Strike Out Where Not Applicable

by Nicolas Freeling

  Compromising on the funeral, trying to keep both sides happy, she had succeeded in discontenting everybody. The one thing she could feel grateful for was that the few rather-lost-sight-of relations Bernhard had had in Germany weren’t coming. She had telegraphed news of the death on Saturday, but, being a village, they hadn’t had the wire till Monday morning. She had wired again on Monday evening, and a stiff reply had come on Tuesday. That the notice was too short, that they regretted, that things were crucial on the farm (they always were), that the harvest couldn’t be left just now (at the end of April? – what harvest?) and that they were sure she understood. She did.

  Now that Wednesday had at last arrived, she was feeling stunned, although it was still only eight o’clock. At least that odious undertaker seemed competent: she supposed that was a comfort, obscurely.

  Saskia and the girls had been busy since seven. Tables had been removed and piled in the yard at the back, the restaurant judiciously dimmed with flowers and candles into an atmosphere of whispering. The bar and the goldfish tank had been kind-of-shrouded. The others had just disappeared to wash and change, leaving her in command, already in her black frock and gloves with no jewellery, looking serene and rather splendid, a dignified figure but with a nervous need to go to the lavatory every ten minutes.

  At a quarter to eight the undertaker had arrived with his discreet black fleet and begun at once to buzz.

  ‘A public room, Madam?’

  ‘Our private rooms are upstairs – one can’t expect people to troop up two flights and I wouldn’t want it either.’ She was stung by the note of disapproval. ‘This was his room, where he was best known, where everybody remembers him.’

  ‘And where shall we put the bier?’

  It had been arranged, finally, in the familiar corner, where Bernhard had been used to sit chatting, cardplaying, pouring out glasses.… Now it was a kind of altar. No spotlights, thank heaven, but a decided feeling of stiffly-bunched-madonna-lilies. Bernhard looked as natural as though reading the vegetable-market prices in the evening paper – she felt guilty at this thought. One had to admit the fellow had done a good job – all that was lacking was a Pharaoh’s gold mask …

  She felt she wanted to cry, which wouldn’t have mattered since legitimate grief had warned her to put no mascara on. But she couldn’t cry because she wanted to laugh as well. Bernhard in his corner – there ought to be a bottle of mirabelle and three glasses.… She rushed to the lavatory, where she laughed, cried, decided not to be hysterical, calmed herself sternly, straightened her clothes and face, and came out in time to meet Van der Valk, arriving punctually at nine o’clock and leaving Arlette in the car down the road, waiting for a group with which to mingle in a properly effaced manner. He had his midnight-blue suit on and was carrying his stick to reinforce the note.

  ‘Good morning, Mevrouw Fischer. My profound respects and sympathies and I trust you have not been annoyed. Press?’

  ‘Just the ordinary.’

  ‘Have unpleasant suggestions – or hints – been made?’

  ‘I don’t know what hints could be made,’ icily. ‘If you mean has anyone hinted he was drunk, no. People are not as nasty as you seem to think!’

  ‘I see. That is better than I might have feared – I’m relieved to hear it.’

  ‘Are you still, uh, enquiring, Commissaire?’

  ‘I am, yes, but you notice that I am very quiet about it. I don’t go about cross-examining people. I have every reason to believe that when I have finally assembled all the details and the accounts of all the witnesses the authorities will be perfectly satisfied. Such things are bound to take a few days.’

  ‘A plane made a bang and frightened the horse?’ timidly.

  ‘All these tiny details need minute examination. It was wise of you to go ahead with no loss of time.’

  ‘Will you be wanting to talk to me, uh, any further?’

  ‘Not today in any case,’ politely. He walked over to look at the bier. ‘Very good – excellent.’ He didn’t say what, but presumably he was impressed by the convincing look Bernhard had. After the pathology laboratory …

  ‘Good morning, Commissaire.’

  Saskia, with her softest voice, was standing at his elbow. ‘We are not offering anything officially, but perhaps you would like a glass of sherry? Or are you here officially?’ It was a pleasantly turned sarcasm – of course plenty of people are sarcastic when nervous.

  ‘An unofficial drink, in an unofficial moment – with pleasure.’

  ‘If you don’t mind coming through to the back.’

  Through the door, between the kitchen and the cloakrooms, was a fair-sized hallway. The stairs led up to the living quarters, and a passage led through to the scullery and store-room doors. A restaurant table had been set against the wall, covered with a white cloth, and laid with sherry and port and a tray of glasses. From this vantage point he could observe the undertaker in the grateful role of chef de protocole and the arrival, scattered but growing thicker, of the people who come to a ‘Private’ funeral, only a few of whom were smuggled through by Saskia for a ritual glass. Cooks, stiff in Sunday suits, a delegation from the Hotel and Catering Association (which got sherry), the local burgomaster and councillors (who preferred port – sweeter), Bernhard’s cronies, looking no deader than he did – they got a dignified handshake from Marguerite and a sort of bow from Saskia, as though from an open carriage. Wholesale butchers and greengrocers. Rob, in a dark suit, very polite and formal. Most people, after saying the right words, melted out to the carpark, embarrassed by Bernhard’s nose sticking out in a jovial, faintly alcoholic manner.

  At the end arrived Francis La Touche, shepherding his horsy band. He was very good, bowing over Marguerite’s hand and saying in a clear military tone, ‘I am greatly saddened, this occasion touches me personally and deeply, and I speak for all of us when I ask permission to extend my heartfelt sorrow and regrets,’ which made the mumblings of butcher sound unusually lame and lengthy. Van der Valk, hovering, could not quite hear what Marion said: her voice was too low.

  Janine had not accompanied Rob. She was perhaps in the group of those who did not know the family and had not been invited, but who would come to the churchyard. Not a churchyard, thought Van der Valk. A cemetery. Churchyards in Holland are thought of as slightly insanitary inventions.

  He was – both professionally and personally – unsentimental about dead people, and believed in being earthy on the subject of rotting to flowers and fruit. He detested hygienic cemeteries, polished granite with gold lettering, marble noticeboards, little metal plaques saying dogs and prams were not allowed. One can be an English Protestant or a French Catholic, he thought, but one is short, to the point, and one does not take portentousness as a substitute for nobility. It was Arlette’s influence that had shaped him – she was a great enthusiast of country churchyards. ‘A wooden cross,’ she said, ‘and if your children like, a sandstone slab.’ You that are born of woman, he was saying to himself now in this abominable municipal cemetery, are a breath and a whisper before you descend into the soil that will, we hope, nourish an apple tree. You are the breath of flutes at evening time, the little curl of whitish foam on the sand. He thought he would be quite contented to be thrown overboard at sea – it showed more confidence. Committed to the deep – he liked that word ‘committed’. God would know how to disentangle the bones from the sea bottom. He would rather be in the ossuary at Verdun than in Père Lachaise between Marshals.

  This now – petty smallness and pretension – undertakers had recently decided to suppress the hole in the ground, pretending it was not there. Cypress branches had been arranged to screen the infamous with an ingenious fan, a cunning mechanical invention was added that poised the coffin above this prudish cache-sexe, and at the crucial moment the chef de protocole pressed a button. No men with ropes: you sank silently from sight, the fan bending to admit you to Abraham’s bosom and – this was the really expert touch – springing back into p
lace: not only was there no hole – there wasn’t even a coffin! The old and noble custom of throwing handfuls of soil had long been suppressed as unhygienic.

  He almost laughed, and hurt his nose suppressing it. Victor Hugo! The Mother Superior, in Les Miserables, who has a cunning plan for putting dead nuns in the crypt, a thing frowned on by the administration.

  ‘God subordinated to a commissaire of police,’ she fumes. ‘What a century!’

  That was him! Seeing that everything went off hygienically. Seeing to it that the administration was satisfied …

  Just before pressing his ignominious button, the undertaker lifted his voice unctuously.

  ‘Does anyone desire to say a few words?’

  Marguerite stood still and stony. A few butchers stirred uneasily, led by the brother-in-law from The Hague. Francis stood in an attitude of military petrification, with a slight sniff: funerals without ceremonial shots, flags, and the Last Post, were a very poor affair. Marion wore a faint knowing smile, like a child with a secret that the others are begging it to tell. Saskia Groenveld had a face of beatific content, flights-of-angels-wing-thee, and Arlette was concealing boredom really extremely poorly. Just behind her, looking as though she should be holding to the older, taller woman’s skirt, Janine was snuffling in a silly little hanky. He wondered why. Was it one of her conventions to sob at funerals? Or was she snivelling for something else, more permanently lost? His eye travelled round a ring of butchers, liquid of eye as humanely killed calves, and was struck by the painter, in his dim everyday greyish-green suit, armoured in his contempt for such goings-on. He would not have thought that the painter might deign to attend a funeral, surely a bourgeois attitude. Still, there he was, his face designed to tell anyone curious enough to look that he was not there in spirit.

  Marguerite had her eyes fixed on the coffin with steady severity, as though determined not to miss the vanishing trick. The Rope Trick Inverted, thought Van der Valk. We want no little Indian boys; we want a live and faintly sweaty Bernhard in his white jacket to come climbing out from behind the cypress-branch fan and invite everyone back for the apéritif.

  The President of the Catering Association would dearly have loved to say a few words, but had waited too long for someone with prior claims – he was too late; the head mute pressed the hoojah and a fruity eulogy sank into the womb of lost opportunity.

  Perfect, thought Van der Valk. He bowed to Marguerite, cut his wife adroitly out of the ruck, and ran away as quickly as dignity and his stick would allow. The motor of the deux-chevaux raced noisily, but was masked by many much more expensive motors doing the same thing in their politer way.

  ‘Why do you think nobody had the courage to say the few words?’ asked Arlette.

  ‘Perhaps in the clinch, now that they are really rid of him at last, words would have been otiose,’ with relish.

  ‘For a person presumed to have been so universally liked, though, wasn’t it a scrap pointed?’

  ‘I feel fairly certain that there wasn’t a soul there that didn’t detest him.… Have you ever been to a cremation?’ She hadn’t, and what was more she never would. He had – professionally.

  ‘It is only worse than that performance in that you don’t even get a breath of fresh air. Not even a smell of earth and leaves. A sort of desiccated drowning, asphyxiation in an odour of atheist piety.’

  ‘When you die,’ said Arlette happily, ‘I will be there to finish you off. Women are always tougher than men.’

  ‘You won’t commit suttee?’

  ‘What is suttee?’

  ‘Widows’ self-immolation, on a pyre.’

  ‘Penses-tu,’ greatly shocked. He laughed.

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Put you in a little boat and pour whisky all over before striking a match and giving a determined shove.’

  ‘Lovely. What’s for lunch?’

  ‘Steak tartare – nothing to get ready. Did you notice how the sun came out suddenly?’

  ‘Yes indeed.’

  Yes indeed. That April sunlight that came out suddenly, blinding: illuminating …

  Full of peace and good digestion, he had to go and see the Officer of Justice. He was not yet back from lunch, but, being the Commissaire, Van der Valk could wait in the empty bureau. The magistrate was a punctual person, and would certainly be back in five minutes.

  He had known many of the breed. Old Slotemaker de Bruin in Amsterdam, elegant and eighteenth century, with his little digressions from law into metaphysics. Karstens, the opposite, the very worst type, the old-fashioned hanging bullying magistrate whose summing up in the courtroom never varied, who banged out a good dose of correctional training with the same emotional impartiality for robbery with breaking as for indecent exposure. (He had once, to his immense joy, overheard a barely murmured whopping indiscretion, unthinkable in an Officer of Justice … Old Slotemaker, passing Karstens in the passage on their way to their respective offices, half to himself, half to his ‘greffier’ – ‘I do believe he must be a repressed homosexual …’) And Rodcik, thin and dry and infinitely scrupulous, more scrupulous than most presidents – and Keller the swift and cutting, the reporters’ delight, with his love of colloquialism and folklore illustration.

  This one was of a newer school, a youngish, ascetic man with close cropped grey-blond hair and rimless glasses that gave his bony face a boyish look, so that from some angles he looked like a young law-student, and from others like a fanatical military bishop – he was both. You could never be sure how he saw things: at times startlingly progressive and liberal, one for ‘leaving the door open’, he could be ruthless, a hammer of the infidel. His name was Romeijn and as Officers went he was reasonable; patient and considerate with prisoners and courteous towards the police, which was more than some …

  ‘I beg your pardon, Commissaire.’ A doublebreasted suit of brighter-than-legal blue, a long bony white hand, slightly moist. A non-smoker – there was something to be said for those healthy tireless old hams, smoking big cigars and thumping the table. A man of the centre, embedded uneasily at times in the Palais, a pompous Victorian building smelling of damp umbrellas and echoing to continual clerical coughing. He had a canopied brass table-lamp and a modern red-and-grey telephone, a morocco blotter whose green had dulled to black – and a goldrimmed Parker pen-set; diamond-paned mahogany bookshelves full of lawbooks bound in quarter-leather – and a Philips tape-recorder encased in chaste grained grey plastic. He had a trick while talking of taking his glasses off (which gave his face an indecent appearance), gazing blindly at the lenses, which were always perfectly clean, and rubbing at them nervously with a huge pure white hanky.

  ‘Do sit down. You’ve come to tell me about this Fischer business, have you?’

  ‘Yes, sir. He was buried this morning. I think we’ll have to do some work on it. I’ve spent some time on the persons and places, getting to know their little ways, but it would take a whole team arid thorough work – it may come to that.’

  ‘Your conclusion?’

  ‘That the man was killed.’

  ‘Your premises?’

  ‘None at all.’

  Plenty of Officers of Justice on getting this answer would get all exophthalmic and flap their hands like angry pigeons, and yelp about timewasting. But Mr Romeijn stayed tranquil and said gently that perhaps it was time for him to know something about these people. Van der Valk was grateful. His idea about violent emotions, so jarring in this placid landscape of pale green and watery grey, like the belts of brilliantly coloured flowers, wouldn’t do at all in this office.

  ‘The presumption about Fischer begins with the village doctor. A youngish man but of considerable experience among these people. He chose to stir up a troublesome enquiry that would certainly harm him if it failed to produce its result. It wasn’t physical evidence that really moved him, because an accident, while unlikely, remains possible. We couldn’t act on that alone. I have questioned him, indirectly. He knows something, but he w
on’t say. Possibly aspects of what he feels come under professional lipsealing, and his suspicions can’t be substantiated and can’t consequently in fairness be formulated. He cuts the knot by throwing veiled warnings our way, which takes the monkey off his shoulder.’

  ‘The physical likelihood of an attack?’

  ‘Open. The ground is reached easily by anyone whose presence at the manège would pass without comment, and that is very large. One could be seen but unremarked. The spot is not, though, overlooked either from the windows or the fields.’

  Mr Romeijn had uncapped his fountain pen and begun to make notes. It was a little like a copywriter presenting an advertising campaign to a soapflakes manufacturer.

  ‘Around this patch of ground – here are the photographs – lies a variety of natural junk – by natural I mean that it’s not unexpected or incongruous. Among the rubbish an old golf club and a round iron weight. The means for an attack lay at hand.’

  ‘Thus no presumption of planning or spontaneity.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Further.’

  ‘Fischer: his wife is on friendly terms with the owners of the manège, Francis and Marion La Touche. He is if anything not. Told to take exercise by the doctor, he chooses horses. The choice seems to strike a false note. He had never shown interest in horses – he suddenly does so. I am left with a notion that he wished to provoke people – to show his importance – perhaps even his power.’

  ‘You must support this remark.’

  ‘He had nothing to do in the restaurant, beyond superficial appearances. There he was faced with a coalition of two women, his wife and a woman called Groenveld, of no particular age, not unattractive, of decided character.’