Not As Far As Velma by Nicolas Freeling

Author:Nicolas Freeling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

May—it’s a good, and a bad month, in the North. Good since at least everything is green, birds sing, maybe even nest if one looks carefully: there will, presumably, be some summer vaguely in the offing. Bad because it seems to do nothing but rain.

Nothing worthy of comment, there. Isn’t that the case with any month of the twelve you care to name? Right, but around May one gets an obscure sense of dissatisfaction; the feeling that it’s gone on raining long enough and that this would be a good time for it to stop. One has had this feeling in April; one will have it again in June. It leads the peoples of northern Europe to behave in silly ways, in the months of July and August.

Castang is feeling staled and dulled. The young, bright greens of tree and hedge are a weariness instead of a solace, for the blackened old brickwork, lighting the dimmest plant into brilliant green flames, tells him that men age less well than bricks. The lengthening days seem to him too short, and the chronic twinges of pain in his smashed arm are harder to bear. He is irritable and so is Vera. They nag at one another in a foolish, boring fashion. Damn it, he had no holiday last year.

These old, battered provinces of Artois and Picardy, with their many rusting skeletons of mineshaft and steelworks, their innumerable reminders that for nine hundred years the invasion routes of Western Europe—the sunset land—have lain along this path, have an astounding vitality. Townsman that he is, he forgets too easily that this is farming land, strong and deep, and absorbs the torrents of blood, the stupefying rain of fragmented bone and splintered metal.

At least he can look at trees, taking a roundabout way to work; perversely, since of course it is raining, and his arm feels put through the mangle. How the hell, Castang, are you going to understand anything about human beings without learning (as Vera has taught him) to look at trees? It is not the much hacked and demolished oak-ash-thorn of the Artois countryside. Desk-bound senior officers have not much opportunity to look at that.

These are municipal trees, as recommended for resistance to car exhausts, acids, salt in winter, draughts, small boys; the long list of municipal hazards. There has been, thanks-be-to-god, a diminution in Japanese prunus. Tulip trees; rowan trees. Ginkgos. Sugar maples, a variety that will never produce any sugar but has pretty, lanceolated leaves.

Castang feels much cheered, arriving twenty minutes late at the office, taking his hat off and shaking it; good, that’ll lay the dust on this vile staircase.

“Madame Metz, good morning and ring my wife will you, there’s something I’ve forgotten to tell her.” The holiday roster is on the wall. He jerks at the phone cord which has become entangled. The two senior inspectors have by tradition and sacred right the two months of July and August. Those he doesn’t want anyway. Young Louppes must wait

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