Chapter Twenty-Five — A Plain Biro

The lorry had been gone six hours and the town had had all of Sunday to decide how to hold it, and it held it the way the town held everything, which was by not saying.

She knew it before she got to the corner of the Pastoorstraat. There was a thing the street did when it had her in its mouth — a small lull, a half-beat of held breath behind the net curtains, the dropped-stitch in the ordinary noise of a Sunday morning that told you you were the subject of the kitchen you were passing. She'd grown up reading it off the street the way you read weather off the birds. They'd done it to Bram for years, that lull, every time he came up the road with the wrong walk on him. Now it was hers. She came up the Pastoorstraat in the thin June light with her face shut and the loft key heavy in her coat against her hip where she'd kept it since the open latch, and the lull went ahead of her down the row like a thing she was pushing, house to house, a wave of being looked at and not greeted, and she thought: so that's the price of it, then. That's the first instalment. They'll let me walk up my own street like my father.

At the bakery the bell went over the door and the talk stopped.

It had not stopped for her in weeks. For weeks it had been the other thing — she's got his hands, did you hear, fourth off the loft, a Maes bird in the union list again — the warm wash of it, René's mother sliding her an extra koffiekoek across the glass for nothing, the old men touching their caps. She had hated how much she'd liked it, and had told herself she didn't like it, and that was the last lie she'd let herself tell, she'd thought, the night she opened the tin all the way. Now the warmth was off it like heat off a stone after dark. The two women at the counter went back to their bread with their backs got somehow rounder, and the girl behind the glass — not René's mother today, the younger one, the niece — served her the loaf without the small free thing and without the eyes, took her francs and gave her the change counted exact into her palm so their hands needn't meet, and that was the whole of it, that was the town turning, in the weight of a coin laid down instead of pressed into a hand.

"Thanks," Lieselot said.

The girl said nothing. Not unkind. Just a girl who'd been told at her own kitchen table last night what the Maes one had done at the club, and didn't have the years yet to know what to do with her own face about it, and so did the safe thing, which was the town thing, which was nothing.

Lieselot took her loaf out into the street and stood a second under the dead sign of the frituur that hadn't opened past nine in two years, and looked down the Pastoorstraat at the black winding-gear at the end of it standing over the whole row like always, and understood, with the loaf warm against her ribs, that she had taken a thing off this street that the winding-gear had not been able to keep. The pit had gone and they'd survived it. The young had gone and they'd survived that. The one thing the town had carried out of all of it — the one gold thing, the Saturday-afternoon thing, the a man off this street stood at the top of the whole world thing — she'd carried into the lokaal in a biscuit tin and set down on the green baize and broken in front of them, and there was nothing the winding-gear could do about that either, and nobody up the row this morning was going to thank her for it, today or maybe ever, and she'd known that going in and done it anyway, and the knowing didn't make the cold off the bakery counter any warmer on the back of her neck.

That was the deal. She'd shook on it in the dark on the heath. Now she was paying it in koffiekoeken.

Bram was up when she got in, which on a Sunday was its own news.

He was at the kitchen table with no drink in front of him, which was newer news than that. There was coffee instead, his own making, too strong by the smell, and the radio off, and he was sitting in his shirtsleeves with his big ruined hands flat on the oilcloth either side of the cup like a man waiting for a verdict, or like a man who'd been to a thing he didn't have words for and had come home to sit in the room it had happened to.

He'd been there. She'd not known if he would be and she'd not asked him to come and he'd come, in his good cap, and stood at the back by the door near the Berys the whole of it, and she'd been too far inside the thing to watch his face. She watched it now. It was doing something she hadn't a name for. Bram had two faces she knew — the drink coming up in it and the drink going out of it — and this was neither, this was a third one, older, like a photograph of him she'd never been shown.

"You heard about the street," he said.

"I felt it."

"Aye." He turned the cup a quarter-turn on the oilcloth and didn't drink it. "Verhoeven's not coming round, if that's what you're braced for. Talked to him last night, after. He'll not. He's gone quiet on it. That's worse, with Gust. The quiet."

"I know what the quiet means."

"Do you." He looked up at her then, and there was the strange thing in it, the third face. "They came at me last night. Couple of them. Down the café." He said café the way another man would say church, the place he was a regular in his ruin. "Bert Cleynen and that. Wanting me to say you were — overwrought. The girl's overwrought, her grandfather's dead, you can see the state of her, it's grief, it's a sick man's bit of paper, sign here it's all a mistake and we'll have it down off the green baize before morning and never spoke of." He turned the cup the other quarter. "They had it half-written. The thing for me to sign. Father of the girl, head of the house, says the family withdraws it. They'd thought it through. They'd been thinking it through since the lorry left, while we were all still standing in the wet."

The kitchen was very quiet. Out the back, down the garden, the loft was empty of its racers and full of its hens and its young and its breeders, and one of them, low and far, made the round wet sound a pigeon makes to no one.

"And," Lieselot said.

She'd meant it to come out flat and it came out smaller than she'd meant. She'd built herself all season for the club and the Berys and the cold street, and she had not built herself for her father at a kitchen table with no drink in front of him and a thing in his hand he could sign that would take the whole of it back, undo it, fold the gold name back up onto the wall and the truth back down into the dark, and let his daughter be overwrought instead of the one who took it — and she understood, in the held breath of the kitchen, that he could do it. That he was the one with the standing to do it. Father of the girl. Head of the house. They'd been right to go to him. He was the one loose latch in the whole of what she'd done.

Bram looked at the cup a long time.

"I had the pen off Cleynen," he said. "He's got Staf's old Pelikan habit, carries the fat black one, you know the kind. He put it in my hand." He turned his own hand over on the oilcloth, palm up, the ruined miner's palm, and looked at it like the pen might still be there. "And I'm sitting there with their bit of paper and their pen, and Cleynen's saying it kind, he's saying you do right by her, Bram, you don't let a kid throw the loft and the legend both away over a notion, he's saying think of your father, and I'm thinking—" He stopped. He had a thing he did with his mouth before he was cruel, the working, and she watched for it, and it wasn't that. It was something else trying to get up his face that the face had no practice at. "I'm thinking, forty years they let him be the legend. Forty years they let me be his son, the drinker, the one didn't inherit, didn't measure up, the one the old man wouldn't even leave the birds to. And I'm sat there with the pen and they want me to be the one signs it back into the dark, the family man, the responsible one, the first responsible thing they've ever in their lives let me be — and it's to make my own daughter a liar so they can keep loving a dead man for a thing he never did."

He put the cup down very carefully, like it might break, which it wouldn't, it was the thick green café-saucer kind.

"I gave Cleynen his pen back," Bram said.

She didn't say anything.

"I didn't make a speech of it. You don't, with Cleynen, he'd only have it round the town you'd lost your reason an' all. I just give it back and stood up and said she's not overwrought, she's right, my father did the thing she said and you all know it, and I'm not signing it, and you can put that round whoever you like. And I come home." He looked at his hands again. "First time in my life I've stood up out of that café for a reason and not just because it was closing."

The wet sound came again from the loft, far and low.

She wanted to say something and there was nothing in the house's grammar to say it with. They were not a family that said the thing. They were a family that did the small movement of the head, like Marcel in the doorway, the coin that was worth everything and bought nothing. So she went and filled the kettle she didn't want, because that was a thing the hands could do, and put it on the cold range and lit it, and the gas caught with its little blue thud, and she stood with her back to him at the range the way she'd stood the night Coemans read the will, and said, to the kettle:

"He'd not have signed it either. Verhoeven thinks. Staf. He'd have wanted it down."

"He wanted it down forty years and hadn't the nerve," Bram said. "He left you to have the nerve for him. That's a hell of a thing to leave a kid." He said it without heat. Then, after a while, quieter, the third face full on it: "But he picked right, the old bastard. He'd not have left it to me. He knew I'd sign anything for the price of a quiet life." A breath. "He knew you wouldn't. That's the one true thing he ever thought about either of us, and he kept it forty years and only said it with a will."

It was the closest her father had ever come to being her father, and they both knew it, and neither of them was going to say that either, and the kettle began its first thin note on the range, and that was the conversation, that was the whole of it, a man giving a pen back and a girl boiling water she didn't want, and somewhere in it the one true thing got passed between them with no words on it at all.

She went up to the lokaal in the afternoon because she had to, because the brass clock that lied was still standing at the foot of the board where she'd left it, the club's now, not hers, and she'd said you'll have decided it looking at the thing and not in the dark, and that meant the thing had to be lookable-at, and a thing left in a locked room with the light off was no kind of looking. The lokaal was open Sundays for the men to come and read the union results off the fax and drink one and go home. She had a key to the back room because Staf's key had everything on it. She let herself in.

Three of them were in the front, at the long table, with the union sheet and their pils. They went quiet when she came through. Gust was not among them. The quiet followed her to the door of the back room and stopped at it like a dog at a step.

In the back room the brass clock stood where she'd set it, at the foot of the honor board, under the gold.

She'd half-thought they'd have moved it. Hidden it. She'd half-thought she'd come up and find it gone into a cupboard, the green baize wiped, the night put away. They hadn't. Maybe none of them had the nerve to be the one whose hand it was that hid it; maybe that was the same gutlessness that had kept the name up forty years, only now it cut her way for once. The clock stood at the foot of the board in the grey light off the high window, the heavy old drum of it, the keyhole that would never take a seal again, and above it on the varnished oak the names went up in their gold-leaf seasons, Lemmens '71 and '74, Verhoeven '69, the dead chairman Verschueren, and at the top in the thickest oldest gilt, amber under forty years of varnish, the gold lifting at the corners so the M had lost its corner and the second A was half a letter:

MAES — 1958 — BARCELONA.

Still up. They'd not taken it down.

She stood and looked at it the way she'd told them to and felt the thing she'd been braced against all day, which was not the cold street and not the bakery and not even her father with the pen — it was this, the name still up, the gold not gone, because she'd done the loud terrible thing and said it in front of every mouth in the town and the wall didn't know. The wall hadn't heard. The name sat up there in its gilt exactly as bright and exactly as false as it had been on Saturday at noon, and would tomorrow, and the truth she'd torn herself open to say had not so much as scratched the varnish. That's what a town does, she thought. You break the thing and the wall keeps it. You say it out loud and the gold doesn't even flake. They put it up in 1958 and it'll be up when I'm Bram's age unless somebody with a chisel and the union's leave takes it down, and nobody will, because to take it down is to admit it was up wrong, and this town will let a thing be true forever before it'll admit it was ever wrong.

She'd thought the truth was a thing you said and then it was said.

It wasn't. The truth was the clock at the foot of the board. It just stood there, lower than the gold, and waited for someone to be brave enough to put it where the gold was, and there was no guarantee in the wood or the gilt or the whole grey room that anyone ever would.

Then she saw the card.

It was on the green baize below the board, propped against the brass clock — a thing that hadn't been there when she'd left on Saturday night, a thing somebody had come in and put there since, on a Sunday, in the cold, with the men gone home and the light off. A bit of white card, the kind off the back of a feed bill or out of a cigarette packet, torn not cut, the edge soft. And on it, in plain blue biro, in a hand that pressed hard and slanted and was nobody's careful Sunday hand, two words.

Frans Bery.

That was all. No date, no race, no winner, no flourish. Just the name, in biro, pressed hard enough to dent the card, propped against the clock that had stolen it, below the gold name that had taken its place — MAES — 1958 — BARCELONA in forty years of varnished gold leaf, and Frans Bery in ninety seconds of someone's biro, on a torn bit of card, at the foot of the wall where the gold had never gone.

She stood looking at it a long time.

She didn't know whose hand it was. It wasn't Gust's; she'd seen Gust's careful old fountain-pen hand on forty entry forms. It might have been Jules. It might have been one of the three out front who'd gone quiet when she came in and would never say. It might — and this was the thought that got in under the day's whole cold and sat in her chest — it might have been one of the ones who'd turned from her on the street this morning, one of the rounded backs at the bakery, someone who'd been told at his kitchen table what the Maes girl did and was hard against her for it in the daylight and had come up here in the grey of the afternoon alone, on the quiet, where nobody would see his hand do it, and torn a bit of card and pressed the dead man's name into it hard with a biro and propped it against the clock. Both things at once. Cold to her in the street and brave in the dark of the back room. The town in one man. That's how it'll come, she thought. Not in gold. Not all at once. Not where they have to be seen doing it. It'll come in biro, on torn card, by hands that won't put their own name to it — but it'll come.

She did not move the card. It wasn't hers to move, no more than the gold was hers to take down. She'd said the club would decide and the club would decide, in its own gutless brave slow way, in fountain pen or in biro, this year or in ten. But she crouched down on her heels in front of the board, the way Staf used to crouch to read a bird low in the basket, and she looked at the two words on the torn card a while longer, the hard-pressed biro of them, lower than the gold and realer than the gold, and she found she had her two fingers out, not touching it, just held near it, the way you hold two fingers near a keel without yet putting the weight on, reading a thing before you trust it.

Late, she thought. Forty years late. Said in biro by a man too feared to sign it.

But there it was. On the wall. Where the gold had never gone. Frans Bery, coming up out of the dark of the room the way a bird comes up out of the dark of the south — a speck of it, the first faint wrong-shaped dot that might be nothing and might be the thing — and her crouched in front of it with two fingers held near and not yet daring to believe, the way she'd been lifted to the loft window when she was small to be the first to spot it.

Out the front the fax machine woke and chattered out another loft's result onto the floor, and one of the three men said something low, and the radiator ticked, and the grey light moved a half-inch up the oak. She stayed down on her heels in front of the torn card and the clock that lied and the gold that hadn't flaked, and she didn't pray, she wasn't the praying kind, she was the last of the line of people who could look at a thing and feel nothing — except she wasn't, she'd given that up, she'd given it up the night she set the tin on the green baize, and so she crouched there and felt the whole of it, the cold street and the warm loaf and her father's given-back pen and the biro pressed hard on the torn card, all of it at once, the town turning in the dark by the one hand at a time it could spare.

The hen was over the mountains by now. Somewhere south, in the wires, in the lorry's dark, on her way to the Spanish dawn and the long water past it. The choice was made and the card was up and the gold was still up too, and none of it was decided, and all of it was coming.

She got up off her heels. Her knees had gone stiff with the season's crouching, an old man's knees in a fifteen-year-old, Staf's knees, and she let that be true too. She left the card where it was, against the clock, below the gold, and she went out through the front where the three men didn't look at her, and out into the Pastoorstraat where the winding-gear stood black over the dead street, and she turned south at the corner out of long habit, her face up to the empty afternoon sky where there was nothing yet to see, nothing for three days, only the road the lorry had taken getting small at the edge of the town — and she stood there in the cold with her face up anyway, waiting, on purpose, the way the honest things wait, with a clock on them, for a thing that goes out across the water and is late, but coming.