One Damn Thing After Another (22 page)

“I heard a woman the other day saying she'd never accept what she called the Violence of marriage. The poor cow.”

“Yes: you know what I mean. Rambling though, aren't I? I don't know Casabianca. Not an uncommon type by the sound: all rounded and jolly and reasonable. He's a crook or not, I wouldn't know. But steer clear of him as much as you can. That's advice. You better not listen to it. Professional advice.”

“It's good.”

“I suppose it's possible,” said Arthur, “and in fact one knows it to be possible, though the chance factor is always bigger than one would like, because it's been done. The economics are simple: put every penny you make back into the business. Fine, if you can do without eating for two or three years: it's bound to be that before one begins to haul ahead – but then, if at that moment you haven't the bank on your back …”

“You need luck,” thought Arlette aloud, “and that's too elusive. Get bronchitis at just the wrong moment or drop a hammer on your toe, and months of labour go for naught. Can one, I mean is there any way of putting luck on your side?”

Arthur got up and went to the fireplace, or where there would have been a fireplace if this had been an English house. He did a lot of thinking in a characteristic attitude, standing with his back to an imaginary fire with his hands in his pockets. An Englishman smoking a pipe needs anyhow a fireplace to tap his pipe out on. He can't do it on his heel because of the carpet, and because of women making faces. An ashtray is altogether bad: the shape is all wrong, the sound unpleasant, and there is risk of breakage. Arthur needed further English chimneypiece accessories; a mantel to lean elbows on, a looking-glass whose frame one sticks memos in, ideally a leather-covered fender to sit on. Arlette had done her best, providing a sort of shallow dish, as though for the dog to eat out of and made to her specification by a puzzled Arab in Marrakesh, and recently a lovely block of sandstone, a remnant of the Citadel in Strasbourg and with a natural hollow on one side made perhaps by rainwater. It weighed about seven kilos and was ideal for tapping pipes on, as though designed by Vauban for that very purpose.

“I don't know,” said Arthur, “but you can make a living, however small your talent is, if you've originality. If you do something mechanical like taking photographs or playing the piano, this is pretty difficult. If you've something with infinite variation like a singing voice, it's easier. You have to do some
thing that's recognizably yours at a glance.” Should he be in a Club? No: the furniture is too ugly, the conversation far too boring, and there are no women. But the exiled Englishman always does something preposterous, like wearing solar topees. One can see George Orwell, on that frightful hillside in the pouring rain, complaining of Catalans never cleaning their rifle and taking a shit wherever they happened to be standing, finding meticulous, ritual, original ways of performing these chores; unmistakably English from ten kilometres off. While shaving, Arthur could look at all those gold-lettered cards stuck round the edge of the glass, see whose wedding he'd been invited to that day. Whistling to himself ‘Variations on a theme of Haydn', by Johannes Brahms, followed by ‘Don't let's be Beastly to the Germans'.

There is something touching, but above all intensely English, about Noel Coward dying in Jamaica while reading an E. Nesbit book in bed.

Arlette, under perpetual exposure to eccentricity, behaved in ways sometimes coloured by English casts of thought. In Holland she had behaved in unbearably French fashion, complaining about such Dutch addictions as gin, cheap cigars and talking Dutch. In England she went on a good deal about the English addictions to sugar, silly accents and poison-green peas. In France, the unspeakableness of being French claimed her attention. In this way the jingo, the chauvin and the national were held at bay. And a Mediterranean hard-headed soumindedness was enlightened by strange outcrops of fantasy.

The day held several things needing time and needing thought but one of them was Xavier, whom she found healed but
apathetic, and whom she urged out for a cup of coffee. Nobody seemed to be watching them, following them, or taking any interest at all, and she wondered what was going on in Friend's mind.

“One gets ideas. They don't have to have any value in themselves. They might start one's mind working along a new path, that's all. We can say that you have a multitude of talents, some conspicuous and others perhaps undiscovered, maybe even unsuspected. The most obvious one is the big frustration. There's precious little that you don't know about commerce, and it's ridiculous wasting all this on some idiocy like door-to-door insurance policies. What I'm about to suggest may appear ridiculous too, but just think about it, and it does no harm to explore it. I know a man who is in some ways in much the same situation as you, but who left his position because he found it was wasting his existence. He is about to start something new: it's still in the planning stage. He's virtually single-handed. His wife's in this with him, but she too has to reforge her abilities into something totally new: she's a teacher.

“He's got lots of skills, he's technically inventive and good with his hands, and he's experienced in the ways of the world. But one thing he knows nothing about and it worries him; that's commercial practice, like elementary book-keeping, buy and sell margins, the whole area of how to survive in business. To him it's I buy something, I make it into something else, I sell it again, I make a living from that: he's never done this. He realizes that sounds a bit too simple. He has for instance a horror of borrowing, because that undermines his independence. I can sympathize with that, because I'd feel exactly the same, but at the same moment if I were in commerce I realize I'd make a success of it because I'm a bargainer at heart, whereas he isn't, and that's why he left his job at the age of oh, mid-thirties somewhere. Younger than you. Are you getting my drift?” Xavier's dull eye was beginning to get some life in it.

“Yes.”

“Well, it's bound to be a fantastic gamble, and if I'm any judge he has a very good chance of running himself into the
ground without an associate who understands business, and with one, I'd say a good chance of doing rather well. And either way, four or five very hard years, but perhaps singularly interesting. Would it be a good idea to go and talk to him?”

“Yes,” said Xavier.

Now where, thought Arlette, did that idea come from?

“It's not at all badly thought,” said Arthur. “You got it presumably from sheer instinct, but it's in
Little Dorrit
. Daniel Doyce the inventor, who's always getting screwed up by the Patents Office. Dickens doesn't take any pains with him, he remains quite a shadowy sort of minor character, but he's well characterized with a ‘plastic engineer's thumb' that feels and understands the shapes and meanings of things. And he joins up with Arthur Clennam, who knows all about commerce, but is otherwise a totally useless drink of water. This might be clever of you. But will a pathetically rigid sort of bourgeois like Xavier, who is a fearful bore, be able to make any headway with a suspicious sort of peasant like Subleyras?”

“Worth trying, I thought,” said Arlette.

A little before closing-time she went into the town: once people started to go home, she would find space for the car. At the backs of buildings are little privileged enclaves, where the transport of the Executive class, notoriously incapable of walking twenty-five metres, enjoys immunity from the harassments awaiting anyone with a heavy shopping-bag. There is no question of Corruption of municipal functionaries, but arrangements have been made. Arlette observed an expensive model of Mercedes, very nicely polished and packing lots of power, with regret that the evil eye alone was not strong enough to let all the air out of the tyres. She was only just in time: Monsieur Thibault liked to start for home before the rush-hour built towards universal frustration.

Once he was gone, senior employees started sneaking out, and the back door started getting fixed for the night in a clash of metal panels. Nobody would get in there without setting off a heap of electronic alarms. She went to the little alley towards
the Place Broglie, where the salesgirls were leaving. In these dumpy housewives, scurrying out to bestride unlikely steeds – Peugeot mopeds for the most part – it is hard to recognize the haughty black-gowned virgins, who touch up their eyelashes at the perfume counter.

When one thought of it, typical that the woman she was looking for should be the last out. There must be somebody utterly reliable to see that the lights are all out, no taps left running in the ladies' lavatory, before the ritual of the Keys. When Arlette saw a fairly broad behind in a leather raincoat stooped over the floor-lock of the safety grille, she was reassured. Madame Henriette was the hinge on which the place turned, she who does the menial tasks; getting on a stepladder to change burned-out bulbs, scrubbing the carpet where some cow spilled a whole dainty flagon of nail-varnish, fixing the electric typewriter which refuses-to-go-this-morning: bringing the cheques to the bank.

Arlette's notion did not deserve any gaudy coral dawn, was indeed only a crude idea of retribution, grey-green and greasy like the Limpopo River, like Strasbourg in evening rush-hour, but … The lady straightened up, stretched with the key to the alarm, put the bunch carefully away in the inside compartment of her handbag. Arlette wondered how she was going to get at them there.

“Madame Henriette.”

“Oo, you gave me a start. Oh, good evening madam, did you leave something in the shop?”

“Not exactly. I'd like to talk to you, though.” The fat face was kind but puzzled. “Are you in a very great hurry?”

“Hurry … not really.” It is the incompetent who are always in a very great hurry. “I've menfolk to provide for. But I'm often later than this.” Puzzled, but something extra was plainly in the wind, and for taking trouble everyone else is always too
pressé
.

“I'm in a rather awkward situation and I'd like your advice.”

“Something to do with the shop?”

“That's it – perhaps we could sit down somewhere,” thinking
hard. Pubs would be crowded, teashops were shut – a hotel was the best bet.

“I usually wait for my bus here,” irresolute.

“Oh no – I'll drive you home.”

“Oh … that's kind. I don't bike any more; the traffic's that dangerous.” A hotel dark and narrow, formerly sordid, now done up in blue velvet for guests of a perpetually thirsty sort: a languid waiter was hanging about.

“What would you like to drink?”

“Oo – could I have a whisky?” He came with Chivas of course: well, in a good cause.

“I'm going to be very direct,” said Arlette. “Your boss – not, you know, the straightest of men.”

“Oh yes – I know,” with simplicity. “But he pays me my wages, you see.”

“No, I'm not complaining about some kind of rip-off,” floundering a bit.

“It's best I don't talk about it,” with dignity.

“I agree, not something I could expect you to listen to. It's much more serious, I'm afraid.”

“Then if I may say so – why come to me? You see, I try not to think about it.”

“Me too. Life goes on anyhow. One tends to say, what can one do? But we should do something.”

“I know,” unhappily. “But one can't walk out. Very likely then I wouldn't have a job at all. And I need it, you see.”

“My name is van der Valk. I run a kind of help agency.”

“Have I seen your adverts in the paper?” guardedly.

“That's right. It isn't all women who come. Men are ashamed to, but they come too. Mostly though, women. So that I know something about the way women are pushed to the limit – and beyond it.”

Henriette's pale eyes were full of that kind of knowledge. She looked at Arlette steadily, but said nothing.

“The woman came to me, whose son got shot. Out at the weekend cottage, breaking in. The thing is, that's not the way she brought him up.” A mournful nod, to that. “She's a widow, she's poor, she goes out cleaning, she's never had anything but
the rough end. Brought up in a public orphanage, lost her man in a work accident. The boy didn't deserve to lose his life. Totally in the wrong, of course. But he was gunned down.”

“I know. It was hushed up, in the paper. It always is … But where I am … He didn't try to hide it. He said straight out, ‘I dare say you've heard; all right, I'll tell you, that's right, and I'd do the same tomorrow, so no quack there in the women's room, you understand?' … The whole day I went cold down my back every time he spoke to me. But I've been with him a long time. I've had to shut my eyes tight, sometimes.”

“Like about what?” Too hurriedly. The woman shook her head.

“Nothing one can do in a court. She's not looking for money. She wants to clear her name, and how can she? She feels bitter. So I went to see him, hoping at least he'd agree to meet her and say something, to help wipe it out. But he wouldn't budge – refused pointblank to discuss it.”

“He always does. Says he's not getting in an argument. Men dig their heels in, when they've done something indefensible.”

“I came to you because you know him well.”

“To me he'll say things, less guarded, because he doesn't care what I think. What a fool some customer is, how some salesman tried to put it across him. He has contempt for people.”

“This stiffened me into revolt. I can't just sit and say it has to be left to Providence.”

“He was defending himself,” Henriette pointed out, “or his property, which comes to the same thing. And he's tough: I mean to him it was nothing very terrible.”