Arthur, coming home for lunch, found lunch ready, which was very agreeable. No sweaty wife panicking about in the kitchen trying to race against time, with a lot of nasty things spilt on the stove top which, against all justice, he would later have to clear up. Arthur’s notion of justice was that hating the dishwasher, a thing that went rumble-belly interminably and was both extravagant and inefficient, he washed the dishes. Women’s view of things is that the dish-washer cleans the stove: men’s view isn’t.
Instead, he found his wife standing stock-still in the middle of the livingroom, which meant she was staring at nothing and thinking. He stopped in the doorway to admire this vision. Female in office skirt and navy-blue jumper. Looking her years but wearing well; good bones and good carriage. Tallish, thinnish; a cinders-blonde with big brown eyes that go green without green eyeshadow. High-bridged Phoenician nose. Looks good sitting down and better still walking. A really good walk is very rare in women. He was pleased by what he saw.
“You forgot to empty the mailbox.”
“So I did. I’ve had quite a busy morning, and I’ve three different sorts of oddball, and my mind wasn’t really on the mailbox.”
“Who are all these people writing to you from Germany?” She frowned: she’d seen that neat small printing in red ballpoint before. Inside the envelope was a half-sheet of paper.
‘It’s silly, you know, shutting your eyes to things and hoping they’ll just go away.’ She showed this to Arthur, who looked blank.
“Means nothing to me. Mildly deranged in the sense that quite a sensible commonplace remark becomes dotty when put in a dotty context.”
“I’ve another, full of vague hints and warnings. Since it means nothing to me either there’s nothing one could do even if I wanted, which I don’t. Piet used to have a good phrase, typically Dutch, about waiting for the cat to come out of the tree. Down to earth, you know. Let’s have dinner: the pot’s in the oven,”
During dinner the telephone rang. This was Arthur’s telephone, but since he refused to answer phones at meals, she got up patiently. Arthur was one of those people anyhow who chew each mouthful thirty times, was indistinct and elliptical at the best of times: even if he did answer nobody would understand what he said. The woman just swallows and says “Yes, this is Mrs Davidson.”
“Ah,” said a man’s voice, cheerful and ingratiating, “you got our letter, then?”
“Who is ‘our’?”
“You’re still pretending, you see.”
“If you’re the anonymous author, I can’t congratulate you. It’s meaningless.”
“Ach, you don’t want it to be made public: that’s understandable. We don’t want to make things difficult for you. We’ll be right around, now you’re at home.”
“Give me your name, please.” A chuckle.
“One doesn’t forget a name that easily. Be with you in a few minutes.”
“You aren’t going to be let in, you know.” But the phone had been put down. Arlette walked heavily back to the table, where Arthur, having taken another mouthful, said nothing. People who insist on believing that you’re staying in the tree and playing cute, while the plain truth is that you haven’t the remotest what they’re talking about, are tiresome.
Outside the livingroom window was another Dutch invention. Known as a ‘spionnetje’ and one saw them on all the old Amsterdam houses. Simply a mirror on a flexible bracket: a rear-viewer from a car will do. All the old biddies had one fixed to the windowframe, so as to see what is happening in the street without getting up from your chair and your knitting. Not only cheaper than closed-circuit television; much more efficient.
When the doorbell went, Arthur strolled over with his hands in his pockets.
“Youngish man, considerably overweight, with a large bushy beard – not a success in the circumstances. Youngish, thin woman, nervous, abrupt movements. Faded middle-aged woman, leather raincoat, knitted woolly hat. This is weird, Further observation discloses grey Mercedes car, rather dirty, looking fairly old. German numberplate, but even with my glasses I can’t read it.” He wasn’t worried about them getting in. Since last year, when an unpleasant person had got in, all the tenants in the house were on the qui-vive.
“Tactical withdrawal to the car, for consultations.” He lost interest and walked away. If Arlette wasn’t worried, and plainly her mind was on other things, he certainly wasn’t.
When Arthur went back to work, which he did on foot, or by bicycle since it was only a question of crossing the boulevard and crossing the university ‘campus’, Arlette heard sounds of altercation, but by the time she reached the window the adversary, it would appear, had been put to flight. His public persona was mild and indeed diffident, but he had an English talent for shockingly direct speech in a loud voice: invective rather than insult. She observed his walk down to the end of the street; rather fast and a bit pigeon-toed; one arm swinging broadly and the other carried still by his side, with the shoulder tucked in as though afflicted by a slight paralysis; every few steps a small, but perceptible, toss of the head. This walk, much imitated by facetious students, bespoke a passage of arms with ‘some jackanapes’. Victory was apparently complete, since while she watched, the grey Mercedes trundled off, turning up towards the town centre. Assembly of loose screws in disarray? – or simply going off to get something to eat?
Mm, she had herself an errand. Rue Ravel. One of the most elegant of the ‘Musicians’ quarter’, which is considered, broadly, the most desirable place in Strasbourg to live. Much of it is in large ponderous blocks of the late nineteenth century, built during the German occupation and of Kaiser-Wilhelm weight and majesty, and absence of any aesthetic sense whatever. There are also large – and small – villas standing in gardens. Wherever a speculator has got his paws on one of these, he has instantly knocked it down and built an apartment-block designed to milk the space to the last square millimetre.
It wasn’t at all far. She could walk, as she often did when feeling ruffled. The weather was afternoon-autumnal, and delicious. What had the silly woman said? ‘The Orangerie end’. Since the Rue Ravel runs parallel to Strasbourg’s prettiest public garden, it wasn’t a helpful direction.
One of the new ones: everything bijou. The wretched fellow called in to ‘landscape the garden’ which is the size of a pint pot, employs the little horrors sold by nurserymen to this end; a dwarf cypress, a dwarf weeping ash, and one of those stunted bushes with gold and silver foliage. The entrance is a corkscrew of crazy paving between shelves of artificial stone inadequately clothed with miniature alpines. There is no room for plaster gnomes; they must live in the house, getting their beards caught in all the burglar alarms.
The interior arrangements show the same inadequacy: there seems no provision for anything but drinking, fornicating, and being-in-the-bathroom; activities catered for with a lavishness amounting to frenzy. There are a very few unreadable books, several hideous daubs purporting to be pictures and many of those ugly things florists insist are flowers.
The furniture, generally a mix of oriental, modern and bogus-Louis, is dwarf-size and gossamer-fragile. The slightest rip or chip in the leather or lacquer and you must throw it all away. The owners do not mind. Whatever their pretended profession, they have a great deal of money. One need not feel sorry for them, nor for the cramped and squalid discomfort of their pastures in Passy or Neuilly: they like it this way.
The woman who let Arlette in was called Madame Estelle Laboisserie. There was also a daughter of late teen age, spotty and supercilious, with neither brains, looks, nor character, named Ghislaine. Mama was thin, with a beige face, and a body like the furniture, of kindling wood swathed in beige suède with gold accessories. On her spindly legs were high boots of glove-leather, coloured violet.
This all sounds, Arlette was later to remark, exceedingly improbable. I swear, she said, it’s all true. I did have such a strong sense of unreality I could hardly concentrate upon what the woman said. And she had one of those voices thought in Passy to be Parisian, that swoops upward upon high at every punctuation mark. Government ministers, those expletive-deleted counter-tenors, adopt this voice in television interviews when taxed therein with peculation.
The one thing real is the story. It comes out very slowly, with a multiplicity of evasions and euphemisms. But this woman is not a plaster dwarf after all. Was once a human being, and produced a baby from between her legs. Has still occasionally remnants of human emotion. Is terribly ashamed of them, but they’re there. It is a shameful story, and pitiful.
Monsieur Hervé Laboisserie is a consul. The French Foreign Service, still known as the Quai d’Orsay, exactly the way M. de Norpois spoke of Saint-James’s and the Ballplatz, is as snobbish as it is useless, and despises consuls terribly.
‘Le service consulaire
C’est une belle carrière,
Je ne dis pas le contraire:
Mais, moi, je suis Ministre.’
Monsieur, and Madame, suffered terribly from this. However, he had grown to become a very grand consul. In one of those extremely large oriental cities thought to be strategic and important. Singapore, or Shanghai? Or perhaps Hong Kong? Well, I’m sorry, but they’re somehow all Hong Kong to me. Anyway the mixture of climate, airconditioning, and natives, doesn’t suit Madame’s health, and the children are a great bother, and anyway they’ve got to be sent back to Paris because you can only get educated at the Collège Stanislas or the Lycée Louis le Grand, I don’t recall which. Yes, there’s a boy as well, year or two older than the girl, his name is Gilles. Of course I’ve got it all down exactly, but my notes are in the office.
The boy produces, as was very much to be expected, a fairly massive revolution against both Shanghai and Victor Hugo, and goes native in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince or thereabouts. Works selling life insurance, throws that up because of its extreme dishonesty, acquires a girlfriend called Caroline and traffics in heroin. He is caught in possession of a ludicrous quantity, sixteen grammes or something. To him, this simply represents a sum of x francs upon which he can live for x months. He gets clapped in the Santé for x months instead: x plus y, probably. She, Caroline that is, is heaved into the Petite Roquette or whatever the modern version is. This breaks the boy up utterly because she kills herself there, the poor silly wretch. End of story.
“How, end of story?” asked Arthur.
“The father doesn’t want to know. A consular career is quite difficult enough without children, and of course he does worse things daily than ever the boy did. The mother is blackened totally by the shame of it all, it seems the old aunts in Passy made some very disapproving sounds, and has retired to this dusty provincial corner where she has relatives of sorts until she can live it down.”
“What are you supposed to do?”
“Find the boy: he did a bunk the moment he was released.”
“Is it known where he bunked to?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Then it’s a cop problem and not a widow problem, no?”
“That’s what I thought, until I got told it was Buenos Aires.”
“You can’t go there!”
“No,” said Arlette. “No, I suppose not. I’ve in any case at the present moment a great deal too much to think about.”
Very close by the Rue Ravel lived a friend of hers, an advocate called Paul Friedmann. She possessed after a year’s practice a few handy contacts, lawyers and doctors, and so forth, spoken of vaguely as ‘tame’. Paul was anything but tame, but as well as being close by was bright. He wasn’t at home, reportedly was not pleading at the Palace of Justice, was, reportedly, in his office in the Rue de Verdun, and there with difficulty was routed out.
“Come on round,” he said on the phone.
“I’m on foot.”
“I’ll drive you home.”
From this exchange Arlette concluded that Maître Friedmann would welcome a pretext for putting an end to a boring day. It was pleasant to see her: she found it pleasant to see him. It was nice having a sprightly chat: likewise. He was plainly making lots of money, which showed in the furniture – nothing like that she had been looking at – and was indeed boringly lecturing at some length about Chippendale pattern-books, and being learned about mahogany. But he wasn’t very helpful about Madame Bartholdi. Ready enough to have her as a client, but couldn’t see what it all had to do with actions-at-law.
“You were nodding a bit there, weren’t you? Any criminal action is extinguished. Remains a civil action, consisting of efforts to put a price upon a boy’s life. Not up my street, not, if I’ve understood, up hers, and in the circumstances a weary row to hoe. She feels like pulling all this fellow’s teeth out one by one and we can sympathize in that laudable aim, but court-wise it’s a Pyrrhic victory and largely symbolic damages. Think about it some more. I’m strongly averse to litigation.”
She avoided the subject of Argentina: not a place, she thought, likely to interest Paul Friedmann much. She said nothing either about peculiar Germans outside the door. They were there again, hovering at no great distance when Paul dropped her and said no, he wouldn’t come in for a drink but love to Arthur. They made no attempt to accost her. She felt obscurely grateful for his unwitting protection.
This though was absurd. These Germans weren’t a threat. She should go perhaps and have it out with them.
There was nothing on her phone tape, but while she was checking it the phone rang in the livingroom.
“Brigitte Buckenburg here from Graphik.” She’d forgotten about this but wouldn’t you know it … The combination of Ther Press, and the type of German womanhood that would work for this kind of press …
“Yes, well, my German isn’t too brilliant. I got your proposal. Very kind of you and thanks, but no, thanks. I mean, I don’t much want to be interviewed.”
“Really – why?”
“Now ja – I don’t feel obliged to give reasons, you know.”
“But do, though.”
“Let’s say that I see no need for it.”
“But of course there is need for it. Very valuable for you. And most interesting to us, and our readership.”
“Doubtless: I’ve simply decided against it.”
“Oh, I seeee,” knowingly. “I don’t believe you really mean that. I’m sure you’ll change your mind.”
“Better not count on that. And good day,” ringing off firmly. Let those people once get their teeth into you! … And the tone had been patronizing, as of ‘Oh yes, the old hard-to-get act; we’re used to that’. Why could people never accept simple truths?
And those people outside … but that must be sheer coincidence. Graphik probably was capable of anything, but wouldn’t use so roundabout an approach, and people seeming unbalanced: that was not their style. The dog started making a noise, keys clattered in the hallway; that was Arthur.
“I was just thinking of taking the dog out, and seeing once and for all what these stupid people want.”
“Wait a moment,” said Arthur. “It’s not going to be quite so easy. When I went out this afternoon they started bawling after me.”
“Yes, I heard that, and I’m not putting up with it.”
“It was all about Jacky Karstens. So I stopped, and said I knew all about him, and wasn’t in the least interested. They kept on yelling about the SS, so I got a bit cross and told them to shove off, sharpish, and went upon my way.”
“I’ll have them cleared off by the police. Let me handle this.”
“When I came back just now, they started waving in a pally way and shouting Hallo, Karstens, hallo, old chap.” This was a little ambiguous since he was going hallo-old-chap at Dog, but she got it disentangled.
“Oh dear,” she said. But at least the cat, in the tree, had shown what colour it was.