The Janeites

by Nicolas Freeling

  Bump, whizz. “There’s no point in Rushing,” said the stewardess. Quite as usual, Raymond cannot recollect where he has left the car.

  An ordinary day, filled with violence – roads, planes, people – but no more than usual. Not going to squawk like a jay but inclining to gibber, Raymond went to the office. Silvia – fat, lovely, comforting, competent – knows him in this state, shields him from an evil world. When he jerks out ‘Tea’ like that, and shuts himself in the stuffy little office (before you get to the air scrubbed and filtered) she obeys. Tea green and gunpowdery is stowed in a padded basket. He won’t come out, and she’ll let nobody in.

  Doctor Valdez Consults. In the polite world of medicine, formal and protocolaire, tight-mouthed about fees undeclared to nosy tax officials, this is well understood. Idea-man. What – today’s topic – do athletes mean by ‘form’? Dope left aside (boring topic at best) what makes a footballer score goals, a skier gain a yard of speed, a tennis player see the ball earlier?

  What makes William Barton, so harmonious a figure in that extravagant Paris household, so disjointed here upon a bed of roses? The Crab had reached out, given him a nip. That can happen to anyone but there’s more than an extraordinary chance.

  The wife; one always suspects the wife, but Valdez is wary of an argument that facile. A football trainer buys a player; a wonderful talent costing millions. Everything points to his fitting in perfectly – and he turns out utterly useless; sullen, awkward and unhappy. The wife – but no; there isn’t any wife.

  William had felt himself bought?

  This woman; had she invested too much – never mind the money – of hope and delight and pride? That this marriage should turn so sour after so few months, leaving a cancer lodged in William’s gut, and who could tell what bitter misery in hers – that is not only an evil and unhappy chance.

  There’s a factor, Valdez, that you would prefer to disregard. Just tell me, would you, why you found this woman so sudden and so violent an intoxication?

  You ran like a rabbit. Five more minutes and you’d have been propped there on your back legs with your eyes gone glassy, while the predator danced. About to make a meal of you, whenever it shall choose.

  Part Two

  You don’t need these Vast quantities of water. Enough for it to swim in. You put a little salt, a splosh of oil, stops it sticking. Keep the pot boiling quite gently, stir it with a fork so the strands stay loose, respect the time it says on the packet. Choose thick spaghetti, not that skinny stuff, this is number-seven.

  They are together in Raymond’s flat. William has invited himself to dinner. Asking for a cookery lesson; things for when you live by yourself and are sick of sardines off the corner of the table.

  “I only know about ten things, oh all right, twenty. But I do those really well. My spaghetti is Famous,” preening ostentatiously.

  “I’m writing it all down,” said William humbly.

  They’ve already made the Bolognese. (‘I know four ways but this is the easiest.’) Demonstration of this great brilliance. Only cooks and doctors have a really sharp knife.

  “Difference is that cooks don’t sterilize it. Wash your feet but not the rice. Learn to be a bit dirty.”

  “What kind of cheese?”

  “Oh I don’t know, Czech Emmenthaler. Parmesan is for when you keep it separate. This you strew over, and we’ll bake it in the oven, all gold and crunchy. There. About a quarter of an hour. Time now to have a real drink. While we make the salad.” All sorts of greenery. “Good for your bowels,” said Dr Valdez.

  “I have to take my pill.”

  “Yes, poor you. Filthy chemicals. Let’s see. You aren’t really supposed to drink, with this, but we pay no attention. I’m going to get you off all these pills. Little girl instead to massage you. Spray you with cold water so you don’t get the horn. Right, let’s lay the table.” William said, “This is good. Oh Yaysus-Gott. Give me some more. Three star.” Wiping his mouth for a long drink of red plonk.

  “I’ve never been to a real three-star restaurant.”

  “I have and often. My masters, getting in was one of our perks. Monsieur-le-Marquis was addicted to them. Liked his tumtum. You say then, thank you Baby-Jesus in the little red velvet waistcoat.”

  “It’s immoral to spend a month’s wage on a meal.”

  “Yes, that’s what’s so nice when it’s free. You’re right, these people are awful. Caillera.” A good word. Backslang for riff-raff.

  “Green tea tomorrow. Vegetables and fruit, I’m taking you off meat. Fish, but not the Bar en croûte Sauce Choron.”

  “You sound like a judge of instruction.”

  “Proust remarked that in a priest as in an alienist – and I’m a bit of both – you will find something of the judge of instruction.”

  “This is you working for me. Now,” said William seriously, “here is me working for you. Let’s have a talk about the fellow who busted you.”

  “You setting up as my guard?”

  “I’ll do the exercises you prescribe. Physically limber. Mentally too – your damn Jane. Not ‘Guard’ – that’s a monarchist word we refuse.”

  “If not a guard,” said Ray, “then perhaps an angel”.

  William had been struck by the simplicity of the flat.

  “This your vow of poverty?” teasing him.

  “Nonsense.” Ray rather cross. “Everything I want, and in perfect comfort. I like it this way. I’m afraid I don’t pay much attention to vows of poverty.”

  “Nor chastity? I rather thought not. She left a lipstick in the bathroom.”

  “Ay de mí. The police are on my track… That’s Janine.”

  “I know how to be discreet,” said the angel,” and I intend also to know the joker who clonked you, and why.”

  “Really,” rather helpless. “I know very little about Janine.”

  “But one can find out.”

  “I’m sure you can… Dumas says somewhere ‘It isn’t always the one with the key who enters the house’.” Raymond was feeling the same sudden exhaustion as attacks him when there is a violent meaningless quarrel with Janine whom he loves and can’t help it.

  One passes through the world, knowing scarcely anything – probably nothing important – about people who are intimate friends. There used to be a euphemism, ‘intimacy’ meaning you’d slept together. Now they just ‘have sex’ which is about as intimate as being squashed together on a rush-hour train. Not Ray though.

  Somebody at a ‘party’ had put on an old Kansas-City record and Ray said ‘Lovely thing’.

  ‘So you like a Beeg swing band’ said the girl taunting him. ‘Isn’t that a bit antediluvian? Benny Goodman in all his pomp?’

  ‘No no that’s just loud. Vitality but crude, noisy, obvious, incurably vulgar.’ He was drunker than he thought.

  ‘Oh I do so agree. I do so love Ellington.’

  ‘Like my father. My grandfather too, probably. Conveys thought, that’ll never do nowadays.’

  ‘Pom de pom pom’ singing the piano chords of a famous introduction. Yes, back when it started in 1940 ‘Take the A-train’ had been soft and relaxed – tender.

  But this was the Count; the bounce he gives the orchestra has the lightness – swift, airborne, articulate – she was still there.

  ‘The Count – Freddy Green – Walter Page – Jo Jones; you’ve the best rhythm section there ever was.’

  ‘Add in the Prez’ with her eyes shining.

  ‘So let’s go home and listen to Lester.’ As a master of slipping sliding piano chords says – ‘Maybe it happens this way’.

  “Whose house was the party?” asked William.

  “Roger. Is his name Blessington? – doesn’t sound quite right.”

  Doctor Roger was quite easy; a big jovial man with a general practice, wide among the Council-of-Europe crowd because he speaks good English (he is English; name of Pilkington). A man with golf clubs in the back of the car and pills in the pocket for all occasions, a
man who makes you feel better straight away. He thought he knew Janine but rather-thought the name sounded wrong.

  “Not one of my patients.” It’s going to be one of those days, William told himself, when everyone has another name. “If it’s the one I’m thinking of. Decorative girl but have it in my mind she’s called Mireille. Wait a moment, did she come accompanied – well sorry, it was that kind of gathering.” With a sudden shrewd glance, “I know now but I didn’t say this, it doesn’t do to repeat gossip so you didn’t hear it from me; it was PermRep.”

  William is quite at home in this world. Strasbourg is one of the diplomatic cities. What with the Council, the Parliament, floods of Funcs, Ministers forever popping in and out, Community countries have accredited missions here, the Permanent Representatives with a vaguely ambassadorial status. This one has an exalted view of his own importance; the name of PermRep attaches to him. Dr Barbour (doctorate of what? – nobody knows) is a tall thin man of much greyish distinction. His teeth and fingernails glitter, the lenses of his glasses flash like lasers, his shirts are very white and the cuffs show off long flexible busy hands; a silvery tie goes with his hair and he has suits the colour and texture of cigar-ash. Oh yes and he’s a secret football-fan. William finds out a lot more but most of it irrelevant.

  William doesn’t lurk and neither does he stalk; it gets noticed. Incompetent and illegal, and he has no intention of disturbing Doctor Holier-than-thou – or not for the moment; that’s the fellow would be quick to make a complaint and he’s no longer a serving cop: status dodgy. He’ll pounce though, on poor ‘Mireille’. A grin there, thinking of the Marquis, one of whose techniques was getting names wrong. ‘You – Francine – or are you Muriel?’. She’s easy to spot; the studio (that’s what they call a one-room flat) is in the Robertsau quarter for ‘prestige’ and she has a little Spider, Italian racing red, old but bold. She’s also very pretty – really Ray has good taste, he thinks when she looms. He looms too, large and cop-like.

  “Now my girl, you’re being conspicuous. You’ve been attracting my attention.”

  “Who are you? Oh – you’re some sort of police.”

  “Putting it in a nutshell. You can call it that.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it.” The card with the tricolour stripe in a little plastic folder is old but has been genuine.

  “Less backchat, girl, unless you want to be brought down to the House.”

  “No. I have to do my shopping.”

  “What you need my dear is a talking-to, so we’ll just walk into this café here where it’s nice and quiet, and drink a cup of their delicious coffee.”

  “I’m not your dear and keep your hands off me.”

  “Quite enough that you’re Doctor Barbour’s dear… Now that’s diplomacy for you. Important foreign power, authority is sensitive to such things.” When you pounce make it a good one and be sure it’ll stick. “It won’t do, my dear.” Paternally, dislodging, sitting her down. She is not about to scream.

  Continuing to fix her with the eye – Two coffees please miss. – William is about to switch on the kindness but makes sure of the demolition first. Janine has taken a cigarette out of her bag and is lighting it, giving herself a countenance. Thinking.

  “What’s he been saying? He’s got no cause for a complaint.”

  “Nothing, he’s made no complaint. But you’ll do well not to ask. You’re also very friendly with another doctor – eminent research scientist.”

  “That’s right, we’re friends.”

  “Quite so, you clean his flat for him and leave your lipstick in the bathroom.”

  “Is that where it got to? – I thought I’d lost it.” Perky.

  “Understand this little chat” getting omens into the voice, “Somebody attacked Doctor Valdez outside his house. Nasty thing that was and we want to know more about it. Now would you want me to dress you up a Verbal-Process? Make you eat it too, and without any mayonnaise.”

  “No truly I know nothing about it. Please, that’s the truth.”

  “So you can tell me the nothing in detail, for as long as it takes, if need be we’ll eat lunch here together. Each pays his own” with the tiger-shark smile.

  Like all European towns Strasbourg is made up of villages. The old walled city was also moated; and a loop of water – the Faux Rempart – was led around and rejoins the river Ill, making quite a distinctive passage over to the ‘new’ town built in the nineteenth century. Indeed the river splits into several streams which meander before tipping themselves into the Rhine, dividing land areas each with a little village centre of its own. Until 1945 the city came to an end at the canal which links the Rhine to the Marne, rather a bold engineering feat. Here, bordering the waterway, they put the complex of quite hideous buildings which make up the Palace of Europe and house the Parliament, the Council, the Court of Human Rights; all of it peopled by a monstrous swarm of bureaucrats. The grandest of these functionaries found themselves housing in the pleasant villa district surrounding. Minor funcs had nowhere to go until they crossed the canal and invaded the village immediately beyond; this is the Robertsau.

  It was known, famous, for the quality of alluvial soil which had built up a bank between the marshy bits; it was Strasbourg’s market garden. Since it is no distance cartloads came daily, beautifully fresh, to the city markets, along with chickens, and fish from the river.

  William’s authority for these historic details is of course Albert, a real Strasbourgeois who remembers these good times.

  A horrible change has overtaken this peaceful and civilized area. The speculating builders offered the price-you-can’t-resist to the small farmer, drowned the little fields of carrots and onions under a flood of concrete and threw up desirable-residences for funcs who could afford much higher rents than other people, and were pleased to find themselves handily placed for the job. The Robertsau gardens are now dinky apartment blocks with ‘standing’, a French word meaning nasty-but-expensive. People like Janine live there in cramped conditions but happy to have an address with prestige… There are a few old houses remaining, and the church, but the main street is now the bus route out to La Wantzenau where the chickens used to come from, and is choked with diesel exhaust. As for the carrots they all come now from Morocco.

  And even the pubs have become tea-shoppes with little calorie-reduced menus for the weight-watching func wives.

  William worked on this girl. It wouldn’t occur to him to say ‘hard’. A professional would know what he means when he says ‘Could do with a drink’. No need to explain, he has turned her inside-out like a glove.

  He sat back, caught the waitress’s eye and said “Un quart de rouge.”

  “A what?”

  “Un pichet. Anything but Bordeaux.”

  “We don’t have little jugs, we’ve only bottles.” This is the point (Albert would have said) of explaining how an honest village becomes a toffee-nosed suburb. There must be a real pub left somewhere for the old men to play cards in, but you’d have to know where to find it.

  “Oh all right then, a glass. What have you got?”

  “Hold on then,” said Janine in a very small voice. “I could do with one myself.”

  “What d’you want?” asked Kind Uncle.

  “What I was thinking, d’you know, suppose we were to share a bottle of crémant.” Alsace champagne, and when good can equal the stuff from Reims. It won’t be that good here but it won’t be that naughty price either.

  “Right” said William, “and bring two menus”. Now he’s in a way to get a few things straight and more reliably: Janine can’t open her mouth without lying but now they’re beginning to understand one another. It’s much too grand to talk about Stockholm syndrome but the principle is the same; a kind of human relationship begins to instil itself. If, interrogating people, you can get to a point where they begin to find you sympathetic, you can do without a lot of threats and bullying. You’ve some idea of the level of disbelief applicable, and you’ve a li
ttle list of the facts and opinions you want to verify. And if you’re William this is the moment to gain her confidence.

  Raymond Valdez

  Janine has vanished. Janine doesn’t live here any more. I’ve rung her number, got the machine, left a word. No reaction. I know what that means. I’m not going to ask any questions.

  ‘I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.’ Epigraph to a Greene book. A good writer; nobody like him at throwing the noose around your neck. Old Hangman Greene.

  I am a Jesuit? A consecrated man? Awful word, next door to castrated. No wonder that people see one as a weirdy. A suspected pederast. I can be respected, even admired, but at the back of their minds I am a poor thing, unable to love or fulfil a woman. I’m like anybody else. I am Monsieur Tout-le-Monde.

  The French like to think about God from time to time. They like to be baptized; that’s a piece of insurance. To be married in church, as well as the town-hall. More respectable, though it won’t make the marriage last longer. And if possible, to be scraped clean by the curé when dying. Allaying fear with a dose of pious sentimentality. Praying is an incantation, helpful in hard times. Rather like the old Bovril advertisement. ‘Buoys up that sinking feeling.’

  I am aware that I made promises, among others a vow of celibacy. It is no excuse to say that I never believed in it much. The arguments seemed to beg the question. The early Church didn’t bother about it much. Avoid Fornication: yes, quite.

  I need no telling that adultery is the worst of human conditions. Very well; one has a mistress – rather like Mr Greene.

  No sensible bishop ever threw out the curé for having a mistress; he’d get left with the pederasts. There are celibate men, to be sure. Yes, and a house full of them is a nasty sight. Smelly, too.

  Raymond, you are behaving badly. Like a small child. I do not mind your being ignoble but do not be irresponsible. Please call to mind the simple truths you tell your patients. You can treat their symptoms: they must find their therapy. Look your emotional upheavals in the eye.