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it was still his home town, different from anywhere else in Holland, and he was faithful to people and to places in an innocent way, saying things like ‘You’d never find a dentist that good in The Hague.’ Handy, too, to Police Headquarters; five minutes down the road in the Keizersgracht, another devotedly loyal Amsterdammer, who moreover collected Chinese porcelain.
    â€˜Oh that’s lovely now, you can rinse that if you like. Two helpings of amalgam, Annie. Old Louis, let’s see, about six months ago he got me a celadon plate, Ch’ing, rather nice: he’s genuine, you can rely on him.’
    â€˜D’you know of a nephew?’
    â€˜One moment, we’ll just polish that a bit. Nephew? – no – nice old boy there called Bosboom, never seen anyone else there. Honest? – good heavens yes, as the day. You people in The Hague suspect everybody, your professional deformation, ha, don’t chew on that for an hour or two.’
    He walked back towards the station; he hated bringing the car here and it was rush-hour, which made trams impossible. Floods of little typists, thousands of boys and girls piled on to bikes and scooters, running for their suburban trains, ruthless about pushing this elderly gentleman with his hat and his stick and his briefcase, what’s the matter with you dad, if you want to stay still buy a hammock.
    Beating up laboriously across wind and tide towards the Lindengracht Van der Valk felt sorry for all these freshfaced country children who come down to Amsterdam because that’s where it’s at, and find themselves in those appalling lodging-houses. Now that, he thought, really must be a potent factor in the antisocial tendencies. They may or may not be exploited at work by capitalists, but in furnished lodgings the last drop of juice is wrung from them by the pettiest and greediest of the bourgeois. A ghastly breed in general, lodging-house keepers; busybodies with lists of nasty rules, glorying in the power to make as many more as they liked, and extremely quick to put their victims on the street at the least sign of anything but meek conformity to their bullying.
    Squalid windowless minds, living in squalid windowless basements to screw ten extra gulden from four square feet of glassed pane in an attic. Extortionists, and blackmailers too. Despite all his experience he had always felt an oppressive emotion of contempt for those houses where children barely out of the shell were taught the facts of life in a capital. If those rats would show a scrap of charity or just humanity – the very smallest dose of something like home. Those wretched children, getting the bleakest work, eating in the greasiest cafés, sleeping in the most threadbare shelter, trying to create warmth and happiness and the right to be an individual with thepathetic means they had … He had reached the Linden-gracht.
    At least this boy Richard was luckier than most. The landlady let him in without a sour complaint at being brought up the stairs. Even the smell, close and mean though it was, held a memory of air and light however narrow the passage.
    â€˜Sorry to disturb you,’ he said politely.
    â€˜ ’S’allright,’ she said. ‘Oddinga, ‘m, dunno ‘f he’s in ‘r not,’ clipping her ripe Amsterdam accent. ‘I s’pose y’can go on up, he’s mostly back b’now.’ She wasn’t going to face those stairs! He had to, hitching his leg behind him: it was these interminable ladders as much as anything that had made work here impossible to him, but he was going to manage in a good cause.
    A startled voice said ‘Who is it?’ to his tap, opened the door on his prudent silence, staring on the dim landing, recognizing him, becoming filled with confusion, glancing alarmed down the well to where the landlady had an ear of unrivalled sharpness cocked, muttering, ‘Oh, it’s you,’ with