A Long Silence (19 page)

‘You had the funeral private,' Trix was saying – ‘Willy, there's a customer – and I don't blame you, I wanted to come, I would have come, but I don't blame you, one wants to be alone with one's grief, and the same time, love, when your friends stand by you it's a good thing sometimes, share your burdens and heaven knows they're heavy enough. Now isn't that fine, love, that's grand, you've come back to spend a bit of time in your old quarter and you'll find we don't forget our neighbours round here, love, say what you like, this is Amsterdam, hippies and the like we may have, dirty long-haired work-shy ruck it is but we're plain and we speak our mind, are you going to stay a day or so, love? – come on up tonight, do, and have a cup of coffee.'

‘I'm staying with my old neighbour downstairs – yes I hope I'll be here a few days – that reminds me I came in to get her
something. Oh, I'd love to come and have a cup of coffee, but I can't tonight, I'm afraid.'

‘Then tomorrow,' said Trix firmly. ‘You'll come tomorrow, and I'll show you the flat, it's all new done up, real nice it is, and we'll have a laugh over old times, remember the time love you said the steak was horse and poor old Willy got that mad?'

‘I'll come tomorrow,' promised Arlette.

‘You won't forget?' asked Trix humbly, meaning, ‘You won't be too toffee-nosed?'

‘I won't forget,' promised Arlette absolutely sincerely, and got a hug.

‘But I mustn't forget my errand, I want a sweetbread.'

‘Sweetbread, of course, I'd get it myself but,' whispering, ‘I've got to get back to the desk, love, that old mare there's waiting to tell me off, just ask Willy.'

‘Sweetbread?' said Willy, as though he had never heard of it, ‘Calves' sweetbread?' in disbelief, ‘now you know dear they all goes to France.'

‘Willy!' warningly from the cash desk.

‘Willy!' said Arlette, shocked.

‘Yes of course, schat, you know I'm only joking, it just happens I do have one, come on in the cold-room.'

‘No,' said Arlette – now that she was a widow, Trix wouldn't care for that! ‘Too much draught, and I trust you.'

‘Well, well,' said Willy, delighted at the thought of her suspecting him of wishing to kiss her in the cold-room, ‘that's a change, ha ha.'

‘Oh lovely, dear,' said Bates happily. ‘I do love them, and he always pretends they go to France. You know – he keeps them for black market customers, it took you to get one. Delicious – I'll enjoy that. You go upstairs and have a party, my pet, I'm sure you'll enjoy yourself.' And so she did.

Arlette had come to Amsterdam without any clear ideas at all. While in the train on the way up she had thought in a vague and probably dotty way about a number of people she knew in Amsterdam. People who would be pleased to have her to stay, who would give her excellent advice and sympathetic help – who would use their influence … that was it really; that
was why she had turned them all down one after another; they were all of them, vaguely ‘important people' with high intelligence, trained minds, logical reasoning powers and frequently with various useful official connections – hell, that was just what was wrong with them. She didn't want anything to do with the police, and supposed that was fair enough, but plenty of these people did not have anything to do with the police: what was wrong with them, then? She didn't know; just somehow that they would interfere with her muddled mind, make her do things that were probably very sensible but she didn't want to do them. They would see her problem backwards – worse still they would take it away from her and rearrange it till it was tidy: that was no good to her …

So what had she got? Old Mother Counterpoint. Kind certainly, and in her limited way shrewd enough. But not what you'd call very much of an ally, hm, for breaking up a logjam that had left all the policemen saying well now, mevrouw, we don't think there is much more that can usefully be done just at present, we think perhaps time will tell, and patience will be rewarded.

And who else did she know? Sympathetic neighbours in the quarter, who had known Piet and liked him – Trix and Willy, for instance! She tried to explain something of this to Dan and Hilary de Vries.

She had taken an instant liking to them, and hoped they liked her. They understood everything, and asked no unnecessary questions. They were perfectly relaxed; they had all the time in the world, did not jump about worrying because the ashtrays weren't emptied. The cooking was all done, except for the rice, which was going to get shoved on when everyone felt hungry and not before. In the meantime there were drinks, conversation, leisure: what more did anybody want? So they talked about cooking – like all artists Dan was interested in cooking, and held stern ideas about it. About the smell of sculptor's clay. About the way Arlette had had the flat arranged when it was hers: Hilary had never been able to find a good place to keep the sewing machine either – one kept tripping over it, tiresome thing. Nobody pushed her, nobody said,
‘Now you have to get yourself sorted out – you've got to get Organized.' Dan sat and wrinkled his odd brown bald forehead, cocked the head, picked at peanuts, switched the bright small bird's eyes up and down behind the steel rims. Hilary, a quiet-moving rather massive young woman with a square plain face, an untidy boy's hair and no dress sense, smoked and said almost nothing. She might have been one of those placid persons whose main purpose seems to be to provide a centre to other people who don't have one, if it had not been for her evident intelligence which shone out all round, and the careful courtesy with which she would always listen to other people's arguments before opening her own mouth.

Arlette found herself slowly loosening and untying, able to say something about the character of her husband, the way he had thought about things, the way he went about a problem.

‘He didn't believe in regretting things,' she said, ‘but I wonder whether he felt rather sad. At dying, I mean. He used to say he'd wasted incredible amounts of time and energy on things he'd never properly understood, and towards the end he remarked quite often that he thought he was beginning to understand but didn't feel at all sure of it.'

Dan nodded.

‘All artists like that if any good. Sit there wondering about the form of something and being hopeful that next time they really will get it right at last – ask what and they don't know. Not a thing one Knows. In the wrong job, your man.'

‘I wouldn't know that I'd agree,' said Hilary. ‘Why should there be a rule saying the police is a reserved occupation for people who'd never be any use at anything else? Who was it anyway that said the ruler of the ideal state would be an artist?'

‘Wouldn't a good artist have too much humility?' said Arlette. ‘Didn't Renoir die muttering something about he was beginning to get the hang of it?'

‘Auto-satisfaction enemy of art,' said Dan. ‘First truism and soonest forgotten. Arlette quite right, police investigation work of art. Attempt to impose form upon material. Chap died in the middle of it, like as not. Why shot after all? Came too close
perhaps to understanding something, we might be allowed to guess. Right. Official police mechanisms turning on computers, whirring away there, vastly astonished when no work of art disgorged at end, only vast quantities of irrelevant rubbish. You want to find out what happened,' to Arlette, ‘but you don't really have any interest in who did it?'

‘Not really – only like oh you know, what's the end of
Edwin Drood.'

‘Exactly. You're not feeling revengeful are you? – want to see the fellow hanged or something?'

‘I don't mind thinking about it – which isn't to say I could do it or allow of it's being done.'

‘Ha,' said Hilary.

‘I think,' said Dan, ‘you feel you have to make the effort to understand because you think that, hell, that's the least you can do.'

‘I can't feel able to go tracking anybody down, being an instrument of punishment or redress or something.'

‘I think perhaps you damn well should,' said Hilary.

‘Oh, nonsense,' said Dan. ‘What is she, the Four Just Men? – easy for you, you're not involved.'

‘Well,' asked Hilary, ‘why shouldn't I be involved? If Arlette allowed me to or asked me to I'd try my best to pin the bastard down, not hang about revelling in the tenderness of my conscience.'

‘Perhaps she will allow you to,' crossly, ‘and then you can put it to the proof.'

‘I don't know what I want,' said Arlette dolorously, ‘but perhaps I'll know better after I've made a start.'

‘Very well,' almost both together, ‘then let's make a start.'

‘I've nothing to go on at all, except some old notebooks.'

‘Right,' firmly, ‘then go and get them. No, on second thoughts, let's eat first. I'll go and do the rice.'

‘The women,' said Hilary, ‘will hang about being decorative while the Deity does the rice and gets beer. Do you want to pee or anything?'

‘I'm like the royal family,' said Arlette. ‘I never miss an opportunity.'

‘Do one for me while you're at it. I'll tidy a bit. Men do the cooking but the sink's left crammed with dirty dishes.'

Arlette was not a Janeite, and when describing ‘Old Mother Counterpoint' it was accidentally that she let slip the fact, which I had never known, that Piet used to call her ‘Bates'. Rather typical, though I do not think he can have been a true Janeite either, but it helped me to get behind Arlette's descriptions. Similarly, it was ‘Bates's' phrase about Mr Gandhi which allowed me to discover something about Danny de Vries. Arlette described him eating curry, lavishly, in corduroy trousers – not in the least like Mr Gandhi, and not very like Mr Kipling either! – and I was puzzled until I learned that both he and Hilary had lived in England, and that Hilary was in fact half English, which perhaps explains her name. It became at once much easier to see them, as well as to understand what happened. For Arlette, you must understand, was tiresomely vague about how things came to happen. Who was it for instance that began making jokes about the Four Just Men? I had thought perhaps it was Piet, presumably an Edgar Wallace fan as well as a Janeite, but no, it was of course Danny de Vries, and it was, I am inclined to think, Hilary that turned it from being a joke into a reality. The ‘moral question' was probably introduced by Arlette herself, who being French loves discussions about ethics, but it was Hilary, with her share of ‘British bloodymindedness' who began the weird idea, amusing me later with its undeniably comic overtones of ‘the committee'. One recalls the man (he must surely too have had English blood?) who waged, and won, single-handed warfare against General Motors and whose ‘committee' became known as Nader's Raiders. Very like the Four Just Men! Only the English, one feels certain, have the stubborn awkwardness, and the courage, as well as the lunatic poetic vision, to do such things. Though perhaps it took Arlette to include Bates as well as Willy the butcher in her schemes. Setting out like that to execute private justice – yes, it must have been Hilary who was at the bottom of that. Very English with her badly bobbed hair and dressed in sackcloth, very English in her artistic ‘hammering at things' – barbaric kinds of silver and copper
jewellery no doubt – and most English of all in her tenacious pursuit of the object.

The curry was very good, Arlette told me, but the coffee bloody awful. Perhaps that is English too.

‘We must find out,' said Danny firmly. ‘You're obviously the only person who can interpret these notebooks, as well as read your husband's writing, and translate this sort of shorthand, but perhaps an objective mind – after all we never knew him and that's sometimes an advantage – can place a construction on the interpretations that you could not arrive at in solitude. Like a crossword puzzle – you know, you sit gazing at something like, “Warmed-up rum issue in an African kraal?” utterly flummoxed, and Hilary for instance just glances over your shoulder and says straight out “Hottentot”.' Arlette looked blank as well she might.

‘There may be disconnected remarks in these notes,' explained Dan patiently, ‘which juxtaposed make up a clue to something. You said yourself that there were references to the watch which you felt sure meant something.'

‘Yes,' said Arlette, ‘I'm convinced that's at the bottom of it somehow. He broke his watch and there's a note on it. It was ridiculous because he said it was an extraordinary accident which could only happen to him. He was winding it or something and dropped it because his fingers were cold – it all hung together somehow he said, he'd lost his gloves or left them somewhere…'

‘Left them Where? Winding it or What? Hung together How?' Dan rapped it out in a really impatient, inquisitorial voice, and she realized she was blithering.

‘I'm sorry; I'll try and be as precise as I can. Left them on the train. Waiting for a tram, dropped the watch, it got wedged somehow in the tramline, got run over before he could stoop to pick it up, and he wrote in his book, “Odd how a stupid catastrophe can give one a notion”, and I wondered what notion, because he came home with a new watch and was mysterious about it. Very pretty watch it was, sort of antique. I gave it to Ruth, our daughter, as a souvenir.'

‘Where did that happen? By the station?'

‘Where he bought it? I don't know. He dropped it by the Koningsplein that's all I know.'

‘We write it all down,' said Dan, fetching a sketching-block and a felt pen, ‘and we look later for things which might fit together.'

‘I looked for any note to do with a watch. I found an odd thing about some private experiment or theory of his, to do with his criminology work, which said, “Tale about supposed watch stolen conceivably planted – what has it to do with me?” but I don't know what it means.'