Free Shutterspeed by Erwin Mortier Page B

spied him do through a chink in their bedroom door one day, and that he was rubbing his stomach over hers, presumably to help settle the food. Uncle often said his wife needed a good cuddle from time to time, or she’d go sour.
    They had left me alone with the dishes, as usual on such occasions. I rinsed the plates under the tap and put them to drain in the rack over the sink.
    Now and then I paused in my labours to take another sip of port. I had been careful not to drain my glass during supper and had smuggled it into the kitchen. I wanted to drink it slowly so as to make the lightness in my head last as long as possible.
    I scoured the sink and caught myself grinning stupidly at the metallic sound of the steel pad against the sides, which reminded me of the mewing of a cat.
    The day was decked in gold leaf. Aunt’s twitters were like a flurry of petticoats up and down the house, invoking the guileless girl she must once have been, as she was in all those snapshots of her childhood: the youngest in a row of nine flaxen-haired children arrayed around their adored, basalt-hewn mother, posing in the yard behind the farmstead where she grew up.
    Later, too, sitting on a rug under a silver willow in the field by the canal with half a dozen girlfriends, teenagers like herself, she is admittedly the only one brazen enough to look up from her knitting, but her gaze reflects little more than the tender greening of springtime.
    At her back Hélène Vuylsteke and Miss van Vooren recline rather fetchingly against the tree. Miss van Vooren clasps her hands behind her neck, the jacket of her two-piece suit unfastened to admit the sunshine, but her blouse is primly buttoned all the way up to her chin.
    Our excursion took us Over the Hills and Far Away
was the somewhat hyperbolic caption penned by Aunt with white ink in the album, which abounded in pictures of prayer meetings as well as pious evening singsongsaround Miss van Vooren’s harmonium. She herself called the instrument ‘my house organ’, which seemed an absurd name for the ramshackle, wheezy apparatus that sent those offensive, nasal tones floating over the cobbles on Saturdays.
    The harmonium would always be open when I came to deliver Miss van Vooren’s groceries, the musical score of some hymn on the stand, presumably to impress her extraordinary piety on anyone who happened to call, but several of the ivories had been chipped or lost over the years, so the keyboard resembled an old man’s gap-toothed grin.
    Aunt Laura had fond memories of the scenes in her album. Each outing must have been like going halfway across the world, for she had rarely travelled further than Bruges or Ghent. She had been to the seaside once or twice, to Ostend, which she remembered well because she and Uncle Werner had spent their honeymoon there, in a small hotel where they served inexpensive meals, as she told me excitedly on the day she bought two return tickets to the seaside as a treat for my First Communion. As it turned out we lost our way as soon as we got there – the small hotel had long since been demolished.
    She did go abroad once, to Lourdes, on a train crammed with crutches and cripples with miraculous expectations, and they had a short stop in Paris, just long enough to pose for a group portrait at the Trocadéro, under the watchful eye of a most combative-looking Hélène who, with Miss van Vooren’s help, unfurled the banner of theCatholic Girls’ Circle, thereby hiding most of the Eiffel Tower from view.
    Two pages further on in the album she is at home, swamped in a sea of bouquets in the living room on her wedding day. She smiles nervously at Uncle, who makes an equally starched impression, as if his mother had given his suit a quick iron with him already in it.
    At the registry office my father signs the marriage certificate as a witness, while Uncle and Aunt look on with a rather dazed expression, but out in the orchard, the formalities over and done with, he stands