Criminal Conversation (22 page)

In opposition was Billy Kol, a medical student in his fourth year, old for his age and for his class. He was an atheist, a great fusspot, especially about his own health, and anticlerical to annoy the ‘clerical party', whom he fought by stealing their jam, hiding their
cushions, and sneakily opening windows behind the dusty plush curtains. He wore glasses, but was constantly leaving them off because of a lunatic theory that his eyes would get too dependent on them.

And the girls… Margie, who called herself Juana and was the mistress of – yes, Casimir, then possessor of a large reputation. Anyway she claimed that she was his mistress, though she hardly left the house, where she stayed in bed all day reading and eating sweets. And Evelyn… But I am anticipating. The point of the move to the Stadthouderskade, a stone's throw from the Jan Luyken but mysteriously lower in standing, was to get Alida into the house. For we all had our own keys here, and came in at all hours, because of Mrs Koning's aversion to ever leaving the basement.

With the first romantic tendernesses worn smooth, my boy's sensuality was stirred by Alida. To help me in getting her clothes off, a thing I was not exactly practised in, I called in Art. Her coltish body scarcely fitted the illustrations to
Salome
that were my ideal at the time, but I had at least understood that the female nude body is beautiful, made beautiful by an erotic element. After a good deal of argument along the lines of ‘how would any painter ever have managed…' a shy, trembly, awkward Alida stripped in the second-floor back, left of the landing, myself just as stricken by these adjectives, with sweat between the shoulders.

I had water-colours, which I tried to use like oils, being in love with vivid colour. I made bad pencil sketches with wandering lines and a most medical lack of anatomical knowledge, and coloured them rather well, with splendid green shadows. Poor Alida! Perched in great discomfort on my bed, in the pose of Manet's ‘Olympia', a facial expression as though the worn rug under her were redhot! My eyes must have burned fiercely upon her juvenile figure; she fidgeted all the time despite entreaties and insisted on dressing after ten minutes, so bothered that she forgot to tell me to turn away and I sat biting my fingers.

Ach, I wore her down, of course. When naked she threatened to scream if I came near her, but there was a lot of moist breathing at
other times, and I succeeded every now and then in boring past rather pathetic schoolgirl underclothes with tight elastic, that would appear highly laughable to, let us say, Suzanne, today.

My youthful virility never penetrated poor Alida's confused and tormented body. Once switched to another department of the university – and the Medical Faculty was in another part of the town – and hard at work, my interest in Alida ebbed. For I was good at even pre-medicine, and was in the top two per cent of my classes throughout, however childish and confused my emotions. I imagined, being full of valuable pre-medical catch-phrases, that she was ‘half-virgin' and therefore despicable, whereas the poor child would have made a good companion to anyone less gauche than myself.

It was not, of course, only Alida that disappointed my longing for female flesh. My first efforts towards another goal were aimed at the ineffable Juana.

Margie was a figure of comedy in many ways. She had a plump, puppyish face and figure, poker-straight long pale-brown hair that flowed casually about her, and immense good nature. The hateful Obbema and the prig Veldkamp loathed her, and complained all day of this slut to Mrs Koning, who took no notice, let alone throwing her out as demanded. She must have had hidden sympathy for the girl, who was indeed thoroughly nice if stupid, and had no notion why anyone should dislike her. She spent hours in the bathroom, and would sail out smiling gently at the furious ‘next', bundled in an absurd peignoir and showing lots of exuberant bosom when she dropped her toothbrush, which she always did. Her room was a perfect sight, and the maids gave up any effort to clean it one after another; there was a sort of huge turn-out about once a month. In between it overflowed with dirty stockings – real silk, very grand for those days – showy but draughty knickers known to saleswomen as ‘French', bits of embroidery that never got finished, knitting for which the pattern had got lost, toffee-papers, and coffee-cups with the dregs gone hard in the bottom. The walls were hung with large charcoal drawings, presumably the work of Casimir, of a very naked
and fleshy Juana, which she could spend hours admiring. When the door was open – and it always was – one was hit every time one passed by these huge eyefuls. Juana washing her neck (good heavens, what sacrifices for art), three-quarter back, Juana brushing her hair, one-quarter profile, Juana couchant, passant, rampant, and apparently needing to be naked whatever her activity. She was only slightly less naked in real life, and her favourite costume was a flappy pair of ‘beach pyjama' trousers, fashion of somewhere around nineteen thirty-seven, with hibiscus blossoms on them, and a cardigan back to front, somewhat shrunk, outlining massive breasts with impudent menacing nipples, and precariously held by two buttons somewhere in the spine, generally in the wrong buttonholes.

However flaunted it might be, I got nowhere in my efforts to reach all this abundance. Margie got shrieks of giggles when I screwed up courage, drinking coffee in her room, to poke a finger at some plump curve, and hit me disagreeably on the knuckles with a hairbrush. But she remained generous with toffees and paperbound novels, and huge wafts of over-scented face-powder, till the war made all these goodies unobtainable.

The war brought a straitening of my circumstances – that money of my father's invested in Indonesia… Suddenly I had half the amount I was accustomed to live on. Mrs Koning was unperturbed, and let me have one of the tiny attic rooms where the maids had formerly slept, very much under the eaves and with walls composed, as far as one could make out, of a few rough wooden posts connected by seventeen or eighteen layers of cheap wallpaper stuck together. There were no more maids, for the lumpish and reddened fruits of the backwoods now stayed there, sensibly; there was more to eat. Naomi still trotted to the conservatoire every morning with her violin in its case, and did the housework in the afternoons, helped by another girl, some classmate. Mrs Koning slept in her treasure-cave, where she kept rice and bacon, oatmeal and brown sugar – and managed to keep it an amazingly long time. The rice got pretty wormy towards the end, but one did not notice the beasts,
said Billy cheerfully, since they stopped moving about once cooked…

Next door to me, in the other attic room, lived Evelyn. She was a law student, two or three years older than I was, and had always seemed aloof and rather adult. We had never seen much of her, because she was poor and did not eat with us at table, but had a spirit stove up in her eyrie to which Mrs Koning turned a kind blank eye. She was thin and pale, anaemic-looking, distinctly flat-breasted, with fearful salt-cellars at her collar-bones. I would never have got to know this bony beauty – for she had good features and fine ash-blonde hair – had it not been for the winter of 1941. Those attics… We heated bricks in the kitchen oven, put next morning's washing-water into stoneware gin-bottles, and collected all the old clothes we could rake up. My mother sent me all my father's old things, and I lived in a wonderful tweed Norfolk shooting-jacket, and at night under a camel overcoat with many moth-holes, but warm…

The night the oil froze in the German automatic weapons in Russia, Evelyn came into my room and asked awkwardly – she was blue with cold and her pinched face looked transparent – whether we could not unite our resources. It was nothing but the need of animal warmth that drove us into bed together.

Of her two great fears, becoming tubercular and becoming pregnant, Evelyn took the best precautions against the second. Never was I allowed to possess her, though it was understood between us that I could touch her as much as I cared to.

In forty-two the despised Mister Veldkamp was discovered to be a resister, and to have been extremely brave, which shamed us. He was, we heard later, arrested trying to get away to England and, I presume, shot. In forty-three Juana, who had got pastier and fatter, was taken to hospital. A year later it was she, and not poor thin Evelyn, that died of tuberculosis. In forty-four, the hunger winter, there were fewer of us, and we were much better disposed towards each other, huddling together in Mrs Koning's kitchen, the last place in the house to stay warm. Obbema was the last to go. Jamless but undefeated, still quoting the Bible at Billy (a real doctor now),
penniless and upright, she survived the war. By the kind of irony that one grew accustomed to, she was hit by a military lorry that skidded and mounted the pavement, a few days after the liberation. She died a few minutes later held up by her old enemy, while settling her bifocals back up between her ferocious eyes in a gesture familiar to us all.

Evelyn had gone before the hunger winter. She had family in Denmark, I think, and volunteered for some German workforce hoping to get up into Schleswig Holstein and cross the border there. We never heard from her.

It was in nineteen forty-four that I slept with a girl for the first time. She was blonde like Evelyn, thin and washed-out, with adenoids and a fearful Amsterdam accent, a prostitute in the old quarter. She was surprisingly gentle with me. I went to her twice, but the third time she had pneumonia and I had to be content with the dark girl who shared the room. She was friendly too but smelt, and had such a professional manner that I had a fiasco. Kay had been professional, but sensitive enough to see my predicament and be patient about it. She had smelt, to be sure, but with her I had at least accomplished what I longed for. Ludicrous, no?

In nineteen forty-six, my dear van der Valk, I became a licensed medical practitioner, and had had just the amount of experience with the female body that I have taken such pains to describe for you. I went through every stage, of collecting pornographic photographs, of reading the very tedious and unimaginative literature on the subject, of filling myself with fantasies about any girl I saw in the street whose skirt, perhaps, had stuck to her bicycle as she jumped off it, showing me a glimpse of thigh that would torment me for a week.

I am glad that my mother lived long enough to see me arrive at the threshold and the promise of a fine career. Life to her was such a simple affair that I am pleased that she had a quiet, simple death with no pain, convinced that now the war was over the life she had always known, centred on Government House in Batavia, would resume the even tenor she had known, even if the ill-mannered
boys and short-skirted girls of forty-five were not what she was accustomed to.

Old Theo Visser was long retired, but I called on him when we heard that David Gold was dead. He used all his influence among his friends and colleagues to get me a good job, and it was he that wangled the postgraduate course in England, where I learned about the neurological techniques bought with the war experiences. It was the first time I had ever been abroad, and I went off in high spirits, but the experience was unfortunate. I had always thought of England in terms of Rupert Brooke; I found the dismal uniformity that anyone will recall who lived in England during the reign of Sir Stafford Cripps. It was like Holland, with points and coupons and austerity. Like Holland, there were a great many forms to fill in after queuing for a considerable time. The subtle difference from Holland was, perhaps, dismaying, for the language of these forms was not the abrupt – not to say rude – menace of dire happenings if one failed to conform, long familiar to me. Nobody can excel a Dutch bureaucrat in composing the most formal and ponderous of sentences that yet contrives to be violently, personally, rude. What dismayed me in England was that the English forms were somehow like the English life, with a threadbare politeness and a false humility that I never understood. The summons, haughty and peremptory, to wait with bows and scrapes upon some petty functionary was signed ‘Your obedient servant'! Being a Stranger, I found, made one automatically an Inferior. Still, I remember England with gratitude; it was there that I learned to go to concerts.

Youth ended, as it began, with a fiasco. At the end of my postgraduate course I went for my first real holiday – to Paris. I had money in my pocket, and a screwed-up sense of freedom. Alas, how provincial I felt myself. I had thought of my French as good, and discovered it to be pitiful. I had thought I would feel at home in Paris. Had I not often heard my parents recall happy times there? My mother had been to finishing-school there. Later she had shopped at Lanvin and Hermès in the Rue Saint Honoré. My father
had been used to say that the only ties he could wear without feeling sick were those from Sulka. They had not felt as lumpish as I did.

More humiliations followed. I tried to get into an expensive restaurant and was told there was no table, fancying I could hear the aproned under-waiters snigger. I got into another, though, could not understand the menu, and was served a dish I could not digest, with a sauce of pounded shellfish and brandy I thought revolting. I ordered a half-bottle of wine; they brought me a whole one that I did not know how to refuse. With my Dutch notions it seemed a crime to waste what had cost so much; I drank it all. I stumbled out somehow, and when the fresh air hit me outside I just vomited everything upon the pavement.

In hospitals I was competent. I was a doctor; I was even regarded as brilliant. Why did the two halves of my life seem to slip apart? Why, outside, did I feel bitterly that I was still the boy that in Paris had stared at the statues in the Luxembourg, and had been only reminded of childhood, and pictures of these statues, young girls by Rodin, that had pricked on that agonised wish to know, to possess, to understand these mystery-shrouded female figures?

I find I have stayed up, writing all this out – should I say spitting it all out? – till well after midnight. I have gone to bed here in my tower, in Casimir's eyrie, secure from interruption or irritation, but I cannot sleep. I have stirred too hard among dregs that I had thought settled and finally hardened. Muddy clouds have swirled to the surface and left me with an unexpected bitter aftertaste. It is pointless now to tear all this up. I yielded to some compulsion to scribble it all down – as though that could do me or anyone else any good – and now I will leave it.