‘Agree …?’ It seemed to be a silly word.
‘Nothing to stop you living in France, I should imagine.’
‘Too goddam dear – you take me for a lousy beatnik or something? I’ve had all that – going without food, sleeping on benches, all that. I’ve had enough of it – you wouldn’t understand.’
‘No?’
A look of open contempt – no, not contempt: there was envy in it too. Derision was the word, perhaps.
‘No.’
‘Do tell me. I should have thought,’ innocent, ‘that it would go quite smoothly once you got accustomed to your hair being itchy.’ ‘You – you’ve never spent the night in a tramp’s shelter – you’ve never been chased off a bench by police.’
‘They do that, in Paris?’
‘They don’t stop to look if you’re washed or not.’
‘But you liked it there?’
‘Know anything about painting?’ with a false politeness.
‘No.’
‘You surprise me. You’re a painter and you go to Paris. You do neo-expressionism, or neo-realism, or neo-whatever-you-like, it makes no odds, there’s a hundred thousand of you. You might even be good, you’d still be up against the machine, that takes one in a hundred, among the good and the bad alike, sells their pictures, gives them space on the wall and in the press, and might even make them a living if they’re patient enough and stubborn enough – pretty poor lookout for the other ninety-nine. Ninety-eight of them are lousy anyway, they’ve all got names like Szabo and Soapsudski, nobody can tell them apart, and the ninety-ninth, who happens to be good, gets drowned in the dungheap. So you try to make yourself different – the bad ones just copy whatever style happens to be in the wind. But if you’re any good you have your own line and you can’t force it. So you look for something else characteristic, like a subject – something you can be recognized by. Butterflies! – that’s Cock. Rotted tree-stumps – that’s Prick.’
Van der Valk listened with exemplary patience. If you can just get them to talk about themselves they are quite prepared to stop being monosyllabic.
‘So you do horses.’
‘I like horses. Very few people can do them. I’m one. I understand them.’
‘It seems illogical that you should be scared to get up on them.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Why, Francis.’ The young man was thrown out of his stride.
‘You don’t paint a thing you’re sitting on.’
‘Why not? Géricault did.’ Not that Van der Valk knew anything about Géricault, whom indeed he generally got confused with Delacroix. He had read Aragon’s Semaine Sainte though.… He was surprised at the young man’s seeming too confused to see this.
‘He was in the army,’ he said lamely, ‘not a suburban manège. There’s all the difference. I’m a good painter and I know it.’
‘And even Francis can see that.’
‘Francis wouldn’t know Rubens from Kokoschka but he does know horses.’ He laid aside the neatly finished darn, wound up his card of wool with care, and realized that he had been manoeuvred into sounding defensive.
‘It’s no good trying to pump me about art. You wouldn’t understand in a thousand years, so don’t waste your breath. Stick to your job, like asking me if Bernhard really fell off the horse.’
‘Did he?’
‘I’d say no, since you ask me, but I wouldn’t know why nor how. I was right there working in the shed, and I had more to do than pop out to watch Fatty exercising. I was minding my business and I didn’t even know a thing about it till after they called the doctor. I came out for a coffee then and asked what all the fuss was about.’
He had at last been allowed to deliver his carefully rehearsed speech. There was probably more of it but that was enough …
‘Yes. You going to go back to Paris?’
‘I’ve been here six months – if I stay another six, I’ll have plenty of work for a dealer I know, and I’ll have money what’s more to live in a decent place and hang on while he’s selling them – as long as it takes. No little bits of charity in advance. You never get anywhere if you give the impression you’re hard up for it, waiting for it with your hand held out. You’ve got to say you don’t give a bugger if they take it or not – it’s too good for them anyway.’
‘You can make quite a fair living selling stuff here, huh?’
‘I stay alive.’
‘I saw the portraits in Francis La Touche’s living-room.’
‘That! I’ve done some soppy stuff for a few of the old bags. I work carefully, and I use decent materials, and you don’t know what that costs. Anybody can dribble paint out of a tube on to brown paper.’
‘But you don’t have much expenses.’
‘You think the empty stomach downstairs gives me this room for free?’
‘Very interesting,’ heartily, getting up.
‘You got any more to ask me? I don’t want you coming messing about afterwards while I’m working – I don’t like being interrupted.’
‘I’ve got nothing to ask you – since you saw nothing and knew nothing, why should I? If I think of anything I want to ask you – any time, any place – I will. Write that on a little label and paste it on your sleeve, so you won’t forget that.’
‘Police! – all the bloody same: just give them an office and a medal.’
‘Where do you come from, by the way?’ half out of the door. The young man was staring ostentatiously out of the window, being deeply interested in the odd car passing.
‘Rotterdam,’ without turning round; ‘if it’s any of your business.’
He went on watching out of the window for some time after Van der Valk had gone. When he saw the little cream-coloured deux-chevaux, his eye followed it with sudden interest. There was no reason why he should not recognize it, thought Van der Valk straightening the mirror: he must have seen Arlette at the manège often enough.
People in Holland eat their supper early. The wives have it on the table for when their husbands get home from work, and here there is a class distinction to be noticed. Working men still take sandwiches to eat on the building site in the lunch break, and when they come home they expect to find a big pot of boiled potatoes and the classic stew with lots of gravy. But bourgeois Holland ‘eats warm at midday’; at six o’clock it is a cold meal and all the wife has to do is make the tea.
Van der Valk’s childhood had covered the depression years of the early thirties, and though his father had been a master craftsman, a carpenter with a tiny shop of his own, and though there had always been a massive pot of stew at midday, his supper had been bread and cheese and cocoa. And nowadays – his wife came from the department of the Var – he got soup and not tea at suppertime! But he knew the routine – backwards; he had been in so many of these houses …
The table laid with sliced bread – two or three sorts. The margarine in a glass dish, and one or two kinds of sausage and cheese laid out in the neat thin slices that have been cut at the shop. Jam, and at least one other sweetstuff to put on the bread after the traditional one-with-sausage-and-one-with-cheese. Perhaps little mice – little sugary pellets like hundreds and thousands. Chocolate vermicelli, or powdered sugar with an anis flavour, called stamped mice. It is sprinkled with a teaspoon on buttered bread which is then cut in little squares and eaten with a knife and fork. Laughable enough to the ignorant foreigner, but it is Holland. Van der Valk was not in the least surprised to find that this was just what Doctor Maartens got for supper.
‘I’m too early.’
‘Not a bit. Sorry it hasn’t been cleared away – the telephone! It’s the daily girl’s day off – my wife begs you to excuse her.’
‘You excuse me.’
‘Shall we go back to my room?’ He had lit a pipe and was puffing attractive clouds of smoke – English tobacco. Why is English pipe tobacco so nice and the cigarettes so nasty, wondered Van der Valk, and why in France is it the other way about?
&nb
sp; It was six-thirty, and he deserved a cigar. There is no nonsense about Dutch cigars. They are well made, cheap, and exist in every possible size and quality. Ask for a Cuban cigar in a restaurant in England and one understands this in a painful way. Come to that, buy cheap cigars in France or Germany …
Doctor Maartens did not seem daunted by the length of his working day. He settled himself comfortably, puffed to keep his pipe going, and shook a matchbox to be sure he wouldn’t run short of fire for when he forgot to puff.
‘I’ve looked at my files, you know, on these various people you mentioned, but it’s all very banal, very unexciting. I realize that what you’re after is the kind of thing people tell doctors in between the blood group and the urine test, but there’s things there I couldn’t repeat, you know, even to you. Stuff told in confidence, not particularly relevant to any medical aspect.’
‘None of that matters. I need to have another person’s impressions of these people. Can be as blurred, as disconnected, as vague as you like. You live here. You see these people both on a professional and an unprofessional level. If I go to the local town hall, the local gendarmerie, I get all the information I want that can go into pigeonholes. I come to you for the stuff that doesn’t go into any files. That’s all.’
‘I’ll tell you anything I can.’
‘Tell me why you think Marguerite married a chap like Bernhard.’
Maartens looked at him a moment as though he thought his leg was being pulled, then said, ‘I see.’ He meditated for a moment over his pipe.
‘She comes from a poor family, you know.’
‘Her father was a tramdriver – pigeonhole in town hall.’
‘Bernhard had not got much money when she married him, but she certainly saw the possibilities in that business.’
‘She likes money?’
‘I’d say she liked the nice things you can buy with money. She has a rather naïve appreciation of luxury, perhaps. You see it in. her house, her clothes.… She loves spending money, gets more pleasure out of that than many people. She enjoys life, lives it with gusto.’
‘Very healthy.’
‘Oh, sound as a bell. Takes lots of exercise, eats lots of fruit – well balanced. Thought herself too fat; I told her not to be absurd. She had a tendency to go in at one time for these ridiculous diets they find in tomfool women’s magazines.’
‘Know anything about the circumstances in which she married him?’
‘I was only just qualified at the time – not an awful lot. The place was his father’s – who was Austrian, or Bavarian – I never saw him. During the war – well, it was natural that they should be on comfortable terms with their own countrymen.’ He was picking his words. These times are still not spoken of freely, without embarrassment, in Holland – one can never be quite sure how the other person thinks of them.
‘I don’t imply that they were involved in any crimes or anything.’
‘If they were there’d be a record of it,’ drily.
‘They were a bit persecuted though, afterwards, I rather think.’
‘There’d certainly be no record of that,’ even more drily. He got a slight smile.
‘I seem to recall that the place was not confiscated but was closed for a while. The old man died – couldn’t face the various troubles. Bernhard inherited a messy state of affairs. The local talk – I certainly don’t guarantee its accuracy – was that Marguerite persuaded the Groenveld woman, who had money of her own, to invest in it. I can tell you one thing – she told me in confidence but it’ll be on file.… Her family were National Socialist sympathizers.’
‘It is on file.’
‘I don’t hold it against her – she was a child at the time. What is she now – forty?’
‘And Bernhard?’
‘I can’t tell you much about him, you know,’ a bit hurriedly. ‘He didn’t haunt my doors – type of chap who thought he’d live for ever. Physiologically, he wasn’t far wrong. He came the once for a checkup, after his wife got on to him. But he didn’t tell me anything – closed sort of a chap.’
‘Any marital troubles?’
‘Never complained to me about them, that’s all I can say,’ cheerfully. ‘Doesn’t mean much – some do, some don’t – some who don’t have worries and inhibitions easily detected – others don’t – simple as that. She asked for pills, which I gave her – usual pills.’
‘She didn’t want a child?’
‘She said once to me that quite apart from business demands she didn’t believe she’d make a good mother.’
‘Odd remark.’
‘Plenty of women don’t make good mothers. If they realize it, so much the better.’
‘What about the Groenveld woman?’
‘She didn’t ask for any pills,’ Maartens’ turn to be dry. ‘Unmarried and contented that way. Well balanced – health very good on the whole. Bit of trouble with varicose veins – I told her to put a high stool behind the bar and take plenty of walks – surgery’s not much good in my experience. Some slight glandular imbalance. Worried a bit about growth of hair – that kind of thing. I won’t bother you with that,’ firmly, ‘it can’t possibly be relevant.’
‘A normal household with no tensions.’
‘As far as my knowledge goes – yes.’
‘Tell me something about Francis.’
‘Ha,’ laughing. Doctor Maartens sounded relieved that the subject had been changed. ‘I know plenty about him – not that he isn’t really a common type of patient. Has a new symptom about once a week; he calls me constantly. He comes from an aristocratic kind of family, you may know – but impoverished. Town hall files?’
‘Certainly,’ laughing.
‘You’ve done your share of homework, I notice. Oh, I approve, you’re doing your job, and in a very conscientious manner. If I didn’t approve I wouldn’t be talking to you, would I?’
‘There might not have been any crime at all. But if there was it’s a murder. I’ve got to find out.’
‘Well, I only mentioned it because he has aristocratic symptoms,’ smiling. ‘Cardiac flutters, awful pains here and there – thinks he’s gout – he hasn’t. Thinks he’s angina – it’s a false one. Half of it comes from worrying himself about it. There’s not all that much wrong with him. A bit arthritic – I treat him for that – a bit diabetic – ditto – he does need care. He’s one of those people that really need a court physician around them to fiddle with them, reassure them.’
Van der Valk liked this. It showed he had been right and that Doctor Maartens’ observations, however reticent – however guarded – were worth having.
‘He loves it if I suggest new pills, a new régime, a recently discovered treatment. Needs constant changes – yellow pills after meals instead of red pills with meals: even if the principle is identical he feels better – till next time. He’s a compulsive fusser. Bound up perhaps with that blustering manner and that bawling at people – he needs to reassure himself constantly, of his strength, his virility, his this and that. You wouldn’t call it psychological disturbance in any way because he instinctively finds adjustments and compensations. Physically he shouldn’t drink or smoke but psychologically they’re both good for him and the one thing balances the other, see? I frighten him into going easy on both but I would never forbid either.’
No – he wasn’t a fool either.
‘He sometimes beats his wife.’
This went over well, and would have, Van der Valk hoped, the desired effect.
‘You know that?’ very surprised and surprised into showing it. ‘How?’
‘She told me.’
‘Ah.’ A pause. ‘Interesting woman – most complex perhaps of this group we’ve been discussing.’
‘Yes.’
‘She feels that people dislike her, and suffers from that. Suffers from being too thin, about which she’s selfconscious: she stuffs herself with cream and then feels guilty – lot of little nervous worries. She needs more calm – has compu
lsions to be on the go all the while. One of her children turned out wrong, which hurt her a lot – you know all this?’
‘I know the children exist. There exist some confused notes on the boy, which I could make no sense of – an enquiry that was botched – there was some question of a criminal charge but it was never pressed. I’ve been wondering about them.’
‘I don’t know anything about that, and whatever I can tell you is common knowledge and no particular secret. There are two; both grown up, of course. The boy fought all the time with Francis, who is impatient and authoritarian as you know – Marion has learned long ago how to handle that but with the boy it came to open conflict; they ended up hitting each other and the boy was flung out … I know nothing of any criminal charge, though I have heard he’s in South America and has got into scrapes there … that might be just gossip. Marion doesn’t mention it. The girl made a goodish marriage – some horsebreeder in Ireland: everything went rosily there, which throws any misdeeds of the boy’s into even higher relief, hm?’
He started to relight his pipe. Not bad, thought Van der Valk; not bad at all.
‘This trouble with the boy – recent history?’
‘A twelvemonth perhaps. The girl comes twice a year to stay; I’ve had her here for banal complaints a couple of times. Sharp, clever girl, rather unsympathetic. Boy was intelligent but not clever. Had a talent for rubbing people up the wrong way, but with immense charm when he wished – I secretly rather liked him.’
Van der Valk chewed the ballpoint pen with which he had been writing little notes. He had a very slick one these days, silver-mounted. The rubbishy plastic things he used to buy half a dozen at a time were not adequate to a Commissaire’s standing, but this one, he noticed – which cost twelve gulden instead of thirty cents – was inefficient. But alas, one had not the courage to throw it away.
‘Murders,’ dreamily, ‘often remain undiscovered, largely because they’re never even suspected. A doctor signs a certificate without questioning it or thinking to. You didn’t.’
‘I would have accepted an accident – but I would want to know what caused it and how,’ unhappily.
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