A Long Silence (8 page)

‘Why worry?' Larry did not even look up from his paper. ‘Are we involved or something?'

‘Well, but…'

‘But what? It was in our cellar for over five years – no question of a speculation there. We made a perfectly fair deal with a third person. If he has dealt illegally we don't even know.'

‘Oh I'm aware how adept you are at invariably finding a third person. It will never be you, my boy, who carries the can, will it now?'

The paper rustled slightly, as though with irritation, but Saint did not allow his voice to rise.

‘I don't see you complaining when there's money to be made.'

‘If it was only in this business – if it was only pictures,' said Louis angrily. Dick, embarrassed, was staying very still, but Prins had perhaps forgotten all about him. ‘There's nothing wrong with this business and one should stick to that, I've said so a hundred times.'

‘You've said so a hundred times,' repeated Saint, in a colourless tone that was somehow more insulting than mimicry. Spire was stung.

‘That girly stuff, and dirty books – I suppose that's trivial, but-'

‘Not to you it isn't!' and this time Saint's voice had an unmistakable edge.

‘These other fishy deals …' Louis's voice trailed off.

‘That's my business,' slowly and coldly. ‘You're the picture expert. You stick to art.' But Prins was not going to be snubbed.

‘Art,' with a snort of real contempt, making for the door. ‘You talk about art as though it were groceries in a supermarket, and to you that's about all it is. You think yourself clever, my boy, and you take all your precautions – oh yes, I realize – but you'll never know anything about art.' He could not slam the shop door, because it could not be slammed, but he went through the movements.

Saint lowered his paper and smiled sidelong at Richard, as though inviting him to share a private joke.

‘Dear old Louis; whenever he gets cranky – you must make allowances, he's no longer as young as he has been – he always thinks he can squash me by telling me I know nothing. The old invariably think that, as you'll have noticed.'

‘My god, yes,' Dick was pleased at not having to be embarrassed any further. It had only been a little spat of words, a little family squabble. ‘And after all he really is a big expert, isn't he, and they can't bear being wrong.'

‘Very good,' said Saint, laughing. ‘Well observed. Of course Louis is a first-class expert, but not on life, as you'll find out. Their trouble is their refusal – or their inability – to understand the limits of their expertise.'

‘What was all that about dirty books?' with immense casualness.

‘Unimportant.' Saint shrugged. ‘Forms a part of any antique business – erotic engravings and all that – what booksellers call the “curious” trade. Any dealer has a few dirty books; that and “occult” – it's part of the business. There are always good customers for it – nothing for you though; the customers like somebody older, they find him more “understanding” of their special needs.'

The morning was much as usual, with Saint absent for most of it. A little before lunchtime he reappeared, pottered about aimlessly for a minute or two, and then said suddenly ‘Come and have a drink, Dick.'

‘Lovely. Though I don't drink much. Can't afford it on my salary.' Saint grinned.

‘That's all right, I'm paying. We won't go to a bar – let's see, you've never been in my flat, have you?'

‘I don't even know where it is. You live on the Leliegracht somewhere, don't you?'

Richard was first surprised, and then impressed. The shabby, mean little entrance next door to the sex-shop did not seem like Saint, nor did the narrow, fusty stairway. That the flat should be so big, so airy – and so rich … he opened his eyes. Persian rugs and some good antique furniture – well, Larry was in the right business to get hold of them. But he liked the creaky old parquet floor with its inlaid pattern in pale hardwood, beautifully lavender-waxed, the superb bathroom where he was taken to wash his hands, the ease and elegance of it all. When he thought of his own ghastly room …

‘Is that really a Renoir?'

‘No, it's a fake,' said Larry negligently. ‘But people think it real when I want them to think it real, which is just as good. Now – Campari, Lillet, Chambéry? Or a real Spanish pernod, nearest thing to real absinthe nowadays?'

‘Campari, please' – since it was the only one he'd ever heard of.

‘What about a cigarette? – those are blonde, those are French and those are reefers, take your pick.'

‘I don't get reefers as a rule,' with a self-conscious giggle. ‘Too dear. I say – pretty good here.'

‘Yes,' vaguely. ‘Ice? A dealer gets his hands on all sorts of things as you are beginning to understand, and some of them can make plenty. That now – no, you needn't bother they aren't dirty books – the poems of Horace in the original binding, sixteenth century, right here in Amsterdam, you'd be surprised what it's worth.'

‘Nice.'

‘Yes, you've got taste. But it's only like your watch, you know: these material things are small fry. The moth corrupts and the rust spots – I say, that sounds Biblical, doesn't it? They get burgled or broken or lost in a fire and where are you then? It's brains that make money, my lad.'

‘You've got to have them first, though, don't you?'

‘Oh one can acquire them,' merrily. ‘I like you, Dick. Been watching you, as you know, and pretty happy with the promise you show. I'll let you into something – how would you like to come tonight? – I've a bit of a party on: I don't want to sound patronizing but I think it's time you learned something of the world.'

‘You bet – but I don't have anything to wear much.'

‘No strain – we don't go for dinner-jackets any more. If you have money, spend it on clothes if that's what you enjoy – if not, a shirt and corduroy pants goes just as well. Grey matter is what counts. What was your comment again – that one didn't always have it? Very true but other people have, or they have talent. One deals in that,' shaking the iceblocks in his drink gently. ‘The best basic capital, Dicky, the most fruitful, the most adaptable. Doesn't get wet, warped or broken. A clever impresario makes a little country girl into a singer – a star. And he refuses ten million dollars for her. Takes skill, I grant, and luck too, but no more than the Stock Exchange, or any of those other nineteenth-century ways of getting rich. Barney Barnato to Bernie Cornfeld, how out of date it all does sound. Like politics, whether it's Perón or Papa Doc – they made plenty, I grant you, but how clumsy, how complicated, how restricted – and dangerous too,' as an afterthought,
‘always at the mercy of some imbecile with a gun. Things can get taken away from you. Finding a thing you understand and using it, like Charles Engelhard – pretty good – gold, wasn't it? Metals, anyway. But human beings are better. Find what the ruck wants, and give it them. When the small fry start getting into the act, then get out.'

‘The ruck?'

‘The populace, my boy, the consumers. The ones with the money.'

‘But if it were as simple as that everyone would be rich.'

‘A surprising number of people are,' blandly. ‘They don't advertise it, that's all. No need to get the tax people in too much of a fluster.' He grinned suddenly.

‘Beginning to sound like a James Bond villain, am I? Doctor No or something?' Richard was a little shocked. Larry had that disconcerting way of putting things. ‘I'm just small fry too. This place is nothing.'

‘Oh, I don't know. You've got some pretty nice things here.'

‘Toys,' contemptuously. ‘Nothing. But I'm learning too, Dicky, you see. This town is nothing much.'

‘What, Amsterdam!'

‘Ach, it's fashionable. People think it's terrific. It's a springboard, I suppose. No, it took me a long while to learn and I've hardly begun to move. I've got my arms free at last. I was stuck in that bog of a shop for too long.'

‘Hey!'

‘Yes, quite, now it's you that is stuck there. And there you'll have to stay for a while, my boy. But it's not a bad place to learn. You have to learn to be lucid, and how to control yourself. Handling people is surgery, that's all. Oh yes, I did a few years' medicine at the university, I was bored stiff, but now I realize it was very good training, you learn to understand the human machine, that's all it is. You learn when to leave things alone altogether, when to let them ripen a while longer. When to make a little incision, and when to cut deep – you have to do that too sometimes, and it takes nerve. There is a flow of blood – and you learn to cut that off. Nobody need be
frightened by a flow of blood, but it does take training. If you're interested in learning I'll find an object-lesson for you one of these days. Meanwhile you get on top of this piddling jewellery business – oh well, it's a milch cow. Like another? The ice-bucket's there on your side. Time before lunch still. And about this evening – you'd like that? – right then, fine, you trot along here around eight or nine – not a dinner, but cold things I get a place to send along for me, so there'll be plenty to eat. Nothing formal, nobody to be alarmed at, just a few people, imbeciles for the most part, make a good first lesson for you. That's understood then. Pay no heed if old Louis gets a bit shirty with you – he might be humiliated at having let his hair down in front of you.'

*

‘A quiet evening,' said Van der Valk yawning, ‘I couldn't for the life of me say why, but I've had a hard day, I think it's Shufflebottom, she's so extraordinarily energetic.' He looked at his wife with pleasure and surprise, both more underlined than was usual after a hard day.

‘I've no wish to contradict,' said Arlette, with a listlessness that was for her unusual too, so that he felt quite agitated: what was wrong with them?

She wasn't getting younger. Discovering she had grey hair, she had become extremely unbalanced about it, and spoken dramatically of ‘un coup de vieux'. In fact it suited her so well that she was prettier than ever, and the grey streak was no more than just noticeable anyway in an ash-blonde, unless one stared madly. But she was a lot thinner, and more energetic in a nervous way: she moved more, as well as more rapidly. She hadn't got over the ‘new flat' yet. It was, true enough, sadly poky. There hadn't been room for more than half the furniture even if they had wanted to bring it: the solution had been to send a lorry-load to France, to ‘the cottage' bought for retirement and now really home. It made the years to go till retirement shorter somehow to know that those things were already there. They had agreed that with his disability pension it would be worth it to retire early, even though
he was not yet fifty. Good-looking woman, he thought.

At present she was nursing a grievance about the television. The place for this, she said with French logic, is in the kitchen, or at a pinch the dining-room – they never had had a dining-room, but since they ate in the kitchen this was a politeness. Dutch kitchens, alas, are very small, and living now for the first time in a modern building where space has been mercilessly economized she had been hit by this. It really was a tiny flat by any standards, doled out with the utmost parsimony. ‘Well, since your children are grown up,' said the housing official, ‘you don't need all those bedrooms,' and everything else had been reduced in proportion. It was true that the boys were never home now, but the principal bedroom was too small even for their bed, so that it too had been sent to ‘the cottage' and they slept on narrow shelves – it was like being in the army. Ruth, their adopted daughter, the only child at home and now a silent, secretive teenager, hated her bedroom too, as much as they did. ‘Beastly little cupboard'; she didn't think much of her new school, either. Altogether Van der Valk was not free of regret at having accepted his glamorous new job. ‘Think of the money we're saving, though,' he said wistfully.

‘Shit,' Arlette had replied nastily, ‘What would we save money for?'

The cottage was paid for. The boys were nearly through their studies and were already talking of the grandiose jobs they had lined up.

‘I see us as a really cranky pair of old biddies,' she had remarked, ‘seeing our children around every six months, when they dump their brats into our laps before disappearing on another Caribbean cruise.'

She hadn't been altogether happy about the cottage, either. ‘I'm sure it will rain all the time.'

‘Quite, and that is why the entire population is growing grapes. It's absolutely right,' said Van der Valk defensively, ‘just midway between' – for he had been taken by Voltaire's distinction between countries where one thinks and those where one just sweats.

‘If we always agreed,' had said Arlette, resigned, ‘life would be very dull. But I'm always bossed about.'

‘You like to be bossed about.'

‘But only after a considerable argument.' She was a poor advertisement, she remarked gratefully, for women's lib.

The new life was very bourgeois. Arlette had found a new hospital to work in, and came and went on a bike, because there was ‘too much traffic for the
deux-chevaux
'. Ruth, who had further to go to school, complained bitterly that she was not old enough to drive the
deux-chevaux
, and longed for a motorbike. He was nearest to his work, so he went on the tram and walked home.

‘What's for supper?'

‘Sort of tart, with leeks in, and cream sauce. Bouh, your raincoat's sopping, and where the hell one spreads it out to dry in this detergent-packet of a place is what I'd like to know.'

‘Has anybody seen my German dictionary?' asked Ruth coming in, crossly.