They found stale chocolate digestives in the back of a cupboard and rejoiced.
They decided to take them on a walk as supplies, and then decided not to, as they would go all gooey. When they got back! The weather was calm and spring-like. Yellow flowers, some like buttercups, some like small dandelions, had appeared in the woods in spread-out gowns, along with white star-shaped solitaries. ‘We must get a flower book,’ Sarah said.
She had noticed, while hanging out clothes, that the glossy-leaved bushes between the washing-line and the trees bore small globes of orangey fruit, even though the bushes’ flowers were only just beginning to open. They didn’t dare try the fruit, though. Anyway, they were hard, not yet ripe. Nick said that he had seen these laurel-like bushes in Ireland, where they were called strawberry trees; they had nice white flowers and the fruit turned red.
‘I believe,’ he said, as if accumulating points, ‘the Ancient Greeks made their flutes from the wood.’
‘They’re not strawberries, stupid,’ Alicia scoffed.
‘If they’re actually called strawberries,’ Tammy said, ‘they’re probably dee-lish.’
‘Yum yum,’ said Beans, reaching up with her right hand, which had entirely healed within a week.
‘It might be a trap,’ said Sarah, stopping her. She knew the names of hardly any wild flowers, unlike mothers in books. Her own mother’s garden was mostly gladioli and hydrangea and a big ornamental birch. There were huge fields of rape beyond, and the bright yellow along with the bright red of the gladioli gave them all headaches in summer.
They took another path forking off past the granite boulders and descended to an unexpected stream. It fell noisily over rocks into large, smooth-cupped pools as clear as glass. They had to shout.
‘Let’s go back and find the digestives tree,’ Nick joked. ‘The Famous Five ont faim. Are famished.’
They climbed up to the main track and tramped along, having ventured further than they’d meant to. Beans fell asleep on Sarah’s back. The others moaned like prisoners on a forced march.
‘We could buy a caravan,’ said Alicia, suddenly. ‘Then we could cook.’
‘Don’t like caravans. Or camper vans,’ said Nick.
‘You don’t like anything,’ she whined.
‘I like chasing you,’ he growled, and she immediately ran ahead.
He pretended to pursue her as a wolf. She jinked like a hare along the path, squealing. ‘Kill her and eat her up!’ shouted Tammy from behind. Alicia was gurgling and squeaking in both delight and terror. The delight of terror, he thought, pretending to lope fast, pursuing the small, jinking form and unable not to conjure the girl in the Dominici Affair, desperate to save her life.
‘Gotcha!’
When they arrived back, they found Jean-Luc nailing a new eye on the front door, just as dry but with all its lashes and still a coppery-gold colour. He left the old flower on, which now looked blind, wrinkled and jealous.
He told them that people round here called it a cardousso, and the old folk claimed it protected the house because it looked like a sun. It opened when it was dry and closed when it was wet.
‘Une symbole solaire,’ said Nick, nodding in approval.
‘Un baromètre,’ said Jean-Luc.
He hoovered the pool again while the girls watched. He sucked up the white stuff until the bottom was showing for the first time. It’s not as good as when it was hidden, thought Tammy: the bottom had stains and tiny cracks.
Sarah trusted they were safe as long as Jean-Luc was with them, but worried nevertheless. A child’s drowning is silent, she’d read on the Internet back in Cambridge. A child can drown in the time it takes to answer the phone. She kept peeping through the kitchen window. It was sweet, the way they watched Jean-Luc at work. They didn’t need gadgets, telly or computer games.
Afterwards, while they were all having tea, they heard a knocking sound. Nick investigated. Jean-Luc was splitting logs in the barn with a huge axe. He was taking logs off the stack Nick had made, setting each upright on the giant cheese of a chopping block and swinging the blade down unerringly almost every time so that the log in question flew into two parts; then each of these were chopped into two more. Four from one. Nick marvelled at the accuracy, the ease. A split log jumped so far it hit his shin. He pretended it didn’t hurt. He felt he should have been doing this himself.
Better for the fire, Jean-Luc told him. Then you put on the unsplit logs. As if Nick had never lit a fire in his life. But he nodded gratefully nevertheless as Jean-Luc swung the polished blade up high and let it come down on its own gravity. It was his grandfather’s axe, he said. The bulky blade was hand-forged: its edge was fretted but razor-sharp. Only the red handle was new.
Nick asked him, in a pause, having mentally rehearsed the French, whether he was related to Fernand Maille, the man ‘memorialisé’ on the track. The axe’s blade was well bitten into the chopping block.
Jean-Luc seemed to give thought to the question, staring at the pale woodchips on the barn floor. Then he stated very firmly that, no, Fernand was nothing to do with his family. Nothing to do with his family at all. Pas du tout, monsieur.
The church in little Aubain was as cold as a fridge and decrepit. There were peeling eighteenth-century frescoes and the faded names on the backs of the choir-stalls were in thick-nibbed, italic script. A worm-eaten statue of a red-lipped Virgin with cheeks like pink marshmallows stood with raised arms in a piddle of water. Damp had etched, not just stained, one end of the nave on whose high half-dome a crude constellation of gold stars had been painted in a wash of deep cerulean blue. The windows were plain glass, with streaks of cobweb like thin leading. The echo was amazing.
A tiny woman in spectacles and blue frock was dusting the altar. Nick chatted to her while Sarah tried to stop the girls’ natural impulse to whoop. The woman informed them that the Protestant rebels had burnt the church a hundred years ago, leaving nothing of interest except the outside stones. Nick knew that it was two hundred years ago, but kept mum. The kids’ whoops, although parakeet-like, were undeniably English, but the woman gave them a friendly smile.
‘Elles sont mignonnes,’ she sighed, as if that justified everything.
They left at last and the outside flattened their voices like tin. The sun blinded and warmed: they had changed latitude in seconds.
‘Aren’t the French nice about children,’ Sarah remarked.
‘Even us,’ snorted Tammy, screwing her face up into cartoon ugliness.
‘Maybe I should ask her about Les Fosses,’ said Nick.
‘Why?’
‘Historical interest.’
The girls crouched around a hapless invertebrate under the plane tree. From the church came the high, moaning hoover sound in which devils laughed and the innocent groaned. Or vice-versa. Where faith was concerned, one could never be sure. The front door was a cleft in a cliff: Nick disappeared into its black pitch. Alicia ran up to the front steps and sat on them, shielding her eyes while Beans and Tammy hid behind one of the plane trees. The air was cool when it shifted into a gust. Sarah sat on a low, sun-warmed wall and felt a moment of absolute repose; life was good, really. It was really really good, in fact.
Nick reappeared like Orpheus climbing back into the land of the living. He had forgotten his sunglasses at home and squinted as he approached them with news of the dead.
‘Any lowdown on the house, then?’
‘No. Well, she didn’t react. I suggest we try the café. Girls,’ he called out, with a ham note of irony, ‘you don’t want a sirop, do you?’
‘No,’ Alicia shouted back, unexpectedly – and meant it.
They were the only ones making a noise outside for one simple reason: they were the only ones. Aubain could have been a ghost village, apart from the vacuuming. No barking dogs, even. The neat mairie, with its capital A of steps and its French flag above the door and its glassed noticeboard full of official decrees (Avis à la Population), was shut for the day. The redundant words Café du Louvre were just legible in pale brown across a shuttered house facing the church. The hand-coloured poster pinned to its door announced an art competition; Nick was surprised to see the closing date still in the future instead of the far past.
Sarah studied the war memorial while the girls panted theatrically next to her. It was nothing more than a tapering slab of stone inside a chained-off square of tussocky earth. The stone had a dozen victims etched in under 1914–1918 (several of the surnames recurring), while there were six under 1939–1944. Alicia asked if these were people’s birthdays. Sarah explained, while Tammy implored God to give her sister a brain.
‘Shut up, Tammy,’ Sarah uncharacteristically snapped.
‘Look!’ shrieked Tammy, regardless. ‘Fernand Maille!’
Faded flowers, still in their plastic, lay on the plinth.
‘There you go,’ said Sarah, already contrite. ‘Well done, Tamsin –’ and Tammy greeted the cheering hordes with a sardonic wave.
‘We’ll check him out in the cemetery,’ said Nick. ‘Let’s go to the cemetery, then, girls, instead of the café. We’ll go on foot. It’ll be a nice walk.’
‘Yippee,’ said Alicia, despite the mention of a walk.
‘Are there drinks in the cemetery?’
‘Erm, don’t think so, Tammy.’
‘You said we were going to the café and having a Coke.’
‘Not strictly accurate. I proposed the café and was met with a thumbs down. I never mentioned Coke.’
‘That’s just stupid Ali-Baba,’ Tammy scoffed. ‘She can go to the cemetery and we’ll go to the café and sniff coke.’
The hermeneutic key to this precocious joke consisted of one word: Jamie.
‘Coke, Coke,’ echoed Beans, slapping her hands.
Alicia said, tugging her mother’s sleeve: ‘Mummy, she called me stupid and a name.’
‘Cemetery first,’ Nick insisted. ‘It’ll give us a good thirst.’
‘That rhymes,’ Tammy pointed out. ‘Mrs Foster says poems shouldn’t rhyme.’
‘Does she?’
‘She gives you marks off if you rhyme. Oh, how grateful I am for jolly Mrs Foster. Especially her lovely smell, exactly like an old sock.’
‘Tammy, that’s enough,’ Sarah remonstrated. ‘She is your teacher.’
‘She does her best,’ Tammy sighed.
‘Mummy,’ said Alicia suddenly, in a worried, conspiratorial tone, tugging at her mother’s sleeve, ‘where’s all the CVV cameras gone?’
Jean-Luc sees Marcel’s big jeep pass below the window, going too fast as usual, the dogs yelping. It’s not that Jean-Luc has never hunted. He’d go out with his father and a few of his father’s mates from the age of ten, bouncing along in the old Renault van. But he was never a good shot, and something about killing animals doesn’t agree with him, although at the moment of the hunt his blood can get up as much as anyone else’s. He once shot a big hare and ran up to it and found it alive, but badly messed about in the rump. And before he picked it up to chop it on the neck and put it out of its misery, the hare looked him straight in the eyes – not accusingly, no, but wonderingly, as if wanting to know why. They’d warned him about that look: there’s something bewitching in it, they said, as if animals were sorcerers. But he hadn’t looked away in time, and after that he only hunted to please his father. He hasn’t hunted at all for at least ten years. He is glad.
His father would tell him how, in the old days, when he was a boy, they’d pedal out on their bicycles before dawn, their bare feet in wooden clogs pushing at the pedals up the hill in the darkness, each dog in a wire cage behind the saddle.
He’d once got a double kill, his father said, soon after receiving his permit at seventeen; posted as the furthest look-out behind a clump of gorse on the high, lonely hills between Aubain and Valdaron, he’d watched the dawn come up, the sky turn milky, the first robin fix him with its tiny black berry of an eye; he’d watched the buzzards circle and the rabbits feed and the hills turn pink, ‘like they were blushing, like they were pretty girls blushing’. He could have shot ten rabbits, but he wasn’t there for rabbits.
Sometimes Jean-Luc believes that his father’s whole life revolved around that morning just after the war. Elie Maille was four years younger than his brother, Fernand. Poor Oncle Fernand. Had a limp, worked in the stinking tannery in Valdaron, never harmed anyone or got involved in anything: murdered by the Nazis on the way back from Les Fosses. And we all know why that was! Only Jean-Luc keeps him company, now, in his sad wanderings.
Elie was different. He was wilder. He became a messenger boy for the maquis, and saw terrible sights. Then the war was over and he was no longer a boy and there was no longer an enemy. And he got two magnificent seventy-kilo boars in four shots. After that, it was all downhill. Too much drink, a nag of a wife, a useless dreamer of a son; and never any money, or not enough of it – not enough to do anything more in life than exist, apart from the hunt and his handful of goats and the telly. He’d point at the telly with its flickering black-and-white pictures and say, ‘That’s my window on the world, Jean-Luc.’
Poor Jean-Luc. He often thought about his father at that time, just after the war, aged seventeen, before the phone or the telly – and how he must have got stuck, somehow, at that age. Because the way he behaved, until he died aged seventy-one, was not as a grown man should behave. So Jean-Luc, although he was afraid of his father until he was on his deathbed, tried to picture Elie just after the war: with his lame brother Fernand dead, his father Gabriel assumed dead (in fact, he was taking his time to get back from labour camp in Germany), his grieving mother Clémentine seeking comfort in Léon the blacksmith up at Valdaron, and nothing in the larder but chestnuts and old potatoes.
Jean-Luc can just remember his grandmother as a wasted skeleton, wandering about Aubain in black, muttering through toothless gums. ‘Fernand, Fernand,’ she’d mumble, as if talking to her eldest. Maybe she was! Maybe no one died, in the end. Maybe they all hung about like Oncle Fernand, just the other side of the glass, mouthing words at us, eyeless, with limbs like newts.
Elie Maille lived danger and excitement and sorrow too young, the priest said at his funeral. There was the massacre of the Resistance camp at Jallau, way up in the open hills above Aubain. It was a bush-camp, really: Jallau was just a few ruined walls and a shepherd’s hut with a roof of slates. The SS surrounded it after a tip-off and there was a shoot-out, thirty boys against three hundred Germans. Jean-Luc found a book in the flea market with photos of the dead Frenchmen lined up on the grass against a stone wall. There was a German in there, too: a deserter, a Communist, gone over to the Allies. His hands were up to his chin, as if cold. The label on the photo said ‘Karl Goldschmidt’.
This book was interesting, with a lot in it about Camp IV. It cost twenty francs and had a coffee-ring on the cover. He studied the photographs, linking the handsome, living portraits and the dead, battered faces. His father wasn’t mentioned anywhere, but then he was only a boy who brought bread and messages, sworn to silence. Sometimes Jean-Luc wondered, in the periods when his father was behaving really badly and his son hated him, whether the boy messenger wasn’t the one who tipped off the Germans. Only a local knew the way to Jallau, along the sheep-paths. But his father would cry real tears, sometimes, when remembering those men of Camp IV: and Jean-Luc never dared ask him where he was when the camp was surprised by the SS.
There were the twelve corpses, lined up neatly on the grass, some in bare feet, all in baggy trousers, blood coming out of their mouths and noses. One or two looked as if they were sunbathing, with little smiles. A German in uniform was crouched at the far end, his hand on a foot. Jean-Luc wondered what he was thinking. A separate photograph of the dead maquis camp commander showed something strange about his arm; it was bulging in the wrong places, connected to the body in a strange way, and the hand looked like a pig’s bladder. And his face! In the unclear photograph, it was calm under the webs of blood, but the left eye had been blotted out and the nose was swollen and someone had wrapped a cloth around the neck, hiding the chin. Jean-Luc knew the commander, whose Resistance name was ‘Villon’, had been badly tortured before execution. But there was no sign of pain in his expression.
This fascinated Jean-Luc, and he would (up until only a few years back) lie on the floor of his room in the same way, his arm bent crookedly, and adopt the corpse’s peaceful expression, trying to understand what death was. On bad days, he would also enact what came before the death, rolling about on the floor in dreadful agony, his testicles a bloodied mess, one eye gouged out, big SS boots stamping on his arm and then stamping again on the broken splinters. And oh, how sweet death felt, then! And how he understood that saintly expression!
And his mother would sometimes shout up the stairs, wondering what the noise was about. Or the silence after it. If only one could live alone, with only the birds and animals for company. If only the whole human race could be wiped out, starting with his own mother; then Marcel Lagrange; then the politicians; then the rich, especially the foreigners with swimming pools. Then anyone who happened to be in his way.
But he always shakes his head after these terrible thoughts, and laughs out loud. Doesn’t everyone have them? He doesn’t dare ask.
His father knew these young men of Camp IV. They were like fathers or brothers to him – Elie’s own father was a prisoner in Germany. The day after the massacre at Jallau, the bodies were shared out between the villages, to be put on display in the village mairies: Aubain had three of them, laid out on the council table, as stiff and cold as waxworks, their guts spilling from their shredded stomachs. The children at school had to file past, followed by the rest of the village. Jean-Luc’s father was among them, determined not to show how upset he was. The pig-necked SS soldiers were watching all the time. Watching their reactions. Six of the kids, from the Vasseur’s farm, were Jewish – they’d been swapped for six Vasseurs of the same age, farmed out to cousins since ’42. No one knew, or maybe they knew and didn’t say; there were so many Vasseurs, they bred like rabbits. Grégoire and Juliette Vasseur didn’t even get a medal, after the war, let alone a thank you.
You didn’t have to be a Jew, though, to be worried: this detachment had already shot dead ordinary folk for no good reason in the latest sweep – the Coutaud family in their isolated farm, five out of the full eight; Monsieur Bataille in his chateau up at Ardouillet, before chucking incendiary grenades into the lower rooms. They were angry, then, and now they were glad. But they were just as nasty.
It must have been that day, back in 1944, that his father got stuck.
Walking past the bodies in the mairie.
Or maybe during the beautiful early-morning moment of that time he had a double kill. Jean-Luc knew it off by heart; sometimes he felt it had been his own experience, that he was seeing it through his own eyes. His father’s gun is down in the cellar; he should clean and oil it, he thinks. It’s only right.
The hunt is running in the valley below, hidden. Then the music of the dogs (that’s how his father would put it) grows louder. The hunt is turning out of the valley and approaching where Elie lies behind the gorse bush and then there’s a panting and snorting and it’s two big beasts followed by three little ones crossing the field in a line right in front of him.
He lifts his gun and aims at the leader’s flank just in front of the groin and he fires and the boar squeals and stumbles and recovers enough to reach the trees and then it’s the second running into the notch of his sights and he pulls the trigger and nothing, it carries on running. The first of the little ones comes into view and he fires again and it rolls over instantly, as if by magic; so wild with excitement is Elie that the rest of the pack – the piglet’s brothers and sisters – vanish into the trees without another shot being fired.
All he has to do (and by now young Jean-Luc would all but mouth the words his father used, so familiar were they) – all he has to do is find the wounded animal and keep the dogs from ripping it apart. The other one is dead as a log, kidneys smashed. It’s a very young female. They aren’t supposed to kill them too young, but he didn’t have time to think. The wounded boar is the male of the group: he finds it by the barking and the squeals: surrounded by the dogs, still strong enough to keep them off with its huge tusks.
One shot in the head finishes it. Seventy-two kilos ready to be tied up and carried three kilometres along the rough track on his back.
‘It was a family,’ Jean–Luc would pipe up, the first few times his father told the story. ‘Like us. Papa, Maman, and three little ones.’ (In fact, he was an only child, but Papa knew what he meant.)
‘I just thought of them as Germans,’ said his father, each time. Then he would grunt, a bit like a boar himself. ‘Listen, Janno. We were hardened, back then. Nothing but chestnuts, chestnuts, chestnuts. Rough winters, almost no fuel: that had hardened us, not weakened us. We slept outside. We were on the alert. We were as hard as animals. It was war.’
At those moments, when his father talked like a real maquisard, the young Jean-Luc would feel weak and girlish. He almost wished there had been a war when he was growing up, that he might have become his father’s equal. But he would have been filled with hatred, too, and that Jean-Luc was glad not to have inside him. That anger, that hatred. The thirst for revenge that could never be satisfied. Everyone having to forgive and forget, once a bit of cleansing had happened. Jean-Luc’s father among them.
‘Nothing can bring back our Fernand,’ he would say. ‘I’m not going to end up like Mamie. I’m not going to go mad.’
When Jean-Luc’s paternal grandfather, Gabriel, returned from Germany, it was two years after the end of the war. He hadn’t been missed, being a lazy, bad-tempered type. He walked into the village on foot, as he’d walked all the way from the East on foot, with the odd lift in a cart (or so he claimed – but he was also something of a liar, it was said). The first person he passed was someone working in a field. That person was Elie, his own son. He didn’t recognise his own son, after seven years away. And Elie didn’t recognise his own father, so thin had he grown, and so long was it since he had gone away. So each waved to the other, politely, but neither knew.
That’s hard to imagine, Jean-Luc would think as a child, when his father had recounted this other story yet again. And Jean-Luc would pretend he was in the field, hoeing or planting, where a bright yellow villa has been built since. And he would look up and see Gabriel – who had become his father in his imagination, not his grandfather – lift his arm, waving, and he would not know him from Adam. All he could see was a thin man with browned, leathery skin and a drinker’s pouches under his eyes.
A stranger. A stranger means trouble, most times. Gabriel found his wife, Clémentine – Jean-Luc’s grandmother – had hitched up with Léon, the blacksmith from Valdaron. They had all thought Gabriel was dead.
Fortunately, Gabriel left within a fortnight. Vanished, no doubt taking to the road in a huff and disappearing into drink. But wicked rumours, started by the Lagrange clan, suggested he’d vanished more permanently: that the blacksmith and Jean-Luc’s grandmother were behind it. Then the rumours swirled into all the other murmurings that followed the war and, by the time Jean-Luc was born, had become fossilised – and might as well have been millions of years old, for all the truth they told.
Even the Lagrange clan let go of the Gabriel business; they had too much murk on their own side. A lid was put on it all. The blacksmith Léon was killed by a horse’s hoof in the head in 1953. Maybe that’s when Clémentine went mad. Electricity came to the village, then piped water, then, in 1993, a proper drainage system that ended up in a huge circular septic tank that converted the shit to a clear stream. Aubain no longer smelt. It was a new era. Foreigners began to buy houses, the older and more decrepit the better. Swimming pools appeared, bright blue, flashing in the sun, more and more of them, a whole emergency fleet of them – until even the locals had caught the disease.
Towards the end of his life, though, Jean-Luc’s father would talk about nothing else but the war: always the same stories, in the same order, as if he were burrowing back, finding the reason why it all happened. Over and over again, like a tape recorder with only one tape. Until he resorted to Oc, which Jean-Luc only half understood. Over and over again the stories were told, in a gabble of Occitan. No wonder Jean-Luc’s mother had her husband put away in a home, where he could drive the nurses mad instead of herself.
‘But that’s their job,’ she would say. ‘That’s what we pay for in our taxes.’
Not that she paid any tax; they earned too little. And anyway his father withered away after a few months in the home at St-Maurice. Jean-Luc couldn’t stand its smell. It was the smell of sickness and death: toilets, medicines, bleach and rottenness. No wonder Elie Maille fell silent in the last week or so, gazing into the distance as if through the wall of his little room. Jean-Luc was sure his father was back on that slope in the hills, crouched behind the gorse, hearing the lovely dogs bark and the whole hunt moving towards where he had been waiting with his gun since before dawn.
Maybe he’s up there now, Jean-Luc would think. Maybe if I went up there on the anniversary of the hunt, before dawn, I’d see him crouched behind the gorse bush, just the same but aged seventeen and with eyes covered over in a film of white like the skin on old milk.
Like Nick, Sarah was ‘worried’ about Mrs Foster. After the school’s nativity play (in which Tammy played a singing ladder up to heaven), Nick said that Mrs Foster was the type for whom Creationism was validated every morning by the mirror.
He was annoyed because he hadn’t been able to take photographs, even after the play: there were other kids around and the Mallinsons might put the snaps on their computer and send them to paedophiles or cut-and-paste the heads onto naked children’s bodies and so on. Nick fulminated at the fallen world and had a bit of an argument with Mrs Foster, who said it was nothing to do with her, it was health and safety. No photos whatsoever, Mr Mallinson. Sorry.
Mrs Foster was the acting head, now: the rather dull and crabby Miss Kearton had been killed in her car by a newly arrived Pole speeding the wrong side of the Cambridge ring road; he had claimed afterwards that, having realised his continental mistake, he’d been heading as fast as possible for the exit.
Miss Kearton’s death engendered, with Mrs Foster’s encouragement, a Diana-like flood of flowers in front of the school gates. Nick thought about this as they walked along the road to the cemetery. The whole thing had annoyed him, particularly as Tammy was very concerned about the size and expense of her own floral contribution in comparison with the others. He ended up spending far too much: Tammy virtually disappeared behind her showy mass of blooms as they approached the school gates and their huge blown-up photo, somewhat Stalin-like (he claimed), of a much younger Miss Kearton.
Which, of course, was defaced by obscenities within twenty-four hours, causing a mild spasm of despair in the community that surfaced in the local paper as quasi-fascistic rage. Photos were sent of the offending article, but it was decided that Miss Kearton would never have wanted herself to appear in public with blacked-out teeth, hairy nostrils, and obscene drawings all over her face. Tammy found it funny, but didn’t say so. And afterwards, when there were the jokes – about Miss Kearton driving into a pole and bending it, or whatever – she always giggled.
After passing a villa rendered (in the girls’ estimation) the yellow of sick, and then a stranded-looking, half-built one in breeze blocks next to a finished swimming pool, they came to the sign they’d noted on the way in, further from the village than expected. The cemetery was up a winding lane. The girls delayed their progress by treating the short hill as a Himalayan flank, plodding two or three exhausted steps then groaning, or sitting on the grassy verge like refugees. Contrary to their earlier enthusiasm – or at least Alicia’s – they saw no point in visiting the ‘stupid cemetery’; their father fell back on the limpest of justifications (‘It’s living history, guys’) while their mother gave ineffectual encouragement, counterbalancing Beans’s gravitational pull on the end of an outstretched arm. They gradually diluted into a straggly line; at one point the rest of his family were out of sight around the corner and Nick was alone.
He looked up at the sky, which was entirely without cloud or blemish. He might have been a fish at the bottom of the sea, with the bright, lit surface somewhere above him through layer after layer of blue. But the bottom of the sea is lightless, he reminded himself. This was more like the time he’d stood on the bottom of an outdoor public swimming pool as a boy, looking up, until his lungs were almost bursting and he’d had to kick up in a stream of bubbles. Here he was in the air and on the earth and sunlit, the warm photons settling on his face and making him happy. It is quite easy to be happy, he thought. It is a matter of simplification. Of cutting out what interferes in the appreciation of this. That glossed leaf, courageously itself against the depth of blue; a faint honey-smell of warming vegetation. He was actually alive. It’s not often you realise you are actually alive.
The others rounded the corner of the lane one by one, preceded by noise. Nick raised his arm ceremoniously.
‘Nearly there,’ he called. Beans was on her mother’s shoulders, bringing up the rear.
‘Dad-dy,’ Alicia whined, ‘you’re really horrible.’
‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he offered, although Alicia was getting heavy these days – a compact five-year-old.
‘What about me?’
‘You’ve got huge long legs, Tammy,’ said Sarah. ‘Is it much further, Nick?’
‘I said, we’re nearly there.’ Alicia settled on his back, crushing his upper vertebrae. Her hands were in his sparse hair, gripping his scalp like tiny suckers. Her pink shoes were not unsmelly, his fingers circling her ankles at chest-level. The hill felt steeper. He was too old for kids, at fifty-four. They exhausted him. They were unrelenting. He could have been their grandfather.
‘Vroom, vroom,’ he said, feebly, hoping he wouldn’t suddenly drop dead like the Vice Principal last year. ‘Formula One.’
And there were the gates.
The cemetery was surprisingly large for a small village, and had nice views from the crest of the hill it occupied. Four tall cypresses, black against the sunlight, lent a certain disconsolate harmony to the muddle of graves and crosses. The sun felt warmer up here, and beat off the stones in a blinding glare; it was hard to imagine it was still officially winter. The girls ran about between the tombs, gaily looking for Fernand Maille.
‘Fernand! Fernand!’ they called out, as if he were hiding.
Sarah hoped no one local would come, tolerant as the French were.
He was discovered by Tammy; carved on a simple grave he shared with other members of his family. The slab was scattered with miniature stelae and fake flowers, but no more clues were given as to the precise nature of his death. Sarah wondered if Jean-Luc could tell them more.
‘Hello, Mr Fernie-Wernie,’ Alicia joked, stroking the stone. ‘Bang! Bang!’
‘Let’s go and explore more,’ said Sarah, looking around her nervously. The three ran about again, making vrooming noises like boys.
A friend had told her that modern Western children, usually shielded from immediate experience of death, needed to visit cemeteries. Needed to have the truth gently introduced into their carefree, indulged lives. The way the girls were now, the picture of merriment between the slabs, seemed to rubbish the friend’s theory. Or perhaps not. Perhaps this was how life and death should be brought together.
Death was rock-hard. Her children were tiny scraps of softness. One of them might already be harbouring a mortal decay, a cancer. She was frightening herself.
She saw Tammy had braked in front of a huge, thick, slate-grey slab with a wavy top, and joined her. It belonged to the Lagrange family, with a cheery colour photo of the most recently deceased, a handsome man called Raoul. Died six years ago, almost to the day.
‘We saw the name Lagrange on the war memorial, didn’t we? He looks nice, poor man.’
She asked them to calculate his age, swinging her glasses from the crook of her forefinger.
‘A hundred and one,’ said Alicia.
‘Forty-four and three months and about ten days,’ Tammy murmured, with a sigh. ‘I don’t know how many hours and minutes.’
‘For someone who’s not supposed to be good at maths …’ said Sarah.
‘I got more years,’ complained Alicia.
‘Hawo!’ cried Beans, pointing at a large crow-like bird hopping about on the gravel.
‘Tammy’s right, but then she’s older than you, Alicia. Now, how many years ago did he, um, die, Alicia?’ She thought ‘die’ was more honest than ‘pass away’.
She felt curious about him, about this sunlit, smiling face vitrified and embedded in the stone; he didn’t look forty-four, he looked about her age. It was an old snapshot, chosen by the grieving family to show him at his best. A good choice, she reckoned. Other graves had photos, too, some of them sinister-looking or blurred or somehow unreal, as if the person could never have existed except as a waxwork, or a phantom from the past in a silly hat and spectacles. Always a phantom, even in life. But only Raoul Lagrange seemed impossible to imagine dead. So many of us do, she thought.
‘He died eight and a quarter years ago,’ tried Alicia, earnestly, in a full-on classroom way.
‘Six,’ Tammy said. ‘Almost exactly. Just after Fernando, because March comes after February. That’s really strange.’
‘Slightly different year,’ laughed Sarah, albeit amazed at her daughter’s brightness. ‘And if this poor man’s year wasn’t a leap year, which has an extra day, we’re talking about two days after, because February only has twenty-eight days.’
‘What’re you on about?’ wailed Alicia.
‘Tammy’s actually right again,’ said her mother, compensating the news with a cuddle. ‘Six years it is. Ten out of ten. But you got pretty close, darling.’
‘I can have a Coke, then,’ said Alicia. ‘In the café.’
‘Soon.’
Sarah put her glasses back on and looked about for Nick. He was on his back on the grass that bordered the cemetery, arms flung out as if he’d been shot. She wanted to call him, shielding her eyes from the bright sun and waiting for a sign of life. He’d looked quite puffed and red in the face, carrying Alicia up the last part of the hill. A mistake to come here, she thought. Living history! It was morbid.
Dishy Raoul, four or five years younger than Nick. If he’d lived. How kinky, to fancy someone through a photo on his grave! She walked towards the prone form in a relaxed way, so as not to worry the girls.
He didn’t stir. She wanted him to stir. His arms were flung right out. He never lay like that, normally. Stretched out like that.
Then his head lifted up as she approached, her shoes scrunching on the gravel over the beat of her alarmed heart. He needed to trim his eyebrows.
‘Isn’t the sun marvellous?’ he called out, head still up.
His neck must be almost dislocated. ‘This grass seems OK,’ she commented. She was so relieved for a second that she wanted to cry. Now she was back to normal and saying dull, inconsequent things, assessing herself as usual.
‘Oh,’ said Nick, taking a moment to cotton on, ‘it’s a bit prickly. There are prickly things in it. Not exactly a sward.’
His head was back on the grass. A wash of buttercup-like flowers shared part of the grass with similarly yellow flowers which were probably dandelions from the look of the leaves. She found the way he emphasised words a little cranky.
‘We should get a book,’ she said, sitting down next to him. ‘A flower book.’ Tammy had trailed her and was now hovering.
‘I’ve always found flower books useless,’ he confessed, ‘like bird books. Very little ever seems to match up. They’re gone before you’ve found the picture.’
‘Flowers don’t fly,’ she said, leaning back on her elbows.
‘No, but they wilt and die before you come back with the book the next time, because you inevitably forget the first time.’
‘You’ve always got the following year,’ she pointed out. ‘Assuming.’
The crow-like bird flew up and disappeared over the trees.
‘Tammy,’ said Sarah, ‘I think the others want you. Let Daddy and I have some me time.’
‘Mean time,’ Tammy murmured, moving off.
The three of them, golden sun in their golden hair, were planted comfortably on handsome Raoul’s grave, their ceaseless jittery kid-movements casting long, nervous shadows over the slab. She wondered if this was legitimate, too liberal of her; whether a villager might come along and be shocked at the foreigners’ behaviour. But she couldn’t move in the warm sun, the first real warmth of the year. She felt spiritual buds burgeoning inside her.
Raoul was grinning at the girls from his gravestone as they chatted together. Tammy kneeled on the gravel and felt its painful impression through her jeans. The younger two were making roads out of the gravel between the stelae and the porcelain flowers, visiting each other for tea and cake.
Tammy glanced at Raoul and stuck her tongue out. He didn’t react, except (she guessed) when she wasn’t looking.