it must have been for comic effect that they made her the devil. Her aunt loaned them the black cape and Sister Thérèse fashioned a headband with squat red horns. She fixed the horns onto Grietje’s head, rubbed coal into her brows and pinched her cheek. ‘A devil with dimples,’ she said. Dressed as angels and lambs, and Grietje as Satan, the girls walked two by two, their amber lanterns brushing slow smudges into the dark. What did they sing as they made their way to the town hall? A church song or something for the Legion? What she remembered was linking arms and singing at the top of her lungs, frost grazing the back of her throat raw.
Like most Flemish children, Grietje was raised Catholic. As a girl she gazed at a white-faced Christ and tried to warm to him, but by the time she put the first baby Louis in the ground she had seen enough of life to mistrust the tender embrace awaiting him. This first child was still a stranger, hardly pulled from her own flesh, when he ended. It was a thing she could choose to bear, like losing a limb. But the second Louis lasted longer. He had already weaned to words and steps, and had nine teeth when he died. And though the third came out here in Ireland, piglet-backed, red-faced as the natives with thin, dangling legs that would carry him up through the years, this solace did nothing to renew for her any meaning beyond the needs of this world.
Until her husband Theo died, the afterlife had seemed to Grietje a horrifying prospect – a world overpopulated with clamouring dead. It was for that reason that she wanted them both cremated – no flesh through which a soul might inch back to sensation, no worms or gases or facial hair growing like grass in the rotting muck that time would make of them. But now she felt him sometimes. He could be beside her, in the chair that sloped to the shape of his sore back, or at her shoulder while she knitted a sampler. Sometimes he was there in the morning, for bed was the worst part – sleeping alone, only her own heat to draw from, no Theo folding his knees up under hers; and waking alone, no breath in her hair, no feet to help into socks. She had said it to her granddaughter Dine – ‘Am I getting mad, Dineke? I feel him like he is just here. I can almost hear his voice.’ But Dine had just kissed her brow, and then her hand. She had smiled in that sweet, bewildered way that childless women smile at babies.
Theo had lovely feet – long, spare toes lined up in perfect gradients, silky light skin, soles plush like puppy paws.
*
Grietje left the newspaper spread big on the kitchen table and moved to her armchair to wait for them to come – her children and her grandchildren. One way or another they had all been summoned.
Louis’s wife had said he was away for the weekend, ‘golfing or something’. She had said it in a stringy voice that let Grietje know what she meant. Well, Bertha would track him down.
Where did they get him from? Her third Louis – round-backed and scald-pink when he came out, indignant squeal from him, then soft suckling as he worked fiercely on his own fist. Grietje had lifted up on her elbows, peered over the Sister’s shoulder and she saw the shape of the child and she heard the sound of it and she knew that this time she could not dredge up enough. That was in the clean Coombe hospital where women laboured quietly in close rows of beds, smoked and gossiped between contractions. By the time that happened Grietje was nearly twenty-three. Her heart had shifted and tightened. She held the baby to her skin and tried to believe in him, but her milk turned to pebbles. A kind Sister said she understood, told her to mix an egg yolk with donkey’s milk, gave her a glass bottle to take home, and an address for a donkey keeper, and that’s how Grietje fed this Louis. He was what they called a ‘long baby’. His legs would always be skinny, but he lived, and so did the fat little girls that came after him.
That Sister wrote ‘Liam’ on the birth certificate, instead of ‘Louis’. Theo had to sort it out afterwards. It was a terrible mess, but the Sister meant to be kind, ‘For the child’s sake, love,’ she said. ‘You don’t want him going through life foreign.’
When Louis was four there was a fire that ate their house to a husk without even licking her children. That was because she bundled all three of them into a buggy, threw a wet blanket over it and pushed it through the door. That was a clever thing to do, but there was also a kind of miracle to the four unblemished corners of the blanket. Afterwards on the scorched lawn an itinerant woman in a white-and-blue shawl said, ‘Your troubles are over now.’ Theo thought Grietje was tootle-loot when she told him about that woman. She didn’t tell him that she thought she recognized her way of peering up from her cowl like something hunted.
*
Grietje sat with each hand cupping an armrest, her back straight. Into the silence she said, ‘Theo,’ and the sound embarrassed her but she said it again, ‘Theo. Pouske. Theo.’
Theo would have known what to do – such sharp lines he could draw up with words, building them easily into clean logic. But her mind pulled up only a wild, mute grief. The face of a mime she had seen once on Grafton Street – a painted face, all oily white except the eyebrows, and an expression of outrage so comic and sorry it made her eyes sting.
She remembered the journalist, Tiernach, because it was an unusual name and one she didn’t like, and because they had talked so much about him after he had come to the house. She was not tootle-loot yet, for she remembered his face across twenty years, and she had only met him once. He was young and sure of himself, with a triangular little head and pale, fidgety eyes and a smoothness of brow she had only seen on zealots of one kind or another – Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Brothers, Livina DeSmedt – a sloped brow polished like a shield against uncertainty, salmon scalp clashing under yellow-orange hair.
It was a Wednesday morning when Theo received him. It had been agreed with the editor – the boy could write what he liked, so long as Theo had a right to a written reply. He asked Louis to be there – Louis who was sullenly beginning to learn the ropes. It was a sensitive time for Theo, passing the business on to his son like that, and he could be bossy. Theo sat behind his desk and the journalist on the other side of it, a big flat tape-recorder whirring between them. Louis was given an armchair off at the side. She could remember her son’s face lost beneath all that hair, nose perched like an inquisitive bird on his moustache. He had winced when the journalist sneered at the tea she brought in on a tray with buttered biscuits.
‘Tea with tea biscuits,’ the journalist said. ‘Do you Belgians always take things so literally?’
After the Tiernach fellow had left, Theo’s neck stretched tall with anger. ‘Where are Vincent’s standards,’ he said, his head jerking as he spoke, ‘sending me an ignorant pestkope like this? I had to explain him everything – he didn’t know a thing about the Flemish – and he accuses me of all kinds! Got verdomme! The boy doesn’t know where Flanders is on the map. He thought the Flemish Legion was started by the SS. Started by the SS! Idioot. Idioot. Idioot! He has not even done the smallest research. After all we worked for, all we have given this country, to have some ignorant pestkope come in like this...’
Louis left with hardly a word. ‘Useless boy,’ Theo had muttered, ‘brainless little cockerel, sitting there with his furry lip saying nothing. Where did we get him from?’
She and Theo talked into the night and in the morning she had typed up Theo’s letter to the editor: ‘Dear Mr Bell, I do not know my blood type – do you know why? I have no letters tattooed beneath my left arm, nor my right arm either. You are very welcome to check me over...’ Vincent Bell had pulled the article. He had phoned Theo: ‘I appreciate,’ he said, ‘that in his over-enthusiasm, our young journalist may have jumped to unfounded conclusions. He is not a historian, you see. He does not know the ins and outs perhaps. In any case I do not deem it responsible to publish material that may be slanderous. Let us forget it, Theo. No hard feelings.’
‘May be slanderous, Vincent?’ – Theo’s voice travelled all the way down the hallway. From the kitchen she could hear him – ‘May be? I will come to your office right now. I will raise my arms above my head and you can look me over and tell me if you see my blood type written there for that is what the SS did, Vincent, or must I be tattooed as a victim now to prove my innocence?’
Vincent and Theo had patched things up. But Vincent Bell was dead now, and so was her Theo, his voice strangled by the stroke and burned to ash; now the Tiernach fellow could say what he liked.
Schijterd.
Her Theo could never suffer fools or cowards and he was never a hypocrite.
He never lied, even when it was convenient, but Grietje did. Grietje could tell white lies and darker ones too. At the beginning, when they came here and had very little, she could say that she had eaten when she had not; she could lose an early pregnancy and call it a spot of women’s trouble. Once she had buried a miscarriage at the back of the garden. She had taken the tea towel from around it so that it would crumble quickly into earth. It had a wizened, long head and frog legs and a tight little penis like a pea shoot. Theo had never known how she could fib. More than a fib was the betrayal about the letter – a lie she still squirmed beneath, but one she knew, all the same, to be a right thing. He was very down when he wrote that letter to Louis. Her poor Louisje. Even if Theo meant what he said, he would not have written such things if it were not for the stroke that was storming his brain, hooking his lip up, stiffening his neck and sending the anger crackling out of him.
She didn’t open the letter immediately – the first lie was the nod she gave when he asked had she posted it. She held her breath as she nodded, for the letter was stashed in the lining of her handbag. The second betrayal happened a few days later, after his final stroke. The envelope was sealed with Theo’s trusting tongue, but she could not destroy it without reading it first. There were no surprises in the ugly things written there. He was ashamed of his son, he said – Louis had no integrity, he reduced their life’s work to profit margins, he went with the herd in everything, had no conscience of his own, he was to be cut out of the will... It was true that the pretty teas and massage oils that the firm produced now were not of Theo’s standards, but how could they be? Louis could give no more than himself.
Her son had always been a strange child, awkward with people, clumsy with words, given to sickening silences and cold-faced tears. It was a misfortune that Grietje attributed, sometimes, to her petrified breasts and the way that for many weeks after the birth she found she had difficulty looking at the baby’s narrow red face. As he grew his shyness hardened to look like arrogance, so that few people ever saw her Louis for who he was.
She had dropped the letter into the fire, so she would not have to think on those things again.
She could remember walking Louis home from school one afternoon. He was clodhopping beside her with his frizzing dark hair and those skinny legs – she knitted him thick, long cotton socks, trying to bulk him up beneath his clothes – it was raining and he was under the umbrella with her, and then he was gone. When she looked back she saw him crouching by a bush. He put his fingers to his lips as she approached, and nodded to a little robin only a foot away, beneath a shelter of leaves. His face then – black, close-set eyes and that queer upper lip; too long and peaked as though it hurt, quivering with awe at the speechless world; the brazenness of the bird, the smell of rain calling worms up from the earth, and his own silence. After a pause she called to him and he began to run, his limbs clattering like a puppet’s. All the way home she was warm with the rush of relief, and she said it to Theo that evening, ‘There is something in Louis you know. There is something in that boy that people don’t often see.’
Her son liked freesias – their scent, and the way each stalk trickled down from a simple bloom to pearly buds. They came from Africa, he told her, and magpies came from India. When he was studying for his finals – poor boy, cramming so painfully on a subject he was not made for; he would have been happier flying an airplane or fiddling with car engines – she would wait until he went downstairs for elevenses, and then she would arrange bouquets of white freesias in his room, angle a bowl of seedless green grapes beside his desklamp. His smile then, a secret smile that made his moustache fan out. ‘Thank you Mammy.’
*
When the phone rang, Grietje cursed, ‘Got verdomme,’ because the sound startled her and because, although they had done a wonderful job with the hip replacement, she had pain again – pain standing up from her chair. In any case she didn’t like to discuss things on the telephone. ‘Just come,’ she had told Dine. ‘Just come,’ she had said to Bertha, who hung wailing at the other end of the phone, ‘Mammy. How dare they print a picture of my daddy like that.’
‘Just come,’ Grietje had said, ‘and telephone to Louisje too, will you please? He is off somewhere.’
‘Mammy...’
‘Just telephone to Louis, please Bertha. And pull yourself together darling.’
Yes, it must be Bertha again, calling from her car that way that made her voice sound all alone down the bottom of a well. Before lifting the receiver Grietje settled a kitchen chair up beside the phone. She braced herself for more tears. Bertha would always pull on her like this, she could not be trusted to release Grietje into old age.
‘Yah.’
‘Nazi bitch,’ said the voice – not somebody’s real voice, someone speaking in a lower, rougher voice than their own – ‘Rot in hell with your Nazi husband.’
‘Oh!’ Grietje let a whoop that could, in other circumstances have been mistaken for joyous surprise.
She left the receiver springing at the end of the cord while she checked the back door and the front door and set the house alarm. Then she sat in her chair to wait for them to come, her children and her grandchildren. She felt her pulse too quick and hard for her veins, dredging too much excitement from a stock of weary hurt. She thought, I am an old woman now. She would not weep, not for some cowardly schitjerd, but she covered her face and spoke into her hands, ‘Theo.’ Death was soon and it was a time for closing, not for opening, and explaining, and assembling and reckoning with the world for all the fragments that time tossed up.
*
Her granddaughter Dine came first, tapping timidly on the window, her skull pushing blue under colourless skin. ‘Poor Dineke,’ whispered Grietje, kissing her, for Dine was neglected-looking, hair uncombed and the pouches beneath her eyes tinged with kohl.
‘I am sorry to worry you, Dineke.’
‘Let’s get you some coffee, Bomama,’ said Dine. ‘Coffee. Let’s have some coffee and I’ll butter some biscuits.’
Grietje felt brave with her grandchild there, for Dine had Theo’s thick, shapely lips and his seriousness... but then Dine showed her another paper. ‘What Brews Beneath?’ demanded the headline – ‘The Belgian herbalist who founded Ireland’s leading natural remedy brand may have been a member of the SS...’ It was not the headline that startled her, but the picture beneath it – it was a building she had not seen in over sixty years – that building in Brussels that would make you cross the street and take the long way around, because of the cold that came off it, and the terrible things that might have happened there, and the secret Jewess upstairs of their flat, who disappeared so silently that by the time Grietje noticed she could not remember the last time she had heard her slip out by the basement door. To think on her made Grietje’s throat block, a drowning feeling in her breath.
There was a documentary that her grandchildren watched and wept at one evening in the living room, and when Grietje said, ‘Could it be true, such disgusting things? Don’t you think they exaggerate?’ they snapped at her and were ashamed of her and said yes and everyone knew it Bomama, you must have known it, and she said she never saw such things, not in Brussels, but she did know that there were small children in factories all day making the clothes that they buy cheap and negroes in slavery for their diamond rings. ‘You know that don’t you?’ she said, ‘but also you don’t know.’ And then even little Dine was ashamed of her and went to vomit in the bathroom. But that was many years ago now.
That upstairs ghost was a quiet old woman all alone, her head always cowled and dipped, a grief-stricken face and no story and never even a bonjour. On the run, is what they thought, and so they didn’t speak of her, even amongst themselves. Not until after, and even then – well, where was the point in going over it?
Was she forgetting something now, now that she was old? Sometimes now, in the night, light silvered like rips in the dark, pelvic curves moving slow, slow – is that a man? Not a man nor a woman. Those are other shapes they plant now into her dark. Those are nightmare shapes and why do they pull her into their nightmares like this? Railway tracks and everybody walking and sorry sorry, but the sorry feeling can come to anyone for there is so much in the world to be sorry for. The sorry feeling does not mean it was she who saw or she who was there on the bone-slivering nights they show now on the television. Some people want angels and all that but all Grietje longs to know is a black night at the end.
They were for a free Flanders, but not for the ugly whispered things. And though they had once been in sympathy with the Germans – though they did not resist when their houses were occupied, though they were obedient and polite with the soldiers – on her parents’ street everyone left their back doors unlocked at night, soup and bread on the table, warm blankets ready by the stove and a basin with soap and washcloths. Would they have done it if the first Louis was still alive? That was a thing she sometimes wondered. The difference between sacrifice and suicide, Grietje knew, all lay with the right witness. She could have been more curious about that building, and about the whispered things, but Grietje did not think so much of herself to believe her curiosity could veer the course of history.
‘They are saying Bompa worked there, Bomama. Do you know anything about that building?’
Grietje was cold from remembering that building and the whispered things, and the way it could suck the voice and the heat from you just by standing there so tall above the pavement. She laughed to push out the insult, but the anger made it come out wrong; a snicker.
‘Why are they inventing? You have no idea...’ she said, ‘what that building was. We none of us could bear to walk that street, for the shadow of that building...’
Grietje heard her own voice tremble and trip. Was Dine not ashamed to ask such things, she who was born so far from it all? She who once loved to sit on Theo’s belly with her bottle, head nestled back in Theo’s neck and her legs crossed at the ankles? As a little one Dine brought her grandfather wounded things – snails with cracked shells, earthbound birds – as though he could heal all. There was a time she wrote him poems about endangered species and acid rain. Theo had kept them in a blue folder.
‘What about the Flemish Legion, Bomama? That’s what they say... that the Legion joined with the SS and that Bompa was in the Legion and that’s the connection, you see, that they are making,’
‘Connection, Dine? The connection?’
‘Well... or the leap. The leap they are making. They think that means he worked there...’
‘Ha! Suddenly the communists were a fine people?’
‘The communists? No, that’s—’
‘They have the time of things wrong. With the Legion he was on the Eastern Front,’ she said, ‘against communism. That was much before occupation – though then, you know, we were in sympathy with the Germans then. The communists wanted to take over the world and there were things that came out about them too you know, you know what gulags are, don’t you? You don’t blame the communists for that, do you? You think they were so much better than the Germans?’
‘No Bomama, I’m not saying that. No one is saying that...’
‘It was only right to fight against Russia, doesn’t matter with who – the things that were happening. You know about it, Dine, Bompa must have told you? And when they hear he fought the communists they say he was a Jew killer? You think the communists spared Jews?’
‘Don’t say “Jew killer”, Bomama. If you are talking about this, please don’t say that. It might sound – people might take it the wrong way.’
Grietje wrapped her fingers tight over each armrest and looked at her granddaughter. Dine had the moon-bright skin of an early baby, and it seemed to glisten now, slicked over her temples like something less solid.
For this she had carried herself away from Belgium, her hair bleached lurid rust to match the passport, the third Louis pushing her old stretch marks fresh, so that all the flesh she sent out after that would be new, all her children and her grandchildren. She had named him for his lost brothers, but she never spoke her mother tongue to the new Louis. She wanted no way back to Belgium, the rotten gendarmes or the girlish nonsense of nationalism.
She could have slapped Dine, she could have torn up the paper. Instead she nodded and clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth.
‘Yah. Don’t say this Bomama, and don’t say that Bomama, but who was there, Dineke – you or me? I can say how it was. I hide nothing and I tell how it was and they can check it and check it and make their stories but it was me who was there, not this little schijterd with his inventions and not you my darling! Oh after the war you could not speak. No one had an opinion on anything – how is it possible? No one saying a word about anything. And we mixed together in the evenings – a great big Russian with bullet wounds in his back and shoulder, and when he drank he would open his shirt and show us and tell such stories you wouldn’t believe; and a woman with the painted red lips of a gypsy and no one giving their real name... All the Russians were called Richard and every word we spoke was salted. They locked me up, you know. They locked me up for three months – threw me in a van with abortionists and all sorts – disgusting women – and my sister too, because the postman said we had a picture of Hitler over the piano – of all the stupid things. That was the kind of stupidity and spite that was happening. For three months I waited to hear what I was accused of – and it was that Walloon postman, saying I had a picture, framed, over the piano...’
Her granddaughter drank coffee and let her speak, squinting sometimes as though trying to make her out from a distance. Such a terrible glow from her skin.
‘It was not for fun that your Bompa fought on the Eastern Front. Theo who could not see a rabbit shot in the field, you think it was for fun or for murder he went to the front? There is no shame in it and he never lied about it. He was there two weeks. It made him so sick he passed blood and they let him home for stomach ulcers and is it for that they say these disgusting things? I will answer. They said he could reply and then they wait until he is gone to spit at us. Well I will make my reply for them.’
‘Okay, we’ll give an answer. Let me write it down, Bomama... or maybe we should get a journalist to come. What do you think? To hear your reply? Will I get someone to come, Bomama, and write an article with your side?’
‘Would you? Yes. Yes, that is what you do, Dine. Do that will you please?’
She would tell them how it was, but how could she begin? They wanted a story that ran glossy and clean as ribbon like their own, not the convoluted knots of sixty years ago.
It was like when she first arrived here, nodding and frowning to facial cues, unable to shape her mouth to the new language, saying only things she had the words for because what she meant would take so many unknown sounds.
‘You know, don’t you, what they did to us? The Walloons? You know when our baby boy was sick, how the gendarmes laughed at us? They laughed at him burning up in my arms, the eyes nearly popping with pain, his arms slapping out, and they would not allow us to call the hospital, they laughed and said, “No loss, we do not want more Flemish muzzles yapping at our heels...”’
‘Don’t think about that now, Bomama.’ Dine’s face seemed to shrink to the frame. She smiled a sore smile, her Irish-blue eyes edging shame. Such terrible white skin, like Theo’s sister. ‘Don’t talk about the Walloons, Bomama, if they interview you, or the evil Russians!’
‘Dine, you are pale darling,’ said Grietje. ‘I hope you are getting enough sleep.’
And was it the ream of morning light that beaded along the bones of her face, but Grietje thought she saw an unhappy laugh ripple over the big, sad lips of her frowning grandchild.
*
When the bell rang, Dine gave her grandmother a kiss for reassurance, and left the room, closing the door quietly behind her. The front door of her grandmother’s house had a rectangular hatch set at eye level. It opened onto a window of diamond-patterned bars. As children, Dine and her cousins used to stand on chairs either side of the door, opening and closing the hatch, exchanging secrets and coded notes through the diamonds. Like a church, or a hospice, the house had fixed her into tiptoeing slowness, and she almost put her finger to her lips as she unlatched the little hatch. Through the bars she saw Billy standing on the doorstep, jigging in the bright cold. There were patches of dust-coloured hair daubed across his face and neck. Billy was a stocky man, all mild angles, wobbly throat, kind grey eyes and clean, blunt fingers. He wore his knapsack secure over both shoulders, each hand clinging tight to a strap.
‘Hey,’ Dine whispered, ‘hang on till I get the alarm.’
He nodded. He was trying to look solemn, she could see, but the excitement twitched in his cheeks. Billy’s father had once been a very successful journalist. At university Billy was president of the History Society, editor of the college paper, a leading member of the LGBT society, a great debater, but since graduating he’d had only a few articles published – dense, essayish things that, he complained, had pivotal chunks clumsily cut at the last minute. This could be a proper story for him.
She opened the door only enough to admit him.
‘It’s warm in here,’ said Billy. He gave Dine a brief hug before tugging off his scarf.
She nodded. ‘I like the beard. When did that happen?’
‘Oh...’ he rubbed a palm back and forth across his jaw, ‘it’s not quite there yet. I – Paul likes it so... But how are you doing, with all this? Disgusting, isn’t it? I would have thought the paper still had some standards. Things like this have their own momentum, it only takes one irresponsible journalist...’
Dine shrugged. ‘She’s upset, Billy,’ she said, ‘and shocked. Just see what she wants to say, that’s all. Don’t push for a story, okay?’
‘Can I see this right-to-reply letter? They will only publish if we have that...’
‘It’s not here, but we have it. I’ll have it by tomorrow...’
She led him into the kitchen where the fire’s heat swelled viciously and blocks of yellow sunlight cut the tablecloth. As Dine entered she saw a private frown pass over her grandmother’s face. Her eyes moved from Dine to Billy, and she touched her hair briefly, smoothed a hurried finger sternly along each eyebrow. A painful impulse kicked in Dine – she wanted to wrap herself over her grandmother.
‘This is Billy, Bomama,’ she said, ‘he’s going to hear your side of things.’
‘Yah.’ Bomama’s lips closed small, her cheeks tightened. ‘Hallo,’ she said. She pushed herself to her feet, one palm flat on the table as she leaned to shake Billy’s hand. Dine’s grandmother had big, bony hands. The pads of her fingers tapered flat to the strong curve of her nails.
‘Sit down, Billy,’ said Dine. ‘Tea or coffee?’
‘Oh tea please, if you have it.’
‘Dineke darling, get me my hand cream will you please? It’s in my handbag.’
Dine flicked the kettle to boil and rummaged in her grandmother’s handbag, ‘Sit down, Billy,’ she said.
Billy rested his bag on a chair and unzipped it. ‘Mrs Tack, do you mind if I record this?’ He removed a silver contraption the size of a small wallet.
‘Oh. Well. Dineke, what do you think darling?’
‘It’s up to you, Bomama. It’s handy for Billy, so that he can remember exactly what you say.’
‘Yes okay. Whatever you think.’
‘Don’t worry, Bomama. Billy is here to help. Two sugars, Billy?’
‘Just one now,’ he said, ‘I’m trying to cut down...’ Then he turned to her grandmother. ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Tack. I’ll explain what you tell me. I’m a historian really – my thesis was on twentieth-century independence movements... Just to say, you know, I am aware of the complexity of these things. My father says Tiernach Mac Mahon is a notorious ignoramus... He says his name has no place on a broadsheet...’
Dine set Billy’s tea in front of him, and sat beside her grandmother. ‘Drink your coffee, Bomama,’ she said, kissing the large hand which scrunched her fingers in an oily grip of rose-scented hand cream, leaving only Dine’s thumb to rub back and forth, back and forth over the raised veins, the waxy skin stretched thin as a drum across the bones, and a single brown age spot, raised like the blisters on the flatbread she used to make.
‘We will sort this out, Bomama. We will sort this out together.’
Billy pressed a button on the recorder and placed it in the centre of the table.
‘Do you want me to put some questions to you, Mrs Tack? Or do you know what you want to say?’
She shook her head and straightened her back, released Dine’s hand and grabbed it back again. After a silence her voice came thin. ‘You should have known him.’
It sounded guarded and hard. She took a breath to say something, but swallowed instead. Dine rubbed her hand again, and her grandmother repeated the words as though to herself.
‘You should have known him.’
‘Well,’ said Billy, ‘well, I am here so that you can tell me about him, Mrs Tack. Tell me why Mac Mahon is incorrect? Mr Tack was listed somewhere as a translator. Mac Mahon is saying that translator was code for interrogator, so maybe if you tell us about his translating job...’
‘He got a job, for a few months, translating local papers into German and French. He needed a job... they were gossip papers. We used to laugh about them – advice on how to manage your wife and so on...’
‘Okay,’ said Billy.
‘You know, Dine will know this – when Theo was nineteen, all in the Legion swore allegiance to Hitler, but he refused. We didn’t think all these ugly things about the Germans then – that wasn’t why – it was just because he had already sworn allegiance to the King. “How can I swear to both?” he said, and he was quite right. “It is not logical,” he said. Nobody took it in bad part. Theo could be particular like that. That was the kind of man he was. He would not lie. You know, Billy, it is important to say it – that was a terrible building. He was never inside that building...’
The phone rang again and her hands flew up like a flurry of startled birds. ‘Oh – don’t answer it, Dine!’
‘But Bomama—’
‘Leave it. Don’t answer.’
Billy looked at the table.
‘It’s probably Mammy, Bomama, or Aunty Bertha. They’ll worry if you don’t answer.’
The ringing stopped, but just as Dine drew breath, it began again.
‘If it is some halfwit you just hang up, Dineke.’
‘Okay, Bomama.’
‘Hello?’ There was silence on the other end. She tried to sound nonchalant. ‘Hello?’
‘I’d like to speak to my mother.’
‘Hi Louis.’
Uncle Louis was always uncomfortable. As children Dine and her cousins were afraid of him, for he was one of those rogue adults with the demeanour of a slighted child. He would scoop children up by the ankles and hang them upside down for too long, his face set in a sardonic scowl until one of his sisters found an excuse to retrieve them from his clutches. The other thing he would do was rub balloons on their hair to make it stand up. Sometimes, when babysitters did that it was funny, but there was nothing light-hearted about Uncle Louis; that was the problem. He rubbed so hard that their heads burned. Even when he smiled there was a shadow pressing on his brow. Instead of putting them at ease, the sense that he was not actually grown-up under the moustache, but another awkward child like them, was cut with danger.
‘Bomama,’ said Dine, ‘it’s Uncle Louis.’
‘Oh Louisje!’
With her daughters and her granddaughters, Bomama was clucky and bossy, but Louis brought on a sort of cheek-flushing heartbreak in her and she stood now, as though in honour of the caller. When Louis came to the house the children used to disappear to the back of the garden, and Bompa retreated to his study, but Bomama bustled for tea, hung on his every word. Uncle Louis liked to stay standing while everyone else sat. He had a proud way of delivering a small piece of information, or a statistic that he had gleaned from the daily news. Straight-backed at the kitchen table, each hand lightly touching Bomama’s embroidered tablecloth, looking straight ahead at no one, he would kick all sorts of banalities out from beneath his moustache, while his mother nodded. ‘Oh yes you have it, you are right Louis.’ When Dine got older she learned to sit in the kitchen and pretend to listen to Uncle Louis too, because it hurt Bomama that Bompa never gave him much regard.
‘Move my chair up to the phone would you, Dine?’
Her grandmother settled herself in the chair and spoke her son’s name like a sigh, ‘Louis.’ She clutched the phone to her head with both hands, nodding. ‘Have you? Well if you think so, Louisje... Now I need you to get something from Daddy’s files, Louis. You will find it in his letters from 1985, I think... the right to reply, yes, that is important, Louis... No, only Dine. The others will come. And a friend too. A friend of Dine’s. A journalist... Oh well he seems very nice you know. It is a friend from the university.’ Then she cupped her mouth with her hand, and lowered the pitch – but not the volume – of her voice. ‘I think he is of a special kind if you are with me. Nice to his mother I would say, but they can be very nice too, those fellows, you know. He is writing down the real thing, explaining what Theo did in those years, and all about the Legion, you know... Oh do they? Well I don’t know, Louisje. Do they yah? Well you know best... But he seems to know a lot about the history. We have the right to reply, Louis – Daddy made sure of it so you find that letter, yah?’
Her grandmother stopped speaking then. Red patches blossomed high on her cheeks. The sag beneath her jaw began to tremble, and she lowered one hand onto her lap. Dine mouthed, Okay? and her grandmother rolled her eyes theatrically, but she lodged the phone between cheek and shoulder and began to rub hard at the age spot at the back of her hand, harder and harder, as though scrubbing at a stain. After a while she held the phone at arm’s length, her face spattered red as fresh burns. ‘Dine. Your uncle wants to speak with you.’
Dine took the phone, leaning her back against the sink. ‘Hi Louis.’ After a silence she said it again, ‘Hello Louis, would you like to speak to me?’
She was about to hang up when his voice came low and steady. ‘Dine. Get that journalist out of my mother’s house.’
‘Billy is a friend, Louis. We are helping Bomama to write Bompa’s reply.’
‘There will be no reply.’
‘Well Louis, Bomama would like to write a reply, and we are helping her.’
After a pause, he pronounced, ‘I am the head of this family.’ Some loyalty to her grandmother stirred with embarrassment for him; the steadiness in his voice, and each word spoken deadpan like a magic spell that might conjure him into greatness. She could hear him suck a breath before he said it again, ‘I am the head of this family.’ This time he said it in protest and yearning and bald insistence, like a brave child, ‘...and you, Dine, are way down the pecking order.’
‘The pecking order, Louis?’
Dine remembered it suddenly – one summer when Uncle Louis shaved the moustache. She saw his naked upper lip, a wavy, hurt-looking thing, flinching like a snail.
Billy was looking up at Dine from his downturned head. Her grandmother was moving her gaze eagerly from Dine’s face to her own hands, to Dine’s face, and back to her hands where she had drawn blood by scratching at the thin skin of the age spot.
‘Dine,’ Louis said, ‘I am giving you twenty minutes to leave my mother’s house, with your faggot friend. I am coming now and if you are still there when I arrive...’
‘Yes, Louis?’
‘You will regret it.’
When Dine hung up, her grandmother said, ‘Well. Louis is a special one. Many people do not understand him very well. It caused Theo to wonder a lot, you know. Where did we get him from?’
She would often say, ‘There is something in Louis, that people don’t often see...’ Her favourite proof was, ‘You know he built half an airplane, once?’
For Dine this had once added an exciting dimension to her strange uncle. He was a teenager when he built it, and it was still in the shed. ‘Ask him to show you,’ Bomama would say, but Uncle Louis had a way of raising his eyebrows if anyone spoke to him, as though to demonstrate how unimpressed he was, how unsurprised he would be by anything they might try on him.
On Dine’s phone a text came up:
Dine this is Bertha. Do not be flattered and tricked by that journalist. Do not be naïve and lured into a trap. We have hired the most expensive PR team in the country. Please stay out of it or you will regret it.
With a surge of pride Dine wrote,
Is naked propaganda really the way to go?
When Bomama spoke of that plane, the grandchildren imagined baked-bean cans rolled out and soldered together to form the body; skeletal bat wings covered in parchment, Uncle Louis an unlikely genius, twiddling tiny cogs and bolts, fashioning an engine from old bikes and bits of oven. When they finally snuck to the garage to look, they left quickly in silent disappointment. It turned out he had bought the parts and assembled the plane like a very expensive Lego kit; no wings, just the nose.
Billy looked into the bottom of his mug. ‘Mrs Tack, would you like to leave it for today?’
‘Leave it? Oh no. No I will reply. I have the right to reply, you know? Theo made sure of it. But we should be quick you know, my son Louis has some funny ideas. Always buying. Theo said we gave him too much money. You know he has a fish tank that makes the wall of his kitchen? Tropical fish in it. Poor Louisje.’
Billy rewound his tape and placed the recorder back in the middle of the table.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘remember this is a reply, so try, if you can, to answer each of the suspicions that Mac Mahon has raised.’
‘You should have known him.’
*
Lola had offered to come to the office with him, but Louis dropped her at the crossroads near her house, ignoring her pout and sigh. He would put an end to all that Lola nonsense soon. Not today – he hadn’t the energy for it – but soon.
He swiped his ID card at the staff entrance and made his way across the lobby, head down to avoid the gaze of his father’s portrait. An old, slow-shutter black-and-white picture taken in the garden while he sniffed at some knobbled twig, his eyes serious and his lips breaking a smile, it was a thing Louis regretted the moment he first saw it installed. He had done it for his mother, though, because his father had died only six months before the new lab was finished. Perhaps it was also for the sentimental nagging that came with his father’s death, the guilt at the perfect revenge that fate had wrought on him. That the man who could never suffer fools should be reduced to a kicking infant had given Louis more satisfaction than he could reckon with. The portrait was as high as a man, each pixel impregnated in plastic resin. It was mostly for her that he had done it, but when his mother saw it she had said to him, ‘Well Got verdomme Louisje, where did you get such flashy taste from?’
As he mounted the stairs, Louis ran his fingers along the metallic wipe-down walls. He was proud of the impersonal functionality of the new building – the faintly green walls and the hospital smell that meant business.
His parents had started their firm at home in the back room. They maintained a desperate intimacy with their staff – loaning them money, cooking them lunch. His mother even cleaned the house of the handyman when his wife was ill, and when the itinerant girl whom they hired cheap as a lab assistant said she was moving to Liverpool, his father made his way to the caravan site, dressed in his brown suit, head high on that skinny neck, believing, like some fool, that he could talk the family into letting her stay. Oblivious to his thick accent and foreign head, his father always thought he could set his own rules, deaf to snickers and blind to sneers, and retreating always into a sterile stoicism. These were the humiliations that had punctuated Louis’s teen years, but by then his family name was known all over the country, and being a Tack was something to be proud of. It got him onto the rugby team, and they had so much money that he had his own car to drive to school in.
His sisters didn’t remember what it was like at the beginning. Their parents worked all day and much of the night and Mammy went without medicine sometimes, because an order was worth more than her own health. At first it was just them: Mammy mixing and typing and posting and filing and delivering; Daddy weeding and planting, writing advertisements and phoning, visiting the pharmacies and coming home with a grin for every tiny sale. Bitters was the thing they had started with – a complex goo of twenty-two herbs and roots. It was fermented for eight weeks and every day his mother turned each bottle at a certain angle according to the moon. For years, the hotpress was full of bitters. The smell of it, solemn as bile, thickened the air of that windowless back room. They got a secretary in first, and a delivery man, but still his mother did all the disinfecting and chopping and mixing. The palms of her hands were scratched and yellow from powdering roots.
There were colleagues who thought Louis had been handed a golden goose for nothing. There were those, Louis knew, who sneered at nepotism and his graduate degree, but they did not know how he had paid. Louis had taken nothing from his father that he had not earned with his mother’s absence and exhaustion, with the strangle-ache of those nights he woke to find her downstairs with a single lamp, still in her house frock, still crushing and chopping and measuring according to his father’s instructions, her hands fluttering up when he startled her. ‘Oh Louisje darling...’ kneading the cold from her hip as she kissed him, then knitting while she watched him drink his camomile, the fine grey needles clacking softly and the socks towering down around and around beneath her hands. The stench of flax seeds boiling to molten glue on the camping stove.
And he’d laboured for his inheritance – all those afternoons he’d spent harvesting herb leaves and scraping the dirt from the roots – never quickly enough, and never cleanly enough for his father. Then the quiet days in the living room with his little sisters, a jigsaw that spelled CAT, paper airplanes made from old invoices to shush the girls because Daddy was researching, or Daddy was angry over a spoiled batch, or Daddy was showing the garden to a client. Louis’s father may not have been a Nazi, but he was certainly a tyrant, and Louis had paid for his life’s wealth in his mother’s flushing cheeks, her pushed-down tears, the sneaking she did, back then, to make it seem she had enough when she did not – dandelion salad for her supper, water in the milk, the dregs of the teapot to bathe her eyes.
He had not told his mother – there was no need, she need never find out – that they would be discontinuing their signature Tack Bitters. The concoction must have worked at some time, for some reason, but along the way they had tweaked it here or there, and at last the mixture had lost its power. Few bought it now, and those who did sent letters to say that it tasted like tar and stained their teeth and did nothing to cure them.
His mother had given everything to his father’s name. All of this stuff in the papers would upset her terribly, he knew, and she should be kept out of it. He had warned Bertha not to get hysterical, and he had tried to speak to Mammy on the phone – ‘Yes yes Louisje...’ – it was the voice she used to respond to his father’s rants, not listening but only soothing, ‘Yes Theo, yes,’ the blush climbing her cheeks, the way she hurried the conversation closed – ‘Yes, yes Louisje...’ It was as if his father was at her shoulder, for it was the same yessing she did always for Daddy, smoothing things over, tucking things away, agreeing with everyone.
On the second flight of stairs Louis wondered why he hadn’t taken the lift – he was eager to find the file and get that troublemaker out of his mother’s house. The eldest grandchild, Dine, had always been an attention-seeking, interfering little bitch, but somehow she had his mother wrapped around her finger. She was his sister Josephine’s. Josephine had her young, and it was his mother who ended up minding her. As soon as she was born her picture appeared all over his parents’ house. This was followed by lumps of clay, rocks painted like ladybirds, framed certificates for one thing or another. The two often spoke intimately together, heads bowed, and at his father’s funeral it was Dine who rocked his mother back and forth, back and forth as she wept.
His sister Bertha told him that she had often seen their mother pay for Dine’s taxi like she was some sort of princess. She was always giving her gifts, she even gave her his father’s pen after he had died, and once, he found them at the dining-room table, leafing through a small photo album of his mother’s first child.
Now the girl was studying pharmaceuticals – of course she was – and his mother had told him already that he was to give her a job at the firm.
*
Louis had put on weight. His breath was sore when he reached his office and he had to sit for a moment and take a drink from the water cooler, before searching out the key for the file. The water was so cold it hurt his teeth. That was another thing his mother objected to – the water cooler. She said it was a waste of electricity, and that it was healthier to drink room-temperature water.
After his father’s death, he and his sisters had cleaned out the office. Bertha had suggested, and probably she was right, that it was best to clear out their father’s things now, and do the room up. They had agreed already that they would sell the house after their mother died, and it was best not to have too much work to do on it when the time came. It had given him pleasure to take a blank cardboard box and jumble together all those papers that his father had kept in painstaking order, that careful, slanted handwriting. He told his mother he was keeping them safe, and he had driven straight here to his new, clean office, and pushed the box onto the highest shelf of his file room.
He remembered exactly where the box was – at the very end of the room on the cold metal shelves, a spot labelled ‘Private’. He was panting when he set it down on his desk.
The item at the top was a shock – he had forgotten about that. It was a hardbacked book with lemon-yellow pages and pink lines. There was a white label stuck on the front, and in soft, knife-sharpened pencil his father had written, Louis (III). He did not need to open it, for he knew what was there. His mother knew too. He had seen her peering around the kitchen door as he left his father’s office with the ledger in his hand. He could see by the droop at the corner of her eyes that she knew, but whatever she thought of it all, she would never say.
His father gave it to him the day after his graduation – a miserable event at which his father complained about the uncomfortable chairs, the ‘pomp’, the cold, the vanity of graduation photos, and his mother kept her jaw shut tight, for she had left school at fourteen, and she felt her accent and her knowledge and her dress all wrong for the setting.
Over breakfast the next morning, she told him, ‘Daddy will have his elevenses in the office today, you are to join him.’
When he arrived the tea tray was already there on the desk – an almond finger for his father, some buttered tea biscuits, the metal teapot and the two cups, their gleaming white interiors gaping in their saucers. His father beamed at him.
‘Now, Louis,’ he said, ‘you are a man.’
In the book, his parents had logged every penny they had ever spent on him – new shoelaces, piano lessons, the car.
He did not know why he had kept that book. He pushed it at his wastepaper basket, but it was too wide.
Next in the box was a blue envelope folder made of thin card. The sticker across it said ‘DINE’. It had been written in the same smudging lead, but with a child’s hand. The backwards D had been rubbed out and rewritten. Louis had expected to find the same thing in there – all the taxis and the school fees which, he knew, his parents must have paid for her. But the folder saying ‘DINE’ contained objects of her own authoring: splodgy paintings, handmade birthday cards, scribbled rhymes. There were other folders too – for Bertha and Josephine there were bits of paper that amounted to love letters. His father had written out the funny things they said as children, he had collected photographs of places they had been together: ‘Theo and Bertha a nice day in the Park’; ‘JoJo falls asleep in the Camomile’...
Louis stacked all of these useless things on his desk. He had taken them all from his parents’ house in a post-funeral trance, and now he did not know what to do with them. He should find that letter about the reply. His mother was getting herself all worked up about it.
He hadn’t mentioned all that to the PR team. He would be meeting them later that day, but on the phone the assistant had advised that today’s newspapers were the fish-and-chip wrappers of tomorrow. Often, said the expert, the best thing to do with a scandal was to do nothing – particularly where a business was concerned. People wanted to buy and they wanted to forget any reason not to. Why remind them of something they were already forgetting?
But his niece was there working his mother up into a fret. By the time he arrived she would be all set to go with her reply and there would be no talking her down. He knew how it would go. ‘Yah,’ she would say, ‘yah you are right Louisje.’ But she would go ahead and do what she wanted anyway, and what she wanted was whatever that bony-arsed little bitch told her.
The letter was in its very own folder with ‘TRIBUNE’ written across the front. There were three letters inside, and a clipping from the paper, a picture of Josephine cutting a ribbon. It was the opening of his parents’ first lab. ‘Tack Herbals to Employ 150 Staff Members’, said the headline.
The important letter was there. ‘Right to Reply 1985 Me/Vincent Bell’ was written along the top in his father’s hand.
‘Dear Mr Tack,’ the letter began, ‘I hereby confirm that, should the upcoming interview with our journalist, Tiernach Mac Mahon, result in an article of any sort, or quotes of any sort, this article will first be read by you in order to allow you the opportunity to reply as you see fit. I hereby agree to publish your full reply, notwithstanding...’
Louis did not have much time. His mother would be waiting for him to come, moving to the window with her sore hip, and back again, sitting and standing and rubbing her hands. She would phone him soon, he knew, wondering where he was.
He piled them back into the box and brought them down in the lift. Several times he had to set the box on the floor and swipe his card – to activate the lift, to access the lobby... He crossed his father’s giant portrait which was – his mother was right – in poor taste. He balanced the box in one elbow while he swiped himself into the photocopier room. Inside, the air was caustic with paper fibres, toner dust, the eye-tingling ozone from all that photocopying and scanning and faxing. He glanced up at the air vent before letting the door swing shut behind him.
There was a plywood table in the centre of the room, and the walls were lined with grey and white machines – the sleek new colour copier, the laminating press, the humpbacked shredder. Louis set the box on the table and removed the lid. He began with the ledger, and he was surprised how little it hurt as the shredder ate and spat, ate and spewed. One by one the yellow pages went quietly into the great machine.