Over the High Side (4 page)

He got into a Victorian armchair with a high back and wings: not an object of beauty but good for working or sleeping in. Once in, it was notorious that one could no longer get out. Arlette brought a drink and promised supper on a tray.

‘What is supper?'

‘Minestrone.'

‘Not terribly exciting,' unfairly.

‘What else do I have to do?' snappish.

‘Take your clothes off.'

‘Coarse!' One of her snubbing words, meant to floor him. Well he was coarse. Though he preferred to say he was Robust.

He arranged a little table for the suitcase, a little table for supper, a notebook, a ballpoint that didn't work, another ballpoint, and was nicely settled when he found he'd forgotten an ashtray. He attacked the business file first.

After a little while, he began to discover a pattern.

KANTOOR MACHINE TOOLS

Weteringschans 612

Amsterdam

My dear Xavier,

Well – water under bridges – we don't get any younger, you and I. It was exceedingly pleasant to relive a more youthful decade in your company and I got back to the office feeling the better for that slightly self-indulgent lunch!

I looked up the correspondence as promised, but I don't think there is an awful lot to be done, since they were infiltrated, for the levers of decision are now in other hands. I can of course put you in touch with Masterson, but frankly he has become a figurehead, and I fear that the gentleman from Akron would not be disposed to give much continuance to your notion. But I will of course think around your problem in more general terms. Do please remember me to your charming Aglaia.

Yours youthfully,
Alfred.

Plainly a frost. Businessmen's smoke, masking a diplomatic refusal to help, despite the personal approach from an old pal.

Cher Monsieur,

We accuse reception of your study concerning the proposal outlined in your verbal communication to Monsieur Martin in Rotterdam, and we have studied the modalities thereof with an interest wholly sympathetic.

You will forgive our labouring the point (already in all probability well known to you) that the credits available for payments
of American-owned patents are parsimoniously distributed by the Ministry. Copyright in a licence of this nature would in our opinion be unduly onerous, and in the Ministry's eye tending to outweigh the indubitable technical advantage attractive to ourselves and rightly emphasized in your interesting presentation. It is therefore with the utmost regret that we decline.

We beg you, cher monsieur, to have the goodness to believe in our most distinguished and sincere sentiments.

Matthieux
for the Company.

VEREENIGDE VLAAMSE CHIMIE NV

Antwerpen 24 maart

oliebollenkade 97

Esteemed Sir,

It is with considerable sorrow that I am compelled to point out an error which has inadvertently crept into your calculation, based to the best of my knowledge upon the figures supplied by our Textiles Division in Kortrijk. Due to an unfortunate lapse by a clerical junior, in it must be said a hasty telephonic communication, these figures are not altogether as advantageous as you were then led to believe, since they fail unluckily to take account of the recent tendency towards a universal upgrading in raw materials.

Begging to undersign with highest and most faithful esteem,

Moers.

Poor old Martinez.

There were successes to be sure, and even coups, glad confident mornings of wouldn't-you-like-a-few-oysters-to-begin with, but in a world growing ever more bland and slippery too few. The carbon flimsies of Martinez' own letters, carefully typed at home, sparkled with wit, ingenuity, imaginative enterprise and grasp of detail, but with the cautious deadness of professional commerce choked too many young plants.

None of the letters showed trace of anything construably illegal. To be sure Martinez might be engaged in contraband, industrial espionage, bribery, tax evasion, and tra la la, and had simply been too prudent to put things on paper; but one had no right to assume any such thing. No apparent motive for murder. He hoped the personal files would be a less barren field.

Dearest Father,

We were overjoyed, naturally, to hear from you for the St Nicolas. The little parcel – sweet breath of Holland far away – arrived on the exact date and gave much pleasure. I had to stop Joaquin being greedy!

I am infinitely sorry to hear that your health gives anxiety, and Paquita, I must tell you, is making a special Advent Novena. She was entranced with the little Bavarian figures, which are quite unobtainable here and gave me an especially happy memory of that summer in Tirol long ago.

I quite see that your conscience must often pain you; none of us, alas, is a stranger nowadays to this unhappy type of moral compromise and our prayers go with you.

Felipe is as usual dreadfully overworked. His department is deeply involved in the efforts towards peaceful settlement of the endless troubles arising out of the sordid greed of You-Know-Who. Anxieties and uncertainties beset us. I fear I see no prospect of Europe this year. We have sympathy for your present straits for our own position is by no means rosy! This nasty expropriation talk has made the market more than nervous and some of my own shares as good as valueless. I need only mention that I had to cut down on Paquita's pony.

Both children send warmest affection to Opa. Rest assured that during the Nativity Season that is so dear to us all we will ask for an especial blessing upon all that is dear to you. My warm love to Anna.

Your ever-loving daughter,
Charlotte.

Nothing there. Poor old boy had hinted at a bit of help and got the rather odious mixture of piety and the Bourse which so often characterizes bourgeois women. Still, she was one of ‘the girls': his hand stole out towards his notebook. He shrugged: what could he write? Convent-bred; flowery in style, handwriting and doubtless appearance. Heavy, hairy blonde women taking such pains to be neither, unable to prevent the attention of their over-shaved and over-powdered husbands straying towards supple youthful flesh, flashing shiny brown thighs … come, come, he was being literary. He couldn't help imagining Charlotte, decidedly over-perfumed,
drinking coffee over the financial columns that were her substitute for sex, but he didn't think she had anything to do with the death of her father.

Dear Papa you are sometimes really – with all respect – insufferable. Your Christmas letter was intolerably full of moral unction. Do try and realize that letters are seen by Jim, and vu his morbid jealousy I have a great deal of trouble pacifying him ensuite. What you call ‘regularizing my position' is impossible unless we suddenly get a new bishop more flexible in his views, and even then … Well, to happier topics! Snow in Holland – and pea soup no doubt – I can just smell it! Dublin is muggy and moist as usual and we have all colds, Jim a nasty bronchial cough. That ghastly raw wind is so trying and you know how damp this flat is. I am thinking of rounding out our income by giving German lessons – Jim doesn't like the idea but at least it's at home! There are firms enough here doing business with Germany and Holland, and I could earn a worthwhile salary in a secretarial post but the bee in Jim's bonnet about married women working stops each and every effort (and please spare me sarcasms; render to Caesar what is C's). Jim was not very impressed either by your strictures on Dublin business practice. In this climate one just doesn't get up early and anyway this just isn't Holland but why I tell you this I can't imagine since you know it perfectly well. What you don't grasp is that attitudes have changed a great deal – we are not so isolationist and antiquated as you appear to believe – but I have scolded enough. Knowing you as I do, your irritability is just nervous tension: I sympathize – you didn't really need to tell me what the doctor said because he says it to me! We wish you all possible New Year blessings and especially peace and health with very much love from

Agnes.

Van der Valk, who had been biting his ballpoint, clicked it: this was better. The over-neat, over-regular writing was as uninteresting as Charlotte's rococo twirls, and they seemed to have gone to the same convent. But there was more conflict: a sharper lecturing tone, more self-pity. A husband who wasn't a husband and was ‘morbidly jealous', apparently no children. Not much money and plenty of frustration; the bossy querulous tone was unattractive. However …

Dear old silly Father –

I'm on night duty this month and have time for letters, though not that much I warn you since next week I have an important exam, indispens. for SRN. Your letter gave me pleas. – your being sunny and serene means I worry less about you and worries heav. knows I have enough. Poor Mal has such rot. luck – he went for a radio which we were all cert wld be neg. and that accurs Tierney said there was still a shad. rnd the apex – really hvng tb. nowadays is too absurd & its only T's dnd incomp. that he didn't shake it off long ago.

Sorry many interrup. I have a whole squad of priv rms as well as the ward & must study too. Yr sugges studying at home isn't v. clever you know – one no lgr gets the maids & gvrness & all that folk we had when we were little! The new kindgrt – thk heav. Francis goes to school in Spt. – is v. handy, but Lil is nowhere nr old enough to be given rsponsblty at home and cnot ‘take them off my hands' as you so blandly put it! Mal does his best I mst say but he's often away in winter & when at work at home is blind & deaf to all but his wrtng & he too is chldsh enough heav. knows blast I have to fly –

Later I hv been so much delayed that I will send this as it is More news soon yr Ever Loving

Agatha.

The last file was different from the others. For a start it was twice the size, and the writing was more interesting. Van der Valk was no expert, and he despised graphology anyway – something much believed in by earnest German businessmen! – but this struck him as elegant, incisive, intelligent. The first two had been rather stupid. Agatha's large slightly backward-sloping ‘lecture-notes' had more character perhaps – but this one … Anastasia … the youngest? All three were saints mentioned in the Mass in those lists one always skipped. She had the same convent upbringing, the same fluent pietistic jargon, but there was, he felt at once, more to her.

The writing was rapid and hurried, strongly sloped, but legible and well formed. There was a powerful will, an aesthetic sense, a feeling for form. The words had wide even intervals, that made reading agreeable and, he did not know why, attractive.

Dearest Papa,

I have not, I know, written for some time; writing has been difficult and painful. Poetry as you know has been impossible to me for some years, and yet this winter I was moved to begin again. But on the paper nothing would come; the old familiar gap. This time it took a new form, for my whole arm was paralysed, as it were, frozen. A pen brings me no peace.

Winter was shadowed. E. is drinking less, but knows that unless he maintains – at best it is intermittent, at worst the schrechlich existence that needs – bears – no description – then he will not hold his job. I wonder if he sees – really sees – how close he is to the kind of dégringolade that ends in the Salvation Army Hostel. I myself see little chance; he is characteristically sanguine and optimist at all times. The lendemain he is abject with apologies and resolutions and seems genuinely to believe that each time is the last. I envy him his illusions. The physiological cross that I have to carry complicates existence … to finish with the woes, yes, my health is irregular, but nothing to cause concern: rassurezvous.

I have not yet read the book (I prefer to put it off than to read it badly). I have a disinclination to effort which annoys me, which I combat, not always well. Lack of conviction … Speaking of books I have one on which I should value your opinion, which I send you. The translation is stiff, and reads awkwardly, but the thought I found compelling and very lucid. It has influenced my recent thinking.

Of the little train-train there is not much to say. Children, thank God, well, garden beginning again to give me pleasure (the crocuses were remarkable this year) and the feeling of again living out of doors, walking, finding ‘countryside' still not too far away (Killiney is still, just, Killiney) – all this does me good, makes me happy for once to eat and breathe and be alive. You know how my disgust with the world has given me a sombre outlook.

How I sympathize with present trials. How I wish I could help! E. is well-meaning, but his own position is too shaky … anything but the solid planks you need for a venture. Jim or M. would
not
strike the right note. Oddly a student acquaintance is the son of an ‘influential personage' – but said i.p. sounds a pompous ass. It is a pity – Anna's flat is empty again too just now, not for long of course.

Do let us hear from you soon. There are one or two paragraphs
in your letter that I have disregarded, as you see, but I imagine you will prefer it so. Your finishing ‘stroke' could only cause a bitterness likely to be more lasting than we could wish – or endure. There – my love to Anna. How I should enjoy coming to spend a few days with you: spring in A'dam – I think of it with longing. E. would have a fit!

Your always faithful loving
Stasie.

More talkative, more fluent, more literary. Brighter; closer to Pa. Closest resemblance/affinity to Pa? What is all the mumbo-jumbo? What is ‘physiological cross'?