Tsing-Boum

by Nicolas Freeling

  The border already; the road went easily. Ruth was not a chatterer, and neither is Esther, she thought, smiling slightly. I am a pretty bad mother. I am not exactly a prize packet as a wife either. I try. Marx, quite a good report for effort; I suppose that’s something. Takes pains with her appearance, keeps that stinking little apartment in reasonable shape, doesn’t get drunk, doesn’t whore about.

  The big lummox of a Fleming – should she after all turn back? No – Ruth would be horribly disappointed. She was looking forward to it, and had even begged to make a parachute jump. Esther had to promise to make one herself. Didn’t have to feel defiant about it, either. It wasn’t nostalgia, and it certainly wasn’t self-indulgence. Esther didn’t know what it was: didn’t have much imagination, thank God. Maybe just a bit of snobbery. Nobody in the Van Lennepweg thought much one way or another of little Mevrouw Zomerlust: she wasn’t particularly liked, nor was she disliked, she hoped. But she was damn sure of one thing – none of them knew how to make a jump.

  Was there disloyalty to one’s husband in putting on overalls again and a jump helmet? Honestly she couldn’t see it. She would tell him if it worked. Almost certainly he would laugh in his unmalicious generous way, and tell her to go ahead and enjoy herself because what gave her pleasure pleased him too.

  This must be the place. A dozen cars – all a lot grander than the Ariane but she was not going to be ashamed of the Ariane any more than of herself. Fat business men. Give them lessons – all right she would. Remember Gilles – le père Gilles with his glass eye which he took out when he jumped. Been over forty when he made his first jump.

  Office place – Ruth was exclaiming with excitement. Now she had to go through with it.

  ‘Just wait outside a moment – I have to go in here. Why don’t you go through there, and you can look at the planes?’

  She had to be patient for several minutes while a big sporting golfing character went on about putting the papers through and how many hours he had. Her turn at last – soppy girl with stupid clothes and a ghastly shade of lipstick, who looked at her as though she wasn’t rich enough for this league.

  She had to straighten the cow out a bit. Conny Desmet was giving a lesson and would be down in twenty minutes, but …

  ‘No, I’m an old friend.’ Le gros Flamand was not exactly a friend but that was no business of office girls. ‘I came to do a jump.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s Mr Bos – he’s in charge of that – oh yes, he’s around.’ Who the hell was Mr Bos? But Ruth would be fidgeting. The girl got up and looked through the window.

  ‘Oh yes, there he is on the apron. Is that your little girl? Well, that’s him talking to her.’

  Esther walked out into a smell of creosoted wood baked by a bright September sun, of dried grass and motor oil, her heart lifting and contracting at remembered smells, remembered excitements. It was Pau again, Pau where she had made her first jump ever. Yes, she wanted to buckle a harness on again, tighten the heavy straps around her thighs, feel that sharp empty air as she jumped into it and the exquisite second after one punched the release on one’s stomach and felt the snatch of the chute. There was a glare that blinded her a second and then she saw him. The muscles in her calves and thighs jumped and twitched furiously; the blood roared in her throat and head.

  Him. Talking to his daughter. She walked slowly, shakily, as though the dusty concrete on which the air danced and shimmered were the thigh-deep black mud of a delta ricefield. She stood there a metre behind Ruth, waiting for him to see her. She said nothing because there was nothing to say. What could one say?

  ‘Drop dead’?

  ‘I love you’?

  ‘Good afternoon’?

  ‘Hallo Mevrouw – seems I’ve a pupil here, or have I two …’

  His turn to stand rooted. Esther made a monstrous effort not to be a fly stuck on the flypaper.

  ‘Come, sweetie.’ Ruth looked properly astonished, never having been called sweetie in her life.

  ‘She’s told me her name,’ said Laforêt slowly.

  God it was cowardly. Look at him. Speak to him. Say something. Jump you fool. And she couldn’t jump … Esther Marx … couldn’t jump …

  ‘Come, Ruth.’

  ‘Why?’ She was flabbergasted, naturally. She was getting along fine!

  ‘I don’t know – it’s the wrong place or something. I must have got something wrong but they’ve no place – no room or something. They’re booked up. Come; I’m going to buy you an ice.’

  She had gone to a great deal of trouble, working out all sorts of elaborate details to forget her cowardice. Buying a picnic lunch, taking Ruth swimming and hiring two bathing costumes from a Belgian who plainly thought her an imbecile, driving all the way over beyond Liège into the Ardennes, getting stranded with no petrol – lord, behaviour of a startled virgin – going back through Spa and up to Maastricht, letting Ruth drink beer mixed with lemonade and spending an awful lot of money …

  She had managed to raise her eyes after bending down stupidly, dizzily, to fix Ruth’s sandal strap, with which there was nothing whatever the matter. Just for a moment she had managed to meet his eyes before dragging the protesting child back to the car. She didn’t know what her expression had been, but she hoped it had somehow managed to convey ‘I’m sorry’ and that he would have understood what she meant.

  For weeks she had waited for the consequences, knowing there would somehow be consequences, uneasy and frightened, cursing herself for a fool, trying to be less surprised at her agitation. After all, seeing somebody for the first time since the night in the bar you shot him – bound to be a bit of a shock however you looked at it. Even after twelve years. It made her furious that she could not even tell Harry, even hint – caught in her own trap: had it not been herself that had laid it down so adamantly that whatever happened the past would never never never come up between them?

  Had he seen in that one second that whatever she did or said she would go back to him at the drop of his hat – if something did not stop her? – and one minute she found herself praying desperately that something would not stop her, and the next second that it would.

  Would he find out where she was? Perhaps through Desmet? Would Desmet? She knew – she knew – that sooner or later she would find one or other of them waiting for her.

  Esther did not tell anyone what she went through in the fortnight which followed. Laforêt – who was cursed with too much imagination – later thought that he had some idea.

  It was Desmet who came. She was quite glad when at last it happened. And glad that he was so easy, so unembarrassed, so casually ready to admit he had spied her out. He had enough brass for a whole military band, that one. And the easy accustomed swank of a drum-major marching at its head.

  Esther lost hers. Her head, she meant. Right bang there in the Van Lennepweg he walked in at the door as unconcerned and confident as the man come to tell you you’ve won ten thousand on the football pool. ‘Good morning, Mevrouw. We’ve a simply great piece of news for you.’

  Of course the great piece of news that people like Desmet brought was their own marvellous self. There he was, in his beautifully cut suit and shirt, with that lovely soft black leather briefcase exactly as though selling insurance, and his broad sunny smile. Walked in before it entered her head that she could have shut the door again.

  ‘Hallo, Esther.’ Cheerleader.

  ‘I’m sorry, the place is a mess. My girl’s at school. I wasn’t expecting anyone. I’m sorry, sit down. Can I offer you something? – I’ve some whisky,’ desperately.

  ‘I’d love that. Trust Esther to have something good.’ In her nervousness and haste she poured herself an enormous one, far bigger than she intended, slopping some on her fingers. It was a brand new bottle of Johnny Walker, bought just that morning, the tissue paper still wound round the bright red and gold label. When he went it was empty, and she stayed sitting there looking at it, tipping it up to her mouth to get the last drops out, throwing
it in the bin and crawling after it to get it back out, with an absurd notion of sticking it up on a bracket with a ribbon round it and a little gold-edged card saying ‘Esther Marx is a whore – everybody knows that’. Esther Marx is a whore, Esther Marx is a whore, beating in her head, beating with drums, in march time. The drums swelled and banged inside her head, and the boots of a column of soldiers following, cracking down in rapid rhythm. Boots, boots, boots, boots … Go on, boots, kick me to death.

  A slogan. Chant it, sur l’air des lampions. Esther Marx – is a whore.

  ‘I thought now Conny, you have to pass by to apologize. Without knowing or even guessing – and that was damn stupid of you, boy, you’ve caused her one hell of an embarrassment, and now how could you be so damn dim?

  ‘Sure I knew where you lived. Went to some trouble to find out. Couldn’t leave you thinking that old Conny would be such a bastard as just not to do anything at all, just laugh and say too bad, let’s forget it. Wouldn’t do that to any girl. And Esther! No no no no no.

  ‘Honest, you won’t believe a man could be such a total clot, but I never thought. Why sure, I knew you used to go about with him in Hanoi, but then we all used to do some queer things in those days. I never knew, of course, there was anything big in it. And those days – well, jesus, we used to do some things then, didn’t we? I reckon there’s a lot of us did things we’d be a bit ashamed of now. But it’s all such old stuff, isn’t it? I mean to say, these people that go about holding reunions and remembering where they were back at good old El Alamein or wherever, they’re simply not for real. Stuff like that one keeps for kids who’ve never grown up. Mean to say – I’ll admit it; couldn’t be less than honest with a girl like you – I had heard something years after from some guy I knocked up against who used to be in the old mob, good old Third Thirteenth, and he told me some garbled story of a row back there in France. But I mean, I never gave it a thought. Long forgotten. You too – why it’s obvious, you’ve got your own life, went off and got married and all, didn’t just hang about brooding.

  ‘No, I’ll explain. I was setting up the airfield deal and I was just wishing I knew somebody who was a parachute instructor because that’s great stuff and who do I run up against in a bar in Brussels but Lieutenant Laforêt and who else do I remember as one hell of a crackerjack jumper and who else is better-looking for a job like that – and what’s more he’s thinking of changing jobs. Well I mean there’s no question of his being an employee or something, but he makes the ideal partner, and if he’s got no money to put into the business that’s all right, he works and takes responsibility. Managing director you’d say, and Conny’s president or something, belting round the countryside to whip the businessmen into garaging their planes at Conny’s place …’

  How it had gone on. And she had drunk more and more in her fever and uncertainty and fear, and had got drunk, for the first time since the night in the bar when she had taken the pistol out, the one she had taken from his suitcase. Drunk. Drunk as a stinking slut. And of course it had ended the way such scenes always ended, with her getting up to empty ashtrays, and being pushed up against the wall in the kitchen, pushed back through into the living-room, pushed over on the living-room sofa. Didn’t it always end that way? What else was Esther Marx good for, in heaven’s name?

  She had gone into the lavatory and vomited and vomited and then got under the shower, sitting huddled on the tiled floor and letting water wash over her until it was time for Ruth to come home and she had drunk cup after cup of strong coffee and forced herself to be a suburban mum.

  Suburban mum tumbled by the milkman.

  She hadn’t wanted to live any more. And then one day he had come, ten days after the other.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  He hadn’t come barging into the house. He had waited lord knew how many hours outside being unobtrusive. Days for all she knew.

  ‘Esther.’ It had been hardly over a whisper. But at least the Desmet episode had broken her out of the rigid shell. She didn’t have to play the blushing housewife. She could look at him naturally, speak to him unselfconsciously, have a human normal contact without freezing, or opening and shutting her mouth like a gaffed fish.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come here, you know.’

  ‘I know. But I had to. You know?’

  ‘Yes. But not here. I’ll meet you. Wait – in an hour. No – tonight. Nine tonight.’ Harry had a duty, a guard or a fire picket or something.

  ‘I was very amenable,’ remarked Laforêt with his tissue-paper smile. ‘A well-brought-up little boy, and a malleable, suggestible man.’

  He went on speaking in the same slow careful voice; he seemed to have forgotten Desmet standing just the other side of the little bar, immobile and menacing, sipping whisky with an ugly detachment.

  ‘Where did you meet her?’ interjected Van der Valk, colourless.

  ‘The railway station buffet – there’s nothing more classic than that, is there? An emotional scene would not be noticed.’ But there had been no emotional scene. Esther had flinched, once, but she would not flinch again.

  She spoke bleakly; when she spoke of herself she spoke harshly. But her voice was gentle.

  ‘I have tried to make something. I wanted to make a human being happy. I suppose it will fail, but I will have tried. It must seem very laughable and somehow pathetic, what I tried. You haven’t seen my home, and you’re not going to. Well, it’s just a rotten little council flat. You haven’t seen my husband, and you’re not going to, because if anybody tries to involve him in my dirty stories I’d kill him. I mean kill him, as I would a cockroach, with no more feelings about it. He’s just a quiet working man. Nobody thinks much of him. He doesn’t think much of himself. But he’s worth the lot of us put together. I don’t love him, but I’d go to prison for him, and if need be I’d die for him. You don’t understand that, because once I went to prison for you, and would have died for you, and you thought that quite all right, because I loved you.

  ‘It won’t even surprise you to hear I still love you. You’ll take that as quite evident and normal. That’s how it should be. Faithful Esther, through all these years, I’m her man.

  ‘So I’m going to ask you to go away. Just for once to consider yourself something unimportant. Are you able to do that? I’m not going to see you again, and I won’t run away with you, or sleep with you in secret, or anything, much as I’d like to. I’ve looked after your daughter, and I’m trying to let her grow up in a way you’d be proud of, but I’m not letting you see her either. Even though with you I could have been very happy.

  ‘You see, you go around with this certainty that everyone looks at you. That you are under a curse, just because of a moment when your nerve failed. It’s just egoism, can you see? One isn’t important enough. You keep on creeping around thinking you are being humble, and you’re just exalting yourself. You’ve blamed yourself all these years for not being like Hervouet. You remember Hervouet?’

  Of course he did. Nobody had forgotten the young tank captain, with the pale, fragile-seeming student’s face, who had fought the battle with both arms in plaster casts, who had come through to the last day, only to die on the march to the Viet camps.

  ‘Romantic,’ and the word in Esther’s mouth was a distillation of derisory bitterness. ‘You are asked to be like Guérin, who lost both legs and shot himself rather than risk the lives of the men he knew would come for him. Understand that of all things the last I ask you to do is to shoot yourself. That would be just one more crowning egoism. Just remember instead what Langlais said – yes, I know, you don’t care to be reminded of him. Somebody complained of being tired.

  ‘ “Tired?” he said. “And us? You weren’t asked for your advice, but to come and have your face broken with us.”

  ‘Remember all the boys who got up from their hospital beds. The boy with one eye and his face in pieces. Fox, Le Page, Guy de la Malène. You think that because you once broke the solidarity and they threw you out
you are forever in exile, forever in darkness – and you’ve loved it. Now rejoin.’

  He had stared at her stupidly, mechanically stirring the spoon in half a cup of cold railway station coffee, thick and syrupy in the thick white railway station china.

  ‘I want to ask you another thing,’ went on Esther, inexorable. ‘You’ve got a pretty good job there, haven’t you?’

  ‘Not bad – not that good,’ hastily.

  ‘No, but comfortable,’ and there was irony in the word ‘comfortable’. ‘A soft easy job, undemanding. And you can show off to people. And you don’t have to rub yourself against the ruck of common stupid folk. A select classy lot.’

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ but she brushed his words aside.

  ‘Jammy. Those little planes, and that windswept airfield stuff. You’ve learned to pilot and all, and you teach them to jump.’

  ‘I had to take what I could. I’d no training, no skills – I knew nothing else.’ Esther picked up her handbag and stood up.

  ‘Leave it,’ she said softly. ‘Go far away. Not for me or because of me. That man is a bad man. A vicious man. I do not know why. But I know that he is only waiting for an opportunity to blackmail you. Just as he is only waiting for a chance to blackmail me. But he knows that I will not yield to that. Though I yield to everything else. Goodbye.’ She had walked straight away from him.

  ‘Esther,’ he had called, jumping up from the bewilderment of her finality. But she was already gone, and he dared not make a scandal. He had reason to know that Esther was not to be trifled with.