The Widow (20 page)

‘Even me. I'm after nobody's job, I threaten nobody. Yet I'm surrounded by people plotting against me for fear I might push them off the narrow ledge. Granted there's nothing more obscurantist, cowardly and cringing than academic circles: I never fail to be astonished. You're paying the price of all this a little.'

‘I don't understand altogether, but I understand I have to go on. For both of us.'

‘
There's no discharge in the war
, as Kipling says.
Boots, boots, boots, boots, movin' up and down again
. One of the most terrible lines ever written, that.'

‘When will the women put a stop to this?' asked Arlette. ‘It's not going to be the libbers, the man-haters. One understands them, but they're such fools.'

‘Don't let them hear you saying it,' said Arthur.

Arlette walked out into a clear night, cold for October, the kind that in Central Europe tells you Russia is not far away. Strasbourg is closer to Prague than to Paris. The sky was saturated with stars, the air so vivid that she could forget the silts and oozes of the city, the marshy exhalations of her own and so many other bodies, the fear and the anxiety of the three hundred thousand soggy sardines buried down here in the mud.

Strasbourg is a couple of hundred metres above sea level; the Rhine has a long way to go before the mud-filled ditches of Holland. She didn't know how high; she knew it was the same height as the spire of the cathedral. But the Rue de l'Observatoire felt like the bottom of a canyon. She glanced through the railings into the garden, at the cupola of the observatory itself, silent and dark among the last of the leaves – the planes as usual holding out gallantly.

People! Why aren't you there observing? I should like to go over and knock on the door and climb up and take a look at something simply glorious like the Crab Nebula. They would tell her that it might look bright, but that in reality there was a thick blanket of filth caused by her and all her little cousins, and sorry, cousin. Stick to terrestrial observations, girl.

She climbed into the car. She had felt frightened coming out. It had cost her a lot to force herself through that door. She had come out like paint from an old dried twisted tube unwillingly, from the cosy nest of music and a smell of left-over veal curry. She had added some even-more-left-over tinned tunny in cream sauce. A classic marriage making a marvellous supper. Stay at home! Listen to Maria Callas! What songs the sirens sing.

She put the Lancia in gear; the new windscreen was already dirty. Through the Esplanade, over the Churchill bridge and the oily, glaucous canal, down into Neudorf.

Strasbourg is awfully flat. They built the cathedral on the only hillock there was. One superb result of this is that if you look back from twenty kilometres away the entire city disappears, and you only see the beautiful ship at anchor, naked in the mudflats. Neudorf is the flattest and muddiest, lying towards the Rhine, and up to a century ago tended to disappear under the Rhine each time the Alpine snows melted. Even today, Neudorf smells as though this still goes on.

It is not like the Meinau lying on its western flank. It is the old easterly high-road to the Rhine crossing. Here beside the Esplanade is Vauban's Citadel. Long before that, the city gate was that of the Ancienne Douane. Pedlars' road, Jews' road, bankers' road across to Augsburg, Nuremburg. On the river bank are the forges and mills of the Port du Rhin, and along the road you can trace the beginnings of the industrial revolution, the wooden sheds and hangars of artisan workshops still there between factories.

There is romance here, for those with a taste for it. Along the Route du Rhin the giant articulated road-freights come to rest, their lamps spattered with the mud of Turkey, Hungary,
Bulgaria, with enigmatic, cyrillic lettering along their sides. And on the top of the dyke built from the Alsace gravel pits, the Orient Express rattled by; the wheel spun; the Lady Vanished; Alfred Hitchcock smiled; Albert Demazis died. From the top windows in the Rue de Labaroche, where Albert lived, you can see this railway line.

Arlette drove down to the end, parked, crossed a footbridge over a tiny waterway, saw the embankment loom above her, followed a cyclists' path along it. Thin trees and bushes clothed the dyke. After a while her eyes grew accustomed to the starlight; she could see what she was looking for, a thin oblique path to the top. The railwaymen from the Port du Rhin station or the Neudorf freightyard rode their bikes along here, took short cuts down to their homes. Trembling from cold and fear she trudged up to the top, stood looking at the double row of silent metals, the worn path just wide enough for a bicycle or a man walking, his dog either in front, behind, or on the line.

Yes, there were brambles to trip on. Yes, if you stepped aside to avoid a muddy puddle there was loose ballast to slip on. If, anxious to miss these little traps in the dark you walked on the sleepers, the old baulks were worn and slippery, and set just too close together for a man's stride.

In the still air, the mutter of the city traffic now distant, one would hear anything coming a long way off. Would one though! Arlette, absorbed in detective pursuits, jumped back suddenly with her heart in her mouth. A loose locomotive had stolen round the curve silent as a ghost upon somebody absentminded. Its lamps gleamed on her with an evil, oily yellow light and it tooted angrily as the big diesel thudded past her. From the cab a man shook his head and tapped his finger on his forehead, with no smile to her upturned, aghast face. Christ! Her heart thumped and she felt sweat in her armpits. The loco – perhaps the same loco – thudded round, the curve out into silence, and in the silence a signal changed with a sharp snick and she jumped afresh. He might report her at the Port du Rhin a kilometre down. ‘Now there's another one on
the line same place. Stupid cow of a woman.' Arlette fled guiltily.

Accident – my god, yes. Only too damned easy; proved it to herself Most adequately, thank you.

Only what the hell was he doing on the railway line at all? One didn't walk, or stroll, at all comfortably even by daylight. At night the streets were quiet and one recognized the other dog-walkers; smiled, nodded, said good-evening.

Was that it? If one didn't want to be seen, recognized, maybe remembered by other dog-walkers would one …? And if one didn't, why didn't one? A stupid, weary, profitless speculation.

Her mind had strayed into preposterous Hitchcock situations: spies, white slaves, crimson Orient-Express fantasies. A mysterious parcel was jerked out of the window to the man waiting in the shadowy bushes. Cary Grant, most athletic, dropped skilfully off the rear platform, like the man with the crutch in
Double Indemnity
. Back through the trees, Barbara Stanwyck blinked her headlights, twice. Joan Fontaine's face was seen an instant at the window, mouth open for a scream just before the chloroform pad was slapped over it. Arlette shook her head and tramped back to the Rue de Labaroche. She pushed the bell labelled ‘Demazis'.

Pause, as of somebody getting up from in front of the television. ‘Yes?' barked the little metal grille.

‘Mrs Demazis? I'm sorry. I knew your husband, slightly. I wondered, could I have a word with you.'

Pause again, considering this, wondering what it meant. Curiosity overcame irritation. The intercom made a faint meaningless noise; the door clicked and buzzed. When she stepped out of the lift the landing door was open and the passage light was on: a woman stood in the doorway cautiously, peering to see who it could be late at night, ready to jump back and slam the door and ring the police to say there's an Intruder. Normal this tenseness, especially in a woman living by herself.

The woman waited. The lift-door slid shut and the lift trundled downward. Arlette was alone standing there.

‘Yes?' said the woman again.

‘I wanted again first to say I was sorry, and that I sympathize very much.'

‘That's kind. And?'

‘You see, Monsieur Demazis phoned me the day before. He didn't tell me exactly what he wanted; it was all a little confused. And when I read of his death like that I got a shock, naturally. And I wondered whether you know anything of it, and whether there was anything I could do to help.'

‘Excuse me but – who are you?'

‘My name is Arlette Van der Valk. I run an advice bureau in the town.'

‘An advice bureau?' thoughtfully, running her eyes doubtingly all over Arlette in that quick acute glance that prices your clothes, places you socially, knows to the hour when you had your hair last done. ‘How very odd.' She hesitated, running her fingernail to and fro across her large even teeth. ‘I think p'raps you'd better come in.'

‘I'm sorry; perhaps I'm disturbing you?' Timid in the little hallway, conventionally neat with dark blue moquette, reddish veneer panelling on the cupboards, brassbound lighting, a stag's antlers for one's hat.

‘No, no,' absently, moving on with quick supple movements over sturdy well-shaped legs. ‘I'm alone. I was only looking at the box, nothing interesting.' In the living-room dancers vaguely waved scarves and wiggled over a blurry singer–saxophone duet; it all vanished together and the woman said, ‘Please sit down,' politely.

Alsace comfort; furniture too large for the flat, too much wood with too much carving on it. Warm and bright, smelling clean and pleasant. It would be interesting to know where Albert had lived and how, but she had no time to stare about her. The woman sat opposite with the heavy supple gesture, face sharp and concentrated. A fraction shorter and thicker than herself, in a greyish silky buttonthrough frock half way to being housecoat. Leather slippers with a woolly fringe. Fair hair blonder and more metallic than her own, fading and
beginning to grey in much the same way, drawn loosely back and knotted in a bun. Large oval face that had been pretty, still was pretty, or handsome at the least; large well-shaped features, unpainted but for big pink lips heavy in their modelling. Big shell-shaped rimless glasses over big, perhaps magnified, protuberant eyes a vivid pale blue. Garnet studs in the pale fleshy lobes of the ears, and a necklace of garnet snowflakes to match: the throat was soft, heavy, fairly deeply lined. Cared-for white hands long and strong, unpainted. The smile was pleasant, and the face holding a little suspicion still, but mostly curiosity.

‘I'm afraid I don't at all get this thing about an advice bureau. What's that?'

‘Quite simple,' smiling. ‘You know how officials are; they send you somewhere else. People go round and round and end by eating their own tail. Discouragement leads to frustration. I find I can help, quite often.'

‘I can understand that. But my husband …'

‘I thought it odd myself. As I told him, I don't do divorce and I know nothing about finance. You see why I've come to you,' smiling.

‘Yes,' said the woman. She stared at the wall and said, ‘Yes,' again. ‘No, I can't account for that at all … You didn't actually meet him, did you say?'

It was rare, in Arlette's view of things, that one lost anything by telling the truth.

‘Yes, we met; briefly. I told him approximately what I could do and couldn't: he said he'd think things over. He gave me no hint of what was troubling him.' The woman was running her necklace along her lips.

‘And did you draw any conclusion?'

‘I didn't have enough to go on. An impression perhaps; he seemed nervous. I wondered whether he'd been working too hard. I thought you'd know more about that.'

‘The police asked that. They wondered I suppose whether suicide seemed a possibility. I mean, people do throw themselves under trains. All I could say was it didn't sound likely to
me. Working too hard – no. He was a very serious person, and he took his job very seriously. He was extremely meticulous, and if there was any small error in accounting somewhere he would get very annoyed until he found it.'

‘If he found some employee cheating perhaps, he might worry? Case of conscience?'

‘Oh no, he'd have gone straight to the boss. Why d'you ask?' suddenly. ‘Did he suggest something like that?'

‘Not in the least. I was casting about, looking for something that would fill the bill. You know, forced to sack the man but hoping I might help.'

The head turned to look at her, quite sharply.

‘I never heard of anything like that.'

‘People aren't always hardhearted. A man rang me yesterday. He wanted to employ a man with a prison record, and asked me to find out something more about him; family, background. I thought it nice of him. A lot just refuse, pointblank.'

‘Anything at work,' said the woman flatly, ‘Mr Tagland would know. He came to see me. To say, you know, how sorry he was and all that. Very nice man. And anything else, I'd know, wouldn't I?'

‘Of course.'

‘So I'm afraid I can't help you.'

‘It was just an idea,' politely, getting up to go. ‘Did he walk often on the railway line? Doesn't sound very safe.'

‘I've no idea. As I told the police. He used to take the dog out, walking.'

‘What happened to the dog?' The question seemed to disconcert her.

‘I sent it to the animal shelter. I never liked it. It used to destroy the furniture.' She seemed to think something else was needed.

‘It was an unhappy reminder.'

‘Yes of course. I mustn't keep you. Very kind of you to talk to me.'

‘I wouldn't worry any further. What's past is past.' She
brought Arlette as far as the lift, still putting the necklace between her fine teeth now and then, as though testing whether it were real.

Arlette got into the car. She glanced up while turning the key in the lock. The corner of a curtain was lifted. A thing most people did. Just checking up – idle curiosity.

Strange woman – hardish. Spoke about her husband with unusual detachment – a man who had been around the place, and now wasn't there any more. Like the dog, referred to as ‘it'. Perhaps she had simply made up her mind to carve out a new life for herself. Being suddenly widowed – Arlette was aware – isn't the easiest of experiences. Your husband isn't there any more. You are still relatively young, and fairly attractive.