Silent Saturday

by Helen Grant

  She checked that the stairway was deserted before venturing down to let Kris in. She opened the street door, taking care to keep part of her body inside the doorframe to prevent it swinging shut and locking her outside again.

  ‘Kris?’

  He materialized from the dark shadows under the oriel window and slipped into the lobby beside her. He was grinning. He put his arms around her, pulling her close, and said, ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘Shhhh,’ Veerle warned him, but she was smiling back.

  They went upstairs, treading carefully, saying nothing but listening for the sounds of doors opening, of footsteps on one of the landings – anything that might signify a nosy neighbour on the lookout. They heard a radio playing behind a closed door, but otherwise there was no sign of life. They made it to the second floor without encountering anyone, and Veerle let them into the flat.

  She was biting her lip, torn between smiling at her successful ascent of the building’s façade and anxiety about Kris’s reaction to the flat. When she closed the door behind them she was acutely aware that it wasn’t opulent like the places Kris had shown her. In fact, she was pretty sure Tante Bernadette hadn’t redecorated since about 1955. Everything had a worn and slightly faded look, from the antique gold and cream striped wallpaper to the fraying runner on the hallway floor. At the end of the corridor was a sagging dog basket, the wickerwork chewed, the cushion inside leaking its stuffing. Toulouse’s basket. That gave Veerle a pang. If whoever had taken the little dog hadn’t taken his basket along, perhaps he had been re-homed or, worse, euthanized.

  Kris moved past her, further into the apartment. Veerle followed him, hand to her mouth, chewing her knuckle. Let him like it. Let it be OK. She was half expecting him to turn round and say, This is just some old lady’s place. It doesn’t count. Or What a dump.

  Then she heard him say, ‘Amazing.’ He disappeared into the sitting room. Veerle went after him and found him standing in the middle of the Persian carpet, looking around with evident appreciation at the antique furniture: the gilded salon chairs with their graceful legs and upholstery the colour of dusty roses, the ormolu mantel clock, the oil painting over the fireplace. She felt a rush of something like gratitude.

  ‘This place is like a museum,’ Kris was saying, touching the ormolu clock with his long fingers, almost caressing the little gilded figures that decorated it. ‘Look at this.’ He was holding a little alabaster statue, holding it with both hands to avoid the risk of dropping it. He began to pace the room, stopping to examine things here and there. A Japanese lacquered box. An antique silver rose bowl. ‘This is amazing,’ he said again, shaking his head.

  Veerle sagged against the doorframe, overwhelmed by a curious mixture of feelings: the inevitable down that followed the adrenalin of the climb up the front of the building, relief that Kris liked the apartment, and a seeping sense of unreality at the sight of him wandering about in it, picking up Tante Bernadette’s things and examining them. The apartment didn’t feel entirely real to her; it was as familiar as the lines on her own palms, but without its garrulous ancient occupant it felt strangely empty, as though it were already a memory, and Tante Bernadette already nothing more than a string of words chiselled into a marble headstone. Seeing Kris prowling about in it was even stranger; it was as though he had suddenly strolled across one of her childhood memories, an incongruous and slightly ominous presence in his black leather jacket and jeans.

  Eventually Kris looked her way. ‘Hey, are you OK?’ He came over to her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Veerle. ‘I feel strange about being here.’

  Kris put his arms around her, pulled her to him. ‘It’s different, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘When you’re the one who’s found the place.’ He looked down at her, and his expression was serious for once; that ironic smile that always seemed to be lurking at the corners of his mouth was nowhere to be seen. ‘That’s why you have to do it.’ He touched her face with the same care as he had caressed the little figures on the ormolu clock. ‘Everyone has to do it. Nobody gets to go along for the ride.’

  She gave him an uncertain smile. ‘So did I pass the test?’

  ‘Of course.’ He leaned over and kissed her.

  Veerle closed her eyes. She could feel Kris’s lips on hers, his fingers in her hair. But she could also detect the smells of the apartment: that furniture-polish smell and the lingering memory of coffee and something sweet and powdery, the old-fashioned perfume of an elderly lady. The ormolu clock chimed the half-hour, silvery notes that seemed to shiver on the air. She would hardly have been surprised if she had heard Toulouse come running in, his claws clicking on the polished floor.

  When Kris broke the kiss at last, she said, ‘Are we going to do something for the flat? I don’t know . . . repair something?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, but he didn’t move. His fingers were still in her hair, twisting the strands. She thought that he was going to kiss her again, and if he continued doing that she was really not sure where it would lead; in the setting of Tante Bernadette’s apartment this was not a comfortable thought.

  ‘Let’s look,’ she said, pulling away. She moved towards the doorway into the kitchen and Kris followed. They went into nearly every room, although when Veerle opened the door which led into Tante Bernadette’s bedroom, with its high bed covered with a padded pink satin counterpane, she shut it again almost as quickly, feeling as though they were invading.

  In the sitting room they found an antiquated gramophone player, so old that it was housed in a kind of wooden cabinet with little feet. There were cupboards at either side for storing records, strange brittle things in dog-eared cardboard sleeves. Not only had Tante Bernadette not heard of MP3s, she hadn’t even progressed to CDs.

  Veerle fished out a record with a jolly-looking cover. Charles Trenet, she read. Boum! The name didn’t mean anything to her, but she decided to try the record anyway.

  It took her a few attempts to start the record player. It didn’t seem to have buttons, mostly dials, and you had to lift the stylus up and put it onto the record yourself. Then there was a hiss and a crackle and a brief musical flourish before a cheery male voice launched straight into a song. Veerle listened with her head on one side. She couldn’t help smiling; the music was so ridiculously bouncy and cheerful. And loud. Tante Bernadette was evidently getting deaf; the volume was turned right up.

  Kris had wandered over to the other side of the room to examine a black-and-white photograph of Tante Bernadette taken around 1960, looking a little like Audrey Hepburn in a tunic dress and sunglasses. Now he came over to Veerle and he was smiling, a real smile, not just that sardonic little twist of the lips that always gave him a slightly mocking air.

  Suddenly she could see her Kris, the one she remembered from her childhood, the shock-headed ten-year-old who had always been nice when the bigger boys were horrible to her, and had once dared her to climb the bell tower of the Sint-Pauluskerk.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked her, nodding at the gramophone.

  Veerle showed him the record sleeve. The vocalist had started on something about deer making bleating noises and she was trying very hard not to laugh. ‘I’m sorry,’ she managed to say.

  Kris put his arms around her. ‘No, it’s brilliant. It’s like travelling back in time.’

  Veerle tilted back her head to look at him. ‘You take me to rich people’s houses and I take you to nineteen-fifty?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You think this was cool even in nineteen-fifty?’

  ‘Maybe—’ began Kris, but got no further.

  Even above the music they heard it. Knocking.

  Both of them froze. Then Kris reached out almost casually and lifted the stylus off the record. Charles Trenet fell silent halfway through a line, and for a moment all they could hear was the faint sound of the turntable revolving.

  Then it came again: a persistent tapping on the front door of the apartment.

  ‘Bernadette?
’ said a voice through the door.

  Veerle and Kris looked at each other with horror on their faces. Veerle raised a hand, showing her palm to Kris. Stay here, she telegraphed. Then she slipped out into the hallway of the flat, treading as silently as she could on the worn runner. The knocking had ceased and for a few moments there was silence. Veerle approached the door very carefully and pressed her right ear to the wooden panel.

  When the knocking started up again on the other side she nearly jumped out of her skin. She clamped a hand over her mouth as if to prevent the screech that nearly burst out of it. She glanced back at the sitting-room doorway and saw Kris standing there watching.

  Stay calm, she told herself. Don’t lose it.

  ‘Bernadette?’ said the voice again. It was high and a little quavery; an old lady voice, thought Veerle. Some crony of her great-aunt’s from another apartment, most probably.

  Why did I put that record on? she asked herself. That was stupid – stupid! She wondered whether there was any possibility that the person outside would simply give up and go away. She didn’t think so, though; the nervous tremor in the voice indicated that its owner was one of those fussy types who wouldn’t give up easily. Like Mum. Veerle knew perfectly well what Claudine would have been like in a similar situation; she would have been imagining every possible freak accident and debating whether to call out the emergency services.

  ‘Bernadette, tu es là?’

  No, she’s not here. Just give up and go away. But somehow Veerle knew she wouldn’t.

  There was silence for perhaps a minute, during which time Veerle remained with the side of her face pressed to the wood, listening. Then she heard a shuffling sound in the hallway outside, and a second voice, a male voice, spoke in French.

  ‘I can’t just break down the door.’

  ‘Well, I definitely heard someone inside,’ said the old-lady voice. In a higher-pitched, louder tone she added, ‘Bernadette? Bernadette, is that you in there?’

  ‘It was probably number one, downstairs,’ said the man in a grumbling tone. ‘Always so much noise.’

  ‘It wasn’t. You think those two play anything the rest of us would want to hear? It was Bernadette’s favourite song. It definitely came from here.’

  ‘Well, maybe she came home early and she was listening to it.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t she open the door?’

  ‘She doesn’t want to be bothered?’ suggested the man.

  ‘It just stopped, suddenly – as though someone didn’t want us to hear it. Something’s wrong, I tell you.’

  Then the man said something that made Veerle’s breath catch in her throat.

  ‘Well, you have a key, don’t you?’

  Oh God. They’re going to open the door.

  ‘Yes,’ said the female voice, slightly huffily. ‘But it is upstairs in my apartment. I would have to fetch it. It may not be easy to find.’

  Let it be lost, please God, thought Veerle. Her heart was beating so wildly that she was afraid she would faint.

  ‘Easier than shouldering the door down,’ said the man. There was some further discussion and then he said, ‘I will wait here while you fetch it.’

  Veerle did not wait to see if there were any more protests from the woman. How long would it take her to fetch the key? Ten minutes if we’re lucky and the old bat can’t find it; a minute and a half if she puts her hand on it right away. She sped back down the hallway, flicking off the hall light switch as she passed it. If the man was really waiting right outside the door, he might see the thin rim of light around the doorframe vanish, but that was too bad; they were in trouble now anyway, whatever happened.

  ‘She’s getting a key,’ she said to Kris in an urgent whisper, pulling him into the sitting room.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Some nosy neighbour.’

  Veerle began to move swiftly about, switching lights off. ‘She’s going to be back any minute. We need to be out of here.’

  ‘Well, let’s go.’

  ‘There’s a man outside the front door.’

  ‘Is there another door?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘There’s only one way out,’ said Veerle eventually.

  Kris opened his mouth to argue, but realized that there was really nothing to say. They were staring at each other in the dim light when they heard voices in the hallway again.

  ‘We have to go now,’ said Veerle, opening the window that led onto the balcony.

  Kris followed her out. Veerle closed the window as best she could from the outside, and drew the shutters across it.

  When she turned to Kris, he was standing with his back to the wall, his expression unreadable.

  ‘Kris,’ she said, going up to him, ‘we can’t stay out here. That window doesn’t shut properly. Anyone with eyes in their head will notice it, and then they’ll look out here. We have to climb down.’

  She was making it sound as though it were nothing, she knew that, whereas in fact climbing down was a lot harder than climbing up, and neither of them had the right footwear.

  Kris just looked at her. Over his shoulder Veerle noticed that a light had gone on in the apartment; she saw a thin line of yellow flare up between the panels of the shutters.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ she said. ‘It’s easy – there was one difficult bit but there’s some sort of metal thing sticking out of the wall. You can put your weight on that – I did it on the way up. You’re taller than me, anyway – you can reach further.’

  Heavier too, so more chance of that metal strut giving way. She didn’t say that.

  ‘Just follow me, use the same holds as I do, and—’ She had been about to add, For God’s sake don’t fall onto the railings, but she caught herself just in time. ‘Take your time, OK?’

  She went to the stone parapet and climbed over. Now she was standing with her back to the street and the empty expanse of chill night air, as exposed as a diver about to perform a backflip. The first move was the worst; she had to put most of her weight on a single stone boss while she looked for the metal bracket to step down onto. When she had done that, and safely reached the bottom of the oriel window, she crossed onto the top of the bay window next door and looked up.

  Kris had followed her over the parapet and was clinging to the bottom rim of it with grim determination. He remained in that position for so long that Veerle began to fear that he would lose his grip, that his fingers would become numb from the cold and peel off one by one. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the sudden vision of him plummeting from the window onto the sharp tips of the railings below, the terrible bursting sound as the iron points tore into his flesh. Stop it. She made herself open her eyes again, and now he was standing on the metal bracket, and it was holding his weight. She could see one half of his face by the amber light of the streetlamps. His expression was grim.

  The shutters of Tante Bernadette’s window remained closed, but Veerle wondered how long it would be before it occurred to the old lady’s concerned neighbours to check the balcony. It was a relief when Kris reached the bottom of the oriel and stepped over onto the top of the bay window beside her.

  There was no time to waste congratulating themselves on getting that far, however. Veerle could not stop herself glancing upwards, waiting for the light to stream out of the shuttered window above. Darkness so far. She led the way down the side of the bay window, taking great care this time as she placed her foot on the railings. Kris was visibly more confident now that they were nearly at street level; his boots hit the stone steps of the next-door apartment only half a minute after Veerle’s.

  Not a moment too soon; with a clatter the shutters of Tante Bernadette’s front window opened and someone came out onto the stone balcony. Neither Kris nor Veerle looked up, however, and when whoever it was looked down, all they would have seen was a young couple who had apparently emerged from the next-door apartment block coming down the steps hand in hand and strolling away
up the street.

  ‘Nom de Dieu,’ floated down quite clearly through the frigid night air, and Veerle guessed that the owner of the quavery voice was getting an earful from her male sidekick for wasting his time. She realized that she had left Tante Bernadette’s keys in the apartment, but it didn’t very much matter. She could not imagine herself ever going back there again, and remembering the grim expression on Kris’s face as he clung to the outside of the building she thought that he would not be in a hurry to do so either.

  Now that they were safely out in the street, she was terribly tempted to laugh. The thrill of having escaped by the skin of their teeth filled her with a savage joy. As they turned the corner she looked at Kris and her eyes were shining.

  ‘I wish we could do that again,’ she told him.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ he said.

  A couple of minutes later a middle-aged lady on her way home with two Delhaize supermarket bags full of groceries was forced to step into the road to avoid a young couple who were standing entwined in the middle of the pavement kissing each other so enthusiastically that they didn’t even notice she was there.

  Young people of today, she thought to herself as she trudged past them. Shameless.

  25

  IN THE FIRST week of March Egbert decided to do another house. He hadn’t visited the Koekoeken website for a while. With Egbert, everything went in waves. He’d be obsessed with something for a month, and then he’d drop it and start something else. Just lately it had been an online empire-building game. When he’d started playing it, he’d been staggered by its depth and complexity, the fluid beauty of the graphics. Fucking awesome, he’d posted on a web forum under his online name, Horzel. He’d spent every single spare moment on it – and eventually realized that it wasn’t that awesome after all. It wasn’t the ultimate game. Nothing ever was.