Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

We ate a hasty breakfast of dry biscuits and cold coffee. The rain had cleared the sky, clouds were still sliding in front of the sun, but they hung less heavily and darkly in the heavens.

Flemish weather, I called it — and he peered at the sky with a frown. He had to be back at his post by late afternoon, so we hadn’t much time, but before we left he wanted some photos of the monastery buildings.

We passed the kitchen, where a massive coal-fired oven of heavy cast iron was frozen in a cold winter sleep and immediately communicated its coldness to our palms. In the small chapel saints of polychrome plaster raised palm branches or instruments of torture aloft, and looked down beatifically on a flock of empty pews under a mosaic of yellow and blue patches of light. In a corner room next to the corridor the dry smell of yarn and textiles had already alerted me: lace cushions were in two strict rows opposite each other, so that it looked as if the nuns and young ladies in their care had abruptly stopped work when they had left their accommodation.

An illusion of industrious fingertips still seemed to be flitting above those cushions, and above the pinheads around which rudimentary floral motifs had come to a premature stop. The lame bobbins that hung over the edge seemed as heavy as lead. It was as if silence were playing through all that fine meshwork and kept a thousandfold silence under that one light bulb which, on a cable that was too long under a sober porcelain shade, surveyed a collection of chairs spread carelessly across the floor.

I heard something creak behind my back.

He had found the switch by the door, but the bulb remained dead.

The first cloister was connected to a second: smaller and also much older, as could be seen from the weathered pilasters, which bore a gallery of open pointed arches, around a smaller courtyard of pebbles. Only when we had walked round almost the whole cloister did we see at the far end the hole that the impact of a projectile had made in the ceiling. Frayed bits of lath and plasterwork hung around the hole; the heavier beams had fallen through it and were sticking in a pile of rubble, on which, when the sun broke through the clouds and illuminated the openings with its full glow, the ethereal green of grass clumps reached up to heaven.

“Look at that light,” he said. “Simply perfect.”

Like his smile.

We ate a last quick snack on the hill, in the same establishment where we had first seen each other. In the restaurant on the other side of the courtyard the matron still resided at her lectern, just as determined to support the firmament with her hairdo, should it be on the point of collapse. She did not seem to recognize me or consider me worth looking at when she greeted him with a cheerful “ Bonjour, mon cher Matthieu .”

Obviously the house rules had become less strict, since we were allowed to choose our own place in the restaurant, where there were only a handful of customers, all soldiers.

We chose a table at one of the windows that looked out over the landscape. “Wine, dear?” he asked, with feigned gallantry, as he sat poring over the menu and peered at me over the edge — his inward glee produced fireworks in his pupils.

I did not intend to let myself be floored. “I don’t know, da’ling,” I retorted. “White if you must, and not too sweet. It tends to disagree with my stomach…”

“Excellent!” He motioned to the waitress.

I could scarcely fail to notice the wink she gave him after she had noted the order and taken the menu out of his hands, nor the body language of understanding that went on over my head when a second young lady came to arrange the appropriate cutlery next to our plates.

“Blanche and Suzanne,” he said, when I looked at him in bewilderment. “ Les deux filles de Madame Loorius … We call them ‘The Peaches’…”

“Because of the colour or the taste?” I asked.

He laid his napkin jauntily in his lap. “Well, you know the saying, mademoiselle… Mieux on connaît ses pêches, plus on aime les bonnes poires de Flandres .”

“You’re making me blush…”

He giggled and looked outside. The windows were open, letting a cool breeze into the restaurant which drove the oppressive heat of the day before out of the beams. Above the plain the rain of the night before was rising in veils of mist, colouring the fields, wooded banks and distant villages with a blue-green haze, and in the distance became thicker and thicker and obscured the horizon. The clouds were almost motionless above the land. The roads, above which the occasional short flicker of light betrayed troop movements, dissolved in the mist. Farther away, towards the coastline, floated the long, stately cigar-shaped balloons.

“Could sit here for ever,” he mused, looking up as the food was being served. “A bit like Kent… Fewer fruit trees, however. Though I like the French accent…”

We ate. He looked happy, and I did too, an innocent, pure happiness — in my breast a child threw a handful of poppies into the air. We looked at each other in turn above our plates, and smiled.

“And now, mon cher Matthieu ?” I asked as light-heartedly as possible when we had finished, imitating the intonation of the matron, who had left her unassailable position, probably to have lunch herself.

He was playing with the tip of his fork on his plate — something that my mother would not have taken as a sign of a good upbringing — and then looked up. “It may be some time before we see each other again,” he said. “Got meself detached.” He put the fork down. Pulled a face as if his tongue had found something unpleasant between his teeth. “Guiding spoilt, obese Americans. I’ve had it … I can travel with a regiment, off to Belgium as a matter of fact…”

“When?”

“Soon…” He signalled that he wanted to order coffee. “I can move more freely, Helen. Down here, it’s rules, regulations, rules… Drives me mad it does… Besides”—he tapped with his fingers on the small hand camera that lay next to him on the table—“must make the best of Mummy’s allowance…”

He meant the legacy that his mother had left him at her death. “She married down. Know what that means, ‘down’? Beneath her class, not many steps or rungs, but obviously enough to make her anathema to her blood relations, while on her husband’s side, well-to-do but modest middle class, she proved too precious in style to win much confidence. It wasn’t exactly a huge success, that marriage…”

So after her death his father, a gynaecologist, decided—“She died of excitement, as you can imagine”—that a new house plant was better grown in more familiar compost, and that his son, if he was not at boarding school, could not thrive better than with his mother’s family.

Hence your French, I thought as I listened to him. Hence of course also the obscenities with which he liked to lard his sentences, perhaps to test me. He spoke the swear words too emphatically. They did not trip off his tongue the way they did with the chaps from the slums — who found it as difficult in their way to mask their origin. They who belonged “down”. He mixed their patois with his words the way he stirred cream into his coffee: in small doses.

I tried not to let him notice that he had thrown me. “Perhaps you’ll bump into my brother,” I said, in an attempt at lightheartedness. “He’s with the engineers now, I think.”

“One never knows,” he nodded. “It’s a small world over there, mais peut-être un peu surpeuplé …”

I was silent.

He saw I was finding it difficult to hide my disappointment and put his hand on mine. “Helen, look at me… We’ll write. OK? Besides, it isn’t as if I’m leaving for New Zealand, is it?”