It was better than the photographs because of the air, the silence, the silent sweetness of the air, the sky, the proud beauty of the house. It was not as good as the photographs because the house no longer looked like a Mayan monument. Or a farm, all sweat and toil. Its tawny-hued, sandblasted stones gave the place an almost spruce quality.
But the view was the same, and stupendous. The slope descended from the building in a series of overgrown terraces. First there were the tops of bunched trees, both leafy-dark and wintry-bare, then the narrow valley falling away, then beyond that the flanks of hills and, to the left (they hadn’t yet worked out their compass points), folding in ever-paler contours, the more distant mountains, blue upon blue like a screenprint. A far-off glow of light, they surmised, was the presence of the sea.
Nick Mallinson would have shouted for joy except that he had a voice complaint; his vocal cords had been thinned and inflamed, not by overuse in lectures (as people thought) but by acid rising from his stressed stomach, churned by college and departmental politics, his work as a member of the history faculty board, the dreaded Research Assessment Exercise, wranglings over everything from pay scales to information-communication strategies – and, above all, his failure to be appointed a professor. This was why he was here with his family. He hadn’t been very good for the last year or so.
He’d had a dream a few weeks back in which his core lecture was invaded by the geography department – by the likes of Sue Jacobs and Jeff Michaels, scattering papers and turning over tables and backed up by their geography students who were screaming over his words, victorious, having the last laugh. What is history but the effect of the weather, the soil, the hidden minerals in the rocks, the relief of the land?
He pointed to the huge, oilcloth map of the Chad oilfield in desperation as they closed in on him with their drills, but to no avail. History was over. It was all to be biblical torment, now. He woke up shouting about geology.
Sarah had pushed him into taking the sabbatical early on grounds of ill health. He felt vaguely fraudulent, watching the poor and the sick scrabbling for survival in countries no one took any notice of these days, except to plunder. What did he suffer from? The affluent West’s disease. It wasn’t throat cancer, although he’d had all the symptoms as described on medical websites. It was ‘life in the academic fast lane’, as his departmental colleague Peter Osterhauser, newly-made Professor, put it. Not without a twist of ironic glee.
The five of them had set off from Cambridge on a grisly morning in early February and would not be back, if all went well, until late summer. The drive down the length of France, to the accompaniment of ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and other nursery favourites, was broken only by a dreadful night in a cheap hotel in a village somewhere near Limoges. The interior of the charming old building had been sucked out and replaced by a motorway motel smelling of wet paint in rooms with, instead of pictures, huge wall-clamped TVs tuned to global laughter and disaster. The girls loved it.
They reached the track that left the lane half a kilometre after the little stone humpback, as directed, and passed the American-style letter box on a stout pole: Sandler, it said.
‘Checking the post should keep us fit,’ Nick observed.
Two kilometres of bumps, the owners had said. A late, particularly fierce rainstorm in November had pinpointed the wood-covered valley at the head of which stood the house and the track had been badly mauled – criss-crossed by what were, effectively, the dry beds of flash streams. The three Mallinson daughters swayed and squealed in the rear seats as the car bounced along over hole, rock and rut. The car was the same age as Alicia: five and three-quarters. Tammy was a precocious eight. Beans was nineteen months. They were disco-dancing to the music of an unmetalled road.
‘Girls, please,’ Sarah pleaded, clutching the glove compartment and peering anxiously forwards, although she had her glasses on. ‘Hey, this track goes on for ever and ever.’
Nick gripped the jittery steering-wheel and said, ‘Nothing goes on forever except delusion.’ He was fifty-four.
Sarah, eighteen years younger than her husband, laughed too loud – mainly from nervous excitement. ‘And sleazy politicians!’
‘Lord, spare us sleazy politicians. Youch!’
A series of metallic clangs sounded as loose stones – rocks, possibly – struck the chassis. The track widened into an open gravelly area and the house was sprung on them by the trees: it was like a great flat cliff, soaring three stories to a fretted verge.
‘Please keep your seat belts fastened until the plane has come to a complete stop,’ said Nick, pinching his nose with two fingers.
Alicia said she wanted to be ‘let off’ and blew a raspberry.
‘Wowee,’ said Sarah, peering up through the windscreen. ‘Look at that. Here we are. Blow me away. Look, girls!’
Alicia yelped. ‘Tammy hit me with her elbow, Mummy. Really hard.’
‘Yeah yeah,’ said Tammy, still struggling with her seat belt.
‘Look, girls!’ their mother insisted. ‘This is it!’
‘Likkel window,’ said Beans, clouding the glass with her tiny nose.
‘You don’t even love me,’ Alicia groaned.
Tammy unbelted Beans and waited for the child-lock to be neutralised, the gaoler to come with his keys. The three girls spilled out as from a helicopter in a war zone. The house was now an even higher cliff eaten out of granite, with windows for handholds. There was a cold wind, despite the southern-ness, and Sarah stepped straight into a spindly stand of heather.
Not a bad view, they all agreed, exhilarated and amazed by the blueness. The very air itself was blue, despite a whitish sky. Sheer, clear-eyed promise.
As the children raced off round the corner of the house, Nick Mallinson stretched his drive-weary spine and spread his arms out either side, as if embracing the infinite space before him. In a film of their adventures he would have leapt up and punched the air in slow motion, thought Sarah, already jogging gamely after her brood.
Who were skidding round the house and hurtling over weeds in what must have been the old farmyard, a considerable flatness half-enclosed by walls and outbuildings and overgrown with dried husks, tiny bristly weeds and matted tufts of grass in intermittent blotches. A long section of the back wall had tumbled, revealing a swarm of dry bracken spilling down the slope from the woods. A shard of porcelain sky had dropped into the middle of the yard and was framed by terracotta tiles. Sarah called out to the girls to be careful, vaguely wondering which one to save first if they were all three to fall in.
‘Where’s the garden?’ Tammy shouted.
They were on the edge of the pool, which was large enough (Sarah calculated) to do about five breaststrokes per length. It was surrounded on only three sides by tiles: the fourth was rough earth to the concrete lip. The water was the colour of lime jelly.
‘Yuk, it’s ill,’ said Alicia.
A set of metal steps descended into the murk and she gripped the rails and swung herself between them; the steps were slightly loose at the bolts and ticked. Tammy pulled off her shoes and sat on the edge and lowered a toe in.
‘Freeeezing!’ she announced.
Dead leaves were suspended inside the jelly, like bits of rind; the ones still floating were huddled together in a corner. Alicia continued to swing on the steps’ rails, panting excitedly as they ticked and tocked.
Sarah, out of breath, surveyed them all in one efficient glance – especially Beans. ‘Well well,’ she panted. ‘So this is the pool. We’ve got to be very aware of the dangers, kids,’ she added, with an apologetic lilt.
Tammy stirred the water with her hand. After a minute or so the filters started to cluck like the farmyard’s missing hens.
Beans clutched her mother’s thigh and stared at the liquified, wobbling light. Alicia had found a stick and was hitting a white plastic object clipped to the edge with an extension running into the water. It resembled a commode.
‘Carry on like that, sweetheart,’ said Sarah, ‘and you’ll be going straight back home.’
‘Goody good,’ said Alicia. She hit the object again.
‘Oh, what a lovely little house,’ Sarah cried, indicating the shed.
‘Wowee,’ Tammy said, drily, using her mother’s favourite word. ‘Let’s get a postcard of it.’ Nevertheless, she crushed her wet feet back into her trainers and ran to look.
The shed was padlocked. They could make out a giant vacuum cleaner nestling among half-deflated crocodiles with popping eyes; an enormous duck with a toothy grin (did ducks have teeth?); folded deckchairs; and something technological with dials and pipes.
‘We’ll have to dust that lot off in the summer,’ said Sarah. ‘Exciting. That must be the pool’s pump thingie or whatever.’
The two older girls were already scampering away into the outbuildings – a big stone barn and something dark and low for animals; maybe a goatshed. Between these and a stone arch leading back to the front lay a long, wide strip of tangled briars with big charred stones among them. Sarah wondered if a wing of the house had burnt down.
Moments later they were back at the pool where Alicia leaned over the edge at an alarming angle, waving at her reflection.
‘There’s a frog!’ she screamed. ‘Yuk.’
Beans, still holding her mother’s hand, exploded with astonishment when she spotted the frog, which was in fact a toad. Sarah told them. It had stuck its nostrils above the water and turned into a knot of slimy wood. ‘Come on, you lot, let’s help Daddy,’ she said. Alicia threw a pebble and the toad vanished. Tammy was annoyed and belted her sister so she nearly toppled in.
‘Tammy, don’t you dare hit Alicia on the edge of the pool like that.’
‘OK, I’ll hit her when she’s not on the edge of the pool, then.’
Alicia pretended to cry, balling her eyes with her knuckles.
‘Fwog! Toe!’ screeched Beans, pointing at a greenish bird in the sky as it passed over them calmly and into the trees.
Le Mas des Fosses.
The Mallinsons had advertised in History Today, the Times Higher Education Supplement and the London Review of Books:
FRANCE: Two Cambridge academics and their three well-behaved girls seek quiet rustic house in South for six-month sabbatical, preferably in Languedoc.
They had received thirteen replies, and had fallen for the Mas des Fosses. A converted farm in a remote and stunning location; art-collecting owners; the fact that the swimming pool was mentioned in passing instead of, as elsewhere, being trumpeted as the main feature to which the house was a mere backdrop. In addition, the rent was very reasonable compared to the others: the owners wished to retain use of the master bedroom for the odd weekend, as needed. A minor compromise that dovetailed happily with the Mallinsons’ meagre income.
Secretly, they were pleased there was a pool. They imagined post-meridian slumbers in the shade while the girls gambolled and splashed. They made vows to carve the water each morning. To keep fit. To grow more alive.
The owners were a Mr and Mrs Sandler; they lived in Chiswick, in a house full of ancient pottery. Visitors had to take off their shoes and select furry slippers from a linen set of shelves in the hall. Alicia and Beans were not present, in case they misbehaved. Tammy was old enough to understand: the representative Mallinson child. She tended to be either quiet (locked into her own thing) or extremely ‘verbal’, as her teacher put it, so she’d been told that this was a kind of interview and that if she wanted she could tell the Sandlers about previous trips to France but otherwise to let Mummy and Daddy do the talking.
This was early December, two months before the Mallinsons were to set off. The Sandlers had only spent summers in ‘Les Fosses’, but there were electric radiators and a ‘fantastic’ fireplace with simply ‘heaps’ of dead wood lying about. They’d had the place sandblasted last year, so it was even better than in the photos (which, to the Mallinsons’ delight, had shown a beautifully unkempt place, whereas the others all looked blow-dried). And – the husband chortled – a great wine cellar, but the contents were not part of the furnishings, naturellement.
The Sandlers were dealers rather than collectors, but the Mallinsons, who were academics and knew no better, did not feel cheated. Alan Sandler was American and dealt, not in antiques, but antiquities. Lucy owned a print gallery in Chelsea. Alan found Sarah Mallinson small, dark and attractive, like a fine little chocolate left last in the box only because people are greedy. He asked straight out why she was so much younger than her husband. He liked her small, oval glasses. They were coy.
‘Nick supervised my doctorate,’ she replied, taking his candour as a colourful national trait. ‘Usual story.’
Alan whistled. Lucy wondered what the doctorate’s subject was.
‘Fairly grim,’ Sarah admitted.
‘Oh go on, tell, tell,’ laughed Lucy, whose beauty was taking affectionate leave of her features behind a screen of cosmetics. She had very short grey hair and fingernails painted dark plum.
Lucy tried to concentrate but was distracted by the way the tip of Sarah’s nice nose was affected by certain consonants. ‘M’, mostly. Lips coming together. Something to do with Africa, ideology and technological development. The reticence of the French. Copying British engineering projects. Or not.
‘Basically,’ Sarah continued, noticing Lucy’s intense interest, ‘for fear of replicating the perceived despotism of the British Empire. So it’s mostly about water control, forest clearance and oil. Any the wiser?’
Lucy raised her eyebrows and affirmed she was, miffed at the suggestion that she might not be.
‘An under-researched area, both in the geographical as well as the intellectual sense,’ Nick commented. The otolaryngologist had advised him to speak at low volume but never, ever to whisper. And to take a break. ‘Basically lots of juicy, unread documents,’ he added, as if this was the most exciting thing in the world.
Lucy looked sharply at Sarah. ‘You don’t teach, then?’
‘I stopped for the kids,’ she fibbed. In fact, the completion of her thesis, delayed by the usual part-time tutoring and an active social life, had melded straight into Tammy. She’d never really launched herself on a career, and this bothered her. ‘I’ve spots of supervision and so on. I do plan to go back,’ she added, a little too forcefully. ‘I hope to turn the thesis into a book while I’m in France.’
Lucy turned to Nick. ‘Which college in Cambridge?’ she asked, somewhat querulously.
‘FitzHerbert’s,’ he replied, trying not to sound apologetic.
‘Never heard of it.’
‘It’s one of the smaller ones, founded in the sixteenth century,’ Sarah broke in. ‘Beautiful chapel and lovely little front court. I mean really exceptional.’
‘So what’re you going to be up to, Professor?’ asked Alan, apparently wincing at Nick. ‘Stirring the pool while your good woman slaves?’
‘I’m not a professor,’ said Nick. ‘I’m a reader. My title is Doctor.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to demote you,’ said Alan.
‘You did the opposite. A sensitive area,’ he went on, candidly. ‘Anyway, as a colonial and post-colonial specialist I’m editing a collection of essays written mostly by fellow historians, the theme of which is oil, oil in Africa. And working on a more popular book about reactions to Suez, targeted at students and people like yourself, which was meant to be done for the anniversary, alas. One will hardly be read and the other might earn me a little bit extra.’
‘Oil, huh?’ grunted Alan, eyeing Nick suspiciously.
‘Principally.’ The role of oil in post-war African politics and the dirty, viscous tricks of the United States: but Nick kept that to himself.
Alan sucked on a tooth, sizing him up. ‘Do you know, Nick, that the energy in a single barrel of oil is equivalent to 25,000 hours of manual labour?’
Nick looked politely nonplussed – although he did know this, in fact. There was nothing he did not know about oil and its lamentable history. ‘Well, that’s why we’re hooked,’ he said, although he had not wanted to raise sparks. ‘We’re dependent on something that’s destroying the basis of our existence, like a heroin addict.’
‘So oil is heroin, huh?’
‘Metaphorically, yes. For the last hundred years or so. A mere blink. There are analogies: potency, vicious effects, rapid decline of health.’
‘And oil companies are the drug dealers?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Nick, head cocked apologetically. They were being assessed, after all.
Alan smiled mischievously. ‘Are you walking to Languedoc?’
‘I know, I know,’ said Nick, raising his hands as if surrendering. ‘We’re all addicts, whether we want to be or not.’
‘Take out shares in biofuels,’ said Alan, with a knowing sigh.
Nick and Sarah simultaneously, if somewhat murmuringly, protested. This conflictual debate was not what was supposed to happen.
‘The thing is,’ Nick insisted, crossing his legs and leaning forwards as he would have done in a seminar (the legendary ‘Mallinson slant’), ‘only the human race would dream up a solution that’s even worse than the problem. Stuff like palm oil requires massive forest clearance.’
‘Trees are trees,’ said Alan, with a smirk.
Nick drew in his breath as if hurt and Sarah pulled a face. This is the enemy, she thought. We can’t take this house. We’ll be cursed.
Lucy, as if reading her mind, said the Mas des Fosses was an utterly fab place for kids. ‘And what are you planning to do when you’re not at school, Tabby?’
‘Tammy.’
‘Tammy.’
‘Just being grateful.’
‘Grateful?’
Despite her brightness, she couldn’t quite remember what her parents had said she should be grateful for. She sipped her Coke to fill the gap. The ice rang against her prominent front teeth. She was worried about missing her friends.
‘She’s going to have some quality free time,’ her mother filled in. ‘In the countryside. She’s ahead at school, anyway.’
‘You’re bunking school?’ said Alan, provocatively again. ‘That sounds neat.’
‘We’re not supposed to by French law, but I don’t think anyone will bother,’ chuckled Nick.
‘We’ll be home learning,’ Sarah assured them, as if she needed to.
‘They certainly won’t bother,’ said Lucy. ‘No point in educating them in the midst of a ploughed field. As long as they don’t play with matches. From May onwards it’s a tinderbox. Bone dry. No barbecues, either. Look what happens in Australia.’
‘Absolutely not,’ said Nick, siding quickly with a phantom group of sophisticates against the mass of vulgarity she’d conjured. ‘Actually we do know the Languedoc quite –’
‘And why the south of France,’ she interrupted, turning to Sarah, ‘apart of course from the sun and the wine?’
Sarah told her, with an inward relish, that the Centre des Archives d’Outre Mer was in Aix and held original documents relating to major French engineering works in the African colonies. Apart from the sun and the wine, she added, pretending to laugh. She really wanted to pull out of this deal, to leave this awful couple.
Nick, battling his weakening voice, mentioned his sojourn at the Centre many years ago, rummaging in the archives for his paper on forced labour under the librarian’s stern, owl-like gaze (the account exaggerated, of course). Tammy, having heard all of this many times before, rolled her eyes to the plaster grapes on the ceiling and began wiggling her feet. At her mother’s whispered instigation, she settled down on the carpet to the felt-tip pen drawing she’d been told to do if she got bored, leaning on a picture book brought along for the purpose.
‘What a genial family,’ said Alan, eyes flicking from one to the other.
Possibly by association, he started on about the village mayor, who was a Communist. ‘Organic farmer. He can’t stand anyone earning more than him, and no one earns less. Up to his eyeballs in agricultural grants. That’s Yurp for you. But what he hates most of all are you English folks.’
‘And Parisians,’ said Lucy. ‘But don’t let us put them off, Alan.’
‘Perhaps he’ll share my fascination for obscure Trotskyite splinter groups,’ Nick chortled. The furry slippers at the end of his tallness made him look like a daddy-long-legs.
‘Now I’ll bet you’re the type that uses words like incommensurable,’ said Alan, leaning forwards good-humouredly and tapping Nick’s knee.
‘Oh, not always,’ Nick grinned, a frown giving his irritation away.
Lucy hastily brought up the subject of speaking French. Hers was schoolgirl, it had got locked, it needed a kick-start and lots of axle-grease. ‘I’m going to have to have lessons,’ she grimaced, as if talking about surgery. ‘How’s yours?’
‘I can read it for research purposes but talking isn’t great,’ Sarah admitted. ‘Nick speaks it rather well.’
Nick waved a modest dismissal. Somebody had once taken him, after a brief exchange, for a Belgian. ‘You’ve got some very impressive, er, artefacts,’ he said, looking around him.
Alan was a specialist dealer in Near and Middle Eastern antiquities, it turned out. ‘Only the best,’ he says. ‘I don’t bother with anything else. No one’s told this guy that the game’s up,’ he went on, confusing them. ‘He’s like a Jap in the forest who thinks the war’s still being fought. The whole damn country of France is like a Jap in the forest who thinks the war’s still being fought. “Come on out, guys! It’s all over!”’
Alan laughed in wheezes, slapping the arms of the chair. Tammy paused in her drawing and took another biscuit, waiting a little before consuming it in rabbity nibbles.
‘Do go ahead,’ Lucy said to her, flatly. ‘Eat as many as you want.’
‘Thank you,’ said Tammy, with her mouth full.
‘That’s a great drawing,’ said Alan, leaning forwards with a grunt and turning it sharply towards him. It was of spindly horses under a tree with red apples and a volcano in the background over which flew a sinister black bird. ‘You know, Tabby, in certain New York galleries you could give that a pretentious name and say it’s by a recluse and you’d be into five zeroes. I’m thinking of going into that myself, as a dealer. It’s called Outsider Art. I prefer the French term: Art Brut. Raw Art.’
Tammy looked faintly bewildered.
‘Rubbish, in other words,’ said Lucy. ‘Not that your drawing’s rubbish, of course,’ she added, rather unconvincingly.
‘She’s really mad about drawing,’ said Sarah.
‘I’m not,’ Tammy complained. ‘It was your idea, Mummy.’
After an embarrassing pause in which everyone smiled, Lucy told them about the lawn. The lawn in embryo. ‘I’ve wanted, since time immemorial it seems, a proper English lawn, near to the pool so you can walk onto it off the tiles without lacerating your feet. I’ve told Jean-Luc that if he can’t do me a lawn, with proper soft grass –’
‘A lush sward,’ Nick broke in, smiling engagingly.
‘Exactly – then he’ll get the chop. I told him this two or three years ago, by the way.’
‘This suggests,’ Nick said, scratching his left eyebrow, ‘that earlier attempts by Jean-Luc have been unsuccessful?’ The last word was a hoarse croak.
‘This suggests I am remarkably tolerant,’ she said. ‘Oh, there’s always some little problem. The latest is climate change or something. Let us know of the lawn’s progress, please. Have you got a throat?’ she asked Nick, suddenly. ‘The air’s very dry down there.’
‘Pseudopolyps,’ he said, as if admitting to taking drugs.
‘Too much lecturing,’ said Lucy, sharply.
‘Stress. I’m told. Unlike Ferdinand Lassalle. Who painted his throat with silver nitrate so he could carry on lecturing, heroically.’
Lucy frowned. ‘Should I know this man?’
Nick tried to disguise his surprise behind a grin, but he was blinking too much: sometimes, Sarah thought, he really isn’t in the real world, where no one knows anything much.
‘The true founder of German socialism,’ he said. ‘Unlike Marx, he believed in brotherly love. Killed in a duel in 1864.’
‘Good riddance,’ chuckled Alan.
Sarah realised, concious of her feebleness, that there was no pulling out. Life was all about compromise, her mother had always said.
‘What should we do about the telephone costs?’ asked Nick.
‘Oh, there isn’t a telephone,’ said Lucy, as if they’d asked about an indoor cinema or a sauna. ‘Your mobile will work, but you have to stand on a stool in the bathroom. It’s the countryside, you know. Undisfigured by cables. There is an Internet café in St-Maurice, full of saddos. Alan goes there and feels very at home. Don’t you, darling?’
‘I picked up the mouse and there was this damn scorpion underneath,’ he chortled.
Nick felt dismayed: he didn’t want to admit that, for ideological reasons, they had never had a mobile.
‘Problem,’ said Sarah, glancing at Nick. ‘The thing is, we don’t have a mobile.’
‘Then get one,’ laughed Lucy.
‘It’s rather against our principles. Given our field of specialism.’
‘Coltan mining in the eastern Congo,’ Nick clarified. The Sandlers still looked puzzled, as if sucking on something tart. ‘Mobiles can’t operate without coltan, and most of it’s in the Congo forest. The local leaders use the revenue to buy arms. A third of the workforce are kids. Slavery, basically. And it’s disastrous for the gorillas, too. The Conradian darkness at the heart of the mobile phone industry. Actually, it’s also used in laptops and so on, but where computers are concerned I have no real choice, bar going for the more responsible names.’
There was an embarrassed silence in which Nick’s own voice echoed in his head, sounding crazed. Lucy and Alan looked at them as if they were vaguely dangerous. There was, in fact, a sleek black mobile on the arm of Alan’s chair. Nick banned them from his seminars, and was famous for it. It amused his students: Dr Mallinson’s eccentric foible.
Lucy gave a little sigh. ‘So the house is no good, then. Well, what a pity.’
They had no choice but to acquire a mobile for the duration of their stay. Purely for emergencies and to receive calls. Then they would bin it, they assured themselves, while Lucy and Alan gazed on them indulgently, as parents gaze on their naïve teenagers.
They were shown Alan’s private collection in a locked glass cabinet: these items were not for sale. He put on a pair of white cotton gloves and opened the cabinet and took out a couple of treasures. A ram-headed jug from Ur. A votive cup from Uruk. Around 3000 BC: rescued from the rubble of ziggurats. They weren’t allowed to touch. Sarah imagined them slipping out of his gloved hands and falling in slow-motion to the unforgiving stripped pine of the floor: it would only need a jab of the elbow in his large belly.
They were locked back in.
‘My precious children,’ he wheezed, tapping the glass with a gloved knuckle.
‘Iraq,’ Nick sighed, hoarsely: like a very distant army’s battle cry.
‘Great for crooked dealers like me,’ Alan chortled, his white-gloved hand seizing Nick by the elbow and shaking it as if it were a cocktail. Nick smiled gamely, too flabbergasted to comment.
Sarah gazed into the cabinet, picturing each priceless pot being attacked by a hammer in extreme slow motion: the tambourine sound of it.
‘Are your other children as “well-behaved”?’ Lucy asked her suddenly, miming the inverted commas with a waggle of her plum-varnished nails. She was referring to the small ad placed in various highbrow journals, but it took a moment for Sarah to cotton on.
Sarah stroked her daughter’s hair. ‘Well I’m bound to say yes, they are,’ she said. Tammy had red, claw-like felt-pen marks on her cheek. Sarah rubbed at them vaguely, but Tammy backed off.
‘Children tend to know no limits, these days,’ Lucy sighed. ‘Their mothers are too fat to bother. They pass hamburgers through the school railings.’
‘We try to establish firm boundaries,’ Sarah reassured her.
‘Your hair is loganberry,’ admired Lucy, a touch wonderingly. ‘The teeniest hint of dark red in the highlights. Lucky you.’
‘I don’t know for how much longer,’ winced Sarah, very pleased. Her Indian grandfather had resurfaced in the hair (which she had always considered blue-black), along with large black eyes under smoky lids.
‘Actually, Lucy is crazy for young Jean-Luc,’ said Alan, as if it had been weighing on his mind. He turned and winked at Sarah. ‘Happened all the time in the slave colonies.’
‘Give us a break,’ Lucy retorted. She said that Jean-Luc lived with his sick old mum. ‘He’s probably gay,’ she added, with a peculiar wobble of the head. She gave a start and glanced down at Tammy. ‘I’m not even sure he can read and write properly,’ she added, floundering a little under the child’s stern gaze. Tammy finally opened her mouth and informed her that, in Boulogne last year, they saw a sign on a restaurant that said French Cock.
Nick was lying on his back. He didn’t move when the others approached from the side of the house. Only his head turned.
‘You won’t believe this,’ he said. ‘I’ve done it again. My back.’
The girls ran up and rolled on top of him, squealing. Sarah had to pitch in physically to throw them off, but this increased the fun. Like wasps, they kept returning: it was like the game they played every Sunday morning, clambering onto the bed and being pushed off. Because of his pseudopolyps, their father couldn’t yell at them. He couldn’t even yell in pain, not without damaging his vocal cords for good. Instead, he whimpered, pleading with them to stop.
‘Daddy’s hurt!’ screeched Sarah as best she could over their frenzy. ‘For God’s sake leave him alone!’
They did, eventually. The house looked down on them like an old, disapproving nurse. The boundless view had absorbed the din and was now silent – even more silent than before. Nick lay there under his family’s gaze and apologised.
‘It’s sitting too long in the car,’ Sarah said.
‘I hope it’s not a slipped disc, that’s all.’
‘What’s a slip diss?’ asked Alicia.
‘What a start,’ sighed Sarah.
‘I do apologise,’ said Nick, drily. ‘As a misbegotten blemish on the smooth order of things.’
‘What’s a slip diss?’
‘Is blemish the same as a bee in my bonnet?’ asked Tammy.
‘Shush,’ Sarah ordered, without thinking. ‘Try to get up carefully, Nick.’
The children watched, fascinated and a little scared.
‘I feel so daft.’
Sarah commanded him not to talk, giving him her hand. He winced and sank back.
‘Daddy deaded,’ announced Beans, pointing at his feet in their sensible English shoes.
‘No, actually he isn’t,’ Alicia assured her, with an authority that sounded medical.
‘Not yet,’ said her father.
‘Try rolling on your side,’ Sarah suggested. Part of her was annoyed with him. He neglected his body in favour of the head. A terrible start to their stay. She could see herself doing everything, everything. She pushed up her glasses and sighed.
He rolled over and slid onto all fours. ‘Now what do I do.’
‘I don’t know. Pray to Mecca.’
This made Nick laugh, against his will. Sarah joined in. And they both laughed helplessly, Nick in the evening-prayer position, groaning between the monkey-like yelps. Tears ran down their cheeks as the three sisters gazed on them like indulgent adults.
‘I think that’s done it,’ said Nick, eventually. He stood up in slow motion, stretched his arms above his head, then lowered them. He gingerly advanced a few steps, then stopped, like a waxwork of someone walking.
‘Fuck,’ he breathed.
The front door was on the side of the house, which made the side of the house the front. There was a dry flower nailed to it, like a big blind eye with golden eyelashes. Sarah slotted the black key into the hole. The door opened directly into the kitchen. Nick crawled in, inch by inch. He was crippled (it was his right hip’s swivel joint), but it was an old problem arising from a student drama exercise thirty-odd years ago. It had happened before and usually lasted a week. The only remedy was to lie on a firm surface for as much of the day as possible. It was maddening, especially as the girls’ favourite game was to ride him like a horse. He could just about go upstairs, but as little and as slowly as possible.
‘This is so incredibly predictable,’ he sighed, lying on the rug in the sitting room and feeling chilly under the blanket. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘So you should be,’ said Sarah.
But he still shared in their awestruck excitement, the analysis initially conducted in subdued whispers.
There was a pleasant woody smell in the house, along with a hint of mice. It was cold in a flat, fridge-like way. The sitting room had two long windows facing the front and huge, thick beams. Low-slung sofas which were useless to bounce on, a fireplace the kids stood in pretending to burn in agony like Joan of Arc, a bookcase full of what the Mallinsons assumed would be light holiday reading, apart from the large expensive art volumes, but turned out to host a decent, spine-creased smattering of mainly American and Irish literature, including a Complete Yeats and an annotated Collected Shakespeare bearing cigarette-papers as bookmarks. Lucy, they assumed.
The dining room was across a narrow corridor from the kitchen; it had a huge antique oak table and numerous porcelain statuettes of shepherdesses, clearly valuable. Sarah opened the dresser and saw a small scorpion on the side, its pincers wincing at the intrusion. ‘I think we’ll give this room a miss,’ said Sarah.
‘I love it,’ said Tammy, naturally.
A low door off the corridor led down uneven steps to an interior cave, in which some thirty bottles were ranged on ancient wooden wine-shelves, the dark glass blessed with pale dust. The oldest – a Bordeaux – dated from 1982.
‘I think we’ll give this a miss, too,’ said Sarah.
Upstairs had to be described to the afflicted: the bedrooms had white walls which left powdery traces on their clothes if leaned on. The walls were thicker than Beans’s outstretched arms (Tammy tested her protesting form against them). The windows only opened inwards, which meant nothing could be put on the sills: this struck Sarah as bad design. There was a sweet little table in the bedroom, painted yellow and stencilled with grapes, which she earmarked for her desk. The small room at the back, with its miniature window overlooking the pool, could be Nick’s den: it vaguely reminded her of his book-lined outpost at college, dark and woody.
Right at the top was the attic, reached by a narrow wooden staircase and lit by a dirty Velux: it was huge, bare and dusty, with old newspapers from the 1940s and 1950s, a box of pine cones, some venerable spindle-shanked spiders, a heap of dried bracken, a crate of bottles, and nothing much else.
After hauling everything out of the car with almost no help from the girls, Sarah began to prod the kitchen into life. It was long and had a butcher’s block flecked with saw- and blade-marks, with a tell-tale depression at one end where the cleaver had worked over generations. Stools stood round it. There was what Sarah termed a ‘catering-industry sink’ of stainless steel, deep enough to drown someone in. Apart from the large fridge, there was a small, independent freezer. There was no dishwasher, amazingly.
No one had cleaned the house in preparation, as had been promised; or not in the last few weeks. The attic spiders’ comrades were evident in all of the rooms, but the industrial-sized hoover dealt with them briskly as the girls watched, pretending to feel sorry as the frail, unsuspecting forms were whipped away by the hoover’s grin.
Sarah was fed up, despite being here. Her fed-upness was deeper than travel weariness. For eight years she had bustled from one toy-strewn, high-decibel environment to another, sitting on rugs while infants battered her head with bright moulded plastic or flung themselves from side to side in her lap while she tried to engage in grown-up speak. Now, despite Nick being freed of commitments, she was still the domestic skivvy.
To her husband’s annoying commentary (he now lay prone on the longest sofa), she prepared the fire with balls of the Daily Telegraph. There was something propitiatory about coaxing flame, she thought. Above the fireplace was an African mask fringed by hundreds of hammered-in nails that Tammy identified as its beard; it made her mother think of a mournful Victorian with mutton-chop whiskers. They were unable to identify its provenance. A crack went through one eye, blinding it; the upper lip was chipped and worm-holed.
‘How’s it going?’ Nick asked, yet again.
He had brought along a Complete Sherlock Holmes for diversion and now he was working his way through it, tale after tale, interspersed with the odd dip into Habermas.
The room was opaque with smoke. Beans coughed. Alicia copied her. Tammy outclassed them.
‘I think there’s a blockage,’ Sarah said, peering up into the flue.
‘If you don’t mind me saying, you need to use smaller bits at the beginning.’
‘Crap. Girls, that’s enough or you’ll end up like Daddy.’
‘Oh, what a dreadful fate,’ groaned Nick, genially.
They would have to phone Jean-Luc, but not straightaway. They didn’t want to look helpless. The girls went upstairs and carried on coughing: it was fun pretending to be tubercular.
The volume control was dicky on the telly and the reception was poor, but the old video machine worked. The girls eventually sat down on cushions to watch Postman Pat driving up and down his Yorkshire hills and dales while Nick dozed and Sarah leafed through Exciting Things To Do with Nature, an old-fashioned book she’d found in a jumble sale. She’d pictured the girls turning branches into animals, painting pebbles or making pomanders out of oranges and cloves. She could have done all these things at home, of course, but there was never enough time and Nature wasn’t quite what it used to be, somehow. Now there was bags of time.
The girls settled with difficulty, bouncing about on their beds and then promptly getting scared the moment the light was switched off. Even Tammy was scared. Without the shutters closed, it was as black as ink outside, the stars glittering through rents in the cloud. At home in Cambridge, comforting yellow streetlight defeated the curtains, accompanied by the ambient wash of urban noise.
Only one of the bedside lamps worked, and Sarah briefly assumed the intricate skills of a film-lighting engineer, moving it about on the floor until a compromise was reached and they were neither dazzled nor plunged into gloom.
Tammy was allowed to read for another twenty minutes. She was very bright: even (at least in reading and writing) a ‘prodigy’. She had finished The Sword in the Stone and was now deep in a book about the sea and had reached the chapter on tide gauges. Her parents’ chief terror was that she might run out of books, as an aquarium shark might run out of meat. She reassured them that she could always consume what she’d already digested: following her starring role in the school version of the Odyssey, she had read T. E. Lawrence’s translation twice. Although not all of its meaning had sunk in, it had given her many useful words: ‘steading’, ‘wainscot’, ‘cleave’, ‘merchantman’, ‘perforce’, ‘bloom’. She did not mind a third go, if the spine held out. Or a ninth reading of The Jolliest Term on Record by Angela Brazil, near to disintegration on the top of her pile, and which had Grandma’s name written inside in italics. Or a second of The Myths of the Norsemen, a thick old book which had belonged to Daddy and had frightening black-and-white illustrations.
‘You looked so like a horrible monster doing that, Mummy,’ she declared, idly flicking the book on the sea to find her page. ‘Like at Hallowe’en.’
‘Nightie-night you lot,’ Sarah said, having smothered their soft, smooth, sweet-smelling cheeks in kisses. ‘Sleep well.’ She was trying her best to sound dully managerial, despite suddenly feeling full to the brim with love. She marvelled at the beauty of their lustrous fair hair, a blondeness that was temporary because their eyelashes were dark. Tammy’s was already turning – autumnal, Sarah smiled inside herself.
‘Like a skelington,’ Alicia lisped, pushing her bedding down to her waist. The word heronshaw was embroidered on her nightie, a cream garment reminiscent of Edwardian illustrations. She lifted it up to reveal a rather corpulent stomach. Sarah was trying not to be too worried about Alicia’s roundness: Tammy was bony, if anything, while there was still something miniaturist about Beans (three weeks premature).
Who now picked up the word ‘skelington’ and repeated it with an ear-shattering shriek.
‘All you could see was your mouth and glasses,’ Alicia went on, sitting up in bed and pulling the duvet back to her chin. ‘Like really thin people.’
‘Like ghouls,’ Tammy added, relishing the rare chance to use the word, and stretching the syllable as taut as it would go.
Sarah had another bash with the fire. Until she succeeded, they’d all have to wear thick sweaters. Smoke curled over the plaster chimney piece, curved like a huge clamshell.
‘No luck?’
‘Some of it’s going up.’ Her upper body was fully in the fireplace, twisted to look.
The small heap of tinder suddenly caught, flaring like a miniature oil-well. Nick gave a hoarse shout of warning. Sarah scrambled out and ticked him off for ‘panicking’. There was soot streaked over her face, like a rescue worker’s. The little blaze sent its ghostly fingers of smoke creeping up over the chimney breast and past the long-suffering mask. The room was hazed once more: gauzy levels wavered under the ceiling as though the two of them were submerged.
‘I never panic,’ Nick said, closing his eyes. ‘I simply react.’