How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea
Whose action is no stronger than a flower
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet LXV
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30
He drives through the hot, clear weather, through a landscape that remains foreign to him but that he’s hesitantly starting to love. Sometimes he still misses the city, the colours, the sounds, the distractions. Here it’s different, not worse. The blossom and buzz of spring turned into a promising summer that fled an excess of rain before coming back to confound the approaching autumn. The fields are still sodden. As if not growing dull and blotchy, the crowns of the trees nod with restrained bravura at the sky, incessantly: bring it on. Hop poles bear fat baubles, drunk on themselves, ready for harvest. Lonely dust whips up and catches in puddles. Roundabout art plumbs the depths. He’s not sure whether all of this strengthens or stupefies him.
In a village shared by France and Belgium he sees two men with flat caps and baskets, of pigeons, perhaps. Apart from that, many ponies and a farmer, his glistening tractor circled by seagulls. The other people are hard to see. They’re behind front walls, or, like him, in cars, between front walls.
Today he’s expected in a nice neighbourhood. In this region the houses are fewer than in the other scraps and patches that make up this small country. With its liking for red brick it keeps things simple. Just the occasional Spanish hacienda among the mock farmhouses—he’s yet to spot any pagodas from the Brussels Periphery. The cacophony of building styles, so frequently written off as tasteless, has always cheerily endeared him, the way the houses stand next to each other like twelve-year-olds on their first day at high school, thrown by pure chance into long-term togetherness, adrift in their desperation. It pleases him to see the two modern houses where he parks his van leap out of the monotony.
He lifts the tub of sponges, cloths, rollers, and brushes out of the back of the van and selects one of the pots of paint he’s put ready. Pick Nick, from the Joie de Vivre collection, for the largest of the kitchen walls: his suggestion; their approval.
‘Alphonse!’ he hears as he crosses stone slabs in trimmed grass to the front door of one of the houses.
It’s the woman who lives here, a beautiful woman with a confident voice. He met her the evening they chose the colours. Her sportswear looks new, the fabrics showing no trace of exertion, and the sweat has beaded only at her temples, in the margins of her hair, which is held in a ponytail. She gives an awkward wave. He puts down the paint pot to shake her cold hand.
‘Not been here long, I hope?’ she asks. ‘My husband’s taking our daughter to school and I thought I’d just have time for a run, but part of the route was under water and I missed a turning.’
‘Only just got here,’ he says.
He’s come to repaint their kitchen and living room. He estimated three days, but now he suspects he’ll have it done sooner; they’ve made meticulous preparations. The curtains and socket covers are off, the furniture is in the middle of the room, draped with sheets, and the long kitchen worktop is empty.
A black dog runs at him in ecstasy, skidding and banging its head on a table leg before continuing with undiminished bounce on its original course.
‘Björn!’ the woman shouts.
‘Hi Björn,’ he says. Tail wagging, the dog snuffles at his outstretched hand, then farts and turns round to investigate, shocked.
The woman joins in his laughter, until Björn’s frenzy reignites and she drags the animal by the collar to the neighbouring room, where she shuts him in. ‘I think he’s got a multiple personality!’ she shouts above the distraught howling behind the door. ‘And he misses the cat. Benny. Benny and Björn! As in ABBA?!’
The dog bears more resemblance to a late-1970s hard rocker, thinks Alphonse.
‘They were inseparable. When dogs and cats grow up together they can get to be friends!’
‘Cats mostly live longer than dogs!’ he shouts back.
‘She was murdered!’ and because Björn ends his dirge while she’s saying it, she repeats: ‘Our cat was murdered.’
It’s the denouement of a story she’s eager to tell, a long story that smoulders behind her lips, but this is too soon—she swallows it on hearing her husband’s car.
The husband too has an athletic build. A swimmer.
‘Hey, the Fons!’ he says, as if they’ve known each other for years, and raises both thumbs. His master’s voice reactivates Björn.
He’s forgotten their first names. He must look them up in a moment.
‘Ready for the big job? I wish I could help, but there are plans that need finishing.’
He’s an architect, Alphonse reminds himself. He works from home.
‘I’ve shut him away,’ the woman says as her husband strides over to the door behind which the howling and scratching increase.
‘Shut away?’ the husband asks in a childish voice. ‘Is my very best buddy shut away?’
Wrenched back and forth between mixed but extreme emotions, Björn skitters across the floor, trembling with irresolution.
The man picks him up. ‘He’s a Portuguese Water Dog,’ he says, while the dog attempts to insert its tongue between his moving lips. ‘Our daughter’s allergic to most other breeds.’ He turns his attention and that piping voice back to the thrashing dog, setting it down on the floor: ‘And who else has a Portuguese Water Dog? What am I saying, two?’
For an answer he looks at Alphonse, his hands making a graceful, proffering gesture that transmutes into two pointing fingers, two pistols. ‘Obama!’
‘Well, anyway,’ mumbles the woman. She gives Alphonse’s forearm a brief, feeble tap, announces she’s off for a shower, and hurries out of the room.
The man tickles Björn’s head, then kneels in front of the dog, lifts its front paws, looks deep into its round eyes and whines: ‘You know I didn’t mean anything wrong by that, don’t you?’
‘I’ll get started,’ says Alphonse.
Els and Dieter, they’re called. It’s written on the estimate. Els left after making him a cup of coffee and Dieter has been working upstairs for some hours now, in his study on the other side of the house. He makes frequent trips to the toilet.
In the absence of their inhabitants, houses often inform Alphonse about the kinds of stories they’re going to tell. Or they mislead him. That happens too. A wastepaper basket with children’s drawings torn into tiny pieces, or shrines, or holes in the plasterboard, recently kicked.
Els and Dieter’s house gives little away. They’ve tidied their things into sleek fitted cupboards and drawers. On the walls are pictures of the family in the snow, the family in swimming gear on a slide; the series runs thematically through the four seasons.
One of the living-room walls is made up of large glass doors that look out onto the garden at the back of the house. In contrast to the orderly interior and the front garden’s manicured lawn, it makes an unkempt impression. The ladder against the wooden fence reminds him he’s forgotten his own. He can make do with a chair, removing his shoes to stand on one, but it’s not easy working like that.
Björn keeps Alphonse company, silent but watching his every move. For a long time he believed the barking of dogs came down to one of two messages: ‘Don’t do that!’ and ‘Hey!’ They had nothing else to say. Björn isn’t the first dog to have caused him to doubt this, even yawning along with Alphonse as he stretches after applying the masking tape. Coincidence, he thinks, but it happens again.
He mentions it when Dieter comes down to check there’s nothing he needs.
‘That means he likes you,’ says Dieter.