Dimitri Verhulst - The Latecomer

We were planning on informing the children that this might be the last time we would sit together as a family in this garden. The reason was simple: the upkeep was too much for me. It was taking me longer and longer to mow the lawn and the toll it took on my lower back was getting worse and worse; I had started to let nature run its weedy course, and the hedge clippers hadn’t left the garden shed all year. Growing old is no fun, but being old is worse. Besides the garden, there was the exterior woodwork, which needed painting biennially, if not annually. Plus all the other countless jobs that come with owning a house and garden and were now beyond me. A tap that needed descaling, a sagging door, a drive belt that had come off in the washing machine … They became colossal tasks.

‘You’re lazy! You give up much too easily!’ So said my wife. Who else? ‘Just look at next door’s garden, how beautifully that’s maintained. This year Michiel trimmed his hedge in the shape of a swan. If a Japanese tourist happened to pass by, he’d stop to take a photo of it straight away. And how old do you think Michiel is? Three years older than you!’

Moniek saw the struggle against physical deterioration as a competitive sport.

‘Did you see Lucienne? She could hardly walk! You’d think she’d make more of an effort to lift her feet up. I told her, “Lucienne,” I said, “if you don’t show a little more courage in resisting old age, you’ll be dead and buried before you know it! At our age you pay a terrible price for laziness of any kind at all …” Talk about ungrateful, I should never have raised the subject. The look she gave me …’

What Moniek was less keen to broadcast around the neighbourhood was that she too was not immune to the ravages of time. Her elephant marches around the house with a vacuum cleaner were taking longer, and more often than not she had to interrupt her wars on fluff and spiders to catch her breath. On the bike to and from the baker’s she had started to wobble, and for an old-age pensioner with osteoporosis a single smack against the tarmac can be the beginning of the end. A broken hip is our greatest fear.

The process had been long and painful, but we were ready to sell the house and move into a flat in town. She had fought hardest against what she saw as collaborating with decrepitude. One of those little flats people use to adjust to the regime of an old folks’ home was cowardly capitulation …

I should have been relieved when Moniek finally admitted to being ready for something smaller in town, where there’d be a range of shops close at hand and fewer windows to clean. For her, the decisive event had been a fall in the bath: she didn’t hurt herself badly but had to lie there soaking for three hours until I heard her cries for help and was able to liberate her from the tub she’d stepped into independently, but couldn’t climb back out of. Yes, that made the idea of a flat with modern conveniences like a shower suddenly more appealing. But greater than my joy at never again needing to paint an outside wall or exterminate moles was my growing revulsion at having to move somewhere new with this woman. Despite the demands it put on my stiff muscles, this garden had been my haven for all these years, somewhere to be alone for a while. It was where I fed the birds and while I did so I was happy with my place in the universe. In a flat I would have to sit even closer to my wife, chin-to-chin. If we were lucky, we’d find something with a balcony big enough for a drying rack and a flowerpot. I wasn’t looking forward to putting our house up for sale, having estate agents and potential buyers tramping through and quibbling over every penny, the slick conversations with the leeches at all those banks, men who were ready to squeeze you dry if you requested a simple bridging loan, the maze of legal paperwork to negotiate, having to apply for a new telephone number … And on top of all that rigmarole, Moniek again, who wouldn’t be able to bring herself to clear out the attic and say a definitive goodbye to the thousand and one things she hadn’t given a second glance for ages but still considered essential, guaranteeing that the flat would immediately be rendered uninhabitable by piles of junk. Like many women, my wife suffered from chronic shoe-itis: she was incapable of walking past a shoe shop without her interest being aroused. As a result there were one hundred and forty-nine pairs of shoes in our wardrobe, of which she was unwilling to discard a single pair. Add in the scientifically established fact that in nine out of ten cases this condition is accompanied by handbag-itis, and you can rest assured that every available square metre in one of those flats would immediately be taken up by leather goods. I only had to close my eyes to hear her trotting out her full repertoire of clever remarks:

‘Why on earth should I get rid of shoes or handbags to save space? It’s not as if you can take your lawn-mower to the flat with us. Or your chainsaw. Your vice isn’t going to be any use to you either. Work it out! How many shoeboxes fit in a lawnmower?’

No, I couldn’t bear all that. Let alone romantically bickering over the colour of the new curtains, the design of the bathroom, the pattern on the kitchen tiles …. thanks, but no thanks! I had already decorated one house with Moniek and I hadn’t found it romantic back then either.

The vol-au-vents had been served, the mashed potato too. (For Charlotte, who couldn’t stomach vol-auvents, there were cheese croquettes.) And Mother, that epicentre of all that breathed and clipped coupons, said, ‘Kids, we’ve got something important to tell you! Will you tell them, Désiré?’

‘Huh? What?’

‘Will you tell them?’

‘But what?’

‘You know, what we were going to tell them. The news, of course!’

‘The news?’

‘Yes, the news!’

‘Can’t it wait till after dinner?’

‘Why do we have to wait? Isn’t the dinner allowed to know what we’re going to do with our lives? Come on, out with it. The children will start worrying it’s something terrible.’

I said, ‘All right, then, if you insist … Hugo, Charlotte, we have to solemnly inform you of something: namely, that your mother has just bought her one hundred and fiftieth pair of shoes!’

My son-in-law, Pascal, laughed long and hard, but he was the only one.

Moniek then delivered the News herself: ‘Your father is no longer up to washing out paintbrushes, so we’re looking for a little flat in town where he can park his bum in an armchair and fossilise!’

I was pretty sure I could see deep disillusionment clouding her eyes, simply because our children weren’t putting on a show of grief at having to kiss the parental home goodbye. She had hoped for theatrical reactions, sorrowful pantomimes that originated in a carefree childhood whose memory they would cherish forever. But Hugo and Charlotte’s verdict was terse and unanimous: ‘You should have done it long ago. Making Father get up on a ladder with his bad back to paint the window frames or clean the gutters is just cruel …’

And then, a shriek out of nowhere, ‘Tart! I forgot to buy a tart!’

Nutritional experts agree that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but for Moniek it’s dessert, consisting preferably of a tart with a crisp base, butter cream and fruit smothered in jelly. And a blob of cream, of course. Her forgetting to buy a tart for this afternoon was a very worrying sign: if I wasn’t careful she’d get dementia before I did!

‘Moniek, please, don’t worry about the tart, we’ve got more than enough to eat. What’s more, anything we don’t scoff today, we don’t have to worry about losing again tomorrow in the gym.’ (Lisa, the daughter-in-law: someone who always knew her precise body weight. The sight of a potato instantly made her think of potassium.)