THREE

Jean-Luc Maille taps the nails into the doll with exquisite delicacy, using a glazier’s hammer. Tap. A navel. Tap tap. Another nipple.

The doll is tiny and legless and half-bald, a little bigger than his thumb. He found it in one of the Sandlers’ cellars last year when he was digging into the crusted layers of goat dung for garden fertiliser.

The doll lay in a spread of straw and ancient dust on what he guessed was a kind of oven: a great slab across two stone uprights next to the fireplace.

This cellar at Les Fosses has a fireplace in it, and two waist-high stone basins embedded in the walls, so worn that the bottoms, where the water ran out long ago, are wafer-thin. The floor, once he’d dug down to it, turned out to be cobbled, not tiled. He knows that makes it very old, maybe as old as the Romans. It hasn’t always been a cellar, obviously. It was once a house, carved out lower than ground level to keep an even temperature – warm in winter, cool in summer. It still keeps an even temperature. Maybe there was a whole village up there. Or at least a hamlet. All gone, now.

Jean-Luc lives with his widowed mother in the main street of Aubain, the commune’s principal village of some three hundred souls – two hundred in winter. Their house is slotted into a row that dates back to the Middle Ages, but which has suffered so many vicissitudes – burnings and floods and rebuildings – that their skew walls face the thin street with a kind of dun amorphousness, an ashen neutrality not helped by the odd, garishly painted set of shutters. Jean-Luc’s shutters are varnished the colour of chocolate: his late father’s taste. On the front door is the cardousso flower his father nailed there for good luck thirty years ago: dry as cigarette paper, it beams on the street like a very old and gap-toothed sun. Jean-Luc won’t touch it: it is the only defence against all the dark forces of bad luck.

Like the others, his house has one continuous staircase with a worn lino runner. It rises from the kitchen to two pinched rooms on each floor, without a corridor to join them. The door straight ahead in the kitchen opens to the little backyard and stepped garden – the households used to cultivate the hill’s terraces: onions, potatoes. The bathroom also lies off the kitchen, housed in a lean-to put together thirty years ago by Jean-Luc’s father, Elie Maille, out of breeze blocks roofed in transparent corrugated plastic, tinted a urinous yellow.

For almost all of his thirty-six years, Jean-Luc has had to pass through his mother’s room on the first floor to reach his own. Except for a year in the army when he was eighteen.

He’s had a dream for years: to clear one of the attics, insulate it with plasterboard, and knock out a window under the eaves. His mother thinks he’s mad. During the storm in October – the storm that drowned twenty-five people in their département and washed away hundreds of homes – the rain poured down the slope at the back and Jean-Luc had to open the yard door to let it through. The kitchen became a turbulent pool, emptying out into the street through the front door, where people were wading up to their knees. There was that much water it bunched up on the roof and moved uphill, seething under the cover tiles and finding every crack in the rafters, sheeting through onto the stuff stored in the attic, welling on his own ceiling and leaving brown tree-rings of damp. The house still stinks of damp. His dream will have to wait until they can scrape enough together to sort out the roof. The insurance won’t pay for that. And Jean-Luc hates heights. He can’t do it himself. He’ll just feel himself being dragged over the edge. He can hardly climb a ladder beyond a man’s height without it turning his head. Look at what happened to Raoul Lagrange, who wasn’t even scared of heights.

Aubain lost its school and its shop back in the 1990s, and its café hangs on by a thread. The bread van and the butcher’s van come round twice a week, hooting in front of the church. The farmer, Edouard, his vegetable stall a meeting point for the gossips every Saturday morning, has had a row with the mayor and no longer comes. The row was over the one euro the mairie wanted him to pay for parking his big van all Saturday morning: it was because he was a commercial enterprise, it was the law, it was not them being cussed. A matter of papers, forms, ticking boxes. Edouard left in a rage, one morning. He was never coming back, on principle. He was a sodding charity, putain: he was up before dawn on his land and got nothing for feeling knackered all day. The women drifted away, resigned. The mayor organised a weekly trip to the supermarket in Valdaron, using the mairie’s clapped-out minibus driven by Serge, under whose seat rolls a perpetual bottle of half-consumed local red.

The village is all but dead. This annoys Jean-Luc. He blames the foreigners, the second homers. He blames the Parisians. He blames all those who profit at the expense of others. But he keeps this rancour to himself. He has never been to Paris. He doesn’t see the point.

The legless doll has a hole each side of its groin where the hips swivelled. It’s like a Barbie but much smaller, it fits on the palm of his hand. Shreds of what might have been its clothes fell away as he was blowing it clean in the Sandlers’ main cellar. It has starry blue eyes and long dry dusty hair on one side of the scalp, exactly the colour of meadowsweet, and a rosebud mouth like a pimple. He guesses it must be old, maybe from the 1950s. He was startled, and not a little frightened, once he’d taken it out into the light, to see a tiny rusted nail embedded in its head, and another in its pointed right-hand breast, just where the nipple would have been.

He took it home with him.

He makes sure it is kept hidden from his mother. Since she’s pretty well bedridden, this isn’t difficult. Sometimes, however, she’ll recover her strength for a day or two and hobble about the house on a stick, bothering him, back to her old nagging self; a short barrel of a woman and very powerful again. Today she is definitely unwell. Or at least weak. When he’s tapped four more glazier’s nails in, the last in one of the miniature hands, he puts the doll in the cardboard box under his bed and unlocks his door. Apart from Oncle Fernand, this lock is all that keeps him from going insane. He likes the feel of the key as it turns and slots the bolt into place: he is back in his own realm. She can shout through the door as much as she likes.

She is dozing. She dozes a lot, these days, especially in the afternoon. A nurse comes round twice a day and deals with her legs and other more intimate areas that Jean-Luc doesn’t want anything to do with. Her room has the close sweetness of a sickroom, like sticking your nose in a mouldering bowl of fruit, along with something medical. He creeps past her and goes downstairs. Despite the creaks of the floorboards, she doesn’t wake up.

He was worried that the hand would break, but it didn’t. It’s a different kind of plastic, better quality than nowadays. Tapping one of the nails into the left-hand breast, matching the other, was extremely satisfying. It was something about the tininess, the delicacy, the beauty of it against the fatness of his thumb. The tit’s sharpness, like in the old films. The way the old-fashioned film-stars’ tits were always sharp and high, as if offering themselves, as if asking to be stroked and – unimaginable delight! – kissed.

That’s enough, says Oncle Fernand.

It is nearly time to eat and his mother will soon be calling him. She’s a stickler for keeping time, even though time for her is an unrolling nothingness, a boredom between dawn and dark, dark and dawn and dark.

The clock in the kitchen shows a quarter to seven. He unwraps a Marie frozen lasagne and shoves it in the microwave. Sometimes he pretends he’s made it himself. When his mother has one of her good days, she rustles up something nice; he goes out and buys vegetables and fresh meat and soon the smells fill the house as in the old times. And he loves her for it. He’ll watch her hobbling about the kitchen and love her all over again, everything sizzling and bubbling away as in the old days. The most he can rise to is broccoli, and then he always overdoes it. He’s always liked broccoli, but in his clumsy hands it turns to mush. And yet he can hammer tiny, pin-size nails into a doll. The true artisan, my boy!

Jean-Luc blows on his lasagne. The microwave makes everything too hot and for too long – the plate, the meal, the innards of the meal. He keeps burning his hands on microwaved dishes, on the underside of a cup’s handle. But there is no point in using the oven for a Marie meal, it isn’t worth the time and the electricity. He’s watching Marie-Sylvaine Vidal’s show on M6, Tout N’est Pas Entre Nos Orteils. The clever gabble allows him to forget his own silence. It is all rubbish, what they are saying, but it allows him to forget. And he fancies the presenter: she has a dark mole on her left breast, just above the low-cut top, that his eyes are drawn to. She flaunts it, this little fault in her perfection. She flaunts everything, she draws millions of eyes to her and loves it. Each week her outfit is a little more daring and then, suddenly, she’ll go all prim, like a Catholic schoolteacher, with a lace frill at her neck. That’s good, because the next week she’ll have a plunging neckline you can almost bury your head in. She’ll lean forward, laughing at some stupid joke one of her stupid guests has cracked, and Jean-Luc will all but crane his head to see deeper down into the shadows of her cleavage.

It is Marie-Sylvaine Vidal in Tout N’est Pas Entre Nos Orteils that he imagines whenever his little frog begins to swell its cheeks, wanting to croak. He travels out, out and away into her long, naked arms on her tropical island under the coconut trees. Apparently she is off with some junior minister. A bloke in a tie and jacket and shiny black shoes, poncing in and out of some government building in Paris. He has to throw this ponce off a cliff, in his imagination, before travelling to see Marie-Sylvaine on her private, palm-fringed beach. Every time he has to boot him over the cliff, hear his screams. The crunch. Stamp on his fingers, sometimes, as they clutch the edge. And Marie-Sylvaine thanks him. She hates being what she is on the telly. Laughing, grinning, gabbling on about nothing, about nothing at all. Putting up with her ugly, greasy guests that hardly anyone has ever heard of. That’s why she loves me, Jean-Luc thinks. She can be herself with me. Completely natural. And when I kiss her mole on her left breast, she strokes my hair and says, ‘I love you, because you love my faults.’ Even Oncle Fernand approves. And she kisses his frog each time, amazed at its size.

His mother is calling him. They’ve had lasagne already this week, and she is not happy having it again. It was the same story last week. Each week is a rerun, like the films on telly.

‘There’s nothing else in the house,’ Jean-Luc always tells her, placing the tray on her lap. She lies against the pillows like a shipwreck.

‘You don’t think ahead,’ she moans. ‘Men never think ahead. If it wasn’t for my legs, I’d go shopping myself.’

‘No shops,’ Jean-Luc always reminds her.

Tonight was just the same, almost word for word. His technique is to stay calm, to sound bored. He blinks at her from behind an impassive stare. She can’t get him worked up: it increases her sense of paralysis. Her legs are swollen, her heart dicky, her body filled with damage. But her mind races. She’s always been robust, efficient, active. She carried a yoke on her shoulders with a bucket at each end up the slope to water the top field every day, when it was all potatoes, years ago. Fifty years ago.

But to Thérèse Maille it isn’t fifty years ago. It burns in her mind as if it happened last week. The field is no longer theirs. It was swindled out of them by the Lagrange family in 1982, who built a house on it and made loads of money after the Maille family were told by the old mayor that it wasn’t building land.

She burns with rage in her bed: it scorches the pillows, her rage. Then come mornings when, suddenly, she knows she can move, and she is out of bed and limping about, elated. Then the damage returns, she feels her body being swallowed up by it, her legs won’t communicate with her head, she feels exhausted again just sitting up in bed. But she’s never lost her appetite. She’d eat and eat, if she could. But Jean-Luc can’t cook. He just brings her rubbish. At least that’s stopped her getting too fat, because she’s hardly able to stomach it. She reviles it. Factory food, she calls it. Pigswill. No taste. No goodness.

‘Yes?’

Has she called him? She must have nodded off. ‘I feel like an orange,’ she says.

‘There’s apples.’

‘No oranges?’

‘I’ll get some tomorrow. I’m going to Champion tomorrow.’

‘I’m stuck with an apple then. Cut it for me. My teeth won’t take it, otherwise.’

‘Yes, Maman.’

‘You’re like a robot,’ she says, grinning. ‘That’s what you’re like. A robot. What are you watching downstairs?’

The noise of television laughter underneath them, like the rumble of a lorry filled with imps. Jean-Luc seems to be considering it.

‘The news,’ he says.

‘The news? It’s not time. They don’t laugh on the news.’

‘Then why ask, if you don’t believe me?’ says Jean-Luc, as he takes the gleaming plate away. Its mush of lasagne has been wiped clean by the hunk of bread that has also gone – swallowed up like everything is swallowed up, in the end.

Maman asks him about the English people up at Les Fosses.

He has brought her the apple cut in eighths, white newish moons that are already browning as they rock on the plate in a circle. He bought a crate of them a month ago, fifteen kilos for ten euros, and has kept them in the stone shed in the yard, but they’re looking faintly wrinkled now, like amputated bollocks. There are loads of them left. They were off Monsieur Bernard’s trees. He’d been hoping his mother would make an apple pie, but she’s been up and about too little since he bought the crate.

‘The English people are nice,’ he tells her.

He knows this will get her going.

‘Nice? How can they be nice?’

‘Just because someone isn’t French, doesn’t mean they’re not nice.’

‘It’s not that. The English helped us in the war. It’s that they’re friends of the Sandlers.’

He sees the English woman briefly appear in his head, but not clearly. Staring at him beside the pool as he explains about the boars coming down to drink and setting off the alarm. Nice smile. Bright black eyes, like a squirrel’s or a bird’s. Small and slim, not plump and red-faced like the other English. Dark hair loose, if a little thin, naturally curled below the ears. Not blonde and bobbed like Marie-Sylvaine Vidal’s.

‘Maybe they aren’t friends,’ he says. ‘Just tenants.’

He is chewing on an apple himself. He peeled the skin carefully in one spiral with his Opinel, then bit into the flesh. They look tasty, but aren’t so good in the end. The skin lies like a bedspring on the plate.

‘Why don’t you cut it up, Janno?’

‘Cut what up?’

‘I’ve never seen anyone peel a whole apple then eat it. It looks queer. It’s too white. It makes me feel like making the sign of the Cross over you, I don’t know why.’

She laughs her hoarse, weak laugh. She has already swallowed all of her apple sections. She often asks him why he does this – a hundred times in his life, if you count it all up. That’s why he enjoys eating an apple in front of her. The part he most enjoys is popping the core in his mouth and crushing it with his teeth. It sets her own teeth – not that she has many real ones left – on edge.

‘You’ll get appendicitis doing that,’ she says.

‘No, Maman, I’ll get an apple tree growing out of my arse.’

He’s lying in bed, now. He has managed to coax the image of the Englishwoman out from the blur of inattention and given it flesh. He isn’t sure of its accuracy. Her face has a soft, motherly vagueness apart from the gleam of the eyes: an elder sister’s lack of definition. He’s always been envious of those with elder sisters, like an extra mother; not having a brother, older or otherwise – or a younger sister – doesn’t bother him so much. He might have ended up with someone like Marcel Lagrange! Marcel’s boy, Serge, although almost as nasty as his father, is quite a few years younger than Jean-Luc, so he can’t picture Serge Lagrange as an elder brother. A younger brother, maybe.

Imagine: he might have been buried in brothers, like the Lagrange family. Big, vicious brothers (not that the Lagrange brothers are all vicious, of course; but the vicious ones dominate, most of all Marcel – and the nicest of them, Raoul, is dead). He’s better off, being on his own. There’s no one to nag him, to hit him about the head. To kick him out of bed.

But he wouldn’t mind a soft, kind, gentle elder sister. Marie, she’d be called. He indulges in a brief fantasy in which Marie, looking very much like his memory of the Englishwoman up at Les Fosses, is reading to him at bedtime. A picture book. Stroking his forehead, because he has a little fever. He even hears himself whimpering. In fact, it is more than a little fever. He is very ill. He is possibly dying. No, he is dying. His invented sister, Marie, cradles him, lies in his bed next to him and cradles him in her arms. His face is buried in her nightdress, he can feel the hem of the neckline against his mouth, the smell of her warm, brown flesh. But he won’t die; onto his brow fall her salt tears, and her tears have healing properties. Marie’s tears cool his brow, dribble down over his cheek to the corner of his mouth, where his parched tongue licks them and feeds on their saltiness. He is already recovering, miraculously, although Marie doesn’t know it, she is weeping over him silently, weeping for her little brother, squeezing his hot form to her soft and giving body that smells of talc and strawberries and sweat in the dim candlelight.

Jean-Luc gives a shuddery sigh as he lies there, the sheet drawn up to his chin, his head straight on the bolster; a faint smile has settled on his face, its eyes closed and staring up into their private dream. When he opens them, he is back in his own, unsatisfying present. Oncle Fernand hasn’t talked to him properly for days. Just a glance now and again, a rattle in the throat.

The bedside light is on. His eyes creep over the walls. Years ago, so long ago he can scarcely recall it happening, his father smoothed the rough walls and hung patterned paper. The paper has faded, its green splashy dots now blue, its red zigzags a fleshy pink. The water from the leaks in the roof crept down and found its way into his old bedroom, carrying with it tannin from the chestnut beams; so now there are dark vertical streaks along two of the walls, some of them making it all the way down to the lino, like long icicles the colour of dried blood. His eyes can’t help straying over these streaks: they are like faults in his own life, somehow deathly. They say: no matter how hard you try, we’ll dirty you. We’ll smear your dreams with our shit-coloured filth.

One of the streaks disappears behind his old, black-and-white poster of Johnny Hallyday, its trace visible on the paper as a raised, cancerous welt that cuts right across the pop star’s face. He’s still where he always was, in the same narrow bed with its oxidised brass rods, staring at the same poster he’d stare at as a youngster. And he sees in it decay, his own decay. He is thirty-five. Or is it thirty-six? His elder sister would have known his age. Marie would have known. He could have buried his face in her body and still remained unblemished, completely innocent. The Englishwoman looked at him as he was talking by the waters of the swimming-pool; a lovely, lost expression he can’t quite recapture in his memory, her eyes shyly sliding away from his. So very different from the way most women look at him, with their hard, closed faces; or mocking faces; or faces filled with only one animal thought. Her look was not like that. He struggles, lying there in bed, to recapture it. He switches off the light and curls around the expression, nestling it back into life.

But he can’t. He sees the green, leaf-crowded water and his dipping rake more clearly than he can see her. But this doesn’t bother him; the English family are there for six months. He will have plenty of time to fix her in his mind. An expectation wells up in him at the thought of it. He can go there whenever he wants – every day, if needs be.

‘Marie,’ he murmurs, stroking the cool, hard bolster between his fingers as he has always done, even as a child: ‘It’s all right. I’m well again. I’m right as rain, Marie.’

Sarah spotted the plaque first.

They were on their way to the nearest weekly market: there was a Champion supermarket recommended by Lucy in St-Maurice-de-Cadières, the nearest proper town (which she’d affectionately called ‘Saint Morris’), but one of their aims was to shop small and local. Supplies were very low after several days of meals, including the freezer-kept bread. They’d been in virtual retreat, like monks or nuns. It was the first time they had gone anywhere and it felt adventurous. Nick’s back was much better, he just had to avoid sudden movements. They had decided not to bring the camcorder, as it would make them look like tourists.

The car was bumping and swaying along the track between the house and the lane when she noticed the plaque, discreetly embedded in a flat-topped stone.

‘Look, what does that say?’

‘It’s a milestone,’ Tammy suggested, having recently done a project on the Romans, bringing back a vitrified, paint-splattered lump meant to be the Pantheon and returning to school on Monday with a detailed felt-tipped map of the Forum at her parents’ insistence.

‘Kilometres in France,’ said her father, peering forward at the track as they struggled on.

‘I was only joking,’ Tammy fibbed.

‘We’ll stop and check on the way back,’ said Sarah, pushing her glasses up when they didn’t need to be.

The market was in Valdaron, about fifteen minutes’ drive away. There was a broad and surprisingly green river-valley in the hills which abruptly narrowed to a kind of gulf, and Valdaron was squeezed into the gulf. It had a narrow main street that wound on and on, pressed either side by gaunt, unbroken houses. The market was in the square which bordered the river, busily foaming between its smoothed rocks like a mountain stream. The one modern note was an old people’s home, berthed like a vast cruise-liner near the school the children were not going to, despite the law.

It was half-heartedly raining and the shadowed street felt damp and cold. The market filled the square with awning-covered stalls, diesel-generated meat-vans and redolent bread-trucks that were open all along one side. And people.

The people were badly, even clumsily dressed: Sarah remarked on it, although she was no fashion parade herself. She approved, in fact: it was a sign of authenticity. There was a host of fur-lined anoraks, long dull coats and baggy trousers. Some of the older women had consigned themselves to the identical type of blue, mid-length working coat (with lots of pockets) that Nick recalled from old French films. Spotted skirts or thick-stockinged legs protruded, finishing in the modern equivalent of clogs. Their owners had staunch, browned faces, rather closed. Both men and women were on the short side, with some very wrinkled specimens only coming up to Tammy’s chin as they passed – or that was her impression.

There were hippies, too. Or what Sarah called ‘ex-hippies’. She could tell by their ponytails (the men) and long beaded skirts (the women). One of them stood behind a trestle-table selling organic jams and pickles. She had piercing blue eyes. There were even some younger people with piercings and dreadlocks and combat trousers who would get on well with Jamie.

‘There was a kind of youth revolution in 1968,’ Nick explained. ‘And some of the youth came down here from Paris to make pots and look after goats, after they’d lost.’

‘Why did the goats lose?’ asked Alicia.

He explained in more detail but they weren’t listening. They were subdued, for once. The bustle, the smells, the colours had shut them up: Beans pegged herself to Sarah’s skirt with white-knuckled determination, refusing the pushchair. The hocks of meat on the butcher’s stall looked dauntingly raw. The multitudinous cheeses, the tender heaps of greens, the peppery smell of dried sausages hanging like fat tentacles, the shouts of the burly stall-holders – it was peculiarly loud and confusing after their four-day retreat.

There was a stall full of shiny fossils and dim skeletons of prehistoric fish, tens of millions of years old. A small trestle-table with a clutch of orange and yellow gourds and three tired salads. A very long stall bursting with plenty, apples and lemons rolling carelessly over the ground every time a huge lettuce was fished for. The Mallinsons wandered about in a daze past plump, glossy fish heaped up in polystyrene boxes, a small, twisted mouth in a sole’s white flatness drawing Tammy to touch it. How cold and wet it felt, as if drawn from the unimaginable depths!

The familiar sound of bongos floated over the market chatter; two men pounding away as a girl played vague scales on a wooden flute. They were dressed in patchwork minstrel attire and their faces looked dirty. In Cambridge, they would have been perched in front of M&S and Sarah would not have given them a second glance; here, they delighted her. One of the drummers caught Alicia’s eye and started juggling three coloured balls. He looked as if he had been out in all weathers. Almost a gargoyle face, with frizzy hair. He glanced at Sarah, who responded with a look of elation.

‘I’m going to get the bread. You can watch this with the kids,’ said Nick, from under his floppy hat. He looked different from everyone else, and might as well have had a sign round his neck saying ENGLISH PERSON. In Cambridge, she thought, he looked tall, handsome, even debonair.

‘You don’t need your hat,’ she laughed, although she wouldn’t have wanted him any other way, right now.

Beans, affixed to Sarah in two different places on the skirt, refused to take one of the balls when offered and caused the minstrel to cry – to pretend to cry, knuckling pretend tears.

‘Go on, Beans,’ Sarah encouraged in a sing-song tone, ‘take the ball. Don’t be clingy,’ she pleaded, unpinning a small and complicated hand.

‘I’ll take it,’ said Alicia.

‘It’s not to keep, stupid,’ said Tammy.

‘Didn’t say it was.’

‘My name ees Coco,’ the minstrel announced, settling on his heels.

‘His name’s Coco,’ Sarah explained to Beans, who was gawping at him with her fingers in her mouth, still pressed against Sarah’s thigh and with her bean-frog, Wally, pressed in turn against her own. ‘That’s a nice name. What’s yours?’

‘You know what it is, Mummy,’ Alicia said.

‘What’s ees your name?’ asked Coco the juggler.

Beans mumbled something through the bean-frog, now squashed to her mouth. Coco smelt as if he could do with a wash and wasn’t a very good juggler. The other two performers had stopped playing and were rolling a fag. Coco offered the ball again. It was a bean-ball in coloured leather, to go with the bean-frog. He had white hairs in his frizziness and red spots on his neck.

He said something funny and poked Beans’s tummy. They left, waving goodbye, as Beans screamed in apparent agony, making people look their way with troubled expressions.

Nick was also the subject of glances; talking to a rat-faced man selling bread, his height was exaggerated by the need to keep his fragile back stretched. His floppy hat shook as he laughed. Tammy gazed at the stall next door, hung with plastic gewgaws: mini bagatelle-boards, water-pistols, butterfly hairgrips that would break at the first go. The Made in China stall. Beans had calmed down, looking at it with her.

‘Don’t even think about it, Tammy,’ said Sarah.

‘I was just telling him how we were escaping English weather,’ said Nick, coming up with a grin, a week’s worth of baguettes and chunky loaves in the basket. ‘Weather a bit like this!’

‘No wonder he was splitting his sides,’ Sarah said.

‘You never buy me anything,’ Tammy grumbled, as they headed back to the car.

‘Let’s redirect that one to the Truth Department,’ Nick said.

‘Nor me,’ said Alicia, seeing the advantages of a sudden, unusual alliance.

‘Actually,’ said Sarah, as they passed a stall with stitched-leather slippers and shoes, ‘you do need new casual footwear, Alicia.’

‘What?’

The young Moroccan woman behind the stall cooed over her, all smiles. Alicia chose, naturally enough, the pinkest and least handmade pair there, with buckles that were bound to break.

‘Ve-ery trendy,’ said Nick, gallantly.

There was a shop in the street full of bric-a-brac, which included a fireguard with brass knobs. It was, Nick thought, overpriced and fake-looking, but Sarah insisted. Apart from the child factor, sparks could pop out a long way and burn a house down.

‘Coco,’ said Beans, in the car, as if a penny had dropped. ‘Touch Beans here,’ she added, lifting her top and thrusting a finger into her rotund belly, then bending her head and investigating the pressure point with a concentrated gaze.

Tammy reminded them about the plaque. They had some difficulty in remembering where it was, because the overgrown woods either side made one length of the track look much the same as another. ‘My plaque’s on my teeth,’ Nick joked, so they all groaned. Alicia spotted it on a curve.

‘There!’ she screeched.

The car stopped and they all got out. The plaque was embedded in a large boulder at chest height, near the flat top.

‘Ici le 28 février 1944 le jeune Fernand Maille âge de vingt ans a été assassiné par les Nazis,’ Nick read out. ‘Which means, girls: “Here on the twenty-eighth of February 1944, the young Fernand Maille, aged twenty, was, er, murdered by the Nazis.”’

‘Am I one of the girls?’ asked Sarah. She had taken off her glasses to examine the words chiselled in, bending to them as if they might have other words hidden inside them.

‘Nasties!’ shouted Alicia.

‘Alicia, quietly,’ her mother remonstrated, as the cry echoed through the trees. Alicia had an extraordinarily loud voice, when required.

‘Was it right actually here they killed him?’ asked Tammy, stabbing her finger towards the leaf-strewn ground in front of the boulder.

‘Oh, I guess so,’ said Nick. ‘Right on this spot.’

‘Oo-er,’ said Alicia, stepping back and looking at the ground, fearful of her new shoes. ‘Lots of goodgy blood.’

‘Why did they do that?’

‘Now thereby hangs a tale, I suspect, Tamsin.’

‘For oil,’ said Alicia, which made her parents laugh.

‘A very simple tale, I should think,’ suggested Sarah. ‘Fernand Maille was in the Resistance.’

The term beat dully in Tammy’s head, but would not take flesh. ‘What’s that?’ she asked, reluctantly.

‘A kind of cupboard,’ said Alicia, nodding. ‘Like my Frosties are in the cupboard.’

‘Good guess,’ said Sarah, as Tammy covered her face in dramatic despair.

‘Not necessarily in the Resistance,’ said Nick, raising a finger. ‘Let’s not jump to conclusions on the basis of slender evidence.’

‘Very likely to have been,’ Sarah insisted, a little piqued at being treated, yet again, as if she were still one of his students.

He explained the term as they got back into the car.

‘Coco here,’ interrupted Beans, as Sarah strapped her back in her car-seat for the half-kilometre left. Beans was poking her round belly again. ‘Coco touch renisance here tummy.’

‘And Charles de Gaulle, in London –’

‘That’s not renistance!’squealed Alicia, snorting into her palm. ‘You blinking fat pussy! That’s a big fat –’

‘Alicia,’ Sarah broke in, ‘where on earth did you get that word from?’

‘What word?’

‘It just means a cat, sweetie,’ Nick said. ‘So when de Gaulle, in London, Tammy, gave a speech –’

‘Cats kill stupid little mice,’ Tammy said, spreading her claws wide and baring her teeth.

* * *

They had got the Sandlers’ stereo to work, despite its outdated Jumbo Jet console, flashing and winking and bobbing green-lit levels that meant nothing, even to the initiated. Troubadour music: all harps and girly voices, Sarah thought. It was Nick’s choice. She had brought along Bach and Sibelius and Ravel and he had brought the Smiths, the Cure and Joy Division as well as his difficult jazz, so she counted herself lucky. The former trio dated from his early teaching years when he sported a radical’s superior gloominess, nudging thirty and desperate not to be. Helena, the parti-coloured New Ager, had fallen for his all-black look. The fusion was Jamie. Or confusion, as Nick would put it.

They were having a candlelit supper, the kids in bed. They had started with fresh oysters. Tomorrow they would definitely start work, and lessons for the girls. The fireguard looked fine, if a touch flimsy. Nick looked a lot younger in the soft light.

‘I’m quite pissed,’ she said, although she wasn’t. They’d been talking about Fernand, the ‘man on the plaque’. Sarah couldn’t get him out of her head. Only twenty years old!

‘You can ask around, I suppose,’ said Nick. ‘What exactly he did to upset the Boche. Maybe nothing. Then you can check all the oral stuff against the documentary evidence. Archives, the town hall files. Then you’ll find, to paraphrase Anatole France, that the evidence is, as ever, contradictory and irreconcilable. Then you’ll write your report.’

‘Like a war report. A field report.’

‘We’re heading towards the bottom of the bottle, look.’

‘We’re English,’ Sarah observed, looking up at the ceiling, the knotted cross-beams, whole thick branches with curves in them. ‘The English drink like fish. It’s the only way we can let go.’

‘Tell me why this very ordinary wine tastes so much nicer than its equivalent would over there,’ Nick said, swilling it a little in the glass.

‘Over there,’ Sarah repeated. ‘And far away.’

They were sitting near the fireplace at a round metal café table they’d rescued from the goatshed and covered in a Provençal-yellow tablecloth. The dining room was too cold, too frigid. The one-eyed mask gazed blindly at them, unidentifiable in its mournful dignity. It certainly wasn’t Benin, although Nick hazarded a guess at Anyang or maybe Bakongo, while Sarah went for Dogon.

Nick emptied his glass. ‘Beats off the cold,’ he said, only warmed on one side, like a flitch of bacon, by the blaze of the fire over the last of the dry wood. It made the shadows dance in the corners and Sarah look even prettier. She was smiling, drawing her hand through her loganberry hair.

‘I didn’t think the south of France got very cold,’ Sarah said. ‘I guess that was slightly dunce of me.’

‘Must ask Jean-Luc about logs. Oh, and the cherry tree.’

‘If you were a real man, you’d be hewing and sawing away in the woods.’

‘I know,’ Nick sighed, bowing his head. ‘I’m top heavy with mind. I’ve got a bad back. And I’m in my mid-fifties.’

‘At your intellectual peak.’

‘Fugh.’

She placed her hand gently on his. ‘Love you, you old goat,’ she said.

‘God knows why.’

‘Because you’re incredibly special.’

‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘And you,’ he remembered, cocking his head to one side.

‘And the girls.’

‘Yup, they’re not bad either,’ he nodded. ‘And not forgetting, in our loving embrace, the son of me and my ex.’

‘I’ll give it a go,’ Sarah laughed, although she felt he’d squirted a touch of lemon on her brain.

‘Basically,’ he added, in Alan Sandler’s American twang, ‘we’re genial. We’re the genial family.’

‘Did he mean that in a totally nice way?’

‘Oh, why? Do you think it might not have been?’ He looked genuinely surprised.

Sarah had prepared the supper with exaggerated care. Even including the market oysters (such a pain to open) it was nothing fancy, but she was determined not to mistreat the fresh market veg, or the roll of pork tied up in string like a gladiator’s muscular forearm. She underdid the greens, if anything, and was careful to place quarters of tomatoes in the oven dish the pork sat in, for their moisture. She’d kept edging her knife into the broccoli stalks, consulting the potatoes before setting them around the meat to roast; she’d docked the courgettes and sliced them lengthways, cut the indigo aubergine as thinly as possible and laid out the divisions on paper towel before frying them in what Françoise, her cookery teacher in Cambridge, would call ‘no small garlic amounts’. The garlic bits had been sliced thin and were nicely browned.

The girls had partaken first, and spent most of their meal holding the garlic bits to their faces and pretending they’d extracted them from their noses, which all but put Sarah off the dish entirely. They’d been favoured with two oysters each, relishing the pained retraction of the flesh as they squeezed their quarters of lemon. Inevitably, an eyeball had been hit: Tammy’s, fortunately. She was very grown-up for her age, most of the time.

Sarah hadn’t attended the full twelve classes, for various child-related reasons, which meant that the series proved somewhat expensive in the end, but it had been a stimulating preparation, a crash course not so much in ‘what to do’ but in ‘what not to do’ – what never, ever to do, in fact, if you were not to embarrass yourself in front of your French guests. Nimble-fingered, slender-legged Françoise was from Paris, and her anecdotes conjured a chic Parisian dining room quivering to the haut-bourgeoisie and their elegant reign of terror.

If nothing else, Sarah had learnt to keep greens al dente, beef bloody. And to make crème brûlée with a crust that was fissile and all but snapped at the pressure of a spoon, subsiding into the light, buff-coloured custard (though never call it custard, please), like a tectonic plate into lava. She’d followed the oysters with melon, filling the scooped hollows with chilled white wine.

‘This is a feast, and not even that expensive,’ said Nick, who worried about money. ‘Ten out of ten, sweetheart.’

He had put the girls to bed himself, as usual. A bath had been in order, which had resulted in the bathroom floor getting wet; Tammy slipped and knocked her head on the basin. The Sandlers had not laid the bathroom with non-slip tiles, but with something marble-like and no doubt very expensive. Wet, it glistened like fish flesh. Nick found a herbal salve in the medicine cabinet and let Tammy rub it into the bruise. He noticed, while searching through the cabinet’s crowded contents, the same blood-pressure pills his father had taken before the end.

‘Look, Poppa’s pills,’ he said, although they hardly remembered Poppa except as a grey mass of smells. It surprised him to see what it took to keep a holiday couple alive, if not well, when they were not that much older than himself. Not much more than five or six years older, maybe. He pictured himself as a cartoon figure walking out on a beetling cliff-edge that stretched over the sea and grew thinner and thinner, hollowing out under him, under the innocent, solid-seeming turf until the edge was pencil-sharp.

He tucked them in and read them Winnie the Pooh, entertaining himself in the scent of their clean pyjamas and washed hair. Beans made sucking noises on her bottle and it whistled, surprisingly empty. She will wet herself in the night, he thought, despite the nappy (changed by him): she’ll wake up with a sodden pack at about six. She dropped the bottle ruminatively over the edge of the iron cot as he delivered an Eeyore monologue in suitably lugubrious tones. This, he thought, is what their deepest memories will be founded on.

Now all that was blissfully over. He emerged from bedtimes as after a particularly difficult academic colloquium: tousled, the begrimed survivor, weary of limb and in urgent need of a Scotch and its uncompromisingly adult deglutition. The sheer outrance of a straight Scotch.

The light was down to a flicker of firelight and the honeyed candles they’d bought at the market from a smocked woman, her hair dyed an erratic ginger. The music seemed to hold each moment rapt – although, as Nick pointed out, the style of playing and even the basic count ‘is always guesswork’. The candles, which were not cheap, burnt down surprisingly quickly and smelt slightly acrid under the sweetness. The crimson Fitou, giddyingly reasonable at under five euros, had subsided in the bottle with like speed.

‘What I wish,’ said Sarah, ‘is that life could be more – no, that life could be guaranteed to be like this for the foreseeable future.’

‘It’s going to be.’

‘For six months?’

‘That’s quite a long time,’ said Nick. ‘Half a year. No, that sounds less.’

‘Yes, but we always complicate things, it’s bound not to stay this simple,’ Sarah insisted, puzzled by her own pessimism.

She sighed and went for it, pouring herself more wine, imagining the disapproving look of Françoise the teacher of haute cuisine. Françoise seemed odd and vaguely exotic in Cambridge – out of place, like an actress playing a Frenchwoman. Today, in the market, in the swirl of French locals, it had been Sarah’s turn to feel odd. Nobody seemed to be acting French, they were French. Very French. That had suddenly struck her, in front of a cheap shoe-stall, as an extraordinary, even dislocating fact. She had felt a dislocation of her own Englishness, its reticular complexity tearing.

Now the medieval harp was weaving her into a heartfelt past she had never known – she honestly had the feeling, as Nick was taking out the dishes with a thoughtful expression, that she might travel back weightlessly into this far past, seeing no reason not to, because the far past was in fact only a transparent soap bubble’s thickness away, it was simply a matter of yearning. Of will. No, just of yearning. It was all just a matter of yearning, pressing against the bubble’s wall. That’s what this music was saying, plucking its simple twelfth-century melody, its impossible love song. If you allowed your yearning to carry you, it would carry you, back and further back and through the wall, popping it. Popping the separation, the division. Nothing really died. How could it? What would be the purpose of anything, if everything was allowed to die?

‘I think I’m rather sloshed,’ said Sarah, as Nick came back with the cheese.

‘Sloshed,’ Nick repeated, laying the board on the table. Sometimes he repeated what Sarah said as if rolling it in his hand, marking it out of a hundred. They had decided to eat cheese before dessert, the French way.

‘Sloshed is good. One better than tipsy.’

‘I haven’t really drunk much for ages and ages. I shouldn’t have had the whisky.’

‘It’s a five-course celebration,’ Nick smiled, parting dried leaves from the peppered, mould-coloured pat they enclosed. To be honest, the oysters had made him feel slightly surcharged from the beginning. ‘There’s this tiny little window of opportunity, this very narrow gap, this kind of potholer’s cleft, between the kids being put to bed and one of them coming down babbling of monsters. And we’re going for it, babe.’

He had to admit that he was a little bit merry himself. They started on the salty chèvre, melting onto the board despite the chilliness still in the air. Sarah mentioned how Françoise had told her that if a cooked goose-bone turns blue it means rain. The four-by-four incident was circled briefly and then left alone, obscured by affectionate remarks about the kids, the daily music hall of their growth and change, before the conversation drifted onto work, inevitably. It settled for some time on Nick’s prospective capstone to the essays he was editing: a long piece on the Chad oilfield. History nudging current events, as he put it: the urgency of the times, the world wasted by corporate crooks, political conmen. Sarah would sometimes picture the Chad oilfield as a sticky black meadow in which the odd gooey horse or cow forlornly stood, surrounded by desert and a swarm of evil people in dark glasses. She preferred it when he remembered Lake Chad as it was some thirty years ago, waving its reeds all the way to the horizon. The nomads who lived beside it, ignored by the world, watching the waters shrink to cracked earth.

Alicia had buried the remains of Boris under a holm oak, while Tammy helped her plait a cross out of twigs. Which Sarah had found touching.

‘If only we could somehow take over,’ she said, equally worked up now, her face flushed, still upset by the incident with the four-by-four. ‘All the right-thinking people like us. There are loads of them out there and we don’t do anything. I mean, Bush is completely …’ She wanted to say ‘evil’, but knew how ontologically dangerous that was in front of a rationalist like Nick. ‘Look at his expression, OK? It’s barely human. He’s exactly what clones are going to look like. And we allow him to do anything he wants. It’s just so annoying. How can we? How can we allow him? We don’t do anything. Look at us now. We’re not doing anything while they’re just ransacking the planet, it’s just so annoying.’

‘The Genial People’s Revolution,’ said Nick, nodding calmly as if all his rage had been siphoned into her. ‘And who has all the guns?’

After their fancy supper, they removed the fireguard and stared into the flames. They lay on the rug together. Nick whispered into Sarah’s ear. The heat from the fire had temporarily banished the chilliness.

‘My back’s ace,’ he said, to her voiced worry.

‘The girls?’ she murmured.

‘We’ll hear their door open. It’s got one of those old iron thumb-latches on it.’

Their words turned into sighs and giggles. Nick kissed the knuckles on Sarah’s neck, undoing her buttons from the back, unthreading the cord that bound her skirt, revealing the long and miraculous flesh of her. He ran his hand along its landscape, its proud hills and hollows, until he reached in to find the place that always reminded him of the spot between his pet rabbit’s ears when he was small. His fingers crept under the hem of her knickers, finding the warm, invertebral pulp as she let out a tell-tale sigh.

‘Mummy?’

‘Oh shit,’ Sarah sighed. Apart from the knickers, she was completely naked.

Alicia was at the top of the stairs, peering down at them like an inquisitive old lady. They were nestled into each other like a pair of spoons in a drawer, the firelight stroking their flanks with complicated shadows and golden tones. As Nick slid his hand out little by little, with a deliberate languor, he ordered Alicia back to bed.

‘I can’t sleep,’ she said, as if they were stupid to think otherwise. She leaned forwards from the curve of the staircase, one hand on the creaking banister, dangling her bare foot over the next step down. ‘Why’ve you gone all nude?’

‘We were fast asleep,’ said her father.

‘Especially me,’ Sarah added. ‘Darling, go back to bed and I’ll come up in a minute.’

‘I can’t,’ said Alicia, lowering her foot arthritically onto the next step and bringing her hand to her mouth.

‘Why not?’

‘Monsters. Like that one.’

She pointed to the one-eyed mask.

‘Alicia,’ said Nick, ‘go straight to bed and stop that monster nonsense.’

She considered this, as if it were an intricate argument on which she had to adopt a viewpoint. Her parents did not move, not even reaching for their clothes. The shadows fumbled over them as the flames danced. His hand was free. He rested it on her thigh, the forefinger slightly glistening.

‘I really can’t, Daddy,’ she said, finally; and lowered herself onto the step, sitting there in her nightie and shivering slightly, looking at them slyly out of the corner of her eye. ‘What’s Ram-a-dan?’

‘What?’

‘It’s in my book.’

‘Oh God, Alicia,’ said her father. ‘Please, please go back to your nice warm bed.’

‘Or,’ said her mother, ‘we won’t buy you any nice things at the market next week.’

An inadequate threat. Alicia cupped her chin in her hands and rocked her head from side to side, like a doleful guardian in the flickery gloom.

‘I want to go home next week,’ she said. ‘I don’t like monsters.’

‘The monsters were in your dream,’ said Nick, Sarah’s warm heat salty on his lips, the top of her vertebrae beaded with sweat. ‘Now go to bed.’

There was a short, victorious pause.

‘Not without Boris,’ Alicia said, looking to the side and splaying her hands as if rebuking a diffident companion on the stairs.

‘There are definitely no monsters here, Alicia,’ said Nick, suddenly sounding very tired, a wave of tiredness taking him beyond desire.

‘I’ll come up in one minute exactly,’ Sarah promised, shifting her rump minutely against Nick’s groin, reviving him a little. Too much, in fact: he had to concentrate hard on other things: reinforced concrete; the last department meeting; the question of wheelchair access to FitzHerbert’s library.

‘But first you have to get into bed.’

Alicia stood after a moment and asked them when they were going to get dressed.

‘Go – to – bed,’ her father intoned. Around his data-driven, precision-debated professional realm, where every error was magnified a thousand times (he had once muddled, during an academic conference on Suez, General Chehab and President Chamoun of Lebanon in a passing comment – and suffered an imaginary ignominy for years), his children’s mental world swirled like the confusion of a frivolous, waking dream.

‘Very quietly,’ Sarah added, with a kind of stuck-on weariness.

The latch socked its clasp like a gunshot as the door was manhandled shut by Alicia.

Inevitably, after a few seconds of thought, Beans began to wail in short bursts. It was intensely annoying, because there was studied reflection behind each burst. Then she started to drone softly like a distant air-raid siren, without much conviction, but with all the time in the world.

* * *

The next evening, the monsters made noises again.

The girls watched from their bedroom, shielding the subdued light behind in the tunnel of their hands. Their bedroom looked out onto the pool. At first they saw nothing, brows cold on the glass. The water was lighter than the ground; there were stars, but not yet any moon.

Then Alicia gasped, fisting her mouth. A shadow, a shadow detaching itself from the darkness and becoming something alive and big. They yelled for their mother. Their mother arrived, breathless, from reading downstairs. She was astonished to see something dark and monstrous down below, as terrifyingly indistinct as the Loch Ness version. The mercurial water in the swimming-pool rocked and rippled as the shadow, bulky and ogre-like, dipped towards it. Something glinted on its face, like a toothy grin. It craned round and stared up at them, still grinning, its head eyeless and twisted. A terror and tribulation.

Tammy opened the window, nevertheless, and the cool wind brought with it the faint, sweet smell of night, tinged with dung. The shadow was making noises – human snuffles, old-man grunts. The toothy grin turned into a giant curved horn.

‘They’re very cute really, boars,’ said Sarah. ‘Even sharks are pretty harmless. We’re the ones to worry about. We human beings.’

She closed the window as her girls stared up at her. Alicia was kneeling on a chair. She waggled her bottom. ‘I know the names of three sharks,’ she stage-whispered. ‘Great white, basket, and blue.’

‘We’ll just keep one as a pet,’ Tammy said, quietly, bypassing any higher authority with that assurance Sarah sometimes, at weak moments, found disturbingly unassailable.

Nick wasn’t certain whether boars were generally dangerous, or only so if cornered. Royal boar-hunts were not, as far as he remembered from the records, without their danger. A composite image came into his mind, drawn from old paintings filled with saliva-whipping, canine snarls and a vast hairy bulk in the middle, impressively tusked: it wasn’t reassuring. Boars had long disappeared from Britain, he told them, hunted to extinction and becoming somewhat mythic, even primeval. The fact that they were using the swimming pool as their watering hole seemed almost surreal.

‘It’ll be lions next,’ he joked.

‘God, don’t.’

He and Sarah were lying in bed. While the Sandlers’ bed was a modern double with a state-of-the-art chiropractic mattress, the guests’ bed was an antique: aesthetically satisfying but nothing else. Too narrow, too high and too creakily bouncy, it had a bedhead of dark wood, with a primitive carving of grapes in the middle, that rocked slightly and knocked the wall at the slightest movement. The horsehair mattress sloped inwards and, if a couple were not to end up kneeing each other in the middle, necessitated a counter-balancing force in the body. The Sandlers’ bed next door spread like an inviting island. Could the Mallinsons sneakily move to the hallowed master bedroom, until the Sandlers came for their possible visit? Would the Sandlers know if their bed had been used, as the Three Bears had known?

Probably not, but there was another factor. Small kids are not only unreliable confidantes, they have Pavlovian tendencies. When the Sandlers visited – they were planning to do so at some point towards the end of the sabbatical, after some major sailing trip or other – Beans or even Alicia was likely to toddle sleepily into the familiar nest and find Alan snoring there and scream. Worse, they might run out of their bedroom into the shuttered morning gloom and leap onto the cuckoos, heartily pummelling their bodies. This happened from time to time, usually much too early, back in Cambridge. Reading the clock correctly was neither girl’s forte.

Their parents kissed each other ‘nightie-night’ in the usual ritualistic way and Nick had walked through the sleek bubble-wall of sleep before he knew it. He dreamt he was placing an old tile over his own thigh. Perfect fit. The mould of a dead man’s thigh over a living thigh. The weight of it, of the hump of the tile. Always heavier than you expected. It made you think. For instance, how this tile would probably outlive us all, not just its maker a hundred years back. His shoulders were nice and large, he could feel his hard dorsal muscles like the shell of a tortoise, his thick neck. He hadn’t been aware of this until now, but really he was very strong, he’d spent his entire life underestimating himself and overdoing his age. He was, in fact, forty-four.

He grunted and told himself to shut up and lay the tile, slipping it under with that high, scraping sound he liked. Then he cracked it. Hammering in the nail, he cracked the tile. The bastard tile cracked, for no good reason. Like biscuit. That didn’t outlive me, he thought.

He chucked the two halves over the side, without checking, and woke up to a dreadful scream from far below that might have been one of his girls, visiting her daddy and getting brained by a tile.

The scream hung in the blackness that he couldn’t quite shape into their bedroom in Cambridge: it was too dark. Then he remembered. The scream was repeated, but very distantly: some sort of bird or animal, some raptor or raptor’s victim. The secret life of the night. All those protoplasms shaping up for the next million years. His mouth was dry.

His neck was stiff enough to hound him through the rest of his troubled sleep, as if some linkage was out, though his swivel joint was now fine.

Woken again later by his neck, he knew straightaway where he was, from the lumpy horsehair mattress: the dorm at school. Second time round. The first time he’d won a scholarship, propelled from the grammar to Hilmorton Academy for Boys, long closed down. Now he was back, and the bed still fitted, squeaking in the same way. He’d written an article about his old school, once, which they wouldn’t have liked. Set up after the war by a rich eccentric who had discovered to her amazement, via a batch of urchin evacuees, not only how the other half lived but that there was actually another half, leaving her Lincolnshire manor house to the Ministry of Education and retiring to Cassis, Hilmorton College was a public public school, an anomaly, a melting-pot of the classes.

Nick was bang in the middle of the scale, and therefore nowhere: not like his best friend Duncan, Duncan Haighley, the son of a leftish judge. For some reason, despite the idealism, bullying was a problem. It went on secretly under the benign, Ministry-approved surface. It was peculiarly vicious, and classless. The posh boys were no better nor worse than the pale, gifted cockneys, the runtish scousers who could do long arithmetic in their heads. Renton-Parr was the worst, with his cricket-thickened wrists, his malevolent gaze: he was no doubt out there right now in the darkness, plotting to leap on him and twist his nipple. A vicar’s son. With bony, painful knees.

No, Nick realised, surfacing further: he was in Cambridge, he was an admired Reader in History, he was thirty – no, fifty-four years old! Hilmorton Academy was now a residential centre for business courses. His legs were sweaty with fear. It was never usually as black as this. A thin, small voice reminded him that nuclear conflict had taken out all the street lights. Correction: the collapse of the climate. Desert winds blew beyond the broken glass, swirling about the shattered carcass of King’s Chapel where wild boars nested among the elaborate fallen fans of the vaults. His hand strayed towards the bedside lamp and knocked a wall instead. There was no bedside lamp.

Sarah was stirring as he surfaced entirely and remembered with a playful skip of his heart that everything was fine, that he had six months of his sabbatical in front of him, that the sheets were softer for a good reason. Their faint scent of lavender was happiness. Lavender was good. Shepherds kept it in their pockets to rub between their fingers, he’d read: it was the thin line of happiness running through the obdurate human story, as crude oil was the line of evil. Define evil. A philosophical, not a historical, question.

He kept very still until he reckoned Sarah was fully asleep again. He could hear the night wind whistling softly in the rafters, merging with her breath.

By which time the darker clouds had moved in. He was on the downhill half of his life. He’d wanted, at nineteen, to become an archaeologist, to study the mute mysteries of Bronze and Iron Age Britain, in love with tussocky, windswept hillforts and ancient nettled ditches. But this was politically otiose in the 1970s; he followed the banners, embraced the clamour of names and dates, the harsher materials of great men, of social forces and ideals instead of pottery and tombs. He concealed his real self under the guise of the rebel. He fell for absolutes, gigantic dreams, the overarching system, dialectics and determinism. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: simple, really. He transferred his sensibility to the post-colonial, to power rather than settlement patterns. It was all a huge mistake. He would have liked to have knelt in grass in the rain, scraping and brushing. His entire career had been a mistake. He could have been an antiquarian.

He thought of the boars returning to the trees, to the inscrutable blackness of the forest. He thought, inevitably, of poor Duncan: Duncan, who went up to Cambridge with him but did English, not History. Who one day in their second year had shyly shown him some poems. Oh, how he blushed to think of it now, picturing his own mouth with the sound turned off, moving around the syllables of those few, terrible words in the revolutionary lexicon, trampling Duncan’s frail verse under the heel of righteous polemic.

Privileged. Middle-class. Precious. Detached.

Individualist.

And Duncan left the room all but in tears. How easy it was to destroy a friendship! To cut down a great and spreading tree!

To massacre in the name of love and progress. Except that Marx rejected brotherly love, so there could be no illusions there.

In the panned-out curve of her professional life, there would be a book on the history of isonomy, with particular reference to its survival, or otherwise, in the emergent African states after independence. The isonomic basis of otherwise oppressive systems, with an analysis of the abuse and distortion of their constitutions. Even Stalinism was essentially isonomic, her introduction would suggest. The word was one of the keys to her and Nick’s domain. Even some of their Cambridge colleagues did not know what ‘isonomic’ meant.

Equality of the citizenry before the law. The most cherished, and the most abused, of all ideals.

Not even a tattered mask, now. The winds were whipped up. She dreamed of the waving reeds of Lake Chad, glimmering to the boundless horizon; of the Teda nomads fishing in their hollowed pirogues. Nick had given her this. She was grateful. But she sometimes wondered what might have happened had she not walked into his room that first tutorial, unbearably naive.

She woke up almost every night, these days, and worried about the future. Nick said that when he was a student no one really believed they would escape a nuclear holocaust, that humanity tends towards apocalypse when confused. But she didn’t find this at all reassuring. She tried to picture the worst-case scenarios, but it was always like a bad epic film: squalid, tormented extras clawing at each other, parched and hungry, over-acting, amateurish. No, she thought: we’ll still make light of it all, when we can. The English will stick together, though no notion of a nation will remain, and we’ll queue at the river or the lake and be laughed at, tormented by a kind of exaggerated species of gnat. We’ll make jokes and gossip, veer between embarrassment and sudden bursts of what used to be quaintly termed ‘yobbery’. We’ll keep our chins up and pass the time in hope. My children will be there among the hordes: they’ll be rumpled and prematurely old, wondering what happened to their childhood. The halcyon days.

Then she’d want to cry, each time, and would feel the beginnings of a real terror threshing in her stomach, as right now, while Nick snored gently beside her in this strange bed in this strange house in this strange country. And even in Cambridge, in her own home, she had felt this.

Nick had gone back to sleep, having woken her up. A kind of see-saw, she thought. One up, one down.

* * *

‘What?’ she asked, tapping and scraping Beans’s toast free of carcinogenic cinders. She felt as though her eyes had been twisted in their sockets. The toast ended up too thin, almost membraneous.

‘Want them ones.’ Beans pointed at the biscottes bought on the way down.

‘Temperatures today are expected to break all records for February,’ Nick repeated.

‘I’ve got three records,’ Alicia informed them, a moustache of hot chocolate giving her a raffish look. ‘No, four. And you can’t break them cos they’re special and anyway they are still CDs.’

Tammy snorted into her cereal. ‘Who was responsible for your birth, Ali Baba?’

‘Mummy,’ Alicia complained, ‘Tammy called me Ali Baba.’

Tammy’s nickname for Alicia was forbidden, on grounds of compassion: the victim hated it, which was the whole point.

‘Tammy,’ said her mother, wearily, surveying Beans’s attempts to spread her biscotte with the wrong side of the plastic knife, ‘you know you’re not supposed to.’

‘Supposed to what?’

The biscotte exploded like a letter-bomb in Beans’s hand.

‘Lots and lots of honey,’ her mother reassured her, spreading another one. This biscotte, too, splintered under the mild pressure of the knife. ‘Oh for God’s sake, how daft!’

‘Stupid bikset,’ said Beans. ‘Want toatsie now.’

‘Please, Mummy,’ instructed Sarah.

Beans smiled wickedly at her, not saying it. The toaster was operated again, nevertheless, on a lower number.

‘Beans is really rude,’ said Alicia.

‘Not like you,’ said Tammy.

‘I know,’ said Alicia, too young for the dose of irony.

Tammy covered her face in her hands, stricken with mirth.

‘You make us say please,’ said Alicia. ‘Or else.’

‘She’ll say it next time,’ her mother reassured her, like a pathetic negotiator at some intractable peace conference.

‘Wanna toatsie now,’ Beans shouted, through a goblin smirk.

‘Shush,’ said Nick.

He was leaning to the old, bulbous radio on the kitchen windowsill, trying to catch the weather over the family noise. The newscaster seemed delighted by the record temperatures. Nick wanted some comforting signal, some boffin to come on air and say it was all fine, his kids were going to have a good life, not some Old Testament visitation craved for by crazed Americans.

‘Want toatso!’ Beans repeated, banging the table.

‘Can’t you help a bit, Nick?’ said Sarah, fishing Beans’s toast out of the toaster with a knife.

‘What?’

‘Ali Baba,’ Tammy murmured, catching her sister’s eye.

‘That’s asking to be electrocuted, sweetie,’ Nick pointed out, unplugging the toaster.

‘She said it again, Mummy,’ Alicia moaned.

‘Is it so interesting?’ asked Sarah. ‘The radio?’

‘About gay marriage,’ he said, in a low, depressed voice.

Beans’s toast shot, apparently of its own volition, out from under Sarah’s probing knife and onto the tiles. Beans leaned over the side of her chair to examine the damage as someone might look down from a biplane.

‘Stilboesterol,’ she remarked.

‘I hope you like authentic French dust on your toast,’ said Sarah. What she had wanted to say was ‘Oh, fuck.’

‘You look tired,’ Nick observed.

‘You woke me up,’ she replied, flatly.

He was hurt. ‘I dreamt I was back at school.’

‘I dreamed of Pooh,’ said Alicia.

‘Ugh,’ Tammy said. ‘In your nappy.’

‘Pooh and Piglet, stupid.’

‘And before that,’ said Nick, turning the radio down as it entered into a jingle, ‘I dreamt I was tiling a roof.’

He repeated the information, as no one had reacted.

‘That must have been exciting,’ said Sarah, scooping the fragments off the kitchen’s ancient floor.

* * *

Nick did wonder sometimes whether he had somehow missed it. That’s to say, he had the feeling he was living just next to the real Nick Mallinson, who was experiencing the excitement of being alive. That he was this entity’s shadow or blurred double. Everything he might have been if he’d been a little more courageous. Was it Aristotle who believed that courage was the supreme virtue, as all other virtues followed from it?

Cambridge, where he had spent his entire adult life, save the odd semester in Africa. FitzHerbert College, in particular. He felt sometimes that he had gelled over to one of the college’s time-moulded stones, one of its lintels scooped by countless bottoms. Fitzherbert’s was small, discreet and ignored by tourists unless they were lost. Three fifteenth-century courts leading to the modest, shrub-lined garden at the end, which was enclosed by a huddle of old flint walls and shaded by a vast yew on one side; the Gothic chapel ‘uninteresting only to the jaded’, as the last President famously put it; the dining hall boasting three full-figure paintings by Van Dyck and a mysterious, unnamed portrait of a woman from the sixteenth century which, though darkened by age, moved its eyes at night. The girls saw it move its eyes whenever they visited, but (despite the intensity of their squeals) they were evidentially unreliable. They’d made similar noises on their recent visit to Loch Ness, which Tammy had pictured as a large pond.

‘There’s the monster!’ they’d kept squealing, pointing at the flux of dark wavelets. It was like the study of the past, living or no. You saw what you wanted to see.

‘There’s the monster!’ cried Alicia. She was pointing at the lawn-to-be, this time. It had been trowelled up, hacked and cratered. Small clods of soil were scattered over the poolside tiles.

‘I think they’ve left the field of battle long ago,’ said Nick. ‘Welcome to the Somme. No, the Zone. Post-explosion.’

They were very impressed. Tammy asked why they did it. Her father told her they were looking for their supper.

‘Strewf,’ said Alicia. ‘I can’t see any chips or yoghurt.’

‘At least, I’m assuming they were. They do like rooting about, do pigs.’

Beans threw her plastic cup into the middle of the mess with a sudden, violent thrust of her arm. Sarah retrieved it, ticking her off. The soil, sticky from the watering, stuck to her shoes in clods.

‘I’ve a feeling,’ said Sarah, ‘that Lucy’s going to blame us.’

‘Jean-Luc, I thought.’

‘We’re the new arrivals,’ she explained, cleaning her shoes of mud with old tissues from her pocket. ‘The immigrants.’

The girls disappeared into the barn. Sarah asked if someone shouldn’t keep an eye. Nick volunteered. ‘I’ll kind of hover,’ he said.

‘I’ve got a letter to post.’

She’d jog up to the letterbox at the end of the track once or twice a week, otherwise they’d check en passant in the car. Sarah regarded it as ‘me’ time, and it kept her fit.

Nick didn’t like jogging: it jolted, and felt a shade naff. He wandered pleasantly about the old farmyard and noticed a low tumulus of builders’ sand behind the scrubby growth on the edge, just in front of the collapsed wall. The sand was old, with tufts of grass and weed growing out of it; a few sacks of some chalky white substance – lime, presumably – lay burst and no doubt rock-hard next to the hummock. Several stacks of old tiles, spotted with the scars of moss and lichen and clearly handmade, pretended to be a landscape-art installation.

It reminded him of his dream and he picked up a tile. They’d had their roof redone in Cambridge; he knew a bit about roofs, but from down below. Strangely enough, it was not only the right weight for the dream (heavy for its size), but it was correct in every detail: the moss-spattered, terracotta mould of a long-decayed thigh, tapering to a thickness at the ends, the tracks of smoothing fingers visible. A beautiful object of utility.

He thought of the Sandlers and their projects, the feeling he had about this place – that something had been abandoned halfway, despite the bright zinc flashing and guttering, the neat génoise cornice under the eaves, the walls knocked back to stone and sensitively pointed, the proud finials at either end of the handsomely ridged roof. It was a peculiarly poignant sight, that builders’ debris, but he couldn’t quite think why. A kind of intrusion onto the empty farmyard’s rusticity, yet beaten back.

The future stalled, grassed over. A strange concept. He breathed in the clear air’s present and felt firm with the moment, even joyous. He was looking forward to work, oddly. All this was such a good idea. Through the stone arch that led to the front he could see a castellated line of cloud over the invisible, far-off sea: thunderheads, he thought.

He sauntered in a broad arc over to the barn, just to check, high-stepping through the strip of briar and charred stones that they’d conjectured had been a wing of the house, destroyed by a blaze.

He and Sarah lived with this proleptic worry, this attempt to anticipate and thus cheat the gods, every day since they’d had kids. The kids were tiny, and the world was huge. They’d eventually get bigger (though he found this hard to imagine) and then they’d get boyfriends with motorbikes and go to parties where drugs circulated. Look at Jamie, who’d wanted to be an astronomer once. Jamie, the one great failure of his life. The guilt he couldn’t dilute.

This was why he was blinking into the barn’s darkness: it was a maw that had swallowed his girls. He considered the unseen rusty tools, their sharp flanges and points, the heights and the wheels and the places that were rotten. Then his eyes adjusted and he saw them squatting in a tumble of old, blackened hay in the far corner of the barn. In between lay a huge beam, strangely orange, with dark welts of decay. And thin hoops of rusty metal, piled one on top of the other, like a giant’s discarded bangles. He had this suspicion that the cart and the waggon, belonging to an age as lost as the Palaeolithic, might creak and inch forward at any moment, rumbling out of the gloom.

He had spent time yesterday explaining to the two older girls how this was what the western world used before cars; their first home lesson. Tammy had drawn a wheel with hub, rim, spokes, felloes and iron tyre marked in different colours, and Sarah had suggested they take a rubbing somewhere interesting on the vehicles’ planked sides with their chalks. It was a hands-on educational triumph, despite the rubbings not quite working out.

A thick slice from a tree trunk, like a giant cheese, was criss-crossed with nicks and blade marks. That’s what they chopped wood on, he’d told them. That’s what we’ll chop wood on.

They pretended not to have noticed him, now, only glancing up as he approached.

‘Look, Daddy,’ Tammy said, pointing to a large circle cleared in the rotted hay, ‘it’s our fatherlands. Towers and swift-eddying rivers and all our golden fields’ bounty,’ she added, reciting breathily from her starring role in The Odyssey at the end of the last school year.

‘Motherlands is better,’ Nick suggested.

‘Tammy’s got the morest,’ said Alicia.

‘Me Disneywhirl!’ shouted Beans, thumping the edge of the circle with her heel.

Alicia sighed. ‘I wanted Disneywold, but Tammy give it to Beans.’ She stood up, spreading her hands like a believer at prayer. ‘I’ve just got fowest,’ she explained, bending forward at the waist in emphasis.

‘Forest is really ace,’ Tammy insisted, losing patience. ‘You can have a tree-house and a lot of the trees grow brussels sprouts, Alicia.’

She was imitating the strained, diplomatic tone their mother used as a last resort before the heavy stuff.

‘Hey, brussels sprouts,’ said their father, nodding. ‘Cool.’

‘I don’t really like brussels sprouts,’ said Alicia. ‘I was only pretending.’

‘Too late. They’ve been planted.’

‘I don’t care,’Alicia said. ‘She’s got the sweet factory, of course.’

‘Brussels sprouts are far more nutritious,’ Tammy pointed out. ‘You’ll be still alive when I’m stone dead from too much sugar and coloureds.’

‘Colourings, Tammy,’ Nick corrected, hastily. ‘Short-term gain, long-term loss. Sounds pretty good to me, Alicia.’

Alicia stepped into the cleared circle and dropped onto her knees and brushed their sweet lands out of existence, all the towers and the swift-eddying rivers and the fields’ bounty, the long-settled hay-particles rising in sour and suffocating clouds around her. Beans wailed. Tammy clasped Alicia’s hair in her fist and tugged as if on a heavy door. Nick was rendered hors de combat by a fit of coughing; he’d swallowed a wedge of fruitcake made from dust.

‘Monsieur?’ came a voice from the far glare of daylight, oddly commanding. ‘Monsieur?’

Jean-Luc looked a lot bigger in silhouette.

He didn’t seem to care much about the ruined lawn. Instead, he pointed to a small heap of gravel on the edge of the pool. Jean-Luc told Nick that gravel is very bad for the pool, that it would abîmé the filters. The water was no longer green but a cloudy white.

Nick asked the girls if this was their doing. Tammy said they were pretending the stones were sweets, because they weren’t allowed sweets at home. Or not many. Not enough.

Nick explained this to Jean-Luc, who nodded.

Although Jean-Luc had said nothing of the sort, Nick quoted him as stating that ‘Never, ever are you to bring gravel near the pool, or you won’t be able to swim when it’s hot enough. I hope you didn’t throw any in,’ he added.

Tammy sucked her upper lip before saying, ‘Who do you think we are, Daddy?’

He sighed, unconvinced. ‘When was this, anyway? You’re not supposed to come near the pool without adults around.’

‘Yesterday. Mummy was with us.’

They had to pick up the gravel and place it in their palms stone by stone and return it to the front of the house. They looked like a procession carrying offerings to the gods. The gravel leaked from their hands and left a trail like breadcrumbs.

Nick tried to turn it into a game.

‘Empty your loads!’ he cried, with his hand in the air like a crane. Beans threw hers up and it hit her face. She screamed just as Sarah came back from her run, red and sweaty in the face.

‘It’s nothing,’ Nick reassured her, having checked for any damage to the eyes. ‘A case of friendly fire.’ Beans stumbled to her mother, who picked her up with the air of a superior humanitarian service. ‘By the way,’ he went on, ‘don’t let them take gravel near the pool again.’

‘What gravel?’

Beans was pointing to her woundless forehead while a miniscule bead of blood welled on her chin. ‘They said you were with them,’ he pointed out. ‘When they were taking this gravel to the pool.’

‘Beans is bleeding,’ Tammy observed. ‘He gave us blood to drive our hearts, our souls to drive our minds.’

‘Don’t exaggerate, Tammy,’ said Nick, pained by the religious guff – the legacy of her new, young, possibly born-again teacher. Beans, of course, looked panicked.

‘Goody-good,’ said Sarah, bouncing her up and down, clearly energised by the jog, ‘we can put some French-style iodine on it. I saw some in the medicine cupboard. It’ll look incredibly spectacular, Beansie!’

Beans sat on the bathroom chair and stared at her with huge glistening eyes, holding the precious wad of cotton wool stained with iodine. Sarah kissed her on the forehead. Immaculate little clutch of hatchlings. Everything working as it should behind the soft envelope of skin. The brimming personality behind the eyes: the innocent, open-eyed promise.

‘Mummy,’ said Alicia, ‘I really need that on my finger where I cut it.’

Tammy laughed in the echoey room.

‘You cut it last year, sweetheart,’ Sarah pointed out, creasing her eyes up. Where her glasses usually went on her nose there was a red mark.

Alicia winced, insisting it still hurt a really lot.

‘Just a bit. It’s not a game.’ Sarah stained the red thread of Alicia’s scar where her forefinger had been caught between two supermarket trolleys, a miniature digit versus a web of metal. That was a drama. ‘From what you’ve told me, we’re lucky it wasn’t severed,’ the hospital doctor had confided to her, after planting three stitches. Sarah nearly fainted, watching the needle ply the flesh like an oar. ‘But as long as you stop the bleeding and pick it up intact, there’s a good chance we can sew it back on.’ It was as though it were bound to happen again, only worse.

There were no angels guarding the doors. No all-seeing God, unless it be the wicked, creator God of the Gnostics. Yet she still offered up little goodnight prayers, as if someone good beyond cognition might be looking after them. A guardian spirit with wings of white goosedown. Sometimes she preferred the old gods and their tantrums, their jealousies, looking like humans in the flaring torchlight of their high-up abodes.

‘I’m hungry, Mummy,’ said Alicia.

‘That’s because you left your hot milk at breakfast.’

‘I wasn’t hungry then, stupid.’

‘Alicia, don’t be rude.’

‘I’m defnelly gonna starve to deaf,’ Alicia asserted, covering her face in her hands.

‘I think you’re going to be an actress when you grow up, mate.’

‘Can I have some hot milk now? With honey and cimmen?’

‘Missing word?’

‘Beans didn’t say it,’ Alicia pointed out.

‘Cinnamon,’ Tammy joked.

‘Alicia,’ Sarah chided, feebly.

Poor Alicia, she thought. Hard to be in the middle, but everyone has two elbows.

‘I’m a prodigy,’ said Tammy, looking through the bathroom’s small window, ‘and you’re a podgy.’

Sarah joined her at the window. Jean-Luc was raking the messed-up Zone. ‘Tammy,’ she murmured near her child’s small ear, ‘that was totally unnecessary and arrogant and cruel.’

‘Why?’ demanded Alicia, who had excellent ears.

He could have done it himself with a sweep of the broom, he doesn’t want the girls turned against him. They kept looking at him as if he was an ogre. It wasn’t that serious, the gravel business. They’re only kids. The Sandlers have provided him with a hoover for the pool, he’s supposed to hoover up stuff like gravel before it gets into the filters or damages the lining. The fact is, the pool is crap; installed by a firm of overcharging cowboys, it’ll begin to crack and buckle in a few years’ time, squeezed or pulled by the ground. The ground moves in the heat and the cold, millimetre by millimetre. Fifty-degree shift between summer and winter. Everything gets pulled about.

Nothing is certain in life. Jean-Luc knows this. Not even rock. Not even the North Pole.

He stands by the tormented-looking, gouged-up lawn and feels contempt for the Sandlers. At the same time he knows what the consequences will be of this disaster. Madame Sandler is as tough to work for as a Parisienne: oddly, Jean-Luc doesn’t mind her ways. He knows where he is with her, he humours her as he humours his own mother. She shouts and stamps her feet, and he measures his response in careful nods and shrugs, in moments of reflective silence. He’ll let her get to the edge of hysteria, and then sweeten her back again to sanity.

She is totally dependent on him. He’ll talk technically minded rubbish and she’ll go to her con of an American husband and repeat the rubbish, but get it so wrong that it comes out as sense. It is fun, this game. A pity, in a way, that they are here so little, these days. Now and again she’ll phone him at home, sounding anxious under the bossiness, and he feels a strange sensation of power, that he holds all these people in the palm of his hand, that he can close his hand into a fist and crush them to pulp.

Once, when the rains swept away some planting project or other, she threatened to hire a professional gardener from one of those firms that charge a fortune and advertise themselves in fancy websites on the Internet. He pulled a face. The problem, he said, after a thoughtful pause, is that you never know which firm to trust. Some of them are in league with the crooks, who are hand-in-glove with the antique dealers. Some of them are the crooks. They have all the time in the world to survey the house, knowing in advance the times when it is empty, the times when their mates can arrive with a furniture van and suck it dry. They’re no better than the blokes who sell rugs from the backs of vans, or the firms who pretend to be timber specialists, or the ones who phone you up again and again with some prize or other, seeing if you’re at home – going for the foreign-sounding names, the rich pickings. He knows builders who’ll nick keystones from arches (Marcel Lagrange, although he mentioned no names from sheer fear of the consequences), who’ll strip empty houses of every original door, who’ll steal the old capstones off stone walls, the slabs from a hearth, even the chimneypiece itself, if it’s fancy enough.

‘They are locusts,’ he said, and Madame Sandler frowned. ‘And if you make a mistake and you’re at home, they’ll knock you on the head. They wouldn’t even bother with the DVD player, the telly, the computer; we’re talking big stuff,’ he added, as a garnish. ‘Mafia. Organised crime. Not even Frenchmen. Russians, Chinese, Sicilians. It’s enormous, it’s international, because the rich love old stuff, don’t they? Quality stuff, stuff no one can make any more, because we live in a world of rubbish.’

He was sweating, by the end, and he imagined Lucy Sandler on her knees, trembling away, looking up at her house as if it were a helpless virgin surrounded by lusting old men, like the other employers he’d given the same spiel to. But she wasn’t kneeling. She had this little knowing smile on her face.

‘I understand what you mean,’ she said, in her decent French. ‘You’ve got to be very careful.’

Whatever, he’s become the guardian angel. It has never crossed her mind that he, too, might be in on the game.

But he isn’t, of course. That’s Lagrange territory. Dangerous. As dangerous as crossing the hunters. Not even the President of the Republic dares to cross the hunters. Jean-Luc keeps out of all that. Which is probably why Marcel Lagrange has called him a pederast, a homo. It is a Lagrange world, this world of ours, and Jean-Luc keeps his head down. He likes the woods, when they are left to the animals, the birds. In the woods he can think, in peace. He can work things out, where it is all quiet, where there is no one to judge him. He’s always liked the woods.

He looks up at a window from the edge of the smashed lawn, seeing something move, and is surprised to see the wife and one of the children looking down at him through the panes. He turns away, embarrassed. He was probably muttering to himself, pulling faces, moving his hands about. He’s got used to being the only person here in Les Fosses. The only living person, anyway.

He squats on his haunches and pretends to examine the disturbed soil. A boar’s droppings lie snugly in a crater, like a badger’s – only bigger. He is always surprised to see how deep those snouts can dig, the amount they throw up. He feels the Englishwoman’s face in the corner of his eye, like a warm pad on his cheek. He doesn’t want to lose his job here. Before, he couldn’t have cared. But now he does care. And he doesn’t want to be humiliated in front of her.

The husband comes up to him and says something he doesn’t understand, in French so bad it might be English. To Jean-Luc, it sounds as if he wants to close the lawn down, like a factory or a brothel. Then he understands: the husband is suggesting they put a fence around.

Jean-Luc makes out that he’s thought of this already. It is a good idea, because it gives him an excuse to spend a whole day or even two here, erecting a chicken-wire fence. He will tell Madame Sandler that the lawn is doing well, but that it needs protecting from animals. Then, when the fence is erected, he can resow the lawn. It’s late to sow a lawn, the dryness will be starting soon, or the April frosts might come early in a month or so and shrivel the seedlings, but at least there is very little risk of rainstorms now. The idea is crazy, anyway; these people are full of crazy ideas, but that isn’t for him to judge. The world itself is crazy. She will have her damp green English lawn, and the water table will be too low for the pipe, eighty metres down. Sucked dry.

The Englishman asks him if the boars are dangerous. Jean-Luc snorts. He folds his arms and recounts how the official hunting body introduced pigs to the indigenous wild boar population to bump up numbers some time back and the result is a lot of big hairy pigs because pigs breed faster. There are hardly any pure-blood boars left, he says, like you got in his father’s day. The type that’d gouge out a dog’s stomach just like that. He clicks his fingers. Intestines everywhere. He slipped in a dog’s intestines himself, when he was a boy, out hunting. His father’s best dog.

These new boars are soft, nothing but sweet little girls.

Nick felt good about this conversation. It appeared that someone, perhaps Jean-Luc himself, had suffered from a stomach-ache after drinking and tripped over a dog belonging to someone’s granddaughter. He smiled and asked about logs. Jean-Luc knew a man in Aubain. The wood was a year old, holm oak, the best for burning. Sixty euros for two tons. Then Nick remembered about the cherry tree. Jean-Luc nodded without saying a word. He was at the pool now, holding a plastic canister marked CLARIFIER and pouring its liquid contents into the cloudiness, which foamed a little as it was struck.

Nick strolled round to the front view, satisfied. Small stone steps built out from the wall led down to the terrace below, which was choked with leafless brambles. A hyacinth pushed up out of the leaf-mould at his feet, and there was a scent of violets. The deciduous trees’ buds were faintly swollen, encouraged by the warm, wintry sun. The trunks of the holm oaks, covered in lichen, were a sign of clean air, something one hardly ever saw in England. Perhaps before the Industrial Revolution all tree trunks were painted in these complex patterns of green and grey. Halcyon days! Like his youth!

Clarifier. That’s what we all need. A dose of clarifier.

His life seemed ridiculously short, incomplete, as if it had only just got going. Always a terrible shock, in bed, to wake up to the fag end of middle age, into the later years of the empire and its crumbling frontiers instead of the dynamic beginnings of its apogee. He had never had an apogee! Day had followed day, tutorial after tutorial, lecture after lecture, exam supervision after exam supervision, paper after paper, meeting after meeting, holiday after holiday – and somehow the whole process had cheated on him; it had eaten up most of his working life, without him really noticing. He was pure product, in the end. Fragment of some vast time-and-motion study. Everything, everything had to be accountable, these days, even in the cosy antique splendour of FitzHerbert’s.

He settled himself before the view’s immensities and took a deep breath of the clear air, as if to re-establish his own reality. He had the kids, which was something. He was still celebrated (was that the right word?) within the narrow confines of his profession, as a Suez Crisis specialist; his fresh interpretation, circling as it did around concepts of power, control and hegemony, caused some controversy twenty-odd years back. But who now cared about Suez? Who now talked about power and control? Or used words like ‘hegemony’? His book was almost certainly a waste of paper and ink, although he could write it with his eyes closed. And he was planning to.

He’d already wasted too many years on Suez. He’d poured his life-blood into that wretched canal and watched it flow away into the shimmering heat, just as now he was pouring it into the dry scrubland of the Chad basin, its vast, mostly concealed pool of viscous dollars – billions and billions of them, while thin-ribbed goats snuffled about the pylons. Suez meant nothing to his students, it was arcane – more so, even, than something chronologically further back: the Balfour Pact, the Congress of Vienna, Peterloo. The Third Crusade. Suez was impervious to the electroconvulsive shocks of gender studies, or queer theory, let alone the faded glories of post-structuralism. Suez was a black hole of foolishness, like the invasion of Iraq, with a whimpering and anti-climactic end (unlike Iraq, which was monumental tragedy). And Chad? He felt outnumbered by the grim faces in dark glasses, the scuttling rats of power, the melancholy elephants of the wells.

Oil was his heffalump trap, and he was falling into it again. The mammoth in the black tar-bog.

Nick dug his palms into his eyes and rubbed: an old habit, with him since student days, the years spent writing essays in the early hours because his days were full of fun – the fun never to be admitted to, though, in the thaumaturgical theatrics of the hard Left.

He saw it all differently, now. A man crouched over a brass engine in a Glasgow yard, shrouded in steam. Threads, threads. Spinning all the way to the future: the skeletal longshoremen, the toothless hags, the scrabbling in the dust amidst clouds of thistledown. The hoarded, precious sheets of paper. The terror they’ll have of the sea.

This was not yet history, it was only on the very marge of history, merely approaching through the fog. But they were already shouting at him from the future, from behind the thick pane of unbreakable glass that surrounds the present tense like a bubble. Help! they were shouting. Do something! Now! While there’s still time, for pity’s sake! Do something!

The pressure of his palms on his eyes left his vision blotched and blurred.

There was a growl of engines and a thumping of wheel on rock from the direction of the track. He turned, but all he could see through his blotches was soldiers and invasion: half-track troop carriers coated in dust; slit-eyed assault vehicles; the Krupps 1,500-ton tank powered by four massive submarine engines roaring like a miracle from its design stage; a howitzer bouncing on its panzer chassis. Strange, for a man of peace, this expertise in armaments. It dated from his boyhood: the massed ranks of Airfix models, the carnage caused by a fired pencil, the care with which he crippled his Junkers’ wing with a match: that evil plastic stink, that elation.

He watched like that small boy as the hunters passed. A convoy of twelve four-by-fours with chrome nudge-bars like gates; some were the polished black of a hearse, others ivory white, one – monstrous, like a nightmare pastiche of itself –completely silver. An ordinary white estate van bumped past in the middle, looking miniature. Off into the forest like outlaws, one Little John towing a cage full of bouncing canine muzzles. He glimpsed stubbled, bloated faces topped by fluorescent orange caps or the odd stetson with a bandanna wrapped round of the same shrill primary-warning colour; more snouts poking through bars; slim rifles. Surprisingly, his hand went up in greeting. Equally surprisingly, several of the hunters waved back. The others glanced at him with a blank, faintly contemptuous air. One laughed. He was left standing in a swirl of diesel fumes.

Sarah came around the house with Alicia and Tammy as the last vehicle disappeared between the trees.

‘Who on earth was that?’

‘The local warlords.’

He had to be careful not to strain his throat again, because he felt like yelling.

‘Did you say anything to them?’

‘Oh yeah,’ he laughed, feeling soured. ‘No problem. Flag ’em down and take their numbers. A little too nippy there, sir. Blow into this, please.’ He glanced at Sarah. She wasn’t finding it funny. Neither were the girls, who were clearly nervous about stepping out in front where the huge tyres had rutted the gravel back to the original ground. ‘How’s Beans? Still in the land of the living?’

‘Daddy kissing it better would make her even better. She’s in the kitchen.’ She strolled past him to where the ground dropped away. ‘Oh shit,’ she called out, over her shoulder; ‘I’ve left the milk on to boil.’

‘I’ll see to it, I’ll see to it,’ Nick called, making silly siren noises as he trotted past the two girls at a dignified speed on his long legs, diluting his anger and humiliation by playing the genial dad. Embarrassingly, Jean-Luc was kicking his mobilette into life near the door; he sped off up the track in the lane’s direction with no more than a glance. His lack of expression annoyed Nick.

The kitchen was dark after the bright sunlight. He heard a faint bubbling and then Beans’s dwarf form emerged from the aqueous uncertainties; she was standing by the cooker and reaching up on tiptoes for the milk pan. Her fingers were touching its wooden handle. It had begun to rock in a satisfying way, the boiling milk spilling over the rim already, but she couldn’t quite bring it all the way down before her father hurled himself forwards, advancing against the air at what seemed to be the speed of an Ice Age glacier.