A Long Silence (15 page)

Why was it that she clung irritably to living in the little crouched stone house, pottering anxiously around it as though there were still a floor to be polished somewhere but she couldn't remember which?

*

Spring came with its marvellous suddenness, half-way through April. A flood of hot sun swept the snow away overnight except for the north face of the hillside, in the shadowed rocky hollows where only moss flourished. Dead beechleaves were dry and hard as potato crisps, bleaching to grey, and the new buds were as sexy as anything one could hope for. A big drift of snowdrops Arlette had not known existed appeared behind the woodshed; the field where in summers gone they had picked wild strawberries filled with pale wood anemones, and all the garden thrust out clumps of green spears, happily identified as crocus, jonquil, iris and narcissus.

Arlette had been dreaming of the wild strawberries. She was in the field hunting for them. The plants were there, and it was
June, she knew, feeling the hot sun. She was in a cotton frock and a straw hat, bending to search. The leaves of the strawberry plants formed a stiff barrier, prickly and heraldic, hurting her hands when she tried to lift them. There was no fruit at all; she was more angry than disappointed – it was so unfair somehow. And then, with an extraordinary sense of relief she was lying on bare ground, hard and reddish, land she knew lay between La Seyne and Cassis, land from her childhood. She was lying on her back looking up at the plants, large now like vines, the huge leaves throwing dappled shadows – and yes, there were the strawberries, just above her face, thousands and thousands, and as big as peaches. Arlette woke up. The April sunshine had heaved itself over the shoulder of the hill, and lay hot upon her yellow blanket: she was boiling. She jumped up and opened the window wide to look out: the still cool air blew through her nightdress in slow affectionate breaths and her bare arms got gooseflesh. She looked with an intensity only a spring morning in central Europe can bring. In the south the spring is banal. Almond blossom everywhere, and to a child Christmas was only yesterday. In the north the spring comes acid and shuddering as a bite into a green apple. It seemed to Arlette that she was seeing the spring for the first time, with an eye as fresh as a child's.

Outside her window the shiny grey grass of the year before (the new green showing now clearly through) was greyer and shinier with dew. Birds were making a monstrous racket. Because her top half was flooded full of sun the rest of her, from the point where her pelvis pressed against the window-sill, felt chilled. It was Thursday; Ruth was free; they could have breakfast out of doors. If he were here, she thought, he would have been up and roaming about: one would smell bacon being fried and hear the clonk of the cork being pulled from a bottle of white wine. The thought did not hurt her, and she was grateful for feeling so generously warmed.

The postman's yellow
deux-chevaux
, more clattering and unbridled than her prim white one, a vulgar big daffodil to a frail narcissus, arrived while they were sitting lazily having a cigarette, relaxed and heavy.
'Alors mesdames'
with a jolly
leer, ‘
la grasse matinée, ca fait du bieng.'
Yesterday's
Monde
and a postcard from one of the boys in Zagreb, and what on earth could he be doing there? A mail-order catalogue oh how dull, a bank statement from the computer in Melun, a large square envelope with a Dutch stamp. She grimaced, snicked it open, and sat staring dully. Ruth got up and began clearing; the clink of teaspoons roused Arlette to begin giving proper attention to the prickly stiffness of written Dutch. The commissaire of police, embarrassed, poor man: it showed in the contents, as stiff and prickly as the style.

He has promised to write, to keep her informed, but he is sorry to say that the enquiry has not so far given the results hoped for. They have used every diligence, but the affair is very puzzling. Since hahum the deceased was not on active duty the presumption was and remains that of some certainly pathological act of vengeance from the past. This has been most minutely pursued: every file he ever handled has been turned up and the present whereabouts and activities of each and every subject has been verified. Particular attention has been paid to all persons recently released from prison. Everything has been done that could possibly be done using the very considerable resources of filing systems (just ask the computer in Melun), archives, a most comprehensive routine, and large numbers of persons. On the technical side the forensic science laboratory has done wonders: the gun has been identified, but not alas discovered; the car could be identified but is unfortunately a commonplace model. Now as Mevrouw doubtless knows such cases are never classified and every hope exists that in the near future further indices will appear leading to identification and apprehension…

Arlette sat with her eyes shut, turning her head from side to side, trying to wipe away these clinging cobwebs. She knew nothing about crime, and very little about detection, for her husband had never believed in involving her with his work or his worries, but she had heard him often enough remarking ironically upon the official passion for files, archives, and routines. They were indispensable but incomplete; they deadened the imagination and paralysed all unconventional approach.
How often had he not remarked that the interesting things about people didn't get into files.

The clatter of the
deux-chevaux
roused her: postman had forgotten something – ah, he'd had a parcel in the back and had neglected, sorry, to give it to her.
Bonne journée, Madame
.

Pareillement
, said Arlette automatically, reading the last paragraph of her commissaire's letter.

A quantity of personal papers relative to Mr van der Valk's work for the Commission had been forwarded to him by the secretary of the same. He had had these examined for anything which could conceivably advance the enquiry with unfortunately no positive result, and since they were personal things he had taken the liberty of sending them on, with his respectful and profound sympathies he was hers with the utmost reverence.

Arlette opened the parcel, and felt the clutch of a living man who had scribbled in these living notebooks. One of them slipped and fell on the floor: the fall jerked a piece of folded paper loose, and she picked it up and opened it, reading with a smile that grew gradually more sour. It appeared to be the rough draft of a written report made by some deskbound policeman. A conscientious man, he had typed a fine copy, and had certainly eliminated a few rough edges. But – as does happen sometimes – his polished phrases were wasted, because he had forgotten to destroy his rough.

‘I have been over these manuscript books in an effort to discover whether any of the material therein could be in any way conducive towards further light being shed.' (He had spelt the word ‘condusive'.) ‘Some of the official work could be of value, and might be construed with the aid of his secretary, colleagues, etc. I understand however that this has been done. The remainder however amounts to no more than disjointed scribbles in a kind of personal shorthand, containing what appear to be cross-referenced scraps of personal memos regarding conversations held with colleagues, sketches for a variety of highly metaphysical and personal theories,
aide-memoires
concerning library research, and much of an over-subjective and therefore hermetic nature. Most of these notes
are further confused and consequently vitiated by being mingled with what I can only call the raw material of his private life in its more trivial aspects (jokes about the Ministry, puns on his secretary's name and even shopping lists, to give a few examples) and a great deal of this is quite incomprehensible, apart from being of interest to nobody but perhaps a psychiatrist. I knew Van der Valk quite well at one time, and was familiar with this habit of making private footnotes to his work. In justice to him, his written reports were models of concision (consicion?) and legibility but these notes present a state of confusion inextricable, probably, to anyone but himself. It is therefore concluded that unless we are interested in his having needed a haircut on January fourth or the fact that his wife has the deplorable habit of squeezing the toothpaste tube from the top' (this whole phrase had been crossed out as an unjustifiable piece of sarcasm) ‘we are unlikely to find anything herein of relevance to the enquiry afoot.'

Blood had been steadily mounting in Arlette's head. She was not really very cross with this little man, despite a smack of complacency and priggery about him, and she was not cross at all with the Commissaire, who had done his best with his enormous wooden machine, was now paralysed by embarrassment at the fiasco, and had summoned the honesty and the courage to tell her a fact painful to both of them and to him extremely humiliating. But she was furious. Her husband had been so quickly downgraded to a pension, a posthumous medal, a photograph in a black frame of officers-fallen-on-the-field-of-honour. A cipher. The moment he was no longer alive, to these writers of reports he was no longer human. How often had he not said that it was the victim who counted – whereas in all the detective stories, and in all too many murder cases the victim is a mere peg on which to hang a plot, a tiresome, uncomfortable, embarrassing preliminary detail, to be hushed up and tidied away as soon as possible?

Arlette opened a notebook.

‘Dropping a watch on the tramline – how is it possible just mechanically? I would never have believed it – I could have cried. Odd how even a frightful catastrophe can give one a
notion. But I'm not buying one here; too bloody dear. Mem: A. ask boys get a nice classic one in Schweiz Land für mich anniversaire.'

She shut the notebook and started to cry.

*

‘All the same,' asked Ruth, ‘where did that other one come from, that pretty one with the enamelled numerals? It must have been awfully dear.'

‘He told me he'd got it remarkably cheap so I suppose it was second-hand or something, but now you mention it he was very mysterious about it, said it had been a lucky break in something he was puzzling out.'

‘Could that have been do you think …?'

‘I don't know,' said Arlette. ‘But I want to read these notebooks. I'm not inclined to shrug all this off with airy disdain the way those clowns did, just because they couldn't read them.'

She said it frivolously enough, but a resolution was beginning to form, somewhere down inside her. Not to revenge, avenge, whatever they called it. But to strike a blow, somehow, for the victim, so ignominiously diminished and dismissed. There was an explanation to that assassination, and she intended to find it. And she felt convinced that it must be there in the notebooks. For Van der Valk had written, always, everything down. It was his method and always had been. Whatever it was, trivial, irrelevant or confused, he wrote it down, and at night he spent hours brooding over that confusion of scribbles, and surprisingly often a pattern would begin to appear in the blurred and blotted lettering, and things he did not understand at all started to fall into place. ‘Odd how even a frightful catastrophe can give one a notion.' The most flippant, unconnected, illogical remarks – they had a link which he had known. He probably did not know his assassin … but he would have known how to go about finding one.

That evening Arlette took a clean notebook from a suitcase of junk she had packed without looking at it in the little flat, chose one of his ball-point pens, and began to go over the
notebooks, line by line. It would be flattering at this point to say she asked for my advice, but it is typical of her that she didn't. She was going to worry it out, stupidly, individually, honestly, personally. I find this altogether in character. I had never thought about her very much before, I am sorry to say, and this was lazy of me as well as singularly stupid, because I was interested in Piet, with whom I felt sympathy, but on the whole uninterested in her with whom I did not, and I never properly understood Piet because I consistently underestimated the influence she had upon him. This led me, certainly, to a deal of bad writing. I have defended this upon occasion (both to myself in private and to others in conversation) by remarks like ‘Well, in a crime-story, you have to keep the action moving and not get too wound up in the interaction of characters.' And yet I have sometimes made pretty vain claims that I was practically the inventor of crime-stories based on character (a damfool claim as well as vain, because there is never any inventor of anything. All ‘inventions' are made simultaneously by twenty or more people, simply because the time is ripe. A well-known example in the technical field is the invention of television, claimed by the Russians, the Americans, the English and the French, all of them with perfect accuracy.) So that throughout a dozen books I left Arlette as a minor character, shoving her way in when a bit of colour seemed indicated, and in a superficial way: she was a skilful cook and liked music.

I can only excuse myself by saying that this was the way I knew her. We used, when we met, to talk about cooking, a craft I am interested in, and about music, which I love but know nothing about whereas she knew a lot, and this amused me because it is rare for French
femmes d'intérieur
of humble countrified background and unsophisticated upbringing to have any taste for music at all beyond, perhaps, Gilbert Bécaud, who is talented as well as good-looking.

I never troubled to look more closely at the way in which this banal married couple had grown into and developed one another, and yet this is one of the most basic elements in any serious attempt at fiction. We see – to take another well-known and obvious example – that Soames Forsyte is a tragic figure
because there is no contact at all between himself and either of his wives (that infinitely tiresome Irene isn't even any good in bed) but we never get further. What did the damn fool marry them for – what did he see in them? Galsworthy funked the issue, from fastidiousness, convention, and one is bound to say stupidity or incompetence. The relation between Michael Mont and Fleur is equally superficial, and we cannot help concluding that here is a second-rate novelist.