I have said that this man was the one teacher with intelligence. That seems harsh, but I encountered in the superior classes nothing but a dull pedantry. There was nothing whatever to give a child the slightest pleasure in anything, outside the curriculum or in it. For a Jesuit school it must have been a very bad one. I recall little of those years, save ludicrous episodes like the embarrassed cleric and Victor Hugo. I remained good at languages and bad at algebra. I got prizes at the end of the year (of the genre Southey’s Life of Nelson) and reprimands for not being able to trace the exact outline of Charlemagne’s empire upon the map of Europe. I made frequent penitential excursions to the office of the Prefect of Discipline, and others to the Prefect of Studies, where the torment, though not corporal, was just as disagreeable and lasted much longer. I would be told here that my parents paid reduced fees, and Made Sacrifices, and that Consequently…
We were doing Booz endormi, an example favoured by pedants for illustrating Hugo’s less-ranting manner, and had got to the line where Ruth is asleep with her breasts bare.
“Seins,” said the pedant, mumbling, “means – uh…”
“Breasts,” said Gold, who had a sophisticated home life.
“Bosoms,” suggested some other urchin.
“Tits,” sotto voce at the back; some overgrown child with a huge dirty wink at various fifteen-year-olds corrupt in an innocent and fumbling way.
“Chest,” said the pedant firmly, searching in his sleeve for a handkerchief. “Chest,” defiantly. Fish kicked me under the desk, I sniggered, and was immediately sent to the Prefect for judgement.
I recall nothing of my lyceum years but trashy French verse. ‘Oh combien de marins, combien de capitaines’ and the poetry for housemaids by Alfred de Musset. Was there no French prose? I suppose that there were approved authors, like Chateaubriand. Of English literature I recall the dreary set pieces by Lamb and Hazlitt with titles like ‘A Cold Morning’ (somebody warming a razor in his bosom, surely an extraordinary notion) or ‘On Going a Journey’. English poetry seems in retrospect to have been suppressed along with the French prose, but it was that kind of school. Those worthy and excellent clerics – one is reminded of Stendhal’s tutor, the Abbé de Raillane.
Fifteen
It must mean something that Ruth’s bosoms stuck so fast to this capricious memory. I was certainly the kind of child described by Raillane-tutors as ‘prurient’. I was precocious, nervous, easily touched by the sensual. My mother, going through a Life Beautiful phase just after the Kaiser’s War, had many elaborate books. It is the illustrations by Rackham and Dulac, rather than the splendid Don Quichotte by Doré, that I recall. Hawthorne’s Wonder Book, or the Ring of the Nibelungen, with endless flexible naked little girls: all these illustrators must have had a bit of a Lewis Carroll complex. I recall one of these books vividly, called The Earthly Paradise- or some such name. It was bad verse which I never read, but each page was accompanied by a large arty photograph in the pearly halftones of the period. All were of naked pre-pubescent girls on a beach, playing little games with sand and reeds and shells, the mysterious shadows between these children’s slim elegant thighs photographed with loving attention. Did these pictorial Annabelles and Lolitas give me a taste for rounded women in their late thirties? No, Henry; no explanations.
My memories of my father are vague. He was a big, robust man, who had made a lot of money as a mining engineer in Indonesia. There he had injured his health, maybe as a consequence of rheumatic fever. Certainly he had also a recurrent tropical malady that laid him up at intervals in a black depression. I think he may have been furious at his muscular body letting him down.
I was born in Indonesia, but within three years we were all brought back to Holland. My sisters, much older than myself, would talk about the wonderful life, but no colourful or uninhibited memory, no word of Malay disturbs my placid Dutch childhood. My father had wealth placed in mines of various kinds, and we lived, as I have said, in a large hideous villa suitable to a well-off rentier. I recall glass cases of geological specimens and others with daggers and shields, bellicose handwork of Dyaks or some such, less dull but with which I was not allowed to play. I recall the garden, damp and gloomy with overgrown laurel and rhododendron, and a house also damp and gloomy with stained glass that lent mahogany and pampas grass a churchy feeling surely depressing to others as well as me, but nobody did anything about it.
My father’s shares lost value steadily during the depression. My mother, who dramatised most things, was fond of saying that we were as poor as rats, and that we should be on the street in our shirts at any moment. I cannot recall our suffering the slightest hardship. We never got to bread-and-marge-and-cocoa, like most. But the house was sold, certainly at a huge loss, and we moved to a small poky house in a new, rather ‘working-class’ district. I think my father suffered. He used to go out into the country, such as it was: splendid farming ground but flat and featureless. The polder, and on one side the sand dunes, were no substitute to him for the forest, the jungle.
I think that he was a nice person, because he made botanical drawings, a few of which I still possess. He would take a little sketch pad, and draw field flowers. At home he did these over, exactly, minutely, in Indian ink and water-colour, and wrote all the names he could discover underneath in his printed engineer’s script. They are quite clumsy and naïve but there is devotion in them.
My mother was a nice person too. You will notice the strange distance between me and my parents. Affection I had, and affection I returned, but there was always a gap of which I was aware.
She was a very pretty, gushing, talkative woman, from a family of important colonial administrators; an uncle had been a Governor General. She had greatly lost caste in her family by becoming converted to Catholicism; she swam in emotional fervour with all a convert’s uncritical joy. She had plenty of intelligence and much charm, marred by a certain tiresome silliness. She crowded the houses with bondieuserie – pious pictures and holy-water stoups covered in sugar angels. She had a very showy missal, and a terrible rosary of wood from the Mount of Olives, blessed, it was said, by a Pope, of which she was very vain. She poisoned my life with sentimental child saints – well-born of course, like Aloysius Gonzaga or Guy de Fontgallant – and invited curates to the house for glasses of sherry.
Once we were poor she maintained herself with innocent snobberies. She could not of course cook or do housekeeping, and that was not her fault, surrounded as her whole life had been with a flock of servants, but unwittingly she made me suffer. Hardship, I have said, there was none, but suffering there was. I was sent to the most expensive school. My sisters had been to expensive convents, but had finished, being much older, before the depression really made itself felt. They were now independent, with their own friends, and cared little. I was small and fragile, much mothered and babied, and had no such defences. I was sent to school in the cheapest clothes. My companions played tennis, but we were too ‘poor’ to afford a tennis racket. They had expensive bicycles; I had none.
They went for holidays, which we could not afford. Their clothes were elegant and their shoes of supple leather. I was sent to school in boots, and my mother was proud of the economies thus accomplished. Some of these things bit very deep. I have never forgiven that tennis racket. Or the shapeless cotton swimming-shorts, that when wet hung on my shanks like paper, outlining my extremely self-conscious penis, causing sniggers from children with solid wool shorts that had badges of swimming-clubs stitched on them. Occasionally the kind mother of a rich comrade – Mrs Gold – would invite me for a free afternoon or even a day at weekends. My mother made me accept these invitations, quite rightly but inconsistently, and I see myself still climbing into the Golds’ big luscious Talbot auto, wearing boots, clutching my cotton shorts, agonising. Fish himself was much too nice a boy to comment, and Mrs Gold, and the chuckling, cigar-smoking Papa Gold, who dealt in furs, showered me with kindnesses. But other children remarked with their natural cruel
ty upon my mother’s petty snobberies and pettier economies.
My father did not notice such things. He had himself plenty of clothes, old but good for a lifetime. When on my twelfth birthday I begged and prayed for a bike he gave me one, and saw that it should be a good one. I think it is because of that bike and the rolled-gold fountain pen that I remember my father, quite unjustly really, with more kindness than my mother. She could be extremely kind, but I wished sometimes that she would go to heaven with Guy de Fontgallant – a little boy as I recall from an exceedingly wealthy and snobbish family – and leave me in peace.
I was not allowed to make friends with poorer children who wore boots, whom my mother said had common accents and very likely ringworm.
With girls, of course, I had no contact whatever. Girls did not approach expensive Jesuit schools. I was eighteen and had won a scholarship to the university before I met and spoke with a girl of my age. That, van der Valk, must seem extraordinary, and unlikely, to you, but I assure you that it is so.
In fact I seem, on looking over these pages, to get a slightly bitter taste. That is fair, for I had, despite many solitary pleasures, an unnecessarily harassed and painful childhood.
There is a sense of needless stupidity in that combination of ‘standing’ and cheese-paring, as there was in my father’s dislike of bothering himself punctuated with bits of sudden, perhaps shame-stricken generosity. Certainly all that widened the gap.
My father died in my first year at the university. He had quarrelled, I believe, with his family, of whom I recall nothing but a portentous bearded brother and a faded sister at the funeral. I felt little emotion, perhaps a vague pity. The gap had got too wide. I could spare only one day away from lectures and from Amsterdam.
My mother went to live with her sister, my aunt Mathilde, in Voorburg, just outside The Hague: my aunt’s husband, regarded as a high candidate for colonial honours, had died in Djakarta in administrative service while quite young. Really my mother did this to get back to the atmosphere where she felt at home; the sisters drank tea and talked about the good old days, with their friends, for Voorburg is full of pensioned colonial widows as well as old gentlemen who have retired, as full of honours as their houses are of tiger-skins and Balinese dolls. But I was given to understand that this was done out of altruism, to save every penny and further my education. I was not impressed, nor particularly grateful. I lived in a respectable lodging house – how well I remember it – in Amsterdam, near the Museum, in the Jan Luykenstraat. I had henceforward money for books, a few clothes, and even some cheap amusements if I cared to discover any.
I had been sent to the university to study humanities – Arts, as the faculty is named, pleasantly but vaguely. For my teachers had said that languages living and dead were my only real strength. True to principle my mother had not the remotest idea of steering me towards some career that would earn me a living. Nor had I; so little notion of reality had I at eighteen that I planned to get a ‘good degree’ and enter the Diplomatic Service.
Fish, still the only friend I had, despised ‘Arts’ though even better at the disciplines than I was: I was throughout school the eternal second to him. He was going to read medicine, and it was at his house, halfway through my first year, in the first flush of independence, that I was bitten by the bug. Theo Visser, then professor of materia medica, had come to dinner, and after a very good meal, Mrs Gold’s excellent coffee, Papa’s wonderful Cuban cigars, and armagnac brandy, old Theo got so lyrical about medicine – the two boys sitting enraptured, both mouths slightly open – that I determined then and there to change over. Forgotten the good degree in languages and the Diplomatic Service. I dawdled out the rest of the academic year reading all the medical books I could lay my hands on, went to no more lectures than were necessary in order not to get sacked altogether, and at the beginning of the next semester, to my mother’s anguish, I plunged into ‘pre-medical’.
That was the year of Munich. Papa Gold, no fool, was settled in Canada three months later, and Fish, my only anchorage, with him. Mrs Gold cried a little when I went to say goodbye. She was fond of me, and I think understood me well enough. She gave me a cheque for a hundred pounds – a hundred pounds! – from her own account, and Papa gave me a signet ring which I still wear. Fish volunteered three years later for the Canadian Army. He was killed in Holland, ironically, just at the time of the Liberation. I never saw him, though I was in Amsterdam throughout the whole war.
There you are, van der Valk, my boy. You will be, I think, in your late thirties – old enough to remember the years before Munich and the years of the depression, the years when things like schools were extraordinarily old-fashioned in comparison with other countries, the last years of Holland’s long isolation, and comfortable prosy dozy sleep that was to end only in the violent breaking-in of reality in the May days of nineteen forty.
But we may as well go on, and even perhaps get all this thrashed out in one sitting. Beatrix is expecting me for dinner, but I do not intend to go. I am proposing to do what I have never done, instead. I am going to eat at a cheap ‘lunch-room’ restaurant, where there is music and a huge menu full of strange things, and people order the oddest combinations, like cold Russian egg salad with fried potatoes. They are open till late at night. I think I shall enjoy this. I will take a pocket book with me – a Simenon, for instance – and read it at the table, and drink beer. What on earth would anyone say who knew me, to see Doctor van der Post, who has certainly as high an income as any specialist in Holland, sitting in a lunch-room at ten at night, eating Russian eggs with chips, drinking beer and reading a Simenon printed on lavatory paper, rested on his plate’s edge?
What would you say?
Would it please you to see me rub shoulders with the people of Amsterdam, those very ‘people’ my mother found rather shocking? You are one of them yourself. You see, I am not so stupid after all.
My youth, yes. The twentieth birthday, big landmark. I was halfway through ‘pre-med’ and worried at not losing my virginity. In these days, no boy has any difficulty finding a girl of his own age to sleep with. In England they wear little badges, these girls, to proclaim their accessibility, and have contraceptives in their schoolbags. You recall, the yellow golliwogs? – rather a poetic conception. Or contraception, as you prefer.
But then… Any town more provincial and puritan than the prewar Amsterdam is difficult to imagine. To find a girl to go to bed with, even at twenty, smoking a big pipe and using ridiculous medical jargon, was a formidable undertaking.
Naturally, there was the old quarter. It is nowadays a tourist attraction. Any young girl, even alone, can walk giggling through narrow alleys, peering with a greedy choky sensation at the ‘girls behind the windows’. And any boy with a pound note in his pocket can push the door and see the ‘girl’ of his choice get up bored to draw the curtain, putting down her book or her knitting with a sigh, languidly undoing her skirt, fumbling at the zipper with her free hand already held out for her money.
But before the war, you must know, the old quarter was a place of terror and legend. Nobody well-brought-up dreamed of going near it. Even policemen went there in couples. There were tales of drunken seamen robbed and knifed by a banditry that went to ground in the rabbit-warren of attics and cellars. Legend went further. In the minute, stinking alleyways there was cholera and sleeping sickness, and in those attics where, opening a tiny window, you might get a breath of tropical scents there were even, it was whispered, lepers hidden. Amsterdam, recall, was the great European port for the Far East, the visible, tangible, smellable link with Holland’s empire, which was a tropical archipelago the size of the United States.
In fact, even as medical students, puffed with bravado, we shook in our shoes when we first came to the Binnen Gasthuis, the old hospital that stands still on the demarcation line between the old quarter and the prim city, and has fingers, and toes, that are dabbled in the blood and pus of both.
There were women students,
of course. Fewer than now, but quite a huddle in the literature and history faculties. They were mostly plain, with spots and stringy hair, and tended to come from earnest provincial families. They were stiff and proper, and lived boarded out with an uncle in the big city. Two, however, met my standards, which were exacting.
For I was a great admirer of beauty. A devotion to the senses, to the curving sweeping line, to nineteenth-century romanticism. Music as yet I knew nothing of. (My family was, in retrospect, strangely philistine. My mother, a great talker about books and pictures, never once took me to a concert or a gallery.) Books, however, there had always been in the house, and during my last lyceum years I had discovered Wilde and Beardsley, the Bakst and Benois designs for the Russian Ballet, the nudes of Titian and Giorgione, the verse of Théophile Gautier, and I was something of an adolescent aesthete. These two girls came within the definition of what was acceptable to such.
Marie was blonde, with a little tilted nose, quiet and neat, and rode on an expensive bicycle from her parents’ superior residence near the Zoo. Father was some departmental secretary in the municipal administration, a functionary of quite a grand sort. Marie was very much a little Sainte N’y Touche, her nose somewhat in the air. She was conscientious, went to all lectures, and took careful notes in a neat but stupid rounded backhand. I sat just behind her, did my best to smell her hair, and dared say no word to her.
Alida I admired less; she was less well shaped. Taller, a little clumsier, with a suspicion of hair on upper lip and sturdy calves as well as her strong forearms. She had long brown hair with a reddish tinge, strong black eyebrows, long greenish eyes that gave vitality to her face, and a very pretty mouth. She may have been the only girl in the university to wear lipstick, then thought distinctly fast and decidedly common. She came indeed very nearly from the ‘people’ and lived in a flat-chested apartment at the very limit of Amsterdam-South, a district only just built.
Criminal Conversation Page 16