A great plain, tiny figures waving desperately at the helicopter for a moment of attention, even rescue. The helicopter most often hovering over the wicked or the insane, rescuing them from the oblivion they otherwise deserve while their victims remain on the ground, largely anonymous. What was it Emerson said? ‘The first lesson of history is the good of evil.’ That’s a mystical positivist for you. Actually, history is tragic. No one ever learns from it.
But at least there is a helicopter.
Almost everything escapes attention. One forgets that, Nick was thinking. Most of life falls off the edge like millions of ball bearings on a continually tilting tray. The few little balls that remain are formed into patterns, as people in families or firms or villages make up stories about each other. Contradictory stories.
He had become, despite his political rekindling, a relativist, a near-total sceptic incapable of trusting the evidence.
Once, as a boy, on holiday in a windy Lowestoft, he’d walked across the flat sand against a brisk wind that stroked the incoming tide to molten pewter against the light, and he’d pretended he had the power to walk across water: you couldn’t tell from the brilliant, rippled surface whether it was an inch or abyssally deep. He’d think of that moment – the salt air in his mouth tainted with the stink of fish and lumpy wrack – when toiling in the dismal, obscurer reaches of history. It remained one of the key moments of his life, even more than the birth of his first daughter.
He’d scanned all of his own essays back home and was now scrolling through, the years flashing past, all those thousands of hours of furrowed thought. He would include two of his more relevant efforts in the collection, as the editor’s privilege – one to introduce and one to conclude, like bookends. A definitive review of the field.
His three distinct periods were too distinct, smelt of fracture and intellectual confusion. One of his more Deleuze-style pieces took Stalin’s statement that the Soviet people were too perfect to need jokes as a basis for analysing the records of various of his drunken meetings, where jokes had flown all night. This followed, in terms of publication, an earnest comparison of Peterloo with the miner’s strike of the 1980s: the last effort of his Marxist phase, it still resembled polemical juvenilia, riddled with methodological errors. Not much worse than the ensuing period, though, wracked by icy, polysyllabic mumbo-jumbo, like scientific formulae, and peppered with French words like shots of Drambuie. Even the term ‘imperialism’ now looked hopelessly faded.
Oh, this was a stinger: a brief look at the Muslim Brotherhood during the Suez Crisis, his lofty rejection of claims they were being trained by ex-Nazis, late of the SS. Paddling about in jejune references to ‘ideological discourses of power’, he’d never once investigated the fact that the claim might have been true. The Brotherhood’s roots, its early allies, the links between vestigial Fascism and mullah-brand nationalism –
There were sudden shouts outside. A wailing? He nipped to the window, which looked out onto the doomed lawn and the pool. Following Jean-Luc’s instructions, he had tested the pool’s pH levels after breakfast and the strip had turned the deepest possible purple, almost black. An acid bath, anyone falling in would dissolve. He didn’t tell Sarah. Instead, he’d poured in an entire bottle of pH Decreaser: sodium carbonate. He felt he was dealing with something alive, like a crafty, bone-idle and generally impossible student.
He listened. Muffled high-pitched voices from the front area. All fine. Let kids be kids. And then he saw, the other side of the arch, the stream of goats passing. The babble of their bells. The dream of Greenland. Poor Greenland of the melting ice-trays.
This was his third bash at work since their arrival, and he was finding it difficult. He opened the file marked Contributors and rubbed his neck, crouched to the screen. His neck was stiff, as it would sometimes get after swimming. It came of thrashing through this confused swirl of facts, the names all demanding to be brought alive again, made sense of. People briefly swept into historical play, then mostly forgotten. Reconstructing a voyage from snapshots of the barnacled wreck on the ocean floor: the music, the affairs, the quarrels. At least two of the contributors had disappointed, their efforts feeble or out of date. Others were still to deliver. One had died, her husband sending a draft that would need revision. Several were superb, and made him feel faintly obsolete, as their authors were mostly young. Peter Osterhauser’s was, alas, a corker.
He wobbled his tooth with his tongue, remembering the day his father bit into a raw carrot and said, ‘Blimey, my tooth’s gone.’ His father then fifty-four, of course, or thereabouts. Totting up figures in a British Rail office, proud of the computer that took up an entire room calculating timetables. To his son, home from university, he was already an old codger, part of history’s detritus. He didn’t wear jeans, for a start, and had his hair buzzed away an inch above his large ears every fortnight. And believed in the Red Menace, despite his son. Or because of, it suddenly occurred to Nick. So hard to interpret correctly. Motivation. Reasons for. He envied the Anglo-Saxon chronicler in his draughty cell, setting down the handful of facts picked up from passing monks knocking the mud from their boots.
The door shivered, as if someone was trying it. It wasn’t locked, though. It was only kept shut with a drop-latch.
‘Hello?’ he called.
The draughty cell. The silence. Despite the ever-surprising antics and noisy demands of the kids, there was a smooth quality to time here, an unruffled surface that was on the verge of being dull. Dull only because he was not yet adapted to Eden. Midgard. Whatever. On the other side of dull, he felt, was wisdom.
That night he had one of the most vivid, meaningful dreams he could ever remember.
He was in a kind of purgatory, perhaps the gloomy plains of Tartarus, all asphodel flowers and misty pools. The Sandlers were wandering about, naked and with split knees. ‘What we need is a ladder to the Lord!’ shouted Alan Sandler, shaking his fist in a crack of light. He reminded Nick of a faded rock star in a bad musical.
He looked down. As in waking life, his own big toes had curved inward but even further, it was hideous, he had to limp everywhere – it was not just the sharp stones. Alan Sandler was worrying and worsening a huge groin scab like the shell of an old hermit crab into which his manhood had retreated, overlooked by the folds of his withered belly. His nails were shattered. Nick was half-aware this was a dream, a tremendous one, and deliberately turned his back on the daylit mind. He was dressed for a moment like d’Artagnan. He swirled his rapier about and called Alan Sandler names: Uncle Sam, Washington, Exxon-Mobil, Saudi-sucker. Alan laughed and nodded his head like a madman. Lucy, with her withered breasts, seemed to have vanished.
‘Too right! Too right!’ yelled Alan Sandler. ‘America fucked up the entire world!’
Nick told him not to exaggerate, to remain faithful to the facts, to recall that the Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain, with a restless man bent over a boiler in a Glasgow yard; except that he could only sing it in a kind of plainchant. Alan said he was talking about casino capitalism, about crookery and oil, sounding weirdly like Nick himself, who was now intent on finding his own father in the humming swarms. The mist thickened briefly so they became phantasmal to each other, even though they were squatting together on a pool’s littoral, the water stretching into the mist like a sea. The stench of bad eggs gagged them, then a breeze blew through and the light silvered on the water, glittering here and there where the light shafted.
‘That light must come from somewhere,’ Nick’s father mused, suddenly present and as young as in the photos.
The hordes were by the pool of forgetfulness, scooping the brackish water in scrawny, pustuled hands, elbowing past in their coming and going, eyes hazed by amnesia.
Nick made for the pool of memory, dragging his father. They sat under the shade of the white poplar by the lapping water, the hordes despising them for it, throwing them angry glares and pointing until Nick dismissed them with an effort of mental will. Burning his mouth on the scooped-up water enabled him to talk of the old times. Nick had a need to talk of the old times. But his father had gone, pushed away by Alan Sandler. Sometimes it was better to dive straight in. Not here, of course: whole crowds ran into the brackish shallows and waded out to where the water reached their necks in a bid to drown themselves, but they could not drown themselves. No one died twice. Their lungs were phantom lungs: water passed straight through them. Were they to suck the bitter, burning waters of memory up through their noses, as he had once done with apple purée through a straw when he was five, they would only feel the pain, they would not succumb. The white poplar fluttered its leaves in a pale shimmer.
‘What I miss is the power shower,’ Alan croaked, with a wet mouth. ‘It’s right there in my head again.’
‘A soak in a hot bubble bath,’ sighed Lucy, who had materialised as if she had never been away, as if it were Nick’s memory that was faulty.
The brackish pool of Lethe was actually the remains of Hendon Reservoir, Nick’s father told them, having been around all along. Nick laughed uncontrollably. What does that make the pool of memory, he screamed? The Ruislip Lido? He woke himself up laughing, which reality translated into a mute juddering in his throat.
They made their presence known at the tiny mairie – a mixed experience. The secretary was a charming, attractive woman in her thirties, with impeccably cut hair that curled below each high-boned cheek; Sarah recognised immediately that Nick was taken by her, but didn’t mind that much. An attractive woman is an attractive woman. The President grinned at them from the shadows, his charisma reduced by being hung crookedly. The chugging of a photocopier in the back was the sole sign of activity, despite the slew of papers (mostly forms) on the desk.
They introduced themselves and the secretary seemed pleased, admiring the girls and giving them each a flat, grown-up’s sort of toffee from the drawer. ‘A present from the State,’ she joked. When they asked about the origin of the name of the farmhouse, she fished out a thick, stapled little pamphlet from a wad in the bottom of the cupboard behind her desk, and blew on it. It had a dim picture of Aubain church on the front, and a hand-drawn map of the commune on the back. The house was marked on the edge with a dot and Les Fosses (ruine), which impressed them. It must have been very romantic in 1992.
‘The previous mayor was a great intellectual,’ she explained. ‘He knew everything. A great loss.’
Then the present mayor appeared on cue from the inner room, holding a sheaf of papers; short and stout at the hips, in his late fifties or early sixties, wearing baggy jeans, a dismal old sweater and half-moon glasses, his crumpled, brown face under the straggly hair and droopy moustache never strayed far from its expression of profound distaste. The secretary introduced Monsieur le Maire and told him who they were. He didn’t even shake their hands.
They were glanced at over the half-moons, given the briefest sign of recognition that they existed, and then granted a view of his mayoral back. Sarah was struck by how incredibly like their local Cambridge bag-lady he looked from the rear. She felt a peculiar anxiety at the rejection, however. When Beans pulled a box-file off the desk by mistake, Sarah rescued it in a flustered way, as if she were a fiunkie at the court of a tyrant.
She left the mairie feeling unwanted and unloved, which was stupid. Her notion of a tubby little mayor with cheeks rosy from wine and a fund of amusing stories had gone up in smoke. It didn’t seem fair.
It was oddly misty, today, and the village resembled a daguerrotype. An elderly man was coming up the steps. He asked them if the mayor was in and they said yes, he was. Anglais? Yes, they were English. They were staying, etc., etc. He commented on the extreme prettiness of their girls (who were skipping about at the foot of the steps) and the parents thanked him without showing their discomfort – which in any case was, for some reason, negligible.
His face brightened even further when he learned they were Cambridge professors and he insisted they come over to his house opposite, a perfect little eighteenth-century place set back next to the church, to look at his books. They did so, thirsty for approval.
His name was Georges Chambord and he was a retired engineer. He had designed motorways: his chief pride was the motorway that curved on concrete columns between two places they didn’t recognise and did not retain. It was a work of art, he said. They could have no idea how long it had taken him to design it thirty years back; he’d studied the landscape and now it was part of that landscape. His hands swept the air in his small front room lined with books and, although they disapproved of motorways, both Nick and Sarah felt inspired.
The girls were running about in the little square, safe as houses, as Georges Chambord swept the parents up in his scholarly enthusiasm for motorway design, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo and the philosophy of Hölderlin. He showed them a book of de Musset’s poems signed by the author: he had picked it up for twenty francs years ago. His neatly dressed wife arrived and shook their hands and seemed equally at ease with the heady heights of literature, philosophy and concrete engineering. They drank tiny coffees laced with some ancient family-distilled liqueur and laughed and chatted, while the Mallinsons’ French soared as it had never done before; this was because neither Georges nor Claudine seemed to notice its lack of fluency, and their own French was so clear it was almost transparent: the English visible at the bottom. The only flat note was Georges Chambord’s scathing view of the locals. Nick told him, in a neutral manner, about the hunters passing the Mas.
‘The hunters are onion-heads. They feed, sleep and reproduce, like my onions in the garden. That’s all.’
‘And hunt,’ Nick laughed. ‘Not quite like onions.’
Pas tout à fait comme les oignons. It was the first successful joke he’d made in French, ever.
Georges said he was a Parisian and, for Parisians, everything was a joke except revolution. For him – Georges – revolution was also a joke. Around here, he claimed, they were mostly inbred peasants with nothing in their heads but how much money they were hoarding under the mattress. That’s the Midi for you. And Protestants. Don’t trust anyone in the South, from around Clermont Ferrand down. As Hugo said, La moitié d’un ami, c’est la moitié d’un traître. Not that anyone’s heard of Victor Hugo, down here!
The liqueur softened the content of these acerbic reflections to an acceptable mush in Nick’s head – and he was still smarting from the reception by the mayor. A Trot, pickled in ethyl. The only great Trot was Leon himself. He idly spun the image of his old, wild-haired hero opening the door to the assassin’s alpine axe. Georges may be a neo-fascist, he reflected, but at least he’s welcoming: friendly and civilised.
They asked the Chambords about the history of the Mas des Fosses, but all Georges knew was that it had been a Resistance camp in the war. ‘Like most other places!’ he laughed. ‘You won’t find any family here who didn’t have a heroic relative in the Maquis! Strange, hein?’ From the way he said it, he was clearly being ironic, even cynical. They nodded knowingly, although really they didn’t have a clue. But at least it vindicated Sarah’s interpretative reading of Fernand Maille’s plaque.
They only beat a retreat – a somewhat hasty one – when Georges began to tell them about the British Club in Valdaron, run by someone calling himself Dezerez, eventually disentangled by Sarah as ‘Des the Res’ – an amusing character, according to Claudine, if a bit loud. They met fortnightly over tea for gossip, discussion, and the occasional talk or film. Georges was privileged to be an honorary member, improving his English as their French was almost non-existent. He was sure they would be joyeux at having two newcomers – they were all a bit long in the tooth!
‘Thank you, but no,’ said Nick, instantaneously guillotined by depression. ‘We’re very busy, you see.’ He pretended not to have a telephone number of any kind.
Driving home, the liqueur no longer romping, he felt remorse. The mush had now hardened to something salamilike in his forehead. Sarah kept muttering ‘Right side’ at every junction. Fortunately, there weren’t many. The kids pronounced the mayor’s title like a sheep noise, exaggerating in the car, going over the top, hungry.
‘I guess,’ said Nick, ‘you can’t blame the Trot. Rich Brits called Des pushing up property prices beyond the reach of locals. Swimming pools draining the water table. We’re the class enemy. The lackeys of imperialism. Turning farmhouses into fun palaces.’
‘They’d fall down,’ Sarah pointed out, ‘if we didn’t do that.’
‘Phew, that was close. Thank God for us Brits, then. Saving France’s heritage. Phew. All power to your elbow, Des.’
Nick drove on with his head tilted back and his mouth open, anticipating a response. Sarah should never have made such an elementary mistake. A few years ago she would have crawled out of the wreckage with broken wings; now she ignored the momentary press on her heart, as if her head and her heart were in separate compartments. Anyway, she was a little tipsy.
‘The mayor doesn’t even know us,’ said Sarah, prodding the point on regardless. ‘Right side.’
‘We don’t know any of the locals.’
‘Jean-Luc. Georges and Claudine. We tried in the café, but they weren’t exactly friendly.’ She pushed up her glasses and recalled the café visit, the telly blaring above their table, the big hairy man with the cigarette stuck to his lip, who was nice at first but then turned cold when they mentioned where they were staying.
‘Georges and Claudine aren’t locals, they’re Parisians. We’ve known them an hour and a half. And that’s probably enough. Jean-Luc is the handyman, not a friend.’
There was an awkward silence full of little wormy things they couldn’t say in front of the girls.
‘The grass is not coming up,’ she said, as if rebuking herself. ‘No sign whatsoever. Lucy Sandler won’t be happy. Right side.’
‘If she asks, we’ll pretend it’s hirsute. We don’t want him to lose his job, do we?’
Sarah turned round, frowning. ‘Tammy, what’s happened to your seat belt?’
‘Broken.’
‘Rubbish. Put the end thingie back in. Or you’ll go flying through the windscreen.’
‘Wheeee,’ yelled Alicia. ‘Fun.’
‘It is the mayor’s job to welcome people to the commune,’ Sarah continued. ‘Alicia, that’s enough!’
‘I’m parcel deaf,’ she explained.
‘How do you know that’s his job?’ asked Nick, rhetorically.
‘I’m assuming. Right side.’
‘Please don’t keep saying that,’ he snapped, still nettled by the sour face of the mayor and his own political spinelessness in the Chambord house. ‘It’s become meaningless.’
They bumped past the plaque with its gaudy offering and Alicia made gunshot sounds as best she could. Tammy’s sheep now made feeble, dying noises. Beans was asleep, head lolling like a drunk. It was still strangely misty today.
‘Nothing sourer than a sour Trot,’ Nick said, trying to make up for his burst of temper. ‘Except a bitter Leninist. As we used to say. And I should know. We’re the vanguard, comrades, not the guard’s van!’
‘That photo you had in your passport when I first met you,’ said Sarah, as the house swung into view through the trees, ‘it looked so like one of the Baader-Meinhofs. That hirsute one whose beard looked like a giant bow tie.’
‘They were all pretty hirsute.’
‘He was by far the hirsutest.’
‘What’s hirsoot, Daddy?’ asked Tammy, head thrust between the front seats.
‘Hairy.’
The girls exploded. The car growled to a stop.
‘Did mine really look like one, in the photo? A giant bow tie?’
Sarah nodded. ‘Uh-huh. Well, it was sort of on each side of your chin. A floppy bow tie. Thank God you’d grown up by the time I met you.’
Whiffs of pine sap, warm pine needles, sticky pine cones: always that flash feeling of bliss from pine sap, as if heaven or its equivalent was just round the corner. He had found a helpful, if rather heavy, field guide among the novels in the sitting room, concealed in plainness behind its lost dustjacket. A field guide to heaven would be thinner, he considered: he couldn’t quite think why. He was introducing the girls to the local flora and fauna in the part of the forest that was mostly pine.
He explained to them about what botanists call ‘litter fauna’ – the forgotten centipedes, slugs, worms, ants and so on who eat up what drops down onto the ground and then make fresh soil out of it.
‘Yuk,’ said Alicia. ‘Does it come out of their bottoms?’
‘Kind of,’ he admitted, turning a page of his crib.
Alicia shot to her feet and expressed disgust. From now on she’ll have a soil phobia, he thought. She’ll live her entire life in the city.
‘I was only joking,’ he fibbed. But it was probably too late. She’d end up in New York or Shanghai. ‘Let’s make a documentary about it.’
They scraped with twigs at the soft forest floor of pine-needles and instantly discovered creepy-crawlies, which Tammy filmed, using the zoom to make them bigger. Unfortunately, Beans enthusiastically stamped on a large, newly emergent snail and they spent several minutes trying to mend its shattered hull. Detergent-like spume began to ooze from its writhing, muscular slime.
‘That’s medicine to mend itself with,’ Nick lied. ‘Now it needs to be taken to the hospital and covered up.’
‘Antibotticks,’ Tammy nodded.
‘Anti bottoms,’ giggled Alicia.
‘Not quite,’ Nick said. ‘This is one-hundred-per-cent natural.’
He placed the broken, pulsating snail in his palm and carried it ceremoniously over to the next tree. The foam issued forth from its chilly bulk in surprising quantities, like the contents of a fire extinguisher. He hid its agony in the pine-litter under their innocent, enquiring gaze. Beans seemed not the slightest bit troubled. A moral lesson had been missed.
‘I used to put leaves and stuff on slugs, because I thought they were homeless,’ he told them. ‘That they’d lost their shells.’
‘When you were our age?’ checked Tammy.
He nodded. ‘A long, long time ago.’
A gunshot sounded, making them jump.
‘Whoops. It’s the Wild Hunt of Odin. We’ll have to whistle, kids. To let them know we’re here.’
‘Don’t like Odin,’ said Alicia, for whom Nick’s bedtime reading of the Norse myths was a luminous swirl of incomprehension.
‘Can’t whistle,’ Tammy admitted. ‘But I’m in training to.’
‘Sing then.’ Nick cleared his throat. He’d been told by the doctor to avoid singing for six months. But this was an emergency. ‘Frè-re Ja-cques, frè-re Ja-cques …’
Another gunshot, closer. It echoed dully and flatly through the tall pines. The song hiccupped and then continued, louder. They sang, raggedly, between the trees.
Sarah was at work in the bedroom while they were among the pines, using the little yellow table with the grapes painted on the drawers. She had reorganised and expanded a single paragraph from her thesis (which had been generally regarded as ‘exceptional’); it was so hard to fit everything in and yet keep order and sense.
The grand irrigation scheme of the Office du Niger in West Africa, its engineers inspired by the hydraulic works of British South India, was hardly consonant with contemporary conceptions of an ‘associationist’ rather than ‘assimilationist’ French empire (as illustrated by Normandin’s narratives of hydraulic decline and fall outlined in the previous chapter), and remained the exception. As Raymond Betts and Alice Conklin have argued, continued French rule would be assured by decentralised adaptation to the interests of native societies and economies on the part of modernising colonial developers. The Office du Niger’s vast waterworks were attacked by the Sorbonne geography professor Charles Robequain as being ‘a waste of time and money … [resulting] from an intense desire for assimilation, into which certain factions hoped to force not only people but climate and soil as well’ – unfavourably contrasting that scheme with the development plan he had drawn up for post-war Indochina.
She looked again at the paragraph and felt it needed major hydraulic works itself, perhaps preceded by a development plan. The laptop’s keyboard yielded again to her quick fingers – a spatter of rain on glass, a stormy gust of concentration. It was even worse: poor Normandin would have to be relegated to a footnote. She groaned hammishly in her throat. How odd, to make a private sound, to be completely alone.
On a strange whim, a kind of amusing feint, she opened a new document on the screen and began something entirely fresh:
Nobody is sure why Le Mas des Fosses is thus called, since there is no indication of any ‘quarry’ or ‘burial place’ in the records held at the two-room mairie in Aubain (the commune’s only village lying some five kilometres away by narrow road).
A local publication by the previous mayor of Aubain – a well-read ex-teacher and amateur archaeologist - suggests that, given its superb position, the site was a sacred place in the later Iron Age, marked by now-obliterated sacrificial pits or ditches before the ilex trees took over. His only evidence for this is a nineteenth-century discovery (recorded by the village priest but now lost) of an iron sword-blade folded back on itself, recovered during the laying of a terracotta water-pipe behind the house. The blade was dated to pre-Roman Gaul.
Scraps, she thought. We cannot always choose what we carry with us. A shopping list. A supermarket flyer. An iron sword.
Even if most of the above was lifted from her reading of the ‘local publication’, it was still good, objective history. Sarah did not yet know how to introduce her own memory into her account. She was too well trained, and history undoes memory, picking it apart and reducing it and reassembling it. No memory – organic, self-constructing – is ever reliable. It is easier to forget, or to reinvent. That is the role of the historian, she thought: to remember, and not worry about being despised for it. She was enjoying herself.
She turned over another page of the pamphlet and tapped gaily on, scarcely noticing the vague percussives of gunshots from the woods.