The Folding Star (3 page)

Half-way down the stairs I stopped, hearing an earlier echo than Cambridge and my first independence. A church tower, somewhere in Kent, its narrow door left open: there’s a rehearsal, part of a festival, and my father is singing in it. I’m a little boy, clambering up among the junk the verger and cleaners have stacked at the foot of the spiral ascent, mops and brooms, rolled-up banners, tumbled flower-tripods with their dry Oasis and bent cowls of chicken-wire. Dust and secrecy. I haven’t been missed. I go up and up with my hands on the steps above, until there’s the slit of a window. When I look out over the churchyard, our Humber drawn in by the lych-gate, the drop of the land beyond trees, I feel afraid, giddy, I have gone too far. And then the beautiful tenor sound starts up, high and untroubled, probably Bach, though maybe something lesser, I know nothing of all that, only the rise and fall of my father’s sung line, which I have the illusion of seeing, like a gleaming trace across the shadows. Without knowing why I sit down with a bump and start to cry.

The bar Cherif had named was a good walk away, along the broad deserted quays of broad deserted canals, linked by rare stone bridges. The cloud had lifted in the afternoon and in the cool that followed there was a first hint of autumn. I passed a small park with empty benches and an odd dreamy restlessness in its trees. Then there were wide wooden boathouses, broken-down cottages and dogs and children playing who looked unaccustomed to strangers. I wondered for a minute if I had gone wrong, but there was Wanne’s bar; there was a curtain inside the door, and beyond it a narrow brown room with men at the counter listening to a football match and abruptly shouting their disgust. The long-haired barman dealt with me neutrally, or it may have been with mild hostility.

I needed something to do, and rehearsed and updated my Flemish on a discarded newspaper, which slowly revealed itself as rancorously right-wing. I drank my beer too fast, and ordered another. I wanted to be with Cherif again, the whole day’s search had been leading back to him, and flat anger settled in my stomach as he didn’t turn up; and then amazement at myself and my baseless belief that my needs could for once have been so easily met. Whenever the door swung open I knew it would be him and swallowed my distress at the sight of his friendly face and everything it offered, and it was always someone else, a regular who won a curt, delayed greeting as he was absorbed into the group around the bar.

With the exception of a woman in a dressing-gown who looked in from the back to complain, there were only men here. Yet it certainly didn’t seem like a gay bar – unless it was some specialist working men’s kind of ugly set. At last I nerved myself to gesture the barman down. Did he know someone called Cherif, French Moroccan, a docker …? At which he made a very clear announcement that what do you call him Cherif was not welcome there, or any of his type. I walked out at once and started back the way I had come, the same children turning and watching as I passed. The early evening was high and receptive and unsurprised.

The silence of neglect that enveloped the old church of St Narcissus was broken only by its hourly chime and – as I discovered that night – a six-hourly broken-toothed carillon, which donged its way heartlessly through a hymn that I hoped had ended each time it reached the irregular pauses of its missing notes. It had me awake at midnight and at six, with a stab of despair about last evening; I worked through wearying punitive fantasies about Cherif that fizzled out each time in shallow sleep.

At ten I went round, through a gleaming holiday haze, to the Altidores’ house. They lived in Long Street, which ran out from the centre of town in an elegant, endless curve; I counted ahead of me and picked out No 39 before I got to it: tall and reserved, with a high basement and four or five steps climbing steeply to the black front door. I noticed I was repressing my curiosity about my future, coming to our first encounter with the empty mind and last-minute turn of speed that are a way of meeting a challenge; though all the time the boy’s touchingly sullen image was in the air before me, flickered, like a subliminal projection, over spires and gables, while his surname exercised its glimmering romance: Altidore, it was a gothic belfry in itself, or else a knight-errant out of
The Faerie Queene
…

Luc’s mother answered my short but frantic-sounding ring; I stepped into an interior I had never guessed at, and which I saw at once was the shrine and workshop of an obsession. She must have been the most prolific needlewoman in Belgium. The hall, and then the sitting-room she pushed me into, were festooned with her work. Large-scale hangings, or saggings, depicting the sort of subjects – ships, timbered inns, corps de ballet – that are favoured in jigsaw puzzles for their monotonous difficulty rather than their beauty, were the mere backdrop for floral firescreens, beaded and bobbled tablecloths and sofas so heaped with wildly coloured cushions as to leave only the tiniest area for the sitter’s bottom. I ambled round amongst it all, giving speechless shrugs of appreciation, my gaze running for relief up to the high ceiling, though even there a woven affair, implying an almost Victorian suggestibility, extended like a growth down the chains of the chandelier. Following her politely through to the kitchen to get coffee I glimpsed the dyeing pantry, where hanks of red and orange wool hung dripping into buckets and giving off a raw smell.

Her manner was vague, disappointed and accidentally bitchy, so that I excused her rudeness or took it as a joke. Nearly six feet tall, in a mauve crocheted frock, with long lilac-stockinged legs and buckled witch’s shoes, hair neat and lifeless round a small, pale-powdered face, brisk, apprehensive, humourless, painfully artistic: I saw the absurdity of her at once but thought I might grow to find her sadly sympathetic. When I declined a tiny sugared cake she said, ‘Yes, you should lose weight, ten pounds at least, no cake for you’, and put out just one for herself with the calm propriety of someone who would never be fat the way I was getting already. ‘I am very busy,’ she told me: ‘I am working on a new altar-cloth for the Cathedral. You mustn’t keep me for too long.’

I smiled and said, ‘Of course not.’ I began to wonder if Luc too might be very tall and skinny.

‘I’m glad to see you alone though, while Luc is away,’ she said, as if enlisting me in some operation that was peculiarly delicate and dreadful; though that ‘away’ was what echoed through my thoughts and resolutions. Away! So the pressure was off, the anxious gambits of the first conversation had been needlessly rehearsed. It seemed he had gone to stay with friends on the coast, no one could stop him, though Mrs Altidore had begged him to take some books, and held, frowningly, to the belief that he would be studying. She spoke about him in a tone of careless despair; but checked herself several times, to remind us both that he was clever, cleverer than almost anyone. He was wayward, troubled, unknowable; but then again he was gentle, introspective and beyond question a good boy. When she despaired I was full of conventional reassurance, modest confidence, I would see what I could do; when she withdrew into sudden solidarity with her son I found I was faintly jealous, and wondered how I could free him from her multi-coloured web.

She told me Luc had been a scholar at the college of St Narcissus, the province’s oldest and most exclusive Jesuit school, where his friends were the children of various important lawyers and bankers whose names meant nothing to me. Last summer, however, following on an obscure incident, which it would be ‘too great a waste of both our times’ to go into, he had been required to leave. Now there was the worry of his finishing his education: Mrs Altidore thought she had persuaded him to try for university – perhaps in England: she had heard that Dorset had a European exchange scheme and a way with sensitive misfits. Luc himself was keen to go abroad. My task was to facilitate his escape – to polish his English conversation, already near-perfect, apparently, and to widen his knowledge of English literature: Milton, Wordsworth, Margaret Drabble and whatever further authors I considered significant.

Before I left she asked me what other pupils I had and seemed satisfied that as yet I had only one and so might really be able to devote myself to the cause of Luc. She wanted to know who the second one was; and raised her eyebrows and tilted her head when I said it was Marcel Echevin; she thought him a suitable stable-mate even if hopelessly dim. ‘Don’t try to cut corners by seeing Echevin at the same time as my son,’ she advised. ‘They are wholly incompatible. I hope I can trust you.’

The weather had turned breezy and hot, ideal September days, the pale-backed leaves quivering and glinting like spring, and I would have left town too, given the chance – joined my pupil at the beach in the flimsy pretence of studying a book. But I had the other one to see and my living to earn. It was hard to identify the impulse to work among the other sensations of merely being on holiday. I wrote a letter to my old friend Edie, telling her all about my rapid new start with Cherif but skirting round the blunt humiliation of the rendezvous at Wanne’s bar. Also to my mother, but sticking more closely to matters of weather and diet. I felt them both in their different ways watching for me, half-hiding their concern at what I’d suddenly done. And once or twice I thought of them all, and the pub and the common and the whole suburban sprawl – half a map, half a picture, like the tourist hand-out here but infinitely draggled and banal – with a sudden heart’s thump or two of longing.

Young Echevin came to see me after lunch: he was late, couldn’t find the place, had disturbed the doctor’s difficult old housekeeper (who asked rather pointedly that it shouldn’t happen again), and sat pink and wheezing through the scheduled hour of our conversation. He was a severe asthmatic, as I knew from his father’s letter, and had been absent from school for much of the previous year, gazing out from a dustless sanatorium near Brussels. I felt a twinge of pity for him, and remembered schoolfellows obscurely stigmatised by diabetes or inhibiting allergies. The same involuntary unlovely quality hung about Marcel; plus he was fat and anxious and maladroit. His asthma provided the main topic of discussion, and gave me glimpses of the boy’s tame, glass-cabined world; it had limited his experience cruelly. Several staples of these lessons – sport, nature, what we had done in the pollinous summer holidays – were almost inaccessible to him; his own August had been spent playing video games (and for a minute his vocabulary took on an impenetrable self-confidence). A new drug had been his salvation – that and television, which had given him a certain scrambled knowledge of current affairs that he was too incurious and shortwinded to make sense of. Our primary rule – that we spoke only in English – was frequently broken; ‘I do not know, I do not understand’ was his timid refrain. And I was recollecting my tutorial manner, out of the vacant social politeness that our chit-chat parodied, and a sudden pedantry or loss of patience which alarmed him and brought him close to tears. Of course his other tutors, for maths and history and so on, all talked to him in friendly Flemish, they were local people who shared his world of reference. It took me a moment to see how alien I was – I felt myself being dreaded, in what I hoped was an unusual way, and not being sure whether to live up to it or try to soften it down.

Marcel wore bright-coloured kids’ leisure-wear, as though he was usually out on a bike or a skateboard, and had a huge wristwatch with various rotating bezels and inset dials that might have been of use to a sports coach, deep-sea diver or trader on the international markets. He looked at it with disarming frequency, so that I began to ask him each time how long was left. I was as keen as he was for the hour to be up.

The shock came towards the end, when I asked him how long he’d suffered from asthma, and if he knew why he had it, a two-part question which I felt was unwise with a beginner, it might fluster him and only one half would get answered. He looked away and I saw a change in the colour of his unhappiness. ‘Yes, I can tell why,’ he said. ‘And when.’

I didn’t quite make the story out at first, I was chivvying him and making him repeat words without knowing I was taking him back, like some kinder and wiser analyst, to the scene of a childhood tragedy. It turned out he had been shopping in the town with his mother: he was only six, it was ten years ago, in the summer. They had gone into a florist’s and were waiting to be served, when he saw a bee hovering around his mother’s shopping-basket. He knew she mustn’t be stung by a bee, but she was talking to a friend and she told him not to interrupt. He tried to flap it away, but only frightened it, and as his mother turned to him it flew up and stung her in the face. She groped for the antidote in her handbag, but she’d brought the wrong bag. She fell to the floor in front of Marcel, and within a minute she was dead.

His asthma had started a few months later, and was triggered especially by flowers. There was a sort of pride in his possession of these facts. He said that his father loved flowers, but had never had them in the house since. I asked, with what was clearly a suspicious sweetness, what it was his father did; and learned that he was the keeper of the little museum of Orst’s paintings, out on an edge of town I hadn’t visited, but where five or six old windmills had been renovated on top of a high dike. Marcel said firmly that he did not like Orst’s work.

I drank quite a bit in my room, tippling through my litre of duty-free Cap and Badge, and went out about eleven to the Bar Biff, a club in the basement of a house right next to the Cathedral. The unwary or short-sighted pilgrim might easily have mistaken it for the entrance to the Crypt (10th Century) and the shrine of St Ernest. The street outside was almost deserted, with an occasional late walker or pair of denim-jacketed boys pausing to peer through the locked grilles of electrical shops. Warm, too, with a scent from the trees that seemed to insist again on a last frail summery possibility. I felt quite good in my leather jacket, charcoal 501s and tipped, tight-laced black Oxfords; nervous, but adrift and irresponsible.