The Widow (6 page)

‘Very well,' said Arthur, ‘we agree; a commonplace. People unable to face their responsibilities, or inhibited from doing so. Here's one that's worse, so shocking that it was front-paged. A deliberate avoidance of responsibility, to such a
degree that the witnesses, amounting to a dozen, are being prosecuted for failure to assist a person in danger.

‘A mining district in Lorraine. Pre-war workmen's cottages in a clump. These are of poor quality; the point is important. Thin-walled wretched things: you hear the neighbours' light-switch snap on. An old woman known to everybody – she'd lived there forty years – was battered to death by ruffians, presumably for her moneybox. What is not banal is that the battering took over an hour and was extremely noisy. The old woman fought. There were screams, crashes, shouts for help. After darkness fell – and upon her – loud noise continued; the furniture was all smashed.

‘Now allowing for exaggeration, for a perfunctory, confused and superficial report possibly cut, and clumsily, by some sub-editor, this is a little bit much. Wouldn't you say?'

‘Not all that exaggerated, alas, or the bystanders wouldn't have been charged with non-assistance.'

‘That's quite an ironic touch: these people are most indignant. They've been charged, while the local gendarmerie haven't yet caught up with the actual authors.'

‘Appalling,' said Arlette, ‘but only too frequent. A hundred cars will hurtle past an obviously hurt person, covered with blood at a road verge. Each saying “Catch me getting involved – not on your nelly!”'

‘These people were the neighbours. Loitering around the block. Who, says the reporter sarcastically, one and all hurried off saying they had to go and see about the soup.'

‘Frightened of the ruffians.'

‘What – a dozen able-bodied men? Miners! An old woman they all knew, whose screams are setting the whole quarter ablaze.'

‘There's something undisclosed, not brought forward,' she decided. ‘The old woman was a violent drunk, who often screamed and threw things. Or a moneylender, as in Dostoyevsky. Whom everybody hated and nobody would regret. Or perhaps a witch with an evil eye. Who looked at the cow
and the cow died. Nothing's too far-fetched for a Central-European country dorp.'

‘Who are you telling! And you must have put your finger somewhere near the truth. But it's beside the point. I was illustrating a flagrant phenomenon, by your own comment as common as a drunk shooting a red light. Individual and collective avoidance of responsibility.'

They had got as far as the Orangery, a pretty urban park in the romantic style of the early nineteenth century. They sat by the lake-side. Canada geese waddled about. A swan looked evilly at Arlette. Go away, she said, hateful beast.

‘“There was a young man from St John's,”' said Arthur lazily. ‘Irish poet at Cambridge University. “Who wanted to roger the swans. No no, said the porter, Make free with my daughter, But the swans are reserved for the dons.”'

‘Being rogered by the swans is how I see it. I always did sympathize deeply with Leda.'

‘You've a point there,' said Arthur.

There is a pretty pavilion in eighteenth-century style, supposedly built for the Empress Josephine. Orange trees are ranged along its terrace. Behind, a splendid lawn flows to a perspective of trees now ruined by the ugly silhouette of the new building for the European Parliament.

‘Cars are absolutely forbidden in the park,' said Arlette crossly, ‘and in they sail. I asked a cop once to intervene. He just grinned.'

‘The bourgeois,' said Arthur sententiously, ‘Are constitutionally incapable of getting out of a car to walk a hundred paces. It might, you see, diminish their self-importance. Responsibilities are evaded by the administration, in this case the Municipality of Strasbourg, which characteristically fails to enforce its own rule, for the convenience of a few parasites.'

‘There's the heart of the matter,' angrily. ‘How can you blame the people, wretchedly educated and brought up to depend on the whims of their government for avoiding responsibility? Right up to the rather ugly Palace of the socalled
Elysée, that same appalling government lies, cheats, and thieves. As do all the others.'

‘So we try,' said Arthur tranquilly, ‘to rebuild. In a small, humble, individual, personal fashion. This is what we've been talking about for two hours.'

‘A telephone, number? It's really of very little use. Alcoholics Anonymous, SOS, the Battered Wives, the Sally Army. All more or less soup kitchens.'

‘Yes. Anonymous and paternalistic. Old-fashioned. Reformed drunks who got religion. But a name? – followed up by a tiny office – perhaps in the Rue de l'Observatoire? A small advertisement in the local paper? It needs thought. Arlette Van der Valk, the Policeman's Widow? Might be more fetching than your own maiden name. Bear it in mind; turn it round now and again.'

‘Still sounds very old-fashioned,' complained Arlette. ‘Philip Marlowe, the Warm-Hearted private eye.'

‘There's something,' quite seriously, ‘in that notion too.'

Arlette did not know, often, why she did things. Followed profoundly rooted instincts, and worked it out later. She had been quite certain – most decided about it – that she would not marry again. Now she'd changed her mind.

Oh well, logic … Arthur was logical, with that neat Barbara-Celarent-Darii way of thinking. She wouldn't be much of a sociologist.

One decides suddenly to remarry, on Tuesday fortnight. That's a long way away, practically never. But one inescapable piece of logic, even for her, is that suddenly it is tomorrow. At this moment she would have liked to run away. This was all very wearisome. But one didn't bunk rather than face
the consequences of frivolous and probably drunken decisions.

There's been the wife of Policeman Van der Valk, a long apprenticeship. Making things hard for herself as usual. Storming off, declaring that France is and always has been the bitterest most obstinate enemy of tolerance, liberty and progress: who repealed the Edict of Nantes, hey? And where had Descartes gone, and all the Huguenots? Holland of course. She'd fallen topplingly in love with Holland, much more than with Piet. This was the dawn of the revolution, when to-be-alive-was-very-bliss.

Wore off quick, to be sure. Amsterdam is just another narrow-minded provincial town. Some silly things she said, and some she did, caused catty comment, damaged, said Piet sorrowingly, his career. There'd been the episode with the Political Police, which she'd called a Gestapo; never altogether shaken off. Holland is a family, said the Political Police reprovingly, and you're an Outsider.

Piet was a just and a good man for twenty years and what did you ever do? You bore the children, and brought them up, but what did you do?

So then we'd had Arlette-the-Widow. Who lived a life of bourgeois comfort; well, relatively. Worked herself into a well-greased rut, quite certainly: both a body and a mind trundling along the same tramline. Selfishly cultivating that most delicious of all relationships, so comforting, so consoling, an amitié amoureuse. With Arthur Davidson, a gentle and considerate person whose mild eccentricities were an amusing antidote against boredom.

And now Tuesday fortnight had almost arrived, and poor old Arthur didn't know what he was getting into.

Nonsense: he knew very well. So did she. They had discussed it.

‘Does the bedroom window,' asked Arthur ‘get left closed or open at night?'

‘Open. Because I am not French any more.'

‘Yes, the main trouble with the French has always been
finding everywhere else, outside the dear old Hexagon, such a bore. Canada say, or India: huge boring meaningless places, not worth the trouble. Napoleon flogged Louisiana, for a shatteringly trivial sum, simply because it was too much of a bore.'

‘Quite right. But so has France become a bore.'

‘Agreed,' said Arthur. ‘Nothing could be more of a bore, or deader, or more of a menace, than the Nation-State, and the French so-called, cannot possibly be more tiresome than the so-called British.'

Tuesday fortnight arrived. She had managed to lose a good deal of weight but threw it all away drinking too much champagne.

‘Do you still feel rather French?' enquired Arthur.

‘Do you still feel rather English?'

‘There's a sound Turkish proverb to the effect that the Fatherland is where the grub is.'

‘My dear boy …'

The painters in the new flat were very dilatory, as they always are. Arlette spent much time being sweaty on a stepladder. Both the living-room and Arthur's workroom were a horrible brothel. She wanted a workroom of her own: Arthur's Detective Agency, despite being a bore, was in fact occupying her mind a good deal. They went to Venice for a belated honeymoon. Arthur asked about the Detective Agency a couple of times and she said she was thinking about it.

She found a pleasantly large amount in her bank account: that lovely Dutch gulden got higher and higher. She found too a large and beautiful plank of hardwood, and a country carpenter who put legs on it for her. She got an extra telephone, and after some thought a tape recorder. She didn't know quite what she wanted, except that it wasn't a lot of female junk like ironing boards and sewing-machines.

Arthur paid small attention to her doings, being greatly preoccupied with his own workroom. There were far too many books: there always are. Nor was he allowed in ‘her
room'. This he found quite normal: she had to have somewhere to be perfectly private. But there came a moment when she had to take him into confidence.

‘Come on in my room … Don't be a fool; of course you can smoke the pipe. Sit down … Look, I've decided that on the whole I do like the Detective Agency, but I haven't the least idea how to go about it and you must help me.'

‘Advise and consent.'

‘Not quite right. But something like that.' Arthur was not yet broken in to her elliptical thinking. ‘A little notice in the paper,' she explained. ‘Not an advertisement. Kind of a lapidary phrase, that is understood instantly. Like Our Business is Business, meaning don't ever think we're in this for anything but money.'

‘Now I see,' solemnly, teasing her. ‘Advice and consolation. Tea and sympathy.'

‘Stop it. Like counsel sounds oh, fiscal and financial and all things I decidedly am not.'

‘Aid.'

‘Old clothes and canned milk for earthquake victims.'

‘Personal and family problems.'

‘And a lot of people are afraid of the expense. Must put that consultation costs nothing. Not that word though – sounds like fortune-tellers.'

‘Let me work on this.'

‘And when you get people in – how, incidentally, do you get them in? Where do you put them? And if one uses the house for professional consultancy, isn't there some special tax, and won't the rent double?'

‘Leave these problems to me; they're technical. Suitably vague definitions are my bread and butter. My esteemed colleague Monsieur de Montlibert who is Professor at the Faculty, doesn't in the least do the same work as myself, but we're both called sociologists. Now I can get you cover for your activities. As for the house – will you allow me to help, on this sort of thing?'

‘Of course: I couldn't by myself.'

‘Right; I fixed the landlady: she's quite agreeable to people coming here. A professional colouring is provided by me. Never mind ologies, but my work is crimino and peno and generally sociopatho in nature. From the official viewpoint, you are a kind of radiologist: you screen people. You build up files: they're a valuable research tool.'

‘But isn't this most immoral? To tempt people's confidence, and use the information?'

‘I'm delighted to hear you say it,' said Arthur dryly. ‘Best possible guarantee. Your files will be confidential, of course. All files are immoral when used to menace individual privacy. The Council of Europe has twice recently exhorted its members to adopt standardized legislation against abuse of computerized information. My statistically-minded colleagues, who just love computerized information, carry a heavy load of responsibility. No, you're a watchdog. In a filthy jargon phrase, you launder the files. I'll show you how; the technique is simple. Identity stuff doesn't appear.

‘Now the flat uses another simple technique. We've no elevator to pay for, can afford a few electronic whatnots. That wide corridor at the entrance: we partition that, with a solid inner door to the apartment. Between the two doors is a filter, an airlock – a little waiting-room really.

‘Your street door opens to a ring,' explained Arthur, seeing she looked puzzled. ‘Sets off a buzzer. That's for people who press your bell simply to have access to the house. The door on the landing, the present apartment door, can be made to open to a push, changing the buzzer tone. Assume somebody now in the airlock, where pressure within and without is equalized. You have an inner door,' making a drawing.

‘I see. It might be the butcher's boy, or a man selling insurance.'

‘Or a friend. So you switch off your buzzer, and glance through the Judas. If you've a customer you bring him in the office.

‘But you're not the Town Hall Enquiries: you don't want just anybody dropping in. I think your advert carries a phonenumber.
When that rings it could set off a recorded message, after which it records an incoming voice, until so-and-so puts the phone down.'

‘Why can't I just answer the phone?' asked the well-trained Doctor's wife.

‘My dear girl, are you a footman? You're in the bath, or walking your dog. This is standard for anyone without a fulltime secretary.'

‘Isn't it over-sophisticated?'

‘I agree that offices bristle with these devices and it's easy to have too many, but you must have some protection. Drunks, lunatics, anonymous obscenities, possessive husbands, neurotics of every sort. Come to think of it,' said Arthur, suddenly serious, ‘when alone here you must have some physical protection too. You may be making some undesirable acquaintances.'