Strike Out Where Not Applicable (12 page)

‘I act on the assumption that you're a man who has seen something of the world. And now come with me a moment, please.' She led him into a bedroom across the landing which he would have liked to observe a bit, but he had no time: she marched him straight across the room, went on her knees in a surprisingly graceful and easy movement, and opened a cupboard beside the bed. She came up with a handful of books and dumped them on the harlequin silk bed cover.

‘Take a look.' While he was taking a look she walked back into the living-room, retrieved her cigarette, came back and stood looking out of the window. Faint horsy sounds drifted up from outside. Van der Valk sat comfortably on the bed, spread the literature around him, and was delighted. It was all quite conventional –
Tales of Boccaccio
, unexpurgated
Arabian Nights
, Restif de la Bretonne of course. Not pornography. Complicated fornications prefaced by tremendous beatings, with very good coloured illustrations: witty, rococo, full of verve, almost all funny. There was a Choderlos de Laclos that showed a more formal and eighteenth-century impudence, as well as more imagination than Vadim had managed …

The last was
Histoire d'O
. He had it himself – so did everybody. Not with illustrations. It wasn't pornographic, but he thought it a most unpleasant book. ‘Since she enjoys it,' Arlette had said with disgust, ‘why doesn't she go and do it instead of boring and revolting me writing about it?' It was more succinct and therefore better than his own reaction. The visual imagination of the early scenes at Roissy was the best part, and so the illustrator had found.

‘And a woman is supposed to have written that!' said Marion.

He handed them back and she put them away.

‘Harmless,' he said.

‘Yes. I wanted to show you. My husband doesn't reach over and paw women, you'll notice. In fact you might now be less surprised to hear that he has a lot of old-fashioned respect for women. His upbringing – and his character. That act of saying crude things to
customers – and hitting things with whips – it is an act, Mr Van der Valk, and that is all it is.'

‘You've helped me a lot,' he said, meaning it. ‘I won't wear out your hospitality any further.' He picked up his stick, adjusted an imaginary tweed cap, twisted an imaginary moustache, and said, ‘Amusin' idea, what, bein' able to look under people's clothes.'

She smiled tolerantly, as though convinced of the essential childishness and small-boy nastiness – vicious you could not call it – of all men.

‘Better still if one could lift up the faces and see what was underneath.'

‘More of a problem, what?' banging the stick on the floor with hearty cavalry good humour. They both laughed and he left her, still with the smile that was very nearly contemptuous round the edges of her mouth.

The rest had done him good and so had the whisky. He wasn't advancing: he wasn't even marking time – he knew that well enough, or what did experience serve for? It was always the same. One went backwards inevitably in the first half, and one had to learn not to be discouraged by it. The more one got to know, the more one guessed at what one didn't know and wasn't likely to find out, neither. Oh mother, the grammar, thought Van der Valk, and cheered himself up with the gentleman who split infinitives, by god, so they would stay split …

He parked outside the café and walked in, causing not perhaps a stir, but fixed stares and heavy breathing. Why? he wondered. Anyone can walk into a café – is not the admirable English name for the place a public house? Why is it a closed shop, containing a closed society, hostile, rigid?

Four rustic youths were playing pool on the billiard table, two oul'wans were in a glassy gin-haze in the corner; a middle-aged man was treating his wife to blackcurrant and toying with a beer at the counter while he gossiped with the landlord. All looked at Van der Valk as though this wasn't the place for him. No painter to be seen.

‘Mr Thing in? The painter: I don't know his name.' Francis had talked about Dickie – in Amsterdam he would have asked for Dickie – it was his own fault; he himself had created this barrier.

‘Mr Six,' said the landlord in a chilly way, as though not knowing
the name was what he had expected all along from people like that. He studied Van der Valk from head to foot with care. ‘You're the commissaire of police, right?'

There seemed little point in either denying it or admitting it …

‘I'm interested in paintings,' blandly.

‘He's upstairs – in his room. I suppose you can go up – no, I'll show you the way.' Not out of respect. Not, presumably, because he might pinch the spoons if left to himself. But he was an intruder, an irritant, the pepper in the cream cheese.

‘Very good of you.'

A passage led two ways from the landing. One way was the living quarters of the landlord: a child's playpen stood folded against the wall and on a kitchen chair was a bundle of clothes, just off the line, waiting to be ironed. Signs of life … The other half of the passage was bare, clean, cold. Five bedrooms and a bathroom – the doors stood ajar to stop them getting stuffy. The end room was the painter's, the nicest because the biggest, the one next to the bathroom, the one with two windows. The landlord tapped; a voice inside said ‘Binnen' without enthusiasm.

‘Somebody to see you, Mr Six.'

He had expected a litter if not a smell of turpentine – he didn't know why; the accumulation of casual debris one associated with artists. Nothing of the sort; certainly there was a sheet of cartridge paper pinned to a pearwood board, a few brushes in a jam-jar, a rag showing smears of watercolour, but the room was tidy, bare, almost prissy. The bed was neat, no clothes had been left to lie about, and indeed nothing said the room was occupied by a bird of more than one night's passage except a few books in a row on top of the commode and an extra table in the best of the light, with a bottle of indian ink standing on it.

The young man was sitting in the one cane armchair near the window, a needle in his hand, darning the worn elbow of a pullover, his other hand inside the sleeve, holding an old-fashioned wooden ‘mushroom'. He seemed to be doing it pretty well. He didn't get up, and showed no excitement at his visitor.

‘Since you're in there's no point in saying come in. Sit down by all means – if you don't mind the kitchen chair.' Van der Valk smiled politely, reached out with his stick, hooked the kitchen chair, dragged it along the floor, making a horrible noise, at which the young man stuck a finger ostentatiously in his ear, and sat on
it. Neither said anything for quite a long time, but Van der Valk was more accustomed to this conversational gambit, which is like the game children play, making faces at each other and betting who will be the first to laugh.

‘You're the commissaire of police – I know about you. Saw you around this afternoon. Not surprised to see you – I thought you'd be running after me sooner or later.'

‘Why?'

‘Why, the fellow asks. I'm always round the manège, you'll want to know whether I've seen anything, heard anything, that kind of crap. I've met police before. Did fat Fischer fall or was he pushed? The second reason is of course what the hell is an artist doing here, so under pretext of hush-hush panic about Fatty you come trotting here to satisfy your bloody disgusting curiosity.'

The voice was flat, monotone. There was a trace of a rough accent in the Dutch that sounded like Rotterdam – one could not be sure, because there was another accent added, something foreign that did not quite ring true and puzzled Van der Valk. Now eighteen months ago, he thought, I would have kicked the chair out from underneath this pavement-chalker and told him to show his papers quick before he got his ears boxed.

‘Something funny?'

‘Oh I was amused at the thought of how lucky you are and how little notion you have of it but that's quite unimportant,' pleasantly. ‘Both your guesses are good.'

‘All right, go ahead and ask your halfwit questions – I don't mind. As I say, I was expecting it.' He took up the darning again, putting the ‘mushroom' carefully in place and continuing an elegant basketwork as neat as a housewife's.

Looked about twenty-five, but he might be older. Thin and pale – those first impressions were confirmed, but a handsome boy too; good features, classic nose, magnificent black eyebrows. The white shirt was open-necked, but the tie hung on the towel-rail by the wash-basin. The hands were thin and bony, with clean well-kept nails. Along with the intelligence and the aggressive tone went a careful, shabby respectability that was somehow disconcerting.

‘You don't work here?'

‘Partly – why?'

‘I know nothing about the techniques you use, but isn't the
material big and awkward? Copper engraving, or litho – don't you need tools, materials, chemicals?'

‘Can't have that here. Mr Maag – the landlord – wouldn't have that, so I keep it in a shed behind the stables which isn't used – Francis lets me keep all my material there; makes me pay him for it though, even if he's got no use for the space himself. Trust Marion to watch the pennies.'

‘You don't like her?'

‘Sure I like her. She's no different to anyone else – they all watch pennies: more they've got the better they watch them. You take a look at that private-yacht gang some time. I laugh my head off at the poor miserable little bastards – turn a quarter over three times before giving it to the stableboy – count the change from a cup of coffee.'

‘Is that wrong?'

‘Who said anything about wrong? – do the same myself if I were in their shoes, no doubt. Having money changes people, makes them frightened.'

‘You've lived in France, maybe?'

‘Sure. I'm half French.' He sounded proud of it, too. ‘I've lived there – three years. Go back tomorrow if I could. What makes you ask?'

‘Something in your voice. I've lived there myself.'

‘What the hell you doing here, then?'

‘I like it here too. You don't agree?'

‘Agree …?' It seemed to be a silly word.

‘Nothing to stop you living in France, I should imagine.'

‘Too goddam dear – you take me for a lousy beatnik or something? I've had all that – going without food, sleeping on benches, all that. I've had enough of it – you wouldn't understand.'

‘No?'

A look of open contempt – no, not contempt: there was envy in it too. Derision was the word, perhaps.

‘No.'

‘Do tell me. I should have thought,' innocent, ‘that it would go quite smoothly once you got accustomed to your hair being itchy.' ‘You – you've never spent the night in a tramp's shelter – you've never been chased off a bench by police.'

‘They do that, in Paris?'

‘They don't stop to look if you're washed or not.'

‘But you liked it there?'

‘Know anything about painting?' with a false politeness.

‘No.'

‘You surprise me. You're a painter and you go to Paris. You do neo-expressionism, or neo-realism, or neo-whatever-you-like, it makes no odds, there's a hundred thousand of you. You might even be good, you'd still be up against the machine, that takes one in a hundred, among the good and the bad alike, sells their pictures, gives them space on the wall and in the press, and might even make them a living if they're patient enough and stubborn enough – pretty poor lookout for the other ninety-nine. Ninety-eight of them are lousy anyway, they've all got names like Szabo and Soapsudski, nobody can tell them apart, and the ninety-ninth, who happens to be good, gets drowned in the dungheap. So you try to make yourself different – the bad ones just copy whatever style happens to be in the wind. But if you're any good you have your own line and you can't force it. So you look for something else characteristic, like a subject – something you can be recognized by. Butterflies! – that's Cock. Rotted tree-stumps – that's Prick.'

Van der Valk listened with exemplary patience. If you can just get them to talk about themselves they are quite prepared to stop being monosyllabic.

‘So you do horses.'

‘I like horses. Very few people can do them. I'm one. I understand them.'

‘It seems illogical that you should be scared to get up on them.'

‘Who told you that?'

‘Why, Francis.' The young man was thrown out of his stride.

‘You don't paint a thing you're sitting on.'

‘Why not? Géricault did.' Not that Van der Valk knew anything about Géricault, whom indeed he generally got confused with Delacroix. He had read Aragon's
Semaine Sainte
though.… He was surprised at the young man's seeming too confused to see this.

‘He was in the army,' he said lamely, ‘not a suburban manège. There's all the difference. I'm a good painter and I know it.'

‘And even Francis can see that.'

‘Francis wouldn't know Rubens from Kokoschka but he does know horses.' He laid aside the neatly finished darn, wound up his
card of wool with care, and realized that he had been manoeuvred into sounding defensive.

‘It's no good trying to pump me about art. You wouldn't understand in a thousand years, so don't waste your breath. Stick to your job, like asking me if Bernhard really fell off the horse.'

‘Did he?'

‘I'd say no, since you ask me, but I wouldn't know why nor how. I was right there working in the shed, and I had more to do than pop out to watch Fatty exercising. I was minding my business and I didn't even know a thing about it till after they called the doctor. I came out for a coffee then and asked what all the fuss was about.'

He had at last been allowed to deliver his carefully rehearsed speech. There was probably more of it but that was enough …