Strike Out Where Not Applicable (2 page)

‘When you come to the tables, Gretel, be sure not to put too much polish on. It not only wastes polish; it never shines properly.'

‘Morning everybody.' Bernhard's morning voice, a bit woolly and coated. ‘Breakfast ready?'

‘I didn't know you'd be so quick,' said Saskia.

‘I take the same time every morning,' irritably. He opened the hatchway with a pointed slam. ‘Ted? Be a good lad and make my breakfast, will you? Never can rely on the women in this house.'

The cook was eating his own breakfast and got up with poor grace. Saskia, looking out of the window, paid no attention. Bernhard lumbered half way down the restaurant, glanced out of the window himself – without much interest, merely checking – and picked up the post and the morning paper that lay on the table by the door. He lumbered back and sat heavily in the corner. A smell of bacon and eggs, with a pleasant frying sound, drifted through the open hatch. Bernhard – a great handsome hill of a man around fifty, with silvery hair and pale massive features – threw a big grey bloodshot eye at Saskia and unfolded the paper with a malevolent crackle.

‘Get me my coffee, Gretel.'

‘Gretel's busy. I'll get it.'

Ted slapped the dish with bacon and eggs on his counter by the hatch. Saskia took a plate from the hot cupboard, a knife and fork, and the dish, together skilfully like a waitress, and bumped it all on Bernhard's table. He pretended to be deep in his paper. She walked slowly back for the coffee, taking her time. The door opened and Marguerite came in breezily.

‘Chilly wind. Morning again, darling.' She kissed his cheek in passing, in a wifely, impersonal fashion.

‘I'll go and do your blouse,' said Saskia.

It was absurd to think that Commissaire Van der Valk was not yet used to his new surroundings and his new life. He had been here six months, and if he wasn't used to things yet … Perhaps he had changed, he thought sometimes. Perhaps he was in some ways a different person? Six months on crutches had given him plenty to think about, and time to think in. And possibly, at the age of forty-four, one did not adapt, old tortoise that one was, to a new carapace as quickly as one would wish.

A good life, this, for all the grumbles. He had jeered at his luck, at first. What, it took a bullet to get promotion, the same rank any man of his age and talents had reached four years ago? A permanent disability; was that what it took to make him respectable? But he was contented, and knew it. His job was – compared to what had gone before – something of a sinecure. Still, he was not on the shelf yet; he was commissaire in charge of the criminal brigade, responsible for a town of some fifty thousand people and the countryside within a radius of twenty-five kilometres. And the town was agreeable, much of it sixteenth-and seventeenth-century buildings, with too much dignity to fall into the merely picturesque. This historic centre whose driving force was (as it had been for four hundred years) the university was blessedly freed of cars by the canals and humpbacked bridges, and the industry – a light, clean industry not over given to stinks or loud clangs – was grouped at a respectful distance. Paint, printing, shirts-and-blouses – a well-behaved industry!

Three months in hospital, as good as paralysed from the waist down. Three months remedial exercises. Six months convalescent leave – they had treated him very generously. But after a year Amsterdam had moved past him. He no longer had his ears and
fingertips tuned to the pulse of things – he no longer spoke the new argot or recognized the new catchwords. It seemed a small thing, but to him it was more radical, more definite, than the notes after his last medical stating that he did not, and now never would, meet the physical standards exacted of the Amsterdam police. A lot he had ever cared about things written on his dossier!

But the authorities for provincial Holland were more accommodating, and the notes on the dossier of a moral kind – that was wrongly put, he told himself; let us say less physiological – had been glossed over, as it were, out of sympathy for the stick he would now always need to walk with. He had been given promotion to the grade of commissaire, the command of a brigade, the perks that went with it – and that was not negligible!

In Amsterdam no mere police officer got a house – a whole house – in the centre of the town. And it was a nice house, in the old style, tall, narrow, gabled, with a tiny back garden. Arlette was delighted with it. And with this went the ‘standing' – as ‘The Commissaris' he was something in the upper crust of the bourgeoisie, equal to, say, a full professor at the university. He would get his name in the local paper for subscribing twenty-five florins to a charitable cause – grieving heaven, there were an awful lot of charitable causes, and woe betide him if he did not contribute to all of them.

His eccentricities, moreover, were here put down to wounds received in the course of duty, and to being an Amsterdammer. When he entertained municipal importances, they made, perhaps, faces at the food they got and the pictures on the walls, but they also made allowances. He was fortified by his status, and the notion that at forty-five he could be considered to have mellowed a bit, and he survived …

He no longer ran about – he sat behind a desk like a minister. Come to that, he no longer made jokes about town councillors, he was no longer rude to lawyers and doctors, he no longer sang songs. The slow, dramatic limp on the rubber-tipped, silver-mounted, impressively polished walking-stick helped him very much, and he found this a good joke.… Nobody forgot he had been wounded – it was a most useful stage property and he refused to be separated from it an instant, though he could walk quite well, when not too fatigued, without. Better than being compulsory-retirement material, for a man with a boy in the first year
at the university and another in the last year at the lyceum!

The new standing showed itself in subtle ways. It was a shortish walk to his office – five minutes even for him. He accomplished this four times a day, not dressed in the tweed jackets and shapeless trousers of Amsterdam, but in a well cut, countrified – almost horsy – suit of West of England wool, very small black-and-white dogtooth. With the stick, and a hat (Arlette, giggling, insisted on his always – always – wearing the hat), he looked like a colonel in the cavalry, convalescing, perhaps, from a fall at polo. And if he detested horses she more than made up for it – she loved horses, always had. She was forty now, needing exercise if she was going to keep her figure, and twice or even three times a week she put on breeches and boots, and – carrying her little whip – went to have riding lessons at a snobbish manège out in the country near Lisse, in her little 2 CV Citroen, the ugly duckling as it is called in Holland. She had turned into quite a good horsewoman, with a firm seat, and strong hands; a bit clumsy, but a creditable jumper. And Francis, the peppery owner of the riding-school, who played the part of cavalry colonel so much better than Van der Valk ever could, approved of her too, and hardly ever shouted ‘Keep your belly in, cow that you are'.

Francis looked like General Weygand, knew it, enjoyed it, played up to it. His boots had to be perfect and his breeches shabby; he combined disreputable Harris jackets with Lanvin scarves and pullovers: his monocle and his gold cigarette-case, his clipped sharp voice and his tremendous oaths were essential parts of his ‘Saumur' art, which was most successful and known throughout horsy Europe. ‘That bottom of yours, dear Countess, would give even a carthorse a sore back,' he shouted in public at his wealthiest, most snobbish client, and she loved it …

Francis would light another Egyptian cigarette with an irritable snap of his lumpy old aluminium storm-lighter, hit his boots frenziedly with his switch, and say ‘Bitch, bitch, bitch' on a rising scale of assumed indignation that was a joy to listen to. He had certain surefire jokes that were repeated all over Holland, such as the remark (in the hearing of at least ten wealthy bourgeois women) at the sight of the elegant Military Attaché of an Arab country: ‘Don't give that damned Wog any mares – the moment he's out of my sight they'll start making love.' Such remarks, shattering, surest death to any reputation in ordinary Dutch
circles, were tolerated and secretly enjoyed among the horses. Francis' reputation as licensed iconoclast came perhaps from a peculiar bourgeois notion that there was something fast and raffish about a manège, and that all sorts of things were permissible there that would have caused lifted eyebrows and glacial coughing in any other Dutch circles …

As for Arlette, she enjoyed Francis, enjoyed the horse, enjoyed even the interminable horsy talk, as well as the fresh air and the violent exercise that were so good for her waistline.

Van der Valk, laying the stick with its chased silver band across his polished desk, tried to make the act as good as Francis but he failed. He had, though, cultivated a slow, quiet voice and an air of weary wisdom that was not without effect on subordinates and on the commissaire, his colleague, head of the municipal police, a baldish personage given to self-important dyspepsia about his administration. Had Van der Valk known it, he had brought with him a glamorous reputation; he did guess, though, that the unaccustomed respect in which he warmed himself was that accorded to Major Held, coming home on crutches from Stalingrad with the Knight's Cross pinned to his bosom and making the girls go weak at the knees, and he enjoyed this.

The new job was, too, very pleasant. Regular hours; no goddam weekend duty. He could pack up and go home – and did – upright and distinguished with his stick, raising his hat to people, rather ahead of closing time. No beastly evening chores, no reports to be typed, free from Friday evening till Monday morning.… There was, to be sure, responsibility. If he got a crime wave – ha, then he would have to sit up all night and like it. So far no such thing had happened. Except for an attempted voluntary homicide (two loutish youths who had been supplanted with girlfriends and had tipped the supplanters' Volkswagen into the canal coming home from a dance at one in the morning, materially aided by a big fourth-hand Chevrolet) he had had little work. Puff-puff – petty puff-puff – of a provincial town: burglaries, embezzlements and frauds; juveniles robbing the till in sweet-shops, terrorizing old women with air pistols, putting obstacles on railway lines (vandalism in public parks and breaking up the furniture at pop concerts was the affair of the municipal police) – there was always plenty to do, but it wasn't the kind of thing one sat up at night for.

When, therefore, he heard that Bernhard Fischer, owner of the
White Horse Inn out in Warmond, had died suddenly in confused circumstances, he was at first pleased, then irritated. Something had happened at last to give him a headache over the weekend, not to speak of losing golf, a ridiculous game he had taken to for exercise and which he was getting to enjoy.

A Saturday. Day for a ritual he enjoyed and looked forward to: English afternoon tea. Since this mania for fresh air and bumping on a horse had possessed Arlette, she seemed to eat more than ever and still stay thin, which he grudged. He was not on a diet, but he had to be frugal, watch his drinking carefully, and not smoke before five in the afternoon, and then only cigars. Weekends, apart from suburban joys like golf or gardening, brought the pleasure of naughty, illegitimate cigarettes. There was a suburban ritual too, and passwords given while he washed the soil off his hands. ‘Why is it that the servants always eat the cucumber sandwiches?'

Buttered toast, and cherry cake, as well as Marmite. Goody, goody gumdrops. Arlette poured out tea, the Copenhagen porcelain that had been her promotion present. Darjeeling tea, no lemon at teatime, very austere (China tea with lemon, in a tall German beerglass, was made for him by the typist at ten-thirty on office mornings, while everybody else was gorging milky coffee).

‘Have a good bump?'

‘Jumped over hurdles with Janine. I made fastest time. That horse of hers cost a fortune but she's not really up to it.' He had heard quite a bit about Janine in the last months – Arlette had got quite friendly with her. She sounded an absurd woman. Her real name was Jannie, pronounced Yanny. She came from the South and had the local accent, which she had replaced by French spoken with a strong Belgian accent of which she was absurdly proud, and the name Janine went with this. You could not really blame her. Her husband, Rob, was the best bicycle champion Holland had produced in more than twenty years. World road champion, an excellent six-day rider in winter, a devil in one-day classics, he had become a rich man. Now, just retired at thirty-six, he had bought a seaside hotel and was making a good thing out of that. Janine had not only an expensive horse and two mink coats, related Arlette, but a very classy BMW two thousand coupé. She was a vulgar, noisy girl, greatly snubbed by the haute bourgeoisie of the riding-school for having made her money out of bicycle
racing. Van der Valk agreed that this was pathetic as well as amusing. The girl herself, it seemed, was funny and Arlette liked her, laughing unmaliciously at her horrible French.

‘Any news?' not very interested in Janine or her horse.

‘Well, yes – that is to say perhaps. Might not be news to you, but that's not my business.' Peculiar remark.

‘Out with it.'

‘You've heard of big Bernhard – Im Weissn Rössl?'

‘Yes.'

‘Dead.'

‘So? No, I hadn't heard.'

‘He was too fat, and it seems the doctor told him half jokingly to ride a horse. Everybody laughed, but less when he took it seriously. Francis had twenty fits – “I don't keep oxen for overweight Germans” – you know, no need to repeat it. The wife, Marguerite, was angry because she felt humiliated and that he'd made a fool of her.'

‘Yes but what happened?'

‘Nobody quite knows. He was in a field and got off to look at something and upset the horse in some way and apparently it kicked him, and he got it in the temple – he must have been bending down, they thought.'