The Widow Read Online Free Page B

she’d met Arthur first. For someone supposedly with total recall this was bad. But equally typical of Arthur …
    He drank some milk, put his pipe in his mouth, and buzzed off.
    â€˜Sorry, lots of work. You can manage dinner, tonight? Oh good. I’m not in a properly cooking frame of mind.’ Nor was she, but no matter. She saw him out of the window, bicycling. Pipe, clips on trousers, in no hurry. The University quarter was two minutes off. He was not in the Faculty – on loan in mysterious ways; commissioned for sociological studies by the Council of Europe, financed by them, or the European Cultural Foundation – or somebody: he was vague on the subject.
    The bicycle made recall total. Arthur had fallen off it, distended ligaments in the knee, come to her for physiotherapy.
    â€˜How d’you come to do that?’ making a polite remark.
    â€˜Not wearing clips, caught my trousers in the chain. Classic when you think of it; like catching one’s tit in the wringer.’ She’d laughed, at the correct, polite French, the English accent and the sudden colloquialism. Life was boring.
    Four years she’d been in the Krutenau. A small three-room flat in a quiet solid house of the Art Déco period, with lianas and stylized flowers. Five stories high, which meant sun and air. The plumbing was 1900, but worked. Window boxes. The Rue de Zürich was wide at this point, and had plane trees. It was noisy and dreary, and unpicturesque. The Krutenau is picturesque – it is one of Strasbourg’s oldest quarters, largely a tumbledown medieval slum due for demolition. Arlette was not romantic, and did not yearn for the Street of the Preaching Fox or the Bridge of the Cats. Preferred rooms you could clean and plumbing that worked.
    Four years, pestered by that boring menopause, with a tendency to sudden heatwaves and finding herself too fat for her skirts.
    All over now. Ruth grown up. Fifty. The widow had fined down and become again handsome. Big streaks in the lion-coloured hair; heavily lined around the large fine eyes, but the upright walk and the high-bridged Phoenician features were unchanged. She had not been to bed with anyone. She had no man. She was amused by the appearance of Arthur in the role of beau, and even shteady. Ruth’s crude phrase: Ma’s got a shteady.
    â€˜
What
kind of sociologist? Behavioural – I knew it. Thick as fleas around here, or is it thieves?’ He was funny, thought Arlette, but a fake. She felt touched, and grateful, but emotionally bankrupt. A man who appears on the doorstep, invites you out, makes exaggerated compliments, brings flowers … They’d gone round the corner to the
Preaching Fox
. Food in Strasbourg is just grub, but the white wine is dry and good. It was nice to find they had the same tastes. She drank a lot, enough to say unnecessarily she hadn’t any intention of going to bed with him.
    â€˜Do you think this Calvados will be real, or just so-called?’Arthur had sense, or sensibility, or just sociological experience enough to leave her alone.
    â€˜Why bother at all?’ gratefully. ‘The local marc is good enough: why go in for folklore?’
    â€˜I don’t want to go to bed with you,’ he said next time they met, ‘I do of course, very badly, but I want to marry you first.’ This went on for a longish time.
    He did say that this Harriet Vane lark was very tiresome. She asked who this was, and got Lord Peter Wimsey books by return of post. She replied mildly that she hadn’t been saved from hanging and wasn’t afraid of being thought grateful.
    â€˜If I didn’t think you had better arguments than that… as a prospective mistress, you’re about a thousand per cent frustration. None the less; Harriet has excellent arguments and is rather nice.’
    â€˜Mm,’ said Arlette. ‘Nineteen-thirties intellectual females … bluestocking. Bobbed hair,