The Folding Star Read Free Page A

figure from some ingenious Flemish clock – unlock the gate and start to climb the two hundred stairs to his console in the clouds. Even in the Grote Markt, beneath the stepped gables of the best restaurants and the gilded angels who had paused on top of the Town Hall and raised their trumpets high over taxi-ranks and bus-stands, there was nothing happening. A few visitors wandered out of the glassed-in arcade of the Tourist Office, but the school holidays were almost over and the visitors were studious couples. A few women clambered with supermarket bags into one or other of the waiting buses that showed the names of outlying villages. Sometimes the silent tram came through. These were the days and weeks of a ceremonial square. And then the carillon banged out its lifeless rendering of a folksong or hymn.
    It was the silence that followed that was most challenging. As I went round with my list of addresses the stillness of the town fused with my new suspicion of being watched, of something calculating in the mid-morning emptiness. I found myself coming back with relief to those two or three streets lined with ordinary shops, red flashes of special offers on sausage or coffee on the windows, outfitters and stationers cheerful with skirts, satchels and coloured pens for the
rentrée
. And among the rednosed Brueghel boys with bicycles there were others who looked bored and stylish and desirable. I found myself marvelling that they lived here.
    I saw five rooms in all, but chose without hesitation. The others were such vessels of loneliness, or else too pinned and stifled with rules and considerations for someone who had finally left home. I had a horror of lying there, forbidden to smoke, listening to the cistern filling overhead. It was usually a housewife, garrulous and noncommittal, who would let me in and take me up, observing resentfully as I felt the bed or opened the hanging cupboard. In two of the houses other pallid lodgers were caught on their way between bedroom and lavatory and given a warning. I hardly saw Cherif as a welcome regular in such a place, or the romance of my new life unfurling under such surveillance.
    The room I chose was so hidden away that it gave me the sensation of having entered, with dreamlike suddenness, into the secret inner life of the city. On the street it was a doctor’s establishment, a bare white house with a brass plate polished almost flat. At the side a gated passage led through into a shallow courtyard: the doctor’s residence backed on to a far older range of buildings – rough pink brick, steep roofs with the high-up doors and hoists of warehouse attics. Like a tiny Cambridge college, it had two stairways, one at either end, leading up to disused workshops, storerooms, and, on the second floor, two sets of rooms that were let. One had just been taken by some Spanish girls; the other, which was cheap but primitive, was mine; the old doctor (who still saw a few patients in his retirement) told me in French how pleased he was to have an Englishman there.
    All down one side of the room ran unusually deep cupboards, each with an enamel number, and a door that shut with a boom. I could only occupy them all by putting underpants in one, shoes in two, jerseys in number three; when number four was opened my leather jacket was revealed like a historic vestment in a cathedral treasury, flanked by the monstrances of my special bottles and jars. Each shelf had been neatly lined with old newspaper, held in place by drawing-pins; I turned my head sideways to scan the time-silvered sports news and antique auto-tests. The facing wall was a wooden partition, rough with nail-holes and nail-heads hammered in, that made me wonder what had been stored here, what work had been done here, and when it had come to an end. It seemed an encouraging setting for my own projects, the bits of writing I was going to take up again. Behind the partition was the sleeping area, choked by a high iron bedstead in