A Long Silence (18 page)

‘It doesn't make me any happier now,' said Arlette dryly.

‘No, dear, and that's just what I felt in 1940 when my ship got torpedoed. So now let's be very sensible. You've come here very confused and embittered, and you don't want anything to do with the police, and you're probably quite right because really poor dears they've simply no notion, but at the present you've no notion either. You'd never have thought of asking my advice because I'm a silly old bag but I'll give it you, and
it is that you probably can find out who killed your husband, because it's surprising what you can do when you try, but it's as well to have friends one can count on, and you can count on me for a start, and with that my dear we'll go to bed, your eyes are dropping out.'

‘Did you join the resistance, in 1940 I mean?' asked Arlette.

‘Yes I did, and what's more once I threw a bomb at a bad man in the Euterpestraat and that was the dreadful place, the Gestapo headquarters here in Amsterdam and it was very hard because I was horribly frightened of the bomb, and even more frightened of the bad man who had soldiers with him and most of all because I knew they would take hostages and execute them, but it had to be done, you see.'

‘I do see,' said Arlette seriously, ‘it wasn't the moment to take off one's stays and feel comfortable.'

‘Right, my pet, right,' said old mother Counterpoint.

*

Called in the morning with a nice cup of tea, sniffing with pleasure the solid, stuffy smell of an Amsterdam flat whose furniture has not changed its position in forty years, stirring her tea with a silver teaspoon got from saving up the tokens on Douwe Egbert coffee packets, washing in a well-remembered sploshy way because the Dutch are as bad as the English at believing it to be less indecent to scrub standing up than to sit on a bidet, in a house she had lived in, in pain, poverty and happiness for twenty years, Arlette felt strangely consoled and at peace. Here above her head, on the other side of that dingy stucco ceiling with early nineteenth-century baroque ornaments, her husband's feet had made the floorboards squeak, and between the two of them they had made the bedsprings squeak too, and the thought stayed with her through breakfast, so that she asked Bates, ‘Who has the flat, now?'

‘Yours? Some artists, she's very sweet, Hilary, though I'm bound to say as an artist I don't think much of her.'

‘What does she do?'

‘She hammers at things,' said Bates vaguely. ‘But he's really
very good, such a comic little man, just like Mr Gandhi, or is it Mr Kipling?'

‘Does one get them confused?' asked Arlette, startled.

‘Oh one does, dear. India, you know. Oh I know I'm being silly, one is Simla and polo ponies and not a bit sitting on the floor with a tiny fire made out of cowdung, but somehow they're just the same. One had a moustache, but I never can remember which.' It meant little to Arlette, who was vague about both personages, but when taking the milk in – ‘I wouldn't do anything this morning if I were you; just potter, and let ideas come to you' – she met Mr Kipling, or was it Mr Gandhi, in the hall, and instantly understood: a little bald nutbrown man with steel-rimmed glasses, a soupstrainer moustache like Monsieur Clemenceau, dirty overalls and very bright sharp eyes which glanced at her, registered astonishment, and instantly assumed a dramatic expression of delight and enjoyment.

‘Good morning,' said Arlette, feebly.

'Quelle immense surprise
, do you play the piano?'

‘I used to live in your flat.'

‘No! Don't tell me – you must be Mrs van der Valk.'

‘That's right.'

‘I know all about you, you are French, you smell delicious, you used to keep the whole neighbourhood in gales of laughter and you had dreadful fights with the butcher whom you detested because he used to call you “love”.'

‘How do you know all that?'

Third feeble remark in a row.

‘From Marguerite Long, of course.'

‘Hush.'

‘Oh she knows perfectly well we call her that and isn't offended a bit, quite the contrary immensely flattered, come upstairs and have a drink, oh don't worry I won't seduce you although I'd simply love it, my wife's upstairs, she'll be delighted, we've both always longed to meet you.'

‘I was just going out for a walk.'

‘You come upstairs.'

‘Very well,' and she did.

‘Your husband was assassinated,' he said abruptly on the landing. ‘I am so very sorry. Please go in; I don't need to tell you the way.'

And the sight of the hideous Victorian hatstand, which she had been so glad to say goodbye to, made her burst embarrassingly into floods. Mr Gandhi, whose name he had told her was Dan de Vries, was perfect: he paid no attention at all but said, ‘Can you drink pernod at this hour of the day?'

‘Of course I can,' roared Arlette, adding, ‘it's nearly lunch-time' in a sort of muffled squawk.

‘It's breakfast time,' corrected Mr de Vries severely. ‘Hilary, this is Arlette van der Valk, she's crying because she used to live here and her husband as you know got killed, put a stop to it, will you, while I get us a drink.'

‘Whatever you want,' said Mrs de Vries, ‘we've got it or can shoplift it. Cold water, Kleenex, Tampax, several lipsticks, a fried egg …'

‘A drink,' said Arlette, and got a whopper pushed firmly in her hand, took a pull that nearly stood her on her ear, accepted a bent Gauloise, wiped her eyes and said, ‘Talk about making a fool of myself.'

‘Not in the slightest,' said Dan sitting down. ‘I would be doing the identical things in your place, and probably take a great deal longer recovering.'

‘Do you like peanuts?' asked Hilary, delighting Arlette by producing instead of a saucer-full, or a horrid plastic packet in a vacuum, a large glass jar holding at least five kilos.

‘One's childhood,' said Arlette. ‘Sweetie-shops. Peppermint bullseyes.'

‘Precisely,' said Dan. ‘Now classed as works of art, and probably auctioned for vast sums. Christies were flogging sets of cigarette cards just the other day. And twopenny bloods. The Hotspur, the Wizard and the Champion, Biggies with his jaw set behind the twin Vickers. At the time I was the schoolboy genius, four feet high, looking much the way I do now except that my glasses were horn-rim, the terrifying trick spin bowler at cricket. I got Stan McCabe and Don Bradman with successive balls because my shoulder, my elbow and my wrist
were all double-jointed and still are thank god, it's my conscience that's so stiff. Shooting policemen in the street – I have upon occasion imagined myself a partisan but faced with it in the flesh I discovered a kind of moral revulsion, must be the result of reading Biggies as a child.'

‘Not having been a boy,' said Hilary mildly, ‘it's likely that she doesn't know what you are talking about. He's trying to tell you that he wasn't at all happy about your husband, whose ghost is here present.'

‘I know,' said Arlette. ‘I've come to lay it but I don't know how; perhaps you can advise me.'

‘We never advise anybody,' said Hilary, ‘but we'll help you.'

‘So you've come here to get to the bottom of this,' said Dan in a completely different voice.

‘Yes,' said Arlette.

‘Police no good?'

‘It's not the word I'd use. Earnest perhaps but misguided.'

‘They never can see the wood for the trees.'

‘My sentiment.'

‘Have you anything they haven't? I'm not talking about intelligence of course. Anything factual.'

‘I'm not able to say. I think I'd be very glad of your opinion.'

‘Come to dinner tonight.'

‘If you like curry that is,' added Hilary.

‘Yes,' said Arlette. ‘To both.'

*

That afternoon Arlette went into the butchers'. She was going anyway for a good long walk, all around her ‘quarter' and further, to look at things old and new, things familiar and things startlingly unexpected: it would she thought put her in proportion, arrange her ideas, show her what she wanted – she had still no clear notion what this was. To find out who had killed her husband? It sounded easy, until one reflected that the police however wooden were not exclusively composed of people who had fallen on the back of their head in childhood. What could she think of that they had not already thought of? The few uneasy threads of suspicion she had found in her
readings of the notebooks, back there in France in solitude and neurosis, here seemed exceedingly feeble, scrappy and inconsequent. And even if she found out? What did one do? One didn't just lay one's hand solemnly on a shoulder and say, ‘I arrest you in the name of the law.' And suppose there was no proof? Little as she knew of police procedures, she knew from her husband that quite often there isn't any proof. One can know, the police and the judge and the Prime Minister can all know with absolute certainty, and they can't do anything about it at all, and some really nasty people walk about in arrogant ease and careless splendour, vastly rich and respected, laughing their heads off. A depressing prospect.

She went to the butcher to buy something nice for Bates, who had been full of approval at Arlette's eating curry upstairs.

‘She's very women's-lib, but I think she must be a nice woman, and Danny is a sweetie, really so polite it's rather touching.'

She would go, too, to say a polite word. They knew she was around, they had asked kindly after her. She couldn't go dodging about the quarter pretending they didn't exist, avoiding their street like Dick Swiveller. She would walk in, swallow a lot of guff, and walk out again. After all, that butcher had been one of her great enemies for years and years, was a pig-faced swine, a money-grubbing pig, a thoroughly swine-moralled and swine-countenanced swine, expert in every kind of foul fiddle – but still: he had sent ‘heartiest greetings and profoundest sympathies' through Bates. And the veal cutlets, she was bound to admit, had been perfect. She would do her duty.

She hardly recognized the shop at all – in fact she didn't recognize it, and for an idiot moment thought she had taken somehow the wrong turning and was not in the right street. But there was the dry-cleaners opposite, and the bicycle-shop next door, utterly unchanged, not even a coat of new paint in seven years. Her eyes were not deceiving her. The butcher had simply made a lot of money, and this was the explanation of these palatial marble halls. Bates had forgotten to warn
her. She walked in bravely, with an air of preparing to give battle, just like in the old days when she used to go behind his counter and right into the villain's cold-room to teach him how to hang steak. There the swine was, holding his great chopper, as swinish and piggy-eyed as ever. As he saw her the pig blossomed into a lovely happy candid blue-eyed television advert.

‘Mrs van der Valk!' he shouted, dropping his chopper, pushing a heap of mince out of the way, wiping his hands on his apron, darting out from behind his counter and shaking hands with vast enthusiasm and a bit too much muscular force, roaring the while, ‘Schatje, schatje, look who's here.' Which, as it always did, made her want to giggle. He had always called her – or indeed any other woman customer at all – ‘Schat' which means ‘treasure'. But his wife, who was mountainous, he always called ‘schatje' which means ‘tiny treas'. Treas was a dreadful great cow who sat enthroned in a glass cage where she could keep both hands firmly on the cash and still have an eye upon any jiggery-pokery on either side of the counter, in the street, along the pavement, and up through the ceiling into her flat where the hired girl might be stealing bonbons out of the cupboard, but not if she knew what was good for her because they were counted and so by god was everything else. Schatje's real name was Trixie, and the Swine's was Willy, and there stood Arlette, both hands firmly clutched by one while she was slobbered on by the other, astonished to find herself touched, moved, and finally quite swept away. It was all genuine. They were delighted to see her. That hard, tricky, wicked French cow from a stunted, shifty, crooked race which wore berets, smoked opium and lay about all day in the sunshine in whatever time there was left over from swilling pastis, playing petanque and stuffing itself with veal liver – they loved her…

Trixie's eyes were full of tears.

‘The dreadful thing – I opened the paper – and there's not a day goes by without something horrible – and there it was staring me in the face – but if it's someone you don't know somehow it doesn't hit you, love, does it – and my heart turned
over – and I dropped the paper and I screamed – Willy, I shrieked, come quick – my whole day – couldn't eat a thing – I gave a customer change of a hundred instead of fifty, my hands were trembling – and I wished you were here so's I could tell you, love, we've had some fights but suffering wipes out everything I say.'

‘I was that angry,' Willy had taken it up, ‘and the whole day I thought if I had who done that filthy cowardly trick, shooting in the back like that, if I had him under my hand, well schat, I thought, I wished I was in France that's all where you still got capital punishment that's all, there's only one thing for people like that and that's the chop, I told everyone who came in, I said, Piet van der Valk was my neighbour here in this quarter twenty year, no tell a lie thirty year, we grew up together and there never was a straighter, no.'

What a foul bitch I am, thought Arlette. These people are thinking of absolutely nothing but to show me kindness and love and loyalty. I came in thinking of a polite word and a handshake with two pigs who never thought of anything but money, and I'm so cold and selfish myself that it simply never occurred to me. Look at schatje there, her tears are utterly genuine, coming from spontaneous simplicity, and I couldn't cry at all except maybe from humiliation and shame.