The Widow by Nicolas Freeling

would be.
    â€˜Sure.’
    Janey it’s nearly lunchtime. Never mind, you can get out of trouble with the pressure-cooker. Poor old Norma had to bus all the way back to Hautepierre. Three children staving off pangs with bread and jam. But you won’t help the woman just by being sorry for her, you know.
    Arthur listened with patience.
    â€˜You want no advice, and I’m not giving you any. It’s onefor the welfare worker, but she speaks no English and you do. Poor cow’s helpless, quite. So what’s the obvious? Don’t just help them, that’s no use; back next day for more. But give them some leverage to help themselves, sure. Your question has to be, are you biting off more than she can chew? Or you’d be laying up a heap of grief for her.’
    â€˜That’s what I thought. Want some fromahdge?’
    â€˜You buy this Brie? Hacked out of the limestone is all I can say.’
    â€˜Yes sorry, it’s supermarket.’
    Arthur grumbled, but he did give a hand with the washing up. Things are wrong somehow, she thought.

Chapter 10
The Meinau Marie-Line
    For the brave bourgeoisie of the city Hautepierre exists by hearsay: one would never think of setting foot there. If not actually a waste inhabited by dragons it is terra incognita: one is uncertain even of how to get there, assuming one wanted to try. It exists: that’s enough. The Meinau is a different matter. People ‘whom we know’ live there. A little uneasily, a little apologetically now, but there’s no quarter of Strasbourg now as it used to be. There’s hardly anywhere one gets one’s moneysworth nowadays. Everywhere is under siege.
    If you were a student, whether of sociology, or urban psychology, or architecture, or simply the morals of provincial cities, and Arlette was all these things, the Meinau would be worth study: a residential suburb in South Strasbourg, classic in being ramshackle and piecemeal.
    Before the war – ah, the good old days – land was cheap and building permits available for a bit of palm grease. There were none of these damned controls; socialism was for the poor and was called the French Section of the Workers International.Laughable. An enterprising capitalist could do wonders, cut his coat generously. Buy up a farm, cut it into lots, plan a street grid, lay on a bit of electricity, and you were in a snug way of business. Equipment in the paving and sewage line was perfunctory, very, but that had never bothered anyone. In the Meinau, a rural part of the world along the main road to Colmar, there was an excellent precedent. Schulmeister, a Napoleonic adventurer who had flourished exceedingly selling dubious information to governments and cardboard boots to the army, had carved out a huge estate there, palace and park.
    Houses in bad pretentious taste shot up and surrounded themselves with little trees and flowering bushes. All very nice. You were conveniently close to the town and to business, yet peacefully free of the hurlyburly: the old urban quarters along the Avenue des Vosges were getting alarmingly dirty and noisy. Even in the fifties the volume of motor traffic was becoming quite impossible: everybody said so. The Meinau, bordered by little serpentine waterways and rustic allotment gardens, was ideal: no roads led anywhere, and values kept going up: lovely.
    It was in the sixties that alarming things began. There was a football stadium on waste ground just across the railway line to Germany: stadiums are low. Much worse, the municipality laid violent hands upon the Schulmeister estate and built controlled-rent blocks for the poor around the park and the ‘Canardiére’ pond: decidedly low. The Route de Colmar became a vulgar brawl of congested traffic bordered by filling stations, all the way out to Illkirch: frightful. Last and worst, to relieve the traffic of heavy freight, seeking a way west out of Germany while avoiding the saturated city