The Widow (18 page)

‘Which is what I am.'

‘Right. Advice does not constitute intervention. You advise your customer to seek where appropriate a professional course of treatment: the decision is up to him and the responsibility remains his. It's most important to have this clear. I hadn't thought of this,' laughing, ‘but Paul thinks that Siegel might seek to entrap you, and the next attack might be a whole series of
agents provocateurs
with plausible tales.'

‘Ho. So I don't offer Thai massage to tired businessmen.'

‘No,' giggling. ‘What Paul wants is to get a challenge, to put to the test, on what legally constitutes a minor. We're right on the ethics, and so any tribunal will confirm, so Siegel will back off. Think of it – a doctor seeking to force his own daughter into arbitrary psychiatric examination and treatment. If they get snotty about your ethics, that is exactly the ground where Paul would get most scornful about malpractice.'

‘All right. You send the letter to the paper.'

‘Is there anything you want to do?'

‘Well, I'm like Kennedy with the Russians. If there's a confrontation, a frontal collision, one tries to probe round the edges a bit. While you clobber Siegel with deontology – good word, that – I'm thinking of Uncle Freddy Ulrich. Maybe he'd like a bit of Thai massage.'

‘I won't enquire into that,' said Arthur cheerfully. ‘I say, I'm fearfully hungry.'

‘Those potatoes must be cooked by now. And thanks for getting my car fixed. And I'll try not to get shot at any more.'

‘No, it would be a bad habit to get into. Down these mean streets strides Marlowe unafraid. Tripping occasionally over his own penis. Is this rabbit? Oh good.'

Things happened fast. There was a timid little pip-pip at the front door bell, and in the same moment there was a loud terrifying shattering explosion.

Arthur, who had just put on a resigned ‘I'll take it' expression, ran. Arlette ran. Everybody in the house was suddenly running. As in a movie when a swirl of patterns will freeze into sudden immobility they were all standing still, grouped in silly attitudes, hands and feet poised in mid-air, mouths open, at the bottom of the staircase. In the hallway was smoke, a sharp pungent smell of explosives, a tremendous mess. There were bits of paper and debris everywhere. The groundfloor tenant, Monsieur Lupescu, an inscrutable oriental gentleman who was an expert on East European languages, was standing unperturbed in his doorway. Doctor Joachim Rauschenberg, tall and thin, was arranged in a storklike attitude, contemplating the unhappy follies of deranged humanity. The third floor, an impressive technical something in Electricité de France, was absent but the owner, from the top, known to Arthur as ‘Little Miss Flite' because she had always a reticule stuffed with documents, was in hands-on-hips indignation. As is also usual everybody started talking at once.

‘Somebody rang and I thought who on earth can that be at this hour…'

‘Nothing like plastic; plastic leaves a disgusting mess.' ‘Cops; journalists; I was just wondering what next?'

‘Just like New Year's Eve. Horrible children put bangers in the letterboxes.'

‘There was nothing in them anyhow but publicity rubbish.'

‘They needed replacing anyhow, tatty old things.'

Nobody was worried, nobody looked accusingly at Arlette and said, ‘This is your fault.'

‘I'll get on to the carpenter straight away; obliging little man.'

‘They won't try that again. However, one will keep one's eye open.'

‘A nasty mess – it drew my attention, I thought well, I must tell Doctor Davidson –' Arlette, going back to get the vacuum cleaner and a wet rag, stopped dead at her freshly painted front door. A big smear of blood. A pinkish heap of guts or lungs. Somebody had asked the butcher for debris: somebody with lots of cats … It was much nastier than the bits of red paper from bangers tied in a bundle and dropped in a confined space.

She set her teeth, dumped the filth in the bucket, threw it down the lavatory and returned with disinfectant. When she got back she was touched to find Miss Flite picking up splinters, Mr Lupescu energetically pushing the vacuumcleaner and Arthur scrubbing at the smoke stains. Doctor Rauschenberg was on her landing, taking a professional look at the woodwork.

‘Not nice for you,' said Arlette, setting to.

‘Oh my dear girl! That's nothing. Adolescent theatricals; if one allowed oneself to be shaken or intimidated by such things! Ask Madame Fuchs to tell you the tale of a rather tiresome patient of mine who pursued her all over the house with a loaded revolver. He was cross because I was away.'

‘What did she do?' she asked, fascinated with this new light on Miss Flite.

‘She asked him in, sat him down, talked uninterruptedly for three quarters of an hour and when rather naturally the poor chap fell asleep she crept out still as a mouse and called the police. This house has seen more. When you've finished that I'd be grateful if you'd find a moment to come in to me …

‘You see, I owe you an apology. Would you like a kirsch? A
small cigar? I snubbed you over poor Siegel. Who's a good enough chap but tiresomely up-in-arms about all sorts of things, as I rather gather you've had cause to find out.

‘You see, he came from quite a humble background, and is conscious, uncomfortably, of an arriviste streak. A smack of the nouveau riche? Marrying into the professor's family … he wanted very badly to acquire the life-style. He felt – this is important – dreadfully let down by the wife who ran away. Was that, just a bit, he wonders secretly and it eats him; due to his rigidity, to his straining to attain? You follow. He missed a professorship. Is it surprising that a certain rancour is transferred, without his being in the least aware, to the girl? I recognized little whatsaname, Marie-Line isn't it, on your staircase. Remember seeing her as a child. You understand too, her being a girl was a disappointment.'

‘Isn't there a brother?'

‘There is indeed, a somewhat priggish young man, a goody-goody y'know, a model of virtue whom one instinctively desires to kick in the constipated fundament.'

‘This becomes a classic.'

‘But naturally. Now what I thought of asking – would it be of any service to you were I to ring Freddy Ulrich – in your presence – and ask him to have a word with you?'

‘That would help a lot,' gratefully.

‘You know where he lives?' dialling. ‘That new block in the Contades. Doctor Ulrich please … Not my own taste, but … Freddy – Jo Rauschenberg. My friend and neighbour, Madame Davidson, would much like to exchange a word with you, on a subject you both have somewhat at heart. Be a good idea, I rather think? … Yes, I should think that would fit in fine; I'll ask her shall I? If you dash, he'll fit you in before his first patient – yes, that's splendid; right then: how's the world with you? Great, and my regards to Julie. Till one of these days then old boy.'

‘That's very kind. Tell me, purely as a general opinion, people who make attacks like this – are they dangerous?'

‘Dangerous – no. People who smear blood about the place,
would they commit a crime of blood; that could be difficult to say. In rare combinations one would have to say, possibly. But putting bundles of fireworks in the letterbox, no. Violent yes, in the sense of a personality unable to express itself through normal channels. Emotionally crippled and of course frequently intellectually retarded. Not the pattern of our friend Armand Siegel,' smiling. ‘That'll settle down and sort itself out.'

‘I'm really grateful.'

‘Excellent,' approved Arthur. ‘You whizz off and I'll hold the fort. Masculine presence, to soothe Miss Flite. Rather odd though,' added Doctor Davidson. ‘Have to ask old Joachim. Things in the paper, quite small things, often provoke hostile manifestations, but this seemed too elaborately planned for that.'

‘As long as nobody takes it seriously,' she said. ‘It's awfully comforting to see everyone show such solidarity.'

‘Us bourgeois my love, clubbing together instinctively. Off you go or Freddy'll be getting his duodenum in a twist.'

‘I'm whizzing,' snapping her lipstick shut and making a bolt for the lavatory.

‘Don't you drive too fast,' recommended Arthur.

The ‘park' of the Contades –really a public garden or square – is the centre of bourgeois Strasbourg. It is not particularly pretty, and indeed rather dull, though it has some fine trees and a nice little iron-work bandstand in Second Empire style. It is much favoured by the Jewish population because of the synagogue handily on the corner, and is generally full of solid matrons with little dogs and shrill energetic children, their skullcaps held on by hairgrips. Most of the architecture is
Hohenzollern, but one side, by the pretty little river Aar, is a fine example of Insurance-company-Investment Domestic, thoroughly deserving the hideous name of condominium. The building was madly overheated, which would have caused Arlette even acuter discomfort had not Doctor Frederic Ulrich not been so very very cold.

Not so much his manner, which was undoubtedly freezing, but not designed to freeze her out: it always was freezing. Physically: his was the coldest hand she had ever encountered. He was a specialist in the Digestive Apparatus. Thanks be to God, she thought, there's nothing wrong with my liver. That icy clutch exploring my tummy would be the obsidian knife offering me to the Plumed Serpent.

Not that Freddy looked in the least like a plumed serpent: he had the austerest of crewcuts and a beautiful midnight-blue suit in gabardine. His surroundings showed a devotion to Brancusi-like sculpture and the paintings of Sophie TauberArp. His voice was low and soft, his manners impeccable. Courtly is the wrong word, sounding like Sir Leicester Dedlock. But yes – very like Sir Leicester faced with a Radical Rabble-Rouser. Life imitates art; she had learned it from her father – Proust's kitchenmaid who looked like Giotto's Charity. He used to read Dickens aloud to his children, which she hated. She had seen since how many French politicians adopted Mr Chadband's style of oratory, or how pop singers resembled Mr Guppy at the theatre, and now she was reminded in this hushed atmosphere that Sir Leicester thought of himself as ‘a considerable landed proprietor in heaven'.

‘I am glad to have this opportunity. You are both right and wrong. That Marie-Line misses, indubitably, the stabilizing influence a mother should provide, I should not seek to question. That you should set yourself up to arbitrate in family matters of which you know nothing is, to say the least, open to criticism. Your motives' were generous. I believe I do you no injustice in saying that you were over-hasty, and imprudent.

‘Since you have penetrated, unwittingly, into an old grief never properly healed, I may say this. My sister conducted
herself lamentably: my brother-in-law's behaviour compelled the respect in which I hold him.

‘Marie-Line,' seeing that she made no reply, ‘resembles her mother in much. Her father's anxiety concerning her should be the more understandable. That anxiety expresses itself in what I will allow to be an aggressive defensiveness. I would not, placed as I am, permit myself to criticize his attitude, originating in a painful emotional wound. I can however express my apologies, while seeking your understanding, for an over-hasty riposte to your abrupt challenge to his authority. I regret that assault, since such it was: an impugnment of your character. I wish you to realize that it arose from your over-readiness to take Marie-Line's – divagations – too literally.'

‘Well, you hit me fairly there,' she said. ‘I must apologize in turn, and will. I'll ask in turn, too, for you to understand that I never would encourage her to be hostile to her family. I wanted her to go back home; I still do.'

‘I should hope so, indeed.'

‘Please don't misunderstand me,' cross with herself at appearing to grovel. ‘The first thing I did was to go and see Monsieur Siegel, to try and help Marie-Line to heal any rift that had come about and get her to see where she was at fault. I got a very – mistrustful – reception.'

‘I accept that.'

‘I got rather heated, and I was wrong, and I'm sorry for that. I do think – I feel bound to say – that surely he should – her father should realize that his anxiety, which is natural, exasperates her behaviour. Forgive me, I don't want to make a personal remark, Doctor Ulrich, but are the women in the family, even your own sister – is it fair to say that the women weren't very important, and treated as inferiors?'

His face did not alter.

‘I will reply to you, as far as I reply at all, that my father belonged to an older generation and women in professions were then a relative rarity. Further I will not go. My sister did not have the type of capacity that lends itself readily to a professional formation. I am myself sufficiently old-fashioned
not to accept the upbringing my father gave us as a fit subject of conversation with strangers.'

‘Sorry again,' feeling the weight of the snub, ‘it's relevant as concerns this girl. Bluntly, she doesn't feel she gets treated on her merits. I sympathize with her father's problems: shouldn't we think of hers too? She's quite old enough to be lashing out: it's not just an adolescent tantrum.'

Freddy said nothing for a long moment. Behind the eyes, a highly disciplined mind swirled and came to a stop.

‘Tell me,' he asked mildly, ‘have you been much in her company?'

‘I've noticed that she drinks rather too much. She doesn't look as healthy as she might.'

‘Yes … It used to be thought that the use of one type of artificial stimulant tended to inhibit an attraction – we will not speak of addiction – towards others. The clinical picture is not altogether clear, and I would question the causality, but experience seems to show that the young adapt with disconcerting facility to one stimulant from another.'