The House with Nine Locks, page 2
Everyone wanted to know what was inside the crate.
‘I’ll need a crowbar from your father’s workshop,’ Cornelis said, ‘if there is one.’
Lennart de Wolf was standing in the doorway with his arms folded. As a small sign above him made clear, he mended watches and clocks for a living. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said, going into the house, and returning a few moments later with a chisel.
The present was heavy. It took three of them to lift it out of the crate. The first thing Adelais saw was a large leather bucket seat. It was followed by a pair of bicycle wheels next to each other, and a complicated arrangement of metal tubing, gears and chains, attached to a third, smaller wheel at the other end. The mudguards and chainguards were red.
‘One careful owner. I hope you like the colour.’ Cornelis handed Adelais a booklet. The pages were dog-eared, and there was a round stain on the front cover where someone had placed a mug. On it was written:
THE ‘NETLEY’
A LIGHT RUNNING INVALID TRICYCLE
FITTED WITH FIRST CLASS PNEUMATIC TYRES
R. A. HARDING (Bath) Ltd.
Adelais didn’t know much English, but she did not have to understand the pamphlet to realise that there had been a mistake. She had suffered two great misfortunes at the start of her life: the invasion of her country by the German army, which had occurred a few weeks after she was born; and the invasion of her body by the polio virus, which had followed not long afterwards. Adelais could hardly remember the Germans now – no one in the family talked about them – but the virus had left her with a permanent reminder: a malformed knee and slack ligaments in her right leg. Walking was possible over short distances, with a stick or with the heavy steel support her father had hammered together, but cycling in any form was impossible. Like hopscotch, it was an activity she could only watch.
Adelais knew she should say thank you, but she found her face growing hot at the thought of having to remind her uncle about her leg, in front of everyone. How could he have forgotten about it? Did he imagine her leg was going to mend itself? She glanced at her father: his frown only confirmed what a thoughtless present it was.
‘Thank you very much, Uncle.’ Adelais’s burning cheeks made it impossible to look at him. ‘It’s very kind of you.’
Maybe she wouldn’t have to explain. Maybe they could take the machine and hide it in a corner of the yard and forget about it – like the china nativity angels Grandma Mertens had once given them. They had stayed on display on the mantel for a week, before mysteriously disappearing. ‘They flew back to heaven,’ her father had explained eventually, ‘where they belong.’
Herman Wouters had no use for discretion. ‘Adelais can’t ride a tricycle. She’s got a funny leg.’
With a plap Mrs Wouters’s hand connected with the back of her son’s head, but he was not deterred. ‘It’s true!’
Uncle Cornelis squatted down in front of Adelais and opened the booklet. A diagram of the machine indicated its various features. ‘This is a rotary handcycle. You don’t pedal with your legs. You pedal with your arms – here, see? And I happen to know that you have excellent arms.’
As if to prove the point, he gave them a squeeze. Adelais’s arms were as thin and weak as any eleven-year-old’s, but at that moment they felt powerful, as if her uncle’s words were enough to transform them.
‘It’s a lovely thought,’ her mother was saying. ‘But isn’t that thing a bit heavy for her? And the roads are so dangerous. Maybe if we wait a year or two—’
Adelais launched herself into the seat. She could already see herself careering down the streets with the wind in her hair, passers-by waving, children like Edwina de Groote jumping out of the way as she crashed through the puddles. On her first-class pneumatic tyres she would fly across the city like a witch on a broomstick. People would turn to look at her, instead of looking away, which they usually did when they saw her limping along. It would be like starring in a film.
She knew what to do: the crank arms were in front of her, at chest height. The crank turned the chain, and the chain turned the front wheel. The whole mechanism could be swung to left or right, like a ship’s rudder. Her legs weren’t needed at all.
She gripped the handles, pushed with her right hand and pulled with her left.
‘That’s the idea,’ Cornelis said.
The crank began to move. The chain tightened. The tricycle rocked forward an inch or two, stopped, and then rolled back again.
‘She can’t do it,’ Herman Wouters said. This time nobody slapped him.
Adelais tried again, putting all her strength into it, but the crank would not turn more than a couple of inches.
‘Told you.’
‘Nonsense,’ Uncle Cornelis said, ‘all she needs is a push.’
He got behind her and planted his hands on the back of the seat. The tricycle began to roll forward. Adelais found she could turn the crank, slowly, painfully. By the time she reached the street she was almost up to a walking pace.
‘She won’t make it fifty metres.’ It was the other Wouters boy this time. ‘Not before dark anyway.’
His brother laughed.
But he was wrong: Adelais got as far as the corner of Jan Roomsstraat, which was almost a hundred metres, before the others had to come and push her back.
The de Wolfs lived in the eastern district of Sint-Amandsberg. From the little attic room at the top of the house, there was a view across the rooftops and chimney stacks all the way to the three spires that marked the heart of the city. It was in the attic that Adelais’s father found her that evening.
Adelais did not often go up there. The stairs were narrow and steep, and Mrs de Wolf had never liked her daughter using them unless she had to. Until recently, she would insist on escorting Adelais whenever she went from one floor to another, even when it was to use the closet. Worse, she would wait outside the door until Adelais had finished, so as to be on hand to escort her back again. She even did this when they had guests. Tonight though, after finishing her puzzle of the Taj Mahal, Adelais had found herself unsupervised. She had stolen some gingerbread and made her way to the attic as the sun was going down.
‘What are you doing up here, Ada?’ Adelais’s father was tall, and had to stoop to pass through the door.
‘Nothing.’
Adelais had been thinking about all the sights she was going to visit on her handcycle, once she had built up the necessary strength. On this point, Uncle Cornelis had been encouraging: just as blind people developed sharp hearing, he said, so she would develop strong arms. It was Nature’s way. To prove his point, he had set her a challenge when no one else was listening. ‘I’ll give you three hundred francs if you cycle to the Devil’s House and back again, in one go.’
The Devil’s House was a fortified mansion on the southern side of the old city. These days it housed the Public Records Office, but many centuries earlier it had been occupied by an aristocrat called Gérard Vilain. According to legend, Vilain had earned the nickname Gérard the Devil because all five of his wives died in mysterious circumstances, one after the other.
Adelais’s father was holding something. It was another present, wrapped up in brown paper and string.
‘But you already got me the scarf,’ Adelais said.
‘This is something extra. I don’t know if you’ll like it. I just thought …’
He handed over the gift. Inside the wrapping was a picture inside a frame: a sketch of a stone bridge over a deep ravine.
‘It’s an etching, with a hand tint. I did it a long time ago, when I wasn’t much older than you. I thought we could hang it in your room.’
Adelais said she would like that and her father smiled and went to fetch a hammer and a nail. In truth, the picture was not one Adelais would have chosen for herself. She would have preferred a photograph of Katharine Hepburn wearing slacks, like the one she had seen in a magazine. But she did not mind. She was still thinking about her uncle’s challenge. The first thing she had to do was work out the shortest route to the Devil’s House. Every day, she would go a little further, setting down her progress in a notebook. Then, the only issue would be how to spend the three hundred francs.
Over the months that followed Adelais stuck to her plan. ‘I’m just going to ride around for a bit,’ she would say, if anyone asked. Sometimes, for the sake of variety, she would say she was going to play with the Wouters twins, which nobody seemed to think incredible.
‘As long as you’re back for supper,’ her mother would say.
Within a fortnight, unbeknown to her parents, she had reached the big avenue that cut across Schoolstraat. By the end of the summer, she had passed the end of the ship canal in Dampoort. She hid her notebook under her mattress, in case her mother read it, and put an end to the enterprise. But Mrs de Wolf did not find the notebook. If anything, she was more preoccupied than usual with her own affairs. By Christmas, Adelais had crossed the River Leie, just a few hundred metres from the Devil’s House.
Uncle Cornelis visited them often during this time, motoring over from Brussels, but nearly always in the evening, and often after Adelais’s bedtime. She would hear him talking with her parents late into the night. Sometimes there were arguments. Whenever he saw her, though, he would take her to one side, and ask how she was getting on with his challenge. ‘Am I going to leave here three hundred francs poorer?’ he would ask, reaching for his wallet.
Adelais could have lied and claimed the money. She had a feeling her uncle wouldn’t have minded. Perhaps he even expected her to cheat. But she was not tempted. She dreamed of showing him, of cycling all the way and back, with him following in his car. That way, nobody could doubt her, or call her a liar. And she would have done it, if it hadn’t been for the accident.
THREE
For the last six months, Adelais had been having weekly sessions of experimental physiotherapy. Normally, such treatment would have been too expensive for the de Wolfs, even with Mrs de Wolf putting in shifts at the linen factory, but Ralf Helsen was an old family friend, and only charged a fraction of his normal rate. The doctors at the hospital had warned that the unnatural gait forced on Adelais by her deformed knee might have a knock-on effect on other parts of her frame as it developed: her hips, her spine, even her good leg. That was why every Thursday afternoon after school, Adelais and her mother would take a tram to the neighbouring district of Heileg-Hart.
Dr Helsen’s treatment was concentrated on Adelais’s back, thighs and buttocks. The gluteal muscles in particular were vital for the development of a balanced posture, he said. They would need to be strong and flexible to relieve the strain on her joints.
Adelais was made to sit upright with one ankle resting on her knee, and lean forward again and again, until her nose was touching her calf. She would have to lie on her front with her good knee tucked under her chin, and hold her bad leg clear of the examination table until it began to shake like a jelly. There were a dozen different tortures in every session, some of them involving contraptions of Dr Helsen’s own design, made up of weights, ropes, pulleys and gauges. These would introduce a greater degree of precision to the proceedings, he explained. Sometimes he would coach her through her exercises. At other times, he would wander off to consult a book.
With her mother off shopping, the only distraction during these long sessions was provided by Dr Helsen’s daughter, who would walk into the consulting room unannounced. Saskia Helsen was the youngest of five children, and the same age as Adelais. Her older brother and three sisters had been raised with a fairly normal amount of guidance, but by the time Saskia had come along, her parents’ capacity for nagging had been utterly exhausted. Saskia did whatever she wanted to do, went wherever she wanted to go, and said whatever she wanted to say. No one ever told her to go to her room, or mind her own business, or watch her tongue. At least, that was how it seemed to Adelais, as she stretched and strained, laid out on the examination table, a slave to Dr Helsen’s regime and the implacable demands of her leg.
On the other hand, Saskia knew things that eleven-year-olds didn’t usually know. By some distance the youngest in her family, she regularly overheard her older sisters complain about their husbands, and her mother’s response. She had a fairly clear idea where babies came from, and why the virgin birth was a miracle. She even knew what sort of woman a slet was – all information that was as new to Adelais as it was disturbing.
‘Mother says husbands want three things from their wives, and they’ll only behave themselves if they get at least two out of three.’
Saskia’s head had popped up at the end of the examination table as Adelais was recovering from a stretch. Dr Helsen’s youngest had large, startlingly pale green eyes and dark, shoulder-length hair parted on one side.
‘So, what are they then?’
Saskia counted them out on her fingers: ‘Compliments, conjugals and cuisine.’
‘What are conjugals?’
‘I think they’re like physiotherapy. That’s what it sounds like.’
Adelais thought about her own mother and father, and what passed between them. There was always cuisine, if that wasn’t too fancy a word for it, but she was fairly sure there was no physiotherapy. As for compliments, her father got very few of those. What he got were complaints, mainly about all the things they couldn’t afford. ‘What if a husband only gets one out of three?’
‘Then he goes off with a slet.’ Saskia shrugged. ‘That’s kind of what they’re for.’
Adelais did not like the idea of her father going off with a slet, but it wasn’t an easy thing to picture. The few times she had seen him out without her mother – at a bar or at the archery club – he had always been in the company of other men.
‘How’s the bet?’ Saskia asked. ‘Have you got your three hundred francs yet?’
After keeping quiet for several months, Adelais had finally explained Uncle Cornelis’s challenge. She had wanted something interesting to say in return for the information about Saskia’s sisters and their unsatisfactory husbands. ‘Just half a kilometre to go.’
‘And half a kilometre back again. So that’s actually a kilometre.’
‘I suppose it is.’ Another kilometre on the handcycle was not a trivial distance. As it was, Adelais completed every trip with gritted teeth. Sometimes her arms were so sore afterwards she could hardly lift them.
‘You can always stop for a rest.’
‘No, I can’t. I have to do it in one go, those are the rules.’
‘No one would know.’
‘I don’t need to cheat. I can do it.’
Saskia went to the window and peered out through the lace curtains. Dr Helsen’s was a grand house with four storeys and a facade of classical stonework, like a Greek temple. Adelais’s mother said his family had never been short of money.
‘Do you think he’s right then, your uncle?’ Saskia said.
‘About what?’
‘Nature. Like blind people who can hear like a bat. Less of one thing and more of something else, to make up for it.’
‘My uncle’s usually right.’
Saskia sat on her father’s huge knee-hole desk. Dr Helsen was on the telephone in the next room. ‘What about boys?’
‘Boys?’
Saskia swung her legs back and forth. ‘I was thinking, if you didn’t want to waste your time on boys, if all they wanted was to be fed and pampered like babies, would there be something else to make up for them?’
‘Like being a nun, you mean?’
‘God, no. A nun? I’d rather be dead.’
Adelais was shocked. In her household, brides of Christ were spoken of with reverence. Adelais’s mother had wanted her to go to a religious school, where all the teachers were nuns. This led to arguments, because her father had been against it. Mrs de Wolf had given in only because the community school was a hundred metres away, close enough for Adelais to get there on her own.
‘They have to wear nightdresses in the bath,’ Saskia said. ‘Did you know that?’
‘Nuns?’
‘My sister Madaleen stayed at a convent once, and all the nuns got in the bath with their nightdresses on, even the Mother Superior who was at least seventy and almost dead.’
Adelais considered this information. ‘Were they trying to save soap?’
‘No. It was so they weren’t tempted.’
‘By what?’
‘Their bodies, of course. Tempted to do things.’
‘What things?’
‘Wash each other or something, scrub each other’s backs. That’s how it starts.’
Adelais tried to picture the scene. ‘My mama scrubs my back sometimes. It’s nice.’
Saskia nodded. ‘Exactly.’
The clock on the wall said the session was almost over. Adelais picked up her shoes, and began to lace them up. She had a good idea what Saskia was really getting at. She was thinking that a girl with a deformed leg, who couldn’t dance, and needed help to climb out of the bath, a girl whose hair was always untidy and whose only friends were sickly or chronically shy – a girl like that was unlikely to find herself a sweetheart or a husband, one worth having at any rate. If Saskia didn’t put it like that, it was only because she did not want to seem unkind. But she needn’t have worried: Adelais had already decided that boys were not worthy of her attention. What was more, everything she had learned about the older Helsen girls and their unhappy marriages had convinced her that grown men were no better. If anything, they were worse. The wisest course of action was to steer clear of them altogether, and she resolved there and then to do exactly that, forever.
Forever lasted until the following morning, when Adelais struggled into her blue dungarees and set off on the handcycle towards the River Leie. It was then, approaching the Sint-Joris Bridge, that she set eyes on Sebastian Pieters for the very first time and, in spite of his being a boy and of no possible interest, saved his life.
