Double-Barrel (2 page)

Thought. Dought. Sorry doubt. Reconsideration. Conclusion.

‘The point is well taken. The burgomaster will have to know. You will be responsible to him – but to him alone – and can make a direct verbal report. But this – cover. I think I can agree and I think I could arrange it.' Weird but indubitable legal smile. ‘How would you like to be an official – a responsible official – of the Ministry of the Interior? That is not, technically, an untruth. Shall we say that such an official might be sent from The Hague to draw up a detailed report on aspects of a provincial town. Perhaps with a view to the further industrial expansion in a district of underdevelopment? Mm, your powers of inquiry should be very broad and extremely vague. I am casting about for a suitable vague, impressive, minatory phrase … Suppose we were to say that you were conducting Ethnographic Research? That means nothing and will cover everything.'

Really, he has understood. I have to be able to blind the tiny local bigwigs with bullshit.

‘I dislike conspiracies, but this is an unorthodox situation. It is justifiable to meet it in an unorthodox way,' meditating. ‘I have no doubt but that you can be provided with a lodging, transport, an identity, as well as various necessary papers.' Very cool indeed.

He reached for the private-line telephone.

‘Will you please get me the Minister of the Interior at The Hague? … There is a further point' – while his call was winging towards another discreet burr in another padded, panelled office – ‘I should like you to be accompanied by your wife. You may be there some time, and if you are to be the complete, convincing, colourless if intelligent
state functionary, you need a wife to do the housekeeping.'

‘My wife is French, sir.'

‘Better a French wife than none at all,' remarked Mr Sailer charmingly. ‘Ah – Good morning, Excellency …'

A week later I had a black Volkswagen and a new identity, supported by most impressive and not-quite-totally incomprehensible papers. I was making a preliminary survey of Zwinderen, a small market town rapidly growing past the fifteen thousand persons mark, in the extreme north-eastern corner of the province of Drente, a scant twenty kilometres from the German border. As an official introduction to this new sphere, I had an appointment with the burgomaster.

A modern town hall, very large for a place this size. Very ugly for anywhere. Lot of money and all wasted. The steps were very grand, where the couples stand to be photographed after being married, the farmers' sons vastly uneasy in hired top hats. You don't even get married by the mayor with his sash on, in Holland. It's done by a character whose title is ‘Functionary of the Civil Status' – there's nothing more Dutch than that. The steps of the town hall have to be pretty grand to make up for it. But Holland can be nice. There are tiny dorps in Friesland that were places of importance in the sixteenth century, with perhaps five thousand souls now, but possessing magnificent Renaissance and baroque town halls, their façades towering and curling above sleepy tiny squares, and steps … like Napoleon taking leave of the Old Guard at Fontainebleau.

Inside, black-and-white rubber marble. Aseptic corridors, with glass sliding windows to protect the functionary from the contagious, coughing public. Various depressed members of the said public, waiting to be noticed and
kindly to be allowed to register a child's birth – but only if the name is approved of by the Handbook for Functionaries of the Civil Status. And finally a light, airy, freshly-painted office.

The burgomaster got up from his desk when a neat and competent-seeming female showed me in. He had a firm, resilient face; quite the portrait of a burgomaster. He could hang later in some pompous frame, looking down benignly on the couples getting married. Not quite on the same wall as the swimmy-sentimental portraits of royalty, but well up there in the league – presented by a grateful municipality after he retired, handsome and silver-haired. But he did not look a nonentity. I had already decided anyway that he would not be a dud – this was the man in charge of a town scheduled for expansion into a thriving industrial community. In twenty years there would be sixty thousand people here; it was already well on the way and it was his work.

‘Good morning, burgomaster.'

‘Good morning; pleased to make your acquaintance.' He turned to the secretary, waiting with an alert, impersonal face. ‘Accessible to no one; I am in conference.'

‘Very good, burgomaster.' The door shut crisply.

‘I have an hour. Sit down, Mr van der Valk; let us get to know each other – and see what we can do for each other.'

An hour later I had a lot. Access to everything; neat dockets of disturbing information in close detail; assurance of every co-operation; a hearty handshake, and a request for a verbal report twice a week at least – at his home; that would be more discreet. No need to let the municipal officials into our little secret. I was an embarrassment; he would prefer to see as little as possible of me officially. I could see how he disliked this hole-and-corner game – but he had been convinced of its necessity.

I got passed to the secretary, who was helpful. I had been wondering where on earth I was going to be lodged, and
what the point of the wife was. Now I found that the wheels had turned, and the hand of the Procureur-Général had reached as far as this tiny tentacle of central government.

‘I have been instructed, Mr van der Valk' – bright, very efficient and both conscious and proud of it – ‘that you will be staying here a few weeks. You'll be glad to hear that I've a furnished house for you – oh, only a little one, but at least you'll be independent of hotels. You see, we do quite often have to house officials: inspectors, headmasters; people whose own houses and belongings aren't yet ready. Or of course people who are here temporarily, as in your case; we've had functionaries from The Hague before, doing these administrative surveys. I'm afraid the furniture is rather a scratch lot, but it's adequate. The house does tend to look as though it had no owner – well, of course, it hasn't. I do hope your wife will be comfortable – but if there's any little thing you or she need, you've only to ask me. Any help – I'm delighted if I can be of service.'

Simple as that. In another week, I would be installed, with Arlette and several suitcases, in the Mimosastraat in Zwinderen, province of Drente. Access to everything. I had already arranged for the children to be boarded out, in the house of Inspector and Mrs Suykerland of the Amsterdamse Police. They would get frightful food, but they were delighted with the notion. It all sounded like a holiday. All I had to do was clear up an affair that had not only baffled a lot of people just as intelligent as me, but that had also been trodden on by so many big boots full of flat feet as to be nearly illegible.

I had already been relieved of all ordinary duties – Mr Tak was cross but floored by a minatory letter from the Prinsen
gracht. By the time we moved, I had spent six days studying – but on paper, only on paper – the life of Zwinderen, which when I went to school had been an ossified tiny market town away in the wilds, a stone's throw from Protestant North Germany; but now was become the frontier of the big push at decentralization, decongestion, full employment and Prosperity for All. Boom town. Light industry and housing. Practically Dodge City.

I was Wyatt Earp, getting sent there as United States Marshal. I had better start polishing my forty-five and practising quick draws.

The keyword in this north-eastern corner of Holland is ‘Veen'. It occurs as a suffix in place-names. Over to the west are Hoogeveen and Heerenveen – larger towns these, around the twenty thousand mark. To the south, Klazina-veen, Vriezeveen – smaller, hardly more than villages. Second word is ‘Kanaal' – which means, mostly, a ditch. Stadskanaal, Musselkanaal. ‘Veen' means turf: the boggy peaty moorland that was cut for fuel in the depression days, before the oil pipelines and the natural gas. The canals drain it – a network of tiny waterways. There are a great many; this country takes a lot of draining. But there is no watershed, and green scummy water dribbles vaguely in all directions – towards the Ems estuary, and down south towards rivers. The biggest of these canals have some mercantile use, and there is quite a lot of plodding barge traffic even now.

The funny thing is that the country is on the verge of a big upheaval. They found a ‘bubble' of natural gas up here. To see what is about to happen one need only look at Lacq, in France – and this bubble is ten times the size of Lacq's. Traditionally, though, it has always been a very poor and barren land. Very little use for agriculture, and none at all for anything else. Penniless. But the government has already altered all that.

Railways and roads; factories processing milk, scrap
metal, paper. Big trucks with trailers boomed along broad autoways; new diesel railcars linked Groningen and Win-schoten at one end of the province with Emmen and Coevorden at the other; there was a branch line to Assen, with connexions to the main line south.

More sophisticated industry had been tempted into following. A small but enterprising firm built coach and even aircraft bodies; another directed by a brilliant engineer, was internationally known for electronic equipment – ‘second Philips' was the local boast. A daughter-firm of a huge combine was making wire and cable; and another, forty-five per cent of the total Dutch output of heat-resisting glassware.

The sleepy little place hardly knew itself now. For untold generations it had looked like an ingrowing toenail, with much the same way of thinking.

Tiny shops, dark and smelly – corsets and cough mixture; wooden shoes and flat caps of gaudy cheap tweed; weedkiller and sheepdip; lumps of wet salt pork and margarine-all airy and glassy now, with black and chromium fronts. Outside tumbledown farms with sagging thatched roofs now stood tinny, brightly-painted, brand-new autos. Behind soared concrete cowsheds and haybarns, and fire-engine-colour tractors hauled the swedes and the sugar beets in increasing masses at greater speeds towards ever greedier consumers.

Smelly canal backwaters, scummy green or inky black, were filled in, and the worn-out wood of collapsing wharves cleared up. Concrete came pouring out of huge striped urns that revolved everywhere like merry-go-rounds; bright pink brick streets ate up the rutted cart-tracks. The workhouse-ward schools were gone and there was an annexe to the hospital and even a swimming bath. True, the county insane asylum still stood gaunt in the sour fields; the prunus and flowering-cherry trees were tiny and the grass verges sickly; the few old stunted oaks looked sad and lonely
despite cheerful additions with golden cypress and Montana pine.

But the bustle of the burgomaster – and generous state funds – had infected the whole withered place with new seeds and spores. Rebirth.

The local people, and with them a swelling tide of strangers from congested metropolitan Holland, took with enthusiasm to easy work in sunny, canteen-and-canned-music factories. Pleasant change from trying to dig a living out of wet, black, stinking ground. Population had doubled and redoubled in ten years, and now blocks of flats and streets of tiny balconied brick houses – very Dutch, with extraordinarily large windows – surrounded and hid the surviving nineteenth-century cottages. But a few were still lived in, tiny, sad, depressing; witness still to the meanness, the bitterness and the pathos of life here for over a thousand years.

I saw quite a lot of this the first visit. Not the hour with the burgomaster – I spent the day strolling. Coffee in one café, a beer in another, and a greasy pork-chop lunch in the town's biggest, between a billiardtable and six commercial travellers, all with green Opel station wagons stuffed with samples and catalogues, all bolting their filthy chops with enthusiastic expense-account appetites.

It was wonderful winter weather, that first day. Windless, bright sun, and the canals frozen. The children stormed out whooping at four, and there instantly was the classic Dutch painting: a sun sinking redly behind the stepped gable and tiny spire of the Netherlands Reformed Church, and a thousand four-year-olds buttoned up to the eyes shrieking and tumbling on the old-fashioned, long wooden skates. My eyes were all on the houses, where the oblique beam of sun streamed in through a thousand enormous over-polished windows and lit up the interiors.

They looked like all the other Dutch interiors. Here a lumpy old coal stove, polished brilliant black, and ‘gothic'
wooden furniture upholstered in olive-green plush. There the streamlined grey oilburner, and ‘contemporary' mushrooms of chairs with knitting-needle legs and pink or mauve ‘moquette'. Either the old walnut veneer dresser, with a tiny diamond-pane window showing souvenir German wine glasses (bulbous green, with Loreleis painted on them) and turned chess-queen legs, or the flat slab of imitation teak. All proudly oiled and spotlessly dusted. Everywhere, of course, crammed with climbing plants, far too many lamps and at least three too many tables. Since Pieter de Hooch, Dutch interiors have gone downhill.

None of this told me much about the people who lived there. Were they too just like the ones in metroland? Had a thousand years in the ‘Veen' ground produced a local type? There were local names – I saw several ‘Van Veen' and ‘Van der Veen' nameplates on doors.

I found a local weekly paper to take home, and seized on it with joy. And once at home again, I nearly wore it out. The cheap grey newsprint with its smudgy blunt press frayed at the folds and then disintegrated under the well-known heavy police hand and burning police eye of our brilliant officer. It told me a lot. Just for a start, births, deaths and marriages. And a real invention of ‘the little province' – a careful column telling one who has arrived in our midst, with full details. Address he's come to, and come from. His name and his profession. All compiled from the careful indexing and filing of our industriously nosy functionaries in that damned town hall.