The Widow (5 page)

‘She said nothing?'

‘Only that she wouldn't be going to school because she wasn't allowed out, and I could come and see her, but no more.'

‘What about you – will you be marked absent?'

‘Oh, I don't care. An hour – I'll say I was at the dentist. No problem,' in Mauricette's accent. ‘I mean, my old man's fussy about the exam, but I'm fairly up-to-date on the work. As long as I'm not out late too often … That old prick of a dentist, he really belongs in the time when girls got sent to the convent for dancing with the wrong man.'

‘All right, I get it. Well, I was writing her a note. I'll finish it – will you take it to her?'

‘Of course. Her old man knows mine so I'm tolerated if looked on sourly. I'll be let in.'

‘I don't like this hole and corner passing of missives, but there's not much choice right now. There's nothing private in it. I ask you to add your voice to mine. Tell her to cool it. I don't expect her to apologize if she's unable to, but to show herself amenable and not openly hostile create a chink of light and I can perhaps wedge my foot in it. This nonsense of cutting her wrists – she's not that much of a fool? I'm taking it that's just to jolt me.'

‘Did she say that? – lordy: no, and she's not a fool, but she's
a very emotional girl and she got tremendously worked up. Ten minutes after she'll have forgotten that.'

‘Good. Do you know Michel?'

‘Of course, he's a lamb. Very quiet and well balanced. His trouble is he hasn't a penny.'

‘Would he come and see me?'

‘Course he would. Love it.' Sufficiently spontaneous to hearten her.

She got home to find Arthur stumping about in peculiar underclothes, English and shapeless.

‘It really is too bad. A brand one knew and wore as a child, bought in Jermyn Street, very dear indeed and Look at it.'

‘It's just the same here,' sympathized Arlette, who crossed the border to buy underclothes.

‘Sea Island cotton …' working himself up, ‘my Führer's Face. Shaved off a big black wrestler …'

‘How did they get it white?' enquired the woman of literal mind.

He stopped and put on the prosecutor face.

‘You've been washing these. With detergents.' She wasn't having any of this.

‘You kiss mi bum, mi general.'

‘Where did you learn this vulgar expression?'

‘Norma.'

‘How is ol' Norma?'

‘All right. She agrees there's nothing to be gained by staying. Going to bugger off when ol' Robert's sort of not looking. Only sorry to exchange Strasbourg for Salford.'

‘Is there really much difference?'

‘According to her, Hautepierre's the island of Tahiti by comparison.'

‘Plainly,' said Arthur sociologically, ‘neither of you has been to Tahiti.'

‘Have you? What's there?'

‘A Préfecture, more or less that of Les Deux Sèvres, and the French Navy's washing hung out in interminable lines. And not a naked tit in sight. Where are my trousers! I've got to go to a reception for some Belgians.' She put on her apron and went to the kitchen, which was much the same thing.

Arlette who had a wish for consommé put beef bones in the oven to roast and set onions to brown; to make stock. Have to take stock too, of the Situation. It didn't seem as though she were making much money on the job. Norma didn't have a penny. Albert Demazis, who had, seemed to have got cold feet. Marie-Line's parents, who were simply dripping with it, weren't going to scatter largesse. Shouldn't have married Arthur, huh? Then you'd still have your widow's pension!

The Job had been born the day after Illhausern. A Saturday. Unsatisfactory weather, rainy and blowy, then still and bright again after misty beginnings. They had done the weekend shopping together, come back to the little flat in the Krutenau: she made coffee.

‘I don't understand this,' she said. ‘I'm an average person from a dull narrow background. I've never done anything interesting. I'm now tolerably faded. What is there to run after?'

‘Quantifying things is dull,' said Arthur. ‘Sociologists are forever collecting figures about Russians whose breath smell and drawing conclusions about toothpaste in the Soviet Union. Misleading, and dull. Now was it Luther who said that if the world were to come to an end tomorrow he would go out and plant an apple tree?'

‘Good for him.'

‘Yes, exactly. People of your sort are intensely tiresome and one needs them. Now what I want explaining – you keep up
this sainte n'y touche act all these years and then suddenly collapse utterly.'

‘You looked so vulnerable and pathetic there with your pipe.'

‘Two babes in the wood, my God. Why do you stay in this poky place? – you aren't poor.'

‘I'm beastly rich. I have my widow's pension, in lovely Dutch guldens worth such a lot in francs. And I have a resounding diploma in Movement Therapy, so the hospital pays me. Won't it be nice to be rich?'

‘Yes, I'm grossly overpaid. Now tell me; what's your opinion of the flat in the Rue de l'Observatoire?'

‘Quite good. A nice sense of compromise there, between the Esplanade and the Saint-Maurice. That awful wallpaper must be swept out. But quite good. Mm, I've some pretty old Dutch furniture. And a Breitner snowscape.'

‘Yes. I hate Dutch furniture; its curves are all wrong. Never did get accustomed to the bowls of the teaspoons being wrong way round. And the other – the one on the quay?'

‘Much better, despite the Ill smelling bad. But far too dear. Nicer. Sunnier. Less wasteful. Easier to keep clean. But out of the question.'

‘One takes a mortgage.'

‘One does no such thing. You marry me because I don't compromise with my beliefs. A refusal to make banks rich by borrowing money is among them.'

‘Good. But isn't paying rent capitalism, then?'

‘The old woman depends on renting that house: it's her one resource.'

‘Mm,' said Arthur. ‘I'm sure she's a slum landlord, sweating Turkish immigrants all over Strasbourg. Very well, we agree. I like the Observatoire too. I can bike to work.'

‘I bike too. And it's not much farther than here. Now we have to cook.' Arthur got a potato-peeler pushed in his hand. Arlette said, ‘I should like an eye-level oven. Oh dear, all this is going to be very expensive.'

There was silence. The dinner was good: the salad, made by
Arthur, outstanding, or so she said. They did the washingup.

‘I'll get you a machine.'

‘I don't want a machine; they're a con.'

‘I see,' said Arthur, thinking gloomily that he was destined for a career of washing-up.

‘It's blown clear,' said Arlette watering her plants. ‘We can go for a walk.' Almost as eccentric in Strasbourg as in Los Angeles, but Arthur loved walking, bless him.

He gathered for a spring at this frightful woman.

‘I've something important to discuss. It can become peripatetic later. It's about a job.'

‘I'm not going to give up my hospital work. Yes it is monotonous, repetitive and frequently useless, but I'm not going to potter round the Rue de l'Observatoire polishing floors.'

‘Listen carefully, dearest girl. Apart from a lack of enthusiasm for a wife bustling about in her white overall and her clinical vocabulary, smelling disgustingly of ether, I have an ambition to see you share in my work.'

‘Preposterous. No training or experience. What should I be? – a typist.'

‘Kindly let me speak. I don't want you in the office. I do want you to have your own interests and responsibilities. I have people in the office. With the training, and mentality, and speaking the pitifully illiterate jargon. Now I have huge areas of work that are necessary but bitterly dull. Others I don't approve of a bit, imposed by political pressure. We are subjected of course to lobbying. I am a mammon of iniquity. To gain some slight freedom, for work I consider valuable, I accept roughly seventy per cent of tripe. Par for the course, about. I should like to enlarge my freedom, in fields that interest me. Now suppose – I have not thought this out but that is my present purpose – you were to do freelance work as a kind of advice bureau. Don't frown; hear me out. A small experimental laboratory.'

‘A plaything of yours.'

‘By no means. Let me put the arguments: I've done that much thought.

‘Plaything in no sense. You have your expertise and I have mine. What's a marriage for? Rhetorical question. You're an amateur? I need only say that professionals including me, are narrowed dulled and desiccated by their own professionalism.

‘Expertise? There are very few dogmas worth mentioning. One is that the only way to acquire it is to do experimental field work. I believe you to be unusually well qualified. The other sort is the book sort. We possess a vast library. Most textbooks are in any case out-of-date as soon as written. Virtually all the good stuff comes to my desk.

‘There exist already innumerable advice bureaux? Two sorts; those that are free and those that ain't. Public ones? – social assistants; admirable women, overworked and underpaid. Choked with regulations, ministerial or municipal. Hamstrung by bureaucracy. The defeat-your-own-end syndrome of all governmental instances.

‘Private ones? Have their own axe to grind, alcoholics, battered wives and so forth. Doctors or priests? – all right as far as they go. They give of course valuable and disinterested advice, when they find the time. Like cops, they're all bodies of fine upstanding men, devoted to upholding the Ten Commandments and wondering why it doesn't work. Wrong-footed at the start. All this talk about Justice … They're like the fire brigade, they put out fires. But they've no more time for helping people than they have for catching bicycle thieves.'

It all sounded like Piet talking. Arlette took a cigarette and held her peace.

‘The ones where you pay – anything from psychiatry to tax-dodging. Most founded upon fear, greed and chicanery: squalid. And far too dear. Even when good obscured by cant, humbug and self-interest.

‘I can see difficulties of course. We need patience and some skill. One puts up a board saying Expert? – anyone can, and what does it mean? How to avoid the money snag? I say; the sun's come out – let's go out too.'

They crossed the Rue de Jura and walked along the canal where the barges tie up. Under the Churchill bridge past the Citadel park. Past the
Drakkar
which pretends to be a Viking ship, and sells beer. Past the mother-barge, piled with butane cylinders; surrounded by rusty junk and guarded by numerous dogs. The pleasure-steamers of the Cologne-Dusseldorf Line; ten days on the Rhine with nothing to do but overeat. The Pont d'Anvers and the coal harbour, painterly in the autumn sunshine: the nineteenth-century barracks where you can still, if minded, join the Foreign Legion, and the row of Belgian barges with enchanting names like
Praise God Barebones
. They walked down to the corner where the ship-lock joins the inner and outer harbours, Arthur arguing quietly and Arlette being obstinate.

‘I don't really grasp,' she said, ‘what could one do that isn't – I agree very badly – done already?'

Arthur felt in his pockets, where he collected torn scraps of newspaper, raw material of sociology.

‘These are random samples. Newspapers tell one nothing – the scrabble for perpetual novelty. Assize-court reports …

‘First is an engineer of thirty, highly qualified. He left work one day; said nothing at home. Went on simulating work rhythms, leaving the house at the right time. Spent the day walking about, sitting in cafés, doing crosswords, brooding. After more than a year, think of it, he went home, assassinated his mistress and her daughter, who was not his. He washed and neatly dressed the two bodies; that's quite common. He made then six different suicide attempts. Five days after, he walked into the cop shop, arguably just before they laid hands on him.' Arlette made no comment. Familiar with these things; Piet used to ‘bring them back from the office'.

‘Second is a teacher of thirty-five. Good teacher; model husband of a devoted wife, who was a childhood comrade. Excellent father of three little girls, thirteen, eleven and ten. Happy childhood in comfortable circumstances. Strangled a shopgirl in a perfumery who surprised him robbing the
till. Mystery; he had already robbed the same till twice and knew there was now no money kept in it.'

‘No clue at all?' asked Arlette startled.

‘Oh yes: compulsive gambler. Tried several times to stop; was put on the casino blacklist at his own request. It is, as you know, one of the most tenacious of intoxications.'

‘But these are classics for the shrink. The first is neuropath depressive and the second's like alcoholism; he tries to compensate for a huge hole somewhere in the personality.'

‘Sociopath if you accept the feeble-minded jargon. Quite correct – go on.'

‘The police don't bother with the definitions, but recognize the states. The instructing judge calls for shrinks, who say greatly diminished responsibility but no legal insanity. Assize court ponders it all, pronounces, rather obviously, a suspended sentence, and these poor people are committed to the shrink-shop, where we sincerely hope, etcetera.'

‘Quite so. Some advice and help might have avoided all this, don't you think? Paid advice, quite often. First man was in a good job, and the father of the second in easy circs.'

‘You mean the mistress and the wife were highly devoted but something was missing? Intelligence or education or just strength of character?'

‘They were too closely involved, generally a good reason for not being able to cope. They may have just lacked detachment.'

They had turned the corner and were walking along the Rhine-Marne canal past the ‘Conseil des Quinze' quarter. She did not know what the Council of Fifteen had been; it sounded Venetian and vaguely sinister, but the district is neither. Small bourgeois villas pressed too closely together, with rosebushes and clumps of dahlias in the minute gardens.