Over the High Side Page 8

  Respectable neighbourhood, full of money. Tall terraced houses gave way to semi-detached villas in bulls’ blood-coloured brick; these villas got steadily bigger, uglier and wealthier, with Gothic turrets, greener lawns and leafier trees, and suddenly the name ‘Ailesbury Road’ flashed at him and past him and he felt contentment. These villas were just like Aerdenhout or Bloemendaal, where in Holland people like Senator Lynch lived in houses looking much the same: it wasn’t a foreign country after all. The bus fled on.

  Yes, he saw; that was the edge, technically, of the town. Thereafter was new suburb – concreting, gnomes and crazy pavement – which had been countryside not so long ago, and the high iron gates and stone walls of one or two large country houses were still there to prove it. He thought he understood; these houses with rambling basements and acres of field and paddock were impossible without servants. One or two became schools – there – or convents – there – but most were carved up by the speculating builders: gold in those fields.

  On the left, suddenly, was flat grey wrinkled sea: he was on a wide dreary boulevard moving fast: the houses thinned out, clustered again thickly round an obliterated village that was now a suburban shopping centre with such a High Street look one was surprised not to see Boots the Cash Chemist. ‘Bray’ said a road sign; ‘Temple Hill’ said a piece of painted metal on a wall; ‘Belgrave Square next stop,’ said the friendly dirty bus-conductor who had a blue chin, thick spectacles and that confidential way the Irish had of talking to one, entrusting you with all their secrets. He got off the bus and was knocked sideways by all the fresh air.

  Belgrave Square was a lot less impressive than it had sounded and he had expected, without quite knowing why. The London model, he supposed – he had always thought of something tall and Georgian. This was a squat Victorian terrace with stunted tiny gardens, starveling box hedges, worn strips of bare turf and daverdy gravel: the houses needed paintwork, were weedy round the doors, rusty round the iron gates. Grim little basements had bars over blind windows, flyspecked net curtains needed a wash, and dark poky halls full of prams could do with airing as well as polishing.

  Not all were like this. Some houses had repaired their rotting sashes, put on a coat of that violent pink or lilac paint beloved of the French and the Irish, clipped around their tiny rose or rhododendron bushes. But his main impression was flats with absentee landlords, bohemian tastes, and more children than money. The air was soft, moist, seasidy: there were a few ragged palm trees. But somehow it was very Irish as well as Bexhill-backwoods, and subtly mixed with the flavour of curates and daffodils was a raffish scent, as of Mooney’s pub, Boland’s bread, McCabe the Licensed Victualler and Ryan’s Funeral Parlours. He was delighted to find a symbol, crystallizing it all: a letterbox of florid cast iron, set in a stone wall; a magic casement opening on the foam. It was painted to be sure bright green, but had a crown. He had studied English pillarboxes, columns that stoutly support the monarchy, and knew that V.R. meant Victoria Regina. He was cheered by this, and no longer so downcast about missing Admiral Nelson who had presided so long over Dublin, until – belatedly – removed by fervent nationalists with dynamite: Inspector Flynn had explained Irish politics over a glass of stout.

  ‘A great mistake. Sure the good people up in Belfast will come roaring down to blow up Daniel O’Connell but I don’t mind that at all. Nelson now was a great help to the police: he held up his hand, so he did, and all the trams stopped right in front of him. Civic-spirited, so he was, and gave the street an air: sure without him it’s just a slum.’

  Mrs Edward Flanagan lived behind some ratty privet, a child’s bicycle, and a door-knocker the worse for sea air. The door had been amateurishly done up with royal blue paint that had not been thinned properly. She opened the door herself and he knew her at once.

  ‘Mrs. Flanagan?’

  ‘Yes, what do you want?’ How long has she lived in Ireland? – her accent is still strong.

  ‘Commissaire Van der Valk: Netherlands Police,’ he said in Dutch, and watched it hit her. She showed no fear, but a great deal of surprise.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ She spoke Dutch too, automatically, probably without realizing.

  ‘I will be glad to explain.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry – you’d better come in. Such a surprise. As though you told me I’d won the sweep or something. Netherlands Police,’ incredulously and this time there was a note of fear. But it doesn’t mean anything, he thought. Police is a dread word in the ears of anybody Dutch, be they of the most irreproachable virtue. They shift uneasily inside their clothes, wondering what regulation they can have broken. He followed a brown corduroy behind and a solid Dutch upper half in a sage-green pullover needing a darn at one elbow. This is Stasie.

  ‘I hope you’ll excuse me. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Everything is very untidy.’

  He had heard that too often enough in Holland. In a tone of grovelling but reproachful apology and meaning there is a thread from the sewing-box on a cushion, and a flower-pot out of mathematical alignment with the corners of the windowsill. But here it was different. The words were said carelessly, not in the least as though she meant them. And the room was untidy; very untidy indeed. But he did not have time to look at it because he was concentrating upon the woman and she took all the concentration he had. Beautiful? – oh come. Very very pretty? – he supposed so; he’d no idea really. Like the picture? – yes, and unlike.

  He couldn’t be bothered with any of this, because of the gust of seduction. Great wafts of sex. Massive gushing cascade of luscious femininity. He sat down gingerly in a small fat armchair with upholstery worn threadbare on the arms, crossed his legs with care, and put his glasses on from self-defence. If he had brought a briefcase he would have been rummaging in it in next to no time. One saw the shabby sweater and the sloppy trousers – and one simply saw her naked. Remarkable.

  ‘I am the commissaire of the district in which your father, Mevrouw, was found dead. This has turned out a delicate, even disturbing affair. It was thought best to come and talk with you and your sisters, informally.’ But he was not listening to these idiotic words; his mind was racing to collect impressions that crowded one upon another. Housewives at the butcher’s sausage counter on a Saturday afternoon, dozens and dozens, and he wanted to remember them all. Every movement – she cleared knitting off her chair, looked for a cigarette, found a packet on the chimney-piece, found it empty, saw another on a table, searching for matches and found them too eventually in the chink between the back and seat of her chair – bigger chair, covered in worn brown leather – showed a different woman. She caught the light in facets.

  Not a Renoir, whose skin took the light well. This was the moist softness of the Irish air. Her skin was sallow, with a greenish colour. Not even pretty – coarse. But the nose was straight, delicate, and the modelling of the forehead fine. Fair eyebrows, full of angles. Small, seemingly uninteresting bluish eyes. Large mouth, mobile, sensuous. Strong Dutch jaw and square, not quite heavy chin. Very fine throat, and untidy blonde hair that half-hid well-shaped ears. Was it the mixture of crudity and delicacy, of animal force and spiritual sensitivity, that was so striking? Not a Renoir. Drawing by Matisse.

  She was wearing an amber necklace and tortoise-shell earrings, knowing that lumpy barbaric jewellery suited her. The mouth was only slightly painted, as though pencilled along the outline: she had no other make-up. The eyes were small, their blue a little muddy, but they were an interesting shape and unusually vivid. There was a strong smell of woman, mixed up with an ancient classic Lanvin – Arpège? – no. The voice was warm, heavy for its size, like a peach off the orchard wall, low pitched, with a characteristically Dutch metallic timbre. In fact the whole woman was metallic. Greenish-bronze armour reflecting red wavering torch-light.

  Van der Valk felt that someone had unfairly kicked him in a sadly unjockstrapped tenderloin. The woman had a violent, instant, painful effect. Stasie Martinez. Mrs Edward Flanagan. Licens
ed Victualler and Grocer. Wines and Spirits. John Power & Sons Gold Label Whiskey. Not a drop is sold till it’s seven years old. Boompsadaisy: get up, you clown.

  ‘There are puzzling details,’ his voice said. The hearthrug was off-white and slightly smelly, as though of cat.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ asked Mrs Flanagan.

  Suddenly he understood something important. This woman was a natural, a high-powered piece of rawhide, and the splendid teeth were those of a man-eater. This would take some watching.

  ‘That would be very nice,’ he said gently.

  *

  Van der Valk was a good policeman in some ways. That is to say that he possessed some essential qualifications; quick intelligence, determination not to be blunted by a discouraging job, a vile wearisome job; and ability to learn from experience. This he thought of as the need to keep both sides of his head separate. He was brutish, lazy, and egoist, but he had them both, and kept them fresh. One side belonged to the public, and the other to bureaucracy. There was a continual conflict, and reconciling this was a labour of Sisyphus, and at nearly fifty he had not made much progress since the age of twenty, a green trainee sub-inspector fresh out of the army, thinking he knew it all after seeing something of pain and fear, cold and hunger, having learned to lie still under fire, and experienced the pleasure of being bombed by one’s own aircraft.

  What had he learned, in the days since ‘Constitutional Law’ at the police training college (he could still hear the whiny voice saying, ‘Lax law-enforcement is more of a menace to the liberty of the citizen than strict enforcement; will you comment on that, Mr Sluys’ – he had at least got it quicker than most of the class)? Well, he had learned that the public itself stayed absolutely insufferable whatever the law enforcement: feeling tolerant and sympathetic wore off awful quick. So that one learned techniques for dealing with one’s feelings. A bit of zoology for instance: his relationship with a criminal, say, was much the same as that of Doctor Konrad Lorenz with a goose, bursting out laughing at the observation that ‘well, after all, geese are only human’. Or visits with his children, when smaller, to zoos or circuses (both heartily detested on his side) which taught one a good deal about prisons so that he noticed – coinciding again more or less with Doctor Lorenz – that chimpanzees, dissolute and depraved at the best of times, became much more so when shut up in cages. Very like criminals.

  Alas, one was never left in peace to pursue these pastoral observations – the great bureaucratic octopus got in the way. Doctor Lorenz, studying his geese, giving them pleasant names like Kopfschlitz (Van der Valk knew several criminals called Kopfschlitz), was a great man, no denying it. But he could get on with his work unimpeded by reams of idiot regulation. The same thing happened all over the world; policemen being told how to do their job by gaga Lord Chief Justices. Damn it, nobody made Doctor Lorenz work in a world where all his rules, methods, working patterns had been designed by the geese: worse still, where his scientific papers, lecture-notes, the proofs of his books – even his conversations with colleagues – were submitted to the critical stare of geese having the right of comment, criticism, and final decision.

  He could just see Kopfschlitz (a gander with a most interesting homosexual relationship with another called Max) leaning over Doctor Lorenz’ shoulder, saying, ‘Cross that bit out, Konrad: I’m not having it.’

  The bureaucratic octopus spent plenty of time telling him off, drawing magic circles outside which he might not step, and devising new sets of rules. He broke these, of course – all policemen had to if they were ever to get any work done at all – and wasted a good deal of time in not-getting-caught: already a terrible indictment of his efficiency, that, when he considered the further immense amounts of time consumed in writing reports. So little of what one did made any sense. One lived in a Kafka world; he supposed it helped him a little to look at the castles and the trails, to realize why the examining magistrate behaved in that neurotic way (so like a goose deprived of its partner in the triumph ceremony), but Kafka was not a writer he cared for.

  Pleasant, vanity-tickling notions such as that of the policeman as zoologist would not do, alas. Was he not the centurion in the gospel? A man giving orders; a man under orders.

  Human beings are not geese.

  The octopus did try hard. He had recently been on a ‘recyclage’ training course at the police college in Fontainebleau, and had been amused at recent instructions given to traffic cops.

  ‘Do not lean your hand on a man’s car.’ Better still:

  ‘If a driver is accompanied by his family, and you have occasion to address him a reproach, ask him to step out of the car. You must beware of injuring his dignity as a man, and his authority as a parent.’

  What a terrifying gap there was between ‘We, the people … in order to ensure a more perfect …’ – how did it go? – ‘the blessings of liberty to our posterity …’ and the sidewalks of Chicago – or Paris – or Amsterdam.

  He had of course a high degree of detachment. Learned on simple, physiological lines on dreary nights of street duty upon Amsterdamse cobblestones. Look at the silly bugger, you with the pain in the shoulder-blades, feeling the feet, moist down the neck: stop yawning. It had continued in every report he had ever written, with the other Van der Valk, the goose one, leaning over his shoulder helping.

  He had lucidity, simplicity, humility. Poor things, and permeable. He was a shaky fellow, and Mrs Flanagan not the easiest of exercises. Not when one half of his head was telling him that she was a bit of a chimpanzee, no?, while the other was wallowing upon billows of sex and thinking it lush.

  She was ‘anxious to help’. She spoke fluently of her father, explaining how she and her sisters had been brought to this country as children, of her mother and various stepmothers, of papa’s fantasies, extravagances and instabilities, all with ironic affection.

  ‘An interesting background.’

  ‘Well, I’m at home now, here in Ireland. My birth and my nationality are just accidents. I suppose I remain Dutch, in various ways, but I have become a different, more complex person.’

  She enjoyed talking about the person she had become.

  She seemed to wish to create a special relationship with him, in which they were both intelligent, informed, detached persons, collaborating in the scientific experiment devolving upon her father’s death. Observing the geese together. Was she even moved, or touched, by this death?

  ‘Why do you think your father was killed, Mevrouw?’ lighting a cigar, being very obtuse, very literal, very Dutch.

  ‘That seems impossible to answer – so metaphysical. People get killed. They cross the road without looking, or get attacked by criminals – why? Why are some so old, and some so young? I won’t insult your intelligence, Commissaire, with a lot of talk about Destiny.’

  She was very forthcoming. He did not tell her that he had been reading her letters, but she seemed quite unsurprised at his knowing something of her life, and was perfectly happy to amplify. She spoke lavishly about her husband, ‘my poor Eddy’, who she hinted was a bit of a drunk, of her sisters who had psychological problems with their men, of the difficulties of bringing up children, of anything under the sun; art, music, history, religion: she was unwearyingly fluent. She was compassionate, philosophical – and a good deal in love with herself. She seemed in no hurry for him to go.

  ‘Oh, there’s my youngest waking up – no, no, don’t take that as a hint to go. I’ll make some fresh tea. I like company. I’m only a housewife, you see, and I’m stuck at home a great deal.’

  ‘But you have a lot of friends?’

  ‘Oh, quite a few, I suppose. I like people to drop in; I like to keep open house. We have lots of discussions, here.’ She waved an arm around; he looked about him. Pleasant room, shabby and comfortable: disorderly, welcoming. Vase of flowers, needing renewing: several reproductions of modern pictures as well as a Raphael: heaps of newspapers, magazines and gramophone records muddled casually t
ogether. Intellectual interests right and left. It was very much like Arlette’s living-room at home. What was the difference? Was there even any?

  ‘Do you by the way know a young man called Denis Lynch?’

  Her answer was as easy and open as all her others. ‘Indeed I do. Dear Denis. A boy with a great many qualities – he’ll be a valuable person, I think. In a difficult stage of development of course; he’s not very happy at home.’

  ‘You seem to know him well.’

  ‘I should think that, yes, I did know him as well as anybody.’ With a bland and cheerful innocence, and a note like self-congratulation, as though it were greatly to her credit to have such understanding.

  ‘How did you come to know him?’

  ‘How does one come to know anyone? He’s just a student.’

  ‘I suppose that in Ireland as anywhere else people form compact groups and move in a restricted circle. One meets other people at points of intersection – a sports club, or a music society, or something like that.’

  She gave a supercilious little laugh.

  ‘My dear Commissaire, how Dutch you do sound. We don’t have such tight little circles with those minute graduations of standing: Ireland is more democratic, more open. People are –’ she sketched in the air with her hands ‘– more fluid. Less of these constipated little snobberies. Dublin’s larger than The Hague, you know – and larger-minded.’ The tone was snubbing and he wondered whether there wasn’t an area of sensitivity about Denis.