One Damn Thing After Another (3 page)

We are afraid of murder, but only because we are so terrified of dying. Life is cheap, and replaceable. The building of a family is as slow and dearly bought as the growth of a tree along the shore here, in the teeth of the salt Tartar wind. If that man killed his wife, it was because someone killed his family. She, or another. My lords, many live who deserve death. And many die, who deserve life.

A dolphin had been washed ashore on this beach, alive, but with its sense of orientation destroyed. A veterinary doctor had fought for the animal, in vain, for four hours: the beast had not wanted to live any longer. It had absorbed too much poison. Crude oil, a virtual certainty, said the marine biologists. The ecological balance of a family is as fragile as anything else in nature. A few chemicals, of oil and of concrete, and a kilometre of Breton or Corsican coastline can be destroyed while you watch.

We make a fuss about murder, since the time the first editor noticed that it helped build circulation figures.

This land of Brittany, said Arthur quoting Mary Renault, has a doomed and holy brightness.

Driving now again along the happy, happy autoroute towards supper, Arlette wondered how many of these families had lost a man to the Widow-maker.

Nowadays to be sure we have roads, which kill for preference
women and children. Well, well: Sainte Anne d'Auray, pray for those upon the sea, and for us upon the concrete.

“I can't remember,” said Arthur beside her, driving, “what that old fool Tristan was supposed to be doing in Ireland.”

“Marrying the king's daughter as I recall vaguely. Wasn't there a second Iseult – les Mains Blanches? Sounds a useless cow, that one. It's a great muddle.”

“I incline to think he was the one who got muddled – never was quite sure which was which. Which, at least, he found himself in bed with at any given moment.”

“Not, I hope, to be thought of as screamingly funny on this account,” said Arlette a little cattily.

“Why is it that adultery is screamingly funny in the theatre? Because it is so singularly the opposite outside? For saying that all the world's a stage, that old bastard Shakespeare has much to answer for. The fact is, that the advice Mr Coward gave Mrs Worthington is sounder than he knew.”

In the last week, there is always an urge to get back and slop about in bedroom slippers, saying loudly ‘Comfort again at last.' This fights with the joys of lingering-by-the-wayside. But with Arthur in a car there were rituals to perform, as well as autoroutes to be avoided, and they took the long way round. The Lancia was urged at a gallop out of Brittany, with cries from Arlette of ‘Civilization again at last' upon reaching the marches of Normandy.

But one must climb every step of the Mont Saint Michel: one must tread the holy ground (sadly desecrated) of the Grand Hotel at Cabourg: one must climb the hill at Trouville to look at the four views.

“Even if you had a straw hat, even if you had a gardenia in
your buttonhole, by no stretch of the imagination could you be made to look Proustian.”

“No,” agreed Arthur readily enough. “But I wish to resemble a famous character in fiction: who can it possibly be?” There was silence for some time before Arlette said, “Mr Tod.” He meditated vengeance at length before saying, “Of course – Mrs Tabitha Twitchit.”

From the Seine to the Somme: Gothic churches, and Flemish town halls, with Arthur lecturing upon the deplorable provincialism of Betjemanesque tastes in architecture.

Even with a small agile Lancia, one cannot hurry the roads of Champagne and Lorraine, and it was early evening before the sudden frenzy to be home overtook them, and they galloped over the bleak grey plateau, welcoming the red cliffs of the Col de Saverne, and the first Alsatian houses.

“First one to see the cathedral spire gets a choc. No,” generous “–two chocs.” How absurd to be homesick for a city adopted only a few years ago. How pleasant again to be trundling along the Avenue des Vosges, swept by a chilly shower of rain, looking severely out for any architectural monstrosities that might have sprouted in their absence. For supper they picnicked off stale bread and liverwurst, in the stale-smelling dusty livingroom, instead of the fleshpots of the Moselle valley. After a day this long, one goes on driving the damned car in one's head, and goes to bed instead, thankfully early, with an old James Bond book.

Arlette, freed of hotel bolsters, steely cylinders known as the polochon, plunged in voluptuary, got the giggles at the arrival of her consort, wearing buttercup yellow pyjamas, his reading glasses perched upon his eyebrows to find his way.

“What's that you've got?” he asked severely.

“Hunting Tower
by John Buchan.”

“Ho, yes – well, snigger as you may, ye'll no fickle Tammas Yownie.”

“And you?”

“By the same unerring instinct,
Greenmantle
. Not another word, please. Lovely, it's only half past eight.”

The ghastly realities of next day: filthy flat, dirty washing strewn everywhere, and Shopping to do. Arthur stumped off to the post-office where, nothing having been forwarded, all the month's mail had been kept ‘en instance'. No Paris paper since they were home a day early and not yet officially ‘back': but a huge depressing pile of sordid threats – what would happen if one didn't do something quick about the television tax, the parking fine, the bank overdraft and several repair bills. Strasbourg. lent enchantment by distance, was hideously actual through the computers of all the service companies.

The Administration, refreshed by repose through July and August, was zealous: right-thinking people do not go away in September. The Council of Europe, in a devious way Arthur's employer or, to put things more politely, milch-cow, was changing all its organigrammes.

As Arthur read through all this rubbish, stage one (the lengthening lip) passed quickly to stage two, exasperated muttering. The measured tearing-up of paper into neat small pieces became ripping across and flinging. The mesh of Arthur's sieve was in fact slightly too large. He would curse later, discovering – in a rage – that in rage at a maze of moronic verbiage, one had thrown away quite a lot of recondite information one might later rather want.

Arlette's pile was smaller, but more mysterious. Most of it she couldn't understand at all. What was this extraordinary tangle her Social Security contributions had got into? Who were these acronyms? – as cherished by the French as by Americans. And people bidding her acidly, please, to make it her business to call upon them at her earliest convenience, since her telephone did not answer. Stuff and nonsense; she'd left it on record with a brief and clear message stating when she would be back.

Her sieve was plainly much too fine in mesh. Apart from appeals to subscribe to the
Reader's Digest
, American Express,
Fortune
magazine and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, there seemed to be nothing she could throw away at all.

Like anonymous letters: she got a lot and over a year had learned prudence, keeping them in a special file, even when
plainly mad, illiterate and pornographic. This one was not: neat red ballpoint, in the hand-printed style that several educational systems urge upon schoolchildren, sacrificing character to legibility, so that there is not much to tell about the writer.

German, in language and style. Neat layout, proper paragraphing, good spelling. Cheap paper: that meant nothing, any more than the red ink. Approach, formal and quite polite: if she complied with certain demands (unspecified), it would be much to her advantage. This concerned her family affairs, underlined. But if she did not comply, she would regret it, because the Press, both national and international, would be taking a close interest in her affairs.

Family? – those buried roots down in the south? – and how could that possibly interest anyone, let alone Germans? Piet van der Valk, being a police officer, got many anonymous letters, but he had been dead nearly ten years and could perhaps be allowed to rest in peace.

Of the boys, one was in Spain. Got to know any nice Basque terrorists lately? The other in Norway, when last heard of making improbably large quantities of money. Ruth, her adopted daughter, a medical student right here in Strasbourg; an intense and independent girl, who, after being for many years extremely nasty, had become extremely nice. And not at all inclined to get into scrapes – not that this sounded like that sort of scrape.

The boys she saw little of, and they were notoriously bad letter-writers. Ruth she saw a lot of. One thing all three had in common: if they got into a scrape they would handle it themselves – but they would tell her about it before anyone else did. Her confidence in the children was equalled by theirs in herself. Furthermore, they got on effortlessly well with Arthur.

Arthur? – the blackmail flavour to this … Arthur did not lend himself to such things. And let nobody think they could drive a wedge between her and Arthur.

Herself? She tried to think of things in recent months involving Germans. There were several: she shrugged.

Arthur was still over there playing the celebrated scene from ‘L'Aiglon' – ‘Je déchire'; echoed forty years after by Tommy
Handley's wartime postman, who said it didn't matter what you did as long as you Tore-them-Up, and forty years after that more valid than ever.

She didn't tear it up: she put it in the file. One shrugged, but one looked to see whether anything ever came of it.

Down at the bottom there were more Germans. Letterhead, flaring, gigantic, of the
Graphik
: notorious, not to say thumb in your eye scandal-raking weekly. Signed, this one, with a big splashy felt pen. Woman journalist, anxious forsooth to interview her. Since she had such an interesting-sounding job! And, if possible, also her so-distinguished Herr Doktor Husband – Arthur would be thrilled to find himself in
Graphik
amidst the pornographers and politicians … Would she call the local office to fix this up? Polite in a vulgar soapy way.

Perish the thought; she was in no particular need of publicity and certainly not that sort. That one, at least, could be torn up.

Last of all, and saddest, was a van der Valk one, made incoherent by misery. Your phone says you'll be back by suchaday, but I don't know whether that's true. I've lost faith in everything and everyone. I'll try this just in case. If I don't hear, there's nothing for it: I'll kill myself.

Postmarked a week back. What could one do about it? There was no hard and fast rule: were the ones who talked about it less inclined to do it? ‘I'll kill myself and then it will be your fault' – a kind of emotional blackmail the immature are given to. Arlette hated talk of this sort. Suicide is murder, just as each and every murder is also a suicide: that, if you like, was indeed a firm rule. No phone number: an address, in Neudorf. A week ago … she would try to go. But tomorrow: she was still ‘on holiday' damn it, and everything was crowding in already. An awful lot to do and she didn't feel like any of it, and especially not cooking.

Arthur, hearing deep sighs being heaved and much refreshed by his trip on the tear, offered most gallantly to make his super-special shepherd's pie. Excellent idea, after all that fish too.

“The really boring shopping I can do this afternoon.”

“Good; I'll go to that dust-laden office, dump all this paper
there and pretend I've never seen it. Then have a stern word with the Secretary-General, maybe then kiss his bum a bit; he likes to be thought important now and then.” Yes, and she'd better try herself to get some wits and courage into her own lead-laden bum, and sort out these idiot bureaucracies. She brought Arthur's typewriter into the livingroom, was drafting a stern dignified protest to Social Security, when the phone rang. Ruth. Oh, hallo darling … I just wondered whether-you-were-back … Oh, yes, it was lovely … Oh, good, I'll come to supper can I, and hear all about it … That'll be lovely: oh, and do you know any Germans? … Yes, lots, why? … oh, a silly letter sounding blackmaily, that's all … Nobody I know then, okay, see you this evening.

She had just refabricated concentration upon ‘Dear Sir, I am astonished' – make that disagreeably astonished – ‘at the inability of your computer to understand childishly simple instructions'–cut childishly – when the front door bell went.

Before she could peek through the judas, she heard happy yelps and scratchings. The Davidson dog, towing her Spanish cleaning-woman, who had been looking after it.

“Hallo! – qué tal?”

“Qué tal? – I thought you might –”

“Yes, yes, acabamos de llegar. Hallo, darling, stop bounding about then. Sí, sí, cansados, pero contentos. Googoogoo, oh do shut up. Down, I told you.”

“I met Doctor Davidson in the supermarket. All right, I guess; my rheumatism's being troublesome – oh, aren't you glad Mother's back.”

“Do stop calling me mother. Delighted to see you: we've an awful lot to do. Get away, you wretched beast.”

“Give him a paw; then he'll be happy. Oh, I can't stay today – I just brought old Perro, I knew he'd be so thrilled.” No way of quarrelling with this, alas.

“Tomorrow then, as usual, and you can hear all the news. Like all holidays, you know, quien más tiene más quiere.” Her Spanish was rudimentary, a degree more so than her German.

“Ah yes,” solemnly, and much given to sibylline meaningless aphorisms, “decir y hacer no comen a una mesa.” Saying and
doing don't eat at the same table: self-pitying remark and meant to convey ‘I can't afford expensive holidays on the coast'.

“Sure you can't stay?” hopefully. “I'm rather exhausted.”

“Ah, yes, one always comes back tired from holidays. Ir por lana y volver trasquilado.” No sympathy forthcoming.

“Tras what? Go for wool and come back–?”