The Widow (25 page)

‘Or just the ink. What is it removes ballpoint? And forging fresh figures.'

‘And milking the business that way? And maybe he was on the verge of being caught and killed himself? It seems farfetched. And what you say of this Taglang – he sounds an unlikely candidate for any complicity.'

‘The thing that to my mind links these people together is that they've all so much money. This piffling boy, just out of art school. Place loaded with bottles of champagne. I wished I'd sneaked a look in that big fridge.'

‘Got it cheap from some yobbo who knocked over a supermarket.'

‘Arthur you're not taking me seriously.'

‘Not really, no. I think perhaps you're taking yourself too
much so.' He started quoting, in a special tone of voice. ‘University type, forty-three, divorced, tender – no, gentle or perhaps sensitive – and joyous, sense of humour, romantic, loving life intensely – to the full might be better – not taking himself seriously … this is all plainly me.'

‘What is it?' patiently, aware that Arthur was trying to sidetrack her.

‘It's a phony advert a fella put in the heart-to-heart page of the Nouvel Observateur. “Wishes to encounter Young Woman, twenty-five to thirty-five.”' He had hauled out one of his torn slips of paper. “‘Intelligent and agreeable physique, to make of her a friend, a comrade, a lover, while awaiting better still if the atoms hook together. Bobonnes, emmerdeuses, timorées, contractées, aigries please stay away.” The others are easy but how would you translate “bobonnes”?'

She gave it thought and then suggested ‘Wifeys'.

‘Not bad. As the fellow says, while awaiting better. Chap got ninety-eight replies and made a neat little book of them.'

‘Are all those awful things me? Wifey, timid, uptight, hungup, embittered, oh yes, and emmerdeuse, how does one translate that?'

‘One doesn't even try. You are not in the least bobonne, nor these other things. Emmerdeuse? – yes, occasionally. As now. My advice is drop it. You've lots of more suitable business. What did you do with the lesbian woman by the way?'

‘Told her it didn't interest me; I'm not a marriage bureau or a lonely hearts club. There's a woman who is, and she says nine phone calls out of ten are enquiries about group sex, and she finds it most discouraging. I'm not, by the way, about to get discouraged. I don't believe the fellow's distributing drugs, I mean it's too obvious, the artist's studio and dressed up like that. Far too much of a cliché. But how do they all get so rich?'

‘The way we stay poor, by having nasty talents we haven't, which is why we find them nasty. Women are all the same,' said Arthur gloomily. ‘They invite you out to lunch, ask your advice, don't take it: what I want to know is, do they pay for the lunch?'

‘Dutch treat,' said Arlette nastily. ‘Stick to what is it – Unreadable Heroines. Come across something interesting and all they say is Drop It, as though you were a dog.'

‘I'm giving you good advice you know,' said Arthur mildly, ‘but I might have known you wouldn't take it. Too obstinate. Where are you going now?'

‘Home to be a housewife.' Men! A lot of use they were …

‘The ironing-board is the girls' computer'. The phrase was Arthur's, of course. Arthur being funny. Men being funny … No patience with men right now. Least of all with Arthur, excessively annoying, English, and sociological; roughly in that order.

It was at least slightly funny, since of course true. The ironing-board was a sounding board. Give it a note and it gave you back a note – not always the same note. Resonance added.

Once at home, car parked crossly and rather carelessly, Arlette flounced about a good deal. Her little lemon tree gave her pleasure: she took it to the workroom and stood it in a good light, turned it around several times to get the right angle – but it would need turning regularly for the light to be evenly distributed. She stormed about tapping her heels being bourgeoise. Cleaning women are always so happily lavish with materials they have not had to pay for. Always too much polish on the furniture. The tiles always smell of too much eau-de-javel slopped in the bucket. Three times as much Harpic as anyone needs is put down the lavatory. The paper bag of the vacuum-cleaner is never never emptied. Taxed with this they put on their most cretinous look and say they don't know how. And they always always stack empty cans with beautiful
precision back in the cupboard without dreaming of a note asking for a full one.

Fulminating to herself did no good; irritated her further. She scrabbled in the deepfreeze and slapped things on the table hoping that they would give her an idea, eventually, about supper. The laundry basket was full, as it always was: she separated whites from coloureds spitefully and flung a great bundle in the machine. When its stomach started to rumble in that peaceful digestive pattern she felt better. Its antics drove Arthur – any man at all – utterly frantic. One ought to be able to make a limerick out of that.

There was nothing else to think about. Nothing on the telephone tape, nothing in the letterbox but the electricity bill, heavily padded as usual with bland estimations, fixed charges – and tax on both – added to the meter reading and tax smeared thickly overall like jam. She dragged the board out of the ironing cupboard. After falling down once and settling itself twice at the wrong height – the computer did this too – the camel consented to kneel and be burdened.

I don't like ironing but it does help me think.

Arthur, watching her ironing, with admiration for efficiency, remarked idly that the computer was just the same. Write a bad programme, give it silly instructions, and it would be recalcitrant. He had done this often, ending by kicking it and shouting phallocrat expressions while the wretched thing went on spewing paper into the bin. He had made one of his systematized fantasies, watching her pull rough-dried clothes (and being told to take two corners himself and pull) and fold them neatly. If the cards are not properly punched, in the wrong order or – no, stop it, said Arlette.

But if the computer ‘thinks' (tenacious piece of nonsense) then so does the ironing board. If you start to think it will put disjointed scraps of idea into order, retrieve stuff stored in your memory and then lost, perform calculations. Give you, occasionally, the result in one piece that would otherwise have taken you months. The best way to achieve this is not to think at all. She was thinking too much. Ironing is not a mechanical
chore. It takes a special female intelligence, which men don't have.

My liberated sisters … oh dear, I've given up feeling sorry for them, poor bewildered things. Talk about throwing the baby away with the bathwater.

No earthly use bringing this to the police. Their male intelligence, stuffed with rubbish about rules-of-evidence, couldn't grasp it at all.

The artist, so-called, has a connection with the flowershop, since he has a poster on their door. The flowershop has a connection with Taglang Horticultural Whatnot, of whom they are good customers. Anybody can be someone's customer. As Arthur points out.

Now I see myself standing there, looking in. There's a tall, middle-aged, well-dressed sort of man, thinks himself wonderful. Hands in pockets. Proprietorial air. For a good reason; he is the proprietor. Had that special way of watching the girls. Almost certainly same man – I never saw him properly – at Taglang. Because of that machismo Maserati. Ugly stupid little thing but leave that.

Girls: one girl, giggling, is pinning orchid to stout bosom of German bonne-femme. Second girl is wrapping up pot of chrysanths for a biddy to take to the cemetery for All Saints. Stripy paper, apple-green, dark green, gold medallion; fancy.

She stood the iron with a thump and belted into the workroom, where in the wastepaper basket … Right: Mr Taglang had wrapped my tree in the same paper: that is why it looked familiar.

Idiot! The flowership is Taglang Enterprises. Or, much more likely, the other way round.

There can be a connection between Taglang and the artist. Stretching it very thin to extend that to Demazis. Anyhow, Arthur's thing about washing cheques …

When she went to the bank to pay cheques in she had commented idly on the new colour of her own. Yes, said nice Monsieur Bidule, always ready for a chat, new ones, something magnetic (she hadn't really listened); you can detect if
any comedian has made alterations. To be sure. Lots and lots of other papers you can forge though. Nicely engraved things with Republique Française – or Helvétique, or Bundesrepublik. But it's all too fancy, too tenuous, too … ‘There is just one doctor in the world that can save your baby, and he is in Vienna'. Too women's magazine. Demazis was killed, because of knowing too much or threatening to talk too much. I don't know this, but I do know it. He didn't want to talk and again he did. He told too many lies and not enough. He was too frightened and not frightened enough.

I wouldn't have paid any attention to the second Michel, if the first Michel hadn't been so unwilling to talk about him. He would just have been another phony, a ski-instructor from the New Hampshire backwoods who puts on a pretend Austrian accent.

So don't see him as something out of Freddy Forsyth who washes the Israeli visa off your passport and … oh, stop it. He's simply a character that is making too much money and how? How does everyone make money, including me? As a go-between. Hardly anyone actually produces something, and they don't make a penny from it. But the world is cram-full, and this, basically, is what's wrong with the world, of people who juggle and make pots, simply by passing a thing from hand to hand.

Like what? Like drugs say. After all, what drew your attention to this jokeboy – could you find a bigger contrast than that between the two Michels? Marie-Line, and if she sees something in the one what can she possibly see in the other?

Go back to the beginning and suppose he handles dope. He says he doesn't and wouldn't because it's so obvious. Yes but that's a double bluff. Who uses dope? Anyone who's at odds with the world. The marginals. And who are they? It used to be supposed the hippies, the on-the-road gang. Nonsense; they don't have any money, and any sort of drug beyond a handful of shitty marijuana leaves is much too expensive. Drugs, of any sort, are sold for a great deal of money. The
users, the profitable users, are not children like Marie-Line who have no money. But the rich. The bourgeois, well insulated and protected by money. They are the real marginals, if the sociological gibber-jargon about alienation means anything at all. They are unsuspected, and if they were suspected can protect themselves with large bribes.

Doctors like Freddy Ulrich, dentists like Armand Siegel, might know a great deal more than they say. No sealed lips like a doctor's lips. Why do they say anything at all? Because they are genuinely upset at Marie-Line being used.

Girls like Marie-Line are used as ‘contacts'. Where possible, to tie them down and have an efficient means of shutting their mouths, they are corrupted into a habit. A small habit, it need not take much to pay for. They are the ones who are caught, of course. The poor little wretches found in a coma in public lavatories. To pay for their habit, the girls prostitute themselves, the boys rob supermarkets. The police make a loud noisy fuss. How many are there? A few hundred. But in a very wealthy country like Holland, very respectable, how much quiet money goes to keep publicity away from the door? Going to join the other quiet money.

Arlette knew something about this but not much. Piet did not talk about it. A ‘professional' secret. But every doctor in Europe knows of, and treats, rich drug-users.

Marie-Line is not a prostitute, and does not rob supermarkets. But she may do a bit of quiet pushing. For example,
Chez Mauricette
. Whereas an artist, with a bourgeois clientele …

You could pass drugs in a flowershop. But she knew this much: the ones that make money of it are never the ones who push it. If anybody gets caught, it's always somebody else. The obvious ‘marginals'. Folklore figures: Corsicans in scruffy little bars in Marseille. Paid off with a couple of thousand franc notes to gamble on horses. The real marginals, both those who use and those who profit, live above suspicion in the Avenue Foch. Not on the shady side, either.

The computer had stopped spitting neatly folded paper in
the bin. The ironing was over. The camel was bidden rise, and shamble off back to its cupboard. She went to have a bath. She wiggled her toes, with a lot of
Air du Temps
in the water. When she dressed she put her gun on. While computing away about Michel and Albert and Marie-Line the ironing board had given her a sudden jolt. Concerning that funny little woman Norma.

The gunbelt was broad, flat, of supple leather from some unlikely-sounding animal, and no worse than wearing stays, once you got used to it. It had two unobtrusive buckles and added little to a waistline that hadn't been exactly famous to begin with. Since she inclined to be heavy farther down – euphemism for a broad behind – it stayed reasonably in proportion. The holster was a much more tiresome business. Stiffer, heavier, a piece of saddlery, with a spring-clip mechanism, you could try it in front or behind of the hipbone, it remained hostile to the female pelvis. In the privacy of the bathroom, worn roughly where she kept her appendix, it was hysterically funny; combined with boots and a hat, simply the Playmate of the Month. Once outside the bathroom, a great deal less funny. At the back, quite impossible. It quarrelled with one's behind and stuck out like a shelf. Oh well.

‘The Americans, I believe,' said Arthur straightfaced, ‘call this a belly gun. Well named.' She was prudish about toting it around like one's diaphragm in the old days. The gun itself made a difference to weight but little to bulk: it had a short barrel. Totally inaccurate if not quite ineffective at anything over very short distances, said the police, but you aren't trying to shoot one out of the guy's hand: The purpose of it is to knock him flat in the last resort: this it will do, definitely.