The Widow by Nicolas Freeling Page A

centre, the awful planners are driving new ring roads. The heavy articulated ‘street trains’ come galloping through the rustic orchards, stinking and squealing past one’s own front door.
    There are still a dozen placid, outwardly unwrinkled streets of desirable residences in the Meinau. But the noose is drawn tight: they are fighting asphyxiation.
    One would sell, but values have flattened out. And it’s the same everywhere; you have somewhere nice and the poor appear alongside you. Where do all the poor come from? Why can’t the municipality, run after all by our friends, do better at hustling them off to weird places like Hautepierre with the Spanish and the Arabs? There are flesh-creeping tales of these blocks, of urine-stained elevators, ten-year-old gangsters and women raped in underground garages. Maddened invalid pensioners shooting from their prison windows with .22 rifles. The horde of greasy unisex hornets on motorbicycles.
    Arlette was ironing Arthur’s shirts, a complicated syllogism. Ironing is female servitude, right? But no civilized man wears synthetic shirts. While cotton shirts must be ironed. You can send them to the laundry, but this is not economical. Men iron, if at all, clumsily and incompetently.
    Lamentable conclusion: if the men are not to be laughingstocks the women iron the shirts. All wrong.
    She was curious about Marie-Line. A bourgeois offspring from the Meinau. The sociopathic conditions seemed to Arlette just as menacing as those of the noisy smelly barracks of Neuhof or the Elsau. She knew these houses only from the outside; she was guessing.
    A solid core of solid ugly villas, divided into two, maybe three flats now there are no servants any more. Polished bellpushes and clipped hedges. Veneer drinks’ cupboards and real leather sofas. Italian-tiled bathrooms and matched-unit kitchens. Basement garages shielding well-washed and waxed cars.
    These people have arrived. They are by God going to stay arrived. They will fight tooth and nail to ensure that their children do not lose class, face, standing. The marxist cliché is that capitalism is on its last legs. Maybe; tough ol’ legs though. Marching about chanting slogans produces tightlipped grins behind the lace curtains, while the money flees quietly to Switzerland. The bourgeois are well fortified against riots by the ruck. What they fear most is the creeping attack from treachery within. Today’s anarchists are rarely tubercularorphans in damp cellars. Most are expensively educated well-brought-up adolescents in rude health. The old-style Marie-Lines came from physical slums: the new ones from moral slums.
    Well after two o’clock. Damn this tiresome child. Arlette thumped crossly with the iron. A lovely day outside. Mid-autumn was best of all. When the mists lift – there are rather too many river-valleys in the Strasbourg area – the sherry-coloured light is full of mellow fruitfulness. Keats’ truism is altogether too bland and feeble for the grape harvest in Central Europe, for the splendid cocktail of acrid invigorating smells. Who’d be indoors?
    The buzzer went.
    Marie-Line was still a child; thin bony fingers; flat boy’s behind. The features well formed, the voice poised, the movements graceful. Almost, not quite, an adult.
    It took no skill to see she was in a nervous state. Bit fiercely at her fingers, smoked greedily, fidgeted with her feet. As tall as herself and well nourished. Golden corn hair, pale face made paler by too much whitish make-up but set off nicely by a black sweater and a violet scarf. Very pretty face. Might coarsen and thicken disconcertingly soon, even without beer and fried potatoes. Marvellous classic nose, thought Arlette, her own twitching: that wasn’t beer. Child has been at the whisky bottle.
    She’d looked around, coming in, with a knowing air at the newness and selfconscious rawness of the place. ‘Interviewing’ people