TWENTY-ONE

     ‘The child,’ said Miss O’Brien soberly, ‘came into the lives of two people, who were advancing into comfortable middle age, and stiffened in their little ways. The movement, the natural turbulence of a child, made for strain.

     ‘Picture Vincent, a man accustomed to quiet and unbroken concentration. A pot, broken by medieval carelessness and vandalism, would not worry him. That people would empty their dustbins for a hundred years on top of a mosaic pavement seemed to him natural. But the breakage of today’s mustard pot threw him into a frenzy.

     ‘Sabine was not perturbed in the same way. She had small interest in housekeeping, and few precise notions of time and place. And she enjoyed playing Mama; this new fascinating game of torn trousers and toothbrushes. It was exciting and demanding: she could fuss about compensations and deprivations. I think myself she had a fine time. That’s not meant to sound spiteful.

     ‘I’m not myself much of a witness to those years. I saw relatively little of her, and she was so wrapped up in the child that she thought of little else. Much of this comes from a friend now dead.’

     ‘François-Xavier Martigues, Poet of Our Region?’

     ‘Yes. Who told you?’

     ‘The notary. Sorry.’

     ‘Dear old man. Responsible though for foolishness. He encouraged them. Thought it just the thing for Sabine; deepen and enrich. He was thinking, you see, of literature.

     ‘I was foolish and tactless myself. I told them I disagreed, in a rigid, opinionated manner. I told them it was blah. Full of good sense and righteousness. I did harm: we had a foolish quarrel.

     ‘It’s that, now, which I have to try to repair. How silly intelligent women can be – myself and Sabine both. If I were foolish enough to try to apportion blame in percentages, like a magistrate, I would judge myself harshly.

     ‘My sympathies were with Vincent. He was in poor health. He’d been imprisoned by Germans, in two wars. Coping with an adolescent boy takes youth and energy, and he had neither. And his character needed care and consolation, to be made much of by women. Try and see him, pottering among his little ethnographic studies, doing good work. Living in hope of making an important discovery, finding a really outstanding archaeological piece. A fine early statue, say.’

     ‘And never finding it.’

     ‘That’s correct. Say that the child became the early statue. Into it went all his hopes. He was terribly proud of it, and continually disappointed.

     ‘Tragic, perhaps, that the child showed much promise. Instead of being a stolid little peasant he was a bright, nervous boy, who did all sorts of bizarre things. And they hung, and doted. I’ve one or two old drawings.’

     She darted over to a corner, pulled out an old portfolio, undid faded ribbons, pulled out a sheet.

     ‘As a witness, it’s passable. Not too bad a drawing, and shows a certain likeness too.’

     Red chalk. Recognisable the half-starved look, hangdog and drowned-rat. Also the fine mouth, the high beautiful forehead. But already the suspicious glare.

     ‘Judas as a teenager?’ he suggested.

     ‘Not bad. He’s the most interesting, isn’t he? Apostles are dull. But the traitor – it’s a truism. A fatal intelligence, and perhaps a passion for politics. Perhaps he decided that Christ was a traitor.

     ‘But poor Sabine saw only sentimentality. Infant Francis of Assisi collecting butterflies. I sketched what I saw. Much good, some bad. Character at war with itself. Much would depend,’ with emphasis, ‘on the hands he fell into.’

     Sabine. And then Janet.

     Don’t let’s have any imaginative reconstructions, thought the cop. As Vera says, pictures which tell little anecdotes aren’t worth much. Stick to realities. Sabine hit on the head. The Rue d’Aboukir. A harsh smell of dust and rags. Shots fired, missing him by precious little.

     It didn’t take much to kill people. A momentary loss of reason. What’s that? Exasperated nerves, a scrap of bad luck, a momentary failure of discipline. Or self-defence. Two cops had fired at the man in the Rue d’Aboukir. They’d hit no one. If they had, everybody would have been pleased. One less to cause trouble and extra work.

     Who had killed Sabine? And had it been in self-defence? Had Sabine committed crimes or felonies ‘against the person’?

     There are only two crimes, against the person.

     Killing. Subdivisions: mutilation, torture, rape, wounding.

     And stealing. Subdivisions: taking as hostage, kidnapping, imprisoning, enslaving.

     Everything else is just a misdemeanour.

     To understand Sabine dead one had to see Sabine alive. Anything else was a police photograph of a corpse, with a touch of glycerine on the eyes to make them shine.

     Sabine as a saint. The police detested saints. Crucifixions were bad enough. Cross-examining disciples even worse.

     ‘What d’you mean he went up in the sky? You on heroin or something? Roll your sleeves up; let’s have a look at your forearms.’

     Sabine as the dim-witted pious female, intoxicated by superstition. That might suit Mum’s book: it was hardly the impression he’d received.

     Sabine as a well-intentioned criminal. Well well, avoid literature.

     ‘I shouldn’t have shown you that,’ said the old dear. ‘This isn’t the Rogues’ Gallery: give it back, please.’

     She thought the boy had killed Sabine. Not that she’d say so. And not that he’d ask!

     A bit literary. A cop disliked that. A bit too much like the Massacre in the Rue Transnonain, Daumier’s too-well-known political and literary picture, slanted and sentimental, of a piece of bad police work.

     One of Vera’s stories. The painter Renoir, sketching the actress Hortense Schneider. The writer Zola looking on, gassing away interminably about social justice. Renoir fed-up.

     ‘This is all very boring. Show us your tits, Schneider.’

     Example, said Castang, of good police work.

     He lit a cigarette and finished his beer.

     ‘We were talking about Vincent,’ he said.

     ‘Vincent… He looked forward to retiring. Had it all planned. No more dust, or smells of municipal cheeseparing. That’s a nice house. Sabine’s fault that it never became properly habitable. He was going to cultivate that lovely great garden. And there’d be a bottle of white wine down the well, to cool, and it would all be the Lake Isle of Innisfree.’

     ‘The what?’

     ‘Oh, literature. Never mind. A poem. Yeats – Irish poet. A poor thing. Nine bean-rows would he have there, and a hive for the honey-bee. You see? – stupid Vincent! And stupid Sabine. A toshy poem, in my opinion, and I go and quote it: that’s the Irish for you!’

     This old girl had seen the false, feeble self-indulgence.

     ‘Left to themselves, you see, they understood art. Sabine was a good poet, Vincent a good archaeologist. But that damn boy there, like a bad imitation Renoir, playing in the garden, chasing butterflies, sunlight on the fair hair and blue eyes.

     ‘Vincent there drinking it in, mapping out in his mind the brilliant career the boy would have, so much better than his own. First prize in Latin composition.

     ‘Bright enough, of course. You’ve understood that by this time. But he didn’t want to be a literary portrait or an archaeological discovery. Unconcentrated, impatient, uncoordinated – and of course, never forget it, basically an abandoned child. Wary and suspicious as all hell. So last in the class, and damn the Latin composition.

     ‘And Vincent would come here, and drink weak tea, and mumble out a lot of tosh about how he’d read Madame Bovary for pleasure at the age of ten, while this horrible boy just read comics.

     ‘I tried to dig him out of it, but no use. Groaning away there about how idle and spineless the boy was. Wasn’t in the least spineless, but once they decided he was going to be, by God he would be.

     ‘I’ve said too much already,’ abruptly. ‘Go on out of it, you,’ shooing a cat. Yes and you too, Mister Inspector. You’ll want your dinner anyhow. Think about it by all means. Don’t go arresting people, though, on the grounds of what I tell you.’

     A dear old woman. Wide awake. Full of homely wisdom. Art, too.