She threw in the last rose; the curé gave a little cough, the shovel squeaked on pebbles and the gravedigger grunted at the wet soil.
She shook hands with everyone, gave the right tips and watched the Law, all three of it, retiring rapidly towards the café; the two schoolchildren who had served the mass rushing to spoil their dinner with a Milky Way. The curé was saying something and she was answering. Ruth had taken a glove off and pushed a warm, damp adolescent hand into her own cold bare one. She took off her mantilla, which still smelt slightly of incense. She got into the self-drive car the boys had hired, and was driven back to her new home where Ruth had a daube of beef, not very nice: she was not a good cook. She ground coffee afterwards and they drank it while the boys talked with exaggerated, emphatic gestures until she asked them what their train times were, whereat they looked relieved, and only slightly ashamed when they became conscious of relief. There was a distribution of Van der Valk’s last bottle of brandy, to which Arlette felt an idiotic sentimental attachment but which the boys polished off ruthlessly. Later that afternoon the two women were left alone to their new life. For Ruth had asked to stay. There was a school to which she could go, over half an hour away, which would be grim in winter but if that was what she wanted …
‘So please, Mama, if you could buy me a scooter?’ Ruth had never called her anything but her name before.
One of these days the stonemason came to call, anxious to sell them a nice piece of marble or polished granite, and was vexed at Arlette’s wanting nothing but a big lump of rough sandstone.
‘A bank where the wild thyme grows.’ Ruth had been doing Shakespeare.
‘Doesn’t grow here,’ said the stone-cutter, loftily.
‘No,’ said Arlette, a bit tart. ‘Moss will, though.’
‘And the inscription, Madame?’
The two girls looked at each other. Arlette had not found anything of sufficient simplicity. The best she knew of was the symbol, in music, for a pause, which is on the tomb of the conductor Erich Kleiber. As for epitaphs … the briefest and best is surely the three-word expression of happiness which Stendhal found for himself? ‘Lived, wrote, loved.’ Ruth, going through an exceedingly literary phase, nourishing the desire to be an actress that went with her age, had suggested several flaming lines ranging from ’Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine’ down as far as ‘Our revels now are ended’. Arlette had put a firm stop to these effusions with a faintly evil-minded remark.
‘At that rate one could put “Vous lui remettrez son uniforme blanc”.’
‘Nothing,’ she said now, ‘that is to say the name and the dates. Leave a space below, in case I think of something. And of course,’ dryly, ‘space for me.’
‘Will we put “mort en service commandé”?’ asked the stonecutter hopefully.
‘No,’ said Arlette.
Really these women had no sense of what was proper.
*
It was many months (time indeed of the Toussaint, the first of November, the day in France for remembering and visiting our dead) before the stonemason felt inclined to change his poor opinion.
Arlette had come to see us; it was then, only, that I heard this story. We said we would come over, to look at the grave and go back with her to her house for dinner.
‘The moss is growing,’ she said contentedly.
The quietness in her voice: was it this which sent me to Horace, searching for the poetry that went with this hard-bought calm? Some almost-effaced memory told me that the old poet, better than any other, had known that justice, which we long for, which Van der Valk had spent a life trying to understand, belongs only to God. But that by surrendering ourselves we can put ourselves in harmony, and at peace.
I stumbled clumsily through these, most compressed of all lines, mouthing forgotten Latin, sprawling awkwardly upon the elegant eighteenth-century French of Monsieur Dacier and le Père Sanadon, last read as a raw little boy, in my own eighteenth century.
When I found what I was searching for – one of the presents poetry makes us – I too felt at peace with myself.
Quam se clientum longa negotia
Dijudicata lite relinqueret …
‘I don’t in all honesty …’ began my wife …
Regulus, a Roman general, went to his death at the hands of the executioner with the serenity, says Horace, of a lawyer who has wound up a tedious business affair, and leaves for a pleasant week-end in his country house.
At finding an epitaph I was a poor substitute for Stendhal but Arlette was pleased, I think, most with the classical (in the antique, Mediterranean sense) simplicity of it.
‘I love it,’ she said, ‘and I’ll have it done.’
When it had sunk into the stone-cutter’s mind – leisurely, as was proper – he too was satisfied.
‘That’s something more like.’ The phrase might have given pleasure to Horace.
In her country house, having wound up the tedious affairs of her clients, Arlette also had thought of an epitaph. But hadn’t felt able to cut it on stone. It had run, she said, and rung and sung through her head all through these months.
The marching song which dates back to the campaigns of the Great Louis, in Holland. Yes:
Auprès de ma blonde.
Qui chante pour les filles
qui n’ont pas de mari-
Ne chante pas pour elle,
elle en a, un joli…
I could see, I said.
‘He is in Holland,’ said Arlette, staring at the stone where the moss was beginning.
‘But you have him here.’
No. II ‘est dans la Hollande: les Hollandais l’ont pris. They took him.’ Well… he was Dutch, after all.
Driving home afterwards, through rain, the car still full of the scent of chrysanthemums, I thought of the girl’s words when she is asked, ‘What would you give, to have him back?’
Je donnerai Versailles, she sings,
Paris et Saint Denis,
Les tours de Notre Dame-
Le clocher de mon pays …
We know the lines as a ‘nursery rhyme’ ourselves. They are in Rondes et Chansons de la France on records we bought for our children when they were tiny.
Arlette was right, I suppose, to take the classical line from Horace. But the other, I can’t help thinking, would have been as good. Both indeed have the same antique nobility ‘more durable than bronze’.
*
For about six weeks after the funeral the snow lay round Arlette, and this, she thought, was as it should be. She shovelled snow from in front of the house, and the shed where the deux-chevaux lived, with the sawn logs, and Ruth’s new scooter. She chopped wood for the kitchen range and the big porcelain stove, cursed about this – it is, after all, a man’s work – and determined to have central heating for next year. She wished she lived on a tropical island, the way one always does in March in Central Europe, where winter has the tenacity of a marathon runner. She often went to ski: this had been planned with her husband, to make long raids along the spider’s-web of woodcutters’ paths which enlace every hill in the Vosges. These make good natural pistes for Nordic ski, for they were made when the wood was hauled by the timbertug with powerful slow horses, and the slopes are never too steep. But she found she had not the heart to do it alone, and changed the light narrow ski for Alpine ‘planks’ and drove the deux-chevaux day after day up to the Markstein, to ski there in the sun, on pistes as hard and bare as bleached bones, and when the wind went finally round into the west, sticky, like decaying flesh.
Tall blondes in skiclothes, even when they are well over forty, do not find it difficult to attract admirers. Arlette found herself the object of amorous address from a quantity of earnest Germans: even the instructors, notoriously spoilt where women are concerned, notoriously fussy about their being very youthful and alarmingly nubile, invented pretexts for correcting her style. This was very good for her. After peeling off layers of sun-cream she found herself still a good-looking woman
despite lines around the eyes.
She had looked forward to the quiet of winter evenings. Ruth muttering over her maths and her Montaigne, herself embedded in all the books he had collected ‘to read when I’m retired’. But she found her eyes lifting restlessly to the shelves he had himself built, rather badly but with great glee, boasting about having learned to join two bits of wood in the depression time, from his father the carpenter, mending broken kitchen chairs for out-of-work Amsterdammers. She found that the quiet of the snow-filled valley irritated her, and when the Paris planes slid over, unseen above the heavy cloud-cover, she welcomed the sound.
The town, admittedly, was only an hour’s drive, and one went often enough, for fresher vegetables and cheaper fruit, to get one’s hair done, to get stockings and a new record, to dress up and go in the evening with Ruth to the theatre which tended to bore her, or to concerts which tended to bore Ruth. But she felt distorted, jangled, jarred by voices out of key and a music out of tune: she was upset at even a dearly loved pianist sounding gritty, as though the great black piano appassionato had got left out in a sandstorm.
She missed her hospital work, too; the tottery old men it had been her job to re-educate to walk after an operation, listening to their tedious talk about football and how they were being deliberately and systematically starved by Sister; the women who got so petty, cherishing their varicose veins as though they were jewels; the children with broken limbs, driven into becoming exceedingly tiresome by their itchy plasters; the squalors, the stupidities, the incompetencies and vanities of doctors, nurses, patients and herself: she missed them.
Ski-ing, chopping, shovelling, a great deal of hard work and fresh air had fined her down so much that she suddenly found herself far too thin, produced some alarming female symptoms, and ran anxiously to a gynaecologist with gory fears which she knew to be ridiculous, and laughed at, but she became unaccountably cross when he laughed at them too.
‘The dam’ thing’s not prolapsed or something?’
‘Not at all, my dear girl; all your little affairs are offensively healthy and that’s just the point: when offensively healthy women of your age suddenly lose their husbands they get their nice delicate little balance into a horrible great turmoil. My goodness,’ as she heaved an inelegant nudity off the horrid table, ‘you’ve got the muscles of a tennis player. I’m prescribing you some nice pills but I’d love you to have a job, really, and since you’re trained as a physiotherapist it seems a pity, but let’s get you quietened down first, and then you can think it over.’ Arlette went home vexed, as though she had been told to get a man, but it was all perfectly true. What was she doing in the country anyway? – pure laziness and selfishness. She would get a job, and a little flat, and then Ruth wouldn’t have to plough to and fro on that nasty bike. Everybody’s too tactful to say so, but at the rate she was going on there was nothing to look forward to but babysitting.
Why was it that she clung irritably to living in the little crouched stone house, pottering anxiously around it as though there were still a floor to be polished somewhere but she couldn’t remember which?
*
Spring came with its marvellous suddenness, half-way through April. A flood of hot sun swept the snow away overnight except for the north face of the hillside, in the shadowed rocky hollows where only moss flourished. Dead beechleaves were dry and hard as potato crisps, bleaching to grey, and the new buds were as sexy as anything one could hope for. A big drift of snowdrops Arlette had not known existed appeared behind the woodshed; the field where in summers gone they had picked wild strawberries filled with pale wood anemones, and all the garden thrust out clumps of green spears, happily identified as crocus, jonquil, iris and narcissus.
Arlette had been dreaming of the wild strawberries. She was in the field hunting for them. The plants were there, and it was June, she knew, feeling the hot sun. She was in a cotton frock and a straw hat, bending to search. The leaves of the strawberry plants formed a stiff barrier, prickly and heraldic, hurting her hands when she tried to lift them. There was no fruit at all; she was more angry than disappointed – it was so unfair somehow. And then, with an extraordinary sense of relief she was lying on bare ground, hard and reddish, land she knew lay between La Seyne and Cassis, land from her childhood. She was lying on her back looking up at the plants, large now like vines, the huge leaves throwing dappled shadows – and yes, there were the strawberries, just above her face, thousands and thousands, and as big as peaches. Arlette woke up. The April sunshine had heaved itself over the shoulder of the hill, and lay hot upon her yellow blanket: she was boiling. She jumped up and opened the window wide to look out: the still cool air blew through her nightdress in slow affectionate breaths and her bare arms got gooseflesh. She looked with an intensity only a spring morning in central Europe can bring. In the south the spring is banal. Almond blossom everywhere, and to a child Christmas was only yesterday. In the north the spring comes acid and shuddering as a bite into a green apple. It seemed to Arlette that she was seeing the spring for the first time, with an eye as fresh as a child’s.
Outside her window the shiny grey grass of the year before (the new green showing now clearly through) was greyer and shinier with dew. Birds were making a monstrous racket. Because her top half was flooded full of sun the rest of her, from the point where her pelvis pressed against the window-sill, felt chilled. It was Thursday; Ruth was free; they could have breakfast out of doors. If he were here, she thought, he would have been up and roaming about: one would smell bacon being fried and hear the clonk of the cork being pulled from a bottle of white wine. The thought did not hurt her, and she was grateful for feeling so generously warmed.
The postman’s yellow deux-chevaux, more clattering and unbridled than her prim white one, a vulgar big daffodil to a frail narcissus, arrived while they were sitting lazily having a cigarette, relaxed and heavy. ’Alors mesdames’ with a jolly leer, ‘la grasse matinée, ca fait du bieng.’ Yesterday’s Monde and a postcard from one of the boys in Zagreb, and what on earth could he be doing there? A mail-order catalogue oh how dull, a bank statement from the computer in Melun, a large square envelope with a Dutch stamp. She grimaced, snicked it open, and sat staring dully. Ruth got up and began clearing; the clink of teaspoons roused Arlette to begin giving proper attention to the prickly stiffness of written Dutch. The commissaire of police, embarrassed, poor man: it showed in the contents, as stiff and prickly as the style.
He has promised to write, to keep her informed, but he is sorry to say that the enquiry has not so far given the results hoped for. They have used every diligence, but the affair is very puzzling. Since hahum the deceased was not on active duty the presumption was and remains that of some certainly pathological act of vengeance from the past. This has been most minutely pursued: every file he ever handled has been turned up and the present whereabouts and activities of each and every subject has been verified. Particular attention has been paid to all persons recently released from prison. Everything has been done that could possibly be done using the very considerable resources of filing systems (just ask the computer in Melun), archives, a most comprehensive routine, and large numbers of persons. On the technical side the forensic science laboratory has done wonders: the gun has been identified, but not alas discovered; the car could be identified but is unfortunately a commonplace model. Now as Mevrouw doubtless knows such cases are never classified and every hope exists that in the near future further indices will appear leading to identification and apprehension…
Arlette sat with her eyes shut, turning her head from side to side, trying to wipe away these clinging cobwebs. She knew nothing about crime, and very little about detection, for her husband had never believed in involving her with his work or his worries, but she had heard him often enough remarking ironically upon the official passion for files, archives, and routines. They were indispensable but incomplete; they deadened the imagination and paralysed all unconventional approach. How often had he not remark
ed that the interesting things about people didn’t get into files.
The clatter of the deux-chevaux roused her: postman had forgotten something – ah, he’d had a parcel in the back and had neglected, sorry, to give it to her. Bonne journée, Madame.
Pareillement, said Arlette automatically, reading the last paragraph of her commissaire’s letter.
A quantity of personal papers relative to Mr van der Valk’s work for the Commission had been forwarded to him by the secretary of the same. He had had these examined for anything which could conceivably advance the enquiry with unfortunately no positive result, and since they were personal things he had taken the liberty of sending them on, with his respectful and profound sympathies he was hers with the utmost reverence.
A Long Silence Page 11