The two of them went on a little excursion that began at the source of the local river, leaving the girls with Jamie. He’d got the message about the pool, he claimed, nodding sagely. About never leaving the two younger girls alone outside, especially at the back, because of the pool. He’d loosened his Iron Age topknot and it now poured like a frizzed-up horse’s tail out of a red hairband, more prehistoric than protohistoric, Nick thought.
‘Well, Romans invented scissors,’ he joked.
They’d told Jamie about the danger so many times that he made his sisters laugh by turning it into an advert once the parents were gone. He wrote something out and then put on a baseball cap he’d found in a cupboard and read aloud what he’d written in a funny American voice, poking his elbows out and prancing from foot to foot like a show-horse:
‘Hey, folks, introducing probably the Most Dangerous Swimming Pool in the World, with enhanced drowning levels and no operating alarm! With this state-of-the-art model you can lose your life in two minutes flat! No one will hear you, thanks to its unique location just far enough from the house to make it a true and deadly risk! Yes, folks, there’s one name and one name only when it comes to choosing your family pool: Death Trap Inc.!’
Tammy cheered and Alicia squealed, Beans going over the top and slamming her fist onto her Petit Suisse pot, which seemed to explode in ectoplasmic globs.
‘Death rapping!’ yelled the girls. ‘Death rapping!’ Tammy pretended to drown in bubbling paroxysms and lay on the tiled floor, asking for the kiss of life, which Alicia granted by dripping cold cocoa onto her face. Tammy had to welt her with an elastic hairband, which was quite effective. Jamie said ‘Whoa,’ as ineffectively.
Their parents filmed their romantic excursion on the camcorder. The spring was a muddy whelm in a cave in the side of a rocky overhang, reached through a sloping field of silvered grass the wind kept switching from right to left, left to right. They couldn’t work out exactly where the water came from in the rock behind. It just seemed to seep up, almost a pool, then to trickle through the grass and end up tumbling out of an ancient stone conduit at the bottom of the slope.
There were echoing drips in the little cave. Nick blocked the trickle with stones. ‘Manon des Sources!’ he called out. He pulled a gruesome face for the camera, which made the girls laugh during the laptop screening that evening.
‘It’s that peasant, Ungulino or whatever he’s called,’ came their mother’s voice as the image wobbled. ‘Who blocks it first. Isn’t it? With his dad.’
‘They’ll be looking at the parched fields down below, shaking their fists at the sky,’ Nick declared, lifting a large stone into place. ‘The coolants in the nuclear power station will be at critical levels.’
Despite the leaks in his dam, the muddy whelm became a pool quite swiftly. It was a dryad’s pool, clear and lovely, nestled in the little cave with its strange, greenish light. It lapped at surprised ants on the dry edges: Sarah captured these on the zoom, but for too long and was photographed doing so by Nick. Then the water reached the top of the stone dam and trickled over. Nick pointed to this, as serious about it as a small boy. The pressure of the water had loosened the stones and the pool was diminishing. Where did the water come from? All they could see were secretive little whirls and turbulences in the sinking pool.
Sarah lay back on the field’s tough, springy grass. It was cool but sunny and she didn’t care about the insects, she’d let them explore. She opened her eyes and flicked a tiny winged thing off her cheek; it stuck to her finger, a broken biplane crashed into the giant whorls of her finger. For which she was sorry. She looked up and rejoiced in the puffy white clouds high up like a dream of elsewhere, scarcely moving, as the camera panned away and onto a revolving buzzard none of the others would be able to see on screen.
And the ants were too small to be interesting. The girls could hear their mother breathing behind.
‘Don’t I look unbelievably old?’ said Nick, sitting on a cushion on the floor like a teenager.
Jamie was a fun big brother, quite a good child minder. Nick and Sarah returned from their walk to the source to find the four of them playing sleeping lions in front of the barn: an idyllic portrait, down to the sun playing in Jamie’s wispy chestnut beard as he pretended to snore, his small eyes open just a slit. Sarah said nothing about the use of one of the Sandlers’ magnificent Middle-Eastern blankets, which had picked up half the yard’s natural detritus. Instead, she filmed him. The tiny break had done her good. Seeing her children again, intact: a decision someone had made in a shady heaven.
She also filmed the boat of dead flowers, circling in the water. Jamie had gone off for a pee and discovered it. Tammy had said nothing, feigning ignorance. They’d placed it in the water because a beetle had drowned. The ribbon saying REGRETS was still on it, pinned to the stems and just legible.
Sarah said how strange, to find a funeral bouquet in the trees. Dragged off the plaque by an animal, maybe.
‘It makes me think of military burials at sea,’ she remarked.
The flowers were completely wilted, like overboiled veg. Nick fished it out with a stick and carried it into the trees, relieved that it hadn’t traumatised Sarah, in the end.
‘All gone,’ he said, on his return.
‘We hope,’ said Jamie.
He’d smoke his dope up in the woods, which meant he was out a lot. He only appeared, in any case, at midday: he tended to stay up into the early hours and emerge mid-afternoon with tiny, bloodshot eyes. He never had a meal with the others. He used the very low and cobwebbed back door which opened directly onto the yard and was reached through a kind of scullery, thus avoiding the kitchen entirely. Jamie’s Door, they called it. No one else used it because no one else liked spiders, especially not the long-legged, hairy type that lived in the Mas des Fosses, so big you could see their beak-like mandibles muttering. Jamie could open the door without breaking their webs, which lay across the hinges and half hid the panels in dusty, Victorian swags.
He’d walk occasionally to Aubain (an hour on foot) and from there hitch to Valdaron. He’d met the Chambords, from the sound of it: Hugo, Hölderlin and concrete engineering. They sent their best wishes, he told Nick, and hoped he and his family would come to dinner one day. Nick’s heart sank: what lies would Jamie have told the Chambords? Was his French even good enough? In Valdaron he had a favourite café in which (Nick and Sarah surmised) he was dealing dope. They assumed he’d brought back dope from South America in tight little high-grade wads of darkness to pay his way. This was all they could gather, and much of that was guesswork.
He ate quite a lot, compared to the others. He liked bread. The bread was cut in hunks (rather than slices) straight onto the table – adding to its cleaver-scars – then devoured with butter but without a plate, casually, anywhere in the house. You could trace Jamie’s progress via the crumbs, but only the ants – miniscule, as if assembled through a microscope – appreciated it. Sarah didn’t want confrontation, since any victory on her part would lead to something worse than Jamie the Annoyance: namely, Jamie the Avenger.
He helped a bit. ‘Now you’re here,’ his stepmother said. He even hung out the washing one day, with Tammy’s help. The trousers were the right way up, which was the wrong way up, legs expecting feet. Tammy showed him what she called the ‘Irish strawberry’ bushes next to the line, which now had creamy flowers, but the ripe fruit on the biggest and best had been completely stripped – by the birds, obviously.
‘They’re kind of rough and gooey at the same time,’ she said, handing him one. ‘They made flutes out of them in Ancient Greece. They look like mini hedgehogs, don’t they?’
‘Must have been messy, blowing them.’
‘Not out of the fruit, stupid!’ cried Tammy, creasing up.
Jamie ate one. ‘Hey, I love eating foetal-sized hedgehogs. Now I’m going to die very slowly and in incredible agony, right?’
Nick suggested appointing him as pool manager, but Sarah said no: the idea of a stoned Jamie leaning over the troubled waters with a bottle of acid or whatever was not reassuring.
Unknown to the others, she was skinny-dipping every two or three days, just after dawn. The last time had been under a grey sky, and the pool was a grey slab. Deliberately lowering her body into a liquid grey slab was unpleasant, and she couldn’t quite reach the glow phase before she emerged, as cold as a slug, the filters clucking their disapproval. Afterwards, though, she’d felt good – tingling with health as she towelled herself vigorously. It was a secret corner of her life, like lost ground rediscovered.
‘The thing is,’ said Nick, with his mouth full, ‘we’ve got bags of time in front of us.’
‘He might stay right to the end.’
‘He can’t.’
‘I’m not clearing up after him. He never does his teeth. He never washes his hair.’
Nick shrugged. ‘An anarchist. Or just absent-minded, like me.’
‘Whatever else he is,’ said Sarah, the prunes in her lamb stew swimming like blind eyes, ‘he is not absent-minded. He’s calculating. He’s a schemer. He’s like Peter Osterhauser.’
Nick groaned. ‘Peter Osterhauser?’
‘That’s all just a mask, all that hesitating of Peter’s, those ums and ers.’
‘Ums only. He never ers. As it were.’
Sarah laughed and leaned across the little table and gave him a kiss on his high forehead; the smooth pale sweep seemed to dwarf his features, gathered between it and his jaw as if conferring.
The Bobo Stenson Trio were edging Swedishly through calm connecting lakes of jazz and making him feel forgiving and tolerant. ‘Graffiti,’ he said, miming it in the air with his knife, ‘on the walls of Fellows’ Court. Pffff! Peter Osterhauser: he may, um, umm, but he never errs.’
‘Why does Jamie want to be here, anyway? He can’t stand us,’ he admitted, later, after they’d finished the bottle between them. He fiddled with his plum stones, rearranging them on the bread-scoured plate.
‘Helena? Her suggestion?’
‘Probablement. Knowing we were having a good time.’
‘Mind you, he gets a good deal,’ Sarah pointed out.
‘A good deal of what?’
‘I mean a good deal, period. Fed, watered, sheltered, shown affection. He does love his sisters.’
‘Do you think the way he talks is the way he thinks, or is it a mask?’
Sarah didn’t reply, not really concentrating. She found Nick’s type of jazz tiring after a while, and CDs went on too long.
‘Don’t you think CDs go on too long?’
‘He could’ve got into Oxbridge, you know,’ said Nick, ignoring or not having heard her. ‘If he’d pulled his finger out. Of course he could’ve done,’ he added, draining the very last of the bottle. ‘Instead, he didn’t even manage more than a couple of terms at Chester.’
‘That wasn’t Chester’s fault,’ Sarah pointed out. ‘Your brightest graduate student last year had got his first from Chester, if you remember. The one who did his thesis on the Brazzaville Conference and never stopped talking.’
Nick nodded. ‘The one from Coventry who said he’s going to be a city trader because money equals freedom.’
‘Yup, ’fraid so.’
‘At sixteen Jamie wanted to be a policeman,’ said Nick.
‘Because that was the one sure-fire way to annoy both you and Helena.’
Nick shrugged. ‘We all need the police,’ he said.
‘Did you tell him that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘You OK, Sarah?’
‘I’m OK. Thanks, Jamie.’
‘Cool, yeah, I can kind of imagine what that’s like?’
Sarah smiled sympathetically, spreading apricot jam on a slice of baguette for Beans. Nick was at work upstairs.
‘I can just about imagine it,’ Jamie went on, ‘cos I have this memory of it from somewhere around eight years old? Eight and a quarter? Nine?’
‘I’m practically nine,’ said Alicia, wandering off into the sitting room with her plate of biscuits at a dangerous angle.
‘Silly Bin-Bag,’ chortled Tammy. ‘Bin-Bag Ali. That’s me who’s nearly nine.’
‘Don’t spread crumbs,’ Sarah called after her, her eyes flicking over the king of crumb-spreaders. Alicia came back into the kitchen and said, ‘I’m nine in –’ Here she stopped, counting on her fingers. Tammy laughed.
‘Tammy, you’re not nine for another seven months,’ Sarah said, trying to seek equability between them, placing weights on the scales like a goldsmith.
Jamie’s eyes narrowed, suddenly, as if peering through a bunker’s slit.
‘It’s good you’ve made your life so comfortable,’ he said, perched on the stool with his elbows on the table. ‘With my old man.’
‘Yup, there’s good and bad.’
‘There’s bad then, is there?’
‘I want to do some cookery,’ Alicia announced, tugging on her mother’s sleeve. ‘Mummy.’
‘That’s an idea. We can make that choccie cake.’
‘Choccie cake,’ echoed Jamie, his head moving up and down like a toy sheep Tammy had. The two words buckled under the derision unfairly loaded onto them.
‘Yum, Damie,’ said Alicia, waggling her bottom as if she were desperate to go to the loo. ‘I’m doing it all, not Tammy one bit.’
Sarah announced, in a gay and carefree voice, that they were fatally short of flour.
The day the photographs come in a plastic envelope, his mother is down in the kitchen, watching his every move with eagle eyes.
‘What’s that, Jean-Luc?’
It has dropped through the letter box and sits in the wire basket hanging off the door. Jean-Luc can hardly believe it. It is like a miracle. It has only taken three days. He stands up slowly and calmly and retrieves the envelope, although his hands shake.
‘Fishing stuff,’ he says.
She snorts. Her eyes are like a young girl’s, in terms of sight. She’s noticed the pale footprints on her carpet and the stairs from the plaster-dust in his bedroom. She notices everything. ‘That’s photos,’ she chuckles, as if she can see right through the envelope. ‘Photos of your girl, my sweet?’
Jean-Luc wants to hit her. ‘That’s right,’ he murmurs, too feebly. He puts the envelope into his jacket pocket and sits down and carries on with his hot chocolate, lifting the bowl with both hands and dipping his head with a stretching movement of the neck as he’s done in the same way at the same table every morning since he was three, when he was allowed his first bowl, red and made of tin. He sucks it up and she tells him, as she’s told him for three decades, that he’d win the Olympics for noisy drinking. And as usual he ignores her.
He’s loaded the van with the kit for the electric fence and the bright-yellow outdoor paint for the Belgian couple’s garden furniture, which he is overdue on because he got the wrong shade and they fussed. He’ll look at the photos somewhere on the way to Les Fosses. The idea that he might meet the Englishwoman, with the photos of her nude in his tunic pocket, terrifies and excites him at the same time. His mother watches him, chortling to herself. She used to make everyone laugh, they say, with her Limousin humour.
‘I wish it was photos of your girl,’ says Marie-Thérèse. ‘Instead, I’ve bred a Félix la Ponte.’
Jean-Luc is used to her calling him this. Félix la Ponte was an artiste in a travelling revue way back, before he was born, who dressed up as a woman. The revue went from town to town, and she’d watched it as a kid when she was still living in Dijon. Even though no one except his mother even remembers Félix la Ponte, it hurts him, it makes his chest pop like a roasted chestnut, but the one power he has over her is to ignore her insults. Everything that comes out of her mouth is not much different from what comes out the other end. It stinks, anyway. It’s like her rolling Dijon rs that she’s never got rid of, strange as Spanish.
He takes a sip of his chocolate and pretends to be watching the telly with great interest. It is a programme on parrots. No, on where to go for your holidays. Martinique, they suggest. Shots of lovely black and browned girls in bikinis, gleaming with oil. Palm trees and surf. Then another parrot.
‘Your dad always said you were an odd one,’ she continues, pulling out another cigarette against Dr Demarne’s orders. ‘No one but yourself to blame, I’d tell him. He can’t even hold a gun straight, he’d say. Unless it’s pointing at his foot,’ she adds, in his father’s rasping voice, chuckling again then bursting into one of her coughs that seems to seize her and shake her like a giant and go on and on.
Jean-Luc gets up and leaves the house, even though she is having one of her coughing fits. Let her die, he thinks. He’s walked out like that before now, but she’s always been right as rain on his return. Now, as he closes the door behind him, stepping into the street, he hears her trying to say something, begging him not to leave her like that. Of course his dad never said what she claims he said! Her tongue is not like a viper’s, it is worse than a viper’s. Vipers don’t talk, for a start-off. They only sting.
He pats his packet of photos and starts the van. It coughs like his mother and dies. He tries again. Lucille’s watching from two doors up, as usual, bent forwards on her front step. It fires, leaving its dark smoky trail all the way up the narrow main street of Aubain as he heads for Les Fosses, the posts for the electric fencing jiggling behind him. He hasn’t been back all week, and he is nervous. He glances in the driving mirror and sees he still has a smear of chocolate on his upper lip, like a small boy. A kid he’s never seen before circles on his bike in the road as if he owns the place.
He stops on the way, pulling in off the Mas’s track where there’s a passing space overgrown with low brambles. They rustle under the van and catch in the trailer-hook that he keeps meaning to unbolt because he hardly uses it. He high-steps into the acacia woods to where the slope dips sharply into a hollow darkened by a cover of holm oak. He opens the packet in a single blot of sunlight. His fingers are huge and clumsy and dirty-nailed. A smell of laboratories with technicians in heavy glasses replaces the scents of vegetation. Plastics and chemicals and city life. The faraway dream of Paris.
The first photograph is of her walking nude by the pool, but she’s blurred into a ghost and everything is sloped, including the house in shadow behind. His heart sinks. The second photo shows her from the back, crouched to the water. Although he was standing behind the hut and felt very close, there’s much more background than there is of her and her rear end is not much bigger than a bread crumb, you can almost blow it off. The right side of the photo is blurred by spurge leaves sticking out from their stem, huge compared to her rear end. He should have crawled even closer, snaked up closer as they used to snake up to the German sentries before garrotting them.
Then there are the two he took of her standing up, ready to go in. One is all blurred again because his hand shook so much. The other is better, her chest is outlined against the house – two swollen egg-shapes that make him think of the flowers of the pétaro around the old bucket on their little scrap at the back.
He squints closer. The sunlight and shadow muddles her arms and stomach and the clinging black cat is hidden by her thigh. Her face doesn’t look the same, what he can see of it – she didn’t know she was being photographed and her mouth is pinched in. Below her hair she is as pale as a shaved branch. Her hands are too big. Three useless ones of her swimming, her head a dark blurred spot in the water and then a final one of her that is almost completely blacked out by his finger.
He is disappointed, but not surprised, that the ones left are those he used up on the little girls. He was hoping he’d taken more of her, but knew inside him that he hadn’t. When she’d come out of the water she’d trotted to her clothes with little happy gasps and he was scared of being seen, he’d kept still as a post. Really, there is only one of her that is any good. He feels ashamed of his efforts, looking at them again.
Tick tick tick. A robin hopping about in the hollow, ticking away. He studies the photo of the three sisters posing with serious faces in front of the barn and holds it up to show the robin, talking to it, and it jumps about excitedly.
He thinks he hears voices as he looks at the ones of the kids. Little girl voices as they run about, all blurred, or pose with serious faces, or put their fingers into the corners of their mouths and stick their tongues out like frogs. The one they took of him, tilted as though he’s on a deck in a storm. He looks weaker than he’d expected, and his hunting gear seems as though it’s not on the right person. His face is crooked, completely wrong. Nothing like what he sees in the mirror. He should’ve smiled.
Then silence, apart from the gusts filling the leaves. The patch of sun wobbles like water. The robin has gone further off in a burst of its wings. The holm oaks are twisted with age and their trunks are covered in pale green splashes of lichen. Oncle Fernand would have seen the same ones, probably. Trees live longer than humans, when left alone. He used to think he could talk to them and they were listening, but now he reckons they don’t care.
The best photo of her begins to grow the more he looks: he’s a look-out man on a hunt who after an hour or two starts to see more and more in the muddle of vegetation, slopes, far blue hills. The shape of her breasts is the shape of bells.
There’s someone standing at the back.
Where the zinc gutter meets the drain, there’s someone standing. He feels his heart lurch like a sprung rabbit.
It could be a set of blue overalls hung on a peg. It’s in the shadows, because the sun never touches the back of the house.
He changes the angle of the photo in the sunlight and squints at it until everything fogs. There’s a paler bit on top of the overalls, exactly where the face should be.
The gutter sticks out like one of his mother’s varicose veins; his eye follows it down to the tiny smudge of blue and black. Surely he’d have noticed a man in blue overalls a few metres away, even if he was in the shadows! There are two dots that could be hands. He tries to remember if there was anything propped by the gutter and just to the left of the back door, the one with cobwebs like white bandages across the hinges because no one ever uses it. He’s left a sweaty thumbprint on the glossy photo, that fades as it dries.
And then he shudders, despite himself: the person – if it’s a person – might have seen him taking the pictures. Might have seen him doing much worse. The man – whoever he was, probably not the husband – might have been watching him with sharp, hunting eyes. Jean-Luc looks around, as if expecting hordes of police to erupt from the trees.
And then he hears the voice of Oncle Fernand. A calm voice, as usual, but cross underneath. Strolling about in the back of his head.
‘Don’t be stupid, nephew. You didn’t see him there, out of cover, so how could he have seen you? Go and erect the electric fence.’
It makes everything easier, the silence of the empty yard.
He doesn’t feel scared any more, either. He isn’t ready to face the Englishwoman. He’d stammer and go into a sweat. He keeps expecting the kids to run out of the big black cave of the barn to watch him, he doesn’t know why. His father could remember Les Fosses when it was a working farm; twelve hands, at one time. He’d say you wouldn’t have known where to put yourself for the bustle, the voices, the carts. The hard work, the hay, the weeding between the vines. You could eat a lot of the weeds, chopped up in a salad. Or take them as medicine. You were taught from the day you could walk. These days, his father would say, they just pour in their poison. That’s the world gone backwards, pouring poison into the earth. And everyone would laugh at him, including his wife. Backwards! You silly goat!
And he’d say: ‘What about young Michel Renaux?’
Michel Renaux, back in 1913, sprinkling his father’s vines with potassium, had taken a thirsty gulp from the bottle of wine he’d brought along for lunch. Except that it wasn’t the wine: it was the potassium, the same colour through the green glass. Label hidden on the other side. Oh, how he’d suffered!
‘You weren’t there,’ Jean-Luc’s mother would scoff.
‘But I know people who were,’ said his father. ‘Oh, how he screamed! And only twenty-two! He carried on screaming even after he was dead!’
But no one listened to him except to laugh, and so he just poured drink into himself until it killed him. But Jean-Luc knew what he meant, though he didn’t say so. He’d once felt sick, standing over the pesticide-vat on old Pierre Lézinier’s tractor heading up to the field; suffered a splitting headache for days after.
He works hard, dismantling the old fence, tapping in the plastic posts (short, only up to his waist) with their hooks ready-made to take the electric wire. At least someone’s dealt with the cherry tree and put it back upright, although there’s no sign of the buds breaking and the earth’s not stamped firm enough around it. He takes a break only to test the pool’s levels: a bit high, the pH, so he pours in a shot of acid. That’ll be perfect for her, he thinks. It’s like preparing a bed, smoothing it out, folding back the sheet exactly right.
The messed-up earth is already dry, as dry as the skin on his hands – as if dusted over with cement powder. He’ll smooth out the earth and sow it yet again. It’s much too late to plant seed, unless you water almost all day. And then the water will run out. The old boys in Aubain say it’ll be a drought summer, the chiffchaff arrived early and the wood anemones were out a week too soon. They’re always right, as his father was always right. There’ll be none left for the pool, because he has to top up the pool – making up for the litres lost every day to evaporation once the sun gets going in June, the water melting into the heat and gone forever.
But the main thing is to show he cares. He needs to come to Les Fosses; he’d burst, otherwise. And he can’t come if he’s chucked out. They’d call the police.
Unless he sneaks up here early, to watch her. But she might never do it again. He can at least try, even if that was a lucky present from God, that time.
Maybe it was an angel, stood by the gutter.
He looks again at the spot. He walks over to it and studies the ground, as if there might be some trace. And then he feels a cold flush hiss through him from head to foot – he can hear it, hissing like the sea in his head – as he remembers something.
He remembers something and looks up at the roof. Raoul Lagrange always wore blue overalls, working. The Beau in Blue, he was known as. He’d wear them unbuttoned at the chest, so you could see his hairs. The women undid the rest, they’d say. Or: he hadn’t had time to do them up to the top before the next round. Viper tongues.
He can hear the thump, like the thump of his own heart, as he stands by the gutter. He steps away, as if there’s something there that might bite him.
The Beau in Blue, neck broken like a rabbit’s, was curled up like a baby. Like a little baby, like a foetus in the mother’s tummy, Dr Demarne said, who was called out and saw it for himself. It was normal, it was something called a reflex. Bruno found the body. His brother’s body. Just here. Where tufts of wiry grass grow by the drain. That good-looker’s face.
He ought to clear the drain of dead leaves: it smells a bit.
He turns his head suddenly and checks behind him and all around. For the very first time at Les Fosses, Jean-Luc feels his neck crawling. The Beau in Blue was watching. The Englishwoman is Raoul’s woman, that’s why. And Raoul watches her, invisible, from where he landed with a thump and a crack. Maybe he fell for her the very first time she entered the yard. He’d chase anything in a skirt, let alone nude.
Jean-Luc Maille and Raoul Lagrange are rivals in love.
But instead of running away, speeding off in the van, Jean-Luc stands his ground. Raoul Lagrange is dead. Jean-Luc Maille is alive. This is his one advantage. He feels the air whip and go colder around him, as if Raoul Lagrange is everywhere.
But he is nowhere, really. Because he is not flesh and blood like Jean-Luc Maille.
The fence operates off a battery unit that impresses Jean-Luc by its small size, although it’s heavy. It can go up to 6,000 volts. It has six months of life, if the fence is continually operating. He runs two sets of wires through the posts. Henri advised him to string the lower wire about ten centimetres from the ground, to catch the babies. Baby boars can turn earth over just as nicely as their mum and dad, Henri said. The upper wire is only knee-height from the ground.
The baldie in the shop went on about protecting the battery unit from rain, as if Jean-Luc was stupid.
He finds some breeze blocks in one of the cellars and builds them up around the unit, roofing it with an old washing-machine cover from another of the cellars, and fixing that with a big rock from the tumbled wall. He works without stopping and in complete silence. He doesn’t even drink anything. Something’s filling him up with fuel.
It’s all in place by midday. He is nervous about the connections: the two copper clips spark as they touch the battery. He hears a clicking in his head which is also outside. The fence is alive and its heart is beating in time to his own. The juice is flowing round and round and inside there is somewhere cut off from the outside world, but it is a mess. It reminds him of the mountains of the moon. Only the moon doesn’t have a boar’s turds perched on the rim of a crater.
He turns the switch to the highest voltage and tests the fence on himself, as Henri challenged him to do. Don’t grip, Henri joked, or you might not be able to let go. He isn’t worried; he’s spent so long with the fence it has become what he knows best in the world for now. He taps the wire as lightly as he can with the pad of his forefinger and there’s something about the shock, the way it takes on his arm, his shoulder and then the roots of his teeth without cutting out even after he’s leapt back, that reminds him of the time he received the joke Valentine he thought was for real. He feels sick and shaky. He doesn’t visibly shake, but he is shaken inside, and it is poisonous. It has bitten him. The boars must feel something like that when they’re shot, he thinks. The air biting them before they even hear the noise.
He takes a seat on the top step of the cellar, until the nausea goes. He feels satisfied with himself, for once, looking at the powerful thing he has created, ticking with its poisonous pulse that still stirs around in his limbs and makes him want to drink a lot of cold water. At the same time, it looks like a toy fence, not a real fence. Everything he does in life is playing. He might be a small kid circling on his bike. He studies his hands, which are cut and bleeding in places and have grown-up blisters on them.
He rakes and sows the loose earth and sets the watering to two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. He is hungry, damp with effort, sweat running off his nose in the cool gusts. He has burst one of the blisters.
Madame Sandler won’t get rid of him as easily as that. He’ll keep the voltage on the highest possible. He doesn’t want to take any risks.
The six of them left the house on foot for a walk and a picnic. Jamie actually wanted to join in. Although it was cloudless, there was a coolish, frisky wind that seemed to grind the air’s lens to the finest degree, giving it a kind of magnifying quality; even the front view’s most distant visible trees were over-detailed, as in a pre-Raphaelite painting, instead of being the requisite blueish blur. More bright flowers were out – white, yellow, pink – and new leaves rustled in high-up, pale-green sweeps that had suddenly given substance to the deciduous parts of the slopes behind the house.
Nick wondered aloud, quite a few minutes after passing the Zone, what Jean-Luc would say to Lucy Sandler about the failed lawn. Jamie gave a short, sharp laugh: although he had not yet met the ‘handyman’, he found the subject amusing, for some reason. Nick had set the cherry tree upright and covered its roots again, a ten-minute spell of gardening which made him feel he should leave his job, sell up, retire to France and become a rural backwoodsman writing bestselling historical novels (while he hadn’t written a line of fiction since school, his later essays had their moments).
There was the hint of a greenish tinge to the pool, they’d noticed in passing – its surface ruffled in spasms by the wind, blackened bits of nature floating within. We have not been assiduous enough, thought Sarah. There was a special vacuum in the shed, with a coiling, python-like pipe, but that was Jean-Luc’s sphere. Nick begged the pool not to be naughty, which amused the girls.
‘It needs a sacrifice,’ said Jamie. ‘Like a sacred lake.’
‘After you, Jamie,’ Nick cried in a jolly manner that produced only a mew of distaste in his son.
Following a good stretch, the poor elephant’s fifty-four-year-old body taxed by several kilos of Beans who rode in the backpack like a stately Maharajah (Maharanee, Sarah corrected him), they stopped at a rock in the middle of the high heathy area with its wastes of broom and heather, munching on bread, dried sausage, sticks of celery, market cheese and ripe cherry tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes were a mistake, of course: one bite disembowelled them, their contents shooting out like shrapnel.
Slicing a nobbled saucisson with his curved, very sharp Thai knife, Jamie asked, after an unusual lull in their chatter: ‘So what’s in this murder deal at the house a few years back?’
Nick blinked in surprise. ‘Come again, Jamie?’
‘Yeah, this guy who was pushed off the roof at Les Fesses?’
‘Les Fesses’ was, in fact, Jamie’s joke and not copied off Alan, whom he had never met; elucidating it to the girls (that ‘Fesses’ meant ‘bottom’ in French) had resulted in an entire afternoon of instability and near-insurrection.
‘Pushed off the woof?’ squealed Alicia, as if anywhere else might have been acceptable.
Tammy left a mouthful of celery half-chewed in her mouth because the noise might have drowned out something important.
‘Yeah,’ said Jamie, with an oracular smile.
Sarah suggested he meant the young member of the Resistance shot on the track.
‘No, that’s being shot and this is being pushed off the roof.’
‘Sounds like a bit of local Gothic,’ Nick said, deciding not to admit his prior knowledge.
‘The shepherd told me. He’s wiser than all of you Cambridge guys put together. He told me a lot about how to raise goats and sheep. Like, eating chestnuts helps them build up grease on their skin for the winter?’
‘I didn’t know you spoke French that well, Jamie.’
Sarah sounded genuinely surprised. She’d meant to emphasise that, in fact: a subtle difference. That well. It was a minor slip.
Jamie seemed to crouch, suddenly, without moving a muscle. He said fuck so quietly it might have been something else, a sigh or a groan. Then he looked up at her with a smile, emphasising his comments with the Thai knife. ‘GCSE grade A French at fourteen but I’m not all up myself about it. I was really good at school until I was fourteen. Right up until the day of the triffid,’ he added, because no one had said anything in between.
Triffid! Tammy’s ears pricked. At fourteen Jamie had caught Helena’s nickname for Sarah and run with it for several years until his father had exploded. Jamie had told Tammy all about it: the glass in the front door smashing, her father out of control, throwing things, hitting him. She could barely imagine it, because her father hardly ever lost his temper, and then he only shouted. Each time Jamie recounted it, it got worse, more violent: broken bones, by the end. The police. There was a secret Daddy she didn’t know about, he implied. Tammy didn’t want to know about it, but Jamie’s version of the story was planted deep in her consciousness, nevertheless.
‘No, sorry, sorry, correction,’ said Nick, raising his hand and sounding like someone in Parliament. ‘You started smoking cannabis before the separation. Dates, dates.’
‘Wha’?’ Jamie’s face looked as if he were trying to make something out in a fierce wind.
‘Is “murder” killing someone or just putting them in the junjun?’ asked Alicia. She had a tomato-pip on the end of her nose.
Tammy pretended to laugh and it came out in a hideous cackle: ‘Putting them in the dungeon! Bear with no brains.’
‘Shall we change the subject?’ suggested Sarah, brightly. ‘Who’s for an apple?’
‘Not if it’s got crumbs and earwigs and catkins all over it, as usual,’ Tammy said, wrinkling her nose. She’d surprised herself with ‘catkins’. Her brain was growing every day and it was wondrous to behold: she just let it.
Jamie watched his stepmother, only about twelve years older than himself and young-looking for her age (‘the perpetual student’, his mother would call her), peeling the apple for Beans. The wastes of broom stirred in a sudden gust all around them. Tammy was picking the skin off a slice of saucisson. Beans uncurled her fist to show a crushed splodge of Camembert peppered with the rock’s grittiness and said, ‘Shop. Maramama Beans.’ It didn’t ease the tension.
Sarah’s eyes glinted with wet. ‘Triffid’ always did something intimately nasty inside her, like a school nickname.
‘Girls, why don’t you play hide-and-seek in the bushes?’ she said, finding strength from somewhere, she never knew where. The broom was chest-high, it was a good idea. ‘But Tammy, you’ll have to hang on to Beans the whole time. OK?’
‘Then that’ll only be two of us doing it,’ Tammy complained, already off the rock.
Alicia started counting down from thirty in her usual breathless dirge; Beans and Tammy had already vanished. To the adults on the rock, there was nothing but the dark-green sprays of massed broom, shifting like a cartoon sea. In fact, Tammy was just behind the rock and she had her hand over Beans’s mouth. The broom sprays covered them. It was like a small arched room. The dirge ended on minus three, as Tammy had just been doing minuses at school and they were a fascination to her sister, who was also said to be advanced for her age, although Tammy found her stupid.
‘I’m coming, ready or not!’ Alicia shouted; her voice, despite its decibels, taken by another gust. She also seemed to her parents to vanish, kept track of only by glimpses of her yellow hooded cardie, moving further and further away.
Now the adults thought they were alone. Tammy could just hear them over the wind rustling in the broom.
Jamie asked if they wanted him to carry on with the murder story.
‘If you have to,’ said Nick.
‘That’s it,’ Jamie chuckled. ‘That’s all he’d say. Il était poussé. Kind of chatty guy?’
Although Nick knew the dead man was Bruno the shepherd’s brother, and called Raoul Lagrange, he pretended not to for Sarah’s sake. ‘Better that way,’ he said.
‘So you’re not interested, Mr Historian?’
‘I don’t frankly believe it.’
‘Because it’s me telling you.’
‘Nothing to do with you per se, Jamie. It’s just that the evidence follows a conviction. Dangerous. You started out with a conviction that the house was negative and lo and behold here be the evidence. Remember Iraq and WMD?’
Jamie glared at his father with undisguised venom.
‘He saw it happen. J’était là. Je I’ai vu. Il était poussé. I was there. I saw it or him. He was pushed. Original research. Peter’s always said that’s your weak point, Nick.’
‘Peter can go fuck himself,’ said Nick, in a quiet, defeated tone.
There was a pause in which Sarah felt she might start trembling.
‘That explains the funerary bouquet,’ she said, in a jolly voice.
Bleak, complicated stories trailed away around her, leading to huddled figures in cowls in the middle of fields, to want and famine and disease.
The shepherd had made it clear to Nick that it was an accident: the man had used that very word. Jamie infuriated him with his elaborations and dramas, his embellishments, his fabulations. He cleared his throat, intent on dampening it all down, avoiding conflict. Jamie would win if there was outright conflict; he would destroy the sabbatical, the idyll. This was undoubtedly his twisted aim – on a mission from Helena, probably.
‘You sure, Jamie, he wasn’t talking about the young man murdered on the track by the Nazis?’
He could be so obtuse, Sarah thought.
‘Found you!’ came faintly from afar, desperate now.
‘Even I know,’ said Jamie, ‘that a guy in his forties – that’s roughly the shepherd’s age, right? – is too young to have seen a guy being shot by the Nazis. It’s like Helena says, you have to position everyone around you as stupid. Maybe not Sarah but Sarah’s just the skivvy, so that’s OK.’
Ah, thought Nick. Helena is, after all, behind this one. He would go Zen. He would not let her win.
‘I don’t think skivvy’s quite the word,’ laughed Sarah, her eyebrows right up like a clown’s.
The girls had all disappeared. Could Tammy be trusted with Beans? Voices were snatched away in the wind. The broom was a slur of wildness. The clouds were grey-black and piled up over the horizon, over the sea. Her hair was unmanageable, the shifting broom made her think of her hair, made unmanageable by the water here. She ought to do it every month, she reflected, but that’s expensive. Everyone else has money. She had noticed silver threads in her comb, like a character in a fairy tale. Jamie was pathetic, in the end. He had nothing but his own wounded pride. He was to be pitied.
‘’Course I asked whodunnit,’ Jamie pursued, ‘but he kind of shrugged and held his lips between his fingers?’
Sarah nodded. ‘So why did he mention it in the first place?’
‘I told him the house was really, really negative.’
‘Right,’ said Nick. ‘OK. That’s nice to know.’
‘That’s bats,’ muttered Sarah.
‘Maybe we should ask the Chambords about this,’ Nick suggested. ‘On second thoughts, maybe we should just let it drop, if you’ll excuse the pun.’
‘He grabbed my elbow and was pretty excited,’ Jamie pursued. ‘He thinks you’re all disgustingly rich and maybe American.’
‘You put him right on that one?’
‘’Fraid my French isn’t good enough.’ This came with a self-consciously sly grin.
‘Where are the girls?’ asked Sarah, sing-song.
Tammy removed her hot hand from Beans’s mouth and waited for release. Beans didn’t make a sound, as if caught in a spell. The broom made its own swaddle, as in swaddling clothes. Tammy had already decided where the TV room would go, and the bunk-bedded bedroom. A wail went up from far away, barely carried to them on the wind.
‘The lost soul,’ said Nick, standing and waving.
‘Essentially,’ he said, on the plod back home – all of them anticipating a nice mug of tea and the chocolate cake Sarah had made with Alicia – ‘history’s made up of little bits sort of strung together, but each little bit isn’t the past itself, it’s only a memory of the past, and strictly verbal at that, so it’s all pretty provisional and somehow loose, and my job – our job – is to tighten it up as far as it’ll go. But the past – the living present of the past, I mean – is gone. Kaput. Finito. All that’s left of the great lady is a necklace. Or a bit of the necklace. That’s what people forget. Especially the archaeologists,’ he added, checking Jamie was still listening.
Now and again father and son managed a truce in which messages were exchanged by carrier pigeon rather than crow. It often followed one of the nastier skirmishes. This present truce had begun with Jamie stating that his father’s job was a waste of time, breath and money, and completely divorced from reality. Nick had asked him what he meant by ‘reality’, apart from Beans using one’s head as a Congo bongo drum. Jamie had reckoned real ‘reality’ was something hidden behind what we think of as reality; he was into solitude, he said, because other people got in the way of real reality. The discussion then swerved into the meaning of history. Tammy was holding her father’s hand and letting the words flow in and out of her head without capturing many. She was too low down to be heard: she’d tried, pulling on her father’s large hand, but kept being interrupted.
Incessant gull-cries from behind: Alicia was tormenting Sarah by dragging back in her foot-slogging misery, describing in medical detail the state of her blisters (she hadn’t any, her feet were as smooth as a peeled onion). Sarah, while irritated, was also marvelling. Only yesterday, it seemed, Alicia was not constructed, knew nothing of anything, not even pain or the pleasure of sleep overwhelming you at the end of a day. She was not, full stop. Sarah had made her so well that she could fabricate, fib, flirt.
‘I wanted to be an archaeologist, yeah?’ said Jamie. ‘But the steering wheel kind of came off.’
He walked in a strange way. He dragged his feet and failed to keep a straight line. The bottoms of his trousers hit the ground around his boots and were scuffed to threads and shreds, or were maybe bought like that. You could see his underpants. His tee shirt had tiny holes in it and a large one exposing an underarm when he swung his hand up, and bore a discreet logo that said Sticky Marks.
‘There’s still time,’ Nick suggested, without enough conviction. He’d never heard anything about Jamie wanting to be an archaeologist. ‘Bags of time.’
‘And you can open the bags when you need more time,’ Tammy remarked, in a loud enough voice for once.
The trees either side were silent. Sometimes a track between trees could be menacing. There was only the crunch of their footsteps, now, as if they were eating their way to the house through a line of biscuits.
Did French birds sing in French?
These faint springtime whiffs of woodland darknesses were not English – even the resin from the pines was a foreign epiphany.
Yes, Sarah thought: there are these bad moments when you feel you are nothing but an intrusion. After we are all over, the creatures and the plants and the endlessly moving waters will breathe easy again. The historyless sigh of the seas.
The afternoon weather had turned: the gusts smelt of rain, while cracks of light sheathed the dark clouds so they resembled high, glistening cliffs towering to infinity. She looked up and was glad she was here, after all.
As soon as she was set down in the yard, Beans ran towards the new fence in her splay-legged, two-year-old’s way. Alicia and Tammy began to send out rescue craft in the form of leaves to insects failing to swim in the swimming pool, feebly battling against extinction.
‘I don’t suppose that’s electric,’ said Nick. ‘The new fence there. He wouldn’t go to that extreme.’
‘There are these like really small magnetic forces,’ Jamie continued, ‘you measure with something called a torsion-balance?’ He nodded at his own words. ‘We’ve got the equivalent in our brains.’
Beans stopped within inches of the wire and turned round, grinning at them. ‘She knows she shouldn’t touch,’ said Sarah, smiling. ‘Cheeky thing. She’s a terror.’
Nick agreed. ‘Beans!’ he called out, a touch snappishly. ‘Don’t touch the fence, will you? I know just that feeling,’ he added.
Beans picked up a pebble and threw it in the air and grinned at them. Jamie was rolling a cigarette; Sarah assumed it wasn’t a spliff. She was looking forward to the next trip to Aix, to the Centre des Archives d’Outre Mer, to the grown-up, polished haven of pinewood tables and stacked shelves, the order and the quiet, the secretly enthralled scholars, the oiled precision of a space in which no children were permis.
She started walking towards Beans. Nick followed her, the empty baby-chair at his side, spilling its straps and buckles and almost tripping him up. Beans ran away from the fence, teasing them, and her mother trotted after her, playing catch. Beans squealed in the full agony and delight of being chased as Tammy and Alicia played by the pool. The skin of the water prevented the insects – types of winged beetles or ants – from clambering aboard the rescue craft that were too far from the girls’ hands to guide, although they stretched their arms as far as they could over the water.
They were told to stop and Tammy joined her father by the fence. He was contemplating the two low wires strung through the moulded hooks on each short post. He was listening. A soft, regular click, like someone tutting in their heads. He bent down and touched the upper wire with the tip of his finger.
The slight, if disagreeable, furry sensation he was used to from long-ago games of dare was not what happened. He’d fallen out of a tree and hit the ground shoulder-first. He was still doing so.
‘Bloody hell!’ he yelled, flapping his hand. ‘That could kill someone!’
Sarah had caught Beans a few yards off and was squeezing her. ‘You are joking, Nick. Tammy, don’t touch.’
‘I am not joking. I feel ill.’ He took his pulse on his wrist. It was steady. ‘He’s mad. Completely insane. If the kids touch that, they’ll be shot across the yard. Fried for breakfast.’
‘You nearly let Beans touch it,’ Sarah said, wonderingly.
‘I didn’t let her! I didn’t know!’
Tammy was dying to touch it, but was told to retreat.
‘What’s the big issue?’ asked Jamie, ambling up.
‘The big issue,’ said Sarah, as if ticking him off, ‘is that the idiot French handyman has put up a massively powerful, potentially lethal electric fence knowing there are small kids around, with no warning, to keep wild boars off the owners’ stupid prospective lawn.’ She shook her head and snorted like a pony, she was so cross.
Jamie had an unlit roll-up in the middle of his mouth, caught by his teeth. ‘The case for the defence is that they’re pretty keen on having a lawn?’
‘I don’t care. It’s unacceptable. We’re paying them good money.’
‘A capitalist contract,’ said Jamie. ‘By 2050 or probably 2030 the world’s going to be uninhabitable except for the filthy rich thanks to the capitalist contract, yeah?’
Nick found the battery unit under a plastic cover on the house side of the fence, nestling inside a little shelter of breeze blocks. He used two long splints of wood like a claw to release one of the copper clips, which sparked furiously as he worked it off. He was scared. Another electric jolt was sniggering in the wings. He told the others to stand back, having some vague idea that electricity could arc through air.
‘Wood doesn’t conduct, does it?’
‘’Course not,’ Tammy scoffed.
‘We do have our fair share of troubles,’ Sarah sighed.
‘I wouldn’t call them troubles,’ said Nick, unnecessarily. ‘I’d call them very minor incidents.’
The clicking stopped.
‘Let’s hope they stay that way,’ said Sarah, involuntarily conjuring dark, skeletal figures in dust-storms, tarpaulined camps, flies on babies’ cheeks.
Jamie said: ‘I once knew this guy called Les Trubb and he was something like Hungarian or maybe Slovakian in the form below at school, and really up himself?’
‘So what?’ muttered Nick, easing off the other clip with his claws of wood, still not trusting the basic laws of circuitry.
‘He’d be on the noticeboard for, y’know, exam results and so on as Trubb Les and I’d put a circle around it and write spelling, exclamation mark.’
The clip came off. Oddly, it sparked.
‘Right,’ said Nick, standing up, ‘now for our pronunciamento to the gods.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Tammy, glad that her father was still alive.