One Damn Thing After Another (16 page)

“It's a very old settlement, this.” What is sociology after all? Everything. Archaeological, too. Everywhere you go, you look, you wonder what is under the ground.

“Piet said the same. We never turned anything up. The garden was made long before us. The woods are full of queer things, if one knew where to look.” One came across traces of foundations, buildings of who knew now what purpose. The ground had been mined for many years; there were forgotten shafts and tunnels of a buried, faintly sinister, Nibelung sort. Here in living memory had been the German front line in 1914. A little higher, along the crests, were the French trenches. In this terrain both positions had been impregnable. At the beginning, here and there, both sides had been ambitious and had a go: lost so many men that here, at least, they'd had the sense to sit it out. Under the dead leaves and the little landslips that occurred whenever a tree fell, tearing out the roots that held the fragile soil together, was the metal that had equipped
those ghost armies; an unquiet grave. It didn't do to scratch about in the soil there.

Arlette knew more about it than she would say. She, herself one night, had gone out with pick and spade to dig a grave in the horrible silent owl-haunted wood. In it she had buried the van der Valk armoury. Those souvenirs she hadn't wanted: the submachinegun that had killed Ruth's natural mother, the hunting rifle that had chewed a hunk out of the man's hip bone – the Luger pistol that had killed him, wry-mouthed presentation from a Dutch police officer. Go back and join all your brothers under this hill that so many boys have bled into.

She'd thought of it all – the adverb she supposed was ‘sardonically' – when Arthur had insisted, with police connivance, that she possess and, if necessary, carry a revolver, ugly thing, American, efficient, and very frightening. Short barrel and heavy calibre, the sort of thing that at beyond ten metres missed you altogether but at less blew a hole in you one could drive a truck through: she had no wish to experiment either way. She recognized the point, which was that it impressed, mightily, anybody looking at the business end. It had been a temptation on seeing it first to say ‘I can do better than that'.

She never brought her pistol out here. Guns didn't do, here. One might, like Monsieur Thibault, be tempted to use them. As bad, if anybody broke in, they would be found – Piet had kept them brazenly in the bottom drawer of the big chest. It had been full of contradictions living with a cop, married to him, bearing him children.

Arthur, after a further transfusion of coffee and cooling the sweat upon the manly brow, went back to his turf where she had clumps of jonquils hidden; yellow daffodils and white narcissi. She was still sitting in her nightie. On the terrace the sun was hot. She went back in to wash and dress. The pump was still out in front, and the smooth-lipped stone watering trough, but she hadn't carried romantic primitivism that far. Even Piet, who let loose, here, all the sentimentalism the job forbade, had had a proper bathroom put in straight away, and borrowed the money moreover, to pay for it.

Hum, as a young woman, very determined to be French
and hard-headed, she'd caught him out once or twice. Being romantic over ‘innocent young girls': if she'd ever laid hands on them she'd have wrung them out, the sluts. That damned Lucienne he'd gone soppy over – she'd wrung him out too. He'd had a gritty Dutch bottom that saved him from the worse foolishnesses but …

A few years ago she'd have been prepared to agree … no, no, she'd never admitted, would never have admitted … that to some extent he'd lived, even died, a failure. It was the ghost that had always haunted him, catching him always by the elbow. Most of his equals, nearly all his superiors, treated him with a sort of contempt. That this hid envy she had always known: the man had gifts that they hadn't. But it was only after meeting Arthur that she had learned really, and truly understood, what in the van der Valk days she had only dimly perceived: that the world cannot be understood or handled by merely being ‘rational'. Instinct, and emotion, and even sentiment played a greater role than she had ever allowed herself to admit. Davidson taught her. ‘It's a well-known philosophic axiom, that he who gives, dominates. Your Piet was a giver, and that's why he won his little wars. You are one too.'

All those years of being married to a cop … She'd understood more upon meeting Sergeant Subleyras.

They'd got on together like a house-on-fire. A silly phrase this, and what did it mean? That fire and dry wood got on together? No, they got on together like brother and sister, who haven't seen each other in ten years, who have been indifferent to one another; who realize, only upon meeting afresh, how much they shared that they had forgotten.

A simple problem, that of Subleyras. One that men have: the neuters don't have it. There's this job. You have done it for a long time: you are, even, good at it. But it makes you sick. What are you going to do about that?

Inspector, gradually Chief-Inspector, eventually even Commissaire van der Valk had had protections. ‘Educated man'. An officer. A law degree, a bundle of diplomas. An acquired authority and expertise, in the field of juveniles, in forensic criminology. He'd even sat, and exercised humour, upon a
committee, God-help-us, a committee on penal reform, and criminal law, and hadn't been ridiculous. But even a young officer is not going to be sacked, short of grave misdemeanours. You have somebody in the department who can handle the dread ‘marginals', the weirdos, the artists. So his superiors reasoned. A fellow who can patter a bit of French and Spanish too, handy sometimes. The fellow of whom the Procureur-General remarked dryly one day, ‘It's not a bad thing to have one person in the department with a few flashes of imagination.'

In short, he'd been perpetually in the shit, but had always got out again. He'd come skin-thickness near to resigning a score of times, but had never done it. Humour, a rarity in Holland, as well as cynicism, had helped him sit very loose to the job, loose in his skin. For a man like Subleyras, and Only-a-Sergeant into the bargain, it was much harder.

The General, in his exalted way and familiar mystical style, had a phrase about mountains. The slope is steeper up there, the going harder. But the air is better, and there are fewer Peepul. What there are, too, are men and not neuters. The sheep huddle down there at the foot, looking about afeared.

An English chap, in more pragmatic vein, said the same. When you have one of these frightful choices, always take the way that sounds the nastiest, the one you least want: it will invariably be the right one.

Cops, thought Arlette settling to The Dinner, see people at their worst, know far too much of the nastiest human behaviour, get it on their clothes and hands. In their first years they cultivate sick humour. As a trainee, paired with an experienced man, Piet had found a hanged man. I'll get the van, said his mentor, you stay by the corpse. ‘Why?' asked Piet, ‘will it walk away?'

The next stage is humourless. You're in this job; that's the way it is. Don't bring it home with you. You'll start losing sleep, and the end of that road is the bin: clinic, between two men in white coats. There is a high suicide rate, during this stage.

Many do not arrive at police maturity. The less good turn
into bad cops. Some are crooked. Others morally corrupt. A great many simply become insensitive. They can be brutes; they can also be sheets of toilet-paper. They are no longer men.

Some of the best become like Beckett's Winnie. Buried up to the neck, they are still showing a toughness of humour and of courage that is impressive. But what you cannot see has been eaten away by despair.

Arthur entered, gay, sweaty, very happy.

“Hungry hungry hungry,” he said.

“Lay the table then,” said Arlette patiently, “and keep your hands off my bottom; this pot is hot.”

She stopped on the way home on Sunday night, in the village of Grendelbruch.

“I've heard of Grendel's cave,” grumbled Arthur, “but what's his bruch?”

“I won't be but five minutes,” she promised. He looked pointedly at his watch, let the back of the seat down, and composed himself for slumber.

It is one of the hilltop villages, prettily situated, with a wonderful view and almost an Alpine feel, with fretwork wooden balconies and cows with bells round their necks. Arlette found what she was looking for quickly enough: a gate in a high bank, and steps going up. Once her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she could see well enough for her purposes. She kept in the shadow, and kept a cautious distance. The house was dark, but people had got caught that way before. She did not think it likely that anyone would let off guns at her, but had no wish to be put to ignominious flight by a peremptory challenge. It was only curiosity that had brought her. Could be
called effrontery and she would not complain. Creeping about spying, yes? Well; yes.

Bulldozers had been at work here: it was all a little too good to be true. The steep approach to the rounded hillock gave the house a commanding view down to the road and over the unseen valley beyond: all at the exactly wrong angle for a sunset, but eminently eligible. On the far side it was artificially levelled, and a nicely gravelled track swung wide around the contour and back down to the car entrance. Little trees and bushes were dotted about: a landscape gardener had been at work. The house itself was built high, with a massive rounded buttress and a terrace above that. No modernistic angularities, nor anything in the least imaginative, but suburban villa architecture of the most conventional kind. All the lower windows were protected by wrought-iron grilles of atrociously rococo ropework in potbellied curves. Hm, the boys must have made quite a daring escalade. Which, of course, in itself, is a criminal offence. Pebbledash alternated with facings of dressed stonework; stuff that comes two centimetres thick but exceedingly dear, in a gaudily variegated sandstone that sets the teeth on edge. It was not a new house – it might have been ten years old. There were coy, cottagey features. She could swear she knew every detail of the interior.

Arthur was pretending to be asleep.

“You haven't been five minutes,” he said. “You've been fifteen.”

The road from Grendelbruch winds steeply down into a valley and climbs again to a plateau, before the more deliberate descent to the little foothill towns of the wine country: Rosheim, Obernai and Barr, picturesque places with little medieval gateways and toy-soldier ramparts. It is all real enough, despite nineteenth-century romanticism. All these villages were fortified. They were refuges, against the inrush of the Barbarian across the Rhine; forlorn hopes against the blood-boltered, baby-crunching Swedes of the Thirty Years' War. The holocaust's brighter ideas, such as herding peasants into a wooden church and then setting fire to it, are really nothing very new around here.

The foothills are soft and gentle, in spring placidly bosomy with apple and cherry blossom, and the tender green tendrils of vineshoots. But immediately behind is the scarp of the Hohwald, and the road is in hairpins. Narrow gorges are overhung by perpendicular cliffs, rising to commanding heights, round which one must twist and thread a way over the Vosges passes. By night, the black wings of Dracula fold all about one, but even by day the pinewoods are sombre, in stiff serried ridges like the teeth of a comb.

Wherever there is a pass, the curious eye discerns, upon the height, fingers pointing upward; ruined cliffs and chimneys of stonework that is not natural but built, perched with much daring and greater pain upon narrow ledges of rock. These are the castles of Alsace, a hundred odd, the mountain eyries of the robber barons; built, and improved upon, between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, caring little for bishop or duke, less still for the Holy Roman Emperor. Virtually inaccessible and impregnable, yet often managing to change hands by violence, and more often still by treachery. They are all in ruin, but in nearly all can be traced the skull of a keep, the jagged teeth of portcullis.

Kaiser Wilhelm, arriving in his lovely new province of Alsace in 1870, rather fancied one of these. They had built him a hideous house in Strasbourg, but now they set to and built a really splendid huge baronial hall on the top of a hill. It is called the Haut Koenigsberg; it is all still there, complete and untouched and in perfect order, central heating and elks' antlers: Balmoral is nothing to it.

Discredited minor nobility, younger sons gone bad, poor as rats, climbed up here, screwed themselves in, swooped down to pillage monk, pilgrim, with luck a fatter commercial type, with a purse, dreaming of snatching a bishop or some rich count's daughter that would cough up a ransom. Much, we may suppose, like the mosstrooping Elliots and Liddells of the Scotch Border and like them a hardy crowd, freezing up there in draughty stone hovels, nothing to eat but abominably tough venison, barley bread like granite; plentiful swigs of firewater.

Driving from Grendelbruch down to Strasbourg, Arlette
passed three or four, unseen but there. They make nice picnic grounds on a fine day. Nobody will be up there – too steep a climb for the comfort-loving bourgeois: they'd rather sit in the car with the radio on.

There are still robber-barons, and they still build themselves castles on hill-summits in the Vosges. Fat little affairs like tame rabbits, but their owners steal on a scale far beyond the wildest dreams of the twelfth century.

She turned on to the main road down in the plain, driving cautiously because of late-night drunks. She was thinking of the Chateau de Joux, which guards the horrid gorge from Pontarlier across to Switzerland, and is more terrifying than anything in Alsace. There are in it two things at which the imagination really does boggle. One is a well, some seven-eight metres wide, driven down a hundred and thirty metres through the naked, living rock. The other is that the Seigneur de Joux came back one day unexpectedly from the day's pastime of having people pulled apart by four horses, or whatever, and caught his pretty young wife, Berthe, in a bit of casual adultery with a cavalier. Berthe was put in a cell, two metres by one and a half in the thickness of the wall, and there left for fifteen years. Once a day they brought her out for edification, to look upon her lover's remains displayed in the courtyard. After the fifteen years Monsieur de Joux was kind, or perhaps bored, enough to permit Berthe to retire, aged thirty-three, to a convent for the remainder of her days. Now a robber-baron nowadays, thought Arlette, has to find other pastimes. Do they differ all that much?