The hospital was in St-Maurice, which was circled by scrubby hills and announced on a tatty, peeling board as the ‘Centre Mondial’ for portable fire extinguishers. If the town itself looked impoverished, down-at-heel and about as interesting as tarpaulin, its hospital was immaculate, nicely decorated and hummed like a well-oiled, technological marvel. They hardly waited more than ten minutes, with only a bruised young man and his furious mother for company. He was leaning forwards and nursing his wrist. He had fallen off his mobilette. His mother kept shaking her head and snapping at him. The girls watched as if it were on television. The odd stretcher passed down the corridor, bearing its obscure load while the bearers chatted gaily.
Although the burn was superficial, the nurses sighed a lot over Beans, giving her a magnificent dressing which Alicia envied. And rubbery crystal-sprinkled sweets, not one of which Beans gave away. Sarah was vaguely annoyed with the nurses for creating an inevitable scenario of division and fractiousness. She found it thoughtless of them. Nevertheless, she tried to chat away, all smiles. The portable fire extinguishers were now made in China, they were told. This area had the highest unemployment rate in France.
They decided to kill three birds with one stone and not only ‘pop in’ to the supermarket recommended by Lucy, but check their emails in the Internet café, which they did as quickly as possible – given the dejected interior with its one sheepish customer riddling Russians to a bloodied dismemberment under the girls’ fascinated gaze. Still, it took them an hour, at the end of which Nick felt the residual lump of undissolved FitzHerbertitis had grown like an ulcer; despite having put up an Out of Office deflector with the appropriate snailmail address before they’d left, certain messages were unignorable. Professor Peter Osterhauser’s, for instance. Minute, barbed tangles of fuss. The latest news from the Vice Chancellor’s Guild of Benefactors, that circle of millionaire largesse to which he was bi-annually tied by some obscure administrative duty, and whose natural popularity quite unfairly irked him.
‘We’ll make that a monthly visit,’ he said. ‘Maximum.’
The supermarket’s layout, being unfamiliar, foxed them into using up another hour of their lives while the girls squabbled under the quilt of lights; the two oldest were conducting frenzied negotiations for the last of the rubbery sweets, enforced by threats of shootings and bombings. It would end in some corporeal brutality or other. Beans’s face wore an expression of benign munificence, like an oligarch’s, as she clutched the treasure. The queue was almost motionless and Sarah imagined spending the rest of her life there, chronically embarrassed by the girls and their loud, English voices, emphasised by Nick’s stooped tallness. Packets of lollipops were handed out like aid packages the moment they quit the cash-desk, toppling Beans from her throne.
‘They’re called sucettes,’ Sarah informed them.
‘Which literally means suckies,’ Nick footnoted in a small voice.
‘Likkel window,’ said Beans, urgently, pointing to the huge plate-glass front.
As they drove out of Champion’s car park, Sarah scribbled something on an old envelope fished from the detritus in the passenger well and stuck it under the sun-shield on Nick’s side.
AM I DRIVING ON THE RIGHT?!?!?
Nick found the parade of exclamation and question marks unnecessary. It fell down a minute or two later.
‘Leave it,’ said Nick. ‘It’s burnt deep into my cerebellum.’
‘Hey, a great title for my book,’ said Sarah.
‘What? Burnt Deep Into My Cerebellum?’
‘No. Am I Driving On the Right? A book about our six months. Light-hearted, comic. Awesomely bestselling.’
‘You have to be joking.’
‘Have to be? On whose orders?’
‘Oh no,’ Nick groaned, checking Sarah’s seriousness with a quick sideways glance. ‘Spare us.’
All he wanted, though, was for life to be just that, light-hearted and comic. History was far too dark, a damn dark candle over a damn dark abyss. As some wretched historian once wrote.
The plaque on the track had sprouted big flowers set in garden pots on the stone.
‘Of course,’ said Nick, stopping the car this time; ‘it’s the anniversary. It’s the twenty-eighth of Feb. Those could well be Jean-Luc’s doing. He’s got the same name. He’s probably family. Ergo –’
‘Oh they’re really pretty,’ Alicia sighed, pointing with her glistening sucette. ‘I bet it’s his Mummy and not Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc’s too ugly.’
‘Alicia,’ Sarah snapped, ‘that’s enough! Anyway, she’d have to be about a hundred. Fernand Maille would be well into his eighties, now.’
‘But he’s dead,’ Alicia said. ‘They shooted him.’
Tammy groaned dramatically. ‘Would be, she said!’ The conditional had begun to interest her, although she didn’t have that term for it. It seemed to multiply over her like a canopy of leaves.
‘Plastic,’ said Sarah. ‘I’m afraid to say I find them pretty lurid. Bathroom mauve and yuk yellow.’
‘Mummy,’ Tammy said, ‘let me put the window down.’
Sarah released the window-lock. The glass slid down and Tammy leaned right out of the window, taking a deep breath.
‘They smell really sweet,’ she fibbed.
A shot, with a little comet-trail of echo. She knocked her chin in surprise. Then a second, spraying invisible pellets of sadness through the trees.
‘Oh no, it’s the Nazi men,’ said Alicia.
‘The Nazis have long gone,’ said her father. ‘It’s just the hunters.’
‘Or a squirrel with a really bad cough,’ said Alicia, making her parents laugh admiringly. She tried to think up something else.
‘Bung,’ said Beans, through the plastic spout of her cup.
‘Horrible hunters,’ Tammy called out into the air – but not that loudly, she was not bold enough. Nevertheless, she was told off.
‘We’re guests here,’ Sarah pointed out, cleaning her glasses. ‘We should show respect.’
‘Respect for the fascists,’ murmured Nick.
‘Like Mr Elephant banging on the ground,’ said Alicia, but there was no response this time and she settled back into her seat, dejected.
The woods indicated no sign of human activity. Instead, there was a numbness about the aftermath of the two shots, as if even the trees were taken aback but were pretending not to show it. If trees could hear, Sarah mused, they would have heard the shots that killed Fernand, too; the shots that had thudded into him from some nasty German weapon, or weapons. As they drove slowly on, she pictured it quite clearly: the young man with his pistol or hunter’s rifle, taking pot-shots at the advancing soldiers, then running up the track to warn the others, then falling as the bullets tore into him, his body rolling to a stop where the memorial stone now stood.
Nick made tea as soon they got in. They had brought along six months’ supply of good, strong, builder’s tea. ‘I don’t know how anyone copes without tea,’ he said.
‘Shakespeare coped,’ Tammy observed, sitting down at the far end of the table, lingering while the other two watched something babyish next door.
Sarah was wondering to herself why the plaque said ‘assassiné’. Murdered. That implied he wasn’t fighting them. And why ‘le jeune’, when his age was marked anyway? Because of the anger, the emotion, the grief. In any historical analysis, one had to take account of the anger, the emotion. She could see the material of the boy’s shirt or country jacket pockmarked by the bullets as he ran; it was as clear as a film. She could even hear his grunt, the thump as he fell. Perhaps he fell on his face and cut his lip. She felt she was in contact with the death in some way, probably because of the coincidence of the day, the anniversary that a relative – yes, most likely Jean-Luc – had obediently, touchingly marked. It made her feel more positive towards Jean-Luc, even tender; she liked to think it was him, although he couldn’t possibly have known the dead man. One day the flowers would stop coming and the plaque would be forgotten, an occasional curiosity to a hiker. That was sad. But that’s what happened to history; it congealed. It dried up to facts and opinions. Occasionally it withered to a lethal little point, used by troublemakers long after, stirrers full of hate and prejudice.
‘The thing is, Sarah sweets, you left the handle sticking out.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Sticking out and on the front ring. Asking for it.’
Sarah said: ‘Whip me, then. Go on.’
‘No, sorry, but I thought I ought to mention it. Prevent it happening again.’
‘So sorry. What a useless mother.’
Nick spread his hands. ‘Look, why do you have to get like this?’
‘Get like what?’
‘All this overdramatic business. You know perfectly well you’re not a useless mother, so why say it?’
‘Nick, if I want to say it, I can say it.’
‘Fine. Go ahead. I don’t care what you say, actually, as long as you put the pan on the back burner next time. You learn from your mistakes, it’s not a judgement. It’s empirical progress.’
‘Oh put a lid on it, grumpy.’
‘I’m not in the least bit grumpy,’ he declared, raising his voice and straining it.
‘Sounds it,’ said Sarah, recovering old tea leaves from the sink.
Tammy left a little pause and then said, ‘Please don’t shout at Mummy, Daddy.’
‘Tammy,’ snapped her father, ‘this is none of your business. Go on. Leave us alone, please.’
‘Why is Lake Chad drying up, Daddy, in fact?’
And then, for some mysterious reason, they both flared up at her and she had to bury her face in her folded arms.
Sarah wiped the kitchen table with a sponge as Tammy read The Sword in the Stone for the third time, just as Sarah had at the same age. Her family was not particularly intellectual. She always said she came from Kent, because more precision would have been pointless – her childhood consisted of trailing after her army father: Germany, Aden, Hong Kong, Belfast, Bahrain. The family had a small pied-à-terre in a development near Ashford, looking out on flat, undistinguished fields once teeming in the summer with hop-pickers from the East End and now put to desultory cows or slashes of yellow rape. She would stay there for weeks in the holidays with her mother, getting bored, while Colonel Allsopp did whatever he did with tanks far away. She read masses, uncorking book after book and shovelling the contents down past her eyes as her mother did with the whisky.
Even when, in Bahrain, there was a swimming pool as warm as a bath and secretive cocktail parties and young red-faced men who would finger her shoulder-straps under the scissor-like shadows of palm leaves, she read more books than her father thought healthy. She was reading Tolstoy at fourteen, and then again at seventeen, because she remembered nothing of what she had read before. She was plodding diligently, not flying, towards her single aim, which was to read History at Cambridge. Her parents never talked, or not about anything beyond the terrible, tight purgatory of their mutual recrimination. So –unlike Tammy – almost everything she knew was from books, not discussion. It was all printed in tiny letters she digested in swarms, like gnats flying into a great mouth.
Beans and Alicia were having a nap, still worn out by yesterday’s hospital drama.
‘I’m assuming this table doesn’t object to getting wet. Lift your T.H. White, Tam-Tam.’
‘They’d have protected it,’ said Nick. ‘They’re that type. Anyway, it’s only a butcher’s block.’
‘Not if he’s really into antiques. That type just wax.’ She studied some worrying circles where the kids’ drinks had been. There were no coasters in the house, only antique iron rests for hot pans. The circles might have been there before, like marks of ancient enclosures, but she couldn’t be sure. The wet sponge seemed to leave a pale comet-trace after it. Tammy pointed this out, but was not thanked for it.
‘Don’t worry about it, Sarah.’
‘I’m trying not to.’
But he was worried as well. It was like staying with your parents. He had never been a real rebel. His only vice these days was watching High Stakes Poker on his laptop. He was too terrified of the consequences even to touch any porn, quite apart from the ideological angle. It was as if sleeping with the odd student and eventually marrying one had blown all the naughty fuses. He looked aghast at the viciousness of the world’s powerful and went limp. Being genial wasn’t enough. Stalin was fairly genial, behind his Dunhill pipe and yellow eyes. Bush, too, behind his spellbinding lack of the grey stuff, his creepy smirk.
‘I just think we’re all here to chill out,’ he said, ‘and not fret so much over minor things.’
‘Maybe minor things are all we have,’ Sarah said, nettled. She was attacking a recalcitrant mark on the catering sink’s placid steel. ‘Maybe everything else is just concept. Hm?’
Nick grunted and opened Le Monde, bought yesterday in St-Maurice, and pursed his lips, as he always did when facing the world’s cupidity and suffering. This is difficult French, he thought. There are no eye-catching, over-egged stories. Everything in England is story. Instead of analysis. Infantilism, really: keep ’em hooked. What isn’t a fleshy yarn is ignored. This, however, is bony, holding back on the fat, the extraneous stodge. He struggled to feel nourished by it. A child had been murdered, but it was dispassionately recorded, without the lip-smacking details that what passed for British journalism would have conjured (conjured being the key word). A bit of a busman’s holiday, he thought, working his way through the multiple classical arches of the words, the steady murmurings of the long, comma-stitched phrases. But he felt his intelligence was being addressed. That made a change.
Sarah squeezed the sponge out firmly and settled it behind the tap. She leaned back on the sink’s frigid metal and folded her arms.
‘I think I’m going to go to Aix tomorrow,’ she said. ‘And leave you with the kids.’
‘We could all come. Aix is interesting.’
‘Nick, it’ll be a two-hour trip. I’ll be leaving rather early. I’ll need the whole day in the archives without interruption.’
‘The world belongs to those who get up early,’ Nick quoted, with a hint of irony, his finger in the air. ‘No, correction: to those whose workers get up early.’
‘And what kind of a world?’ murmured Sarah.
‘As long there’s some lunch,’ he said. ‘I won’t have the car to go and get anything.’
‘You’ve got the car today.’
‘Oh, I’m sure we won’t starve,’ Nick said, returning to the paper, its major things. A full-page article on Fra Angelico and the anti-Humanist influence of Giovanni Dominici on the young artist. Never a medievalist, what in fact flashed up was that awful scene in the film about the grisly Dominici Affair; he’d watched it, enthralled, as a teenager: the little girl running desperately away through the trees, the black-and-white shot taken from the axe-man’s point of view, hand-held and jerky. Her parents had already been dealt with in their holiday caravan somewhere in the backwoods of Provence, and now it was her turn. At least this wasn’t Provence. Run! Run!
‘Supper?’ asked Sarah. ‘I’ll be hungry.’
‘Oh. Ah. Supper,’ he intoned, turning the page. ‘Omelette? I’ll do an omelette.’
She had these moments when she wanted to take her shoes off and throw them at her husband’s head. She was wearing soft espadrilles, today.
At least Jamie wasn’t here. She had once screamed at her stepson as she’d never screamed at anyone in her life before and then left the house. All he’d done, Jamie had complained, with an air of bewilderment, was mention that the fruit had run out. Nick had asked (he later reported) if that was all. Jamie admitted to complaining about the loo seat being wet, but it had been meant as a joke. Nick had then asked if he –Jamie – had any idea what it was like bringing up two small kids, with a third on the way.
‘That’s her choice,’ Jamie had replied, with irreproachable logic. ‘Nobody forced her. You dig your own grave, man.’
One of the most difficult aspects of Jamie was that he was superficially a replica, or perhaps a pastiche, of his father as he was in his own student years: same language, same look, same smell, with a touch here and there of the new: an earring, a bead in his nose, the occasional variation into matted dreadlocks or, as if a gremlin had gone mad with a miniature lawn mower, an erratically shaven scalp. So Nick found it hard to act the straight-laced, authoritarian father. Anyway, Jamie was a grown-up, at least officially.
As a result, Sarah had gone to a psychiatrist, to get her relationship with her stepson ‘sorted’ (in the stepson’s words). She admitted that she could have done him bodily harm. The psychiatrist unravelled her difficult childhood and the general idea emerged that she was projecting an ancient animosity towards her absent father onto Jamie.
‘How about he just learns some manners,’ she said, embedded in a leather wing-chair that reclined in five positions, ‘to start with?’
But the psychiatrist wasn’t paid to discuss someone’s manners, he was paid to go into the abyss. He’d repeated ‘manners’ with a hint of ridicule. Manners was probably the arch enemy of psychiatry: a bourgeois relic. Sarah felt herself turning into a starched Victorian maid.
‘I reckon manners,’ Sarah persisted, ‘is about thinking of other people. Manners are actually quite deep. Manners maketh man. Or woman.’
‘Ah,’ said the psychiatrist, who was in his forties and quite dishy, ‘now we’re getting somewhere.’
Nick had asked how it was going, after the first three sessions. Sarah had told him that she was, essentially, a starched Victorian maid and it would take a lifetime to unstarch her. No more sessions.
‘I’ll phone the Centre on the mobile to let them know I’m coming,’ said Sarah, already moving towards the door. She wondered what the Centre d’Archives d’Outre Mer would look like, already seeing herself mounting a flight of stone stairs into a beamed and panelled hall, with French intellectuals in scarves and rimless glasses dotted about. She didn’t feel like asking Nick, who had been there many years ago.
‘Don’t fall off the bathroom stool,’ Nick muttered, while unravelling a never-ending sentence in the editorial that appeared to have no object or main verb, with the flash of the Dominici Affair not quite sluiced away.
With Mummy off for the day, the girls plunged into the Daddy-only scenario with exceptional zeal. It took him back to the days after his divorce, when he would take Jamie to the park every second weekend, joining other sad-looking single dads at the swings. The girls weren’t like this in Cambridge – when, in fact, he was hardly ever with them alone for more than half a day. Sarah would be back at about eight tonight. He worried about the drive, whether she’d remember to stay on the right, and kept involuntarily picturing a wreck, fire engines and ambulances flashing – much like the accident they’d passed on the way down, between Le Puy and Brioude. How would he tell the kids?
How were such things even possible, he mused, as he made faces out of the bits-and-pieces lunch, disguising its salady nature; how did they fit into a world of minor, everyday things, burning into them like that heavy knuckle of shell fragment he’d spotted, years ago, perched on a furrow in the Somme?
‘Ugh,’ said Alicia, grimacing at her plate, ‘don’t like cucumber or vegetables.’
After lunch he read to them from Tammy’s ‘lavishly illustrated’ book of Greek myths, a present from her godfather. Beans sat on his knee as he started on the chapter dealing with Persephone, snatched down to Tartarus by Pluto. He read to them about Tartarus, about Charon and the Styx and the ghosts waiting to be judged, about the pool of memory and the pool of forgetfulness called Lethe, and how the clever ones drank from the pool of memory. Why? Because it was vital to remember: that’s what historians do, he added. They remember that we should not forget and do stupid things over again.
It was quite a grown-up book, he realised, but they listened without a murmur. Beside the pool of memory grew a white poplar, with fluttery leaves. Alicia said she wanted to see one, and Nick suggested they go in search of one – he had seen what he reckoned were poplars down in the cleft of the valley where the river ran, although the leaves weren’t yet out. The white poplar’s male catkins turn reddish, he informed them excitedly, looking it up.
Never had he experienced such a perfection of fatherhood: they were behaving like children in an Edwardian novel. He thought of Sarah crouched over documents two hours’ drive away and felt vaguely guilty at his suspicion that all this was due to her absence. Next week he would start on the Norse myths, thickening their knowledge, laying the cultural sediment. He’d had to discover it all by himself.
On the walk, Tammy asked him whether praying hard to Jesus can take you out of ‘Taratarus’. He emphasised that it was just what the Greeks believed and that it wasn’t true, anyway. This Jesus thing bothered him; it was the new teacher. Beans leaned over to one side in the backpack and he told her to keep straight, but she was in fact asleep, her hand clutching a sucette. There should be a law against preaching religion in English schools, he thought, as there was in France.
Alicia said she didn’t want to die. Nick began telling lies, stuff he didn’t believe. Reincarnation rather than the afterlife, but still. He was a confirmed atheist, but could hardly tell them that. Tammy reckoned being reborn was frightening, you might be reborn as someone really fat like her school enemy Lucilla Bales or a beggar or someone without legs.
‘Oh I don’t know, I think it’ll be pretty nice being reborn,’ he said, unable to find a decent eschatological rejoinder to her remorseless logic. ‘It’ll make a change.’
Strange, to think of his kids dying. Of being able to die at all.
It was a bright day, with a peculiarly sharp, cold light that blanched everything and gave it a kind of varnish. They were heading for the granite rocks on the heathy stretch from where you could see the river valley and a row of leafless but poplar-shaped trees, like a painter’s fine brushes. On the way, in the chestnut wood, a brown-and-white troop of goats came towards them like a flash flood, bleating and jingling. The shepherd, walking in the middle, had a jacket over his shoulders and a crook that had a nobble instead of a curved top. His dog padded about at the back, rounding up stragglers. One of the goats had a limp. Nick regretted not bringing the camcorder, then realised it would have been embarrassing, the wrong image entirely.
It was the same shepherd they’d seen passing the house, but had never met. He was somewhere between thirty and sixty, a lined, browned but boyish face with moist eyes that seemed to have two silvery points in the middle from the bright light. He stopped to talk to them, for the first time. He reminded Tammy of the funny man who would stand outside the swimming baths back home, humming to himself. Beans insisted on getting down to meet the goats.
Afterwards, Nick refused to give Tammy a précis of their conversation. The girls had been rubbing the goats on their hard, bristly foreheads: they were slightly scared of their horns and their jostling nervousness.
‘Oh, it was just a chat. About the weather,’ he said. ‘He can tell what the weather’s going to be without watching it on the telly.’
‘So can I,’ said Alicia mockingly, looking up at the clear sky. ‘It’s going to be all sunny.’
‘Wrong,’ said Nick. ‘He said it’ll rain tonight. Coming from the north. He can smell it and he says it’s too bright. That’s a shepherd for you. It might rain heavily, so let’s hope Mummy’s back before it does.’
‘That’s only what you talked about?’ confirmed Tammy.
‘Yup. All we talked about, pretty well.’
Tammy didn’t believe him. She’d picked up the word ‘accident’ in its French version, repeated several times, and the fact that her father’s face looked shocked at one point. What her father did add was that the shepherd was called Bruno and his greatest wish was to visit Greenland.
‘Weirdo,’ Tammy said.
‘Not really. Not that weird. Shepherds are traditionally a little on the strange side, spending so much time on their own.’
The girls’ palms smelt sharply of goat: they made him smell it.
‘Ah, the smell of Pan,’ he intoned, still in the classical swim.
Alicia snorted, smelling hers again. ‘That’s not like bread!’
‘Daddy,’ said Tammy, after Nick had explained about Pan, ‘didn’t the shepherd say something about an accident?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘That’s what I heard.’
‘You don’t understand French, Tammy.’
‘I do,’ said Alicia. ‘Ang, doh, twa, craa, sank …’
‘It wasn’t Beans’s accident, then?’
‘Oh, probably,’ said Nick. ‘Sorry, yeah, it was.’
They were growing like speeded-up coral. He was fading away.
‘You’re not telling the tru-uth,’ Tammy chanted, and Alicia joined in.
‘Sorry, you don’t always get the right end of the stick when you’re seven.’
‘I’m eight.’
‘I mean eight,’ he said, starting to walk on with Beans in one hand and Alicia in the other, their faces turned back to smile triumphantly at their sister.
As they entered the yard on their return, Nick saw what looked like a mysterious stack of broken white crockery or perhaps crumpled balls of paper against the back wall next to where the zinc guttering finished in a stone drain. Alicia ran up to it and yelled so that her voice bounced back off the barn: ‘Look, someone’s brung us nice flowers!’
The white and creamy lilies, roses and chrysanthemums were set against dark glossy leaves and lighter sprays of fern. A pale, silky ribbon bore the single word REGRETS, which Nick assumed was to be read the French way, without sounding the last two consonants, although he mentally failed to.
‘Oo-er,’ Tammy said. ‘Someone’s died again.’
‘Why?’ asked Alicia.
‘No doubt,’ said Nick, somewhat rattled, ‘Jean-Luc will throw light on it. Don’t touch, Alicia.’
Alicia cocked her head like a bird and asked if it was like the thing on the track with the name in it and them flowers on too, her mind almost audibly whirring.
Nick nodded. ‘Sort of.’
What Bruno the shepherd had revealed was that his brother had fallen off the roof of Les Fosses exactly six years ago today, but not that flowers had been left. Maybe it was another relative. Or the wife.
‘When did this one die?’ essayed Alicia again, all but breathless with excitement.
‘I think it’s very pretty,’ said Nick, stalling.
‘Film it,’ Alicia suggested. ‘What’s regrets mean?’
Nick demurred. ‘Something too sad to film,’ he explained.
‘Maybe it was Jean-Luc again,’ Tammy said. ‘He’s pretty strange.’
‘Is he?’
‘He’s nice,’ said Alicia.
Beans broke into earnest chatter, like a little bird, tugging his trouser-leg. Nick nodded and repeated really? but couldn’t be bothered to make out what she was saying, although the word ‘cruck’ kept appearing.
‘Or maybe someone conked out on this very spot,’ Tammy interrupted, also excited now. ‘Not Fernando but someone new, Daddy.’
Nick looked at her uncertainly. This was no doubt the very place where the builder had landed with a thump, a crack of neck-bone. He looked up. The edge of the roof was a long way up, falling slowly backwards against a small, complicated wisp of dark cloud in the blue.
‘Or in the house,’ Tammy went on, tossing the hair out of her eyes. ‘Of something like choleric or turbo locust. And whoever left this couldn’t get in, or didn’t even want to.’
‘Why?’ asked Alicia, lost.
‘Likkel window,’ said Beans.
‘We can go on speculating forever,’ Nick said, eyeing the barn. Turbo locust was good. He would tell Sarah about Tammy’s turbo locust, but not about the accident.
‘We can throw the flowers away when they wait, Daddy.’
‘When they wilt. Of course, Tam-tam.’
‘Hope it doesn’t upset Mummy too much. She doesn’t like deathie thingies.’
‘No, she certainly doesn’t,’ he agreed.
And thought, as his daughter stood there in her diminutive pensiveness, how much could be crammed into the small-size sock of eight years.
Alicia nodded when she was told not to tell Mummy because Mummy ‘doesn’t like deathie things just as she doesn’t like hamburgers’. Nick found his explanation as unsatisfactory as the subterfuge itself.
Away from the others, Tammy was instructed in a whisper to carry the floral offering not too far into the trees and hide it respectfully. She was proud of the responsibility.
The flowers were stuck in wet sponge that soaked her sleeves, and were heavier than she’d expected. She laid them at the foot of a tree, in undergrowth, and scratched her ankles. It didn’t feel good, though, doing this. She thought she’d gone quite far into the woods but when she turned round there was the house beyond the washing-line. There was something big and round at her feet, like a big root. She brushed the prickly stuff to one side with her foot, bravely. The root carried on until it came back and met itself. She suddenly saw it as a cartwheel, like the ones in the barn. Its spokes were broken and its orange paint was peeling off and there were words carved on the rim, almost overflowing its thinness: MAS DU PARADIS.
She threw dead leaves over the flowers and pricked her finger. Like in a fairy story, she realised, and hurtled back before the wheel rose up with a grin and rolled on top of her.
Sarah came back from Aix a little earlier than expected, at seven-thirty. The return trip had been very quick, but she’d also been warned about the rain. The air was wet-smelling and close, despite the coolness.
The Centre d’Archives d’Outre Mer was a dull, modern building with a municipal look to the pine and metal shelving, but the librarians had been highly efficient in finding what she was looking for: records relating to the forced dispersion of French-colonised West Africans to French Guyana as labourers. She was expanding on a footnote in her thesis: Nick, who’d been her supervisor, had advised her to do so nine or ten years back.
‘You found proof that it wasn’t voluntary?’
‘Kind of. I’ll show you my notes. It’s not straightforward.’
Nick had used the Centre several times both before and after he’d met Sarah, and he now recalled finding the records of the Bureau de Recherches de Pétrol’s subsidiaries in Gabon and the Congo, with the usual story of corruption, displacement of locals and so on; and how the files were warped and stained by the African climate, with tiny red splotches of squashed mosquitoes; and how, since the Bureau de Recherches de Pétrol was now Elf-Total, he’d expected a visit from hitmen in dark glasses, almost as much as he had when digging up details about Chevron in Chad – in Chad itself – a few years earlier, which was quite another story (Sarah had, of course, heard it many times).
‘You’d have been so lucky,’ murmured Sarah, fully upstaged.
‘My paper wasn’t completely ignored,’ he went on. ‘There was some disgruntlement in the trade mags and one or two annual reports. Esso’s, for instance, mentioned it.’
Sarah had enjoyed her few hours away, especially the drive there with the CD-player blaring out her Dylan (not Nick’s favourite); what she omitted to tell him was that she had not been able to stop herself worrying about the girls. You either worried or you didn’t: you couldn’t worry a bit, like you couldn’t be a bit pregnant, or a bit Nazi. As it turned out, on her return the girls were deep in a board game with their father in front of the fire and had barely looked up. She’d felt redundant. She’d expected them to run towards her and fling themselves at her skirt.
‘We’ve had a great time,’ Nick had confirmed, just in case she was in any doubt.
The Smiths were playing on the hi-fi: ‘Suffer Little Children’. A song she didn’t like at all – about the Moors Murders. Inappropriate. It was on quite loud, too.
‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘How’s the omelette?’
‘As you can see,’ said Nick, ‘still in the project stage.’
‘And the girls not even in their pyjamas?’
‘French time,’ he murmured, trying not to show his own irritation.
‘By the way,’ he told her, pouring out more wine at the end of supper, ‘I met the local shepherd. Bruno.’
The omelette was fine, in the end. The only flat note, as usual, was the bread: thawed out; fresh each day was impossible. It was a round trip of about three-quarters of an hour to the baker’s in Valdaron, including the wait as folk chatted. Sarah had put the girls to bed and was only now unwinding after a couple of hours of appeasement. Nick felt exhausted.
‘The kids told me, yes.’
‘Fascinating. His greatest dream is to visit Greenland.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘So I said to him, “Well, if it’s for the glaciers you’re going, you’d better hurry up.”’
‘That’s pretty advanced, if it was in French.’
‘I paraphrase,’ said Nick. ‘It’s simpler in French. Si c’est pour les glacières, il faut aller vite là-bas.’
‘Glacières? You’re sure that’s right?’
Nick groaned. Sarah looked it up in the French-English dictionary, tipping the page towards the candle-flame.
‘Glacière is, I’m afraid, an ice-box. Glacier is glacier,’ Sarah announced, looking pleased.
‘No wonder he laughed,’ Nick chuckled, gamely. ‘Actually, he didn’t laugh, he was too polite. He just looked puzzled for a second.’
‘Eef eet ees for zee ice boxes, you must go qweek to there,’ said Sarah.
‘Better than zee ice burgers, I suppose. Or buggers, even.’
They were in fits, worse than Alicia and Tammy in the doctor’s surgery. They polished off the wine, still laughing, and that was that. It was good to be back, thought Sarah. She told Nick about the dishy young Arab guy in the reading room, looking up registers of military recruitment in colonial Algeria; he wasn’t allowed to reproduce it in any form, he’d whispered to her.
‘In your ear?’
‘In my ear.’
Nick pulled a shocked face, pretending not to be bothered. He did not broach the other matter, about the builder, about the builder’s accident and the anniversary flowers. He saw no need. Now she was happy, he felt he could be disgruntled, anyway. Rain began to spatter against the shutters like bursts of typing. Then, after stopping to think about it, the storm broke. At least, they reckoned it was a storm. It drummed on the roof all night, as if it would rather be inside. It made the track into a temporary collection of streams and gouged channels through the gravel at the front. It smacked on the pool and appeared to have raised the level by several centimetres. Sarah, squeaking the shutters open slightly and looking out at the wall of water in the middle of the night, was reminded of Africa, and all that she had not, after all, achieved or (more to the point) dared.
Logs were brought the next day and deposited next to the barn. Some rolled into the strip of briar and charred stones. Everything glittered after the rain, and they thought they could see the snowy flanks of the Alps: a suggestion of whiteness like little teeth, that wasn’t cloud.
The ancient lorry looked much the worse for wear, with broken wing-mirrors and a dented bonnet, and made a terrible din as it bashed its way along the worsened track. The little ‘log-man’, as they called him, was almost perfectly square (Tammy’s description), with a squashed nose and huge leathery hands. He showed Nick how best to stack logs, each layer crossways on the previous layer, so that the air might get in and dry them quicker. He admitted the logs were a bit green and may need splitting. They were certainly wet. The stack was begun inside the barn, just to the left of the entrance.
Nick couldn’t find gloves and the wood seemed to sap all the moisture from his skin, despite the wetness. He initially enjoyed the unthinking task, although it seemed to take ages before any inroads were made on the sprawling heap outside. The two older girls intermittently helped, clutching a single log to the chest or choosing fat sticks, which they stacked separately for kindling. The air was washed clean but not cold, although the log-man assured them that April could be frosty.
His body engaged, Nick’s mind kept returning to the shepherd’s grim tale. He toyed with the idea of not telling Sarah at all. Of trying not to dwell on it, let it float away as most things did in the end, but it remained obstinately moored in his head.
The poor man had been working for the Sandlers. He’d landed just there. He felt bad, now, about the memorial flowers.
Thump. Broken neck. Rabbit punch.
There was something vaguely distasteful about the way the Sandlers hadn’t mentioned it, but he could totally understand their position. It had nothing to do with them, the Mallinsons, it was something that had happened in the past, a few years back, and it could stay there. His instinct was to probe, but he fought it. This sabbatical was about living in the present. It was about dwelling on what mattered, letting time run through his fingers without trying to hold it, to clasp what couldn’t be clasped. Because time was above all a liquid. Time was the historian’s worst ally, like the ultimate peer review.
Time had surprised him, especially by dissolving his Marxist foundations. He had drifted from Habermas and Jameson to the unlikely port of Gilles Deleuze, a thinker for whom everything is displacement, contingency and indeterminacy, like worrying medical conditions. For several years he’d been taken up with domestic problems: his hyper-active first son, Jamie; his aged mother – who’d gone from benevolent sharpness, deep in her whist and bridge in Crowthorne, to blunt recalcitrance and dementia. (She was, he’d say, a paradigm of the West.) He left Helena and met Sarah – not in that order, come to think of it.
He rarely read his contemporaries in the field, there was far too much thanks to the research ratings nonsense: everything was seething – teasing proliferation instead of debate and reflection. It was the fundamental sign of Deleuze’s unsynthesised present, he once wrote (adding to the seethe): experience undergone, not yet passed into memory. None of it, then, had meaning: it was a disparate jumble. Only the cocaine of virtual communication had meaning. At times during this difficult period he had craved a simpler world, a world of mud roads and burning faiths. Simple, stark choices. He’d crave to be back in that world, to be a peasant in the chill plough-lines of feudalism, looking up at the God-filled sky. He had, in other words, become the precise opposite of what he was in his youth.
That’s what time did, because it was liquid. It wasn’t a sea, of course, but a river – as large and powerful as the Congo river, on whose banks he had several times marvelled in earlier years. He could find no more original metaphor for time. He wasn’t a poet. What poetry he read, of the modern kind, he mostly found obscure and baffling.
Maybe he was more prophet than historian, he thought, stacking a large log cloaked in pubic moss, a soft pelt against his hands. The girls had gone in, bored.
The car. The computer. Mortgages and shopping. All of us have fallen for it – hook, line and sinker. Again and again. It won’t be the bathing and anointing, the ewers of fresh wine, the cushioned recliners, the slaves to light our way; it’ll be the toilet paper we’ll miss.
He was enjoying the logs, the creaminess of the bared timber, the criss-cross layering, the woodblock strikes of it.
When Sarah was pregnant with Tammy, was it – his return to Michelet’s history of France? His marvelling at it? The rekindling of Nicholas Mallinson! Dates, dates. His own dates fuzzed. Tammy, precocious Tammy, plus two more. Unruliness. Whole hours thrown into the air like confetti. The days and then weeks and then months, gobbled up. Years. His scholarly biography of Ferdinand Lassalle had taken five of them, and it was scarcely noticed. His more approachable book on the pre-war history of African oil exploration, Tending the Reserves, was remaindered after a year (he first knew of this in a second-hand bookshop in Brighton). His first major appearance in a TV documentary as a talking head last year, illuminating the build-up to Suez, dismayed him: he looked venerable, despite the strange, purplish light on his face.
Looking back from his sixth decade, he was astonished (particularly in the sleepless middle of the night, when whispering, malicious elves took over) by the brevity of what had been his life so far. ‘The syncope of the long breath’, as that young colleague in English put it in one of his published poems. The new man whose name he can never remember, and who expects you to have read him. Who has, in fact, been at FitzHerbert’s for at least five years.
Yet, as a teenager, life had seemed to stretch out to infinity. The simple grasslands of life. The reeds waving to the boundless horizon.
All these logs will be burnt.
He supposed that, if he was insufferably ideological, it was not just in reaction to his own Deleuze period. A tiny handful of people in suits were looting the world. Ransacking it. Casino hustlers, tilting the tables. Consumerism as another, very subtle form of slavery. Founded on literal slavery, if you think about it, if you delve a little deeper.
Oil, too, was liquid. What could be as deadly dull, as viscously horrible, as that one word oil; or be as tediously monotonous as the repetition of that dry, flat, scrubland name, Chad? But the intellect’s pistons had begun to move again in tune with his heart, and he’d seen how his life’s work might, after all, cohere.
Sarah was suffering because of it, her own work obscured by his enthusiasm, his reborn zeal. For ‘oil’ had become his mantra, the thread that made sense of it all: of thirty years of scholarship. The two older girls would pretend to switch their ears off when he talked about his work. He was a gangly bore, and he knew it. When he looked at photographs of himself as a rebellious adolescent, all he could see was his trousers set too high and the absurd explosion of hair in which his pale face stared out like a mouse from its nest. He wondered who those creatures were, who loved themselves, and how contented they must be in their innocence.
By the time he’d stacked the last log, he’d covered an awful lot of ground. He was mentally exhausted, and the tendons around his right elbow burnt.
He stood by the clear pool for a moment, wondering why it had a deposit of what looked like snow or white ash covering the bottom. Maybe that’s what happened when you clarified things: the fog just solidified.
Jean-Luc fishes under his bed and pulls out a cardboard box.
Inside the box is rubbish, including a rusty kitchen sieve, broken plastic toys, old spoons, lots of birds’ feathers, silvery stones from the river, a plastic bowl split on one side, cheap paperbacks swollen by damp, and the doll. She jumps leglessly onto the table and then he fishes out the sieve and places it next to her. He touches the sieve, orange at the joins of the mesh, and it rocks from side to side. Then he lays Bibi inside it and watches her rock with it, like a naked girl in a round hammock, missing her legs but still beautiful.
She is stuck. Like a fly in a cobweb. He stops the sieve rocking and holds it still. He feels excited, now. All he needs, then, is a spider. A big black spider. He’d watch cobwebs for hours, as a kid. The spider wrapping up the fly in a white cocoon, the fly struggling at first, then giving up. He’d pretend to be the fly, lying on the floor and being wrapped up in sticky thread. He couldn’t move his arms for ages.
In the corner of his room, a real cobweb flutters in a draught from the window, which won’t close properly since the rains. It is an old cobweb, so old the spider is a bony white skeleton inside it. He considers using the skeleton for a moment. No, too fragile. It’ll crumble to bits at a touch. He knows what he has to find: something like that bundle of tiny bones. He can look out for it. Again, he feels a surge of pleasure inside him. Bibi is the fly, despite her Jesus nails. But who is the spider?
Himself, he thinks. Everything is himself, from inside him. Even Bibi. Even the cobweb.
His mother is calling his name. She’s beginning to shriek it out, only muffled by the door. She needs help to do her doings. But she can wait. He doesn’t want to destroy this moment.
He thinks of the Englishwoman at Les Fosses, probably a little older than himself. Marie, he murmurs, my sweet sister in love. He needs a photograph of her, he is sure about that. Of her cold face, and of her warm face. Then he will rub the cold face out. He has to have a photograph of her smile, her lost look.
A secret photograph.
Because if she knew he was taking it, she would not put on that lost look. She would not look like Marie. All he needs is a camera.
His mother has stopped, worn out by calling his name. Now she will wet the bed, deliberately. He will let her, so that he can scold her. Scold her as once she scolded him. He won’t let her take over. He is the boss, here. Then he remembers there are no more clean sheets; he has neglected the washing. The nurse comes in the morning, but it’s not her job to do the washing. The nurse, called Elodie, binds his mother’s swollen legs in a tight bandage, gives her the medicines, chirrups and twitters to cheer her up. Jean-Luc quite likes Elodie, who is young and businesslike with short mousy hair and heavy eyebrows, but he is always afraid she will find some fault in the way he does things. Then she might wrap him up tightly in her long white bandage, over and over, and sit on his face.
He studies the wall where the rain ran down during the night. Always in the same place: the dark brown streak glistens, that’s all. And in the morning there’s a big puddle on the floor where the old stain is. The old bruise.
Once, when Elodie found bruises on his mother’s arms, blue as a tattoo, she gave him a suspicious glance. He made a joke of it: ah yes, I’ve been clobbering her a lot lately! And the nurse and his mother laughed. And so did he. In fact, it was when he had lifted her up off the bolsters to rearrange them: she bruised easily. He had strong hands. One forgot.
His mother was always older than other mothers, mothers of his contemporaries. She had him at forty-two. It wasn’t normal, to have your first and only child at forty-two. Not around here, at any rate. Maybe there was some problem.
The excitement has passed. It comes and goes. It can be triggered by pulling out the cardboard box of rubbish, but it’s so easily dissolved. In a few minutes he will go downstairs and watch Marie-Sylvaine on her chat show while getting the supper together. That cheers him up.
He thinks he hears a laugh through the door. His mother is probably pissing into her bedclothes right at this moment, just to spite him. It’ll go right through to the rubber sheet, which will stink unless it’s taken off and rinsed. He gets up from the chair so abruptly the chair falls backwards and he’s unlocked the door and has leapt into her room before the back hits the lino.
It happened when they were all watching television – French television – from various vantage points on the sofa or the rug or both at once. The show consisted of a panel of about ten guests laughing hysterically at their own jokes. They were all ugly. The audience members appeared to be watching a mildly depressing documentary. The Mallinsons, large and small, scarcely understood a word.
The other channels were umbrageous, shifting shapes in a blizzard. One seemed to be about the economy. They stopped on what was either a rugby match or a documentary on migrating caribou.
‘Maybe the aerial needs adjusting,’ said Sarah.
Nick grunted. ‘What aerial?’
‘Isn’t there one? Up on the roof?’
‘Is there? Haven’t noticed it.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, feeling she was sounding like her mother.
They flicked back to adverts on TF1, the channel that worked: they understood those, at least.
‘The semiotics of Omo,’ said Sarah, although it was an advert for a car. She yawned. ‘Nearly time for bed, kids.’
‘We can ask Jean-Luc to check the aerial,’ Tammy suggested.
‘And then he’ll go up on the roof,’ Sarah said.
‘So what?’
‘He might fall off,’ she pointed out, with a hint of a chuckle.
The sound fizzed abruptly and a dark bar descended over an image of a fluffy snow-white cat nestling in a washing basket. The bar, as it descended, compressed the picture comically, the bottom half appearing again at the top. The fizz was electronic and nastily harsh, as if someone was drilling nearby, drowning the voices. It was the perfect projection of what had just happened inside Nick.
‘Stupid telly,’ said Alicia.
‘We can always read instead,’ said her father, stretching. ‘You know, that strange activity called reading. Or play a brief game.’
They waited in a lazy way, but when the interference lessened, it left another channel overlapping what was now the chat show again: a dim, X-rayed face, no doubt a newscaster’s, took up most of the screen. He slid slightly to the left and then to the right, as if on a swing that had all but stopped. The pale lips were moving. He was looking straight out at them.
Obviously the dead builder, Nick thought, alarming himself.
‘Pearl’s on great form,’ murmured Sarah, who had been on her mobile ten minutes ago, up in the bathroom.
‘Really?’ said Nick. ‘How come?’
She looked mildly hurt. ‘Why shouldn’t she be?’
‘Why should she be?’
‘She usually is.’
‘Woman’s Hour, or something?’
She looked at him quizzically, with some concern. ‘Er, what?’
He said, ‘It’s not everyone who gets on Radio 4.’
‘On great form, I said.’
He stared at her for a moment. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Call me Professor Calculus.’
‘Professor Calculus!’ chorused the girls.
Sarah squeezed his hand. ‘Professor Conquest, I say.’
That was a surprise. It didn’t take much to cheer him up. He squeezed her hand back.
‘You’re like the stupid telly, Daddy,’ squeaked Alicia, shoving her head between his knees as her mother rested her own head on his shoulder. The insides of his knees found Alicia’s neck and squeezed it playfully. ‘Cut my head off, pleee-ease.’
‘Maybe we should put him in the recycling bin,’ said Tammy, chin on her hands, staring back at the dim face on the screen.
Nick switched off the telly with the remote. The idea that he was looking at the face of the dead builder had not evaporated. He was reminded of the faces of the torturers, bullies and other apparatchiks in Budapest’s House of Terror museum, about which he had written, for Past & Present, his last published paper: ‘Re(In)formation in the Disney Age: Selective Trauma in post-Communist Hungary’. Despite not knowing a word of Hungarian. It was a sortie out of his field. A refreshment. He got clobbered, quite justifiably, by a revered Central European specialist in the next issue.
Sarah’s head was heavy against his shoulder. Tammy prodded her elbow, presumably by mistake, in his stomach. Alicia was now trying to separate his knees further, exercising his flabby calf muscles. He pretended to complain. He loved them with a scattered intensity: not a single bright point but something dispersed that was still of the same property and energy as the single bright point. History had somehow escaped them all; had so far let them off. He’d heard it all his life, muffled, like a busy street through a closed window. Even in the Congo, with its street-mobs whirling chains and brandishing machetes, its bloodied faces and casually murdered neighbours, he had not felt the window open. He wondered if one day he would hear the high, unexpected smash of a stone in its glass.
Impossible, of course: history can never be present. It can never clamber over you and prod you in the stomach, exercise your calf muscles, lean on your shoulder. It is all words. It is only words. It has always happened, it is always a kind of ghost.