The Widow (2 page)

She had borne him two children, both boys. They had been a turbulent handful. Both students by this time, out of the house and nearly off her hands. They had a younger adopted daughter, called Ruth.

As the years had gone on Arlette had become steadily less French, without ever any temptation towards becoming Dutch. Piet Van der Valk had become a great deal less Dutch, while loathing the French or so he said. They both kept very strong – well, call it regional characteristics. Both behaved in a very xenophobic way when at all vexed.

Piet, while still well under fifty, found his bad leg a bore. And the less said about ninety-nine per cent of police work the better. He had always a fear of finding himself retired prematurely, on political grounds probably while using the medical pretext. He was anxious himself to retire prematurely: it seemed to him that he was still at his best. The cottage had been borne of this. As a child he'd never been in the country. He came out of a poor district in Amsterdam; his father had
repaired furniture there. Arlette's childhood cottage had great importance in her personal folklore.

They'd both had windfalls of money; nothing much, not enough for anything grand. There had been a great deal of quarrelling about where the cottage should be. She didn't want to be anywhere in the south, a point easily enough won, Piet being a disliker of sweaty climates. But she did want to be by the sea. He was infuriating about this. As though one ever saw any sea in Amsterdam. What was this Dutch passion for hills and forests? A silly, romantic side he had. Aquitaine? No, far too hot and full of ghastly Dutch as well as English: it would be a ghetto. Touraine then? Arlette liked the Loire country: so did he. It was alarmingly expensive – Holland then was very cheap in comparison to France and he would only have his pension. But it went on tempting until the dreadful day he discovered that Maigret had retired to the banks of the Loire. If there was one thing he hated it was jokes about Maigret. An utterly frivolous pretext, she said extremely cross.

He'd always had a soft spot for Alsace; been there once and fallen in love with it, silly emotional thing to do. He liked it being neither French nor German, he loved the ‘blue line of the Vosges'. He liked the local white wine, a lot too much she said. She wasn't keen. Frontier people are savages, she said with Mediterranean snobbery. Wotan Mit Uns. They talk a vile and incomprehensible patois and I'm sure they all sleep with their mothers. Collaborators to a man. And so on at some length.

He'd overborne her. And she had to admit she'd been very taken with the little house. A bit too primitive for now. Blow all this pump lark he said, putting in sanitation and spending their last penny. Two happy summer holidays they'd spent there together, and a marvellous snowy Christmas. He began to build furniture, and talk with zest about retiring.

He was buried there now, the nearest thing there was to being home. Arlette stayed on there, buried with him. What's a widow more or less, in a village?

But it's no place for an adolescent girl, and Ruth was
growing up, and the country schools more and more insufficient. Ruth saved her. She thought of living in Strasbourg with no very great joy. But the schools and the university are among the best there are.

They found a little three-room flat: Arlette was experienced with flats, and it was cheap, warm, and easy to keep clean. In the Krutenau, between the centre and the university. Handy for everything, and for the Hospices Civiles, the huge central hospital that has grown from medieval Hotel-Dieu origins to a formidable patchwork of every succeeding century. She worked for, and got a physiotherapy diploma. This, with her pension, earned her a reasonable, even a comfortable living.

About Strasbourg she had mixed feelings. It is much better than a provincial city: even as a regional capital it has unusual riches and resonance. The Roman frontier post of Argentoratum, the town by the silver river, became the Town of the Streets, the Crossroads City attracting all that was best in both France and Germany, a byword for seven centuries for intellectual brilliance and religious tolerance. The cathedral is the happiest blend of early and late Gothic, the Renaissance and eighteenth-century buildings beautifully proportioned. The opera is good, the Philharmonic outstanding, and Arlette had always been a devoted concert-goer.

It has acquired too much suburb, and is far too big now, but the old town, long girdled in its fortifications, has not changed as much as one would fear. The new town, built by the Germans after 1870, is notable for the best town-planning and the ugliest architecture to be seen anywhere. Strasbourg lives in a happy dichotomy of the extremely beautiful and the absolutely hideous. The people have the same two extremes of character.

Contrary to carefully fostered legend one eats badly. Too much tough fresh pork and greasy sausage, and too little of anything else. Enough to convert one to orthodox Judaism, said Arlette snappishly.

Ruth grew up, became a student, went through awful stages.
At times insupportable. She lived in a studio now, and probably in sin and squalor too. She had become herself; it was normal, inevitable. They no longer saw very much of one another.

Life began to get very boring for the widow.

Hautepierre in bureaucrats' jargon is a Zup. A Priority Urbanization Zone, but a French zup sounds more sympathetic than an English puz.

The road began to wind. Unhelpful noticeboards were saying ‘Maille Cathérine', ‘Maille Karine', and ‘Pedestrian Shopping Precinct' without saying which was where. The mailles or links were hexagons of housing blocks, bound into a tangled chain by one-way streets. Get into all this, and unless you are a native you'll never get out again.

Arlette parked her car. She wanted ‘Maille Eléonore' of which there was no mention. She might have a long way to walk. She walked; she liked walking.

Arlette strode along; nothing to notice about her. She hadn't bothered buttoning her raincoat. Her bag hung on her shoulder by a sling with her arm through it and her hands in her pockets. Not just here – you can get your bag snatched anywhere in Strasbourg. The usual technique is two boys, or it can just as well be girls, on a moped. The first steers in close alongside, the second combines a snatch with a shove while the first accelerates away and round a corner. Nothing to it. She didn't believe the incidence of petty crime was any higher here. It probably wasn't a place to loiter in alone after dark. Nowhere is.

The sky was fine; big and open, massive heaps of cloud in every shade of grey down to the horizon where it got bluish-black.
The rain was losing no time, but would be another half-hour.

Place looked nice; cheerful, even welcoming. None of those terrible rectangular blocks scattered haphazardly on bulldozed subsoil with nothing between but draughts: each of the ‘links' is designed to be a village in itself; distributed in an irregular pattern; loosely tacked together by approach roads. The effort has been honourable. The roadways are lined with grassed banks, and a great many trees have been planted. Quite a lot have been broken, but a good deal remain. They are still immature: trees, alas, are slower than concrete.

Arlette could put a name to the first link because of a large notice over an arcade saying ‘Shopping Centre Maille Cathérine'. The housing blocks were not bad at all, cheerfully irregular, not more than six or seven stories; plenty of the small balconies were gay with geraniums. One could do a lot worse, she thought. The interior of the hexagon was landscaped too with hillocks of soil, little paths winding about, large lumps of stone, a playground for little ones with logs to climb on and a sandpit. A cluster of rather shoddy huts was plainly kindergarten and bits of primary school.

Not many people about. Men would all be at work of course but she would have expected more women doing their shopping.

‘Whereabouts is Eléonore?'

‘No idea,' said a man in a hurry, curt.

‘Sorry,' said a woman. ‘This is Cathérine's all I know.' A more leisurely woman, with a basket on wheels.

‘Through that way. No, wait now, that's Jacqueline, or is it? I'm a bit vague.' Arlette walked on; she'd plenty of time.

‘Over there,' said an elderly man with a dog. ‘Just keep on straight.'

The buildings were different in character. One judges, in France, not so much by the exteriors as the entrances. A few green plants grouped around an artistic arrangement of large smooth pebbles set in roughcast – ‘standing'. This last replaced by a small fountain in a goldfish pond – ‘grand
standing'. The letterboxes are great giveaways too. Some blocks here had a surprising amount of standing, others none at all: grim traps of yellowish tiles with the foot of the fire stairs sticking out, like landings in a prison. She understood: in order not to create ghettos the municipal planners had mingled ‘HLM', that coy acronym for Moderate-Rent-Habitation which means a council house, with private-sector blocks that can be bought and sold, and owned.

Arlette, who had lost her way already despite a usually good bump of location, came out in an angle where trees had been grouped round a sort of courtyard, half asphalted and half just ground stamped hard. Dusty in dry weather and undrained puddles after rain. She thought she understood. The municipal architect, worthy man, had done his best. The idea of little villages had been all right as far as it went. But there was no centre to them. No corner grocery or even a pub. No joyfully tatty dirty-shop selling sweets and newspapers and all the gossip. The big money had taken over. An entire ‘link' separate from the others to allow cars to come, and park, had been built around a gigantic supermarket, with a covered gallery of speciality shops all around. Here was the warmth and the light, the animation and the colour. Here, and nowhere else. Apart from the little arcade in ‘Cathérine' where the mums went if they had forgotten something or were in a tearing hurry, there was no activity. The huge Pedestrian Precinct thing was a cancer, sucking all life from the other links, through the fine grey threads of path and underpass and little footbridge. The insides of all the other hexagons were drained and languid, joyous only when the voices of the children at recreation times echoed shrilly between the blocks.

Three small boys were languidly trapping, kicking, heading a football on the dim play space. Why weren't they at school?

‘Hoy,' she called to the nearest, a lanky overgrown child with a mop of fair hair. He stopped and turned politely after executing a ‘corner'. A sudden grin of unexpected vivacity.

‘No speak the language, Missis,' the child said in English.
Norma's child! Well, she'd found her way. But she hadn't been ready to talk English yet; had to gather her wits.

‘I'm looking for your mother but where does she live?'

‘Me mum?' in so broad an accent that she had to keep her face straight. The boy considered, studying her shrewdly. Not a bailiff! Maybe one of those social-assistant women, or likely a schoolmarm. ‘None too sure. Gone out, likely enough.' A child accustomed already to helping fend off unwanted visitors.

‘I said I'd come this morning. She'll be expecting me.' The English even in an accent as strong as his own reassured him.

‘Ey, Ian,' he bawled across the playground. ‘Our mum gone out?' The answer was incomprehensible but not to him. He grinned again broadly.

‘Can always try, Missis. End block over there. Door at the left. Three up on the corner.'

‘Thanks very much,' said Arlette politely. One of the HLM blocks. She studied the row of names on the bellpushes. She didn't even know Robert's name, and it was just ‘sociological' curiosity. A loose net, that had gathered all sorts of fish. French names, and the heavy Teutonic names of Alsace; Spanish and Portuguese, a couple of blacks, a couple of Arabs: but all in the proportions you would expect for the whole city. Not a dumping ground for underprivileged immigrant labour.

The hallway smelt, the stairs smelt, the lift smelt worst, being a shut-in box, slightly but unmistakably. Smell not so much of poverty – these people certainly weren't ‘poor' – as of backwardness, neglect, a low and uneducated mentality, apathetic, with no energy for much more than bare survival. Piss, cabbage, stale sweat, general unwashedness hung faint but certain on the air. But efforts had been made to scrub off the graffiti and keep the stairs swept. There were the usual notices about fire and how to call the cops or an ambulance, an elaborate roster of people's turns at cleaning the landings and tidying the garbage chute, and a few brave ones done in
colour with fancy lettering and roneo'd, from outside, about the cinema club and the pathetic neighbourhood activities, as well as rules about dogs and not playing ball-games. Arlette was borne upwards depressed. Depression gathered when she rang the bell on the landing and the door snapped open on the other side. She did not turn but she could feel the curious, and somehow malicious stare, like a draught on the back of her neck. Norma's door opened finally, after a loud noise of lavatory being flushed, just as Arlette was going to turn and stare back. Norma's look was suspicious too, but her face cleared at once. ‘'S you. Great. Come on in.' She shut the door firmly, put her tongue out at the landing beyond, winked at Arlette and gave her a friendly clap on the arm. ‘Real nice of you to come. Don't mind the kitchen, do you love? – that ol' sitting-room's in a mess again. Kids! Not to worry – have it straight before Robert can start moaning. Make some tea, shall I? Not like yours I'm afraid. Lipton teabags! But in France you know it's either that or the really classy stuff what I can't afford.'

‘I don't mind a bit.' Depression had vanished instantly. What right had she to feel sorry for herself? Norma might well break down into a violent cry, as she had yesterday, but it would go over like the rain, now right above their heads and due to break any second, and be again good tough resilient Norma. And untidy it might be, but there was no smell. She probably put the children's socks to soak in the bidet, but she was scrubbed, and so was the flat.