Strike Out Where Not Applicable (16 page)

‘Oh yes. I believe he's busy with something – I mean, that doesn't mean anything,' clumsily. ‘Did you want to see him?'

‘Big bike fan.' She had looked disquieted a moment. ‘Big Poupou fan but I like them all.' Her face cleared and she laughed. ‘Allez France.' This slogan was unexpected in a Dutch police inspector – even Arlette's husband. ‘Oh yes, I learned that last year at Courchevel – we were there for the winter championships.'

Arlette was keeping silent, rather embarrassed, hoping he wasn't overdoing it.

‘Oh, you ski?'

‘Not me – I was convalescent after this,' patting his hip negligently. ‘Arlette's the sporting one. And the children, of course. Have you children, Madame?'

‘No,' overhastily.

‘I might go out to the coast then. I'll leave the two of you to your games. Shall I take the car then, darling?'

‘You'll have to, won't you,' in a chilly tone. She thought he was being a bit mean.

‘You've only got Lette's car? But how will she get back? I can drive you if you really want to meet Rob. We can give you tea.'

‘That's very kind of you but I'll have to get back too, you know.'

‘But I can give you a lift – that's no trouble.' It sounded over-eager even to her. ‘Rob will drive you back in the Ferrari.'

‘But weren't you going to have coffee or something? – what d'you usually do – go to the White Horse?'

‘No – not much,' abruptly. ‘I've been out since two anyhow.'

She is a phenomenon, he thought. Nothing to do with being keen on me all of a sudden! But she's mighty curious to hear anything I have to say to Rob. And she has a lot of confidence in Arlette, who is cute enough to see through all this, and knows I'm not just belting off for the afternoon because of the black undies!

Good for her! She was smiling sunnily as though nothing could have pleased her more.

‘Yes, you drive him, Janine. Don't let him drink too much; it isn't good for him.' They had reached the stables, passing the spot where Fat Fischer had an accident without thought or comment. ‘I'll see to Napoleon – you two go on. Be home for supper, darling.'

‘Yes of course.'

The BMW coupé was an impressive affair, less vulgar and chemical inside than a Mercedes, a roomy thing but light and nervous enough to suit a woman. It was fitted in a grandiose way with thermometers and tachometers and chronometers – even an altitude meter as well as conventional things like radios and revcounters. She looked very good in it and contrary to expectation she drove well, with brio but tact, knowing how to humour nincompoops in Volkswagens that got aggressive when passed.

‘You drive very well.'

‘Rob says that too. He taught me, so he is very critical and particular, but I do drive well, I know. I can even drive the Ferrari! But it's not much fun here – no real open road. Holland's too small.'

‘You don't like it here?'

‘I hate it,' with so much heat as to surprise him. Not venom really, because she is too nice to be capable of real venom – but heat …

‘You'd be more at home in France, wouldn't you – or even Belgium?'

She was pleased at his being perceptive.

‘Oh yes! The trouble is Rob isn't. He wanted to try things here. I kept saying – but he over-ruled me – oh well, he's the boss. I suppose it's too late to get things changed now.'

‘He's changed his mind since?'

‘I don't know – maybe,' braking for a crossroad and accelerating away with no jerk. She used the low gears well. Arlette would have braked nearly to a stop and gone on still in third, but of course with a deux-chevaux …

‘I'm glad Arlette's made friends with you – being lonely sometimes as she is. She doesn't make friends easily.' For a moment he thought he had been too crude, but she was concentrating on a lorry.

‘Nor do I.'

‘Being a foreigner of course, it's understandable.'

‘I'm not exactly a foreigner – but anyone is among the rich – unless you've got their kind of money.'

‘I would have thought your husband, uh, hadn't done badly.'

‘You don't understand,' seriously, so that he wanted to grin, ‘it's not what you make, it's the way that you make it. Bikes are not good enough for the nose-turner-uppers. As though they were any better than thieves,' changing down into third with a roar from the motor. They were in the sand-dunes now, a well-built road but annoyingly kinky and bendy, curving between the rimrocks and scarps of grass-tussocked sand, with spinneys of dark pine crouched between. Brambles grew at the sides of the road, beyond the bicycle track. It had got much hotter, and the sun could be seen through a pearly curtain of cloud that gave the atmosphere an August stuffiness. It is always warm in the dunes, for the sand holds the sun's warmth, and one is sheltered from the wind. The top of the car was down – it was pleasant driving with this extremely pretty girl, a summery glow on her peach-like skin.

‘Are they so disgraceful, then?' laughing.

‘You'd be surprised.' Perhaps she had forgotten he was a policeman – her tone was so serious. He wondered if he could ask her to be a bit more specific!

‘I thought you were one of them yesterday – I'm sorry; I was a bit rude. But I hate their guts, you see.'

‘I was born in the Ferdinand Bol Straat in Amsterdam.'

‘I was born in a stinking village between the cow and the cabbage,' not laughing, ‘and compared to that the Ferdinand Bol is the Avenue d'Iéna.'

‘You got out of it, though.'

‘Yes, by luck. And how did you? Brains, no doubt. With brains one can always get out. I haven't any. Even Rob knows how stupid I am, though he pretends not to notice. Lette – your wife – she notices but she – she laughs at me – but not nastily. She's nice.'

One of the disadvantages of this coast is that you cannot see the ocean before you reach it. Instead of being perched above sea level the coast is tucked below it. You have to climb a little hill before you see anything at all, though of course you can smell the sea before you come to it.

He had been ‘bland' of course. He knew all about the ‘stinking village' but no need to tell her that the underling he had sent to
the town hall had come up with the background of the whole manège. A fine thing, the town hall; not only are births-deaths-and-marriages on file in this most Dutch of institutions, but wonderful heaps of information useless to anybody but a nosy policeman. (Just so does one see the rag-and-bone man, wheeling his cart piled with rusty bedsprings, an old pram wheel, squashed cardboard cartons. That a man should toil, pushing that cart … That a man can live, and even be happy … Yet the sordid stink of burning rubber, the Stygian flames and pits announce the alchemist, and Dickens spoke of the ‘Golden' Dustman.) Applications for a building licence, claim for unemployment benefit, religious and political opinions, changes of address over any-period-longer-than-three-weeks – the policeman can find gold in this, and a ridiculous annotation in an absurd file might fill him with the joy of the clochard finding a worn-out aluminium saucepan.

Amusing, her compulsive blurting way.

The car whisked through the sanded bricky streets of a Dutch sea-side town, turned on to the sea-boulevard, off it again, on to a large open space paved with apoplexy-purple breezeblocks, and slid into the white-painted slot next to the hotel entrance, where a France-blue marquee with gold lettering sheltered the doorway from wind and rubber-edged automatic doors played sentry against sand. Inside the dunes it had been windless: here the wind, an invisible sower, launched graceful skittish arabesques of silvery dust upon the barren parking lot. The north-westerly blows upon this coast like the mistral; alas, it brings not the fine weather but more rain. The ruffled seawater showed a few whitecaps on a churned steel-grey mud, like corpses stuck in barbed wire, here and there upon a Flanders battlefield. It was much too early for holidaying, but it is never too early for robust Germans happy to exchange the chemical vapours of Gelsenkirchen for the bracing breezes of the North Sea, and there were quite a few cars on the parking-place with Westphalian plates.

Janine, rather proudly, was showing him through a hall elegant with rubber parquet and fibreglass furniture, with a girl at the switchboard behind a muted teak-veneer reception desk.

‘Find my husband will you? – tell him I'm back and I've brought someone – and ask one of the boys to send up tea for three.' Her Dutch was as Flemish-sounding as her French, as though she had
found haven from the cow and the cabbage in suburban Liège.

‘All right,' said the switchboard girl indifferently, not quite insolently, with an accent designed to show that she came from The Hague. Janine walked him over towards the lift: standing close beside him pressing buttons she muttered ‘saucy bitch' meant for him to hear.

The flat at the top of the hotel was very comfortable if you liked being horizontal, with a lot of modern art.

‘Those your choice?'

‘No – Rob's; he likes art. I don't know anything about it; I just read women's magazines.' Another grievance – she was a mass of over-sensitive surfaces. He turned tactfully to the trophies: mm, a Dauphiné Libéré and a Paris-Roubaix: he had not known or had forgotten that the boy had been that good. The icy soaking rain and the greasy bone-jarring cobblestones of the ‘Hell of the North' and the dusty horrors of barren limestone under a pitiless June sun – not what the French called a ‘salon runner', no.

She had gone to change, and he was surprised meditating by Rob coming in unheard and saying over his shoulder, ‘They say champagne tastes good out of silver but give me Perrier.' Van der Valk held a hand out grinning.

‘A collection! How many litres of champagne would one get in these?'

‘Never a Tour though, a Giro, a Vuelta – never even a Paris-Nice. Second once … you French?'

‘No – I didn't think – I was talking French with your wife.'

‘Ah, you're a friend of Janine's?'

‘My wife is – I was with her at the manège and mentioned I was a bike fan – your wife kindly invited me to come back and meet you.' Being bland again.

‘Has she ordered tea? – sit down; have a cigarette.' Kingsize Americans and blonds in the two halves of a silver box.

‘She spoke to the phone girl.'

‘Then it'll be up – or I'll want to know why,' smiling. ‘One advantage of having a hotel – there are precious few. Rather have a cup made by my wife, myself, out of a cracked pot – tastes better! You ride, do you?'

‘No – except bicycles.' That got a smile with warmth in it. Good-looking fellow. Athletes, with their monstrous overdeveloped chests and thighs, making them look like bowlegged dwarfs, look
ludicrous in tweed suits, but Rob didn't. Despite the look of physical splendour and the hard disciplined control that was evident, he showed signs of tension: he had a nervous trick of gnawing at the side of his thumb, worrying it with square perfect teeth.

‘In business?' abruptly.

‘I'm a commissaire of police – not this district: inland.' This casually-allowed-to-fall remark caused no stir; Zwemmer nodded idly.

‘Not much time for things like horses, I 'spect – like me.'

‘I sneak an hour off to look at something like that,' flipping a thumb at the shelves of silver.

‘Supposed to be impressive, but I've never yet seen anyone impressed – people are bored, or jealous, or contemptuous, or think it's showing-off. They'd pinch them though, if they got the chance.' It was not bitter or cynical; just that experience had taught him that mankind is like that.

‘What do they mean to you?'

‘A lot. All the moments when I was ready to give up and fall off, and went on like a fool without knowing why.'

‘That's enough.'

‘There's nothing dimmer than a champ the moment he's retired and there's nothing left of him but those.'

‘And when you're still champ?'

Zwemmer's eyes came round slowly: dark angry battlefield grey, like the North Sea on a windy day.

‘Being champ is a thing only the other champs know about. For every one fellow that likes you, or admires you – wants you to win – there are ten hoping you'll be whacked, humiliated. And twenty who don't care, but get a kick out of hoping you'll slip on a banana skin. Get a puncture and miss a breakaway, they'll say with joy you're finished and they'd known so all along. Win and they say the race was pulled crooked by money. You learn to use your elbows. Good training for business – I've worked as hard building this place up as I did to win those. You don't get much out of it. Television interviews by chaps who've forgotten your name the week after. Money, of course. Flowers. Silver cup with champagne.'

Janine arrived at the same moment as the tea, and with comparable grandezza: one scarcely knew which to look at first.
Human beings are more interesting than objects (Van der Valk had little liking for new-wave novelists); she had a black crêpe frock, much too dressy both for her and for the occasion, with a diamond star and a lot of noisy perfume, a touched-up bouffant hairstyle and shiny shoes so high in the heel that she looked about to perform a vertical take-off.

The tea was overdone as well: it was stainless steel with a brushed finish to make it look more silvery, in angular Scandinavian shapes. Ranged in rows on an enormous oval dish, like cocktail canapés, were the Dutch ‘thé complet' accessories – the more dear the hotel the more there were of them and here there were eleven, which is high on the haunch. Little sippets of buttered toast and tiny three-cornered sandwiches. Glacés fours. Dry petits fours. Fan wafers stuffed with whipped cream. Tiny meatballs breadcrumbed and deep fried. Little chicken croquettes, ditto. Plain chocolate in shiny naked napolitaines, and milk chocolate in oblong pastilles, wrapped in silver paper and covered with a tiny reproduction of a famous Dutch painting, like so many miniature cigarette-cards.