Widow, and widow-maker
Towards the end of the day they turned off the main road, and were rewarded by the sun setting across Quiberon Bay, the inland sea, melancholy and curlew-haunted. They sat on a sand-dune above the tidemark, propped against an overturned pram dinghy, and looked at the golden burning water; whose hydrocarbon content, said Arthur, one would not wish to analyse. Arlette, all van der Valk personages firmly occulted until return to Strasbourg, a thousand kilometres away on the eastern marches of France, wiggled her toes and said nothing.
They had been for nearly a month on the Atlantic coast. September, with hardly any tourists left, around the pleasant town of La Rochelle and the islands. She had got nicely tanned; the fair and the grey in her hair had bleached to something like blonde. Arthur did not tan: went pink and wore strange hats. A restless soul, he had wished to turn north, across the Loire estuary into Brittany. She did not much like Brittany: too sad. We must, he said, because one more oil spill and it won’t be there any more, so that this will be the last time. The old peninsula appealed to his Englishness. The opinion of a hard-headed southern woman was that this was a pack of Celtic twilight and that La Baule was the farthest-flung outpost of civilization.
But she was enjoying herself. Seagulls sat upon decrepit wooden posts and looked at her attentively. More seagulls lolled upon the flat water, looking contemptuous. There was no one to be seen anywhere, and a lovely silence. Until Arthur, who never could leave well alone, began declaiming to the seagulls:
“Ah, what is woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth fire, and the home acre,
To go with the old grey widow-maker?”
Arlette, sufficiently accustomed to these performances, was unmoved.
“Very fine; what is it?”
“The Harp Song of the Dane Women, and plainly wasted on you.”
“Yes, well, that’ll do for now. There are going to be flies, other nasty beasts, living in all that rotting weed.” The nip of chill that at the end of the most perfect day tells you it is late in the year, was beginning: she unwound her body.
Women, thought Arthur, can never leave well alone: they aren’t content to sit and look, but must Get their Cardigan.
Dear old Arthur, cross now at my being deflating, and at being English! Well, I loathe being French. Nationalism makes me sick. The nineteenth-century Darwinism, making wars and sending children to be killed in them. Indulging, now, in economic bragging and commercial rivalry.
“Don’t appreciate much, either, all these references to Old Grey Widows.”
“The prettier you become, the more moronically you behave. It’s nearly over: we may as well make a move. Once it goes all red I must have cliffs, and lighthouses, and Tristan’s ship black with tattered sails, riding in to Penmarch.” They were proposing to spend their last week on the Cornouailles coast, around Concarneau. Suddenly supper was uppermost in Arthur’s mind, and there was still that nasty autoroute to follow up past Vannes and Auray. “I want shellfish, and to go to bed looking out on the lights of Belle-Isle.”
He had eaten enough shellfish already to give even the Great White Shark an allergy. This, he said, was to vaccinate him against a year in Strasbourg, where there is no fish. He could bend her to his will: a woman born in Toulon is not frightened of fishy things even with huge glaring eyes and a great many red spikes.
She’d do anything to forget Strasbourg a while still. And the Widow, and the Help Bureau, that odd sociological invention of Arthur’s. Help indeed – there was so little one could give. Blind leading the lame, most of the time.
A year ago now: in October she’d begun, very frightened and knowing nothing. She’d learned something, and a lot about the ways of bureaucracy, a lot about the trouble one runs into the moment one does not fit the conventional and above all passive role exacted by government, whose great slogan is We’ll Do the Thinking.
Individualists, the French? Oh yes, in petty selfishness, in refusal of all self-discipline, in hedonistic indulgence. But since the General went, we get nothing to eat but premasticated babypap. Oh, for a fish again, with bones in it, and a flavour.
She had felt so discouraged towards the end of the year, and weary of the heavy heat of Strasbourg in July and August. Arthur liked the long summer vacation. Gave him time to write his latest book. To which, it was true, her year’s work contributed a paragraph or so.
And if it were only the job! Getting remarried aged fifty wasn’t a smoothly run-in, easy-riding affair either. No problems with children or pills, no material anxieties, worries about the career or the mortgage. That’s what they say. Mature understanding, dear. Two balanced and well-integrated personalities.
Arlette snorted suddenly with laughter. Her children all considered her a profoundly perturbed personality, if not actually a mental case, and after ten years of saying Menopause in tolerant tones, had greeted Arthur with enthusiasm: Interesting and Amusing new Therapy. Emotional Basket case Himself – in short, just the job for Mum.
In fact, we are excellently matched. We love each other very much, need one another very badly, and fight all day. The maturity and experience goes up like smoke. I think that Arthur’s intellectual grasp of a problem, his academic approach, is bound to be sterile. To him, naturally, my instinctive moves make as much sense as a dog turning round and round before lying down (Arthur’s simile …).
They’d had a row on the way up, in one of the yacht-harbour villages. The pub where they were staying was buzzing with gossip. Nothing better than a local scandal to promote good fellowship and stimulate another round of drinks. The verb regale, conjugated in English often in the passive – we were regaled with the tale – and transitive, is in French active and intransitive. We regaled: meaning we lapped it up. Given death as well as sex, a good man behind the bar can double his turnover.
The facts that nobody thought to dispute were in essence as follows: a rich man from the city, who had a cottage in the district and a boat in the harbour, came down for a weekend’s sailing, with his pretty – and by all account beloved – young wife crewing for him. It had been a bad weekend; lot of wind, nasty sea. Nobody had gone out, but him. Ex-cel-lent seaman; this emphasized by all. Been sailing here since childhood and nobody knew the water better. Boat – very good sea boat, tiptop order, spic-span condition throughout. Designed for these waters and in perfect harmony with them. If there was anything he loved more than that wife, it was that boat.
He’d come back with neither wife nor boat. Given the volume of gossip, the local gendarmerie had made an enquiry. Had to, mate, couldn’t get out of it. But it wasn’t saying anything to anybody, mate. Not just tight-lipped: they got very, very irritable indeed if the subject was mentioned. Nix prosecutor, nix judge of instruction. No judicial follow-up: hence no crime, huh?
Arthur, who had indulged in white wine somewhat, nudged her with a greasy elbow.
“The widow would be in her element here, haw haw haw.”
She felt her eyes injecting with blood: the expression ‘to see red’.
“Rebecca?” guffawing odiously on, “ – I hated Rebecca!” She managed not to speak in front of the assembled company, but stormed out giving the door an unmerciful slam.
The tide was out and she strode angrily along the beach. And if the man had indeed murdered his wife – then he had also murdered his boat. These legalistic clichés about attenuating circumstances! Didn’t it show the pitch to which he had been screwed? In all men, as in all things, there is a breaking point. If the police kept their mouth shut, then in that, at least, they showed wisdom.
This quack about murder – these antique attitudes. As though there weren’t a thousand graver crimes. They say murder is grave because irrevocable, because you can’t bring life back. Are the crimes not graver when, and because, life goes on? When the consequences continue to ripple stealthily outward, carrying their venom, distorting and destroying for a hundred years. Any crime, my lords, against a child.
We are afraid
of murder, but only because we are so terrified of dying. Life is cheap, and replaceable. The building of a family is as slow and dearly bought as the growth of a tree along the shore here, in the teeth of the salt Tartar wind. If that man killed his wife, it was because someone killed his family. She, or another. My lords, many live who deserve death. And many die, who deserve life.
A dolphin had been washed ashore on this beach, alive, but with its sense of orientation destroyed. A veterinary doctor had fought for the animal, in vain, for four hours: the beast had not wanted to live any longer. It had absorbed too much poison. Crude oil, a virtual certainty, said the marine biologists. The ecological balance of a family is as fragile as anything else in nature. A few chemicals, of oil and of concrete, and a kilometre of Breton or Corsican coastline can be destroyed while you watch.
We make a fuss about murder, since the time the first editor noticed that it helped build circulation figures.
This land of Brittany, said Arthur quoting Mary Renault, has a doomed and holy brightness.
Driving now again along the happy, happy autoroute towards supper, Arlette wondered how many of these families had lost a man to the Widow-maker.
Nowadays to be sure we have roads, which kill for preference women and children. Well, well: Sainte Anne d’Auray, pray for those upon the sea, and for us upon the concrete.
“I can’t remember,” said Arthur beside her, driving, “what that old fool Tristan was supposed to be doing in Ireland.”
“Marrying the king’s daughter as I recall vaguely. Wasn’t there a second Iseult – les Mains Blanches? Sounds a useless cow, that one. It’s a great muddle.”
“I incline to think he was the one who got muddled – never was quite sure which was which. Which, at least, he found himself in bed with at any given moment.”
“Not, I hope, to be thought of as screamingly funny on this account,” said Arlette a little cattily.
“Why is it that adultery is screamingly funny in the theatre? Because it is so singularly the opposite outside? For saying that all the world’s a stage, that old bastard Shakespeare has much to answer for. The fact is, that the advice Mr Coward gave Mrs Worthington is sounder than he knew.”
Chapter 3
The last day of the holidays
In the last week, there is always an urge to get back and slop about in bedroom slippers, saying loudly ‘Comfort again at last.’ This fights with the joys of lingering-by-the-wayside. But with Arthur in a car there were rituals to perform, as well as autoroutes to be avoided, and they took the long way round. The Lancia was urged at a gallop out of Brittany, with cries from Arlette of ‘Civilization again at last’ upon reaching the marches of Normandy.
But one must climb every step of the Mont Saint Michel: one must tread the holy ground (sadly desecrated) of the Grand Hotel at Cabourg: one must climb the hill at Trouville to look at the four views.
“Even if you had a straw hat, even if you had a gardenia in your buttonhole, by no stretch of the imagination could you be made to look Proustian.”
“No,” agreed Arthur readily enough. “But I wish to resemble a famous character in fiction: who can it possibly be?” There was silence for some time before Arlette said, “Mr Tod.” He meditated vengeance at length before saying, “Of course – Mrs Tabitha Twitchit.”
From the Seine to the Somme: Gothic churches, and Flemish town halls, with Arthur lecturing upon the deplorable provincialism of Betjemanesque tastes in architecture.
Even with a small agile Lancia, one cannot hurry the roads of Champagne and Lorraine, and it was early evening before the sudden frenzy to be home overtook them, and they galloped over the bleak grey plateau, welcoming the red cliffs of the Col de Saverne, and the first Alsatian houses.
“First one to see the cathedral spire gets a choc. No,” generous “–two chocs.” How absurd to be homesick for a city adopted only a few years ago. How pleasant again to be trundling along the Avenue des Vosges, swept by a chilly shower of rain, looking severely out for any architectural monstrosities that might have sprouted in their absence. For supper they picnicked off stale bread and liverwurst, in the stale-smelling dusty livingroom, instead of the fleshpots of the Moselle valley. After a day this long, one goes on driving the damned car in one’s head, and goes to bed instead, thankfully early, with an old James Bond book.
Arlette, freed of hotel bolsters, steely cylinders known as the polochon, plunged in voluptuary, got the giggles at the arrival of her consort, wearing buttercup yellow pyjamas, his reading glasses perched upon his eyebrows to find his way.
“What’s that you’ve got?” he asked severely.
“Hunting Tower by John Buchan.”
“Ho, yes – well, snigger as you may, ye’ll no fickle Tammas Yownie.”
“And you?”
“By the same unerring instinct, Greenmantle. Not another word, please. Lovely, it’s only half past eight.”
The ghastly realities of next day: filthy flat, dirty washing strewn everywhere, and Shopping to do. Arthur stumped off to the post-office where, nothing having been forwarded, all the month’s mail had been kept ‘en instance’. No Paris paper since they were home a day early and not yet officially ‘back’: but a huge depressing pile of sordid threats – what would happen if one didn’t do something quick about the television tax, the parking fine, the bank overdraft and several repair bills. Strasbourg. lent enchantment by distance, was hideously actual through the computers of all the service companies.
The Administration, refreshed by repose through July and August, was zealous: right-thinking people do not go away in September. The Council of Europe, in a devious way Arthur’s employer or, to put things more politely, milch-cow, was changing all its organigrammes.
As Arthur read through all this rubbish, stage one (the lengthening lip) passed quickly to stage two, exasperated muttering. The measured tearing-up of paper into neat small pieces became ripping across and flinging. The mesh of Arthur’s sieve was in fact slightly too large. He would curse later, discovering – in a rage – that in rage at a maze of moronic verbiage, one had thrown away quite a lot of recondite information one might later rather want.
Arlette’s pile was smaller, but more mysterious. Most of it she couldn’t understand at all. What was this extraordinary tangle her Social Security contributions had got into? Who were these acronyms? – as cherished by the French as by Americans. And people bidding her acidly, please, to make it her business to call upon them at her earliest convenience, since her telephone did not answer. Stuff and nonsense; she’d left it on record with a brief and clear message stating when she would be back.
Her sieve was plainly much too fine in mesh. Apart from appeals to subscribe to the Reader’s Digest, American Express, Fortune magazine and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, there seemed to be nothing she could throw away at all.
Like anonymous letters: she got a lot and over a year had learned prudence, keeping them in a special file, even when plainly mad, illiterate and pornographic. This one was not: neat red ballpoint, in the hand-printed style that several educational systems urge upon schoolchildren, sacrificing character to legibility, so that there is not much to tell about the writer.
German, in language and style. Neat layout, proper paragraphing, good spelling. Cheap paper: that meant nothing, any more than the red ink. Approach, formal and quite polite: if she complied with certain demands (unspecified), it would be much to her advantage. This concerned her family affairs, underlined. But if she did not comply, she would regret it, because the Press, both national and international, would be taking a close interest in her affairs.
Family? – those buried roots down in the south? – and how could that possibly interest anyone, let alone Germans? Piet van der Valk, being a police officer, got many anonymous letters, but he had been dead nearly ten years and could perhaps be allowed to rest in peace.
Of the boys, one was in Spain. Got to know any nice Basque terrorists lately? The other in Norway, when
last heard of making improbably large quantities of money. Ruth, her adopted daughter, a medical student right here in Strasbourg; an intense and independent girl, who, after being for many years extremely nasty, had become extremely nice. And not at all inclined to get into scrapes – not that this sounded like that sort of scrape.
The boys she saw little of, and they were notoriously bad letter-writers. Ruth she saw a lot of. One thing all three had in common: if they got into a scrape they would handle it themselves – but they would tell her about it before anyone else did. Her confidence in the children was equalled by theirs in herself. Furthermore, they got on effortlessly well with Arthur.
Arthur? – the blackmail flavour to this … Arthur did not lend himself to such things. And let nobody think they could drive a wedge between her and Arthur.
Herself? She tried to think of things in recent months involving Germans. There were several: she shrugged.
Arthur was still over there playing the celebrated scene from ‘L’Aiglon’ – ‘Je déchire’; echoed forty years after by Tommy Handley’s wartime postman, who said it didn’t matter what you did as long as you Tore-them-Up, and forty years after that more valid than ever.
She didn’t tear it up: she put it in the file. One shrugged, but one looked to see whether anything ever came of it.
Down at the bottom there were more Germans. Letterhead, flaring, gigantic, of the Graphik: notorious, not to say thumb in your eye scandal-raking weekly. Signed, this one, with a big splashy felt pen. Woman journalist, anxious forsooth to interview her. Since she had such an interesting-sounding job! And, if possible, also her so-distinguished Herr Doktor Husband – Arthur would be thrilled to find himself in Graphik amidst the pornographers and politicians … Would she call the local office to fix this up? Polite in a vulgar soapy way.
Perish the thought; she was in no particular need of publicity and certainly not that sort. That one, at least, could be torn up.
Last of all, and saddest, was a van der Valk one, made incoherent by misery. Your phone says you’ll be back by suchaday, but I don’t know whether that’s true. I’ve lost faith in everything and everyone. I’ll try this just in case. If I don’t hear, there’s nothing for it: I’ll kill myself.
One Damn Thing After Another Page 2