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tarnished, the tinkle took some time to die away in the hallway, suggesting spacious, gracious living quarters. Once upon a time there must have been a maid, and even a manservant according to Aunt, but the current mistress of the house had been its sole occupant for years.
    It was a long while before she answered the door. Perhaps she had paused in front of the mirror above the umbrella stand to pat her hair into shape or to straighten the lapels of her slate-grey two-piece suit.
    ‘Ah there you are, Joris,’ Miss van Vooren said drily,checking to see whether I was wiping my feet properly on the coconut doormat. ‘Come in.’
    She did not extend her hand. She never did. I don’t know that she ever really noticed me. In her eyes I was probably little more than a glorified lackey, a shopping bag on legs, something serviceable that only merited attention when failing to respond, which did not happen often.
    I followed her into the hallway. The sound of her clunky heels on the white marble floor tiles drifted up the formal staircase, which seemed all the grander for the landing with a flower arrangement from which protruded long, plumed grasses so delicate as to be pulverised at the least current of air.
    A second door opened, and Miss van Vooren ushered me into the parlour. The dark wooden cabinets and crochet doilies resembling ropy cobwebs were always bathed in a muddy sort of light, as if the sunbeams, having infiltrated the room through the lace-edged net curtains, were imprisoned there, glancing from lampshade to table leg to the plates on display and back again, growing old and stale in the smell of snuff tobacco that billowed towards me each time I entered.
    I found it hard to imagine that Miss van Vooren would indulge in such an eccentric habit as taking snuff. She was generally considered a beacon of rectitude and virtue, which in her case amounted to being incredibly stingy. Uncle Werner used to say she’d sooner lick the floor of the church clean with her own tongue than stump up for a floor-cloth.
    Perhaps she took a pinch now and then as a kill-or-cure remedy for her chronically congested nose, a topic which, when she was feeling brighter than usual, warranted several minutes of conversation with Uncle.
    For some reason he always referred to her as ‘the skinny woodpecker’. But to me she was more like a dried flower in a botanical album, a flattened, faded buttercup or a poppy with vestiges of colour still in the stamens, but almost transparent and powder-dry.
    Aunt pressed me to be polite to Miss van Vooren at all times. ‘She’s had more than her share of troubles, poor thing. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy, what she’s been through.’
    There were rumours, which seemed all the more plausible for the hushed tones in which they were passed on, that she had been jilted at the altar, that she had waited in vain at the church, where the pillars and candelabras had been decked with roses and carnations at considerable expense by her father, a man reputed to prefer sleeping with his money than his wife.
    He had also paid for the crêpe de Chine gown worn by the bride, his only daughter: a shockingly expensive garment according to Aunt, though in my mind it was just as dingy and drab as the old bedspread draped over the sofa on which she now motioned me to sit. She sat down on a straight-backed chair, clasping her hands on the tabletop in front of her in a pose of authority.
    ‘Joris, my boy,’ she said, sounding unusually friendly, ‘we’re one bearer short for the canopy …’
    I was baffled.
    ‘The canopy?’
    ‘Yes, the canopy of the heavens,’ she said, ‘for the procession. We are short of one bearer. Normally the eldest Dobbelaere boy does it, but he’s staying with relatives down south. You’re a bit young, I suppose, but on the other hand I think you’re quite tall for your age, and your dad, God rest his soul, was a good bearer in his time. The priest always used to say: with