Double-Barrel

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘You ought to get that Miss Burger to see about finding me a fridge,’ said Arlette. ‘Don’t eat all the salt biscuits; I haven’t had any yet.’

  7

  I woke up in deep gloom and knew it was going to be one of those days. The coffee was revolting, the weather beastly, the windscreen wipers were on the blink all day, and when I got home Arlette had (a) forgotten to put the dustbin out, (b) forgotten that it was early closing day.

  Still, that was all unimportant. Things like this happened to Rembrandt too. What worried me the whole day was not understanding a damn thing about provincial towns in Drente. Serve me right. Puffed up with braggadocio, thinking all the other policemen were imbeciles. The elaborate disguise, the calculated politenesses and rudeness, the vaunted urban sophistications … pooh.

  I was a vain, tattle-mouthed dolt.

  I knew nothing.

  I understood nothing.

  When you meet the unorthodox, meet it in an unorthodox way. Pooh – with froth on top.

  I was sitting in Monsieur Cousteau’s bathyscaphe, exploring the great silent wonders of the submarine world. Suddenly I noticed a signboard; neat white paint on shiny blue enamel. Very common, in Holland.

  ‘You are now standing at the exact geographical centre of the Gobi Desert,’ it said admonishingly. ‘No admittance for unauthorized persons (Article 436 of the Code of Criminal Law).’

  I looked out of my copper-bound crystal window. Damn it, they were dead right. I am out of my depth, I told myself wittily.

  I went home and was curt with Arlette, till she got fed up with it.

  ‘Look, I agree that we’ve both eaten better meals, but there’s nothing wrong with this dinner even if it is mostly out of boxes. Will you please stop being disagreeable – or at least tell me what’s eating you. You’re depressed, I can see – but why don’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I make it a rule not to, as you know very well, and also because you intensely dislike hearing about these things.’

  ‘Listen. We’re together here. We’re alone. This place, this house, whatever it is, has been wished on me as well as on you.’ She thought, hard. ‘We’re just going to stack these dishes. Sit down over there. Pour me out a glass of Ashtray.’ This is her name for a sort of German marc whose full title goes ‘Asbach-Uralt-is-the-soul-of-the-wine’. Being French, she feels it her duty to be comic about this, but I notice she enjoys drinking it.

  I heard Arlette throw all the washing-up in the sink. I then heard her go upstairs, change her frock, comb her hair, repair her paint and go to the lavatory.

  Not only was I unaccustomed to the lack of privacy in a small suburban house, but I was outraged at the loss of dignity it implied. The whole street, I thought viciously, can hear and has apparently to know every detail of my wife’s everyday existence. Things that aren’t even my business. I find this revolting.

  She had changed into a wool frock, a soft dusty butter-cuppy colour that I was fond of. She smelt good; I wished, as I do every day, that I could give up smoking and get a better nose. Taste things, and deposit them politely in a silver spittoon. A tea-blender – that would make a splendid job for Van der Valk.

  ‘I hate crimes, yes,’ she said, holding the lighter up to the cigarette in her mouth. ‘Hate murders, and all ghastly gory details. But I can’t really see that whatever’s been going on here is much of a crime.’

  ‘If you put moral pressure on people till they feel there’s no way out but to kill themselves, it’s as much of a murder as a plastic bomb.’

  ‘I suppose, yes. But isn’t it society that is the murderer more than the person? Environment or whatever. If I’ve understood, people killed themselves for fear of the public, for fear of newspapers, what people will say … In other words they can’t stand the pressure of existence. What difference is there between them and someone who kills herself because of an unhappy love affair – the girl who is pregnant and feels abandoned by everybody, say? The man who drinks and can no longer keep a job – or – oh, anything. Go on, tell me.’

  ‘You are my resource against depression, aren’t you?’ I was touched.

  ‘And isn’t that my job?’

  ‘I find you a thoroughly nice woman.’

  ‘Now tell me what is getting you down?’

  ‘Being a foreigner. I’ve never felt so conscious of it in my life. Not in France or even England.’

  ‘You? But I’m the foreigner. You’re the one who’s Dutch. Sometimes you’re even very Dutch,’ grinning.

  ‘Not here.’ Van der Valk; one deep sigh.

  A drink of Ash-tray lent me some sort of spurious energy.

  ‘I came across a file of reports. Brief notes on police court cases, annotated by a judge. Pointing out that people from this part are emigrants in Holland – in the metroland, I mean, our way.They’re still in their own country, but they’re strangers. They seem to have a higher percentage of petty indictments brought against them than the home product. This judge formed a theory, and wrote a memo on it to the Ministry. That they feel both inferior and lonely. Deduction, the indictments are due to a sort of crude bravado – compensation feelings. You follow?’

  ‘I follow, but I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘Simply, this is a foreign country. When they come racing down and get south, say, of Amersfoort, they find that nobody understands their language, the food is different, the ideas are different, there’s Catholics and all sorts of other riff-raff, and they are just looked on as having crawled straight out of the bog. But here the boot is on the other foot. We’re the bloody foreigners, they resent us and they kick. Every way they can. They cheat even – I’ve been diddled out of threepenny bits a dozen times already.’

  ‘I’ve noticed that, but I thought they were penny-pinchers because they were poor.’

  ‘Qué, poor.’

  ‘They’ve been terribly poor for generations. One doesn’t get it out of the blood so quickly.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. I think one forgets quick enough, and they’re all dripping with it now.’

  ‘The ground has a lot to do with it. Bad ground. Just like in the Haute Savoie.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s quite everything. It’s a religious thing too. These queer parts of countries are different in more ways. You look at the figures Larousse gives for the different departments of France on cases of alcoholism, mental disease, congenital deformity, as well as the poverty diseases like TB. Sharp jump upwards in the backwoods territories – Savoie, Morbihan, parts of Languedoc. Same here, I’ll bet. I think they feel apart, they feel persecuted, and feel hatred for the occupying army. Why should strangers come here and get rich? Skin them, every chance you get. Skin the brethren too, by all means, but that’s part of the game – they know the rules. But common front against the outsiders. Of course there are more and more outsiders, and they can’t go on for ever, but they’re keeping up a rear-guard action.’

  ‘You’re feeling that.’

  ‘And how.’

  ‘Are the people who suffer from the letters strangers?’

  ‘It’s an interesting point; I’ll have to study it. But I can’t find out how many people have had letters. They won’t open their mouths unless I happen to know a way of twisting their arm … Sometimes I get the feeling that all the accusations are imaginary; no basis behind the whole thing.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I mean that the author of the letters is just making a witch-hunt. Popular hysteria feeds on this, and is now ready to believe the worst of anybody and everybody. If the burgomaster, to take an example, now got letters accusing him of something frightful or just shameful – with no atom of truth in it at all – people would make an outcry against him. It’s explosive, this; that’s why I’ve got to stop it. You can feel that people are jumpy, uneasy. Ready to throw accusations, and listen to them seriously. At anyone, however respected. Like at Salem. Did you read that book?’

  ‘The Devil in Massachusetts?’ with relish. ‘Y
es, fascinating.’

  ‘There wasn’t any witch, but they constructed dozens. Teenage girls saw and heard and felt witches all over the shop.’

  ‘The people had very hard dreary lives, and a rigid puritan code of ethics.’

  ‘See any resemblance?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. But as far as I could see the girls just invented witches to make life more amusing and exciting. They had no newspapers, no radio, television, trains, shops, cinemas. They’ve all that, here.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not quite what I meant. Those girls had a vague but strong feeling of guilt, that everything exciting and amusing was caused by the devil and therefore witchcraft. There were witches, in the people’s minds. There I think the parallel is better.’

  ‘They hung a lot of innocent people to get rid of the feeling of themselves being guilty – the fear of becoming witches themselves, or even already being witches.’

  ‘Exactly. By the girls’ accounts, every damned last one of them was a witch. They weren’t having that, of course.’

  I found myself enthusiastically pouring in another drink and discovered that I had forgotten my depression. Arlette’s therapy …

  ‘It’s something, though, they need to cure locally. To call in an outsider, like me – mistake. They make resolute common front against me here.’

  ‘There’s witchcraft on the bloody milk here, all right,’ remarked Arlette frivolously.

  8

  In the middle of the night I got an idea. The whole street, I had thought in a loud indignant bellow, can hear and has apparently to know every detail of my wife’s daily existence.

  Why shouldn’t I – or my wife – turn the tables? Take a passionate interest in the whole street’s daily existence. The way they did themselves. Shadow-watching and all the rest.

  I could certainly sit all day bird-watching with a pair of binoculars, just the way the letter-writer did. Like dirty old men in parks. Fascinating; something I had always wanted to do.

  I recalled a visit I had once paid to an English wartime comrade, who lives in Bristol. He went to Cambridge after his demob and is now an architect. Intelligent, delightful man. He complained about the dreadful provincialism of Bristol, but admitted that the huge wooded park at the north side – The Downs, they call it – was wonderful.

  ‘Wonderful place for lover-watching,’ he had said, amusedly. ‘We have a little park in the town too. It’s nothing – just a sort of bare hill. For some extraordinary reason the lovers there are quite shameless. The local boys have a perfect name for it.’

  ‘What is it?’ I was fascinated.

  ‘They call it “taking a piece up Mutton Tump”.’

  ‘Mutton Tump?’

  ‘You Dutch. Etymology is really quite simple. Tump is a genuine old word for a bare hill of some sort. Mutton – have you already forgotten that in the army we used to say, of such and such a girl, nurse, waaf, whatever she was, “That one hawks her mutton”?’

  Mutton Tump! I had been enchanted.

  The trouble was that I simply didn’t have time. In Amsterdam I could have called on an auxiliary. Here I was alone. These middle-of-the-night ideas, I thought, falling asleep again; they never do stand up to daylight.

  9

  ‘Are you really interested?’ I asked at breakfast. Good coffee, this morning; the sun was shining too.

  ‘I almost think I am.’

  ‘Would you like to help me?’

  ‘How on earth can I help you?’ She was astonished. What did she know about crimes – or witches, come to that.

  ‘You can help me a great deal.’

  ‘But what can I do?’

  The Mimosastraat is Holland, and this particularly Mimosa Street is Drente.

  ‘I want you to be one of the housewives that spend all day looking out of their windows.’

  ‘I’m more likely to be canonized as a second Jeanne d’Arc.’

  ‘Yes I know, but that’s all wrong. We are just making them more suspicious of you and me. Have you exchanged a word with any of them?’

  ‘A distant good morning.’

  ‘You see? Now we’re reacting by being defensive. Wrong tactics. You don’t have to be pally, but talk to them, gossip with them. I don’t ask you to invite them all in to drink coffee and borrow the grass-mower, but don’t be stiff or stuck-up. Let them find out you’re human even if you are a queer French cow. Talk about the washing and the dusting and the price of cabbage. And above all, watch. Watch every slightest tiny little thing. And listen. However poisonous, malicious, idle or stupid it seems to be, hang on to it and write it down; it may prove to be exactly what I want.

  ‘You know,’ thoughtfully, holding out my cup for more coffee; in the early morning, thoughtfulness depends a good deal on coffee – ‘I’m supposed to be making an ethnographic study; I may as well take that quite seriously. The better I play the part, the sooner we’ll be out of this.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ dubiously. ‘I can’t see myself exchanging jollities with the wives over the wash-line, our mouths full of clothes-pegs. But I’ve little enough to do, with no boys, and I can sit with a little notebook.’

  ‘You’ll be surprised how easy it is. Remember, they’ll be fair bursting with curiosity about you.’

  Arlette didn’t find it difficult. She trotted out with her clothes-pegs, and smiled agreeably at the nearest wife, busily pinning a back garden away. This was a brisk person, with the quick nervous movements of the housewife, sharp eyes behind her glasses and a penetrating voice. She responded instantly with the classic gambit.

  ‘Lovely day for drying.’

  Arlette found her abominably nosy, a master of the point-blank question that is rude anywhere else, but not in Holland.

  But she was just as ready to give confidences. It is indeed the hallmark of the suburban street neither to have secrets from your neighbours nor to find sharing theirs at all unusual. Arlette was cross-examined closely, and found it difficult work, but the oddity of her ideas could be put down to being French. She forced herself to be voluble about her children, the horrors of other people’s furniture, the income and pension of government functionaries, and the utter wickedness of adding yet another cent to the retail price of margarine. In return she heard all about the daughter that was a nurse, the daughter still at the ‘household school’, and the boy who was the same age as Arlette’s eldest – oh, these boys. Difficult … French or not, they had plenty of common ground.

  Mrs Tattle, as Arlette christened her promptly, finished the delicate work of pinning up her husband’s Sunday white shirt, leaned burly, mottled arms across the fence, and told blissfully all about the neighbours for a quarter of an hour, oblivious to the plaintive whistle of her kettle in the kitchen telling her it was time for a nice sit-down and a cup of instant coffee.

  10

  I spent a busy day detecting – things like having my hair cut, a really long comforting chat with a nice woman in a cigar-shop, another with a bored functionary in the Labour Bureau – with full employment he had nothing to do these days. This way I was piecing bits of my puzzle together. There seemed to be nothing wrong with my disguise; I had grown more and more daring, and had penetrated such sanctums as the bureaux of the Income Tax Inspectorate, the Ministry of Social Affairs, and the adjutant of the local police force, on the pretext that I was interested in working permits recently issued for Turkish labourers in the building trade (all the Dutch labourers popped over the border to Germany every week, coming home on Friday nights with a wage packet twice the size of the one they got in Holland; a thorn in the flesh, this, of both Tax Inspectorate and Social Affairs).

  Nobody, not even the adjutant, a shrewd enough chap too, guessed that I was a policeman. None of them had any real work to do, and all were delighted to find that a superior official from the Ministry of the Interior had nothing to do either, liked nothing better than a quiet natter, and had not, apparently, come here to disturb their repose. We were all friendly bureaucrat
s together, masonic, machiavellian, and determined that whatever we did it would take a minimum of one year to do it, because no problem is Unimportant.

  But few of these folk were from Drente. Like all government officials, they were posted hither and yon at the whims of their superiors, and their opinions of Zwinderen, while illuminating, were not all that helpful. I wanted to get close to the local people, and it was just that which was so difficult. I knew, now, the silence that would fall in any haunt of the real natives if I put my nose in at the door.

  I got disgusted towards the middle of the afternoon with being a functionary, and went to develop my theories in Mr Besançon’s company.

  ‘You are an expert in being a suspected stranger. Not only a foreigner but a conjuror. In other centuries you would undoubtedly have been denounced as a witch. In this century you are simply suspected of writing obscene letters.’

  He smiled behind his table, where he habitually sat, I had noticed. It was a big, very solid table, ordinary softwood, put together by some local carpenter. Its legs were not turned, but rounded roughly by eye with a spoke-shave; its broad top was marked and scored by tools, hands, use, wear. A good table, and he sat there comfortably at it, as much of a king as a minister behind some pompous mahogany twirlygig in Carlton House Terrace. When he spoke, or listened, his hand passed often over the wood, much as though he got pleasure from the sturdy outlines. I liked that; I would have done the same, perhaps.

  ‘It is largely my fault,’ slowly. ‘My doing, then. I avoid contact, I bury myself behind my wall, I have outlandish ways.’