On her tape was a girl, sounding like a fairly frequent kind of girl, wanting an abortion, or thinking she wanted one. Arlette didn’t do anything about the first kind. With the second kind she made an effort, though too often it was the sort of effort judges – junior judges – are legally bound to make in divorce cases; the interview in chambers known as the Attempt at Reconciliation: as a general rule a pretty forlorn effort. Sometimes the girls decided they didn’t want an abortion after all. Not that that was automatically good news either. Arlette felt strongly on the subject, but had learned that the tone of voice known as a good talking-to produced backlash.
She had her apron on when the bell rang. On her doorstep was another girl, at first glance another in the abortion-category, or the run-away-from-home category equally frequent, but at second glance was that girl she had glanced at superficially, judged not very sympathetic: the daughter of the Consul’s Wife – and presumably of the Consul … Sister of that rather ruinous-sounding boy who’d been caught in a heroin fiddle and hammered, and disappeared to Buenos Aires: good luck one rather felt if not good riddance, because what could one do, but say bonjour? Ghislaine was it? – Arlette looked pointedly at her watch, and pointed at her apron while she was at it.
“I don’t work this late you know – I’m a housewife at this time of day.”
“Only a minute – please.”
“A minute …” shrugging. “Look, I’ll give you five; but That is All. Come in then.” She didn’t take her apron off, sat on the edge of her table, picked a cigarette off the table, offered it, lit both, pointed to them meaning ‘that length of time’ and said, “I can’t really add much, to what I told your mother.”
“You didn’t like my mother, did you much? Or me?”
“Even if that were the case, it would be irrelevant. That’s not what brought you.”
“You turned us down. Not that I blame you.”
“But you’re forcing me to repeat myself. What could I do? It’s a police problem.”
“Argentinian police?”
“I take your point. But that, forgive me if I’m being ingenuous, is what consuls are for, no?”
“What consuls are for no, repeat no.”
“Oh, I realize – they get hundreds of these missing-person things and don’t at all like that Rescue the Girl role. But again, this one is in the huh, consular family, surely?”
“Yes in one sense, no in the one that counts. My father won’t – can’t” – hurriedly – “work that way.”
“That’s for him to decide. I don’t follow. If you mean prodigal son attitudes, darken my door no more, I wash my hands of you, then I sympathize with both sides, but I am thoroughly shy of any intervention even where that is possible.”
“I want to ask you please to reconsider.”
“But my dear girl – sorry, don’t want to sound patronizing – what grounds do, I have?”
“None I suppose. I ask – I beg.”
“Look, I’m sensitive to that, but I ask myself seriously what I could possibly do, and find nothing.”
“You hate us. Everybody hates us. I understand more than my mother. She only sees her little clique, on what’s called the right social level. Our kind of people, what. Everybody terribly gushing and sympathetic. In reality they’re all delighted. If you’re on the way up everything is fine. The smallest little crack and they’re eyeing you askance, and ready to put a distance.” Yes; it was much like Xavier talking about ‘the plague victim’.
“My – my brother walked out on it. I thought he was stupid, and I hated him for being so, well, obvious and noisy about it. And now – it sounds so silly, but I want him back. My mother puts on that exaggerated social act, and I could see you hated that. Lot of snobs, you were thinking. She’s – just not able to put it into words. Neither am I, I suppose. One gets frozen up. I’ve been, well, call it in a wider circle. I know how they hate us.” Air of sophistication, at nineteen. Which was touching. And despite the whining, self-pitying voice there would be much that was good, no doubt. And of course that terrible little Foreign Office clique was pathetic, and when a crack appeared in the protective varnish it was painful for them. But what on earth could she do? Xavier was a wet, and this lot was much more wet, and she was tired, and she’d had enough of it all, and in general Oh, Knickers, as Arthur said when exasperated. She stabbed her cigarette out with a notion of wanting, on the whole, to be ruthless about pinching this off.
“I can’t, I’m afraid, see my way to changing my mind.” Stood up. Got a concentrated look of cold hatred.
“You’re obtuse, and you’re no goddamed good to anybody, and I’m just sorry I came.” At the door she turned round again. “I’m sorry I said that.” The look had melted from the desolate eyes.
“I deserve it, often. But do I now? Ask yourself objectively – what in cold reality could I usefully do? Not now: sleep on it, ask yourself then.”
Arlette slept on it and a lot more, restlessly, woke early. Got up, made herself a cup of coffee. Went for a shower, made it hot, very hot, turned it very cold, a frightful James Bond act she had steeled herself to over the years. Good for the morale, the skin, the bloodstream. Take a whack at middle-aged cellulitis. Good for tit into the bargain. She wasn’t too disappointed in hers, at well over fifty: they weren’t that bolstercase known as a Bosom, and they weren’t too sad and flabby either. Not subject to rude jokes by Arthur about Silicone-Seekers.
She buttoned her bra in the swift movement that delights the male pig, at once ridiculous and marvellously skilful, like a clown falling down. Drawing the curtains, she was struck by a phenomenon of light.
Day was dawning in a murky sky of a nasty purplish black. One could not see what mixture of haze, cloud or smog this was, nor how it simultaneously masked, reflected and diffused the sunrise, visible only as a lurid and sinister red spreading from the east. The effect was horrid and frightening, strongly suggestive of apocalypse-imminent. Arlette stood rooted while it got redder and took on fireball incandescence.
Arthur, the pedantic etymologist, would have said that the word ‘ominous’ merely announces an omen. Why does the adjective connote bad and alarming omens? Renouncing superstition she went for more coffee.
“Arthur, get up; coffee’s ready.”
“Muh.”
“Arthur, get up, there’s an extraordinary sky.”
“Meuh.”
Looking again she was thunderstruck. The risen sun was flooding the whole sky with a brilliant colour neither pink nor red, not to be called scarlet.
“Arthur, come quick. Such a gaudy dawn – coral.”
“It sounds,” grumbled the gentleman scratching his pyjama jacket, “like a bad Travis McGee book … Woo,” taken back short.
“What does the shepherd say to that?”
“Such sights,” standing on the balcony reckless of what the neighbour’s wife said or thought, “belong in the lonely immensity of the Pacific, sailing towards the Marquesas, on a schooner” – afterthought – “Gorblimey.”
“What’s it an omen of?”
“That the whole of Bayer Leverkusen has gone up in smoke. That the Russians are coming.”
The first, thought Arlette, was desirable but improbable. The second, perhaps slightly more probable, was somewhat less desirable, and both were on the whole unsatisfactory. Surely it means that something extraordinary is going to happen.
The poetry of the phenomenon lasted only a very few minutes, and by the time she had poured out two cups of coffee, it was again an ordinary autumnal day beginning over Strasbourg in brightish steely-grey tints, neither startling nor objectionable.
Weekend, and market day, and no cleaning woman, nor Spanish lessons, but domestic preoccupations, the weekend supplement to Monde and Arthur hanging about in a dressing-gown reading it instead of washing.
On the tape, more outpourings from the young woman, as yet unaborted, of the day before. Arlette rang up and explained at some length that today was market-day and another day would have to do, besides making no great difference to the problem in hand, which was still within legal limits.
Coming back from the market, she picked up the mail. Printed matter, and a letter asking for advice and help in dealing with an insurance company. Reading this in the kitchen she could see two quick solutions: do nothing, or put a heavy charge of plastic explosive under the insurance company. She left it on her table to think about on Monday. This wasn’t, surely, what was meant by an omen.
Getting on for lunchtime appeared Xavier, in fair repair but his face looking like Joseph’s coat of many colours; apologetic, talkative, much bewildered, full of questions and speculations. She didn’t know any answers; gave him a drink and got rid of him. Seeing him reminded her, not very pleasantly, of that strong and nasty feeling of being watched, of that nastily-loony telephone call. She hoped this had nothing to do with the omen: it was something else that she didn’t want to think about before Monday. The car very badly needed cleaning, tidying, and in general ‘uitmesten’; a good Dutch word meaning literally muck out with the dungfork, highly applicable to car after the holidays, mud-masked without and pigsty within. No use counting on Arthur to do this. Where was Arthur? – she hadn’t seen him for a long time and dinner was ready. She had a small drink, and looked through the printed-matter.
Arthur appeared, dirty, surrounded by a huge unmistakeable halo of virtue, carrying a bag of discarded clothing, tatty maps and sunhats. He had cleaned the car. She made many loud and heartfelt exclamations of gratitude. He was rather short, in dire need of a drink and dinner, in quick time.
Was this the omen? That the husband can be tiresome all week long, but a quiet piece of unselfishness more than makes up for it?
Halfway through dinner the phone rang in characteristic imbecile fashion and Arthur took it, still being nice because usually he refused utterly.
“Davidson … Mrs van der Valk? … Well, I’ll tell you what you can do. She’s not available at the moment, but rebook it in half an hour: she’ll be there then. Yes, this number will do.” Her eyebrows were up very high.
“The operator,” returning to the table with heavy plod. “With a long, involved tale about finding your office phone on record and doing a great deal of detective work before ringing this one. Interminable and tedious.”
“Why can’t they say what they want on the tape? What the hell do they think the recorder’s for?”
“She says, she says, that she has a long-distance person to person call for you. Mustard, please.”
“What can that be? One of the boys, presumably – no; they wouldn’t ring the office phone.”
“California, offering you a movie contract,” closing his mouth upon a large forkful and refusing to say more. Arlette ruminated, but could think of nothing but that it was too early in the day for California. Anyhow, she knew nobody in California. But she could not stop herself getting wound up with suspense. Perhaps this was what the gaudy coral dawn had come to announce.