A Long Silence (16 page)

I do not want to go too deeply into this, because a lot of it is irrelevant to this story: a point weighing much more heavily with me is that I do not want to intrude upon Arlette's privacy, or hurt her feelings with some remarks she might find gratuitously personal. But it is perfectly reasonable to notice a few ways in which these two complemented one another. I did not know Piet in his youth, but it is obvious enough that he was an uneasy, awkward young man, aggressive about being ‘working class', ashamed at once of his crude physique and of his intelligence which he tended to hide even when I knew him behind a yobbo act which was nothing more than inverted snobbery. Being a bright boy, he had gone to the Hogere Burger School, a sort of superior Dutch grammar school akin to a lycée, where he had been surrounded by boys of a petty-bourgeois, successful-shopkeeper class, jeered at for his accent and his street manners. He lost his father, an artisan carpenter from the poor and crowded Amsterdam district of the ‘Pijp', during the war, and his mother soon after, when he was barely out of his teens. He himself ran away around 1943, got to Sweden and reached England, where for several months he was kept shut up in an internment camp and treated with owlish suspicion – a boy of eighteen … Once back in Amsterdam after the war, his education, his aptitude for foreign languages, his military service record, his quickness at study and an interest in law – all this led him to be accepted as a trainee officer of police.

Of the Amsterdam police-corps at that time the less said the better. Several notoriously corrupt and incompetent elements were purged, for real or pretended collaboration: a few casehardened old commissaires were put on the shelf. Other, and
often equally undesirable persons took advantage of the times – a hysterical and most unpleasant atmosphere of vendetta – to ensconce themselves in positions of comfort. The young Van der Valk early learned a sort of homespun cynicism, and he was delighted when I quoted him the fierce lines from Kipling about

How smoothly and how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind.

Arlette came from a family of landowners in a small way, almost a petty aristocracy in the well-brought-up, traditional, Catholic and conservative French style, and she followed the path of her class:
lycée des jeunes filles
, Faculty of Letters at Aix, the literary-philo formation then still undecayed. Rebellion seized her too, and she too ran away, but she never much liked to talk about this, and I do not know the exact circumstances of how she came to meet and marry Piet, except that it was in Paris, in the heady atmosphere of 1947, where he was celebrating the passing of some examination with a pathetic three-day moment of freedom. They got married, probably very ill-advisedly, and lived in Amsterdam thenceforward in considerable poverty. They clung to one another fiercely. She civilized him, and he rubbed the corners off her. He learned not to be ashamed of his streak of sensitivity towards ‘art'. She did not like Holland, never really understood it, and probably would have been miserable were it not for her passion for music – and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, of which she was a faithful follower, was and is one of the most enchanting there is, with a nervous and wonderfully transparent sound, exquisitely sensitive: ‘not at all Dutch' she used to say crudely: still, she did learn to like and appreciate Amsterdam.

Poor or not, she was an excellent home-maker, good at cooking and sewing, disciplined by early years at keeping silent and sitting upright, and with a real imaginative talent for bringing warmth, love and gaiety into her surroundings, which however tatty or penurious had always the glow and patina of a piece of good old furniture. The equilibrium and
support Piet got from all this brought him through many hard years: although good at his work, conscientious, and undeniably clever he had moments of irresponsibility, a tactless lack of respect for superior mediocrities and above all a tendency to indiscretion, which did him much harm professionally, made him more than one highly-placed enemy, and interfered grievously with his otherwise bright prospects of promotion. A few spectacular and brilliant successes, brought about, he said himself, more by strokes of luck than anything else, saved him from dusty obscurity and an embittering sense of failure which would have destroyed him as a person. She kept him from becoming hardened and coarsened: his own optimism, and a sunny spontaneity, as well as being a generous, kind, and humble person, preserved him from becoming sour and discouraged.

When I was myself poor, miserable and disappointed, as well as singularly ill-educated and ill-prepared for life, they both showed me much kindness – I owe them both a great deal.

Closing this parenthesis, which has been inexcusably impudent, I risk one more personal remark. This is that when I learned about Arlette's behaviour it left me open-mouthed. It still astonishes me. I have heard before of instances in which she displayed a reckless personal courage that sometimes – as he himself admitted – frightened Van der Valk. We were discussing criminals, murders, and such-like things, riding our favourite hobby-horses and generally enjoying ourselves, when suddenly – ‘Arlette,' he said, ‘is capable of anything.' Respect in his voice, and also a real fear, which took me aback and embarrassed me.

The female of the species,' I said with appalling banality.

‘In defence of her home, yes, of course. And the woman criminal who shows an implacability, a ferocity, and a cunning superior to anything a man seems capable of – yes there are well-documented descriptions. And there are examples of women as guerrilla fighters, or in resistance movements – one is astounded. Why should that be, do you think? – is it biological? I mean the so-called feeble sex, with weaker muscles and all those awkward bumps, tender breasts and a
big behind, look how idiotic and repellent the sight of a woman footballer – or wrestlers: unspeakable … The female animal, I mean tigresses and wild cats or whatnot, is as active and muscled as the male, maybe slimmer and lighter but just as active and well-armed. So that the legendary viciousness is not a compensation for being weaker. But in the human species which is altogether different – I mean so much more vulnerable … I've no idea, really … Arlette – a couple of times, I tell you, she's raised the hair on my neck all the way down my spine.'

I have, since, been reminded vividly of this remark.

*

Arlette walked slowly along the echoing wooden platforms of the Central Station in Amsterdam, carrying her own suitcase, down the tunnel, through the hall, noticing nothing. She felt tired, stale, disillusioned. Why had she come? What good would she possibly be able to do? She did not even have any idea of where to go, how to start, although she had worried about it all the way in the train, turning over and over the few rags and scraps of uncertain fact she possessed – or hoped she did. The journey had been like a sleepless night, waking constantly from an uneasy, unrefreshing doze and finding no advance in thought which flickers eccentrically without any logical progress whatever, or in the lagging hands of the clock. She had come here, though she did not know what she was going to do.

She had spent hours drinking with the notebooks, not eating, drinking too much, staring about, lighting cigarettes and throwing them away, frightening Ruth. Sometimes it had all seemed clear and reasonable, and half an hour after she would again be plunged into blind ignorance and indecision., After two days she had said to Ruth suddenly, with a snap, throwing herself into a pattern of action abruptly, as though afraid that if she hesitated longer she would never budge at all – ‘Ruth.'

‘Yes?'

‘Darling – I'm going to leave you alone. I don't know for how long. A week, a fortnight, I just don't know. I'm going
to see this through. I'm going to Amsterdam. I can't give you any address – I've no idea even where I'll be staying or anything. I'm sorry.'

She did not enquire whether Ruth would be frightened alone in a country cottage at night – a girl of not yet sixteen. It is quite possible that this did not even occur to her.

One must say that Ruth was splendid. She said, ‘Yes, of course, darling, don't worry, I'll be perfectly all right.' As though Arlette, at this moment probably quite mad, even in the clinical sense, had ever thought of that!

Ruth did the sensible thing and rang up my wife – who told her to come over, of course.

The woman's round the bend,' she said to me, much alarmed, ‘What should we do?'

Ruth rode her scooter all the way over. It was not too terrible for her to stay with us, as her school is not much further away than from her own home. Plenty of other children living in the country have as far to go, and the train service is designed for this. We weren't worried about her …

‘Arlette's gone mataglap,' was the first thing she said. It is one of the Malay words that has crept into the Dutch vocabulary, like ‘amok' – it means much the same; a temporary insanity during which the sufferer notices nothing, neither pain, fatigue nor fear, and is totally unamenable to reason.

‘What shall we do?' asked my wife again. I thought.

‘Nothing, I think,' I said at last. I tried to explain.

*

Arlette came out into the open air and saw that spring had come to Amsterdam. The pale, acid sun of late afternoon lay on the inner harbour beyond the Prins Hendrik Kade: the wind off the water was sharp. It gave her a shock. A succession of quick rhythmic taps, as at the start of the violin concerto of Beethoven. That she noticed this means, I think, that from that moment she was sane again. But it is possible that I am mistaken. Even if insane one can have, surely, the same perceptions as other people, and this ‘click' is a familiar thing. Exactly the same happens when one takes a night train down
from Paris to the Coast, and one wakes somewhere between Saint Raphael and Cannes, and looks out, and there is the Mediterranean. Or was.

The pungent salt smell, the northern, maritime keynotes of seagull and herring, the pointed brick buildings, tall and narrow like herons, with their mosaic of parti-coloured shutters, eaves, sills, that gives the landscapes their stiff, heraldic look (one is back beyond Breughel, beyond Van Eyck, to the primitives whose artists we do not know, so that they have names like the Master of the Saint Ursula Legend). The lavish use of paint in flat bright primary colours which typifies these Baltic, Hanseatic quay-sides is startling to the visitor from central Europe. Even the Dutch flags waving everywhere (there are no more determined flag-wavers) upset and worried Arlette: she had not realized how in a short time her eye had accustomed itself to the subtle and faded colourings of France, so that it was as though she had never before left home. The sharp flat brightness of Holland! The painters' light which hurts the unaccustomed eye … Arlette never wore sunglasses in France, except on the sea or on the snow, yet here, she remembered suddenly, she had practically gone to bed in them. It was all so familiar. She had lived here, she had to keep reminding herself, for twenty years.

She had no notion of where she wanted to go, but she knew that now she was here, a small pause would bring the spinning, whirling patterns of the kaleidoscope to rest. She crossed the road and down the steps to the little wooden terrace – a drink, and get her breath back! Everything was new – the pale heavy squatness of a Dutch café's cup-and-saucer, left on her table by the last occupant; the delightful rhythmic skyline across the harbour of the Saint Nicolas church and the corner of the Zeedijk! Tourists were flocking into waterbuses, and now she was a tourist too. An old waiter was wiping the table while holding a tray full of empty bottles which wavered in front of her eye.

‘Mevrouw?'

‘Give me a chocomilk, if at least you've got one that's good and cold.'

Another click! She was talking Dutch, and as fluently as ever she had! He was back before she had got over it.

‘Nou, mevrouwtje – cold as Finnegan's feet.' His voice had the real Amsterdam caw to it. ‘You aren't Dutch though, are you now?'

‘Only a tourist,' smiling.

‘Well now, by-your-leave: proper-sounding Dutch you talk there,' chattily, bumping the glass down and pouring in the clawky chocomilk.

‘Thank you very much.'

'Tot Uw dienst. Ja ja ja, kom er aan'
to a fussy man, waving and banging his saucer with a coin.

Neem mij niet kwa-a-lijk; een be-hoor-lijk Nederlands spreekt U daar
. Like a flock of rooks.
Yah, yah ya-ah, kom er a-an
. And she was blinded by tears again, hearing her husband's exact intonation – when with her he spoke a Dutch whose accent sometimes unconsciously – ludicrously – copied hers, but when with the real thing, the
rasecht
like himself his accent would begin to caw too as though in self-parody.

Next door to her were sitting two American girls, earnest, quiet, dusty-haired, looking quite clean though their jeans were as darkly greasy as the mud the dredger over there was turning up off the harbour bottom. Scraps of conversation floated across.

‘She's a lovely person, ever so quiet but really mature, you know what I mean, yes, from Toledo.' Arlette knew that Van der Valk would have guffawed and her eyes cleared.

I see her there, at the start of her absurd and terrifying mission. She has the characteristic feminine memory for detail, the naïvely earnest certainty that she has to get everything right. Had I asked her what those two girls were drinking she would have known for sure, and been delighted at my asking.

I have not seen Amsterdam for four or five years, and it might be as long again before I shall. This is just as well. I do not want my imagination to get in the way of Arlette's senses. Piet, whose imagination worked like mine, saw things in an
entirely different way to her. We were sitting once together on that same terrace.

‘Look at that dam' building,' pointing at the Central Station, a construction I am fond of, built with loving attention to every useless detail by an architect of the last century whose name I have forgotten (a Dutch equivalent of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott). ‘Isn't it lovely?' Lovely is not the word I would have chosen, but it is oddly right.