Criminal Conversation (15 page)

Casimir was waiting for me on the landing. He was a tall scraggy thing, very round-shouldered, wearing as always a baggy hairy tweed suit of old-fashioned cut, with flappy trousers and padded shoulders to make him more impressive, which it didn't. He had had red hair, now gone grey. His big head and big anxious wrinkled forehead gave him a superficially impressive look. He had horn-rimmed glasses pushed down on his nose, his eternal cigarette half between his flabby lips and half between his disgusting teeth: I would have been
ready to hate him on account of his breath alone. If he had been put out in the sun and wind of Provence, well dried out, disinfected and browned, he would have been less revolting. He had a moist pasty look, and his scurfy scalp above that skull of a face was really degrading. Can you accept that a young girl could find that attractive?

I am told that he was a good painter in his day, and had even produced memorable work and been world-famous in the twenties. But he had outlived his talents and lived, I am told, through the years following the war on a steadily declining reputation, though his name still sufficed to find a market for his work. No, my authority for all this is not, as you might think, my dear wife. Apart from the fact that I have scant regard for her much-vaunted artistic judgement, I know that she strongly disliked Casimir, and that the feeling was returned. She once, it seems, made a cutting remark about some work of his in his hearing… No, I know a surgeon with whom I play squash, who collects modern paintings, and even has some pictures done by Casimir around 1930 that he says have real worth. He had been a prodigious worker once and was still – here my authority is someone that knew him closely – capable of bouts of astonishing activity between the weeks of nothing but gin.

Certainly his name, even before I began enquiring about him, meant something even to me, but there is nothing dimmer than a figure that had a great success in the twenties. One thinks, ‘Good heavens, is he still alive?'

The flat smelt even worse than the stairs, though very likely an ordinary person would have noticed nothing. It was only untidy in places, and seemed on the whole to be kept clean. I listened to his mumbling voice, had the patches of damp on his ceiling pointed out, and agreed to get the roof repaired with no more ado.

I think that I meant to kill him even then.

I thought about that flat in the days following. Would it not have been a better – and more suitable – place for me to have chosen to live in than this pork-pie of a house, stuffed with expensive trappings of thick carpets, rich curtains, fur-coated wife (I nearly said fur-coated tongue, for that is the taste this house gives me)? Was it not an evil chance that I should have become a doctor, forced to keep up an elaborate front, and not a painter, who can keep up a front or not exactly as he pleases? Naked women are as much a salient feature of his life as they are of a doctor's – nobody would have fastened spitefully upon my perfectly harmless activities. There is no Medical Association with a censorious eye upon what a painter does or says. He is even expected to behave in a peculiar way, and if he should happen to be detected in some scabrous activity there will be a rush of sympathisers – there has been, no doubt, a reaction in favour of Cabestan, now that he is dead – all blithely declaring that not only is lechery quite normal to an ‘artist' but it is even an integral part of him, necessary to him. I have heard Beatrix on this subject. Broadminded, tolerant as she would never be to those she regards as ‘her class of people', prating that lechery is a fertiliser, in which the flowers of art reach their splendour. ‘Art is a flower,' she pontificates. ‘You don't grow flowers in a marble-quarry.' Bitch…

Am I not an artist too? Why not? Why should there be a barrier in the minds of the ignorant between science and arts? Life is organic, a whole. It is these barriers, this splitting and sealing-off,
that stunts, stultifies, desiccates the cheese-nibblers like my wife and her precious friends.

Aha, you will say upon reading this paragraph. Jealous… Yes, jealous. I killed that wretched Casimir out of personal, professional – animal – jealous hatred. That bastard stole my life. When he blackmailed me, it was to me a thin shadow of formal excuse or pretext. For the blackmail itself I cared not a rap. Bella has a husband well able to look after her.

I got so heated that I stood up and walked about. Then I went and had a look at myself in the bathroom looking-glass. (Bella says she has never seen herself better-looking than there.) I do not look at myself for your benefit, my dear van der Valk. I am aware that your trained eye has absorbed every detail of my appearance and manner that could appear indicative. I do the same. Like me, you accustom yourself to using meetings, conversations, examinations, as tools in your trade. We have, as you have remarked jokingly on two or three occasions, a great deal in common… You form impressions of people. Is so-and-so likely to be a criminal? No, that is not fair to you. Capable of being criminal? I would say, and for all I know you would agree with me, that everybody is. Regardless of who or what he may be.

No, I went to look in the glass above the washstand to look at the man as you see him. I wish to see what you see. I am not even familiar with my own appearance, for I have no personal vanity and except as attributes to love I dislike looking-glasses. I shave with my jaw reflected in the tiny mirror let into the inside of the box my razor lives in. I comb my hair, which is short and straight, without needing any reference to my reflection. I know that it is clean, tidy and healthy; what further interest have I? At the barber's, I keep my eyes resolutely shut; I find it a good place to rest and it discourages their infernal tattle. In my apartments, I have no looking-glasses; I pay large amounts of money to tailors to see that my suits fit me. The
only glass there is in any room I frequent is the one above the washstand, in the bathroom between the examination- and consulting-rooms.

It is one of the most important places in the house! How many women who arrived in my house combed and collected, impeccably painted, sometimes cold and haughty to cover their fear, have later seen themselves dishevelled in that glass. It excited and fascinated you from the start, I noticed. You need no guiding hand through that labyrinth at least. One of the first things you did, I'll be bound, was to make a little sketch-map of the way the house is arranged. Old Munck had, of course, this consulting-room, and his examination-room at the back as it is now, the discreetly curtained windows of the former verandah looking out on the chestnut-tree in the garden. But Munck had his secretary in the ‘bathroom', and his waiting-room was the one opening off the hall. It was my idea to put my secretary upstairs, and have a second waiting-room there. It greatly annoyed Beatrix, but it was quite natural and not in the least sinister. A neurologist is always half psychiatrist, and my patients do not care to meet each other or to be seen by anyone but myself and Miss Maas – and not always by her; by no means always! She leaves at four-thirty, and her day is taken up with the telephone and the appointments book, the records and the accounts. My most solid witness! She has been with me since I began in practice, and has never seen anything not of the most perfect propriety. Nor, I may add, would she believe it if she did. She has known patients to behave in the oddest ways and nothing surprises her. You will have decided, regretfully, that Miss Maas will be of little use to you.

But we were talking about the bathroom. I admit that it is vulgar; there are heavy rubber tiles that have a pleasantly soft, matt feel under bare feet; the washstand and the bidet are ‘porcelaine de Paris' with the classic ivy-leaf motifs, and the shower is lined with tiles in the same pattern. The towel rail is heated, and there is discreet austere soap from Roger & Gallet. I do admit that any
expensive hotel gives you just the same. That is the point, in a sense, as you will see if you think a moment.

For you wrinkled your nose at it. You found this luxury contemptible and though you said nothing your face told me that in Holland the most expensive doctors content themselves with a plain washstand in the corner of the examination-room, and that this was all very singular and suspect.

You make me laugh, because for all your sophisticated experience you are a puritan still. Even here in Amsterdam, the only town in Holland where there is a scrap of aristocracy and a scrap, as well, of canaille, one can never be outside the sphere of conventional morality. To have a bath more than once a week is simply not done. As far as I know I am the only person that has succeeded in breaking this rule.

I am making excuses. I know that the bathroom is a weakness, and not only in the evidential sense. It is my streak of sensuality and my yielding for once to the power of sheer wealth. And the women enjoy it so! In my bathroom a woman puts back her face, her self-command – her mask of morality! After a half-hour in my bathroom no woman has ever shown the faintest sign of hysteria, of rancour, of jealousy, nor of any emotional exaggeration. It is a therapy – just like everything else I do. I always left them there for as long as they wished. When they came out I would be writing quietly at my bureau. But I had nearly forgotten, in the defence of my bathroom, that I went there to have a look at myself, wondering what you will find, there behind the features.

The features are nothing remarkable. My hair is short and stiff, and goes sideways at the top of a fairly high forehead. The face is long and narrow, with large ears and a wide mouth. The eyes and nose are large too but regular – no, the face is not bad, I confess; it has character and humour as well as intelligence. Nobody will believe there should be malice in the lines I have in plenty around eyes and mouth, and nobody will think that the character in that straight nose and neat jaw can be so very dreadful. My voice is deep,
calm and deliberate, with quite a pleasant intonation, and the eyes are clear grey and have a level frank look. As a doctor, this face has helped me a good deal. With women, of course, a face is unimportant; I could have the face of an orang-outang, the wild man of the woods, and it would never have made the faintest odds. What is it you see? I am curious.

You appeared again a week and more after the first time. I suppose you had calculated that this was a good interval, enough to make me stew tender, grow uneasy, begin to crumble. I had not crumbled, because I know how people like you work. I had decided that you were anything but satisfied, and that when unsatisfied you would be bulldoggish. I knew that while you would find little to grip in my slippery surface it would be a long while before you let go. There would be a long period of patient calm enforced upon myself before you went away, satisfied or not.

This time again I was struck by a certain force of imagination you possess. You had thought up an original comic approach that was designed to put me off my stroke and you would, I guessed, continue this tip-and-run act, a war of irritation and attrition. I felt fairly sure that you would never adopt the laborious plodding of the average police action, setting large men in raincoats to watch the house, with long tedious lists of every visitor. You wanted to gain a foothold in my interior, in my castle, among my fortifications, there to prepare a subterranean sap to blow me up when I least expected it. So you phoned Miss Maas for an appointment exactly like any businessman with stress symptoms, and in you sailed to the consulting-room, cheerful and full of obtuse self-satisfaction. I was not deceived by this air of imbecility.

“Would you prefer the chair there, or do you feel more at ease on the sofa?”

My consulting-room is extremely pleasant, a large high square room with two big windows that face the tree-shaded street. It was fine warm weather and all the lindens were looking their best. My bureau is placed cornerwise, between the windows and the side wall, lined with bookshelves, behind which one goes zigzagging upstairs towards Casimir. There is no more furniture than is needed in this room, but there is a large sofa of warm ripe yellowish leather. Plenty of people, and especially women, prefer to sit here than in the ‘customer's' chair at the corner of my bureau.

“I think I do prefer the sofa,” in your voice of jovial idiocy, “I like the look of it very much.”

“How's your health?”

“I don't know; there's all sorts of queer things wrong with me, I suspect. What can you treat?”

“Many things. Not conditions plainly requiring surgery, though I have sometimes succeeded in avoiding it even when it looked urgent.”

“But there is a thing called neurosurgery.”

“A very exacting discipline, outside my abilities. I could probably whip your appendix out for you; that's just elementary carpentry.”

“What do you do most of?”

“I get a lot of people whose troubles border on psychiatric booboo things and who need no psychiatric treatment. And of course many people on the obverse side, with insomnia or something that they imagine is a sign of mental trouble, due to a purely physical origin. And, evidently, an army of psychosomatic aches and pains. Is that what you want to know?”

“You do massage?”

“Frequently. And I often send patients to a masseur.”

“And electric things, shock and so on?”

“I give no shock treatments; they belong in certain types of insanity. I use vibration, warmth, sometimes heat, various short waves, ranging from ultra-violet to feeble X-ray. I also use warm air and both warm and cold water,” I added, a little too sarcastically.

“And I suppose fruit and herb cures, and swimming, and riding bicycles?”

“Certainly. We have not, I'm afraid, the time to indulge in an explanation of the various possible applications of these things. You could, of course, go and read up your
Larousse Médical.”

“Oh I have,” you shouted enthusiastically. “Become my favourite reading these last weeks… You treat skin diseases?” you asked suddenly.