When the Sandlers bought the property back in 1995, the interior of the house was all orange: orange beams, orange joists, orange plaster. Orange beds, orange cupboards. Orange doors. It had been a hippy colony for a while, was the explanation. But they had fallen in love with it, and with the view. A coup de foudre, according to Monsieur Soulier, the bespectacled estate agent – with the customary hint of wonder, as if he had never seen such a love affair before in the whole of his life. Far more serious than the orange paint was the ivy, its knuckles dug deep into the stonework and straining even the capstones in the arches, but he kept quiet about that.
He had shown them the house reluctantly, insisting they wouldn’t be interested, that it was too old and remote: an abandoned farmhouse, empty for years. ‘Almost a ruins,’ he insisted in his office, in his decent English. ‘Almost a ruin, ’Lucy Sandler repeated. ‘Like being almost avant-garde.’ ‘À peu près,’ laughed Monsieur Soulier, with a rocking motion of his hand. He didn’t tell them that the Germans – the Waffen SS, no less – had burnt down part of it. You never knew what might put people off.
Monsieur Soulier waited for the end of the three-day search, when the evening light would be gilding the ivied walls. He showed them, with great enthusiasm, three modern villas of mounting ugliness, climaxing in a musty bungalow with a huge plate-glass window like a fish-tank, concealed behind a cypress hedge near the public toilets of a village stade. He cultivated an air of bemusement at their reaction. Then he drove them up the winding road to the Mas des Fosses, like an angler reeling in a fidgeting line, shaking his head all the while.
It had reared before them in the golden dusk, ivy-clad and impossibly lovely after the horrors of the afternoon. The doorless front looked out upon misty blue mountains and a glow that was the light bouncing off the Mediterranean. A forested hill rose behind, stuffed full of evening birdsong – including nightingales. Monsieur Soulier kept looking at his watch and pulling a face. He squealed open the shutters as best he could, apologising for the musty smell more than for the orange paint. Monsieur Soulier reacted to the huge, ghostly barn owl that flew at them in the kitchen as if he had never seen it before. Then he showed them the outbuildings – with a comically overdone air of shame. The barn, strewn with mouldering hay, revealed a threshing-machine, wine-barrels, hung tools cocooned in cobwebs, a two-wheeled carriage and a farm-cart with massive spoked wheels. Monsieur Soulier shook his head mournfully. On the end of the line was a very fat fish. All he had to do now was reach out his hand and grab it.
‘It is normal they demand for so small a price,’ he lisped. ‘It is a complete ruin. And twenty-three hectares of savage land! Who wishes for that?’
There was only one snag, apart from the house’s unfortunate recent history (about which, as about the fatal grip of the ivy, he also kept very quiet): a young French couple from Normandy wished to farm it traditionally, with the help of a grant. Organic mushrooms and onions, he believed, with a gîte d’étape for walkers. The paperwork was finished, the compromis de vente was to be signed the following week. But of course the owners were open to negotiation.
‘Then we’ll negotiate,’ said Alan, with a relaxed smile.
‘We want it,’ said Lucy, who was tall and could look down on Monsieur Soulier’s bald patch.
‘But the young couple …’Monsieur Soulier began, his fingers all but touching the cool, scaly flesh.
‘Can go to hell,’ murmured Alan.
The scaffolding stayed in place for at least five years. The roof had lost many of its old, mossy tiles over the two decades of abandonment, and the subsequent rain damage was serious. When it rains in those dry mountains, the Sandlers were told, it can do so with a ferocity that is unequalled except in tropical areas subject to monsoons. The equivalent of half of Paris’s annual precipitation might fall in a few hours, gouging craters in roads, turning paths into streams, swelling rivers, swirling over bridges, sweeping away houses and people, bulldozing heaps of cars through village streets with a strange grinding and groaning that, once heard, is never forgotten. Three of the main beams were, in places, indistinguishable from wet peat. An expensive red crane was hired. It became a part of the landscape, visible from far off; folk in their dotage will still recall it in decades to come, Lucy joked.
The picturesque ivy had made such appalling inroads that it was, to all intents and purposes, keeping the house upright. Alan compared it to his grandfather’s hernia belt. An expert was called in, more expensive than the crane. Everyone underestimated, he said, the destructive powers of Nature, the need to keep her at bay. He gestured with his smooth hands as he described where the concrete had to go, tons and tons of it, keeping it tight. The house is a web of stresses and strains, he said: the beams and the walls are mutually interdependent. Ironically, Monsieur Soulier had been right. Even the orange paint was a stubborn distemper.
And the price they’d paid was, to any local, the stuff of madness. There, Monsieur Soulier had been misleading. But that price paled into insignificance before the cost of restoration. The house gobbled it up. Fortunately, business was brisk for Alan Sandler, dealer in antiquities: Sumer and Assyria and Babylonia.
Around 2003, there was a sudden glut. A pity, he would think, the site at Uruk was guarded, these days; but there were plenty others that weren’t. And in any case, who was doing the guarding?
By the time the Mallinsons arrived, only the finishing touches were lacking. The crumbling drystone wall around the farmyard. The pool’s surrounds. The English lawn. All the province of Jean-Luc.
‘Oh. Who’s that man?’
The way he just carried on standing there, watching them, not moving from the edge where the big flat area in front of the house fell away in broad, grassed-over terraces like steps into the valley, made Sarah uneasy. She tried not to act uneasy. She was sure he was perfectly normal.
‘Bonjour!’ she called out, heartily.
She and the girls were returning from their first great voyage. They had taken their new ‘sabbatical’ camcorder and climbed the slope at the back of the house, through laurel-like bushes with glossy foliage and into the woods, proceeding through deep drifts of leaves fallen from trees they couldn’t identify and deafening themselves with the rustling, and then on into a denser, darker forest of holm oaks interspersed with granite outcrops. Not being able to make headway through this, they’d turned back to join the main track. It narrowed and curled up and up through skeletal-looking chestnut trees in great skirts and swathes of more dead leaves (in which Beans all but disappeared), only to dip through a scented hollow of very tall pines, the ground soft with needles.
Tammy had asked if there were wolves in this forest.
‘Probably!’
It almost helped that Nick wasn’t with them, but she didn’t dwell on that: Sarah felt truly happy at last. In the bright, low, prismatic light, the pines fell away to a bare moorland area of springy grass and rocks that dropped steeply down on one side, revealing a patchwork of orchards and meadowland, with a tumbling stream at the bottom which had pretensions to river status further along, snaking mercurially between creamy shoals. The steep hills on the far side of the valley – she called them ‘mountains’– were draped in a dark-green pelt of woods, relieved by smoke-coloured patches of something deciduous and bare. There was a black streak they assumed was a fire’s scorch, and the odd mas, the odd little fleck of humanity, with a refractory air of silent resistance under its barrel-tiled roof. Nothing else. They were entranced, even stupefied.
‘There’s too much space,’ Alicia had cried, twirling about on the summit of a rock.
The rocks were great granite lumps inlaid with hornblende and feldspar, spattered with lichen and dried mosses. The mosses felt like toothbrushes. On some the moss was really velvet, Tammy noted, cloaking the boulders’ northern flanks.
‘We have to show poor Daddy how beautiful it is,’ Sarah said, filming Alicia. She swung the camera round to catch the other two. Beans hid her face, which was annoying. Sarah panned slowly over the landscape and back to Alicia, still prancing on the pocked summit in which tiny pools of rain reflected the sky like eyes.
‘Be careful,’ her mother had called, conscious of how unyielding granite was, how unlike the woodchips under the climbing frame in their boring Cambridge park, its liminal safeties. Sometimes she would see her chosen discipline, history, as a park. No, as a curious kind of wedge, a carved artefact stuck in a nameless, aimless and boggy wilderness. It was all about limits, in the end.
Right now, however, back in the yard – back in the place that already, after three days, felt like home – she was wondering who this man was. There was also a very battered green van, its back doors fastened by rope. The children had stopped skipping about and watched guardedly as the man came alive and approached. He might have been a teenager in his long-limbed awkwardness against the light. He aged as he neared them, like a speeded-up film: his close-cropped hair began to grey over the temples, and the lines around his mouth deepened. The peppery stubble darkened a chin that looked as if it had been punched to one side and poorly reset. Or replaced entirely, even, his whole face reassembled from different bits, like a potato man with plastic stick-on features.
His grip was strong and very rough – Sarah felt this as soon as he shook her hand, explaining that he was Jean-Luc, the jardinier. Lucy had called him the ‘handyman’. Large but rounded shoulders he didn’t quite know what to do with. Early thirties, maybe. Bags under his eyes that added another three or four years. At this rate, he would soon wither and crumble to dust like an old apple.
Sarah’s French was quite good, but Jean-Luc’s syllables were tumbled along by the local accent like pebbles in a fast-flowing stream. He also had a faint stutter. She nodded, standing there and catching whatever she could, like a primitive freshwater mollusc waiting for whatever crumbs of sustenance flowed past.
One thing was clear, however: it would be better if no one walked on the area seeded to grass. The Sandlers must have their English lawn. Sarah turned to the girls and instructed them never-ever-ever to go on that area there (pointing, wagging a finger). ‘Ils seront interdit, strictement,’ she laughed. They had walked all over it already: he must have been able to see that. The sprinkler system worked at night, he said, pointing to the yellow spider in the middle. As he talked, the children stared at him; they followed the grown-ups around in a little knot.
He began to clean the pool; that’s what he was here for, today. The girls sat on the tiles and watched him. He didn’t look at them much, he seemed slightly discomfited. He had an extendable rake and a net on a bendy pole. Sarah wondered with a sagging feeling if he came every day. She asked what the white object on the side was and he told her with a snort that it was an alarm, required by European law. It detected any sudden disturbance of the water. If the water was perturbé, for instance by a child falling in, its siren went off. Jean-Luc was raking the water while explaining this, so the machine was clearly not switched on. Sarah wondered aloud how it was activé. She could see the child dropping down and down like a plumb bob without a line.
Jean-Luc looked at her, puzzled. Then he pronounced something entirely incomprehensible: it could have been in Hungarian. The only major word Sarah recognised was ‘anglais’. He gestured towards the woods and pointed up at the surrounding hills then back to the pool, as if ‘les anglais’ came lumbering in heavy hordes out of the wilderness. Well, they did, in a way, at the purchasing rate (she had read this in a Guardian article that began with ‘Sacré bleu!’) of fifty thousand houses a year.
She felt good they were only renting. She would have liked to have revealed their meagre academics’ salaries, their modest house with structural problems off Gwydir Street, distancing herself from the wealthy Brit hordes. Instead, she folded her arms and nodded sympathetically, his French weaving a pleasant web of foreignness around her.
She told him the chimney didn’t work. It never has worked, he said. He was pouring in liberal quantities of a liquid from a large plastic canister marked ALGICIDE.
They went inside to have a look, Sarah carefully explaining that her husband suffered a bad back and had to rest for a few days on the sofa. Embarrassingly, he was lying on the floor under a blanket with his eyes closed and began talking before she’d had time to signal Jean-Luc’s presence.
‘The apposite phrase is helplessness,’ he groaned. ‘Which fatally encourages introspection. And envy of those able to embark on inspiring walks. Go on, tell me. I’m incredibly cold down here. We haven’t even managed a bloody fire.’ When he opened his eyes and saw Jean-Luc standing there with a shy frown, his face was a picture of astonishment. And by the time Jean-Luc had bent down cautiously to shake his hand, Sarah found herself burbling in a French that had completely disintegrated into sitcom Franglais, while fluttering her hands.
However, once Nick had levered himself onto the sofa, apologising profusely, he did a much better job than Sarah at the oral comprehension. Nothing could touch Nick’s brain.
After Jean-Luc had left, his sharp sweaty smell lingering in the air like a faint reproach, it was all explained. There was a code to activate the pool alarm, but Jean-Luc didn’t know the code; the Sandlers would. The fireplace was useless, but Jean-Luc would try to sort out the smoke problem (Jean-Luc had a key to the house, of course, which made them slightly uneasy). Even when the code was found, the alarm couldn’t be switched on at night because of the boars, who came down to drink nocturnally. The water would be thoroughly perturbed, Nick added, grinning.
Sarah was startled. ‘The boars? What, real boars? Or boring locals?’
‘Sangliers. Wild pigs, with tusks.’
She clapped a hand to her forehead. ‘I thought he was saying les anglais. I thought he was saying that loads of English people came in the summer and perturbed the pool by swimming in it, but I couldn’t work out why he was getting so excited.’
Nick laughed, then clutched the sofa.
‘Anyway,’ Sarah said, ‘we can switch it on until we go to bed. The kids aren’t going to be on walkabout at night. Are you? Eh, you lot?’
They were too absorbed in Thomas the Tank Engine to reply.
‘There’s one slight drawback,’ Nick sighed. ‘If a burglar falls in and perturbs the pool by drowning in it, it’s the owners’ responsibility. The victim’s family could sue them. Or any night visitor. A drunk, for instance. According to Jean-Luc.’
‘The gospel according to Jean-Luc,’ Sarah said, drawing a cross in the air. ‘We won’t get night visitors,’ she added. ‘No one’s going to be perturbing us out here.’
The champagne bottle was found hanging inside the chimney a couple of days later, concealed from everything but a two-year-old’s sight-line. Beans squealed with delight and thought it was a rorqual. That was what her word sounded like and no one took any notice of her bobbing on the polished slates of the hearth in time with the repeated word until, trying to concentrate on colouring in, Tammy investigated.
Sarah found it disturbing. ‘What’s he done that for?’
‘No idea,’ said Nick, from the sofa, as Sarah gazed into the darkness of the flue.
‘It’s hung on a wire,’ she reported. ‘Maybe it’s a local tradition. A welcome.’
He must have hung it up early, while they were lying in. Sarah didn’t like this idea at all, that Jean-Luc had been creeping about downstairs while they were all asleep. He did have a key, of course. They weren’t sure whether to light a fire, it might crack the bottle, but she lit one anyway, feeding it old, corklike logs scattered about in the barn. The fireplace smoked less. In fact, the bone-dry wood made it blaze ferociously, billowing a surprising degree of warmth over the room.
‘Clever,’ Nick commented. ‘I think the bottle’s creating some kind of mini-vortex.’
‘Clever old Jean-Luc,’ said Sarah, grappling with two Duplo pieces that had got stuck together. Beans clambered into her lap and stared at the fire, the moisture in her eyes glittering.
‘Fireguard,’ Sarah said. ‘Add it to the list.’
‘Along with firewood,’ said Nick. ‘I romantically assumed I’d be gathering firewood myself. Another delusion. It’s getting rather long, our list.’
‘I do think the Sandlers, for the amount they’re charging, could have supplied that,’ said Sarah, separating the two pieces at last, but splitting a nail in the process. Alicia said she didn’t need the arch now, and turned to her doll, a black infant called Moppet.
Tammy’s head was cocked over the Tate Britain colouring book as she kept perfectly within the complex of hem on the Tudor lady-in-waiting’s dress. She asked, with a kind of weary air: ‘Do you like this place, Mummy?’
‘Of course I do, Tammy,’ Sarah replied. ‘I think it’s very special. Don’t you?’
‘Sixteenth century or earlier, this house,’ Nick chipped in. ‘Same era as your colouring-in person.’
Tammy contemplated her work. The pretty young lady-in-waiting’s face was a drinker’s puce. She picked a dark blue for the dress.
‘It’s sort of a bit crazy,’ she said.
‘Crazy? The house?’
‘A bit.’
‘Only because you’re not used to it, Tammo,’ Nick said. ‘It’s a question of adaptation.’
‘Rorqual,’ said Beans, absently, tiny chin in tiny hand.
The fire had stopped blazing and smoke was once again seeping out.
‘Maybe the bottle’s a fetish,’ Nick suggested, adjusting his head on the sofa’s arm.
‘What’s a fetsheesh?’ asked Alicia.
Tammy snorted at her ignorance, although Nick’s reply surprised her with a new definition.
‘Something they use in Africa to protect a village or a house or a person,’ he said, gazing up at the old beams. He loved old beams. There were several magnificent specimens here, whole tree trunks barely squared off, with patches of bark like callouses.
‘That’s a fetish,’ said Sarah, nodding at the one-eyed mask above the fireplace. ‘See all the nails? It’s not just his beard. Each nail’s a kind of wish, like when you cut a birthday cake.’
‘Poor thing,’ said Alicia. ‘Bet it hurts him.’
Tammy snorted again, even more derisorily. ‘You’re a living quirk,’ she said, sadly shaking her head as her felt-tip worked its way up to the curving black line, like an incoming and unstoppable tide.
When Sarah had first attended Dr Nicholas Mallinson’s lectures in her third year, she heard him use the term ‘Festschrift’ –cleverly, out of its usual context. It was his way to describe the territorial carve-up of Africa after Germany’s defeat in 1918. ‘The white man’s Festschrift, printed by himself and stuck up in schoolrooms all over his various empires.’ Or words to that effect: the image recurred in his published essays. She had no idea what that key, repeated word meant, and had noted it down as fetish?. When he became her supervisor the following year (after her top First), this tiny rent in her knowledge was still unstitched. He used the word again, in a discussion of what she was planning to do for her PhD, and she asked him outright what it meant. He was amazed.
‘I’ve got these gaps,’ she had said, blushing. She pulled her skirt forward over her black tights, wriggling like a schoolgirl. ‘When you first used it in a lecture, I heard it as fetish.’
He had laughed. So had she. She was on top of things, with everything still to play for. She didn’t yet know what a PhD was like. She had a vague crush on Dr Mallinson, imagining long discussions about Fredric Jameson or Michel Foucault, about the abolition of the historical oppositional metaposition or the demise of class analysis before jumping into bed. Then he’d leaned forward after a long, lingering moment, tossed his fringe aside and said, ‘I’m thirsty, Sarah. How about we do this over a jar?’
And here they were now, with their children, a reasonably normal family with a small Victorian terrace back in Cambridge whose thin walls, built on a former cesspit, were cracking in half. The only house in England that hadn’t been printing money just by staying upright: Nick had bought it twenty-five years ago, when Gwydir Street was impoverished and bohemian, suiting Nick’s then-granitic Marxism, which remained like a worn, half-forgotten stele in the folds of his mind; like the embarrassing ponytail he’d abandoned after a year, but which he was always threatening to resurrect. An area which, though now full of earnest, middle-class couples like themselves and with one of the most active Natural Childbirth Trust groups in the country, plus a green-tinged steering committee committed to local issues who met over organic food in the family pub, and in whose expensive streets could be heard the faint drifting, like thistledown, of evening piano practices, he still saw as impoverished, bohemian.
She had just got back from checking the post: they’d decided to do this two or three times a week, but there wasn’t a lot. In fact, there was very little apart from the odd good-luck postcard. It was a lovely jog, though, if a touch oppressed by the thick holm oaks either side; when the sun wasn’t out and glittering on their leaves, they went a kind of dark and foreboding grey-green.
Alicia was jumping off the windowsill over and over. Tammy sat on its twin, looking through the dusty pane; Beans was asleep in Sarah’s arms, clutching her bottle. She was still on the bottle, but not on the breast. The breast was over. Soon there would be school for Beans. School, university, work, children, work, retirement. Sometimes Sarah felt she had stalled at the university stage. That the day she’d walked in to Nick Mallinson’s room was the day the spring had started to unwind. A wholly unreasonable reflection.
The house had draughts that knocked on its stable-like doors. There was a certain scruffiness about it, apart from the dining room; a certain calculated impoverishment in its internal furnishings and equipment. A plump old radio with dicky dials; a lumpen-grey dialling type of phone that was, of course, unconnected; the old video machine and defunct television; a dusty hi-fi that only hissed. Sarah admired the dog-scuffed sofa with its lovely patchwork throwovers and the soft, lumpy easy chairs: the type that were impossible to buy, that were only inherited, squabbled over. Even the refurbished kitchen was full of rejects – knives with chipped handles, a cracked salad bowl, forks with verdigris on the tangs. One bottle-opener, a single piece of metal, like something out of a cracker. And the African mask, although possibly priceless, would have looked at home in a flea market. Lucy’s taste, she thought; not Alan’s. Lucy was definitely class. Only the flashy modern prints from her gallery looked vaguely awkward, although hung crookedly on the uneven walls. One was all orange with a tiny spot of red and the word verdure in splashy white letters. It drew Nick’s eyes to it, for some reason. He found it comforting.
Alicia banged her head, inevitably, on the top of the window-space as she stood on the sill ready to jump. She held the hurt in concentrated silence, working out whether the pain dancing on her skull would fade. Of course, it didn’t. It got worse, wedging itself in. Out of the silence came the cry, furious and sorrowful.
‘Stupid girl,’ Tammy said, as if reading her mother’s unspoken words.
Beans stirred from whatever half-state she was in and dropped the bottle. Tiny spots of milk shimmered on the floor. Alicia’s bawling had no scruples: it swept them all up indiscriminately and deposited them on a steel platform out at sea.
Sarah suggested she stop. ‘Don’t make such a song and dance, Alicia.’
‘Shut up,’ said Alicia, suddenly, out of her arrested clamour. ‘I might have be died, Mummy,’ she explained, making Nick’s heart give a little salmon love-leap.
‘Oo-er,’ he said.
‘Don’t think so,’ said Sarah, as Tammy laughed. ‘You look very alive to me.’
‘Doide,’ said Beans, pointing at Alicia with wide-eyed certainty.
Sarah handed Beans over to Nick as if the child were still a baby and went upstairs to the loo. She sat on the wooden seat and felt a goldenness rising through her body and popping in her mind, as it would during childhood holidays in Wales with the horses in the field behind and the cat that slept in the lane. She was with her friend Madge and Madge’s mother, not with her own parents, and she went there three years running and there was Madge’s brother Mark and his schoolmate Rolly, and that’s when, aged eleven, a boy had first tried to kiss her and succeeded in the lee of a hedge: it was Mark, in fact, the experience marred only by his brace. And that’s when, aged twelve, she’d sat on the quay at Llangranog nibbling a sticky chunk of honeycomb, discussing horses with Madge, or perhaps love (or what passed for love at that age), and thought life could only get better and better.
Alicia’s wail began again, and she could hear Nick’s rumble of a voice like a hoarse foghorn, telling her to stop. Sarah couldn’t help resenting the guilt she felt, but it made no difference. This guilt was no one else’s fault but hers.
That night, Beans woke up and afterwards Sarah lay awake for ages. Nick snored gently. Otherwise, everything was quiet, that amazing quiet of the deep countryside in a country big enough to have such a thing. She crossed the landing to the loo again and heard a strange sound, a sort of insistent, repetitive brushing. She opened the small window and the noise grew louder.
She poked her head out into the clear, cold night. The sprinkler was turning and turning, a sporadic arc of glitter in the moonlight, sweeping the dark seed-bed. The pool was an ingot of silver, a wedge of mercury.
Oh, she felt good. The thought of all those long-dead engineers’ unread reports made her heart rise. They would be spotted with tropical flies, holed by African moths. Their dry texts would be a voyage of discovery under her gaze, revealing the wonders beneath. To analyse was to dive deep in a pressure-suit of intelligence, to uncover what no one else even knew was there. Alertness and wit.
What was that? That sudden hump of a shadow? It crossed the brilliant pool on the bottom edge and vanished. The window knocked in a gust, echoed by the door on its iron thumb-latch. A branch? The shadow of a branch? Moonlight was so strange, so blue and tricksy, in its pure form. She shivered and hurried back to bed; Nick’s warmth welcomed her like a summery bluff over a cold tide and she was asleep within minutes.
Alan Sandler was on the lavatory when the phone went. Ever since Syria, two months back, he’d had a gippy tummy and a bad skin complaint. He was expecting a call, an important call – as usual. He rushed out of the lavatory clutching his trousers to his groin with his left hand, grabbing at the cordless with the other. Sometimes Lucy would not replace the phone and he would track its muffled ring tone until, too late, the message service triggered. He would invariably find it under a drift of Lucy’s material, the wild, silkscreened patterns hemmed up with pins. This was a sideline of Lucy’s, her hobby, an offshoot of her dealing in modern prints. She even had exhibitions now and again: great drapes of cloth like frozen breakers, or rectangles of silk pinned austerely to the walls, like paintings.
‘Yeah? What?’
He sounded gruff. He was gruff. It impressed the clients. It made him look as if he was fielding several phone calls at once. It made him appear in demand and that he didn’t really need the work. What he felt like saying into the hush was, ‘Yeah? So?’
It was someone whose name he didn’t recognise at first. Mallinson? Nicholas Mallinson? His memory was faulty. It was the malaria, or maybe the curse. Years ago, when he was dealing in Central African stuff – village after remote village wangled free of its sacred fetish, a chief or a chief’s relative bribed and the worm-holed, ancient, ivory-fanged mask safely in his arms in the jeep, or swaddled next to him on the Pan Am plane bound for New York, mute and powerless – this guy had cursed him. So the guy claimed: a witchdoctor in flared flannels and with halitosis. Or maybe, if he took this particular one-eyed mask, he would be cursed. It was all in pidgin French. He took the mask.
He never stole anything, not outright. He worked to prise the stuff free. At times he worked alongside the God Squad, their beaming faces offering the snap judgement of the Lord instead of the slow, unnerving mysteriousness of the bush spirits. How could the natives refuse? Sucked free of its magic, the hidden ju-ju stuff was so much junk. Then it became art, pulsating with the glow of money, even before it had been dug out from its earth or hut or wherever it slept between ceremonies. How many curses had, in fact, rained down on his head? Not one of them so effective as his recurring malaria from that time in Dahomey.
Africa! He’d given up on her, on equatorial Africa. Wars, disease, corruption. It was Conrad minus the exciting story. You only have one life. So he closed down his gallery in Los Angeles and joined Lucy in London, turning his sights on the Arab lands.
Iraq. A goldmine for a year or so after the invasion. Now it was, frankly, debauched. The dealers – American, Arab, Indian, whoever – were lewd. Bloated on their riches. Some of them with half a museum in their safes and boxes. Old Saddam hands as middlemen. Clumsy, careless handling, as if the goods were plastic – or someone’s limbs. Alan was not happy with the situation, it made the hairs sit up on the back of his creased, sun-flayed neck. That was why he was waiting for it all to settle down, for the snoops to lose interest, before dealing any more of his Iraqi stock. Two little gypsum worshippers from Tell Asmar, a white marble head from Ur, an ivory plaque from Nimrud, a stunning alabaster statuette of Astarte, goddess of love – along with some Babylonian cylinder seals from East Berlin that had crossed the wall a few weeks before it fell, like so much else. Coming up to five thousand years old, most of it. It was his investment, secreted in a metal box in the smallest of the cellars in the French house. Every day he expected a call from some newt in the Foreign Office, making enquiries.
So when he heard this Mr Mallinson’s well-spoken English voice, Alan Sandler was momentarily hauled up by his nerves. When he realised who it was, and what it was about, he quoted poetry and yelled for Lucy.
Lucy had never really liked children. She’d had Walter and Suzie as adjuncts to her life as an artist, gallery owner and agent. She was always determined that the twins wouldn’t ‘take over’. Her first husband, Neil, was wealthy enough to enable them to be packed off to separate boarding schools at the age of seven. Now they were thirty, amazingly, and more trouble than when they were small. Suzie was an intensely miserable aid worker whom the Red Cross flung into places like Bosnia or Rwanda or Sierra Leone or Chad or post-tsunami Indonesia with a kind of cold, Swiss relish. After the Congo, over two years ago, she’d had a complete breakdown and Lucy had had to look after her. Suzie would not describe what terrible things she had seen over her Congolese stint, only admitting to their ‘banality’. Chop chop. It was the ‘banality’ of the chop chop that had got to her. She sat about and smoked incessantly and laughed at inopportune moments, which led to ructions with Alan, who had only just come onto the scene. Walter was either off heroin or on heroin in Vancouver, of all places. Whether off or on, he was a pain, writing long and rather poetic letters on yellow feint-lined paper that rustled and demanded an answer she felt unable to give, or give adequately.
Now these people, these tenants, were asking her for the code to the pool alarm. This ridiculous piece of EU-sponsored machinery was only purchased to avoid the Sandlers getting involved in tedious litigation. Its sole purpose, she felt, was to provide extra dough for some EU minister’s business-crony: namely, the manufacturers of this apparatus. Now, apparently, it was required to work. If a burglar or local yob (not that there seemed to be real yobs in France) or one of those horrible hunters fell in and drowned, and the apparatus wasn’t actually functioning, the chances were good of being screwed by the vindictive, money-grubbing family of the deceased. She half-suspected the locals were plotting to push in unwanted relatives deliberately, just to get the dosh off the wealthy foreigners. Smelly grannies; mumbling teenage simpletons. Peasants were like that.
The alarm had operated once, on the day it was installed, and made one of the most horrible sounds she had ever heard, leaving her with tinittus for a week. It was an insult to the glorious peace of the place. It was yet another attempt by the EU flunkies to destroy whatever opportunity remained of a decent quality of life beyond the European ‘norms’, which she always witheringly referred to as ‘normans’. The invading European ‘normans’ to match the immigrants and their mafias. It was laughable. So she had ordered it to be switched off –shouting at Jean-Luc over the hundreds of decibels – and entirely forgotten about it.
Now this Oxbridge professor was badgering her to get it up and running, whereas only two or three years ago it would never have occurred to him because such things didn’t even exist. One had a pool, one splashed about in it, one kept half an eye on one’s progeny, and that was it. But no – the normans of this world were in charge. Creeping into every crevice, into the very interstices of the grain, where primitive fear lurked and a childish lack of responsibility rejoiced. It was like vaccines. Measles was actually good for you. You couldn’t guard against every danger, or why live at all?
So she fobbed him off. It was somewhere in a drawer, she said. Really, she had no idea there was even a code to punch in.
‘Sometimes, Alan darling, I think you might need a code to punch in.’
Alan, half-asleep in his chair, grunted. She twirled her third malt in her long fingers. There had been a very attractive young man in the gallery this afternoon, wearing a homburg and an equally retro coat. He was taken with the ‘hydroelectric’ sequence of prints by Philippa Wanberg-Ketch – faint, cutaway diagrams of inner organs superimposed on hydroelectric plants in silhouette with scribbled German words in pencil underneath. She had desired him in a straightforward, lustful way, imagining wrapping her thighs around his face, but he had remained imperviously young and himself. She was past it, at fifty-eight. Even the face-to-face gymnastics of it all.
She hoped that was the last of it, from the tenants. At least for a month or so. The whole point was for them to take over, to chivvy Jean-Luc, to enable the Sandlers (or at least, her) to take a break from the worry. The house was a big, ramshackle ship battered by storms; it apparently needed continual attention. It was vulnerable, far more vulnerable than they’d imagined. They had spotted the cracks on their first visit, even through the romantic ivy, and the estate agent had laughed dismissively, although you could have put a hand into one of the fissures if it hadn’t been for the spider-webs in it. It’s been there for five hundred years, he laughed, I don’t think it’s about to fall down now. Liar. The moment they’d signed the deeds, it started. It started to crumble, to weaken at the knees, to go all effeminate. Even the lovely ivy was catastrophic, wedging cracks wider with its hideous, nobbly strength. Of course, houses fell down like cliffs if you didn’t continually maintain them, seal them, succour them.
And that poor, wretched man had slipped off the roof. What was he doing up there, when it was still wet? Why had they needed to replace the whole roof, anyway? Because half those great, immortal beams were rotten. The house had claimed its victim. Now and again she thought of him, over the six years since it had happened, seeing his face grinning at her, his deep-voiced dishiness above the blue overalls, his lithe body and huge hands that she had trusted with the work, with the walls and the roof. With their bolt-hole from London. Their refuge. Pure man, he was. One of those big Roman noses like Serge Gainsbourg’s, rakishly broken on the bridge.
‘Our marvellous builder’s gone and had an accident,’ was how she’d put it to friends. ‘Oh?’ they would reply, not very interested. ‘Yes. Out of action. We’ll have to find another one. We’ll have to go all the way down there and start the whole process all over again. Meanwhile, the rain’s coming in.’
Hardly anyone knew he had actually died. And so, oddly –at least until the widow started trying to blame them for her husband’s carelessness – she didn’t really know it, either. It remained a kind of abstraction. She refused to go into the village cemetery to check – that would have been morbid. And so sometimes she wondered if it was all another French ruse, a way to screw money out of the foreigners – that one day she would meet dear wotsisname, Raoul, walking down the village street, or strolling with his gun in the forest, and say, ‘Bad luck, didn’t work, did it?’ But as time went on, and it dwindled into the past, she believed in it more and more. It became this concentrated point of intensity in her life, a point so tiny she could mostly avoid looking at it. And then suddenly, in the middle of the night, it would drift into view and she would wake up all but crying out in a kind of blind terror, as if she were the one scrabbling for a hold on the wet tiles, slipping inexorably towards the verge.
‘I told them it was in a drawer somewhere downstairs,’ she said again. ‘Alan. The code. For the pool alarm. Alan!’
‘OK,’ he replied, nodding in his chair, his double chin like a spotted cravat on his chest. He scratched at his belly through the shirt. Something in Syria – maybe a prawn in Damascus –had given him this skin complaint. The doctor had examined his face and then asked him to lift his shirt and had proceeded to write his doctorish name in the skin of the belly. It was exfoliating as they watched. Crumbling away. Cantab., the doctor added with his nail-pared finger, grinning.
‘The young,’ she sighed. ‘They’re so frightened of it all.’
There was a pause, embroidered by a faint police siren.
‘He’s not that young,’ Alan pointed out, suddenly alert. ‘I didn’t even know it had a code.’
‘Like a security door. Like a safe. Do you have to scratch? It’s all over the sofa.’
Alan smiled. ‘I need to put the cream on. The steroids are no longer working. Maybe it was the CIA. Or the Saudis. Maybe I’ve been poisoned. The radioactive Russians.’
‘Alan, don’t be so romantic.’
He chuckled indulgently. Nevertheless, he was afraid at times.
‘I think they’re going to be fussing,’ said Lucy, with a sigh. ‘They’re that type. I asked about the cherry tree. He’s going to investigate. I can’t really believe Jean-Luc hasn’t planted it.’
‘Planted what?’
‘The cherry, you oaf! I kept reminding him. It was one of his priorities, along with the lawn. He should have planted it in the autumn. Do you have to slump? Being an ex-ballet dancer, I don’t know what it means to slump. We’ll have to have a word, face to face. At some point we’ll have to descend.’
‘They’re a nice English family,’ murmured Alan, not moving, one eye half-closed like a toad’s. ‘They’re genial. Filled the house up. An empty house attracts the wrong people. We agreed. We don’t want that Trot mayor snooping.’
‘If one of them drowns, clever boy,’ said Lucy, leaning forwards tipsily, ‘the police will come. It’ll be in the papers. As with Raoul.’
Alan grunted and said, ‘The guy didn’t drown.’
Lucy’s mobile rang.
‘My Lord, no, wow, frightening,’ was all she appeared to say for ten minutes, in various combinations.
He’d been offered two silver Assyrian lions the size of his thumb by a dealer from Dubai this afternoon: their provenance was dubious. He had said ‘no-no’, as he had said ‘no-no,’ to the scarlet ware jar from Khafaje, c.2900 BC, because in two minutes he had found it on Google under ‘Stolen Treasures from Iraq’. The place was an El Dorado no longer. Or at least, it was now minimally patrolled. Bedouins with guns guarded Uruk. Deadly guys. Dealers could be undercover agents. Sites were still getting bulldozed, but the guys doing it were terrorist killers, they were way beyond his remit. He may have to wait years before releasing his stock – releasing it piece by piece, like a leaked report, an elimination so gradual no one would notice. Geological erosion. The silt of gain. Vases, cylinder seals, statuettes. That white marble head of a woman, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, five thousand years old. He was in love with her, this woman from Ur. She hovered over his dreams. You just had to imagine the half of her nose that was missing.
Suspicion was the watchword. He would sit it out, as still as death. Lucy came off the phone, looked glazed.
‘You know what the Chinese say?’ growled Alan, barely moving his mouth, his body still slumped like an overstuffed dummy’s. ‘Or used to say when they were civilised? Have patience: one day the grass will become milk.’
‘Oh the Chinese,’ said Lucy, coming back to life. ‘Now there’s where we’re really talking scary.’
‘He didn’t recognise my name,’ said Nick, up on one elbow on the sofa. ‘He was basically unfriendly. He doesn’t know anything about an alarm. He called it “the watch-dog’s honest bark”, twice. Is that Shakespeare? Sounds like it. He didn’t strike me as the literary type. Anyway, she’s phoning back. Lucy Sandler.’
He confirmed that he’d been recognised eventually. The people renting the farmhouse. Your place in France. Then Alan Sandler had whooped, as if relieved. ‘Oh, it’s the genial family!’ he’d said.
‘Oh,’ Sarah sighed, wondering if there was irony in this; ‘I thought you meant he didn’t know who you were at all. I’d have felt really weird, if he hadn’t known you at all. They did say to ring, didn’t they?’
She remembered Alan saying as they were leaving, in a loud and hectoring tone: ‘It’s called le Mas des Fosses, but I call it le Mas des Fesses. You know why? Because it’s in the butt of beyond.’ And he gave a big American roar.
‘Fesses means backside,’ Lucy had explained.
‘Oh I know,’ Nick had assured her.
Lucy then gave him the keys; the main key being black and enormous, like something stripped from a steam engine.
‘There won’t be,’ Sarah recalled her saying, ‘but if there are – problems, I mean – don’t wait.’ They were descending the porch steps. ‘Mobile, if I’m not in. Just buzz.’
Sarah also remembered the fuzzy, hemmed-in image of the house she’d had then, the impossibility of imagining themselves there at all. And now they were there. Here. A simple translation in the mathematical sense. She’d be in Sainsbury’s right now, feeling anthropological. Or trundling Beans through the Grafton Centre in a short-cut to FitzHerbert’s, navigating huge dogs and hoodies, beleaguered under the endless thrash of what passed for public music. Or walking back home under the grey lid of an East Anglian sky, negotiating the cracks in the pavement with those wretched little pushchair wheels swivelling backwards at every opportunity.
Nick was wondering aloud why Alicia had her giant, inflatable hammer down in the sitting room. It was called Boris. Boris was a present from Alicia’s half-brother, Jamie – difficult Jamie giving the difficult present for Alicia’s fifth birthday. It was not only enormous, this hammer – almost the size of an adult – but undeflatable. Jamie, apparently at Alicia’s request, had dripped Superglue around the nozzle so that the hammer wouldn’t ‘die’. Alicia used it mainly to bash the rest of her family on the head with; Tammy put up with this only because she found it quite fun pretending to have a serious head injury – keeping up brain damage for several hours and frightening her sister until she’d plead with her to be normal. Alicia had insisted on bringing it, which involved dismantling (‘deconstructing’, as Nick put it) the luggage-stuffed car at the last moment. ‘Insisted’ was a euphemism: Alicia’s wails made passers-by pause, wondering whether to call the police. The hammer grinned through the rear window all the way down like something out of a Jacques Tati film.
Alicia now lay sprawled across the hammer in a star shape, thumb in her mouth.
‘She’s not doing anything with it,’ Sarah observed, sitting with a shopping list in the scruffy wing chair by the smouldering fire. ‘She’s promised to be very careful.’
‘I’m sure she has,’ said Tammy. She turned a few pages of the Tate Britain book and reached Holbein’s King Henry the Eighth. She studied the black-lined, colourable version, its appetising white spaces.
‘Shut up, or I’ll hit you wiv it,’ mumbled Alicia around her thumb, staring at the ceiling.
‘Blairite,’ Tammy replied, reaching for her father’s arsenal of insults. ‘Tory by another name.’ She toyed with ‘Porkie’ but decided that would bring down trouble on her head. Alicia was on the podgy side.
‘By any other name,’ corrected her father, already deep in a report about Chad, his favourite subject.
‘Please, kids,’ said Sarah. ‘Beans is trying to nap.’
‘Not,’ said Beans, from under a blanket on the rug. Sarah crouched over onto her hands and rested her lips for a few seconds on the silken cheek under the wood-shaving curls. A tell-tale smell emanated from the blanket’s recesses.
After a few minutes Alicia made a raspberry noise as she propelled herself and the giant hammer in a circle with her feet, catching the colouring book and sending the felt-tip pen’s reposed progress awry. The King’s face had a green streak across it, now, leaping from the half-done collar like the record of a massive earthquake. Tammy stood up and, with the colouring book, began to hit Alicia about the head, silently, with the stapled end first. The victim made a squealing noise. Sarah told them to stop, as ineffectually as ever.
Nick crawled out from the kitchen. He was crawling more easily. They hadn’t even noticed him disappear. He had one half of a plastic blue salad-shaker wobbling on his head. ‘Here’s the UN,’ he cried, in a silly voice. ‘Here’s the UN come to save the day. Stop quarrelling! Be nice to each other! Oh, please do! I’m the UN!’
The helmet fell off his head and bounced and then rolled to Tammy’s feet. Only then did they laugh. Nick’s face was bright red and his thick grey hair was wild behind his ears. He neighed and whinnied. His pseudopolyps were already better, along with his back.
Now he stood up, inch by inch. ‘Et voilà,’ he said, towering above them at last. ‘All is not over with the republic.’
‘Excellent,’ said Sarah. ‘Just in time to change Beans, my Caesar.’
Jean-Luc hoovered the pool, which was now less green near the surface but was opaque towards the bottom. The girls were sailing their boats of stick or leaf and had to stop. The widesnouted monster had a long, flexible neck that travelled to its squat body confined to the shore. It cruised beneath the girls’ frail craft, stirring the muck; it was famished and deadly. Jean-Luc smiled at them as they tried to tell him about the toad. His mouth was as wide as the monster’s, and his teeth were crooked and probably never brushed.
He didn’t take them seriously. They went ribbit, ribbit, ribbit in unison; he didn’t understand. Tammy ran into the house but her father was on the mobile in the bathroom upstairs. She asked her mother what ‘toad’ was in French. Sarah searched through the drawers in her head and came up with ‘crapaud’. Tammy laughed, not believing her, and checked in the French-English dictionary for confirmation.
By the time she’d made it back to the pool, Jean-Luc had finished. No toad, it seemed, had been swallowed. She was out of breath.
‘Crappo?’
He laughed and shook his head. ‘Pas de crapaud.’ His singlet smelt of sweat, with a patch on his back the shape of Chad.
She went back to the house with her sisters to look for more words in French that sounded rude. Their father came downstairs as they entered the sitting room; he was holding the mobile. He turned to Sarah, reading in the chair.
‘She claims she’s remembered that the code’s written down on a piece of paper in a drawer, somewhere.’
‘Somewhere. Oh. Grrr-rreat!’
‘And I’ve got to ask Jean-Luc about a cherry tree.’
‘Are we allowed to look in all the drawers?’
‘The ones downstairs.’
‘Can I?’ yelled Alicia.
‘Fine,’ said Sarah. ‘And supposing it’s upstairs?’
They opened every drawer, downstairs, pulling a few right out to sift through on the floor. Nothing that might have been a code. Scraps of paper with numbers on that Alicia squealed at, but they were telephone numbers with country codes and names. Sarah went especially carefully through an old clerical cabinet in the hallway. Some of its twenty drawers, small and square but deep, smelt sweetly of wax. In most there was nothing more than rusty clips and drawing pins. A scrap of serge with a set of needles stuck in. An epaulette trailing black thread, as if torn from its owner’s shoulder. The usual ephemera of trapped insects, reduced to tiny black knots or varnished hulls.
They did find a few maps, including an official one of the property from the 1930s, showing the extent of the farm’s terrain and the buildings marked in italics with their functions: grenier, bergerie, poulailler, écurie, remise, soue, pailler, maison principale, caves. Several of these had disappeared, mostly sited where the charred stones now lay. It was an entire universe that had vanished, in the end, with all its voices, its sensations, its smells. Stretch out and you touch it, thought Sarah.
They checked the attic and Nick got caught up in the old yellowing newspapers, redolent of the war and l’après-guerre. There was a strong breeze outside and it whistled in the roof, as if someone was trying a tune through their teeth.
Sarah hauled him down to help her poke through the five caves under the house: one of them was fastened by no less than two combination padlocks, which was intriguing; Nick reckoned it was the passageway down to the centre of the earth. The others, dusty and unlit, reached by a few stone steps from the outside, were full of rustic rubbish and rather heavy scuttling noises.
‘This is bonkers,’ said Sarah, back in the sitting room. ‘I mean, to buy an alarm and not even know how to use it. They’re just so incredibly casual. Like the non-existent heating system. Did she sound as if she cared?’
Nick reflected for a moment. ‘No,’ he admitted. His hands were dusty, although he hadn’t scrabbled about that much.
The girls watched another video over tea, Alicia draped over Boris the inflatable hammer as Thomas and Gordon puffed up and down the branch line, bickering like lovers. It was four o’clock. The hammer’s toothy mouth looked stretched back in pain as Alicia’s bulk made the trapped air denser, squealing the taut plastic. They had all got up late this morning, their parents letting them bounce around on the high parental bed.
‘It’s Sun – day – to – day,’ Alicia had announced, bouncing on the unsteady mattress.
‘It’s Tuesday, in fact,’ said her mother. ‘It just feels like Sunday. We ought to start classes soon.’
‘That’ll be fun,’ said Nick, without irony, stroking Beans’s hair as if it were a pelt.
Tammy asked to be pushed off the bed. Sarah pushed her, but not hard enough.
‘Push me,’ she insisted.
Sarah gave her a shove and immediately tried to grab her as she fell backwards. Of course, Sarah thought to herself: they are cats. They fall backwards and land on their paws. All part of the weaning process, to shove them off the bed to the ground – from where they will always clamber back, laughing like pretend ghosts.
‘Why did you try to catch me?’ Tammy demanded, nursing her wrist, which Sarah’s Duplo-split nail had scratched. The whole point was to let them go and let them fall.
She snatched a few moments on her own after hanging out the washing. It was a perfectly clear day. The light was almost severe and certainly pure. Nunnish, she thought. Sacred’s better. An infinite blue hazed into haloes of a green-tinged white along the gauze rumple of the hilltops. The sun was warm – almost burning – on the back of her neck. It was delightful. The whole thing was delightful. She felt as if she were being carried tenderly by the sacredness, her entire body uncoiling in the day’s arms as she knelt by the pool: the contentment of sunlight, the silence, the hints of earthiness in the clear air and the shifting shapes in the pool water. The smooth, warmish tiles under her hands. It was all so simple, really: happiness.
After tea, the girls went outside and played at the front, with an order not to go round to the back on their own.
Their parents were listening in the kitchen to France Inter on the old Sixties radio with dicky dials. This was intended to be a teatime routine, to loosen up their hidebound French. Now and again it was France Musique or even France Culture. It took some getting used to, after a unique diet of Radios 3 and 4. It was like visiting a trendy, younger aunt with a smoky voice after the comfortable, older one called Beeb who gave you your favourite biscuits and poured unsurpassable tea from under a knitted cosy, wittering on about her cats one minute and Kierkegaard the next. Blasts of rock or jazz interrupted the trendy aunt’s earnest discussions: she lived in Paris. The more intellectual she got, the more they understood. Nick and Sarah had great fun with this simile.
Today she was discussing Tadeusz Kantor. Whenever she grew particularly Left Bank, whirling her outrageous beads, they looked at each other and sniggered. The air was thick with the smoke of imaginary Gauloises. Words ended on a sigh.
Meanwhile, outside, Alicia was chasing Tammy around on the rough, gravelly area in front of the house. She was slowed down by her shorter legs and by Boris the inflatable hammer, although Tammy tantalised her by adjusting her speed or stopping altogether for a few seconds. Beans was stacking pebbles near the big pine tree with fierce concentration.
Tammy had stopped by one of the windows – catching her breath while Alicia was momentarily distracted by a sharp gust of wind that had hauled the inflatable from her grip. A noise grew in the corner of Tammy’s eye and for a fraction of a second concealed the view and her sisters in a dark flash. She was too surprised to cry out, let alone move.
An explosion, like the giant snapping of a jaw.
The huge black vehicle, as it disappeared up the track, reminded her of Sophie Cartwright’s four-by-four, always nearly squashing them in the playground as it delivered its golden gobbet on fat legs, and which had now been banned, like the taking of photos, from the school grounds. Beans had vanished. Tammy saw the green shoe, small and rubbery, but not the owner. She assumed she was run over, and frowned.
She had not caught up with the moment; she was still in a dream of it.
Then she saw Beans emerge from behind the big pine tree. She was sucking her thumb in fright: she had not been killed. She’d run away at the first sound of the vehicle, her shoe falling off. Tammy could hear the beast crashing away up the track as it climbed the slope behind.
Alicia stared down at the torn remnants of her inflatable. The wheel had gone right over it and it had burst. Hammer Boris was no more. He lay in surprisingly tiny fragments, shrivelled and torn.
‘Mend him, Mummy,’ she ordered, tearfully, after an account had been given to their mother in the kitchen: a din of overlapping narrative chords obliterating the earnest voices on the radio.
‘There are certain things you can’t ever mend,’ said Sarah, with an air of significance. She felt more disappointed than shocked, partly because the girls tended to embellish. ‘Are you sure it was going that fast? I can’t believe anyone would go that fast with kids around.’
‘Completely crazy,’ said Nick, who had been enjoying the Kantor discussion, having known nothing about him.
‘Stupid Jean-Luc,’ said Alicia.
‘It wasn’t him driving, was it?’
‘Of course it wasn’t,’ Tammy said, the possibility having never occurred to her. ‘It was a manic. Jean-Luc’s not a manic.’
‘A maniac. And it nearly ran you over?’ she asked, with an ironic, unbelieving air.
‘Beans was almost raspberry fool,’ Tammy confirmed, breathlessly. ‘Me too. Alicia wasn’t, she was miles away. Just as well or she’d have made a real fat mess.’
Alicia glowered at her. ‘I was nearly gnashed all up to bits,’ she said, ‘more than you.’
‘We’ll have to complain,’ said Nick, turning the dial on a whiplash of static, reducing the child-free aunt to a mutter.
‘Who to?’ Sarah asked, rhetorically. ‘It’ll be just like at home with our feral youths.’
‘Spoilt yobs, you mean. That’s different.’
‘Feral youths’ was usually an expression other mothers used, not Sarah, which was why she’d given it an ironic colouring. It meant not being able to go to the local shops after dusk. It meant hurrying past the bus shelter and looking the other way. Sarah liked the word ‘feral’. Maybe because she suspected that a universal state of feralousness (was that a word?) lay just round the corner.
‘Stupid cars,’ said Alicia. ‘Why do we have to have stupid cars?’
‘A dose of the real world,’ Sarah sighed. ‘How really depressing.’
‘Course we have to have cars,’ Tammy groaned, shaking her head in despair.
‘Ah, but not necessarily,’ said Nick. Unexpectedly, like a bubble released from a lake-bed, a perfect globe of happiness popped in his chest as he looked at his girls. ‘The internal combustion engine was never historically determined, in fact. Not much is. The whole disaster, in this case, goes back to the moment James Watt tightened the last bolt on his steam condenser in a damp yard in Glasgow. Blame the Scots,’ he added, jovially, turning to the young and lovely woman he loved and was bound to for life by these three perfect ribbons.
But the girls had already wandered back to the sitting room, where they were noisily pretending to be squashed.
Three gooey splats on the sofa.