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A Long Silence

Page 12

by Nicolas Freeling

Arlette opened the parcel, and felt the clutch of a living man who had scribbled in these living notebooks. One of them slipped and fell on the floor: the fall jerked a piece of folded paper loose, and she picked it up and opened it, reading with a smile that grew gradually more sour. It appeared to be the rough draft of a written report made by some deskbound policeman. A conscientious man, he had typed a fine copy, and had certainly eliminated a few rough edges. But – as does happen sometimes – his polished phrases were wasted, because he had forgotten to destroy his rough.

  ‘I have been over these manuscript books in an effort to discover whether any of the material therein could be in any way conducive towards further light being shed.’ (He had spelt the word ‘condusive’.) ‘Some of the official work could be of value, and might be construed with the aid of his secretary, colleagues, etc. I understand however that this has been done. The remainder however amounts to no more than disjointed scribbles in a kind of personal shorthand, containing what appear to be cross-referenced scraps of personal memos regarding conversations held with colleagues, sketches for a variety of highly metaphysical and personal theories, aide-memoires concerning library research, and much of an over-subjective and therefore hermetic nature. Most of these notes are further confused and consequently vitiated by being mingled with what I can only call the raw material of his private life in its more trivial aspects (jokes about the Ministry, puns on his secretary’s name and even shopping lists, to give a few examples) and a great deal of this is quite incomprehensible, apart from being of interest to nobody but perhaps a psychiatrist. I knew Van der Valk quite well at one time, and was familiar with this habit of making private footnotes to his work. In justice to him, his written reports were models of concision (consicion?) and legibility but these notes present a state of confusion inextricable, probably, to anyone but himself. It is therefore concluded that unless we are interested in his having needed a haircut on January fourth or the fact that his wife has the deplorable habit of squeezing the toothpaste tube from the top’ (this whole phrase had been crossed out as an unjustifiable piece of sarcasm) ‘we are unlikely to find anything herein of relevance to the enquiry afoot.’

  Blood had been steadily mounting in Arlette’s head. She was not really very cross with this little man, despite a smack of complacency and priggery about him, and she was not cross at all with the Commissaire, who had done his best with his enormous wooden machine, was now paralysed by embarrassment at the fiasco, and had summoned the honesty and the courage to tell her a fact painful to both of them and to him extremely humiliating. But she was furious. Her husband had been so quickly downgraded to a pension, a posthumous medal, a photograph in a black frame of officers-fallen-on-the-field-of-honour. A cipher. The moment he was no longer alive, to these writers of reports he was no longer human. How often had he not said that it was the victim who counted – whereas in all the detective stories, and in all too many murder cases the victim is a mere peg on which to hang a plot, a tiresome, uncomfortable, embarrassing preliminary detail, to be hushed up and tidied away as soon as possible?

  Arlette opened a notebook.

  ‘Dropping a watch on the tramline – how is it possible just mechanically? I would never have believed it – I could have cried. Odd how even a frightful catastrophe can give one a notion. But I’m not buying one here; too bloody dear. Mem: A. ask boys get a nice classic one in Schweiz Land für mich anniversaire.’

  She shut the notebook and started to cry.

  *

  ‘All the same,’ asked Ruth, ‘where did that other one come from, that pretty one with the enamelled numerals? It must have been awfully dear.’

  ‘He told me he’d got it remarkably cheap so I suppose it was second-hand or something, but now you mention it he was very mysterious about it, said it had been a lucky break in something he was puzzling out.’

  ‘Could that have been do you think …?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Arlette. ‘But I want to read these notebooks. I’m not inclined to shrug all this off with airy disdain the way those clowns did, just because they couldn’t read them.’

  She said it frivolously enough, but a resolution was beginning to form, somewhere down inside her. Not to revenge, avenge, whatever they called it. But to strike a blow, somehow, for the victim, so ignominiously diminished and dismissed. There was an explanation to that assassination, and she intended to find it. And she felt convinced that it must be there in the notebooks. For Van der Valk had written, always, everything down. It was his method and always had been. Whatever it was, trivial, irrelevant or confused, he wrote it down, and at night he spent hours brooding over that confusion of scribbles, and surprisingly often a pattern would begin to appear in the blurred and blotted lettering, and things he did not understand at all started to fall into place. ‘Odd how even a frightful catastrophe can give one a notion.’ The most flippant, unconnected, illogical remarks – they had a link which he had known. He probably did not know his assassin … but he would have known how to go about finding one.

  That evening Arlette took a clean notebook from a suitcase of junk she had packed without looking at it in the little flat, chose one of his ball-point pens, and began to go over the notebooks, line by line. It would be flattering at this point to say she asked for my advice, but it is typical of her that she didn’t. She was going to worry it out, stupidly, individually, honestly, personally. I find this altogether in character. I had never thought about her very much before, I am sorry to say, and this was lazy of me as well as singularly stupid, because I was interested in Piet, with whom I felt sympathy, but on the whole uninterested in her with whom I did not, and I never properly understood Piet because I consistently underestimated the influence she had upon him. This led me, certainly, to a deal of bad writing. I have defended this upon occasion (both to myself in private and to others in conversation) by remarks like ‘Well, in a crime-story, you have to keep the action moving and not get too wound up in the interaction of characters.’ And yet I have sometimes made pretty vain claims that I was practically the inventor of crime-stories based on character (a damfool claim as well as vain, because there is never any inventor of anything. All ‘inventions’ are made simultaneously by twenty or more people, simply because the time is ripe. A well-known example in the technical field is the invention of television, claimed by the Russians, the Americans, the English and the French, all of them with perfect accuracy.) So that throughout a dozen books I left Arlette as a minor character, shoving her way in when a bit of colour seemed indicated, and in a superficial way: she was a skilful cook and liked music.

  I can only excuse myself by saying that this was the way I knew her. We used, when we met, to talk about cooking, a craft I am interested in, and about music, which I love but know nothing about whereas she knew a lot, and this amused me because it is rare for French femmes d’intérieur of humble countrified background and unsophisticated upbringing to have any taste for music at all beyond, perhaps, Gilbert Bécaud, who is talented as well as good-looking.

  I never troubled to look more closely at the way in which this banal married couple had grown into and developed one another, and yet this is one of the most basic elements in any serious attempt at fiction. We see – to take another well-known and obvious example – that Soames Forsyte is a tragic figure because there is no contact at all between himself and either of his wives (that infinitely tiresome Irene isn’t even any good in bed) but we never get further. What did the damn fool marry them for – what did he see in them? Galsworthy funked the issue, from fastidiousness, convention, and one is bound to say stupidity or incompetence. The relation between Michael Mont and Fleur is equally superficial, and we cannot help concluding that here is a second-rate novelist.

  I do not want to go too deeply into this, because a lot of it is irrelevant to this story: a point weighing much more heavily with me is that I do not want to intrude upon Arlette’s privacy, or hurt her feelings with some remarks she might find gratuitou
sly personal. But it is perfectly reasonable to notice a few ways in which these two complemented one another. I did not know Piet in his youth, but it is obvious enough that he was an uneasy, awkward young man, aggressive about being ‘working class’, ashamed at once of his crude physique and of his intelligence which he tended to hide even when I knew him behind a yobbo act which was nothing more than inverted snobbery. Being a bright boy, he had gone to the Hogere Burger School, a sort of superior Dutch grammar school akin to a lycée, where he had been surrounded by boys of a petty-bourgeois, successful-shopkeeper class, jeered at for his accent and his street manners. He lost his father, an artisan carpenter from the poor and crowded Amsterdam district of the ‘Pijp’, during the war, and his mother soon after, when he was barely out of his teens. He himself ran away around 1943, got to Sweden and reached England, where for several months he was kept shut up in an internment camp and treated with owlish suspicion – a boy of eighteen … Once back in Amsterdam after the war, his education, his aptitude for foreign languages, his military service record, his quickness at study and an interest in law – all this led him to be accepted as a trainee officer of police.

  Of the Amsterdam police-corps at that time the less said the better. Several notoriously corrupt and incompetent elements were purged, for real or pretended collaboration: a few casehardened old commissaires were put on the shelf. Other, and often equally undesirable persons took advantage of the times – a hysterical and most unpleasant atmosphere of vendetta – to ensconce themselves in positions of comfort. The young Van der Valk early learned a sort of homespun cynicism, and he was delighted when I quoted him the fierce lines from Kipling about

  How smoothly and how swiftly they have sidled back to power

  By the favour and contrivance of their kind.

  Arlette came from a family of landowners in a small way, almost a petty aristocracy in the well-brought-up, traditional, Catholic and conservative French style, and she followed the path of her class: lycée des jeunes filles, Faculty of Letters at Aix, the literary-philo formation then still undecayed. Rebellion seized her too, and she too ran away, but she never much liked to talk about this, and I do not know the exact circumstances of how she came to meet and marry Piet, except that it was in Paris, in the heady atmosphere of 1947, where he was celebrating the passing of some examination with a pathetic three-day moment of freedom. They got married, probably very ill-advisedly, and lived in Amsterdam thenceforward in considerable poverty. They clung to one another fiercely. She civilized him, and he rubbed the corners off her. He learned not to be ashamed of his streak of sensitivity towards ‘art’. She did not like Holland, never really understood it, and probably would have been miserable were it not for her passion for music – and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, of which she was a faithful follower, was and is one of the most enchanting there is, with a nervous and wonderfully transparent sound, exquisitely sensitive: ‘not at all Dutch’ she used to say crudely: still, she did learn to like and appreciate Amsterdam.

  Poor or not, she was an excellent home-maker, good at cooking and sewing, disciplined by early years at keeping silent and sitting upright, and with a real imaginative talent for bringing warmth, love and gaiety into her surroundings, which however tatty or penurious had always the glow and patina of a piece of good old furniture. The equilibrium and support Piet got from all this brought him through many hard years: although good at his work, conscientious, and undeniably clever he had moments of irresponsibility, a tactless lack of respect for superior mediocrities and above all a tendency to indiscretion, which did him much harm professionally, made him more than one highly-placed enemy, and interfered grievously with his otherwise bright prospects of promotion. A few spectacular and brilliant successes, brought about, he said himself, more by strokes of luck than anything else, saved him from dusty obscurity and an embittering sense of failure which would have destroyed him as a person. She kept him from becoming hardened and coarsened: his own optimism, and a sunny spontaneity, as well as being a generous, kind, and humble person, preserved him from becoming sour and discouraged.

  When I was myself poor, miserable and disappointed, as well as singularly ill-educated and ill-prepared for life, they both showed me much kindness – I owe them both a great deal.

  Closing this parenthesis, which has been inexcusably impudent, I risk one more personal remark. This is that when I learned about Arlette’s behaviour it left me open-mouthed. It still astonishes me. I have heard before of instances in which she displayed a reckless personal courage that sometimes – as he himself admitted – frightened Van der Valk. We were discussing criminals, murders, and such-like things, riding our favourite hobby-horses and generally enjoying ourselves, when suddenly – ‘Arlette,’ he said, ‘is capable of anything.’ Respect in his voice, and also a real fear, which took me aback and embarrassed me.

  The female of the species,’ I said with appalling banality.

  ‘In defence of her home, yes, of course. And the woman criminal who shows an implacability, a ferocity, and a cunning superior to anything a man seems capable of – yes there are well-documented descriptions. And there are examples of women as guerrilla fighters, or in resistance movements – one is astounded. Why should that be, do you think? – is it biological? I mean the so-called feeble sex, with weaker muscles and all those awkward bumps, tender breasts and a big behind, look how idiotic and repellent the sight of a woman footballer – or wrestlers: unspeakable … The female animal, I mean tigresses and wild cats or whatnot, is as active and muscled as the male, maybe slimmer and lighter but just as active and well-armed. So that the legendary viciousness is not a compensation for being weaker. But in the human species which is altogether different – I mean so much more vulnerable … I’ve no idea, really … Arlette – a couple of times, I tell you, she’s raised the hair on my neck all the way down my spine.’

  I have, since, been reminded vividly of this remark.

  *

  Arlette walked slowly along the echoing wooden platforms of the Central Station in Amsterdam, carrying her own suitcase, down the tunnel, through the hall, noticing nothing. She felt tired, stale, disillusioned. Why had she come? What good would she possibly be able to do? She did not even have any idea of where to go, how to start, although she had worried about it all the way in the train, turning over and over the few rags and scraps of uncertain fact she possessed – or hoped she did. The journey had been like a sleepless night, waking constantly from an uneasy, unrefreshing doze and finding no advance in thought which flickers eccentrically without any logical progress whatever, or in the lagging hands of the clock. She had come here, though she did not know what she was going to do.

  She had spent hours drinking with the notebooks, not eating, drinking too much, staring about, lighting cigarettes and throwing them away, frightening Ruth. Sometimes it had all seemed clear and reasonable, and half an hour after she would again be plunged into blind ignorance and indecision., After two days she had said to Ruth suddenly, with a snap, throwing herself into a pattern of action abruptly, as though afraid that if she hesitated longer she would never budge at all – ‘Ruth.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Darling – I’m going to leave you alone. I don’t know for how long. A week, a fortnight, I just don’t know. I’m going to see this through. I’m going to Amsterdam. I can’t give you any address – I’ve no idea even where I’ll be staying or anything. I’m sorry.’

  She did not enquire whether Ruth would be frightened alone in a country cottage at night – a girl of not yet sixteen. It is quite possible that this did not even occur to her.

  One must say that Ruth was splendid. She said, ‘Yes, of course, darling, don’t worry, I’ll be perfectly all right.’ As though Arlette, at this moment probably quite mad, even in the clinical sense, had ever thought of that!

  Ruth did the sensible thing and rang up my wife – who told her to come over, of course.

  The woman’s round the bend,�
� she said to me, much alarmed, ‘What should we do?’

  Ruth rode her scooter all the way over. It was not too terrible for her to stay with us, as her school is not much further away than from her own home. Plenty of other children living in the country have as far to go, and the train service is designed for this. We weren’t worried about her …

  ‘Arlette’s gone mataglap,’ was the first thing she said. It is one of the Malay words that has crept into the Dutch vocabulary, like ‘amok’ – it means much the same; a temporary insanity during which the sufferer notices nothing, neither pain, fatigue nor fear, and is totally unamenable to reason.

  ‘What shall we do?’ asked my wife again. I thought.

  ‘Nothing, I think,’ I said at last. I tried to explain.

  *

  Arlette came out into the open air and saw that spring had come to Amsterdam. The pale, acid sun of late afternoon lay on the inner harbour beyond the Prins Hendrik Kade: the wind off the water was sharp. It gave her a shock. A succession of quick rhythmic taps, as at the start of the violin concerto of Beethoven. That she noticed this means, I think, that from that moment she was sane again. But it is possible that I am mistaken. Even if insane one can have, surely, the same perceptions as other people, and this ‘click’ is a familiar thing. Exactly the same happens when one takes a night train down from Paris to the Coast, and one wakes somewhere between Saint Raphael and Cannes, and looks out, and there is the Mediterranean. Or was.

  The pungent salt smell, the northern, maritime keynotes of seagull and herring, the pointed brick buildings, tall and narrow like herons, with their mosaic of parti-coloured shutters, eaves, sills, that gives the landscapes their stiff, heraldic look (one is back beyond Breughel, beyond Van Eyck, to the primitives whose artists we do not know, so that they have names like the Master of the Saint Ursula Legend). The lavish use of paint in flat bright primary colours which typifies these Baltic, Hanseatic quay-sides is startling to the visitor from central Europe. Even the Dutch flags waving everywhere (there are no more determined flag-wavers) upset and worried Arlette: she had not realized how in a short time her eye had accustomed itself to the subtle and faded colourings of France, so that it was as though she had never before left home. The sharp flat brightness of Holland! The painters’ light which hurts the unaccustomed eye … Arlette never wore sunglasses in France, except on the sea or on the snow, yet here, she remembered suddenly, she had practically gone to bed in them. It was all so familiar. She had lived here, she had to keep reminding herself, for twenty years.

 

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