One More River, page 20
This anyhow he thought extremely comic. Jo, you have to recall, was bigger than me, much cleverer, and a lot better-looking too. He talked himself into a job in the ‘roxy’. Like Kollo says, studs are expendable. He was in on one of the romps. I don’t know if he got to roger Daffodil, that would be a bit too good and I can see one has to discount most of what they tell you, fast talkers one and all and Kollo not the most backward. This much seems true, that the status as performer got him a room in that hotel and some (enough) of a clue to Daffodil’s movements. All the staff knew what went on. They always do, and are well paid to look the other way. I think it was just a matter of an extra bribe, and telling the floor waiter this was an elaborate joke, to ‘scare the knickers off ol’ Daff’.
Kollo says he got on to this afterwards. He didn’t take it seriously. The huff and puff was to save face and soothe vanity.
I don’t want to sound a prude or a hypocrite. A handful of dollars—it’s all cash in that business, just like cattle-dealing, and it’s easy-come, easy-go. I imagine since I haven’t tried that fucking those girls is less fun than one might guess. What effect has a speed pill there? I wouldn’t know. My own experience was such a kick in the balls I’ll not be anxious for another. When I said who I was, Kollo was hospitable with a lot of drinks, and, ‘You don’t let them have any at work’. I didn’t get offered any jobs.
Better get me straight. My girl and I are a very ordinary couple indeed. We do like to drink, and to go to bed together. I have looked up most of the references in the notebook. Like Mr Pepys. I’d say, that if I were to behave that way, then she would act pretty much the way Mrs Pepys did. Saying that in this Restoration time morals were easy-going, this doesn’t impress me much. Those women sound extremely modern to me.
After all, nothing much changes, the world stutters on as best it can, happenings seem dramatic, and they’re quickly forgotten. I went to see Brigitta, who told me that whatever sound and fury she and her friends were able to muster for the last days before the tenth anniversary means prescription, when all hypothetical criminal charges become automatically null and void, they never managed to pin down responsibilities for Palme’s assassination. So that story is still there, waiting for John to make something of it in fiction. It was very much up his street.
She told me another story, that when it happened she had been sleeping with John, more or less openly, and that she’d overheard at a party his publisher talking to one of those chalky old men who have much influence with the Nobel committee, and saw to it that Greene would never get it. The old boy glanced at her and said (intending to be heard), ‘Isn’t that Charles’ whore?’ The publisher made a good answer. ‘She would I think choose so to describe herself.’ Brigitta said she felt a moment of pride.
I’ve been to see a lawyer. I don’t know any, but found a name in the book I recognised as the son of a man Gunther was friendly with. He listened quietly, laughing to see me in a fluster. These stories (he said) which appear as complicated, weird, are lawyers’ daily bread. There are hundreds such. Until the last of those who lived through the war are gone. And the occupation. And their children. And those who live in the East. And those who were flung out by the Czechs. And now—where will Serbia end, and Croatia begin? And where exactly is Bosnia? Do you know? Lawyers aren’t short of business. And we, I mean the ones my age, the students, who thought we could turn the page and start afresh with no hangovers, can’t. Because we too are part of European history.
John’s affairs belong to a French court. Alan will look after them. Sibylle’s, since they never divorced, are in the same boat. On the ‘property’ here, the heritage of Gunther, he says he’ll get a court order, and that I need have no worries. As long as the lawyers are paid … We have nigh as many as in the States.
I went to my professor, who was unfussed and said, ‘Take a year off.’ He gave me too an introduction to the Professor of Latin. I’ve tried to verify references, and knowing no Latin (I must mend that) I couldn’t make much of John’s bits-of-quote. Nice old man. Laughed a lot, said that it threw some interesting light upon John’s character. And he gave me another line, which I’m keeping for the end of this. It seemed a good ‘epilogue’.
I needn’t have bothered. I went to see Cathy. She knows Latin. This was good, because she told me to come back, again and often. She likes being ‘my Spanish aunt’. Yes, I like being her German ‘brother’.
Alan and Steph in France have also become friends. I’m in the family. That’s as it should be.
The professor rambled somewhat, forgot I think that I wasn’t one of his own students, started telling me ‘the sort of thing English schoolchildren would have had in those days.’ You must correct this if I got it wrong because I’m citing him from memory, but ‘big chunks of Aeneid and the more imperial odes of Horace,’ after ‘a good grounding in Caesar and maybe a little Ovid.’ Very imperial—’fitting them to rule the Master Race’—is that a bit naughty? They ‘wouldn’t have had the sexy bits, naked slave girls putting logs on Horace’s fire.’ I think it was this that made him veer off into telling me about a lyric ‘ascribed to Virgil and so unlike him that it probably is Virgil’ about a Syrian dancing girl.
I’ve gone into this detail because he forgot I knew no Latin and when I reminded him put it in colloquial German, so putting that now into English I’m making mistakes? Perhaps that doesn’t matter? John with his English upbringing and his German wife and Spanish daughter might have said, Never mind all these peasant dialects we talk but get the European Essence right. So I wrote the Latin down and asked the old man to see I’d had it right.
Pone merum et talos, pereat qui crastina curat.
Mors aurem vellens, ‘vivite’ait, ‘venio’.
Which is, approximately Put down (lay down?) the wine-cup and the dice, and go hang thinking about tomorrow. Death is twitching (would it be?) me by the ear. ‘Live’, he says, ‘I’m arriving’.
I don’t know whether John knew this, but I thought it just his style.
Yours sincerely,
Christian
(Wade)
Yes, I do like it, which is why I’ve left this in. Incidentally, I think that ‘Set down’ would be the accepted English for ‘Pone’. It was a little bit before my time but certainly this ‘old boy’ wasn’t far out and the bluffer kinds of public school, which I should think really were all exactly like this, right up to 1939. Little had changed since the schoolmasters described by Orwell or Cyril Connolly. One must try and remember that John’s early formative years were in this mould, that ‘the awful relations’ he mentions, Robert’s family, were indeed the empire-building master-race against which he would revolt so violently. Even after the war. I suppose that a historian would now point to Eden’s notorious Suez adventure as the traumatic breaking-off. To this day, one is tempted to say, there would be plenty to yap at the heels of the ‘German woman’, the mother he could scarcely remember. With a name like Magda—seriously, could one, today, imagine an English child being christened ‘Magdalena’? to be persecuted out of her mind by schoolfellows. One quite often wonders whether the xenophobia, the parochial jingoism, the talk about ‘Squareheads’, ever in historic times reached a higher flood level than it does at this moment.
I was not at the end of my surprises. A letter came to me, neatly typed but rather in the style of the signature, which was female, boldly legible and yes, a bit school-mistressy. She had even used a red felt-tip pen to sign, so that one suspected she’d been correcting the children’s exercises and had picked it up without noticing.
Dear Mr Wade,
I think that by this time you have received and will have had time to read the manuscript notebook left behind by my father, John Charles. I agreed that this should be sent to you, perhaps even published. This is still a one-sided picture, and you should know a little more, before reaching a decision.
Christian came to see me, perturbed by what he feels as guilt, and with some questions. One was to ask whether my mother ‘fled’ from the house and from an overwhelming personality. No.
After much battle and doubt, persuaded that she had a life of her own to live, and that this could never be realised, she left after long thought. A proud woman, and the picture of a stubborn, dull, slow-witted one does not do her justice. She was also profoundly religious, with small time for churches, clerics, or accepted dogmas. There are many such, and not just in Spain.
He asked whether she had never come to see me. Of course. She would not cut herself from her children. She also saw my brothers. Jaimie perhaps had no great sympathy with my father’s viewpoint. Alan rather more so. I told Christian that women have their secretive little ways.
Perhaps it should be emphasized that she refused to take any money from my father. Gunther, whom I am sorry not to have known, took pains well before his death to ensure that she should not be in need. I saw her often, and once we spent a happy fortnight’s holiday together.
About the crisis provoked by learning of the ‘incest’ (being half-sister to her husband): I did not know of this. Her sense of family was strong. Her own children had grown up, stable human beings. She resolved that the second half of her life should be given to these boys, unhappy through no fault of theirs nor hers.
I never met Barbara. I could guess at guilt and anxiety in my father. I knew nothing of my half-brother.
Impersonally, I find Gunther at fault in telling Sibylle of the long-buried accident of her parentage. I conclude with a great sympathy for this man, who, his life long, upheld the good and the right. Perhaps he felt close to his death, and the need to unburden was too much for him. He would have had confidence in her common sense. I feel sure that she was unbalanced only by the unhappy series of events, the boys’ rather terrifying plot to pursue and persecute John. I don’t think that Christian ever clearly understood what they had set afoot. He certainly never ‘envisaged’ the possible consequences. It is plain that the elder brother was a psychiatrist’s field day. In the world no less than in Germany are many such people, who cannot face the dark side of their selves, and who create the havoc we read of in virtually any copy of any newspaper.
I have to hypothesise that my beloved mother could not handle the double strain of Joachim’s violence. I am no expert on prolonged intake of amphetamines but have seen other examples, and very nasty they can be. I should suppose you must have similar experiences. And of this fear of incest, traumatic to a woman of that background and upbringing (still much that was Calvinist about that). Finding John actually under her roof in so dramatic and unplanned fashion (pretty ‘steep’, we’ll agree) she found it too much for her. She would, I am persuaded, have attempted her double aim. To ask that he take on a share of responsibility for the boys, in order to heal the breach caused by their father’s failings. And to accept, at last, the independence of spirit which was her birthright.
My father’s euphoric suggestion towards sexual relations (she was a still-beautiful and desirable woman, her age meant little) was I think a bit-too-much, for her.
Are you thinking, Mr Wade, ‘what a frightful female’? I am untroubled. You will find, in Europe, hundreds of thousands of woman as chilly-seeming. In romantic terms such as many men credit us with, a refusal to compromise is often thought a Spanish trait. Neither in Germany nor in England could I accept that this so-called ‘ruthlessness’ would be in the least strange.
In my reading, not long ago, was Maurois’ book on Proust. Maurois has no sort of reputation nowadays, but a passage caught my attention which I believe throws light upon Sibylle as well as on John.
‘Human beings, as a rule, accept glory and love and the triumphs of the world at their face value. Proust, declining to do so, is led on to seek an absolute that lies outside this world and outside Time itself. It is the absolute that religious mystics find in God. Proust, for his part, looks for it in art, thereby practising a form of mysticism that is closer to the other than might be supposed, because all art in its origins was religious, and because religion has often found in art the means of communicating to the human consciousness truths which the intelligence can discover only with difficulty.’ (Maurois: A la recherche de Marcel Proust, translated by Gerard Hopkins. Jonathan Cape, 1950)
Yours truly
Catherine Charles
(Wade)
About the Author
Nicolas Freeling (1927–2003) was a British crime novelist best known for the Van Der Valk detective series. After serving in the military and working as a hotel and restaurant cook throughout Europe, he began writing his first novel, Love in Amsterdam, while serving a three-week sentence for stealing food from the restaurant where he worked. Freeling’s novel King of the Rainy Country received the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Among his other literary awards are the Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers Association and France’s Grand Prix de Roman Policier.
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Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Nicolas Freeling
Cover design by Ian Koviak
ISBN: 978-1-5040-9028-5
This edition published in 2023 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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NICOLAS FREELING
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