The Widow by Nicolas Freeling Read Free Book Online Page A

correct – go on.’
    â€˜The police don’t bother with the definitions, but recognize the states. The instructing judge calls for shrinks, who say greatly diminished responsibility but no legal insanity. Assize court ponders it all, pronounces, rather obviously, a suspended sentence, and these poor people are committed to the shrink-shop, where we sincerely hope, etcetera.’
    â€˜Quite so. Some advice and help might have avoided all this, don’t you think? Paid advice, quite often. First man was in a good job, and the father of the second in easy circs.’
    â€˜You mean the mistress and the wife were highly devoted but something was missing? Intelligence or education or just strength of character?’
    â€˜They were too closely involved, generally a good reason for not being able to cope. They may have just lacked detachment.’
    They had turned the corner and were walking along the Rhine-Marne canal past the ‘Conseil des Quinze’ quarter. She did not know what the Council of Fifteen had been; it sounded Venetian and vaguely sinister, but the district is neither. Small bourgeois villas pressed too closely together, with rosebushes and clumps of dahlias in the minute gardens.
    â€˜Very well,’ said Arthur, ‘we agree; a commonplace. People unable to face their responsibilities, or inhibited from doing so. Here’s one that’s worse, so shocking that it was front-paged. A deliberate avoidance of responsibility, to such adegree that the witnesses, amounting to a dozen, are being prosecuted for failure to assist a person in danger.
    â€˜A mining district in Lorraine. Pre-war workmen’s cottages in a clump. These are of poor quality; the point is important. Thin-walled wretched things: you hear the neighbours’ light-switch snap on. An old woman known to everybody – she’d lived there forty years – was battered to death by ruffians, presumably for her moneybox. What is not banal is that the battering took over an hour and was extremely noisy. The old woman fought. There were screams, crashes, shouts for help. After darkness fell – and upon her – loud noise continued; the furniture was all smashed.
    â€˜Now allowing for exaggeration, for a perfunctory, confused and superficial report possibly cut, and clumsily, by some sub-editor, this is a little bit much. Wouldn’t you say?’
    â€˜Not all that exaggerated, alas, or the bystanders wouldn’t have been charged with non-assistance.’
    â€˜That’s quite an ironic touch: these people are most indignant. They’ve been charged, while the local gendarmerie haven’t yet caught up with the actual authors.’
    â€˜Appalling,’ said Arlette, ‘but only too frequent. A hundred cars will hurtle past an obviously hurt person, covered with blood at a road verge. Each saying “Catch me getting involved – not on your nelly!”’
    â€˜These people were the neighbours. Loitering around the block. Who, says the reporter sarcastically, one and all hurried off saying they had to go and see about the soup.’
    â€˜Frightened of the ruffians.’
    â€˜What – a dozen able-bodied men? Miners! An old woman they all knew, whose screams are setting the whole quarter ablaze.’
    â€˜There’s something undisclosed, not brought forward,’ she decided. ‘The old woman was a violent drunk, who often screamed and threw things. Or a moneylender, as in Dostoyevsky. Whom everybody hated and nobody would regret. Or perhaps a witch with an evil eye. Who looked at the cowand the cow died. Nothing’s too far-fetched for a Central-European country dorp.’
    â€˜Who are you telling! And you must have put your finger somewhere near the truth. But it’s beside the point. I was illustrating a flagrant phenomenon, by your own comment as common as a drunk shooting a red light. Individual and collective avoidance of