A Long Silence (9 page)

It was all very humdrum, thought Van der Valk, picking up his book about Montrose. He liked history; it was one of the best ways of putting life into proportion, by distancing things. Arlette liked fiction, but wanted it to be an easy read; something that told a story. Unless Kai Lung unrolls his mat, she said, I'm not there at all. She was not interested in Montrose. Scotland in the seventeenth century, she said with elaborate shudders, what could be more barbaric? A great mistake, he told her austerely.

‘Supper,' kicking open the door from the kitchen because both arms were full.

*

Marvellous flat, thought Richard, taking off his jacket and self-consciously displaying his splendid pale-green shirt with metallic silver stripes, bought just that afternoon. If everything was new it would look lousy however much money had been spent: it is those faded dark blues in the worn carpet
that make one realize. The big room had an exciting, theatrical smell, like greasepaint.

‘You've come a bit early; that's nice,' said Larry with his curved smile. ‘You won't mind giving me a hand to get a few things cleared?'

‘Of course not.' The sensation of being behind the scenes added zest and gave a comforting familiarity which obliterated awe. Richard had no experience of parties except the student sort with Algerian plonk and a treasured bottle of cut-price vermouth, and the excessively prim little ‘receptions' of his childhood: his mother's agonized fussing in the kitchen with tiny bits of cheese and bacon, limp shrimps and watery smoked eel, imploring the red-handed servant girl not to touch the good china on any account. He was surprised when Larry locked the drinks cupboard with a wink and put the key in his pocket, and more surprised still to find a depressed man in the kitchen unpacking large wooden boxes. There was a pompous big paté cooked in a golden crust, a whole side of smoked salmon already sliced and cunningly reassembled – there were no less than two crates of champagne. His dazzlement was completed when one of the coffins proved to have a zinc lining and to be filled with huge bars of ice. China, glass, silver and napkins appeared magically; the caterers' man tapped at ice with a little silver hammer, put the first dozen bottles into buckets, bowed, produced an imposing inventory, said, ‘Will that be all sir please sign here thank you very much sir', pocketed his tip too deftly for Richard to see how big it was and vanished.

‘Who's getting married?' asked Richard boorishly. Larry gave the bottles a turn to settle them in the ice, wiped his fingers fastidiously, smiled and said, ‘You and Daisy.'

‘Who's Daisy?' in alarm and too late because the doorbell was ringing.

There were so many lessons to learn, so many tests to pass, so many little traps, so many awkward moments in which he felt his provinciality, his adolescent lumpiness and his crude student manners being brutally removed – as though with paint-stripper – and painfully sandpapered down that he certainly
did not enjoy himself. He understood a few things he had wanted to ask but had had no time for, like ‘Suppose someone doesn't like champagne?' One of the men, a German with a noisy laugh, asked for whisky and he heard – with admiration – Larry's silky voice saying easily, not offensively, ‘My word – we should have gone to the pub, shouldn't we, to stock up.' And at one moment he heard the same voice, soft and silvery, whisper, ‘Don't drink so much' in his ear. It was already too late, and he had to disappear discreetly a little later to vomit in the bathroom, but by making an effort he brought himself back under control, and there were other moments when he felt he was not doing too badly, as when Daisy gave him her huge flashing smile and murmured, ‘You know, Larry, I like your protégé.' Daisy had disconcerted him greatly, and he hadn't at all grasped the ‘marriage' joke, because she was very thin, not really pretty at all, and when he tried being flirtatious in a rather heavy provincial way he found her icily distant. Her dark sea-green frock fitted her too well, she wore too much jewellery, and her perfume was so harshly sombre it had a choking quality, almost like ammonia. Anyway, she was nearer fifty than forty if he was any judge.

But everybody was – except for Larry of course, himself, and a young girl of perhaps eighteen who was ravishing, with a silver lamé frock and a black velvet scarf and magnificent breasts called Thalia. Nobody had familiar, solid Dutch names: there was a Winifred and a Maxine and a Franziska; they spoke Dutch when they weren't speaking English, and their accents sounded Dutch, but they weren't like any Dutch people Dick had ever met.

He thought perhaps Thalia had been invited a bit perhaps ‘for him' since she was the only one of his age, but found her very arch and stand-offish, and much more interested in ‘Heinz', the burly athlete who had wanted whisky. A slight narrowing of Larry's eyes warned him, and he did his best to squire Daisy assiduously. There were several underground patterns he realized he didn't understand, little formal movements of conversation like some kind of old-fashioned dance which he hadn't learned. The men, he realized, were in an
oblique way talking business, and he had sense enough not to interfere. The eating went on a very long time, but somehow he never did get an awful lot for himself: he was kept too busy getting things for Daisy and Winifred, a big handsome woman with a deep soft voice whom he had at last realized was married to the German. A long time later, it seemed, a professional waitress in a black frock and white apron was suddenly serving coffee, and Larry was standing in front of the ornate brass-inlaid cabinet drawling ‘Calvados, Jean-Claude?' He himself wasn't asked, but he found suddenly a brandy-glass in his hand, sipped at it wondering what it was – he had never tasted Calvados – and was greatly taken aback to find he had some kind of sugar syrup with no alcohol in at all. Daisy was drinking framboise, and Winifred brandy.

Up to now there had been no music, only that intricate, difficult conversation that turned and dodged and doubled in and out of business, magic – an extraordinary conjuror Daisy had seen – sport; ski and tennis – New York geography and restaurants in Holland and Germany. There were some subjects that were totally taboo. Art was one, oddly enough. Politics was another. ‘Oh, my dear,' said Daisy, ‘that minister who takes his shoes off at conferences, don't talk to me about such boring things.' It was tricky sometimes. Money, naturally, was never mentioned: Richard had understood that nothing is more provincial than money. But neither, oddly, was anything remotely metaphysical, even where the magician was concerned. When, as occasionally it did, the conversation lapsed Dick missed the comforting shout and thud of pop groups with ever more forced names picked out for them by copywriters. It was a relief to him when after the maid had cleared away the coffee cups and disappeared, Larry put on a series of French chansonniers who agonized in a low-keyed, illegible but determinedly intellectual manner, and said gently, ‘Well, perhaps we might have a little entertainment. Thalia, my dear?'

Aha, that was the point of Thalia – she turned out to be a dancer. She did what seemed to Richard a rather brilliant imitation of Balinese girls, a great deal of carefully finished
work with the elbows and fingertips, the silver lamé melting and shivering, liquidly decomposed and reforming into stylized flowers. She retired modestly to the bathroom, came back in a classic tulle skirt with a tight satin top, and did a Balanchine-Stravinsky parody which was extremely clever. Slightly less modestly, she took this off, displaying much rippling muscle, and struck an attitude before saying in her childish, tinny voice, ‘In the style of Maurice Bèjart.' This was athletically extremely difficult and did not always come off, but was greeted with much warmth.

A bronze drum,' said Larry elegantly.

‘My god,' murmured Winifred to Daisy, just loud enough for Richard to hear, ‘her breasts really are superb, I could almost feel jealous.'

The girl sat crosslegged on the carpet, in something like a lotus position with her head bowed, panting from her exertion. Her face gleamed with sweat; she seemed unconscious of the remarks being made. She's magnificent, thought Richard with whole-hearted admiration and fierce desire: he had drunk no more champagne, but a glass of water and the two cups of strong coffee had made him less woozy. He had had just enough to eat, so that his stomach was stabilized. He radiated energy; he felt fine. The girl's body – she was very tanned, and was wearing nothing but a white collant – charged him as though with electric current: he tingled with force.

When her breathing quietened Larry said, ‘Now the Netherlands Dance Theatre' and put on a new record. This one was a percussion group, so intricate in texture that it became orchestral: the rhythms at once stiff and liquid both emphasized and parodied the primitive quality in urban, sophisticate embroideries. The girl stretched out on her back, lay still, began to tense and relax her muscles, banal rhythmic movements modulating gradually into plastic experiments which began with no more than a flutter of her fingers, spreading up her hands and arms to her torso and gradually to her whole body, dying away again and finishing in a kind of trance that had a catatonic quality, so that it was uneasy and frightening. Suddenly she planted her feet, threw her head back, arched her
body and peeled the collant off. Richard found his teeth clenched hard, and a nerve in a back tooth reminding him angrily that it needed filling.

She stretched her arms out above her head, and without moving her feet began to follow the music with her body. Too tensed and angular to be serpentine or fluid, too painful to have any beauty, her movement still held and gripped attention; it was a possession, resembling those ritual performances in which the participants pierce and wound themselves without apparent effect: even the flow of blood is suspended. The percussion clashed and jarred angrily: her body became increasingly harsh and anguished. Was she doped? – no, Richard did not think so, but she had drunk a good deal. He felt soaked in sweat; his eyes blinked dizzily, slipping out of focus; he felt as taut and strung as she appeared; her muscles bunched and roped like a gymnast's. If she had a knife or anything, he feared, she would be doing herself an injury. She had no knife – the movements shuddered to a climax and she began to make love to herself in a way so harsh and cruel that he had to look away; it was unbearable. He saw Daisy's face a few inches away, as hard-set as the girl's body, a line of sweat along the stiff-curled upper lip. He looked uneasily, as though with relief, back to the girl. Everyone in the room had the same rigidly locked immobility. The girl's body collapsed to the carpet and she lay there as though guillotined, head turning from side to side, neck muscles twitching in violent involuntary jerks. The music stopped.

There was a harsh hot moment of silence. Larry's voice, as always soft and easy, sounded with a shrill edge to it.

‘Who will add to the gaiety? Winifred?'

Her laugh was like a crystal chandelier tearing loose and falling on a parquet floor.

‘I wish I could,' she said.

Another woman got up suddenly, a youngish, colourless-seeming woman whom Richard had scarcely noticed. She was carrying a glass of alcohol. She stooped, half knelt, put her arm behind the girl's head, pulled her roughly sitting upright, held
the glass – shoved it – against the pale lips and said ‘Drink' abruptly.

The girl sipped, drank, shuddered violently and spluttered half the glassful back on the woman's shoulder. The woman paid no attention: she threw the glass under a chair where it rolled and lay and no one bothered about it. She put both hands under the girl's shoulder blades and with a violent effort heaved her upright. The girl was limp, the woman more than half drunk; they staggered about and wobbled uncertainly. The woman braced her feet, wrapped both arms around the girl's body and clutched it with a sort of ferocity, so that the skin, gleaming with sweat, left smudges on the pale frock. She held it so tightly that the body arched over and the head stretched back, opening the lines of the jaw and neck down to the collarbones. The woman pressed her face into the girl's throat, kissed it, and bit her ear.

Dick found suddenly that there was a pain in his palate, and at the root of his tongue, keen and crippling. His eyes filled with tears; he leaned over without caring about manners, seized Daisy's half-full glass, and gulped what was in it. The alcohol took his breath away like a kick in the back. When he wiped the moisture out of his eyes and could again see, the girl was holding herself up by her two hands clasped behind the woman's neck. As he watched her hands flickered, flexed, caught hold of the zip running down the spine and tugged at it. He could see that her eyes were shut, and her lower lip caught up in her teeth in concentration.

The tension was snapped by an abrupt movement of Larry's towards the wall. The lights in the room were all put out together. Richard felt Daisy make a sudden movement: he turned towards her with a despairing feeling that he knew what to do, but felt sure he was going to make a very poor job of it.

*

Van der Valk, lying in bed in The Hague, absorbed in reading all about that restless, slippery, crooked fellow the chief of the Clan Campbell, banged irritably at his pillow which had slipped down and said, ‘Have you any peanuts?'

‘No,' said Arlette. ‘An apple if you want, but no peanuts. Do stop bouncing about like that. D'you want half my apple?'

‘No,' irritably. ‘I want something salty.'

*

‘Now come on, wake up,' said Saint sharply. He himself was as fresh and unmarked as the fine morning. Richard made an effort.

‘That auction stuff that Louis bought – a vanload of it. I'll try to get it unpacked and cleaned up, shall I, and then make some coffee?'

‘Good,' said Saint an hour later. ‘You're learning to make coffee, too. All part of the same thing,' helping himself to a little more sugar, ‘a social exercise, whether it's in manners or coffee, you must keep to the rules … You did well there, Dicky, and for a first time it was a bit rough, I had no idea that fool of a girl was going to go that far.'