Double-Barrel (10 page)

Nobody, not even the adjutant, a shrewd enough chap too, guessed that I was a policeman. None of them had any real work to do, and all were delighted to find that a superior official from the Ministry of the Interior had nothing to do either, liked nothing better than a quiet natter, and had not, apparently, come here to disturb their repose. We were all friendly bureaucrats together, masonic, machiavellian, and determined that whatever we did it would take a minimum of one year to do it, because no problem is Unimportant.

But few of these folk were from Drente. Like all government officials, they were posted hither and yon at the whims of their superiors, and their opinions of Zwinderen, while illuminating, were not all that helpful. I wanted to get close to the local people, and it was just that which was so difficult. I knew, now, the silence that would fall in any haunt of the real natives if I put my nose in at the door.

I got disgusted towards the middle of the afternoon with being a functionary, and went to develop my theories in Mr Besançon's company.

‘You are an expert in being a suspected stranger. Not only a foreigner but a conjuror. In other centuries you would undoubtedly have been denounced as a witch. In this century you are simply suspected of writing obscene letters.'

He smiled behind his table, where he habitually sat, I had noticed. It was a big, very solid table, ordinary softwood, put together by some local carpenter. Its legs were not turned, but rounded roughly by eye with a spoke-shave; its broad top was marked and scored by tools, hands, use, wear. A good table, and he sat there comfortably at it, as much of a king as a minister behind some pompous mahogany twirlygig in Carlton House Terrace. When he spoke, or listened, his hand passed often over the wood, much as though he got pleasure from the sturdy outlines. I liked that; I would have done the same, perhaps.

‘It is largely my fault,' slowly. ‘My doing, then. I avoid contact, I bury myself behind my wall, I have outlandish ways.'

‘Has the wall any special significance?'

‘It is an anachronism, which I accepted gratefully. A century ago, I suppose, it kept the lunatics in and deprived the public of a good stare. It still does. I lived for so long in public – I asked for nothing better. But a wish for privacy is always distrusted; seek it, and they think you wish to be rude.'

‘Ha. I have noticed.'

‘I do not think of it as a protection from a hostile world. It has no mental significance to me. Simply a high blind wall to keep out the curious and the prying. I admit that I sought it out, that I enjoy it. You might even say I deliberately erected it.'

‘A high blind wall. Uh. Mine is not blind – a glass wall. But I can neither hear nor speak. A deaf wall.'

‘It worries you.'

‘Very much. You see, if I am any good at my job at all it is because as a rule I am quick to make contact with people. I talk freely to them, and tempt them into being as free with me. Then I can feel them, smell them, taste them. I'm halfway then to understanding. Without that I can never get far. This business has flummoxed policemen who know more about the local people, who are probably cleverer than me. Since I don't understand, how can I get anywhere!'

‘There are any number,' said Besançon slowly, ‘of things in the world – often tragic, even terrible. One does not understand, and one never will. The human being stands there helpless, at a loss, often terrified.'

‘That is true.' I found myself thinking of the children with leukaemia, the clinic in Corsica; I had read about it a week or so ago in
Paris Match
. The professor in Paris said, ‘Sir, your cure is worthless.' The Corsican peasants said, ‘Give every child a chance.' Who was right? Both, obviously.

‘Is this affair really so important?'

‘Not a bit, relatively. The prevalence of road accidents is much more important. To me it is, first because it's my job to stop this kind of thing, second because I got sent here specially, told point-blank that the others had been flummoxed but that I'd better not be. I need to win this one, otherwise I'll stay a post-office counter-clerk my entire life … It does have a certain importance all the same. Not so much in the death of two women – but an attitude of mind that is all wrong, and which I think is
the underlying cause. A certain parallel with persecuting Jews.'

‘This I don't follow,' said Besançon politely. I realized that I was gibbering.

‘I mean that this is perhaps a small unimportant example of something we see everywhere. A mass hysteria that grows out of a mass self-deception, a mass neurosis. There is something wrong with life – blame it on a handy scapegoat. Jews, communists, negroes, Cubans – you name it, we've got it in stock. Here, so my feeling is running, there's a tendency to hate strangers. As though they were saying, “We were poor perhaps, but everything was all right till you came along.” I am afraid I'm probably exaggerating this. Very likely I am. But so far, it's all I've got.'

Besançon asked, suddenly, the same question as Arlette.

‘And these people who have received letters – were they strangers?'

‘No idea. Don't think so, particularly. But I've no real idea, because I'm never likely to find out just who has had letters. But don't misunderstand me. It's not a real physical parallel. The letters haven't any nigger-go-home angle. Just that I get a sense of a community that is tight and closed against outsiders, and a little unimportant internal upset like this has a destructive effect that may become serious. What causes the disruption?'

‘Your interest in Jews – you simply think that whatever was wrong with the Germans, they tried to make a scapegoat of the Jews?'

‘I suppose that seems obvious enough; it's very broad. I couldn't narrow it much; I know nothing about Jews and precious little about Germans.'

‘So you're not drawing a parallel; you're taking a vague idea as an illustration.'

‘Yes.' I wondered why the point seemed so important to him. I had only brought it up, as he said, as a vaguely illustrative notion.

‘Perhaps I'm making a mistake. You have only to correct me if that is so. You come to me – and you are very welcome – and you give me confidences, almost.'

‘That's true. It's a way I have.'

‘It wouldn't be a scheme, would it – quite a carefully arranged scheme?'

‘To pretend to confide in you, as though spontaneously? With what object? To incriminate you?'

‘It has been known.'

‘I see that you know quite a lot about policemen.'

He smiled.

‘I wouldn't be above it if I thought it necessary. Should I suspect you of something?'

‘I am no judge of that. I have been suspected of so many things.'

‘You are sensitive.'

‘I have been interrogated by many, many policemen in my day. Perhaps now I put myself as it were automatically in the position of suspect.'

‘I came, quite frankly, finding somebody intelligent, to pick his brains.'

He smiled again. ‘What I have is at your disposal.'

I changed the subject. There was no use in pursuing it.

Arlette, when I got home, was looking out for me. She had taken my instructions, my silly plan, very seriously, and had filled four pages of one of my scratch pads with pure ethnographic research, quite trivial and absurd, and probably very valuable. I could turn it all over to a sociologist from the University of Yale who was making a survey of provincial towns. Like the man who wrote the absorbing book about the status seekers. I read it all
carefully. She stood like a self-conscious schoolgirl having her essay corrected.

‘One thing happened that was a little odd. I didn't know how to put it down briefly; I thought I could tell you if you were interested; you can judge for yourself. I'm probably imagining things straight away – I knew I'd be no good at this.'

‘Tell me.'

‘Housewives' snooping – incredible. If I lived here I'd turn into a window-peeper too.' She was indignant with herself.

‘Tell me, then.'

‘It's nothing really, and in Amsterdam I would have paid no heed at all, if I'd even noticed, which I probably wouldn't. And I wouldn't have listened. Here I did listen – avidly.'

I had to laugh. She wasn't only indignant; she was ashamed of herself.

‘Woman. Stop tantalizing. Nothing is important, but observe whatever you see with total accuracy. You never know, you may discover the long-sought cure to the common cold.'

‘Well …' Plunge. ‘A couple down the road had a fight. Three doors down opposite. That's – let's see – number ten. There's a man and his wife and they have a little girl about five; long hair tied in a bow with a ribbon.'

‘I'm trying to place them in my mind.'

‘He has a little beige car, sort of butty-looking.'

‘I know – Fiat eleven hundred. I've got him; he's a traveller in seeds and plants and things.'

It amused her, and slightly horrified her, that I was paying attention. That I had my notebook out, and had written on top of a clean page: ‘Mimosastraat. No. 10. Beige mille-cento.' She was a witness; I was taking her down. I could see that she felt this to be a bit immoral after fifteen years of being married to me.

‘I've learned a good deal of miscellaneous gossip about the whole street.'

‘You tell me everything in order. Continue with the row.'

‘The first I heard was, I was ironing in here and heard a door slamming, front door it sounded like, and a woman's voice screaming, “Peter, Peter!” So I remembered what you told me, and flew to the window – I may say that every wife in the street did exactly the same. The auto door banged too; that was the man – Peter, I take it – getting in. She flew out after him, got into the car too just as it started, and there seemed to be a sort of struggle inside, because the auto lurched all over the street. I suppose she was hanging on to the steering wheel but I couldn't see properly' – conscientious. ‘Anyway it stopped down the street, out of my sight.' She went a bit pink. ‘I went to the door and looked. You did tell me.'

‘You weren't the only one, I'll bet.'

‘If I hadn't I'd have been the only one. But I thought myself a dirty bitch, standing there blissfully enjoying someone else's private troubles. It was a very suburban scene. I mean – here, everything seems so hidden and hushed up, and therefore everybody peeks. At home nobody looks because they don't seem ashamed – people do often have fights on the pavement, after all. When they aren't ashamed, one doesn't feel ashamed oneself. Remember Mrs Brooks the greengrocer, in her nightie, racing down the street at three in the morning screaming, “Put down that black thing” – we did so wonder what she meant.'

‘Everybody looked then.'

‘Only because she made such a racket she woke us up – and I did so wonder about the black thing – and because I hated Brooks; slimy thing, wanting to rape one if he as much as sold half a pound of carrots.'

‘Dear Mrs Brooks – extraordinary clothes she did wear … But we're digressing. Back to Peter.'

‘They'd come to a standstill and were having an argument
but I couldn't make the words out. He got out then, and made as though to walk on, but she ran after him and clung. She kept on with Peter, Peter.'

‘What time was all this?'

‘About three; all the housewives drinking tea. Half the men in the street are travellers, commercial reps or whatnot – one often sees them at home in the afternoons. Good: Peter sort of shrugged her off, and she went down on her knees and clutched his leg. To stop him getting away, looked like. He turned round – they were at the end of the street – and I suppose he saw a whole row of housewives staring their eyes out, and I dare say that cooled him down. Anyway he suddenly turned back towards the house. She after him, and tried to hang on again. You could see she was really in a state; didn't care who was looking. Just in front of the door of their house she started clutching again and I think suddenly he got mad because he gave her a real four-penny one. I bet she has a black eye. That snapped the tension; he just took hold of her and brought her in and shut the door. There wasn't any more. Just silly, but I did think I ought to tell you.'

‘Quite right, because I'm very interested.'

‘Really, or do you say that to encourage me?'

‘No, really. And now tell me the answers to a few things. Do you think he was mad at her all along? I mean that he walked out because he'd come in and found her in bed with the butcher – or just that he got mad at her making a scene in the street?'

‘That more, I think, because he seemed quite calm and controlled till the last moment, when he smacked her – but I could be quite wrong.'

‘Did it seem as though she were trying to excuse herself for something she had done, or was supposed to have done?'

‘Not really. She had a sort of begging voice – it could have been. Don't leave me, or just Don't do it – whatever it was he was wanting to do when he got in the car. Oh yes,
getting in – it took her a moment to get the auto door open – she shrieked, “Don't tell it, don't tell it.” I've no idea what she could have meant, though – maybe nothing; she was really hysterical.'

‘Right up my street,' with appetite.

Arlette looked slightly aghast at being taken seriously.

‘And I can't do a damn thing. I think I'm going to yield to a temptation I've always had. I want to get to the bottom of this. I'm going to give the police an anonymous phone call.'

‘Oh, darling. That's a bit revolting – do you have to?'

‘How else are we to find out? One thing – I don't think I know how to place her. What's she like? Pretty?'

‘Well, she's not absolutely horrible,' said Arlette charmingly. ‘About twenty-seven, maybe twenty-five. Huge feet, and seems quite flat-breasted. Sort of bony. Small foxy face, quite pretty I suppose but stupe, like the baker's girl at home; the one on the corner.'