A Long Silence (14 page)

‘I can't stay in this awful place,' she told the boys. They were strangers now, both in their twenties, though both were still in some vague way students. Both had hotfooted it out of Holland. She did not know what they did, any more than what they thought. They were complete strangers, although she knew instinctively that in another few years she would again know them better. One was in Bologna, something legal, and the other in Besançon, electrical engineering of a particularly incomprehensible nature. They did not have much time to spare.

‘Leave this to us,' they said with authority. Limply, she did, and a day or two after found herself translated, transfigured – transmogrified – in the little house which he had chosen and bought, where she was full of him, surrounded by him, with some tea-chests full of junk, and a coffin.

So there they buried him, in a small awkward little cemetery squeezed up against a sharp slope of hill and surrounded by rusty railings, smelling of dead leaves. And all the other right
things, thought Arlette – metal wreaths and plastic flowers; so economical, so French. A grave lined with spruce branches. Bundles of chrysanthemums, a flower he had always liked the smell and shape of, clumsily and touchingly brought by the boys. A great crown of spring flowers, astonishingly yet characteristically bought, picked and made by Ruth. An immense wreath of flowershop flowers with a Dutch tricolour ribbon, brought soberly and so kindly by two local gendarmes in carefully pressed parade uniforms ‘for a confrère' – hand of the Dutch commissaire of police, but they themselves had taken much trouble too. And her own small, silly ‘thing', a handful of little dark-yellow roses in tight bud, the kind that hardly unfurl at all, which she had wanted, and which she now threw into the grave. The curé with a hand protecting the pages of his missal from the spots of rain that were falling again; the
garde-champêtre
, that French village figure who is also road-mender and grave-digger, standing professionally at ease with his shovel, and the gendarmerie as professionally at attention and the salute. He would have enjoyed them. He had always liked French military ceremonial, and would greatly have liked a bugler to sound ‘Aux Morts' … For a second Arlette was standing as she had often stood as a child on Armistice Day, during the awkward silence before the tatty, ragged – but somehow the more ennobled clash of the Marseillaise. She had fallen, she realized, into a trance. She glanced at the two boys, standing bowed with hands clasped, in the attitude of resigned embarrassment with which boys in their early twenties attend a funeral: they themselves are going to live for ever and it is all rather unreal as well as folklore. Ruth, head well up, eyes shut and lips moving through the multiplication table, was thinking of her mother, at whose grave she and Van der Valk had stood side by side. A gang of village schoolchildren on their way home to dinner, gazing through the railings and whispering. Arlette was holding everybody up.

She threw in the last rose; the curé gave a little cough, the shovel squeaked on pebbles and the gravedigger grunted at the wet soil.

She shook hands with everyone, gave the right tips and watched the Law, all three of it, retiring rapidly towards the café; the two schoolchildren who had served the mass rushing to spoil their dinner with a Milky Way. The curé was saying something and she was answering. Ruth had taken a glove off and pushed a warm, damp adolescent hand into her own cold bare one. She took off her mantilla, which still smelt slightly of incense. She got into the self-drive car the boys had hired, and was driven back to her new home where Ruth had a
daube
of beef, not very nice: she was not a good cook. She ground coffee afterwards and they drank it while the boys talked with exaggerated, emphatic gestures until she asked them what their train times were, whereat they looked relieved, and only slightly ashamed when they became conscious of relief. There was a distribution of Van der Valk's last bottle of brandy, to which Arlette felt an idiotic sentimental attachment but which the boys polished off ruthlessly. Later that afternoon the two women were left alone to their new life. For Ruth had asked to stay. There was a school to which she could go, over half an hour away, which would be grim in winter but if that was what she wanted …

‘So please, Mama, if you could buy me a scooter?' Ruth had never called her anything but her name before.

One of these days the stonemason came to call, anxious to sell them a nice piece of marble or polished granite, and was vexed at Arlette's wanting nothing but a big lump of rough sandstone.

‘A bank where the wild thyme grows.' Ruth had been doing Shakespeare.

‘Doesn't grow here,' said the stone-cutter, loftily.

‘No,' said Arlette, a bit tart. ‘Moss will, though.'

‘And the inscription, Madame?'

The two girls looked at each other. Arlette had not found anything of sufficient simplicity. The best she knew of was the symbol, in music, for a pause, which is on the tomb of the conductor Erich Kleiber. As for epitaphs … the briefest and best is surely the three-word expression of happiness which Stendhal found for himself? ‘Lived, wrote, loved.' Ruth, going
through an exceedingly literary phase, nourishing the desire to be an actress that went with her age, had suggested several flaming lines ranging from
'Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine'
down as far as ‘Our revels now are ended'. Arlette had put a firm stop to these effusions with a faintly evil-minded remark.

‘At that rate one could put “
Vous lui remettrez son uniforme blanc”.'

‘Nothing,' she said now, ‘that is to say the name and the dates. Leave a space below, in case I think of something. And of course,' dryly, ‘space for me.'

‘Will we put “
mort en service command
é”?' asked the stonecutter hopefully.

‘No,' said Arlette.

Really these women had no sense of what was proper.

*

It was many months (time indeed of the Toussaint, the first of November, the day in France for remembering and visiting our dead) before the stonemason felt inclined to change his poor opinion.

Arlette had come to see us; it was then, only, that I heard this story. We said we would come over, to look at the grave and go back with her to her house for dinner.

‘The moss is growing,' she said contentedly.

The quietness in her voice: was it this which sent me to Horace, searching for the poetry that went with this hard-bought calm? Some almost-effaced memory told me that the old poet, better than any other, had known that justice, which we long for, which Van der Valk had spent a life trying to understand, belongs only to God. But that by surrendering ourselves we can put ourselves in harmony, and at peace.

I stumbled clumsily through these, most compressed of all lines, mouthing forgotten Latin, sprawling awkwardly upon the elegant eighteenth-century French of Monsieur Dacier and le Père Sanadon, last read as a raw little boy, in my own eighteenth century.

When I found what I was searching for – one of the presents poetry makes us – I too felt at peace with myself.

Quam se clientum longa negotia
Dijudicata lite relinqueret …

‘I don't in all honesty …' began my wife …

Regulus, a Roman general, went to his death at the hands of the executioner with the serenity, says Horace, of a lawyer who has wound up a tedious business affair, and leaves for a pleasant week-end in his country house.

At finding an epitaph I was a poor substitute for Stendhal but Arlette was pleased, I think, most with the classical (in the antique, Mediterranean sense) simplicity of it.

‘I love it,' she said, ‘and I'll have it done.'

When it had sunk into the stone-cutter's mind – leisurely, as was proper – he too was satisfied.

‘That's something more like.' The phrase might have given pleasure to Horace.

In her country house, having wound up the tedious affairs of her clients, Arlette also had thought of an epitaph. But hadn't felt able to cut it on stone. It had run, she said, and rung and sung through her head all through these months.

The marching song which dates back to the campaigns of the Great Louis, in Holland. Yes:

Auprès de ma blonde.
Qui chante pour les filles
qui n'ont pas de mari-
Ne chante pas pour elle,
elle en a, un joli…

I could see, I said.

‘He is in Holland,' said Arlette, staring at the stone where the moss was beginning.

‘But you have him here.'

No. II ‘
est dans la Hollande: les Hollandais l'ont pris
. They took him.' Well… he was Dutch, after all.

Driving home afterwards, through rain, the car still full of the scent of chrysanthemums, I thought of the girl's words when she is asked, ‘What would you give, to have him back?'

Je donnerai Versailles,
she sings
,
Paris et Saint Denis,
Les tours de Notre Dame-
Le clocher de mon pays …

We know the lines as a ‘nursery rhyme' ourselves. They are in
Rondes et Chansons de la France
on records we bought for our children when they were tiny.

Arlette was right, I suppose, to take the classical line from Horace. But the other, I can't help thinking, would have been as good. Both indeed have the same antique nobility ‘more durable than bronze'.

*

For about six weeks after the funeral the snow lay round Arlette, and this, she thought, was as it should be. She shovelled snow from in front of the house, and the shed where the
deux-chevaux
lived, with the sawn logs, and Ruth's new scooter. She chopped wood for the kitchen range and the big porcelain stove, cursed about this – it is, after all, a man's work – and determined to have central heating for next year. She wished she lived on a tropical island, the way one always does in March in Central Europe, where winter has the tenacity of a marathon runner. She often went to ski: this had been planned with her husband, to make long raids along the spider's-web of woodcutters' paths which enlace every hill in the Vosges. These make good natural
pistes
for Nordic ski, for they were made when the wood was hauled by the timbertug with powerful slow horses, and the slopes are never too steep. But she found she had not the heart to do it alone, and changed the light narrow ski for Alpine ‘planks' and drove the
deux-chevaux
day after day up to the Markstein, to ski there in the sun, on
pistes
as hard and bare as bleached bones, and when the wind went finally round into the west, sticky, like decaying flesh.

Tall blondes in skiclothes, even when they are well over forty, do not find it difficult to attract admirers. Arlette found herself the object of amorous address from a quantity of earnest Germans: even the instructors, notoriously spoilt
where women are concerned, notoriously fussy about their being very youthful and alarmingly nubile, invented pretexts for correcting her style. This was very good for her. After peeling off layers of sun-cream she found herself still a good-looking woman despite lines around the eyes.

She had looked forward to the quiet of winter evenings. Ruth muttering over her maths and her Montaigne, herself embedded in all the books he had collected ‘to read when I'm retired'. But she found her eyes lifting restlessly to the shelves he had himself built, rather badly but with great glee, boasting about having learned to join two bits of wood in the depression time, from his father the carpenter, mending broken kitchen chairs for out-of-work Amsterdammers. She found that the quiet of the snow-filled valley irritated her, and when the Paris planes slid over, unseen above the heavy cloud-cover, she welcomed the sound.

The town, admittedly, was only an hour's drive, and one went often enough, for fresher vegetables and cheaper fruit, to get one's hair done, to get stockings and a new record, to dress up and go in the evening with Ruth to the theatre which tended to bore her, or to concerts which tended to bore Ruth. But she felt distorted, jangled, jarred by voices out of key and a music out of tune: she was upset at even a dearly loved pianist sounding gritty, as though the great black piano appassionato had got left out in a sandstorm.

She missed her hospital work, too; the tottery old men it had been her job to re-educate to walk after an operation, listening to their tedious talk about football and how they were being deliberately and systematically starved by Sister; the women who got so petty, cherishing their varicose veins as though they were jewels; the children with broken limbs, driven into becoming exceedingly tiresome by their itchy plasters; the squalors, the stupidities, the incompetencies and vanities of doctors, nurses, patients and herself: she missed them.

Ski-ing, chopping, shovelling, a great deal of hard work and fresh air had fined her down so much that she suddenly found herself far too thin, produced some alarming female symptoms, and ran anxiously to a gynaecologist with gory fears which
she knew to be ridiculous, and laughed at, but she became unaccountably cross when he laughed at them too.

‘The dam' thing's not prolapsed or something?'

‘Not at all, my dear girl; all your little affairs are offensively healthy and that's just the point: when offensively healthy women of your age suddenly lose their husbands they get their nice delicate little balance into a horrible great turmoil. My goodness,' as she heaved an inelegant nudity off the horrid table, ‘you've got the muscles of a tennis player. I'm prescribing you some nice pills but I'd love you to have a job, really, and since you're trained as a physiotherapist it seems a pity, but let's get you quietened down first, and then you can think it over.' Arlette went home vexed, as though she had been told to get a man, but it was all perfectly true. What was she doing in the country anyway? – pure laziness and selfishness. She would get a job, and a little flat, and then Ruth wouldn't have to plough to and fro on that nasty bike. Everybody's too tactful to say so, but at the rate she was going on there was nothing to look forward to but babysitting.