The Widow (27 page)

Arlette breathed pantingly, sucked her sore lip. There seemed nothing left but rags below her waist: she was in a right pickle. She bent herself forward, and jerked the gun.

‘Go on back. Back. Back. Go backwards.' She felt for the entanglement round her knees, found bits of trouser, hitched them, stood, feeling a fool, looking a fool, but less of a fool when the other person looks a fool too. He said nothing, judging it better not to. He was not going to do anything. No ideas about being tough. No ideas about anything at all.

Never mind about her panties: she wasn't going to stay here redressing herself. Trying to control her breathing, with a horrible frightening wish to shoot and see the bullet squash him flat against the wall like a bug in a smear of blood and guts. She got air back in to her lungs, tucked the ripped trousers under the gunbelt, keeping the gun pointed at him the whole time.

She slammed the outside door. They were used to doors slamming here, and a gunshot would just have been another. She walked down the stairs slowly, for the sake of putting one foot in front of another and training those stupid legs not to lurch and land on her nose. Her thighs trembled. She held the gun, which she was still clutching mechanically, stiffly along her side. She met nobody. Down in the hallway she remembered to put the gun back in its holster. Her thighs felt novocained and she stopped to rub them. They ached and wobbled like an unaccustomed skier's.

The air outside was so fresh and keen that she felt giddy. Like going out on deck of a Channel ferry on a rough crossing. It was mercifully dark. She got over to some bushes, thoughtfully planted for the purpose by the municipality, and was sick. Like the young lady of Spain. Again and again and again. She had nothing to be sick with. No hanky. She wiped spit with her sleeve. She got up and wobbled off. People passed her but she paid no attention to them; they didn't give her a glance. She didn't know where she was nor where she had left the car, but she had to walk.

It must have been the right direction more or less, because she recognized the little shopping-centre of the Maille Cathérine. One or two lights were still burning. Nobody to be seen, though.

Yes. There was a girl sitting in the back of a shop, her dark head down, doing accounts. Arlette banged on the glass with her fist. The girl looked up, frowned, shook her head, made a ‘We're closed' mouth, looked again more sharply, got up, came over to peer better into the darkish passage outside. Her eyebrows shot up. But blessings on her she did not hesitate. She undid the bolt, turned the key of the top-and-bottom lock, and opened.

‘What's the matter? Are you ill?'

‘I've been raped.'

‘Seigneur! Come on in. I'll look after you. Lord yes, I can see. Come in the back. There, sit down. One moment – I must lock the door again…

‘He'll have bunked, the bastard. We'll never catch him round here. I'll phone for the lousy cops, but they'll take half an hour.'

‘I'm okay, I mean he didn't, I mean I managed to break away.'

‘You've blood on your mouth. Your clothes are all torn. I can drive you, I've the car outside. One can't let them get away with it. We must make a complaint at once, and go straight to the hospital then. If you don't, afterwards, they don't believe you. I'm sorry, I know it sounds horrible, but we want to get a vaginal smear done straight away.'

‘No, I mean, he didn't get into me. I – put him to flight.' Unable to explain, she lifted her jacket. Eyes widened at the gun belt.

‘You're wearing a gun! … well good for you … You're a cop … right. I understand. I'm not supposed to ask. Doesn't matter; you've had a battering. I've a first-aid diploma. You mustn't have alcohol. What you must have is tea, strong and lots of sugar. I'll put the kettle on.'

She was half Arab, or more, a tiny thing, thin like a sparrow. Masses of black hair in ringlets pinned back, huge eyes tremendously painted, a pink tender mouth, beautifully cut.

Comic in her shapeless loose woolly frock; tiny feet in big boots. Gentle, and very kind.

‘I'm sorry to have made such a fuss. I kept thinking if it were me, and nobody wanted to know, and nobody helped. I'm strong. But one's never strong enough.' Corinne's very words.

‘Here, for your face.' Cotton wool, and ninety-degree alcohol.

‘It'll be all right. It was my own ring. He pushed my hand down over my face.'

‘Damn lucky you had the gun. Tea won't be a sec.' Arab tea. Green and with mint, sticky with sugar, boiling hot in a big mug with ‘Annick' written on it. The kind from souvenir shops in Brittany. She sipped steadily, feeling it go down through her, doing her good.

‘If you like,' said Annick timidly. ‘I mean, I can mend your trousers. I've everything one needs. In the shop I mean.' Arlette had not looked at the shop. Knitting-wool, sewing materials, embroidery. Jumble of decorative objects. Wicker birdcages with bright parrots of coloured felt, spinning
wheels, tambour frames. ‘I'm handy with my fingers,' humbly.

She was as good as her word. Arlette sat wrapped in a blanket, drinking tea, flooded with gratitude, watching the nimble professional hands fly. After a while she managed to get rid of the ruined tights. Annick gave her a needle and thread. With fingers still stiff she mended her panties and wriggled back into them. Annick kept her eyes down; the sewing-machine whirred, putting in a new zip.

‘I'd have pissed in my pants,' was all she said. A pause.

‘If you need to wash the lav's there behind you.'

‘You're a Samaritan.'

‘Wog Samaritan.'

‘I seem to remember,' embarrassed, ‘that the original Samaritans were wogs too. Fact handily forgotten.'

‘You bet.'

‘I can only say, not any more by me.' The girl said nothing, turned the trousers over, bit her thread and knotted it one-handed. Her needle seemed almost as fast as the machine's.

‘Did you have a handbag, or did he pinch it?'

‘No. Only my car keys.'

‘You've transport, then? You able to drive? You going home?'

‘No. My husband would make an awful fuss. I don't want him to know. He'd say it was my fault, and he'd be right. He'd be angry – because he was frightened, you know?'

‘Yes. This is almost ready. I'd say, come back and eat with me. You need something in your stomach, and a good drink. Only I've nothing in the house.'

‘Come and eat with me. We'll find somewhere.'

‘You know mostly these evenings I work late I just go and have a pizza or something.'

‘Do me fine.'

‘I know a good place in Schiltigheim.'

‘I'll follow you.'

‘I'll drive slowly. Here. Good as new. Better, if I say so. They're good, though. Be a pity to lose them. And almost
new.' Arlette stood up and put them on. Annick's gazelle eyes rested on the gunbelt but she said nothing.

‘I've got to tidy my book away.' She put the lights out, locked the door, rolled the shutter down. ‘Where's your car?'

‘Somewhere over here.' Hers was right next door, a Dyane emerald-green as a lizard. She was tickled at the contrast with the prim, pale Lancia.

‘Can I drive it?'

‘Of course. I'll follow you in the Dyane.'

‘I'll go carefully.'

‘Don't be daft.'

‘Yippee,' like a small child.

The Dyane is a more powerful, more luxurious version of the 2 CV Citroën. It was exactly like the days before Arthur. So it was somehow symbolic. She wasn't going to run back to Arthur again, to say she'd made another hash-up, and have a cry, and be tucked into bed with a tisane after some bellowing and many Told-you-so's. She had to fight this one out on her own.

Her humiliation and her stupidity no longer were important. Norma was gone and free. Robert, seeing ways of being vengeful and funny at the same moment, had shot at the car, had put the bomb in the letterbox, had smeared blood and guts over the door. It had been perfectly obvious, but her stupid mind, all tangled up with Marie-Line's nonsense and her own wild fantasies of gangsters knocking off Albert Demazis, had got into a flounder. Dear old Arlette. My so-called brains got into a twist before my pants did, but oh boy, did they both get tangled!

Annick's quite right: what I need now is to get my teeth into a crude hearty meal, not that twee little turkey leg back home, have a lot to drink, and then go quietly home and to bed, rested and sorted out. And in the morning it will all make sense. And above all say nothing to Arthur.

Brightly lit main drag of Schiltigheim. Annick parked feather-light without scraping the tyres on the kerb. Arlette was clumsier. Italian eating-shop, just like all the others, with nets and glass floaters, lumps of cork and bottles in raffia.

‘Don't worry. Looks phony. But the pizza's real. That one's nice,' leaning over and tapping the menu. ‘Hey, Arturo. Finocchio! Big fiasco classico.' Arlette rapidly became hilarious, because Annick blossomed after two drinks. She could nit speak Italian, but what she did speak was the old Levantine lingua franca, of Arab, Provençal and Spanish mixed together.

‘Yes, it's handy. There were two cops one day and they started saying really filthy things, thinking I couldn't follow, and I came out with even dirtier, and their mouths fell open.'

The Pirate Genoese
thought Arlette in the Davidson side of her mind –
Hell-raked them till they rolled, Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold –
‘Shall we have another pizza, a different one? Or a spaghetti split between us?' –
But now through patterned seas they softly run
– ‘I can patter a bit Provençal.'

‘I was born in Constantine. Father was a Pole out of Sidi Bel Abbes. Wog both ways, what. Could have had blue eyes and coalminers' shoulders, think about that.' Arlette laughed: the girl did not sentimentalize herself.

‘Big soft silly blonde mare.' Like me, what.

‘Men,' said Annick, ‘would say that it made no odds with a sack over our heads. So fight the sack, Poppyhead.'

Yes. Efforts were made. It was the answer to the question why she was carting round Hautepierre at night wearing a gun, which the girl was so careful not to put.

‘You know where to find me,' said Annick when they left. ‘Needles, thread, all the things to keep the little woman busy and stop her from ever thinking. Ciao.'

‘Indeed I won't forget. The other is effaced. This not.'

‘Is the other effaced?' cocking the extravagantly painted eyebrow.

‘The fellow who went to Jericho. He fell among thieves. Nobody remembers the thieves. One remembers the Samaritan.'

‘Sure,' said Annick. ‘It's a department store in Paris. Kind us, always seeking new services to offer the customers. Use your credit card.'

Even Arthur, who might have been fidgety, and could become downright nasty if she was out late without his knowing where, had been placid when she rang him when going for a pee after reaching the coffee stage.

‘Sorry, things sort of evolved. Girls together, stuffing themselves with Italian grub in Schiltigheim. Figs you know, and grappa, and cassata icecream.'

‘Pissed again I hear.'

‘Yes, rather. Don't be surprised if I belch.'

‘What does this mean exactly, things evolved?'

‘Oh, you know, the talkative bald-headed seaman. He set the crew laughing and forgot his course.'

‘Ah yes –
with great lies about his wooden horse.'

‘I'II tell you when I get home.'

‘No no, you're much too jolly. Anyway I'll be falling asleep any moment. I went to bed with Jacques Ellul. Soporific, you know.' The austere and exacting Professor of Sociology from Bordeaux!

‘Rather hedgehoggy, I should have thought, in bed. Or no, they curl up and have fleas. A lean and active porcupine, rushing fiercely about.'

‘Good, then, enjoy yourself.'

She was driving home, sober, monumentally correct (showing that she was not quite sober), well under the speed limit, scrupulous about red lights.

One could draw a line under Robert. Margin to margin: she didn't suppose either of them wanted to hear any further from the other. Albert Demazis – an irritating bundle of loose ends, but best not fussed with any more. Marie-Line – that great silly, possibly with encouragement from the phony-artist brigade, had probably been trafficking in palfium and librium and similar nasty things doctors were much too casual about
prescribing. One would have to go a bit further into that. A discreet enquiry
Chez Mauricette
. That girl Françoise …

She reached the Saint-Maurice Church, swung off for her right turn. The Rue de l'Observatoire, short cut between half a dozen different university faculties, buzzes with student activity during the day but is not too uproarious at night. It was raining very softly, not even enough to turn the wipers on; just barely enough to marry with a gently alcoholic haze of well-being. It was her own slowness no doubt, the slight blur on visibility and attention, that made everything so abrupt and rapid and effortless.

She was rummaging about in the car as usual to see whether anything had been left behind that would attract the light-fingered, and she had her driving glasses still on, most incompetent because they promptly spotted up with rain. She scrabbled in her pocket for house keys. Damn. Oh there they were; in her hand. Stupid, she'd thought those were the car keys. Which, presumably, were still in the ignition lock. She was feeling along the dashboard, wondering why on earth she hadn't the sense to take her glasses off. If Arthur were here he'd be tapping his foot, definitely, and putting on that indulgent male face that means ‘silly-women in-cars'. Somebody a great deal less indulgent took hold of her other wrist. Made sore by Robert, so that she squeaked. Her arm was turned and pulled up her back, very painfully indeed, but she squeaked no more because a hand came over her mouth, also made sore by Robert and a quiet decided voice said ‘Don't scream'. For a second she thought it was Robert, and was swamped by total panic. There seemed to be several Roberts.