Flanders Sky by Nicolas Freeling

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

CHAPTER TWELVE

Vera Castang

I suppose Doctor Jung would be calling it synchronicity. I’ve experienced it once or twice. Henri says it is always a factor in police investigations. He doesn’t, he says, have much confidence in fancy academic jargon from Zürich, but there IS something which disturbs the comfortable glib patterns of “detective” fiction.

I cannot in all honesty find any blame for poor Henri. He was irritable and upset because he could see nothing—nor can I really—for those two tiresome girls short of a “talk” (tiring, a bit nerve-racking, one has no guarantee that it’s going to work) with an ignorant peasant of a father. I do it better, because I’m a narrow-minded peasant myself, and my father was another. Do you know that up to the age of twelve, if I misbehaved—and I, too, have lifted cents, and up to a half-dollar, from the housekeeping money in my mother’s purse (a thing every child I’ve ever heard of does occasionally)—I got my bottom slippered. Way of speaking. My mother put a stop to it. “That child has begun menstruating: you can’t beat her: I won’t have it any longer.” My father was a disciplinarian. A railwayman, and the railways work on discipline. Slip up, and you’ll face punishment. It was all quite normal to him. Corporal punishment to me was part of life. I knew, without being told, that he loved me dearly, and that it cost him more than he would admit to whack me: he felt the pain, more than I ever did. And he respected a child who was a girl. I got his belt, yes, for crimes like pilfering or lying. Pretty half-hearted and it didn’t even hurt much, but the humiliation was still considerable. Never, never, never were my knickers taken down. I got hauled into the bedroom and given a few licks on my skirt. They hurt and I bawled. And then I begged his pardon, and he asked for mine. It was a very old-fashioned procedure, and it had some formality and dignity. And then it stopped dead.

Henri, rightly, instinctively, didn’t like the situation he saw. Two girls, teenage or verging on it, forced to strip naked and getting a dogwhip all over the body—no, no, no; he had to show stiffness over that one. It’s hard to know what he could have done better. And those journalists. I’d been brusque, told them smartish I wouldn’t have pestering on the doorstep. So they took it out on him, poor Henri. He’s too much of a professional to feel guilt-stricken, but I know … he worries about “inadequacies” where our own girls are concerned. Once—just once—and it’s some years ago, she might have been ten; Lydia had been poisonous all day. I was tired and my nerves were ragged; I did something unforgivable and shoved it off on to him. “Your father will have a word to say to you, young lady, when he gets home.” And poor Henri, exasperated after a lousy office day.

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