A Long Silence

by Nicolas Freeling

  She had no notion of where she wanted to go, but she knew that now she was here, a small pause would bring the spinning, whirling patterns of the kaleidoscope to rest. She crossed the road and down the steps to the little wooden terrace – a drink, and get her breath back! Everything was new – the pale heavy squatness of a Dutch café’s cup-and-saucer, left on her table by the last occupant; the delightful rhythmic skyline across the harbour of the Saint Nicolas church and the corner of the Zeedijk! Tourists were flocking into waterbuses, and now she was a tourist too. An old waiter was wiping the table while holding a tray full of empty bottles which wavered in front of her eye.

  ‘Mevrouw?’

  ‘Give me a chocomilk, if at least you’ve got one that’s good and cold.’

  Another click! She was talking Dutch, and as fluently as ever she had! He was back before she had got over it.

  ‘Nou, mevrouwtje – cold as Finnegan’s feet.’ His voice had the real Amsterdam caw to it. ‘You aren’t Dutch though, are you now?’

  ‘Only a tourist,’ smiling.

  ‘Well now, by-your-leave: proper-sounding Dutch you talk there,’ chattily, bumping the glass down and pouring in the clawky chocomilk.

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ’Tot Uw dienst. Ja ja ja, kom er aan’ to a fussy man, waving and banging his saucer with a coin.

  Neem mij niet kwa-a-lijk; een be-hoor-lijk Nederlands spreekt U daar. Like a flock of rooks. Yah, yah ya-ah, kom er a-an. And she was blinded by tears again, hearing her husband’s exact intonation – when with her he spoke a Dutch whose accent sometimes unconsciously – ludicrously – copied hers, but when with the real thing, the rasecht like himself his accent would begin to caw too as though in self-parody.

  Next door to her were sitting two American girls, earnest, quiet, dusty-haired, looking quite clean though their jeans were as darkly greasy as the mud the dredger over there was turning up off the harbour bottom. Scraps of conversation floated across.

  ‘She’s a lovely person, ever so quiet but really mature, you know what I mean, yes, from Toledo.’ Arlette knew that Van der Valk would have guffawed and her eyes cleared.

  I see her there, at the start of her absurd and terrifying mission. She has the characteristic feminine memory for detail, the naïvely earnest certainty that she has to get everything right. Had I asked her what those two girls were drinking she would have known for sure, and been delighted at my asking.

  I have not seen Amsterdam for four or five years, and it might be as long again before I shall. This is just as well. I do not want my imagination to get in the way of Arlette’s senses. Piet, whose imagination worked like mine, saw things in an entirely different way to her. We were sitting once together on that same terrace.

  ‘Look at that dam’ building,’ pointing at the Central Station, a construction I am fond of, built with loving attention to every useless detail by an architect of the last century whose name I have forgotten (a Dutch equivalent of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott). ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ Lovely is not the word I would have chosen, but it is oddly right.

  ‘The Railway Age,’ he went on. ‘Make a wonderful museum – old wooden carriages, tuff-tuff locos with long funnels, Madame Tussaud figures of station-masters with beards, policemen wearing helmets, huge great soup-strainer moustaches, women with bustles and reticules …’ Yes, indeed, and children in sailor suits. Arlette’s mind does not behave like this.

  I am changed, thought Arlette, and unchanged. I am the same housewife, familiar with these streets, this people, I am not pricked or tickled by anything here, like a tourist. I see all this with the coolness and objectivity of experience; I am not going to rush into anything stupid or imprudent. This is a town I know, and I am going to find myself perfectly able to cope with the problem. I am not alone or helpless: I have here many friends, and there are many more who were Piet’s friends and who will help me for his sake. But I am no longer the thoughtless and innocent little wife of a little man in a little job, standing on the corner with my shopping bag wondering whether to have a cabbage or a cauli. I am a liberated woman, and that is going to make a difference.

  A tout was circling around the cluster of tables, sizing up likely suckers. A year or so ago he would have been handing out cards for a restaurant or a hotel, hooking for quickie trips around the sights, with waterbus, Anne Frank and the Rembrandthuis all thrown in for only ten gulden. Now – he had closed on the two American girls and she could hear his pidgin German-American patois that is the international language of the European tout – selling live sex-shows. The two girls glanced up for a second with polite indifference, and went back to their earnest, careful, intense conversation, paying no further attention to him at all. He broke off the patter, circled backwards like a boxer and gave Arlette a careful glance: Frenchwomen, generally fascinated by the immoralities and debaucheries of these English and these Scandinavians – a likely buyer, as long as they have first done their duty with a really good orgy at Marks and Spencer’s. Arlette met his eye with such a chill and knowing look that he shuffled back into the ropes and made off sideways: cow has been to the sex-show and has no money left. Amsterdam too has changed and not changed, she thought.

  ‘Raffishness’ was always the first cliché tourists used, the Amsterdammers were always intensely, idiotically proud of their red-light district and since time immemorial a stroll to look at ‘the ladies behind the windows’ was proposed to every eager tourist the very first night.

  They have taken now with such relish to the new role of exhibitionist shop-window that it is hard not to laugh – the visitor’s first reaction generally is roars of laughter. The Dutch have a belief that sex has made them less provincial somehow – for few attitudes are more provincial than the anxious striving to be modern-and-progressive. Paris doesn’t exist any more, and London is slipping, they will tell one with a boastful pathos, and Holland-is-where-it’s-at. A bit immature, really, as the two nineteen-year-olds from Dubuque were probably at that moment saying. Arlette was a humble woman. She saw herself as a snobbish, narrow, rigid, French provincial bourgeois. Piet, born and bred in Amsterdam, used to describe himself as a peasant. This humility gave them both an unusual breadth, stability, and balance. I remember his telling me once how to his mind his career if not his life had been an abject failure.

  ‘But there,’ drinking brandy reflectively, being indeed a real soak and loving it, ‘what else could I have done?’

  Arlette, walking slowly through the lazy, dirty sunshine of late afternoon in Amsterdam, was thinking too, ‘What else could I have done?’ She had come to lay a ghost. Not that she – hardheaded woman – believed in ghosts, but she had lived long enough to know they were there. Piet was a believer in ghosts. ‘I have known malign influences outside the bathroom door,’ he used to say. He was delighted when I gave him to read the finely-made old thriller of Mr A. E. W. Mason which is called The Prisoner in the Opal: he saw the point at once, and when he brought it back he said that he too, with the most sordid, materialistic, bourgeois of enquiries, always made the effort ‘to pierce the opal crust’. Poor old Piet.

  Once we were having dinner together in a Japanese restaurant. We had had three pernods, big ones, the ones Piet with his horrible Dutch ideas of wit which he took for esprit described as ’Des grands Pers’. We were watching the cook slicing raw fish into fine transparent slices.

  ‘There is poetry,’ said Piet suddenly, ‘in those fingers.’ I turned around suspiciously, because this is a paraphrase from a good writer, whom Piet had certainly not read. I used the phrase as an epigraph to a book I once wrote about cooks – which Piet had not read either. ‘Poetry in the fat fingers of cooks’ – I looked at Piet suspiciously.

  ‘So,’ with tactful calm, ‘is that a quotation?’

  ‘No,’ innocent. ‘Just a phrase. Thought it would please you, haw.’ That crude guffaw; completely Piet. The stinker; to this day I don’t know whether he was kidding me. A skilful user of flattery, but damn it
, a friend.

  The Damrak; the Dam, the Rokin. Squalid remnants of food, flung upon the pavements. The young were unable or unwilling to spend much on food, she thought, and what they got for their money probably deserved to be flung: one could not blame them too much, just because one felt revolted. But one did blame them: beastly children.

  The Utrechtsestraat. The Frederiksplein. And once out of the tourist stamping-ground, Arlette knew suddenly where she was going. She was heading unerringly and as though she had never been away straight towards the flat where she had lived for twenty years. It was a longish way to walk, all the way from the Central Station and carrying a suitcase too. Why had she done it? She would have said, ‘What else could I have done?’ crossly, for when she got there she was very tired and slightly footsore, dishevelled, her hair full of dust, smelling of sweat and ready to cry.

  ‘Arlette! My dear girl! What Are you doing? – but come in! I’m so happy to see you – and at the same time, my poor child, I’m so sad! Not that we know Anything – what one reads in the paper nowadays – Pah! And again Pah! Come in, my dear girl, come in – you don’t mean to say you walked … from the station? You Didn’t! You Couldn’t! Sit down child, do. The lavy? But of course – you know where it is, that’s not something you’ll have forgotten. I’ll make some coffee. My dear girl, Marvellous to see you, and the dear boys? – no no, I must be patient, go and have a pee, child, and a wash, do you good.’ The old biddy who had always had the ground floor flat, and still did … She taught the piano. It had been the most familiar background noise to Arlette’s life throughout the boys’ childhood; her voice carried tremendously.

  ‘One, Two, not so hasty. Pedal there, you’re not giving those notes their value, that’s a sharp can’t you hear it?’ And coming back from shopping an hour later another one was being put through its hoops. ‘Watch your tempo, not so much espressivo, you’re sentimentalizing, this is the Ruysdaelskade not the Wiener Wald or something.’

  ‘Lumpenpack,’ she would mutter, coming out on the landing for a breather and finding Arlette emptying the dustbin.

  Old Mother Counterpoint, Piet always called her, and sometimes in deference to Jane Austen ‘Bates’ (‘Mother hears perfectly well; you only have to shout a little and say it two or at the most three times’). A wonderful person really. A mine of information on the quarter, possessor of efficient intelligence networks in every shop, an endless gabble on the telephone, forever fixing things for someone, pulling strings for someone else. She could find anything for you; a furnished room, a secondhand pram scarcely used, a boy’s bike, a shop where they were having a sale of wonderful materials ever so cheap – even if she didn’t have her finger on it herself she knew a man who would let you have it wholesale. Warm-hearted old girl. Gushing, but wonderfully kind, and gentle, and sometimes even tactful.

  ‘You take yours black, dear, oh yes, I hadn’t forgotten – you think I’d forget a thing like that? Not gaga yet, thank God. Good heavens, it must be seven years. But you haven’t aged, dear – a few lines yes – badges of honour, my pet, that’s what I call them. Tell me – can you bear to talk about it? Where are you staying? By the look of you you could do with a square meal.’

  ‘I don’t know, I was wondering …’

  ‘But my poor pet of course, how can you ask, you know I’d be more than pleased and I’ve plenty of room, it’s just can you bear all the little fussinesses of a frightful old maid – oh nonsense child, now don’t be tiresome. Now I’ll tell you what, no don’t interrupt. I’m going to go to the butcher, yes still the same, awful fellow, all those terrible people, how they’ll be thrilled, just wait till he hears, I’ll frighten him the wretch, he gave me an escalope last week and tough … my poor girl, since you left he thinks everything is permitted him. I’ll get a couple of nice veal cutlets and we’ll have dinner, just you wait and I’ll get something to drink too, oh rubbish, I love the excuse and what’s more I’ll make pancakes, I never bother by myself, you take your shoes off and put your feet up and read the paper, nonsense you’ll do no such thing, I want to and anyway I’ll enjoy it: would you perhaps love a bath, my pet?’ The voice floated off into the hallway. ‘Where’s my goloshes, oh dear, oh here they are now how did they get that way, oh wait till I tell the wretch the cutlets are for you, he’ll jump out of his skin …’ The front door slammed. Arlette was home.

  It was a nice evening. Bates brought Beaujolais – Beaujolais! ‘I remember you used to buy it, child, I hope you still like it.’ Cutlets.

  ‘He practically went on his knees when he heard, with the tears in his eyes he swore on his mother’s grave you’d be able to cut them with a fork and I just looked and said, “She’d better”, that’s all.’

  ‘Bananas – I’ve got some rum somewhere, hasn’t been touched in five years I’d say, pah, all dusty, do you think it’ll still be all right dear, not gone poisonous or anything, one never knows now, they put chemicals in to make things smell better, awful man in the supermarket and I swear he squirts the oranges with an aerosol thing to make them smell like oranges, forlorn hope is all I can say.’

  The rum was tasted, and pronounced fit for pancakes.

  ‘And how’s Amsterdam?’ asked Arlette, laughing.

  It isn’t what it was; it wasn’t what it had been. Arlette had prepared to be bored with old-maidish gush about how we don’t sleep safe in our bed of nights, not like when we had a policeman in the house, which did give one a sense of security somehow. She ought to have known better really, because old mother Counterpoint had the tough dryness, the voluble energy, the inconsequent loquacity she expected – and indeed remembered, but the warm-hearted kindness was illuminated by a shrewd observation she had never given the old biddy credit for.

  ‘Well, my dear, it would ill become me to complain. I’ll have this flat for as long as I live and they can’t put my rent up, I have to spread my butter thinner but I’m getting old and I need less of it. I have the sunshine still and the plants and my birds and they’ll all last my time. I think it comes much harder on a girl your age, who can remember what things used to be, and who still has to move with the changes and accept them, whereas people expect me to be eccentric and silly. And I’m sorrier still for the young ones. They don’t have any patterns to move by: it must give a terrible sense of insecurity and I think that’s what makes them so unhappy. Everyone kowtows to them and it must be horrid really. Look at the word young, I mean it used to mean what it said and no more, young cheese or a young woman and that was that – and now they talk about a young chair or a young frock and it’s supposed to mean good, and when you keep ascribing virtue to people, and implying all the time that they should be admired and imitated, well dear, it makes their life very difficult and wearisome; I used to know a holy nun and she said sometimes that everybody being convinced one was good made a heavy cross to carry. When the young do wicked things I can’t help the feeling that it’s because they’re dreadfully unhappy. Of course there’s progress, lots and lots of progress, and it makes me very happy. I don’t have many pupils now, but I’m always struck when they come, so tall and healthy and active, so unlike the pale little tots when I was a young woman, and I remember very hard times, my dear, the men all drunk always because their lives were so hard, but they don’t seem to me any happier or more contented and they complain more because they expect much more. I can’t really see what they mean talking about progress because that seems to me to presuppose that people are good and get better and the fact is, my pet, as you and I know, people are born bad and tend to get worse and putting good before evil is always a dreadful struggle dear, whatever they say. One is so vain and so selfish.’

  And Arlette, who had had a good rest, a delicious bath, and a good supper, found herself pouring out her whole tale, and most of her heart.

  ‘Well,’ said Bates at the end with great commonsense, ‘that has done you a great deal of good, my dear, and that’s a fact, just like taking off one’s stays, girls don’t wear stay
s any more and don’t know what they miss.’

  Arlette felt inclined to argue that it was a good thing to be no longer obliged to wear stays.

  ‘Of course dear, don’t think I don’t agree with you, healthy girls with good stomach muscles playing tennis, and no more of that fainting and vapouring. But I maintain that it was a good thing for a girl to know constraint. Sex education and women’s lib, all dreadful cant. Girls who married without knowing the meaning of the word sex were sometimes very happy and sometimes very unhappy and I don’t believe they are any happier now. I married a sailor, dear, and learned how to go without.’

  ‘It doesn’t make me any happier now,’ said Arlette dryly.

  ‘No, dear, and that’s just what I felt in 1940 when my ship got torpedoed. So now let’s be very sensible. You’ve come here very confused and embittered, and you don’t want anything to do with the police, and you’re probably quite right because really poor dears they’ve simply no notion, but at the present you’ve no notion either. You’d never have thought of asking my advice because I’m a silly old bag but I’ll give it you, and it is that you probably can find out who killed your husband, because it’s surprising what you can do when you try, but it’s as well to have friends one can count on, and you can count on me for a start, and with that my dear we’ll go to bed, your eyes are dropping out.’