Double-Barrel (3 page)

Here, in these columns, one could recognize the local people easily. If Piet Jansen the bricklayer from Zaandam had settled in the Dahlia Street, and Ria Bakker the secretary from Maassluis was now filling the Widow Pump's back room in the Vondel Street, it was doubtless fascinating to the locals, but not to me. Luckily, one could always tell.

The locals had ludicrous names. Ook and Goop and Unk.
Surnames as bad, and clans of course – generations of intermarriage no doubt.

‘Cold Comfort Farm,' said Arlette amusedly. ‘Seth and Reuben, Dooms and Starkadders. No doubt there'll be sukebind and watervoles.'

Quite right; no exaggeration whatever.

‘And a lot of heavy-handed rural fornication in summer. Rose Bernd all over again.'

I wasn't quite so sure about that one. The list of Sunday services in the paper was formidable. I counted carefully; there were seventeen different kinds of churches.

Obvious ones first, of course. Netherlands Renewed Protestants. Even more – Netherlands Reformed. A march of well-known ‘chapel' sects: Baptists and Methodists, Unitarians and Congregationalists. The rather queer ones, not quite certain of acceptance outside a well-tried little clique – Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Roman Catholics (oh yes, definitely queer, here).

But what was one to say to the wilder Irvingite and Campbellite aberrations that flourished here in holy righteousness? Remonstrant Early Lutherans, Purged Presbyterians, Rigid Plymouth Brethren? Sects that didn't have churches – churches were neither rigid enough, nor purged enough. They had Meeting Places of God's Elect. All that was lacking was Aimée Semple McPherson. It was a list to make Elmer Gantry lick his lips in holy joy and clap his great pious meaty hands together and uplift his voice in vociferous sanctity.

‘No Jews or Quakers,' remarked Arlette with interest.

‘Plenty of by-Our-Lady horny-handed early Christians though – very early. Deacon Urk, Gravedigger Bloop, and Sexton Moogie, gathered round Dominie Prophecies-of-Malachi Thunk; she-that-commits-it-shall-be-cut-off.'

‘Have a look,' said Arlette. ‘Klaas Kip married Wilhel-mina Dina Regina Vos.'

‘You've seen nothing yet – you haven't read the report of
the monthly meeting and tea-drinking of the Christian Rural Women. Carrie Nation presided at the bunfight. Takes one back a hundred years. Small towns in Iowa and South Dakota were like this in Elmer Gantry's extreme youth.'

The happenings in this remote, comic place, where a sham modernism hid but did not alter knotted, rooted survivals, were as ludicrous as the names.

I was reminded of two things when I first read the dossier and they never quite left me throughout the time I was there.

First was easy, an obvious one: the Staphorst affair. The international press had picked it up as an example of primitive survivals in a modern world. Staphorst is a village in Drente too, albeit the other end of the province. It has a closed little community and a sort of rural Calvinism unequalled for hellfire savagery. They go to church in procession on Sundays, with downcast eyes and clasped Bibles, and the men have been known to break the cameras of gawping tourists. A pair here had been caught in adultery, had been – by report – among other things drawn through the village in a cart and pelted with tomatoes or something.

The other memory was of a French film based on the classic case of the ‘Witches of Salem'. Reading the dossier, I had thought that twentieth-century Zwinderen had a good deal in common with seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Not only the pillory and the stocks, but the stake and the noose were not very far away here.

Not so very much had happened, factually, and yet one could understand why the Procureur-Général in Leeuwarden, and his colleague in Amsterdam, had taken this so seriously. Two women had committed suicide, and a third had had to be led gently away by men in white coats. There had been an outbreak of anonymous letters – a blackmailing poison-pen – and nobody knew quite how many of these had not come to light.

That was not so very much. But there was more, intangible but perceptible. Like Salem, the whole place sounded hysterical, neurotic. Neighbourhood squabbles tended to be started by virtuous housewives, shrilly accusing other virtuous housewives of immorality. There were too many, and they were too much alike.

There was a lot of immorality – a bit too much. I had the file on the past year's police court cases behind-locked-doors. Incest, mm; never quite unknown in these ingrown inter-married districts. But rather too much rape, indecent exposure, dissemination of pornography, obscene dancing in cafés, underhand prostitution – underneath all the drum-beating and bell-ringing on Sundays, there was a sort of sexy itch. One could not get at it properly. Not only were the reports in a language so stilted, so proper and so bureaucratic that I could hardly understand them myself, practised as I am, but the witnesses were excessively hangdog and evasive, not to speak of wholesale perjury, obvious if quite unprovable.

One knows what ‘he then attempted to commit an offence' means, but one cannot cross-examine a nine-year-old girl in court, after a respectable fifty-eight-year-old farmer had been caught by his wife pulling her pants off in a hayloft. He said things. What? Child couldn't say and wife wouldn't.

This letter writing. Something was common knowledge, more had been debated, in secret but subject to leakage. Some was dead secret – they said.

Neither the municipal police – always stilted in language – nor the State Recherche – unembarrassed, flowery, practised, but empty – were much help. There were facts, but so scarce and vague, and by now so thumbed and hammered, as to be unrecognizable. And this letter-writing was undiminished, but how much was there? How long had it been going on? How many letters were burned, thrown down the lavatory? And how many were kept, re-read, pored over? Even
enjoyed? The whole thing had been frightened underground by three-times-repeated banging and poking by heavy-handed police.

What facts there were were boring. For instance, the letters were composed in the classic way of letters and words clipped from the local paper – the one I had bought. Helpful! But nobody seemed to have thought much about the style, though it interested me. The language was quite practised, that of somebody, one would say, accustomed to putting words on paper. Yet it was stiff and cramped – not a normal feature of personal letters. Not an unschooled person: no spelling mistakes, and carefully accurate punctuation – too careful; it was painful. The letters were formal, selfconscious, grammatically careful but with no eye for a simple everyday word. The style of someone who thinks that a television announcer is the perfect model.

There was no real obscenity, either, in the verbal sense. A dirty-minded bourgeois. The majority of the letters that had been found were to women, but some were to men. Hm, youngish married women. Were they simply quicker to bring such things into the open? Apart from the three ‘victims' there was little known about these women. They were not suspected of anything.

This chasing after suspects is always a bore. I am always more interested in victims. I was now.

A fat lot of good it had done here looking for suspects. That part of the inquiry had been to my mind the most thoroughly botched up. They had found one really juicy, promising suspect, and had ended up with a fist full of gravel. They'd gone on the classical supposition that someone who writes sexy letters to women is most likely to be an elderly bachelor. When they found, on the doorstep, an elderly bachelor, with eccentric habits, a peculiar past, and a secretive nature, they stuck to him with a stupid obstinacy… Mark, he was certainly interesting.

The idea of a woman writer had never been taken
seriously. Yes, perhaps poison-pen letters are traditionally an elderly spinster's work, but all the elderly spinsters around there seemed irreproachable. And though there was jealousy in the letters, it was directed at the men, not at the women. A lesbian in Drente? Pooh pooh.

There had been a hunt for psychopaths of course, and anyone who had ever been caught in a moral scandal, however slight. The State Recherche – very very thorough indeed – had even unearthed the fact that the burgomaster, earlier in his career, had once been thought rather too fond of sitting little girls on his lap. Charming; Burgomaster Humbert N. Petit of Larousse, Ill. But nothing had ever been seriously proved, and there was certainly no evidence, not a scrap, to link him with any of this.

After motive, they had, with relish, attacked opportunity. They had reached vast numbers of conclusions, and nothing whatever proved one way or the other.

I let out a sort of moan. This might all be intensely funny, but I wasn't at all sure I was greatly amused.

Arlette was busily packing her precious gramophone records.

The first working days in Zwinderen were spent observing the manners and customs of Drente; Van der Valk feeling like an anthropologist among the Papuans. Ethnological studies indeed. I felt a bit like the schoolboy who wrote on his examination paper, ‘Customs beastly … manners none', and left it at that.

But I had a suitcase filled with books, newspaper clippings, and perfectly genuine files from the Ministry of the Interior, which I was agreeably surprised to find passionately interesting.

What, in Zwinderen, did they buy, wear, eat, drink, approve of? It wasn't right from the start, at all, what Arlette bought, wore, ate, drank or approved of. For information about all sorts of eccentric things, often simply because I had noticed something and been puzzled, I went to the burgomaster's secretary; she was the greatest help. She knew everybody and everything; seemed to be never at a loss, and was quite willing to instruct a responsible functionary; perhaps it flattered her sense of importance. It needed no flattering; she was important. Of course as confidential secretary she had access to all but the most important decisions, and that meant virtually everything that concerned the little town. She knew, too, all the local politics.

From her I learned of the long-standing quarrel between the Head of Parks and Gardens and the Municipal Gas Works. She knew the whole history of the throat-cutting between the contractors for the new Garden Suburb, and the figures of the loss taken by the subcontractor in electrical equipment for the sake of prestige – it had been she who had seen that he had tried to make the loss up by skimping the workmanship. She was illuminating about the solitary Communist member of the council, about the row over the new hospital equipment that all the doctors claimed was inadequate, about too much having been spent on the swimming bath, and got back by cheese-paring on the new dustbin lorries. She seemed to wave a sceptre over everybody. The burgomaster swore by her tact and ability – Miss Burger could always get it done. I found her myself a pleasant woman – no great beauty, but nice brown eyes and attractive feuille-morte hair – shiny, healthy-looking – and a good clear skin.

Arlette was tedious; bombarding everything with sarcasms. The Mimosastraat, to begin with.

‘Why Mimosa? And why is there a Mimosa Street in every piddling town in Holland? None of these people have
ever seen mimosa in their lives. Dahlias, tulips, narcissi – I find that understandable …'

Dear Arlette. She comes from the department of the Var and thinks that all the mimosa in the world is her own personal property.

Curses were heaped upon the anthracite stove, though it was modern; upon the curtains in the bedroom, which did, it was true, have an aggressively rural flower-pattern; upon the ‘three-piece suite', a bargain, shop-soiled after being used for a Show House by a local emporium; upon the extraordinary shower in the bathroom. I admitted her right to that; one was supposed to sit, apparently, in a kind of pit at waist-level – a masterpiece of plumbing that would rouse an incredulous guffaw even at the sources of the Amazon.

By the third day she was settling in; moving furniture with zest, as though determined to leave her individual stamp on even this borrowed anonymous shoe-box of a house. But she was still acid at meals.

‘Milk here's undrinkable.'

Aha, it was one of my items of knowledge, which I brought out of my rag-bag of Drentse lore. ‘Seems they like it like that. Call it High-Pasteurized.'

‘Which to me means scorched. Butter – rendered cowhide. And the butchers! People live here, I think, on fat salt pork and mince.'

Mince is nearly the dirtiest word in Arlette's vocabulary.

‘But what I find worst of all is the way they stare. Stare, stare, blatantly, openly, uncaring. Stand there transfixed, with great dull eyes, gaping.'

It was true. Even at me – one would say a harmless-looking object. Here an Amsterdammer, it seemed, was an Indian from the Peruvian uplands, plus blanket and llama. The peasants did stare consumedly; little girls poked at each other and dissolved in giggles. Poor Arlette, with her accent that becomes strong in shops, and she still says ‘in a box'
when she means tinned. And her hair in a fringe, with a beret on top … The women here wore scarves over hair like an O-Cedar mop, and the ‘ladies' wonderful hairy hats. They asked for a pound of mince, and took obediently what they were given. I felt a little sorry for the butcher. Arlette's butcher has been accustomed for years to her poking, coming behind the counter, even pursuing the poor fellow into his own cold-room. He is used by now to ‘Too fresh again', and keeps her steak a week longer than anyone else's …

‘Be discreet,' I told her. ‘Disguise yourself. Still, I trundle about all day in a grey suit, clutching a brief-case of crudely imitated pigskin, and even I am stared at. They look, and guess immediately that your name is neither Unk nor Flook and that you don't belong to the clan.'

‘I am discreet. I shall burst myself with discretion. I found Beaujolais, so-called, but in Albert Heijn, so it might well be drinkable. Dear Albert, his shop is a home from home to me.'