One Damn Thing After Another (15 page)

“As dear Dona Silvia is so fond of saying, Hombre propone, pero Dios dispone, which is crushingly unanswerable.”

This being so, she did not attempt an answer.

A long way further, when they were nearly there, he broke again the silence.

“The game of futbol is insufferably boring. Long arid deserts of time during which the ball goes backward and sideways in futile effort to gain advantage. One must not say an unparallelled tedium, since telephone conversations upon business proposals are exactly the same.”

Arthur's monologues could be equally tortuous, but this was not the moment to say so.

“Except, of course, when Argentinians play it, when it becomes funny. Indeed diabolically inventive and subtle. Even at cheating, which all other teams do with a laborious want of
imagination, they have a splendid theatricality and a high sense of comedy.”

They had left the main road and were climbing the last switchbacks to the village.

“Hm, old Borges says that upon the Argentinian character sits a curse of futility, and maybe so, Como no? Being best at futbol is like Czechs making the best beer; it simply twists the knife in the wound.” People in villages always look up when a car passes. Seeing someone they knew they nodded. One is and always will be a stranger, and the nods are both reluctant and sour.

“Likewise the commentators, who like me sit in idleness and observe; like me supplying pretentious and superfluous comment in jargon, ever seeking elegant variation upon platitude. In this atmosphere of hyper-excitability about nothing, when at last somebody scores it's an anti-climax. Except in Buenos Aires, of course.”

Arthur had timed it well. As Arlette turned the car off the track and put the brake on, he got out, clasped his hands over his head, and let out a wolf's howl. “Goooo-ooaal por Ar-gen-ti-na.”

“An unmannerly piece of needless exhibitionism,” said Arlette.

“Not needless. Got rid of a great deal of frustration.” She put the key in the door. A key hand-forged and beautiful, twenty centimetres long and weighing a kilo. The lovely start, Piet had called it. The overture to Figaro, she agreed, when they came first.

It was a van der Valk house. He had stayed here. Never lived here, but now he was buried here, which was what he would
have wished. The soil of his childhood in Amsterdam had gradually grown unrecognizable even to him, and he had moved his heart, before dying. He had bought it to retire to, over a dubious Arlette's head. She needed people around her, she said. He had always had a perverse streak of romanticism. But she'd accepted it, and been glad of it. She had spent the first year of her widowhood here, leaving because her daughter Ruth, too, needed people as well as a proper school. And because she herself had realized that this, for her, was not the end.

But she had kept it, and unchanged. For some years she had done no more than come conscientiously, three or four times a year, to air and turn out on fine days, and make coffee, and sit a while. Everything had tumbled into neglect: the grass grew up long and rank, and the trees were covered in lichen. But the house was sturdy, and resisted.

It was little more than a cottage; was indeed a solid little house with two storeys and an attic, and a cellar, squarish, of a Georgian simplicity and a good proportion, built of local stone in 1827, in the country style of fifty years before. Arlette, looking at a picture of Chawton Cottage, where Jane Austen had once lived, noticed with delight a remarkably close resemblance. Behind it was a clearing in the woods; rough meadow full in spring of cowslips and wood anemone. In front was the valley of a turbulent hill stream, and what had once been garden. Piet had not had time to make it again garden, although he had been full of projects. During the few years they had spent all their available holidays here, driving down from Holland, Piet working the Volkswagen to its limit over the hilly wooded roads, keenly anticipating his great treat. He had recalled that his father had been a cabinet-maker, and had built rough, plain country furniture, recklessly buying thick slabs of wood; oak and beech and elm that would cost a ransom now. All this she had left as it was. The only thing she had taken to the city was her big working table, now in her office.

Rather naturally, Arthur had been shy of this house. He had never tried to possess her, nor try to assimilate her past. There was no rivalry between himself and a dead man. Nor had he
wanted to disturb ghosts. Arlette had asked him to come: he had come with no great enthusiasm, although grateful to her. She was knocking down strong, ancient barriers.

She was grateful to him; he had come with simplicity, and no show of wariness. They had both been happy to find the house uncomplicated and welcoming: it had been a simple and happy house: it remained so. Delighted with Piet's bookshelves, with the panelling, with the big, built-in clock and its soft, eighteenth-century note, he had decreed a risorgimento, and set lovingly to work at by now much-needed repair. They came often now. The thick oak shutters had been burned off and repainted, the dampstains effaced, the house made tight … In the coarse Dutch mockery that was an essential strand of van-der-Valk-humour Piet had called it ‘Het Chaletje', the Little Hut. It had a name now. ‘Amers' which means ‘Seamarks'. Piet had come from Amsterdam, Arlette from near Toulon; Arthur himself from the south coast of England. For these navigators, seamarks were a fact of life. Coasting, with primitive equipment and few aids, they had all come a good way. Landfall had sometimes to be made in fog and by storm, through the short and sudden, steep and hollow seas of these coasts, whose shipwrecks have deforested the whole of Europe of its oak trees.

Being an orderly fellow, with a conscientious housewife, Arthur left the stove always with its ashes raked, and with a pile of kindling ready, and he had the house warm in no time at all, while she was opening shutters. Dust lay thick, but it was not city dust, being mostly soil and woodash; organic stuff, and doesn't smell bad. Ritual dictated the drinking of white wine, a principle laid down by Piet, and the cleaning of all lamps and candlesticks. Arthur, whose digestion white-Alsace did not agree with, had only substituted Rioja, Burgundy being too expensive for anything but anniversaries. Perhaps this was an anniversary? He went down to the cellar and found something suitable. If his wife wished to go to South America, he wasn't going to try and stop her. Knowing her anyhow, trying would be a forlorn effort, and would at best be a quick way to a very disagreeable week of it.

Indian summer lasts long in this part of the world. Spring comes late and grudgingly, a fitful affair of sunshine thin and acid, like bad white wine. In summer it can be unbearably hot, and it can pour with icy rain for weeks. Winter is snowbound, and sometimes quite splendid.

Autumn is the supreme joy. Ah, visitors from the North American continent say sometimes – like New England. A bit like Vermont yes, on a miniature scale since Alsace, one of the smallest provinces of France, is only two hundred kilometres long and fifty wide. There are stupider gardeners than those of municipal Strasbourg, who have an altogether consequent fondness for maple trees. But the especial charm and delight of Alsace is its division into three parts, like Caesar's Gaul, each with a distinct character; longitudinally, like a tricolour ribbon.

The plain is that of the Rhine valley; fertile, watery, and encased between the twin ranges of the Vosges on the French side, and the Black Forest of present-day Germany. The Vosges, whose summits mark the frontier with neighbouring Lorraine, form a chain of hills rather than mountains. They do not run over two thousand metres, they are gently rounded and much eroded, of a soft rust-colour sandstone that makes a most attractive building material, and wooded to the top. The woods are mostly spruce. Forest of pine, forest of boredom, and the close, stiff, scratchy texture of the spruce gives the Black Forest its forbidding name. The happiness of the Vosges is that pine and beech woods intermingle.

The third division is the foothill country, a narrow streak of sunny orchard land that nourishes the vines. These two have the gaiety and charm of variety: pinots, rieslings and traminers interwoven with local oddities, from patch to patch bearing anything from fine, and even distinguished, grapes to acid rubbish, good only to put in a pot with sour cabbage. The orchards are cherry and plum, pretty trees, streaked with resins, fragrant, fruitful; and everywhere walnuts with grave and lovely foliage. Ah, if we had a house in the foothills, said Arthur wistfully. If one was able to afford it, returned his wife
tartly, and you need not regret it: noisy, tourist-ridden, far too many neighbours.

The upper valleys are glens, steep and narrow, full of the noise of water; too cold for vines, too abrupt for tractors. The gardens must be terraced, with drystone walls, and care lest the precious topsoil be washed away.

Arthur sprawled lordly upon the flagged terrace, in a cane chair from Holland: art of rattan learned in the Indies. He poured himself a glass of wine, took off his shirt, and concentrated on becoming a ripe apricot: lank, bony, pinkish English object. Why had stupid Piet not planted maples? He had made efforts, it was true; he had been moving in the right direction. There was a scarlet American oak, a sweet gum, a tulip tree that one hoped one would live to see in flower. One or two semi-failures, like the catalpa that would always look frail and shivery; and this was no landscape for cypresses. One or two abject failures like that horrid copper beech – bourgeois tree – and the Weymouth pine that had died: capricious things they were.

He would plant maples. He had no children – not even silly Angelika – and wouldn't, ever. He would plant maples for children he did not know, a harsher joy, but of higher worth, philosophically.

“Have you poured none for me?” said Arlette's voice. She had put bedclothes out at all windows, hung rugs on everything vertical. Sun struck deeply into the house, eating up gloom and the damp that foxed the pages of Arthur's novelists – only here, he said, could one successfully read
The Heart of Midlothian
, or
The Master of Ballantrae
, or
Chance
. “I intend,” she said, “not to think at all for twenty-four hours.” The sun had already sapped him of power to do anything but grunt, so he grunted. By Quiberon Bay they had sat, so, in an idle but no way impoverished contemplation. Busy, scuttling world of ants … The climate of the temperate zone of Europe, from the northern limit of the olive to the northern limit of the grape, has been, no doubt, the most fertile for thought and art, but makes people too busy to listen for the grass growing. We need Moors too, from the south, and hobgoblins too from Scotland. Under
the palms of Samoa, Stevenson wrote beautifully of the rain curtain weaving magic over the windy streets of Edinburgh. In the Marquesas, Jacques Brel with cancer's cold clutch around the heart wrote poems to the heavy-jointed but vital rhythms of Flanders. Freedom of all the seas of the Pacific can only bring one in the end to the fogs and drains and stinks of the Scheldt-Escaut estuaries. Strasbourg, foggy all morning, stinks all afternoon of industrial effluent so that one longs for the wet westerly wind to come blustering back and shake the sodden leaves down. But up here, beyond the vineline, the air smells of linden and acacia honey, of resin and dry sherry. The sun will sink to a smell of woodsmoke, damptrapped and hanging in the clearing. And will rise in dew and moss and blackberries. No shampoo-salesman, no pederast perfumer can put these essences ignobly into little bottles. The aviation of the French Government, may the foul fiend fly away in, with, and upon same, scars the sky but its disgusting exhalations may, who knows, embellish a sunset for somebody. Alongside the discarded contraceptive, grows the mushroom: oh dear, these lyrical flowers wax ever ranker.

Never mind. Indian summer for the sociologist.

“I would like another glass,” said Arlette a little crossly. “I've asked you twice already but you were rapt in the arms of Proserpina or whatever she's called.”

Why not suggest to him to stay up here? – assuming, that is to say (she added hastily) that she agreed to go at all. Take the best part of a day to get there. And back; jet lag and whatnot. She could hardly be away less than five, six days – poof, it might as well be five minutes for all the good it would do. Anyway, I'm only going to think about this tomorrow. Correction; day after tomorrow.

Arlette woke up from a sleep so deep; a country sleep, a sea-sleep; that she did not know where she was. She sat bolt upright: the bed was empty beside her, and in it had been Arthur and not Piet. The room faced east and south. Morning sunlight dappled things. The wallpaper Piet had hung had got stained and loose over the years of neglect: Arthur had pulled it all
off and whitewashed everywhere. The bed was the same; a country piece in pitchpine, the capitals of the four posts carved into stylized pineapples. She lay down again.

What had woken her was the country sound by definition, even more than logs being split; a scythe being sharpened. The sociologist, clumsy with his hands, did not take kindly to tools, even simple ones of the hobbit variety, and regarded Piet's woodworking chisels and gouges with misgiving. But he had made himself learn elementary skills. Wasn't that, too, social science? What good, finally, were these pale and paperbound folk who got no nearer to a manual task than tables of statistics? Learning to drill a hole in the wall, put a dowel in it, and sink a screw – straight – in that had given Scholar-Gipsy Davidson the confidence and the courage to go out with a billhook. He scythed, now, with intense pleasure. The garden had all gone wild, and they were not here often enough to look after flowers or vegetables. But he dug, and he weeded. A man needs this: to put his feet in the soil. As needful was something to look forward to, and he constructed fantasies around goats, or geese. What would they do when they were on a pension?