One Damn Thing After Another

by Nicolas Freeling

  Being an orderly fellow, with a conscientious housewife, Arthur left the stove always with its ashes raked, and with a pile of kindling ready, and he had the house warm in no time at all, while she was opening shutters. Dust lay thick, but it was not city dust, being mostly soil and woodash; organic stuff, and doesn’t smell bad. Ritual dictated the drinking of white wine, a principle laid down by Piet, and the cleaning of all lamps and candlesticks. Arthur, whose digestion white-Alsace did not agree with, had only substituted Rioja, Burgundy being too expensive for anything but anniversaries. Perhaps this was an anniversary? He went down to the cellar and found something suitable. If his wife wished to go to South America, he wasn’t going to try and stop her. Knowing her anyhow, trying would be a forlorn effort, and would at best be a quick way to a very disagreeable week of it.

  Indian summer lasts long in this part of the world. Spring comes late and grudgingly, a fitful affair of sunshine thin and acid, like bad white wine. In summer it can be unbearably hot, and it can pour with icy rain for weeks. Winter is snowbound, and sometimes quite splendid.

  Autumn is the supreme joy. Ah, visitors from the North American continent say sometimes – like New England. A bit like Vermont yes, on a miniature scale since Alsace, one of the smallest provinces of France, is only two hundred kilometres long and fifty wide. There are stupider gardeners than those of municipal Strasbourg, who have an altogether consequent fondness for maple trees. But the especial charm and delight of Alsace is its division into three parts, like Caesar’s Gaul, each with a distinct character; longitudinally, like a tricolour ribbon.

  The plain is that of the Rhine valley; fertile, watery, and encased between the twin ranges of the Vosges on the French side, and the Black Forest of present-day Germany. The Vosges, whose summits mark the frontier with neighbouring Lorraine, form a chain of hills rather than mountains. They do not run over two thousand metres, they are gently rounded and much eroded, of a soft rust-colour sandstone that makes a most attractive building material, and wooded to the top. The woods are mostly spruce. Forest of pine, forest of boredom, and the close, stiff, scratchy texture of the spruce gives the Black Forest its forbidding name. The happiness of the Vosges is that pine and beech woods intermingle.

  The third division is the foothill country, a narrow streak of sunny orchard land that nourishes the vines. These two have the gaiety and charm of variety: pinots, rieslings and traminers interwoven with local oddities, from patch to patch bearing anything from fine, and even distinguished, grapes to acid rubbish, good only to put in a pot with sour cabbage. The orchards are cherry and plum, pretty trees, streaked with resins, fragrant, fruitful; and everywhere walnuts with grave and lovely foliage. Ah, if we had a house in the foothills, said Arthur wistfully. If one was able to afford it, returned his wife tartly, and you need not regret it: noisy, tourist-ridden, far too many neighbours.

  The upper valleys are glens, steep and narrow, full of the noise of water; too cold for vines, too abrupt for tractors. The gardens must be terraced, with drystone walls, and care lest the precious topsoil be washed away.

  Arthur sprawled lordly upon the flagged terrace, in a cane chair from Holland: art of rattan learned in the Indies. He poured himself a glass of wine, took off his shirt, and concentrated on becoming a ripe apricot: lank, bony, pinkish English object. Why had stupid Piet not planted maples? He had made efforts, it was true; he had been moving in the right direction. There was a scarlet American oak, a sweet gum, a tulip tree that one hoped one would live to see in flower. One or two semi-failures, like the catalpa that would always look frail and shivery; and this was no landscape for cypresses. One or two abject failures like that horrid copper beech – bourgeois tree – and the Weymouth pine that had died: capricious things they were.

  He would plant maples. He had no children – not even silly Angelika – and wouldn’t, ever. He would plant maples for children he did not know, a harsher joy, but of higher worth, philosophically.

  “Have you poured none for me?” said Arlette’s voice. She had put bedclothes out at all windows, hung rugs on everything vertical. Sun struck deeply into the house, eating up gloom and the damp that foxed the pages of Arthur’s novelists – only here, he said, could one successfully read The Heart of Midlothian, or The Master of Ballantrae, or Chance. “I intend,” she said, “not to think at all for twenty-four hours.” The sun had already sapped him of power to do anything but grunt, so he grunted. By Quiberon Bay they had sat, so, in an idle but no way impoverished contemplation. Busy, scuttling world of ants … The climate of the temperate zone of Europe, from the northern limit of the olive to the northern limit of the grape, has been, no doubt, the most fertile for thought and art, but makes people too busy to listen for the grass growing. We need Moors too, from the south, and hobgoblins too from Scotland. Under the palms of Samoa, Stevenson wrote beautifully of the rain curtain weaving magic over the windy streets of Edinburgh. In the Marquesas, Jacques Brel with cancer’s cold clutch around the heart wrote poems to the heavy-jointed but vital rhythms of Flanders. Freedom of all the seas of the Pacific can only bring one in the end to the fogs and drains and stinks of the Scheldt-Escaut estuaries. Strasbourg, foggy all morning, stinks all afternoon of industrial effluent so that one longs for the wet westerly wind to come blustering back and shake the sodden leaves down. But up here, beyond the vineline, the air smells of linden and acacia honey, of resin and dry sherry. The sun will sink to a smell of woodsmoke, damptrapped and hanging in the clearing. And will rise in dew and moss and blackberries. No shampoo-salesman, no pederast perfumer can put these essences ignobly into little bottles. The aviation of the French Government, may the foul fiend fly away in, with, and upon same, scars the sky but its disgusting exhalations may, who knows, embellish a sunset for somebody. Alongside the discarded contraceptive, grows the mushroom: oh dear, these lyrical flowers wax ever ranker.

  Never mind. Indian summer for the sociologist.

  “I would like another glass,” said Arlette a little crossly. “I’ve asked you twice already but you were rapt in the arms of Proserpina or whatever she’s called.”

  Why not suggest to him to stay up here? – assuming, that is to say (she added hastily) that she agreed to go at all. Take the best part of a day to get there. And back; jet lag and whatnot. She could hardly be away less than five, six days – poof, it might as well be five minutes for all the good it would do. Anyway, I’m only going to think about this tomorrow. Correction; day after tomorrow.

  Arlette woke up from a sleep so deep; a country sleep, a sea-sleep; that she did not know where she was. She sat bolt upright: the bed was empty beside her, and in it had been Arthur and not Piet. The room faced east and south. Morning sunlight dappled things. The wallpaper Piet had hung had got stained and loose over the years of neglect: Arthur had pulled it all off and whitewashed everywhere. The bed was the same; a country piece in pitchpine, the capitals of the four posts carved into stylized pineapples. She lay down again.

  What had woken her was the country sound by definition, even more than logs being split; a scythe being sharpened. The sociologist, clumsy with his hands, did not take kindly to tools, even simple ones of the hobbit variety, and regarded Piet’s woodworking chisels and gouges with misgiving. But he had made himself learn elementary skills. Wasn’t that, too, social science? What good, finally, were these pale and paperbound folk who got no nearer to a manual task than tables of statistics? Learning to drill a hole in the wall, put a dowel in it, and sink a screw – straight – in that had given Scholar-Gipsy Davidson the confidence and the courage to go out with a billhook. He scythed, now, with intense pleasure. The garden had all gone wild, and they were not here often enough to look after flowers or vegetables. But he dug, and he weeded. A man needs this: to put his feet in the soil. As needful was something to look forward to, and he constructed fantasies around goats, or geese. What would they do when they were on a pension?

  “It’s a very old settlement, this.” What is sociol
ogy after all? Everything. Archaeological, too. Everywhere you go, you look, you wonder what is under the ground.

  “Piet said the same. We never turned anything up. The garden was made long before us. The woods are full of queer things, if one knew where to look.” One came across traces of foundations, buildings of who knew now what purpose. The ground had been mined for many years; there were forgotten shafts and tunnels of a buried, faintly sinister, Nibelung sort. Here in living memory had been the German front line in 1914. A little higher, along the crests, were the French trenches. In this terrain both positions had been impregnable. At the beginning, here and there, both sides had been ambitious and had a go: lost so many men that here, at least, they’d had the sense to sit it out. Under the dead leaves and the little landslips that occurred whenever a tree fell, tearing out the roots that held the fragile soil together, was the metal that had equipped those ghost armies; an unquiet grave. It didn’t do to scratch about in the soil there.

  Arlette knew more about it than she would say. She, herself one night, had gone out with pick and spade to dig a grave in the horrible silent owl-haunted wood. In it she had buried the van der Valk armoury. Those souvenirs she hadn’t wanted: the submachinegun that had killed Ruth’s natural mother, the hunting rifle that had chewed a hunk out of the man’s hip bone – the Luger pistol that had killed him, wry-mouthed presentation from a Dutch police officer. Go back and join all your brothers under this hill that so many boys have bled into.

  She’d thought of it all – the adverb she supposed was ‘sardonically’ – when Arthur had insisted, with police connivance, that she possess and, if necessary, carry a revolver, ugly thing, American, efficient, and very frightening. Short barrel and heavy calibre, the sort of thing that at beyond ten metres missed you altogether but at less blew a hole in you one could drive a truck through: she had no wish to experiment either way. She recognized the point, which was that it impressed, mightily, anybody looking at the business end. It had been a temptation on seeing it first to say ‘I can do better than that’.

  She never brought her pistol out here. Guns didn’t do, here. One might, like Monsieur Thibault, be tempted to use them. As bad, if anybody broke in, they would be found – Piet had kept them brazenly in the bottom drawer of the big chest. It had been full of contradictions living with a cop, married to him, bearing him children.

  Arthur, after a further transfusion of coffee and cooling the sweat upon the manly brow, went back to his turf where she had clumps of jonquils hidden; yellow daffodils and white narcissi. She was still sitting in her nightie. On the terrace the sun was hot. She went back in to wash and dress. The pump was still out in front, and the smooth-lipped stone watering trough, but she hadn’t carried romantic primitivism that far. Even Piet, who let loose, here, all the sentimentalism the job forbade, had had a proper bathroom put in straight away, and borrowed the money moreover, to pay for it.

  Hum, as a young woman, very determined to be French and hard-headed, she’d caught him out once or twice. Being romantic over ‘innocent young girls’: if she’d ever laid hands on them she’d have wrung them out, the sluts. That damned Lucienne he’d gone soppy over – she’d wrung him out too. He’d had a gritty Dutch bottom that saved him from the worse foolishnesses but …

  A few years ago she’d have been prepared to agree … no, no, she’d never admitted, would never have admitted … that to some extent he’d lived, even died, a failure. It was the ghost that had always haunted him, catching him always by the elbow. Most of his equals, nearly all his superiors, treated him with a sort of contempt. That this hid envy she had always known: the man had gifts that they hadn’t. But it was only after meeting Arthur that she had learned really, and truly understood, what in the van der Valk days she had only dimly perceived: that the world cannot be understood or handled by merely being ‘rational’. Instinct, and emotion, and even sentiment played a greater role than she had ever allowed herself to admit. Davidson taught her. ‘It’s a well-known philosophic axiom, that he who gives, dominates. Your Piet was a giver, and that’s why he won his little wars. You are one too.’

  All those years of being married to a cop … She’d understood more upon meeting Sergeant Subleyras.

  They’d got on together like a house-on-fire. A silly phrase this, and what did it mean? That fire and dry wood got on together? No, they got on together like brother and sister, who haven’t seen each other in ten years, who have been indifferent to one another; who realize, only upon meeting afresh, how much they shared that they had forgotten.

  A simple problem, that of Subleyras. One that men have: the neuters don’t have it. There’s this job. You have done it for a long time: you are, even, good at it. But it makes you sick. What are you going to do about that?

  Inspector, gradually Chief-Inspector, eventually even Commissaire van der Valk had had protections. ‘Educated man’. An officer. A law degree, a bundle of diplomas. An acquired authority and expertise, in the field of juveniles, in forensic criminology. He’d even sat, and exercised humour, upon a committee, God-help-us, a committee on penal reform, and criminal law, and hadn’t been ridiculous. But even a young officer is not going to be sacked, short of grave misdemeanours. You have somebody in the department who can handle the dread ‘marginals’, the weirdos, the artists. So his superiors reasoned. A fellow who can patter a bit of French and Spanish too, handy sometimes. The fellow of whom the Procureur-General remarked dryly one day, ‘It’s not a bad thing to have one person in the department with a few flashes of imagination.’

  In short, he’d been perpetually in the shit, but had always got out again. He’d come skin-thickness near to resigning a score of times, but had never done it. Humour, a rarity in Holland, as well as cynicism, had helped him sit very loose to the job, loose in his skin. For a man like Subleyras, and Only-a-Sergeant into the bargain, it was much harder.

  The General, in his exalted way and familiar mystical style, had a phrase about mountains. The slope is steeper up there, the going harder. But the air is better, and there are fewer Peepul. What there are, too, are men and not neuters. The sheep huddle down there at the foot, looking about afeared.

  An English chap, in more pragmatic vein, said the same. When you have one of these frightful choices, always take the way that sounds the nastiest, the one you least want: it will invariably be the right one.

  Cops, thought Arlette settling to The Dinner, see people at their worst, know far too much of the nastiest human behaviour, get it on their clothes and hands. In their first years they cultivate sick humour. As a trainee, paired with an experienced man, Piet had found a hanged man. I’ll get the van, said his mentor, you stay by the corpse. ‘Why?’ asked Piet, ‘will it walk away?’

  The next stage is humourless. You’re in this job; that’s the way it is. Don’t bring it home with you. You’ll start losing sleep, and the end of that road is the bin: clinic, between two men in white coats. There is a high suicide rate, during this stage.

  Many do not arrive at police maturity. The less good turn into bad cops. Some are crooked. Others morally corrupt. A great many simply become insensitive. They can be brutes; they can also be sheets of toilet-paper. They are no longer men.

  Some of the best become like Beckett’s Winnie. Buried up to the neck, they are still showing a toughness of humour and of courage that is impressive. But what you cannot see has been eaten away by despair.

  Arthur entered, gay, sweaty, very happy.

  “Hungry hungry hungry,” he said.

  “Lay the table then,” said Arlette patiently, “and keep your hands off my bottom; this pot is hot.”

  Chapter 16

  Les nantis

  She stopped on the way home on Sunday night, in the village of Grendelbruch.

  “I’ve heard of Grendel’s cave,” grumbled Arthur, “but what’s his bruch?”

  “I won’t be but five minutes,” she promised. He looked pointedly at his watch, let the back of the seat down, and compos
ed himself for slumber.

  It is one of the hilltop villages, prettily situated, with a wonderful view and almost an Alpine feel, with fretwork wooden balconies and cows with bells round their necks. Arlette found what she was looking for quickly enough: a gate in a high bank, and steps going up. Once her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she could see well enough for her purposes. She kept in the shadow, and kept a cautious distance. The house was dark, but people had got caught that way before. She did not think it likely that anyone would let off guns at her, but had no wish to be put to ignominious flight by a peremptory challenge. It was only curiosity that had brought her. Could be called effrontery and she would not complain. Creeping about spying, yes? Well; yes.

  Bulldozers had been at work here: it was all a little too good to be true. The steep approach to the rounded hillock gave the house a commanding view down to the road and over the unseen valley beyond: all at the exactly wrong angle for a sunset, but eminently eligible. On the far side it was artificially levelled, and a nicely gravelled track swung wide around the contour and back down to the car entrance. Little trees and bushes were dotted about: a landscape gardener had been at work. The house itself was built high, with a massive rounded buttress and a terrace above that. No modernistic angularities, nor anything in the least imaginative, but suburban villa architecture of the most conventional kind. All the lower windows were protected by wrought-iron grilles of atrociously rococo ropework in potbellied curves. Hm, the boys must have made quite a daring escalade. Which, of course, in itself, is a criminal offence. Pebbledash alternated with facings of dressed stonework; stuff that comes two centimetres thick but exceedingly dear, in a gaudily variegated sandstone that sets the teeth on edge. It was not a new house – it might have been ten years old. There were coy, cottagey features. She could swear she knew every detail of the interior.