He hadn’t come barging into the house. He had waited lord knew how many hours outside being unobtrusive. Days for all she knew.
‘Esther.’ It had been hardly over a whisper. But at least the Desmet episode had broken her out of the rigid shell. She didn’t have to play the blushing housewife. She could look at him naturally, speak to him unselfconsciously, have a human normal contact without freezing, or opening and shutting her mouth like a gaffed fish.
‘You shouldn’t have come here, you know.’
‘I know. But I had to. You know?’
‘Yes. But not here. I’ll meet you. Wait – in an hour. No – tonight. Nine tonight.’ Harry had a duty, a guard or a fire picket or something.
‘I was very amenable,’ remarked Laforêt with his tissue-paper smile. ‘A well-brought-up little boy, and a malleable, suggestible man.’
He went on speaking in the same slow careful voice; he seemed to have forgotten Desmet standing just the other side of the little bar, immobile and menacing, sipping whisky with an ugly detachment.
‘Where did you meet her?’ interjected Van der Valk, colourless.
‘The railway station buffet – there’s nothing more classic than that, is there? An emotional scene would not be noticed.’ But there had been no emotional scene. Esther had flinched, once, but she would not flinch again.
She spoke bleakly; when she spoke of herself she spoke harshly. But her voice was gentle.
‘I have tried to make something. I wanted to make a human being happy. I suppose it will fail, but I will have tried. It must seem very laughable and somehow pathetic, what I tried. You haven’t seen my home, and you’re not going to. Well, it’s just a rotten little council flat. You haven’t seen my husband, and you’re not going to, because if anybody tries to involve him in my dirty stories I’d kill him. I mean kill him, as I would a cockroach, with no more feelings about it. He’s just a quiet working man. Nobody thinks much of him. He doesn’t think much of himself. But he’s worth the lot of us put together. I don’t love him, but I’d go to prison for him, and if need be I’d die for him. You don’t understand that, because once I went to prison for you, and would have died for you, and you thought that quite all right, because I loved you.
‘It won’t even surprise you to hear I still love you. You’ll take that as quite evident and normal. That’s how it should be. Faithful Esther, through all these years, I’m her man.
‘So I’m going to ask you to go away. Just for once to consider yourself something unimportant. Are you able to do that? I’m not going to see you again, and I won’t run away with you, or sleep with you in secret, or anything, much as I’d like to. I’ve looked after your daughter, and I’m trying to let her grow up in a way you’d be proud of, but I’m not letting you see her either. Even though with you I could have been very happy.
‘You see, you go around with this certainty that everyone looks at you. That you are under a curse, just because of a moment when your nerve failed. It’s just egoism, can you see? One isn’t important enough. You keep on creeping around thinking you are being humble, and you’re just exalting yourself. You’ve blamed yourself all these years for not being like Hervouet. You remember Hervouet?’
Of course he did. Nobody had forgotten the young tank captain, with the pale, fragile-seeming student’s face, who had fought the battle with both arms in plaster casts, who had come through to the last day, only to die on the march to the Viet camps.
‘Romantic,’ and the word in Esther’s mouth was a distillation of derisory bitterness. ‘You are asked to be like Guérin, who lost both legs and shot himself rather than risk the lives of the men he knew would come for him. Understand that of all things the last I ask you to do is to shoot yourself. That would be just one more crowning egoism. Just remember instead what Langlais said – yes, I know, you don’t care to be reminded of him. Somebody complained of being tired.
‘ “Tired?” he said. “And us? You weren’t asked for your advice, but to come and have your face broken with us.”
‘Remember all the boys who got up from their hospital beds. The boy with one eye and his face in pieces. Fox, Le Page, Guy de la Malène. You think that because you once broke the solidarity and they threw you out you are forever in exile, forever in darkness – and you’ve loved it. Now rejoin.’
He had stared at her stupidly, mechanically stirring the spoon in half a cup of cold railway station coffee, thick and syrupy in the thick white railway station china.
‘I want to ask you another thing,’ went on Esther, inexorable. ‘You’ve got a pretty good job there, haven’t you?’
‘Not bad – not that good,’ hastily.
‘No, but comfortable,’ and there was irony in the word ‘comfortable’. ‘A soft easy job, undemanding. And you can show off to people. And you don’t have to rub yourself against the ruck of common stupid folk. A select classy lot.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ but she brushed his words aside.
‘Jammy. Those little planes, and that windswept airfield stuff. You’ve learned to pilot and all, and you teach them to jump.’
‘I had to take what I could. I’d no training, no skills – I knew nothing else.’ Esther picked up her handbag and stood up.
‘Leave it,’ she said softly. ‘Go far away. Not for me or because of me. That man is a bad man. A vicious man. I do not know why. But I know that he is only waiting for an opportunity to blackmail you. Just as he is only waiting for a chance to blackmail me. But he knows that I will not yield to that. Though I yield to everything else. Goodbye.’ She had walked straight away from him.
‘Esther,’ he had called, jumping up from the bewilderment of her finality. But she was already gone, and he dared not make a scandal. He had reason to know that Esther was not to be trifled with.
His peace was gone and he fidgeted about unhappily, trying to think it out. It was too bad, really. Say what she liked, he had a job in which he could respect himself. And in the three years he had had it he was a new man. What had he ever done before? A pack of rubbishy salesman jobs in Brussels, till he had had the luck to meet Conny one day, and over a drink Conny had said ‘By God this is a stroke of luck’ with a conviction not only fervent but genuine.
Conny had found the wilderness of fields and tumbledown farm buildings. He had his first plane, and a tiny bit of money. He was giving all he had to persuade the bank to back him up, and a few business men to give him a loan. And he had worked; how he had worked. But he had to be constantly away, nourishing and watering the ‘tap roots’ as he called them, and he knew no one whom he could trust or who would work at the day-to-day unglamorous task of turning the depressing mudheap down in Limburg into an aeroclub. Laforêt was his man.
A bad man? He had known Conny’s reputation as a barrack-room lawyer. A fiddler, shifty, dishonest; servile and insolent in turn. But a good sergeant, whom his men liked, and who could get the best out of them. A driver. And that had been in the army, and Conny was not a soldier, it was plain to see. He was a businessman, and he didn’t want to become sergeant-major – he wanted to become rich, to be respected, to carry weight. To forget all the little mean tricks and extortions to which he had been forced to resort in his frenzy to climb out of the ruck of anonymity.
Laforêt himself got on with Conny. They both knew that in the past of the other were some not very brilliant episodes. And they disregarded it. It was as though each was determined to show the other the best that was in him. And together they had worked. It had grown to be a genuine powerful bond between them, the work that they did together. They had built the aeroclub literally brick by brick, themselves, just the two of them. Laforêt had spent weeks on end isolated in that dump, day and night, guarding the little heaps of pathetic equipment as though it were Fort Knox. And Desmet had been away nearly every day, but nearly every evening he had returned, bearing loot. A few bags of cement in the old Mercedes (they still used it to tow gliders), a mysterious wheezing junkheap lorry he had picked up for two sous and which had been cajoled and bullied into carrying sand. For concrete was what they needed before anything, since for nine months in the year the place was a bog, and neither car nor plane could manoeuvre in the clinging mud.
Desmet used to bring supplies of anything he could pick up – a bag of potatoes or a box of oatmeal had sometimes been the only food they had. Sometimes sausage, crates of beer, great lumps of smoked meat. No matter how hard his day had been Conny would carefully wash a shirt, press a suit, polish his shoes – ready for next day. And then get his overalls on and lumber about like a bull. He was tremendously strong, and it was good to see him sweating and bawling, thundering across wobbly planks with the wheelbarrow full of liquid concrete.
He remembered the triumph with which Conny had brought home the puttering one-horse cement mixer, the friendly architect who had drawn plans for them (he was now one of their best customers), the plumber who had advised about drainage, old Pete the mechanic who was fed up with his bankrupt Antwerp garage – he was no businessman. Old Pete wouldn’t shovel sand, but he could and did make the plane and the precious auto go, and he ate what they did, slept where they did – he was one of the team. But he, Laforêt, he had built this place, he and Conny.
And Conny was never discouraged, never failed in his confidence, his tough gaiety, his songs and laughter, even when things had gone badly, these long evenings of the first summer when the bank withdrew support and it all seemed doomed. On Sundays he would put on his good suit and walk around like the big businessman come to see how his investment is getting on, to impress the Sunday drivers, the tourists who stopped out of curiosity and asked what was going on. He would take the plane up, just simple circuits over the field. ‘To believe that this will be a real aeroclub they’ve got to see a plane flying,’ he used to say. ‘Otherwise to them it’s just another cattleshed.’ He had taught Laforêt to fly, those summer Sundays, had brought back parachutes and harnesses fiddled heaven knew where, and they had made whitewashed circles for a jump target out by the road to give a free exhibition the moment more than half a dozen cars had parked there of a Sunday afternoon.
He couldn’t let Conny down.
For they had won, in the end. Conny had bought the Chevrolet (it too now towed planes and gliders) before he had got the Dodge. And before he had the Dodge he had come back with the Fiat, which was a demonstration model from a big agency, as good as new. Italian racing red, the twin carburettor high-performance model, throwing the keys to Laforêt and saying, ‘This one’s yours, cocker. You’ve been stuck here damn near two winters, as good as never going out. Now’s the moment to take off for a week. Go to Brussels and live it up a bit.’
From that day they hadn’t looked back. There had been money in the bank. People had started coming, for lessons, flips. Conny had gone on, never looking back, never sitting still, never contented with himself. Charters, gliders, the gymnasium where the enterprising could learn jumps on the static line.
The flat too had been Conny’s idea. He still slept in a cupboard affair behind the bar, along with the fuseboxes and the fire extinguisher, but he had insisted that Laforêt should have proper living quarters.
‘And this is not just to impress customers. This is needed for you. Hell, for every night I’m here there’s one I can sleep in hotels, have a proper bath, go into the restaurant and pick up a menu. You have to have something to give you self-respect.’ And the flat had been built, with its kitchen and bathroom, and the cleaning woman had been found. Laforêt drove most mornings into Hasselt to pick her up; by then she would have done the marketing, and would bring food, fresh vegetables and fruit. A wine merchant from Liège came out and stocked the bar. Conny knew how to get licences and permissions – never once were they held up with administrative paperwork. And now there was even a girl receptionist to keep accounts and plan schedules. Daisy thought she ran the whole place singlehanded … Conny’s doing again. He knew how to manage women!
One could not let Conny down. He was puzzled, worried, and bit his nails more than he had in ten years.