Criminal Conversation (21 page)

My father did not notice such things. He had himself plenty of clothes, old but good for a lifetime. When on my twelfth birthday I begged and prayed for a bike he gave me one, and saw that it should be a good one. I think it is because of that bike and the rolled-gold fountain pen that I remember my father, quite unjustly really, with more kindness than my mother. She could be extremely kind, but I wished sometimes that she would go to heaven with Guy de Fontgallant – a little boy as I recall from an exceedingly wealthy and snobbish family – and leave me in peace.

I was not allowed to make friends with poorer children who wore boots, whom my mother said had common accents and very likely ringworm.

With girls, of course, I had no contact whatever. Girls did not approach expensive Jesuit schools. I was eighteen and had won a scholarship to the university before I met and spoke with a girl of my age. That, van der Valk, must seem extraordinary, and unlikely, to you, but I assure you that it is so.

In fact I seem, on looking over these pages, to get a slightly bitter taste. That is fair, for I had, despite many solitary pleasures, an unnecessarily harassed and painful childhood.

There is a sense of needless stupidity in that combination of ‘standing' and cheese-paring, as there was in my father's dislike of bothering himself punctuated with bits of sudden, perhaps shame-stricken generosity. Certainly all that widened the gap.

My father died in my first year at the university. He had quarrelled, I believe, with his family, of whom I recall nothing but a portentous bearded brother and a faded sister at the funeral. I felt little emotion, perhaps a vague pity. The gap had got too wide. I could spare only one day away from lectures and from Amsterdam.

My mother went to live with her sister, my aunt Mathilde, in Voorburg, just outside The Hague: my aunt's husband, regarded as a high candidate for colonial honours, had died in Djakarta in administrative service while quite young. Really my mother did this to get back to the atmosphere where she felt at home; the sisters drank tea and talked about the good old days, with their friends, for Voorburg is full of pensioned colonial widows as well as old gentlemen who have retired, as full of honours as their houses are of tiger-skins and Balinese dolls. But I was given to understand that this was done out of altruism, to save every penny and further my education. I was not impressed, nor particularly grateful. I lived in a respectable lodging house – how well I remember it – in Amsterdam, near the Museum, in the Jan Luykenstraat. I had henceforward money for books, a few clothes, and even some cheap amusements if I cared to discover any.

I had been sent to the university to study humanities – Arts, as the faculty is named, pleasantly but vaguely. For my teachers had said that languages living and dead were my only real strength. True to principle my mother had not the remotest idea of steering me towards some career that would earn me a living. Nor had I; so little notion of reality had I at eighteen that I planned to get a ‘good degree' and enter the Diplomatic Service.

Fish, still the only friend I had, despised ‘Arts' though even better at the disciplines than I was: I was throughout school the eternal second to him. He was going to read medicine, and it was at his house, halfway through my first year, in the first flush of independence, that I was bitten by the bug. Theo Visser, then professor of materia medica, had come to dinner, and after a very good meal, Mrs Gold's excellent coffee, Papa's wonderful Cuban cigars, and armagnac brandy, old Theo got so lyrical about medicine – the two boys sitting enraptured, both mouths slightly open – that I determined then and there to change over. Forgotten the good degree in languages and the Diplomatic Service. I dawdled out the rest of the academic year reading all the medical books I could lay my hands on, went to no more lectures than were necessary in order
not to get sacked altogether, and at the beginning of the next semester, to my mother's anguish, I plunged into ‘pre-medical'.

That was the year of Munich. Papa Gold, no fool, was settled in Canada three months later, and Fish, my only anchorage, with him. Mrs Gold cried a little when I went to say goodbye. She was fond of me, and I think understood me well enough. She gave me a cheque for a hundred pounds – a hundred pounds! – from her own account, and Papa gave me a signet ring which I still wear. Fish volunteered three years later for the Canadian Army. He was killed in Holland, ironically, just at the time of the Liberation. I never saw him, though I was in Amsterdam throughout the whole war.

There you are, van der Valk, my boy. You will be, I think, in your late thirties – old enough to remember the years before Munich and the years of the depression, the years when things like schools were extraordinarily old-fashioned in comparison with other countries, the last years of Holland's long isolation, and comfortable prosy dozy sleep that was to end only in the violent breaking-in of reality in the May days of nineteen forty.

But we may as well go on, and even perhaps get all this thrashed out in one sitting. Beatrix is expecting me for dinner, but I do not intend to go. I am proposing to do what I have never done, instead. I am going to eat at a cheap ‘lunch-room' restaurant, where there is music and a huge menu full of strange things, and people order the oddest combinations, like cold Russian egg salad with fried potatoes. They are open till late at night. I think I shall enjoy this. I will take a pocket book with me – a Simenon, for instance – and read it at the table, and drink beer. What on earth would anyone say who knew me, to see Doctor van der Post, who has certainly as high an income as any specialist in Holland, sitting in a lunch-room at ten at night, eating Russian eggs with chips, drinking beer and reading a Simenon printed on lavatory paper, rested on his plate's edge?

What would you say?

Would it please you to see me rub shoulders with the people of Amsterdam, those very ‘people' my mother found rather shocking? You are one of them yourself. You see, I am not so stupid after all.

My youth, yes. The twentieth birthday, big landmark. I was halfway through ‘pre-med' and worried at not losing my virginity. In these days, no boy has any difficulty finding a girl of his own age to sleep with. In England they wear little badges, these girls, to proclaim their accessibility, and have contraceptives in their schoolbags. You recall, the yellow golliwogs? – rather a poetic conception. Or contraception, as you prefer.

But then… Any town more provincial and puritan than the prewar Amsterdam is difficult to imagine. To find a girl to go to bed with, even at twenty, smoking a big pipe and using ridiculous medical jargon, was a formidable undertaking.

Naturally, there was the old quarter. It is nowadays a tourist attraction. Any young girl, even alone, can walk giggling through narrow alleys, peering with a greedy choky sensation at the ‘girls behind the windows'. And any boy with a pound note in his pocket can push the door and see the ‘girl' of his choice get up bored to draw the curtain, putting down her book or her knitting with a sigh, languidly undoing her skirt, fumbling at the zipper with her free hand already held out for her money.

But before the war, you must know, the old quarter was a place of terror and legend. Nobody well-brought-up dreamed of going near it. Even policemen went there in couples. There were tales of drunken seamen robbed and knifed by a banditry that went to ground in the rabbit-warren of attics and cellars. Legend went further. In the minute, stinking alleyways there was cholera and sleeping sickness, and in those attics where, opening a tiny window, you might get a breath of tropical scents there were even, it was whispered, lepers hidden. Amsterdam, recall, was the great European port for the Far East, the visible, tangible, smellable link with Holland's empire, which was a tropical archipelago the size of the United States.

In fact, even as medical students, puffed with bravado, we shook in our shoes when we first came to the Binnen Gasthuis, the old hospital that stands still on the demarcation line between the old
quarter and the prim city, and has fingers, and toes, that are dabbled in the blood and pus of both.

There were women students, of course. Fewer than now, but quite a huddle in the literature and history faculties. They were mostly plain, with spots and stringy hair, and tended to come from earnest provincial families. They were stiff and proper, and lived boarded out with an uncle in the big city. Two, however, met my standards, which were exacting.

For I was a great admirer of beauty. A devotion to the senses, to the curving sweeping line, to nineteenth-century romanticism. Music as yet I knew nothing of. (My family was, in retrospect, strangely philistine. My mother, a great talker about books and pictures, never once took me to a concert or a gallery.) Books, however, there had always been in the house, and during my last lyceum years I had discovered Wilde and Beardsley, the Bakst and Benois designs for the Russian Ballet, the nudes of Titian and Giorgione, the verse of Théophile Gautier, and I was something of an adolescent aesthete. These two girls came within the definition of what was acceptable to such.

Marie was blonde, with a little tilted nose, quiet and neat, and rode on an expensive bicycle from her parents' superior residence near the Zoo. Father was some departmental secretary in the municipal administration, a functionary of quite a grand sort. Marie was very much a little Sainte N'y Touche, her nose somewhat in the air. She was conscientious, went to all lectures, and took careful notes in a neat but stupid rounded backhand. I sat just behind her, did my best to smell her hair, and dared say no word to her.

Alida I admired less; she was less well shaped. Taller, a little clumsier, with a suspicion of hair on upper lip and sturdy calves as well as her strong forearms. She had long brown hair with a reddish tinge, strong black eyebrows, long greenish eyes that gave vitality to her face, and a very pretty mouth. She may have been the only girl in the university to wear lipstick, then thought distinctly fast and decidedly common. She came indeed very nearly from the ‘people'
and lived in a flat-chested apartment at the very limit of Amsterdam-South, a district only just built.

I followed Marie home after daring, after some abject failures, to speak some conventional greeting, to which she replied politely with a pleasant smile. And one weekend I dressed myself as killingly as I knew, polished shoes and hair, more or less with the same product, and knocked trembling at her door. She opened it herself to my relief, looking surprised. I stuttered out some lame suggestion for the cinema; she looked even more surprised.

“Oh… Well I'd like to, very much, but I'm afraid no, thank you, I can't.” I must have looked stupefied as well as unhappy. “I'm afraid my father wouldn't let me. I'm afraid I have to go now.” She shut the door hastily, and I fled, discomfited. I never got the little mystery solved, since Marie continued to smile politely and say good morning, and even asked once for details of some missed lecture. The fluster may have been due to the cinema, or to my being Catholic, for I was of good family, presentable, less awkward thanks to the Golds, not too grindingly poor, and not at all a wild student. However, both the cinema and the Catholicism might have made me untouchable to the sort of strait-laced bourgeois family by no means uncommon then in North Holland.

I now saw Alida in a different light, and was not discouraged for long. I now saw Marie as a trifle insipid, and Alida seemed less earthy to my fastidious eye, and the lines of her figure were athletic…

I did not, after my rebuff, ring at any more doors, but I hung around her district at night, saw her occasionally running errands, and discovered her father to be a head buyer in the big department store in the town, from which came her slightly loud winter coat and smart cheap shoes. That shop had Catholic management, and some of the Protestants refused to buy there, despite the wide choice and low prices.

I did not pluck up the courage to speak till a lucky day when we asked simultaneously at the reading-room desk for the same book - Brunetière, I recall. I was as astonished to find myself a success with
Alida as a senator from Mississippi would be to wake up and find himself President. She was simple and spontaneous. She never made me feel stupid or awkward; on the contrary, with her I felt an easy companionship. We sat in the park on sunny days, went rather hot and sticky to the cinema, and took long walks through the streets during the last nights of the last pre-war summer. Our pleasures were very simple, and as simply I loved her.

Of course to trace the course of all this in detail would be very boring. But in my youth as in my childhood there are salient moments which you will notice.

The pension in the Jan Luykenstraat, which was proper, and where no girl would have been allowed, was clearly impossible, and with ‘adult' daring I moved to another, scruffier, much gayer, where the food was much worse but the company much better; where, indeed, I stayed throughout my student days. Everybody had his own pot of jam, with a label stuck to it, and one frequently put one's feet through tears in the sheets.

Dear Mrs Koning, who lived all day in the basement with her fat musical daughter Naomi, and who permanently wore an amazing hat with cloth parma violets on it, with a stain on her lip from her inseparable cigarette that lived in that corner of her talkative, friendly, vague mouth! I can recall, too, all my fellow lodgers. Mister Veldkamp, the schoolmasters in
The Lanchester Tradition,
his air with a dark curly hair, a thick mouth, and black-rimmed glasses, who was sensitive to draughts and preferred, like the schoolmasters in
The Lanchester Tradition,
his air with a bouquet. Miss Obbema, a desiccated woman with bifocals, fiftyish, who had ‘her' cushion, ‘her' chair, and a conviction that people stole her jam. Astonishingly, she was an artist. Even more astonishing, an artist in stained glass and, I believe, a good one. Both she and Mister Veldkamp were very orthodox and quoted the Bible frequently.