The Widow (22 page)

‘What can I do for you, Madame?'

‘I'm trying to identify, and get hold of a boy of whom I know very little. His name is Michel, he does Greek, and I think he's in the final year.'

‘That's no problem. A child doing Greek is now a rare
species. This one I know well. Good pupil.' A turn half-left, a glance at a chart. ‘Won't be in yet. No class before ten.' The door opened, a youngish overseer bustled in with a draught, said, ‘Excuse me,' and dumped some dirty-looking papers on the crowded desk.

‘What's that?' with distaste, not looking.

‘That horrible Zissel.'

‘Is he there? Shoot him in. Excuse me a moment, Madame,' as an inky boy was produced and stood limp and boneless. ‘Zissel, you're a vile child,' mildly, big thumb turning over the dirty papers.

‘Your father – you're aware?' The papers were covered in exasperated scrawls in red ink. ‘Your professors are feeling ground down. So is your father. You're asking in fact for a monumental backhander. This work reeks of an immense capacity for not taking pains. You're putting a huge effort, Zissel, into persuading everybody that you are mentally deficient. I know you to be nothing of the sort. What have you to say?'

Shapeless mumble, totally inaudible.

‘I see.' Another glance at his chart. ‘You're free at four. Where does your mother work? You will go and wait for her, and you will give her this message with my compliments: will she have the kindness to come in and see me on her way home, and we'll have a talk. Concerning you. You have now three seconds to get from here to your classroom, while stopping on the way for a good wash. That will do, Zissel. I beg your pardon Madame, you were saying? Young Carlin who does Greek.'

‘Who would know him best?'

‘His work, his character? – makes no odds really. His principal professor is Monsieur Perregaux. Who is,' a swing half-right, to another set of charts ‘ … as well nothing before ten: he'll be preparing his courses,' picking up a telephone without looking at it, the thick fingers agile on buttons, ‘Perregaux there? Ask him could he manage to speak to a lady interested in one of his pupils. He can? Straight away if he likes. You'll find him at the foot of the stairs, Madame, by the
concierge's office. Not in the least; enchanted to be of any service.' Wonderful, she thought. A man who wastes no second asking who I am and what my business is, takes one glance, decides I'm serious, and fixes it all within the halfminute, with young Zissel thrown into the bargain.

The nine o'clock bell, far worse than any drumroll – even that for an execution – took her back to her childhood along with the smells and the corridors full of children in crowds parting amiably, vaguely to let her pass without even a glance. Just a Mum, come to complain to the Surge about her Zissel.

Monsieur Perregaux was easily recognized, an elderly gentleman with round-shouldered academic bearing, this one a real figure from her childhood, the teacher with a master's degree and a doctorate, of terrifying erudition about the Bacchae of Euripedes. Unexpectedly sharp eye, shooting her an amused smile.

‘Young Michel? A splendid boy. The rare bird at any time, rarest now when Mathematics is the New Latin. Has it struck you as funny? We based our criteria for excellence on the ability at the Latin Theme, we abandoned all that with horror as outdated élitism, and we now do exactly the same thing, with algebraic formulae substituting for Ciceronian pedantries. Both the same Chinese. Michel is one of the few to whom scholarship has meaning. Asks what the job is, instead of what it pays. I'm tempted to say he knows more about the Achaeans than I do.'

‘Hot-house plant?'

‘Oh yes, we still have our class preparing for Advanced Schools rather than that preposterous university, that Social Security knocking-shop with its courses in Envy and Calumny, the Gold Brick and the Polished Apple.' The old boy was funny, but she wasn't getting nearer Michel.

‘Will you tell me what he's like?'

‘I'm an old man. I no longer care what I say. I'm not to be relied upon. They're retiring me at the end of this year. High time, where they're concerned. Not modern, you know. Give me a chiming clock and a lot of polished speeches, forty years
of devoted collaboration, but glad to get rid of me. Hm, maybe I will tell you. But I've remnants of prudence. Who are you; why do you seek information from me?'

‘I have a partly professional, partly friendly interest in a girl of his age, not one of your students, who has or had a friendship and perhaps an emotional relationship with this boy Michel. She's a little secretive and evasive about it. That's more or less all.'

‘Is it?'

‘All right. She's under some suspicion of handling or possessing drugs. Not officially, not a police matter. I've seen no sign of her using drugs, but it can be difficult to detect and I've not seen much of her. Getting to know something of her friends and associates is a step that's obvious. There's no point, quite frankly, in asking any official of the Lycée a question like that. Their interest is in hushing things, in keeping the parents from getting anxious. I've no complaint to make of that.'

The old man laughed silently.

‘A social disgrace,' he said. ‘Enquiry likewise fails as to how many have lice in their hair. Or gonorrhea. And all these people we have now? – school doctor, nurse, social and psychiatric counsellors – there seems no end to them.'

‘All pretty superficial to my mind. And whatever I did would be not enough or too much. Make a polite murmur, the lips would be sealed. Shocked expressions, and they've never heard of such a thing. Push a bit harder and there'd be a hullabaloo, which I don't want.'

‘And would the evidence be worth much? The children don't confide in these people, whom they view as the tame auxiliaries of authority, meaning repression. Nor I may say do they confide in me, but then I don't hang about sucking up to them. Well, well, I've answered my own question.

‘Drugs? Yes of course. Shows up in their work. An anxiety, a febrile showiness. These children suffer from anxiety, and there is great pressure upon them to acquire social prestige – success in an examination. I've never paid much attention to
it in consequence. Use of hashish and opiates is a very old oriental tradition. Some modern pharmaceutic products, nasty things, adults all have cupboards full, doctors hand them Out to all and sundry, how could you expect the children to do otherwise. Doesn't thus shock or surprise me. I've two or three in my classes mixing sedatives and stimulants. The parents wouldn't thank me for voicing my opinions.

‘Michel? – no. He's not all that gifted intellectually; I've had lots much brainier. A good power of synthesis, a flexible gift of expression, a readily flowering imagination: not however the infant phenomenon. His precocity of development is shown more in an unusual sensitivity of observation, and a surprising maturity. Highly disciplined and a sharply focused ability to concentrate. What shall I say? – taken in isolation none of these talents would appear as exceptional. Taken together they're to my thinking of much promise. His analytic powers are lower. His philosophy professor has not as high an opinion of him as I have.

‘Oh make no mistake, he's bright. And on the other hand I'm not seeing him as the young Proust.

‘What he wants, he'll get. Tough of fibre, close of texture.

‘For the rest, a quiet gentle boy. Can't abide brutality or cruelty. Patroclus rather than Achilles. Defensive, naturally, about this dreamy sensitive side. Puts on a bit of a tough act with the motorbicycle oafs. Repressive about romanticism. Suffers. Hum, I'm saying no more.'

‘I couldn't have done better in a month of Sundays, as the English say.'

‘Flattering of you. Well, I must go think about my courses.'

‘How do you find the girls?'

‘The girls? Ah – I enjoy them greatly. I like to smell their beautiful clean hair. When spotty and unwashed of course, even more pathetic than the adolescent male. And no less vulnerable. Ah me. The elderly pedagogue is not always pederast. Like Theseus, I've a taste for Amazons. Well: to shed light is my calling in life; I hope I've been of use: one so seldom is.'

Follow the Route de Colmar out past the Meinau, and the tentacular suburbs of South Strasbourg seem to stretch on forever along a narrow congested road blocked with traffic lights every thirty seconds. The boring twin burgs of Illkirch-Graffenstaden have long given up the pretence of being villages. The housing promoters who have snapped up the last fields are lyrical about greenery and country air at ‘less than fifteen minutes', means of transport unspecified, from the town centre. Very like the naked girls on television, ecstatic about the new shampoo they've just discovered.

Arlette could not understand it at all. ‘Isn't it from this direction that the revolution will come?' she asked Arthur hopefully. ‘How can they go on and on and on swallowing ever bigger and more blatant lies? Is the public so stunned, so brutalized and anaesthetized it simply does not notice? What is the limit of gullibility? How can anybody, ever, vote for any political party whatsoever? Who is it that sits starry-eyed sucking up the goo? The threshold of credibility has long ago been passed.'

Arthur smiled kindly. Dear girl! He got a smack for that: no male superiority here please.

‘Poor France. They're even selling them cornflakes now.'

‘Kindly answer the question.'

‘There are seventeen answers, all interlocking. The market is continually renewed: the young simpletons replacing the cynical old. People are not more educated; they're if anything less so. Children look at publicity because it's more fun, they think rightly, than what goes on the rest of the time. More imaginative, technically more inventive, catchier rhymes and tunes. The copywriters don't expect to be taken seriously. They want only that you will remember the name of the product as you totter glassily along the supermarket shelf, and
pop it in your basket. Politicians are there because of a void nothing else fills. Having once proclaimed that the people is sovereign and decides things they can sit back, knowing perfectly that the people which has been prevented from deciding anything whatever all these years isn't going to begin now. What more was there? Like everyone else, before reaching the end I've forgotten the beginning. What are you asking me for, anyhow? Your thoughts are as good as mine.'

Halfway down that long long road Arlette turned to the right, dodged about to avoid two more suburbs begging her to come and live in them, squeezed through an autoroute underpass and popped out in exurbia, otherwise known as Geispolsheim.

There are two. This was Geispolsheim-Gare, a commuter railway station around which has grown up a settlement of coyly rustic villas. Once you get out of this, with some difficulty, there is a quite countrified little road where you can see real fields, and there are crab-apple trees along the verges, of which motorists complain. Two kilometres farther is the village of Geispolsheim. Only a few years ago quiet and pleasant, with farmyard muckheaps and a steeple with a stork on it. The fields are filling fast with bungalows, and the airport looms disquietingly, and loudly. But there are still fields, and a tatty gate, and a notice needing repainting which says Taglang Horticultural Enterprises. A jumble of small old dirty glasshouses; a shiny new large glasshouse; a big rectangle of concrete with rusty sort of pillars sticking out of it, announcing one even bigger. The Enterprises were making plenty of money.

She had overshot: reversed, entered where it helpfully said Entrance, and came to rest on a boggy patch made muddier by several cars. If they're making that much money they could well invest in a few truckloads of gravel, thought Arlette, changing her shoes.

A high hedge, neatly clipped, and trees, and a fingerpost saying Office, through-here, and she turned the corner and found a bungalow, very large and super and stinkingly
nouveau riche, with the New England clapboard bit tacked on to the California-Spanish bit, swimming-pool, patio, terrace, orange trees in gay wooden tubs and lemon trees in massive earthenware, Biot style.
Lots
of money being made. All this in the middle of the humble fields of Geispolsheim, and a V6 Jaguar, and a silver Porsche Carrera, and by gum a Maserati too, in Italian racing red. She felt hit on the head.

The office was the old part of the bungalow, now long outgrown, the former kitchen and living-room now tarted up with lavish Italian tiles and terrazzo, with many plants in pots. A girl with several telephones bade her good morning and said she'd try and find Mr Taglang.

He was a rumpled, friendly man in his forties; sports jacket, check shirt, flannels and cowboy boots, with an easy-going manner. She gave a rambling tale about business relations with Mr Demazis, said she'd learned of his sudden death with a shock – left a couple of loose ends.

‘Left a couple here too,' making a lip. ‘I'm the technician – he ran the financial end. Pretty snarled up, without him, but we're getting straight. What brought you out here then?'

‘Oh, just vulgar curiosity, I guess. Was seeing somebody off at the airport.' Hands in pockets, legs crossed, casual; she hoped she wasn't overdoing it. The simple truth wouldn't do here. Lying was unsimple, and she must try not to embroider.

‘What you in, then?' No suspicion. Like her, just vulgar curiosity.

‘Oh, house property. You know. And any business is interesting, isn't it? One always takes a look. You're doing pretty well – I say with admiration.'

‘Got to know how to find the right corner, specialize in the right thing,' with an attractive enthusiasm. ‘Like to take a look?'

‘Very much indeed.'

‘I don't try to do the garden-centre thing. Matter of fact I don't do outside stuff at all, hardly. Always was interested in indoor plants. Got to have a gift for them. This market's hardly scratched. Should see the stuff they have in Holland:
ten times the varieties we have here. But we're catching up. Take a couple of basics, and work on ornamental varieties. Azaleas say, or hibiscus. Fella down the road has half the poinsettia market in Europe. The ecology kick helps us. Grow your own thing huh, even in a little flat. Coffee bean, pineapple top, avocado stone. People living in ghastly conditions, want something natural, something beautiful. Dies, as it nearly always does, they can replace it. Cheap.'