One Damn Thing After Another Read Online Free Page A

September. The Council of Europe, in a devious way Arthur’s employer or, to put things more politely, milch-cow, was changing all its organigrammes.
    As Arthur read through all this rubbish, stage one (the lengthening lip) passed quickly to stage two, exasperated muttering. The measured tearing-up of paper into neat small pieces became ripping across and flinging. The mesh of Arthur’s sieve was in fact slightly too large. He would curse later, discovering – in a rage – that in rage at a maze of moronic verbiage, one had thrown away quite a lot of recondite information one might later rather want.
    Arlette’s pile was smaller, but more mysterious. Most of it she couldn’t understand at all. What was this extraordinary tangle her Social Security contributions had got into? Who were these acronyms? – as cherished by the French as by Americans. And people bidding her acidly, please, to make it her business to call upon them at her earliest convenience, since her telephone did not answer. Stuff and nonsense; she’d left it on record with a brief and clear message stating when she would be back.
    Her sieve was plainly much too fine in mesh. Apart from appeals to subscribe to the
Reader’s Digest
, American Express,
Fortune
magazine and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, there seemed to be nothing she could throw away at all.
    Like anonymous letters: she got a lot and over a year had learned prudence, keeping them in a special file, even whenplainly mad, illiterate and pornographic. This one was not: neat red ballpoint, in the hand-printed style that several educational systems urge upon schoolchildren, sacrificing character to legibility, so that there is not much to tell about the writer.
    German, in language and style. Neat layout, proper paragraphing, good spelling. Cheap paper: that meant nothing, any more than the red ink. Approach, formal and quite polite: if she complied with certain demands (unspecified), it would be much to her advantage. This concerned her family affairs, underlined. But if she did not comply, she would regret it, because the Press, both national and international, would be taking a close interest in her affairs.
    Family? – those buried roots down in the south? – and how could that possibly interest anyone, let alone Germans? Piet van der Valk, being a police officer, got many anonymous letters, but he had been dead nearly ten years and could perhaps be allowed to rest in peace.
    Of the boys, one was in Spain. Got to know any nice Basque terrorists lately? The other in Norway, when last heard of making improbably large quantities of money. Ruth, her adopted daughter, a medical student right here in Strasbourg; an intense and independent girl, who, after being for many years extremely nasty, had become extremely nice. And not at all inclined to get into scrapes – not that this sounded like that sort of scrape.
    The boys she saw little of, and they were notoriously bad letter-writers. Ruth she saw a lot of. One thing all three had in common: if they got into a scrape they would handle it themselves – but they would tell her about it before anyone else did. Her confidence in the children was equalled by theirs in herself. Furthermore, they got on effortlessly well with Arthur.
    Arthur? – the blackmail flavour to this … Arthur did not lend himself to such things. And let nobody think they could drive a wedge between her and Arthur.
    Herself? She tried to think of things in recent months involving Germans. There were several: she shrugged.
    Arthur was still over there playing the celebrated scene from ‘L’Aiglon’ – ‘Je déchire’; echoed forty years after by TommyHandley’s wartime postman, who said it didn’t matter what you did as long as you Tore-them-Up, and forty years after that more valid than ever.
    She didn’t tear it up: she put it in the file. One shrugged, but one looked to see whether