Arlette Sauve was born of petit-bourgeois parents fifty years ago in the South of France. Her father was an antiquarian bookseller in a lazy way, with a mild interest in Mediterranean languages. They lived in a flat over the shop. Out near Cassis they had a small cottage, extremely primitive, with a few fruit trees and a patch of fairly mediocre vines. The shop, which had disappeared long ago, had never made any money, but her elder brother still had the cottage. It was now rather grand: she preferred her childhood memories.
She was tall, blonde, and considered plain. Not tall by Dutch standards; in Holland her looks had been thought striking, while she stayed That French Cow. Some accident of ancestry had given her the Phoenician looks: bony high-bridged nose, large brilliant eyes that were brown in light and a sickly green in shade, a fine upright carriage and a splendid walk. The hair was the fairness called ‘cendré’: now that it was as much grey as blonde, ashes was the word. It was poker-straight and tiresomely fine. No hairdresser had ever been able to do anything with it. Let it hang, it hung like a corpse. Pin it up, where it looked sculptural, it fell instantly down again. For some years she’d had most of it cut off. Gamine with a fringe; never really a success either.
Toulon in the thirties was very dull, all anticlerical civilians and clerical naval officers. In the forties, still dull, despite or because of the war. One was Darlaniste or Pétainiste, Gaullist or Giraudiste, they were all right-thinking and very noisy and boring about it. The French, the Germans and the Americans, roughly in that order, were destructive. One was both Catholic and Communist, not always at the same time. The noise rose to a paroxysm and finally everyone was Gaullist. When the novelty of this wore off, the poor went back to being Communist and the bourgeois were still Catholic. The port filled up again with other people’s cast-off warships.
There had been several Arlettes. They hadn’t really melted into one another except at the edges. There were still several, superimposed as it were. Kept well under control as a rule. Now and then one of the old ones would pop its head out, and squeak.
But the sum was greater than the component parts: too bad about logic.
There had been the goody schoolgirl, terribly well brought up and top of the catechism class, blouse always clean, toys always tidied.
And a big revolution from all that as a student; the anarchist stage and not washing much; which hadn’t lasted long, mercifully. One didn’t blush about it; pretty normal. One did blush, and had regrets lasting up to this day, at being atrocious towards one’s parents.
Once that nasty student began again to wash it remained fanatic, and obstinately virgin till marriage: well almost, until the deplorable evening when Piet, in the interests of experimental science, filled it to the brim with Pernod, and was extremely gallant about the consequences (she’d eaten lots of lobster, and between that, the virginity and the Pernod, been sicker than a dog all night). But how quietly, how kindly, Piet had brought – and emptied – buckets, been good with towels wrung out in cold water, eau de cologne, handling angry tears and harsh words. Nobody had forced her to drink pastis or take her clothes off. And had there ever been such a fuss about doing so?
Arlette, Catholic in her schooldays, went Communist at the university, attracted the odium of the right-thinking and went to Paris, where she even more unsuitably made the acquaintance of a Dutch policeman, married him, worse still, and worst of all made a success of it. Piet Van der Valk, too intelligent to be a good policeman and with too much character to be a successful one, did make a good husband.
For more than twenty years they lived together, fighting furiously and on the whole happy. Most of that time in Amsterdam. Piet got shot by a neurotic and spoiled Belgian woman Arlette took a great dislike to. It smashed him up enough that he limped, and was put out to pasture in a provincial town, getting promoted in return for being demoted. He managed to draw attention to himself in spectacular fashion once or twice, and finally to everyone’s surprise was promoted again and given a bureaucratic job in the Hague, obscurely concerned with reforming criminal law. Just as one could have a quiet existence at last he got curious again. And shot again, this time for good: he died there on the street. Stendhal, a writer she admired, did the same, after saying there was no disgrace in dying on the street: one must not, though, do it on purpose.
She had borne him two children, both boys. They had been a turbulent handful. Both students by this time, out of the house and nearly off her hands. They had a younger adopted daughter, called Ruth.
As the years had gone on Arlette had become steadily less French, without ever any temptation towards becoming Dutch. Piet Van der Valk had become a great deal less Dutch, while loathing the French or so he said. They both kept very strong – well, call it regional characteristics. Both behaved in a very xenophobic way when at all vexed.
Piet, while still well under fifty, found his bad leg a bore. And the less said about ninety-nine per cent of police work the better. He had always a fear of finding himself retired prematurely, on political grounds probably while using the medical pretext. He was anxious himself to retire prematurely: it seemed to him that he was still at his best. The cottage had been borne of this. As a child he’d never been in the country. He came out of a poor district in Amsterdam; his father had repaired furniture there. Arlette’s childhood cottage had great importance in her personal folklore.
They’d both had windfalls of money; nothing much, not enough for anything grand. There had been a great deal of quarrelling about where the cottage should be. She didn’t want to be anywhere in the south, a point easily enough won, Piet being a disliker of sweaty climates. But she did want to be by the sea. He was infuriating about this. As though one ever saw any sea in Amsterdam. What was this Dutch passion for hills and forests? A silly, romantic side he had. Aquitaine? No, far too hot and full of ghastly Dutch as well as English: it would be a ghetto. Touraine then? Arlette liked the Loire country: so did he. It was alarmingly expensive – Holland then was very cheap in comparison to France and he would only have his pension. But it went on tempting until the dreadful day he discovered that Maigret had retired to the banks of the Loire. If there was one thing he hated it was jokes about Maigret. An utterly frivolous pretext, she said extremely cross.
He’d always had a soft spot for Alsace; been there once and fallen in love with it, silly emotional thing to do. He liked it being neither French nor German, he loved the ‘blue line of the Vosges’. He liked the local white wine, a lot too much she said. She wasn’t keen. Frontier people are savages, she said with Mediterranean snobbery. Wotan Mit Uns. They talk a vile and incomprehensible patois and I’m sure they all sleep with their mothers. Collaborators to a man. And so on at some length.
He’d overborne her. And she had to admit she’d been very taken with the little house. A bit too primitive for now. Blow all this pump lark he said, putting in sanitation and spending their last penny. Two happy summer holidays they’d spent there together, and a marvellous snowy Christmas. He began to build furniture, and talk with zest about retiring.
He was buried there now, the nearest thing there was to being home. Arlette stayed on there, buried with him. What’s a widow more or less, in a village?
But it’s no place for an adolescent girl, and Ruth was growing up, and the country schools more and more insufficient. Ruth saved her. She thought of living in Strasbourg with no very great joy. But the schools and the university are among the best there are.
They found a little three-room flat: Arlette was experienced with flats, and it was cheap, warm, and easy to keep clean. In the Krutenau, between the centre and the university. Handy for everything, and for the Hospices Civiles, the huge central hospital that has grown from medieval Hotel-Dieu origins to a formidable patchwork of every succeeding century. She worked for, and got a physiotherapy diploma. This, with her pension, earned her a reasonable, even a comfortable living.
About Strasbourg she had mixed feelings. It is much better than a provincial city: even as a regional capital it has unusual riches and resonance. The Roman frontier post of Argentoratum, the town by the silver river, became the Town of the Streets, the Crossroads City attracting all that was best in both France and Germany, a byword for seven centuries for intellectual brilliance and religious tolerance. The cathedral is the happiest blend of early and late Gothic, the Renaissance and eighteenth-century buildings beautifully proportioned. The opera is good, the Philharmonic outstanding, and Arlette had always been a devoted concert-goer.
It has acquired too much suburb, and is far too big now, but the old town, long girdled in its fortifications, has not changed as much as one would fear. The new town, built by the Germans after 1870, is notable for the best town-planning and the ugliest architecture to be seen anywhere. Strasbourg lives in a happy dichotomy of the extremely beautiful and the absolutely hideous. The people have the same two extremes of character.
Contrary to carefully fostered legend one eats badly. Too much tough fresh pork and greasy sausage, and too little of anything else. Enough to convert one to orthodox Judaism, said Arlette snappishly.
Ruth grew up, became a student, went through awful stages. At times insupportable. She lived in a studio now, and probably in sin and squalor too. She had become herself; it was normal, inevitable. They no longer saw very much of one another.
Life began to get very boring for the widow.