The Widow (10 page)

‘You've only my word that he doesn't. But I take yours.'

‘All right,' with a sudden smile, unexpectedly sweet.

Hm, thought Arlette. Not though about to suspect herself of getting sentimental about young girls and their problems.

This was serious. Young girls and their problems couldn't be taken frivolously, either. One couldn't interfere irresponsibly. She'd have to talk to the parents – to this father – and that would not be easy. He would regard it as interference by a stranger in a family matter. And the girl would regard her confidence as betrayed. One false step and …

What did she know, what qualification had she? Neither
legal nor medical. You've been a cop's wife but what do you know about something of this sort? The fundamental vagueness and fatal ambiguity of the idea still troubled her. She wasn't a shelter for battered wives, despite Norma. Nor a citizens' advice bureau. Nor, heaven help us, a ‘detective agency'…

‘You'll learn what you are, by experience,' Arthur had said. ‘You're all these things. Sometimes you can't do as well as they could, and you send people on to the competent authority. But sometimes you can do a lot better. Because you're just one person, and you bring individual effort and understanding, and that's what people want.'

Norma – yes. She could only give the same advice, and maybe help in filling out forms, as the Social Worker. But she could talk English and give a cup of tea. And that really was what Norma needed.

But Marie-Line … She could look up the legal texts, but had no experience in their interpretation nor skill in preparing an argument. As for a medical opinion on a neurosis … Surely anybody with common sense could see that the child was a problem, and under stress. At this age they always are a problem. The broken family pattern accounted for the rest. The girl just wasn't getting enough affection. Call it a neurosis if you like. But to suggest that a psychiatric clinic would be any good, however skilled and sympathetic, is bullshit.

Look, you know nothing about medicine. You're fifty years old: you've brought up three children. There is in fact little you don't know.

Is it enough? You have never, for example, had to face violence. Secondhand, oh yes, plenty. But you were always sheltered and protected. You followed the rules.

Rules exactly as in childhood, about talking to strangers or opening the door to people you don't know. Rules of school-girlhood, of student days. What does it amount to? The Metro is a place where you get your bottom pinched … Dirty old men can be all ages: quite normal people can get neurotic about female flesh: oh, quite … Don't get drunk and don't
get isolated: keep visible and invisible means of support; oh yes, quite…

Realities were harsher things.

She'd had to appreciate the wisdom of her police commissaire. She'd been sent on to Corinne, an inspector in the street patrol brigade, a tired and overworked woman, but solid, simple, quiet about it all. They got on well.

‘It's quite pathetic,' said Corinne. ‘This July there were four of us passed out as potential commissaires. Get put in charge no doubt of some Lost Dogs Home in the department of the Doubs. As of the first of January this year you know how many of us there were in the whole of France? Women I mean with inspector's rank? Three hundred and thirty-two. As with everything else – thirty years behind the times. You look at Denmark or Norway. Here they expect us to be something like on television, superb blondes with marble tits when your blouse gets ripped in the heat of battle. The realities …

‘Old Joe send you down to learn something about that unarmed combat crap? Oh well … if you've finished your coffee, we've a gym at the back here.'

Square and sturdy in a track suit, Corinne threw mats around in the male atmosphere of socks and stale sweat.

‘Lesson number one, invariably I'm afraid, is not getting raped. So I'll start raping you shall I? – Sorry; not much fun for either of us.'

‘I'd like to meet, frankly, the man who's going to rape me,' said Arlette as she generally did: wasn't this all a bit of a nonsense?

‘I'm afraid you might,' said Corinne unsmiling. ‘I said the same. Healthy strong determined woman, kick his crutch in, claw his eye. Oh yeah. Look,' producing a horrible knuckle-duster, ‘this is now a man's fist. Sorry, but I hit you straight in the face with it and you're a gone goose. They don't stop to worry about your looks. I beg your pardon but interested only in this,' slapping her pelvis, ‘while you're semi-conscious with a crushed jaw and cheekbone. Look, I'm starting with the very worst. But there was an English policewoman, I can tell
you she was no softy, went out as bait for a violent one – and went the same way as the others. He bashed her, strangled her, fucked her: one, two, three. If you don't like this, now's the time to say.'

‘You've been told, haven't you, to show me I'm just a wet amateur,' said Arlette softly.

‘By who – old Joe? No. He said you'd sense enough not to get into trouble, but to show you what could happen if you did.'

‘I can get hit by a drunk in a car, even on my own side of the road doing twenty.'

‘That's right, that's the professional way. Take the obvious, reasonable precautions first. Don't have long hair, necklaces, pendants on chains, ear-rings. But there it is. The best protection, frankly, is to have a man. Yes. I know, I know. But inevitably. Look, in a Latin country, and that's Paris or even Strasbourg, a woman without a man is public property. It's a whore or it's rapable. Once alone, in the street or the café or the train, she's regarded as belonging to anyone who takes a fancy. This attitude is one of the most primitive there is. We've barely scratched the surface. Woman is butcher's meat. I've got as far as educating the men in this office.'

‘Now you are shocking me.'

‘Believe me, I mean to. The women are as bad. How many rapes are there, really? We don't know. We guess that one in ten gets reported.'

‘Go on,' said Arlette woodenly. ‘I don't intend to be the one or the other nine.'

‘That's the stuff. Right, we tend to say that nine of Them are just frightened little flashers. True, but a hard core is bulls. And they can all be physically strong. You're tall, and you've muscles, but you must learn this: you just haven't the strength.

‘You know it, the one place where the biggest stud is vulnerable is his balls. So try to learn to go with it: don't fight. At all costs avoid his hitting you, breaking you. So frankly, try and make it look you're longing for it. Because that's what they want to believe so you must give them the illusion. Never
mind the shrink stuff about how timid they really are; that doesn't help you with your pants down.

‘Set your teeth. Now: my hands are busy on you; where are your hands – make like you want to help me, get my trousers off. Don't worry; I'm hetero as hell. Talk, do a patter, heave about and wail like you're in a porno movie, darling I love it.

‘Sorry, Arlette. I know this is hideous. But the thing is worse, you see. I've talked to certainly thirty women in two years who've been through it.

‘Better … We'll take a minute's rest now. Want a fag? We've done the worst. If you've a gun of course and your hands aren't pinned, then you're super-penis, but if you've dropped it, forgot it, can't get to it … all right? – ready, again? Now if you're grabbed from the back.'

Realities: The world was very evil.

Monsieur Dupont hadn't sounded like a rapist on the phone. But, said Corinne, ‘You're a woman. Take nothing for granted, anywhere.' There are violent emotions in the world. People did violent things, for violent hidden reasons. You don't grasp it, until you go out and learn professional attitudes.

‘Quite right,' Arthur had said when told about life with Corinne. ‘No sentimental attitudes about you; I approve most thoroughly of Corinne. ‘In fact, in his dryest voice, ‘quoting textually the interesting memoirs of Albert Pierrepoint the Home Office Hangman, I never knew what jealousy meant, until I became an Executioner. Even at that job you got sabotaged by the professional colleagues.'

‘I'll remember that,' Arlette had said.

She was silent that evening, and the music she chose, to listen to, a long and to Arthur slightly trying piece by Mahler. He made no comments. It might be in the nature of a requiem for Mr Van der Valk, whom he had not known, but understood, he thought, and fairly well. For whom he felt respect: a cop; not always a polished personality but neither oaf nor ruffian. He suspected that it was still more a requiem for the widow Van der Valk, and was careful not to fidget.

She was remembering the Vosges countryside, and the toylike white Citroen, and Ruth as a young teenager. The flat in The Hague, always rather dark, and seeming cramped whatever she tried. And the road to Scheveningen, where Piet had died on the pavement. Her ‘dottiness': everyone who knew her agreed that she had been slightly psychotic throughout the entire wretched episode. ‘Arlette's gone mataglap' as the thoroughly frightened Ruth told a friend. True: she remembered little of what had happened. There are mechanisms of mercy that obliterate such from the memory.

A peculiarly nasty person, whom she couldn't see, never had seen as a person. She could not remember his face, nor anything human about him: he had aroused in her an intense uncontrollable violence. She had done things she had not known were in her. And it had been a wretched creature, mean-minded and sadistic, eaten by vanity, incapable of anything himself, who had manipulated a harmless immature boy.

She had been driven by what she had seen as the apathy and cynicism of the police. Rushed to Amsterdam, done all those things she could not recall, did not wish to. Violence …

Arlette the Avenger; the Detective … no, and no: she'd never again risk travelling that road.

She looked across the room; her handbag, with a pistol in it. She'd accepted it. A symbol that she was no longer the Widow; she'd broken once and for all with the old life; not only in justice to Arthur, who deserved better than a palimpsest. She'd chosen a new road, set her feet upon it; had no intention of withdrawing. The pistol was a tool, like the waiting-room, like the recording gadget on the phone. But no violence: she'd leave that to policewomen. And any more of Arthur's jokes, about Marlowe or the Thin Man's Wife, would get snubbed.

The ‘agency' existed, and for a purpose. It exists in the first place, she thought suddenly, to get rid of the Widow. A woman I have lived with for long enough. I am shaped, informed, ripened by my past, but it's not going to get up on my back and ride me around. Piet's legs, heavy-muscled, too hairy, wound round my neck strangling me … thanks.

There was a small snort that might have been a snigger, so that Arthur glanced up for a second: the woman had a grin upon her face that seemed to have little to do with Mahler.

This woman … whose body is again being used. Very nice too. Disagreeable to have been reminded how many men perceived nothing but a brutish sex-object. It will be painful no doubt. The Widow got puritanical about Flypaper Sex, and was forever washing the stickiness off her hands. Not fair to Arthur, who is so extremely unselfish. The woman Corinne had reminded her brutally that this body, stupid forked carrot, was a thing people got boringly obsessed with: better remember it.

The slow movement came to an abrupt end: she got up with a jolt to turn the record.

Arlette stood outside the church of Saint Maurice, in silent converse with a bad statue of Jeanne d'Arc on a horse. Not a bad patron saint for liberated women. It was rush hour: the Avenue de la Forêt Noire was full of noise and a bad smell. Even if seven months' pregnant in an orange raincoat and pushing a large shocking-pink pram, do not attempt crossing the road. In fact especially not then, and especially not at a pedestrian crossing. Even under the particular protection of Jeanne d'Arc. A Strasbourgeois in a car is a Hun: rather fond of raw meat under his saddle.

Just then a woman with a pram did cross the road, sailing head high, indifferent to stalled fuming automobiles and a chorus of klaxons. She even made an overweight pig of a Mercedes back up. Ah well, she was young and pretty. No
gesture of thanks to the driver, grinning all galant'uomo out of his prison window at her. Arlette, entertained, missed M. Dupont's arrival.

‘Madame is it, or Mademoiselle?'

‘Madame if it's of importance.' Efforts have been made to struggle with Mzz in French. Little velours hat: he noticed her staring at it and lifted it.

‘Err, my car is parked. You've no objection to err, some café?' There was a tolerably dismal specimen of bistrot down the side street.
Aux Merlets de Lorraine
.

‘What will you drink? Waiter, a quarter Perrier and err, I'll have a whisky.' Not a beer man or a pastis man. Petty bourgeois-man drinks whisky even if he loathes the taste: a Correct drink.

‘You smoke?' Packet of Camels, another affectation. Well-built enough. Shoulders a bit round, when he took his coat off. Tallish, quite a good head, brown hair, nice blue eyes when he made his mind up to take off the sunglasses. He rummaged in the pockets of a business suit for a lighter. Completely normal looking. A small tic puckered the bridge of his nose and between the eyes, giving him a moment's puzzled glare every few seconds, but it was nothing disturbing.

‘D'you mind telling me your real name?'

‘Demazis, Albert Demazis, it doesn't matter. Look, I'll give you a card; I take you into my confidence, but disregard these addresses and numbers will you? I'd rather you didn't contact me at home either.' He had to recover male superiority. ‘This must remain confidential.'

‘You have my word. If that wasn't good I wouldn't be in business.'