Lucy Sandler was in the bath when the call came; heady with Badedas, bubbles like the tops of clouds seen from a plane. They hid her body, in which she found fault. Or many faults. Fault lines, fissures, inadequate muscle tone. She’d given up massaging her breasts; a lot of effort for nothing. She’d once had the sharpest figure – the sharpest – of any of her circle: and the nicest hands. Now she looked, not like a Bonnard, but like the Lucian Freud in the glossy arts magazine she was trying not to get wet, a nude from the eighties whose ‘sombre tones of sagging flesh, relieved only by the cranberry-tinted elbows laid in like bruises above the groin, mercilessly expose time’s stake in life’. What pseudery, she thought. Despite the author of the article, Julian Dale, being an old friend. Who never talked like that in front of a painting; all he did was gossip, queer-gossip. But cranberry-tinted elbows, that was good, she had to admit. She glanced at her own elbow: pale and bumpy, like a pug’s nose. Why so shiny?
She reached for the cordless, carrolling on the glass shelf. Important calls always came when you were in the bath, especially in the early evening. This was from the Fusspot family in France. Yet again. Fuss fuss. She felt it was somehow wrong, metaphysically wrong; they should have had some kind of intermediary. An agent. An agent of the Lord.
Mr and Mrs Fusspot and their three little girls – but she couldn’t think of names, she’d be hopeless on that radio panel show whose sentence she could never remember. She was reasonably sure her mind was going, but terribly discreetly, like a retiring butler. Perhaps it was just age. The same was happening to Alan. Mr Fusspot was going on about an electric fence. An electric fence around the seed-bed, to keep the boars off.
‘What a terrific idea,’ she replied. ‘Jean-Luc has at last shown some initiative. The French are short on initiative. Because of Napoleon, who had much too much. Unlike us, they haven’t invented a thing, I don’t believe.’
It didn’t matter that she knew this was quite untrue. Cinema, photography, Marie Curie. She was a conversational mannerist. The distance-distorted voice went on about how powerful it was, the electric fence. Six thousand volts. That did sound rather a lot. The bubbles cleared to show a flat, unappetising breast. Can that really be mine? she mused. It was like a motorway service-station omelette. The fence could kill someone with a weak heart.
‘What a clever way to get rid of one’s husband,’ she joked.
Oh, how he fussed. They had small children, he was saying, as if she didn’t know it. Who might be grilled like fritters: she saw them sparking, their eyes popping, hair a star-shape, face black and smoking as in those violent cartoons.
‘Then tell them not to touch it,’ she sighed. ‘They’ll soon learn. Anyway, didn’t you touch electric fences when you were their age? We had horses. I was always daring boys to touch them. The wires, I mean. It’s called toughening up.’
Really, it was incredible, the way this intelligent man, this major don, was so dependent on her. The very epitome of the brilliant academic without a single life skill. She said a brusque goodbye, pretending she was in the middle of a meeting, and dropped the phone on the bath mat. Alan came in without knocking, half-naked, his peeling stomach showing through his dressing gown like a separate being, a surly bald servant in an experimental drama. Her cloud cover had mostly vanished to clear sky, exposing the ancient landscape below: he looked down upon it like a disapproving god.
‘Lucy,’ he said, ‘I’m pulling out of Iraq.’
He showed her an email to ‘Mister Shandler, Art deeler’ that said all four of his limbs would be cut off. Not as clever as the one a few months back that said he could have a shorter penis, for free, from ‘Al-Ka-ida’.
She handed it back with a grunt. ‘Probably the silly boy next door,’ she said. ‘The one whose ball breaks our geraniums. He’s Steiner-educated. They don’t teach spelling. That’s my construction on it.’
‘You’re building crap on spec,’ he said, pensively folding the piece of paper. ‘I’m going to pull out, Lucy. Before I fall apart. I don’t even feel the hot breath of Interpol or the FBI on the back of my neck. I feel much worse.’
‘Hmmm. Let me think.’
She let a little pause embed itself with a V in his forehead. Alan could not fall apart. Not the right term. Dissolve, maybe. Exfoliate to a quivering mush in the centre.
‘Funnily enough,’ she said, ‘I’ve just been talking to France, sweetheart. Mr Fusspot. Jean-Luc has erected a massive, lethal electric fence. Perhaps you could crawl inside it.’
‘Where?’
‘Around my lawn. To keep off the boars. As in wild pig.’ She prodded his stomach with her toe. ‘The type with tusks and a big fat belly.’
‘I’m pulling out of antiquities entirely,’ he said, pushing her foot away so that it landed back in the water and splashed him with froth. ‘Don’t sound too interested.’
‘You look like an epileptic,’ she laughed, indicating the side of his mouth by touching hers.
He wiped the bubble-bath from his face with a hairy wrist. ‘I’m telling you, I mean it. I didn’t just come up to ogle you and say how about it.’
‘Silly billy,’ she said, ‘of course you aren’t quitting. You know too much.’
‘Exactly.’ He sat down on the edge of the bath, his huge exposed belly concealing his naughty bits like a Churchillian frown. ‘I can’t handle the Russians. My hair is falling out, my skin is crumbling. I think this is from the Russians. They always spell my name like that. They want the gypsum worshippers from Tell Asmar. Or at least, nice Mr Putin wants the gypsum worshippers, probably.’
‘Yesterday it was the Iranians.’
‘Tomorrow it’ll be the Chinese. Or the Saudis, so help me God. I take a different route home each day, Lucy. They gouge out eyes with their thumbs. Out, vile jelly,’ he went on, quoting flatly, ‘where is thy lustre now? All I want is to live until I can have my own electric wheelchair and get my arse wiped for me.’
‘I’m not stopping you,’ she murmured, closing her eyes. Sometimes Alan’s gargantuan wit grated on her aesthetic sensibilities, and he looked simply fat and revolting.
‘Art Brut is back,’ he said, quietly.
‘Art Brut? Oh, come on, Alan.’ She was genuinely surprised. Alan had gone potty.
‘Zig says it’s the coolest way to make a buck. We had lunch together today. You find some lunatic asylum somewhere dull like Iowa and take the art for a tiny donation. Even drawings in biro. Doodles. Crazy magazine collages by some mute psychotic. Sculpture, if you’re lucky. Stuff stuck on in any old way by a dwarf toe-obsessive with a mental age of five.’
‘Assemblages,’ Lucy corrected him.
He drew a hand over his face as if clearing fog and sighed. ‘Zig sold a crazy painting he found in a garbage tip and cleared, wait for it, twenty thousand dollars, last week. That gallery off Madison, owned by those twins. Twenty thousand dollars. All he did was some preliminary working-up in the local papers and local TV, then sourced it to his friends at the national level. Zig has a long ponytail, which helps.’
‘Outsider Art,’ said Lucy, without opening her eyes. ‘If you want a ponytail you’ll need my sewing machine, Alan.’
‘Let’s stick to the Frenchie name, it’s more accurate. Raw. As in steak.’
‘Sexier,’ she said, contemptuously. ‘As long as you say it with a French accent. Which you don’t.’
‘Art Brut is back and becoming very, very big, Lucy,’ he insisted, leaning forwards and persuading himself. She could smell the lunch with Zigismund Moritz on his breath. ‘Everything else is tired. Tired and old and over-analysed,’ he added, lifting her arm and pecking at it with his lips – ironically, she felt. ‘What’s really tomorrow’s lunch is intimacy and feeling and paint and stuff, not the massive installation that is so up itself it thinks it’s divine as in forever. That’s yesterday’s breakfast. And abstraction is so out you can only swear with it.’
He dropped her arm. It hovered.
‘We need to talk about the fence. That’s today.’
‘We will talk about the fence,’ he said, scratching his stomach and scattering a light fall of snow over the bathroom tiles.
He explained how Art Brut fulfilled people’s need for the unmediated, the genuine; the primitive without the sub-colonial, tribal angle. She knew all this, she’d read the articles, but she let him continue because she felt pity for him. He was so boyish, so American. This was his latest gewgaw. It was going to be overplayed with, ruined, thrown out. ‘The bottom’s gone out of tribal. Everyone travels, these days. Where Barry would come back to LA half-dead from malaria with a crate full of juju stuff from places no white man had ever set foot in, retired couples take weekend breaks in those places. Practically. They have wheelchair access and twenty-four-hour parking.’
‘I thought there was nothing left,’ said Lucy, who’d once had a fervid fling with Barry Jordis.
‘There isn’t,’ Alan confirmed. ‘It’s all fake, now. Even in the deep bush.’
‘Wasn’t it always?’ she murmured, remembering the tiny, terrifying mask above Barry’s great bed, with jagged white teeth and a coil of twine around it. The heat of LA shut out by a vast picture-window, the glacial breath of the air conditioning, the huge and tinkling whiskies on their bare bellies.
‘Art Brut isn’t fake. It can’t be. It just is. That’s the essence of it, in a world that is entirely fake, otherwise. That’s why it’s suddenly becoming it. The prices are following.’
‘It’s unmediated crap, Alan. It’s amateur. The fag-end of this awful campaign against elitism. End of discussion. We have a serious lawn issue. Jean-Luc’s put up this lethal fence and they’re fussing. I can’t find solutions to everything.’
She turned the hot tap with her painted big toe. The scalding water flushed warmth between her legs like exploring fingers.
‘Amateur,’ repeated Alan with a groan, shaking his head. ‘What you’ve just said is very conservative. But the main point, Lucy bunny, is it’s safe. I mean, I’ll go home by the same route each day. I’ll keep all of my limbs. My penis will remain the same size until the day you excite it, in whichever year that may come.’
‘You Americans, you may run the whole show but you’re so brutally naive,’ Lucy laughed, working up the bubbles by paddling her hands, flecking his face again in the process. ‘And such cowards!’
‘I can’t bear them. They’re – oh – completely ghastly. Sort of autocratically callous,’ Nick complained, several hours after the phone call to the Sandlers. ‘They’re heirs to Alexander III. They’d support serfdom like a shot.’
He had, much to his regret, re-established the current in the fence. They were to re-establish the current each evening, then disconnect it in the morning. Life was all about compromise. He had no desire to toughen up his children by the Lucy Sandler method. Or by any method.
Jamie was eating with them tonight, picking at the stew and knocking back the fairly decent Cahors at the top end of their budget (around six or seven euros), and commenting adversely on the music. First Sibelius, then the soft jazz, then the troubadours, then the Smiths. He shook his head each time and asked them how they could listen to it, it was depressing and/or geriatric. Sarah suggested Dylan and Jamie concurred, knowing that Nick didn’t like Dylan very much: he found his wailing voice annoying. Nick was stung by all this, despite trying not to be: ‘What you should be saying,’ he declared, ‘is that you find the music depressing or geriatric or whatever. It’s called projection. The music in itself is not in the least depressing, it is uplifting – and to say any of it is geriatric is just risible.’ Nick hadn’t used the word ‘risible’ ever before in his life, he didn’t think.
Jamie shook his head in disbelief, his contempt visually heightened by his wearing, for no apparent reason, a pair of small, round sunglasses that made him look creepy. He was back in his father’s denims, too; he’d cut the jacket and jeans shorter and sewn a Union Jack onto the top pocket. Nick had commented on this adversely and Jamie had laughed: it was a punk insignia. Nick had missed punk by several years; already in his mid-twenties, embarrassingly old. Jamie wore the jacket open over a tee shirt that said, in discreet letters, This Is My Clone. Nick found it all slightly sad, slightly vulgar and slightly unsettling, but kept this to himself.
He was explaining his comment about projection: the latest research had found that habitual use of cannabis increased the chances of depression or even schizophrenia by fifty per cent. Thirty, Sarah corrected. Whatever, Nick went on; if you artificially stimulated the endomorphin gates you needed more and more to swing them open, and eventually they hung loose and there was no more endomorphin.
‘I think you mean endorphin,’ said Sarah, swaying slightly to her Dylan.
‘Endorphin. The substance like morphine, anyway.’
Jamie reckoned someone had been reading crap newspaper articles and then half-remembering them and that this was no great advertisement for the speaker’s professional rigour. He sounded like a much cleverer version of himself, sneering like this, and Nick lost his cool. He found it incredible that his son, of all people, belonging to a generation for whom the term ‘recliner’ was invented the better to accommodate an evolutionary twist in the upright biped, could accuse him of a lack of rigour.
Jamie sighed, rose from the table and walked off into the night without a torch, distantly slamming his eponymous door and breaking cobwebs instead of glass.
Tammy emerged, investigating the noise from the top of the stairs, and was rewarded with a finger-snapping command from her father to go back to bed. Sarah went up and placated Tammy as if she’d just been beaten about the head; she padded back to bed and clutched her long-haired troll that had once been Sarah’s, when it was already retro.
Nick claimed, when Sarah returned, that kids these days were mollycoddled, over-protected, treated like porcelain. Sarah objected to this accusation and went quiet, even mournful. Once she’d got so depressed and tired when Alicia was a baby that she’d spent a morning yelling from the bedroom and throwing shoes at its locked door while Nick tried to reason with her.
The light flickered off his retreating hairline as he stared into the candle-flame, swallowing his darkness in more wine, costumed against his will in a frock coat and mutton-chop whiskers with a handy birch-rod at his side. The age gap had broadened between them: it usually did on these occasions, giving rise to all sorts of mutual assumptions and misreadings. The wine could not touch the venerable, solemn stuff they served on high table at college. He’d been spoilt, as fruit is spoilt. He no longer felt genial.
‘Oh dear,’ said Sarah, after a silence interrupted only by a night creature’s moronic beep-like call, possibly an owl’s. ‘We should have gone to Finland after all. Or Brazzaville. We did consider Brazzaville, didn’t we? Much more honest.’
‘I’ve tried,’ he said. ‘I’ve done my very best.’
‘I hate it when you say that, Nick. You sound like a doctor over the dying patient.’
‘I don’t think I’m the doctor,’ he murmured, listlessly. ‘Oh, let’s play Scrabble. And let me beat you for once.’
Alicia appeared as they were undressing and informed them there was a cat purring in the girls’ room. Not a cat, but the ghost of a cat. The noise turned out to be the beginnings of a wasps’ nest in a crack in the beam; or perhaps last year’s, reawakening. Nick stumbled on the stairs, going down for a roll of tape to put over the crack.
Jamie was sitting on the sofa. He’d returned from the blank of the night. His eyes were hidden behind his little round sunglasses; he had a leaf in his hair and a scratch on his cheek. Nick, passing into the kitchen, ignored him. On the way back he noticed the dusty bottle of wine and the full glass on the stool at Jamie’s elbow.
‘Oh. That’s Alan Sandler’s untouchable wine supply,’ said Nick, who was more dismayed by this than anything else. ‘Isn’t it? That’s incredibly out of order, Jamie. That’s stealing from the gods.’
He picked the bottle up. A 1985 St-Émilion.
‘Smells corked,’ he said.
‘You never took me skiing.’
‘I didn’t like skiing.’
‘You still went skiing with your friends, right?’
‘Your mother didn’t want you to go. She objected. You’ll have to replace this bottle, corked or no.’
Jamie nodded. ‘Your version.’
‘There’s still time. I did offer.’
‘Like once.’
‘Better than never. You weren’t interested. In fact, like your mother you ideologically objected.’
The little round sunglasses made Jamie look like a rock star being interviewed. His father saw himself in them, tiny and old. He told his son to switch off the lights when he was finished. He put the bottle down and took a sip from Jamie’s glass, the ruby pocked by fragments of cork. A gorgeous berry richness disfigured by a zigzag of vinegar.
‘Pity,’ he said.
‘Finished with what?’
‘Being down here,’ Nick mumbled, already tackling the stairs. One day they and their ilk would be impassable, the worst face of the Eiger. Maybe in under thirty years. He would have made Jamie pay for that bottle. He would have done, if it hadn’t been corked.
‘I know who killed him,’ said Jamie.
He could see the top of his son’s head in the murk of the under-lit room, the retied tribal knot like something on a bird, a suggestion of another socio-economic system, of causewayed enclosures and men coerced into building giant henges. It was unsettling.
He had to whisper it from halfway up, a harsh rasp that stirred his pseudopolyps: ‘Killed who?’
‘The guy who fell off the roof.’
There was a sudden, unearthly scream from the girls’ bedroom. ‘We’ll discuss it tomorrow,’ said Nick, over his shoulder.
His hunch was correct: Alicia had been teasing the few sleepy wasps crawling about in the crack. Ointment from Sarah’s emergency bag was applied. So was the tape. Alicia snivelled, stung on the finger. Beans wanted one, too. Tammy giggled away, for some reason.
The parents retreated into their bedroom’s blackness. Sarah was a soft ledge of warmth Nick settled against. ‘Jamie’s downstairs. Stoned out of his head,’ he told her, in a low murmur. ‘Scratched his cheek. He’s nicked one of Alan’s bottles.’
‘Jesus.’
‘It’s OK,’ he smiled. ‘It was corked.’
‘But that’s out-and-out theft.’
‘He won’t stay much longer, in that case.’
‘The triumph of individualism,’ she remarked softly, without turning. It might have been a shred of her sleep.
He stroked her edge, the child’s landscape of her dip and curve, reaching the end of her nightie on a stretch of cool thigh, the knobble of bone at the side of a knee, like a bared boulder; stubble-fields of calf where she had recently shaved. The shin bone’s exposed, asexual ridge. Unlike the foot. Sarah had beautiful arched feet. Its succulence underneath. He reached the summit of the little toe, the piled cairn. She flicked it out of his fingers, mewing her complaint.
‘Love you,’ he said.
‘I’m sleepy.’
Sleepy was good: there was reconciliation in the word. Tired would have been bad.
‘Maybe too sleepy,’ she said, turning over to face him. He started exploring down below, nevertheless. ‘I ought to go to Aix again, soon,’ she added, following her thoughts. ‘I’m in need of documents.’
His own thoughts that night were industrious, a big noisy factory above the river of dreams. He wouldn’t be carried away. He was vaguely envious of Jamie knowing something more about the builder, but it might be hogwash, empty rumour. The shepherd was the poor man’s brother; he had said nothing about a murder, only that he’d slipped off when it was wet, that you should never go up on a roof when it was wet. Unless his local accent had concealed something more in the interstices.
Jamie had been conducting some oral research, clearly. Original research. He had the time. Nick felt disgruntled about this. Original research had always been his Achilles heel: when he was young, it was theory that had dominated. You sluiced the dense matter of facts with the clear, invigorating waters of theory, Marxist or otherwise. It left him, now, with this traceable fault-line in his work, the fracture in his collected essays that might bring the whole arch tumbling down. Peter Osterhauser had no such fault-line: his very strength was the original research, its depth and breadth, each fact counter-checked and substantiated over and over. Once every ten years Peter Osterhauser would publish something remarkable, unassailable, with a great weight of learning that others marvelled over. Just when Nick felt his colleague had dried up, the waters came gushing forth and the world stood still. This was why Peter had been appointed professor, although he was not yet fifty. Even that stung.
After an hour or so he got up and opened the window. It was a clear, moonless night. The stars massed more thickly and then thicker still the longer he looked, their prehistoric glitter rendering even time’s passage futile. Orion the hunter.
Venus a reddish-blueish sparkle. The owl or whatever was still beeping over and over, a hoot like an alarm clock, hardly animal. Otherwise it was silence, and there were no man-made lights. It might be Africa, he thought. The fragrant night air had a touch of warmth to it, a hint of the heat to come in a matter of weeks. He recalled a research trip he’d made for his thesis to the eastern highlands of the Bamenda peoples; not the wet, viscous air and thick forests of the coastal valleys but dry heat and horizons; short and feathery grass-cover in which he’d knelt one early morning and felt fulfilled.
An hour or so passed – very fast, as sleepless hours always do. He lay in bed and smiled grimly into the darkness as Sarah breathed evenly in sleep. All thoughts at this hour were crap. The moment you were born they handed you a spade to start digging your own grave.
The distant screams continued: harrowing, agonised, bewailing the ruin made of the world. He surfaced from a dream of screaming, pug-like faces with dirty teeth, like something out of Tolkien. Sarah was already awake: he clawed for the lamp and when it came on she looked bewildered.
It was two-thirty in the morning. Somebody was being stabbed. The kids.
Oh yes. The wasps, of course.
Sarah came back from her investigation while he was finding his feet. ‘The kids are fine,’ she said.
They listened. The hellish screams reminded Nick of something. A farm near his school, its dark and solid smell wafting over the playing fields. Smoking in a wintry hedge, sharing a delicious Number Six with his best friend Duncan, feeling huge and adult and furtive near the piggery. Heat and cold.
‘The boars,’ he said. ‘The electric fence.’
‘That’s what I thought, maybe. It’s horrible. They’re in pain.’
They listened. Tortured souls touched by fire, racked on griddles, dismembered with rusty handsaws. Hog-headed sinners.
‘They’re cross, more like. I guess they’ll learn, soon. Pigs are rather bright.’
There was a final screech that tore into bits, whisked away like embers. Then silence.
‘You see? They’ve departed. Somewhat irritated,’ he said, his legs trembling under the duvet.
‘We could put one round the pool,’ suggested Sarah.
‘Erm, I think not. Anyway, it’s too low. False security is the worst.’
Beans jabbered next door, singing an intermittent dirge to her cot’s overcrowded soft-toy population above the synchronous owl hoot. Neither Alicia nor Tammy had woken up.
Nick felt a vague wake of discomfort at having agreed to switch the fence back on. The Sandlers were definitely the gods. Something mischievous and cruel. And Jean-Luc? If he were to look down at Jean-Luc’s ankles he would see little wings on them. Hermes, who could pass through walls and alight anywhere; who guided the dead souls to the ferry-boat.
Oncle Fernand is very pleased with his nephew.
Jean-Luc spends the weekend, when he isn’t staring into the river by his fishing rod or deep in a Spirou, working on the monument. He’s only just realised – in the middle of the night, blinking into the darkness – that the monument is to Oncle Fernand. That is now its official name. The Monument to Fernand Maille. It was staring him in the face. He imagines the unveiling ceremony, with the mayor, the conseil municipal, the President of France. Of course this is a fantasy: he will never show it to anyone. The very idea makes him feel sick.
He also thinks of it as a bird, because of the feathers stuck along the handles. Oncle Fernand had fifty chickens, it was always said. His brother – Jean-Luc’s father – thought chickens were stupid, demonstrating the fact in the usual way when one had to be slaughtered: headless, it still ran about.
Oncle Fernand, however, was different; he nursed a mutant chick with huge feet and a crooked spine and miniature wings. It lived a year and when it died Oncle Fernand cried, apparently. He was twelve. His father – Jean-Luc’s grandfather – was very worried by his boy and beat him, saying everything, good and bad, was merited. These were the stories that Jean-Luc was brought up with.
This isn’t a monument, this is Oncle Fernand’s mutant chick, Jean-Luc tells himself, laughing inside his head. The resurrection of the mutant chick.
He writes this out carefully in pencil on a piece of cardboard torn off a box. La résurrection de la poule mutante. Because it makes Oncle Fernand so happy, he glues the strip of cardboard along the side of the monument, from wheel to wheel. He doesn’t like the look of his careful handwriting, it reminds him of school exercises and is still uneven, but he leaves it.
He doesn’t know what to do with the photographs. He hasn’t looked at them again since the woods, yesterday. Just looking at the plastic envelope scares him. It’s because of Raoul Lagrange, hovering in the background. You can’t get rid of ghosts, just like that. You can’t shoot them, or make them transparent by adding chemicals, or keep them out with an electric fence.
He has a rival in love. It is like a Johnny Hallyday song. He has five Johnny CDs but the one he chooses now is the tape of best hits that he bought from the stall at St-Maurice five or six years ago. He opens his old tape recorder and puts in the cassette. He has to blow the dust off, and the side of the tape recorder is scotched up with tape that’s peeling away, but the music still plays. He knows it all by heart, anyway: it’s not Johnny promising his eyes when she can’t see any more, the salt from the kisses of his mouth … it’s Jean-Luc Maille. It’s the honey from the touch of his own hand. It’s his blood that is the same as hers, that is over and above any difference between him and her, between him and the Englishwoman, because face to face they resemble one another, we are blood for blood the same, we are just the same –
There is moaning from next door. A shout. He checks by putting his ear to the door. You never know. Last year she fell out of bed and fractured something and the bad-tempered nurse – not Elodie, back then – told him off for not responding to her cries. ‘I wouldn’t have a minute to myself if I did,’ he replied. The nurse told him he’d regret it, after, when his mother was gone for good.
‘I’m trying to sleep, stupid!’
‘Too bad,’ he shouts back.
‘You’ll kill me! I’ll call the police!’
‘After I’ve killed you, or before?’
She goes silent at that. He’s noticed that sometimes he gains the upper hand. Perhaps he scares her with his jokes.
As the tape plays Johnny’s best hits, Jean-Luc hangs the old greenish soup spoons by wire from the pink plastic handle; they are flowers on the bush, and you can see your face in a spoon. He used to make faces in his spoon, when he was small. His face all swollen and comical. He could cut out little faces from the magazines in his drawer and glue them into the bowl of each spoon, but he needs the Englishwoman’s face, close up, for the prettiest flower. The one that made him smile in the picture book, when he was a little boy at school. He nips the wire with his red pliers: a satisfying click, each time.
And where is he going to find the Englishwoman’s face, without asking her to pose? The face on the photos he took was too small each time.
Unless he cuts out the photo of her naked, standing by the pool, and sticks that on instead. Her whole body instead of her face. This idea appeals to him more and more. She’ll be safe in the spoon, the heart of the flower. But the envelope scares him. It’s because of Raoul Lagrange, standing at the back in his blue overalls, straining to lift his head on its broken neck. Watching, watching through eyes as white as the pieces of gravel the girls gave him. His rival in love. And he can’t do anything about it: you can’t get rid of someone who’s already got rid of.
He sticks two of the pieces of gravel on the ends of the pink handle, holding each in the glue until it’s dry enough and his finger aches. The duck has eyes, he laughs to himself. Blind eyes. The eyes of the dead. It has to have the dead on it, being a monument.
He picks up the scissors, mustering his courage. But he’s frightened to open the envelope. It’s too strong.
His mother calls him again with a whine like a tom-cat on heat. It is Sunday morning, the nurse has been and gone, and now it is up to her son. The whine won’t stop, she’s thirsty, for a week now she hasn’t been able to get down the stairs because of some kind of feebleness in her legs, and has only shuffled around her room once or twice.
He still has the scissors in his hand when he goes through. She’s sitting in the winged easy chair, where the nurse left her.
‘All I want is a glass of water,’ she moans. ‘My throat’s as dry as a biscuit.’
‘There’s water on your bedside table.’
She grimaces and shakes her head, the folds of her throat wobbling like a chicken’s. ‘It’s last night’s.’
‘Water doesn’t go off that quickly,’ he says, picking it up. He is saying things for the sake of it, he isn’t really concentrating, his mind is on the monument. ‘We could boil some white marrube flower in it,’ he says. ‘Clear you out. Spring cleaning.’
She grimaces. Jean-Luc wants to grimace, too. Every spring until he was eighteen, over three dreaded mornings before school, he’d been forced to drink an infusion of marrube, the bitterest drink there was, as his grandmother had made Maman do – to purge the liver, to clear the blood. They’d pick the ugly flowers in the summer in the hot fields below Aubain to dry over the winter and they would both grimace as they found them, they couldn’t help it, it was memory working, it was the bitterness that had remained in their heads.
‘It’d kill me,’ she says, and immediately regrets it from the look of her.
He puts the glass down, remembering those harvests in the hot fields, the sun on his neck, the scents, the rush basket full of leaves and flowers, the sight of her skirt and her laddered, vein-knotted calves. She’d always wear the same blue working skirt, day in, day out, summer, winter. It smelt like a goats’ pen. On the wall is his present to her when she was sixty: a duck in ceramic, with a bamboo frame. A real artist did it, selling stuff from his studio in St-Maurice. He was Dutch and wore a beret. She liked it. It was very well done, you could see the exact feathers, what type of duck it was: a mallard. He was glad she liked it. He was twenty, then.
‘Why’ve you got those scissors?’ she asks, with the same scared look.
‘I thought you might need a haircut,’ he smiles.
She crouches in the chair, her small, square-shaped body turning even smaller. Her hair is stuck patchily to her skull and cropped every month by one of the nurses. It looks like a worn flannel over her head; she strokes it. ‘You’re not touching it,’ she says, as if guarding a treasure.
He laughs. He didn’t even notice the scissors in his hand when he came into her room. He has a great urge to cut off all her hair, to take it back to the spotted skull. A nurse washes that balding head every week over the plastic bowl, as if they are in a proper hairdresser’s; a towel draped around his mother’s neck, the jug filled up in the tiny bathroom next to the kitchen. Up and down, up and down, the nurse goes. Much easier to have it all off.
‘Much easier to cut it all off,’ he says, smiling. He comes up to her and snips a curl above her ear. It lies in his hand like a tiny clump of fir needles. He shakes it away and it vanishes against the grey linoleum that was once patterned with blue and red spots.
‘Murderer,’ she whispers, her eyes expanding in their creased sockets.
‘I haven’t murdered anyone, Maman. But I’ll murder you if you carry on like this.’
‘I bet you would, too!’ She looks both terrified and defiant, shrinking into the chair with its bald patches and grease stains as if she might melt into it, become the chair itself. One day the chair will be empty, and then what will he think?
It would be so easy, he realises. A quick plunge of the scissors into her chest, then another to make sure. Or into the throat, like the shepherds do with their goats or their sheep, slowly but firmly pressing the blade into the windpipe. Jean-Luc’s father showed his boy how to do that, when they’d a few goats up at the back, the flies and the smell filling the kitchen.
She tripped up a few years ago and hit the radiator: blood spurted from the side of her head like a drinking fountain. He held his thumb against it until the ambulance arrived. The strange thing was, she’d carried on chatting to him, in a good mood, or maybe knocked into sense. Things were better then.
But Oncle Fernand is telling him not to be stupid, to go and get her a glass of fresh water. He has far more important actions to perform than putting his mother out of her misery. Or cutting off what’s left of her hair.
He comes back to Les Fosses on his mobilette to check the fence. He’s on his way to the Dutch couple’s kidney dish of a pool and makes a small detour to see whether the fence has done its work. He half expects to see electrocuted boars littering the yard.
No one about, although it is mid-afternoon. The seeds lie like rice over the earth, blackened by heavy watering. Almost April, everything bursting out already, the cardousso on his own door as open as it can get, the time for sowing long past but he couldn’t not have tried. He’d be fired, otherwise. Madame Sandler was quite clear about that, although he doesn’t always believe her. But these people would be reporting back: she has spies, now. She’d realise he isn’t pulling his weight, that he’s been pulling the wool over her eyes for years. He hasn’t been, in his own mind, but that’s how she’d see it.
The very first thing she said to him on the phone, years back, was: ‘Are you for hire?’ Or maybe that was just her bad French. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not a car.’ She liked that answer.
She phoned him up late at night, once, all the way from England, telling him to plant some red geraniums in pots either side of the door before they got there that weekend with her friends. She wanted to impress her friends. She didn’t want the house to look unwelcoming. Ordinary large pots, Jean-Luc. He did what she’d said, but it was the wrong type of geranium and she was shocked by the pots. He’d chosen the fanciest ones he could find in Jardiland – shiny blue glazed pots imitating baskets, with basket-type handles. ‘I said ordinary, Jean-Luc; these are disgusting pots!’ Her friends laughed. She laughed. Monsieur Sandler laughed. Jean-Luc was upset: he couldn’t see what was so disgusting about the pots he’d chosen.
They were thrown out and replaced by two very old terracotta pots from an antique shop, chipped and peeling like bad skin, with moulded heads sicking up leaves. They were expensive, even though they looked as if they were about to disintegrate. He had to come and water the flowers in these and the other pots she’d bought every other day: she didn’t want a watering system with its little black pipes running everywhere. A year later the two antique pots were stolen. No doubt by one of the passing hunters, as nothing else was nicked. So he went to the café and told Louis in Marcel Lagrange’s hearing, but all Marcel said was that some Arabs had stolen the chrome badge off his Cherokee when he was in town. They’d sell it back in Morocco, he grunted. They all need sending back, then we’ll be comfortable again.
Madame Sandler was glad that nobody had broken in, when Jean-Luc told her on the phone. She hardly seemed to care, otherwise.
Yet she cared about her lawn.
The fence has worked. Jean-Luc feels good about this. There are fresh boar-spoors all the way along the margins. He senses an obscure triumph over the primitive forces of life, shadowing him from the woods. Oncle Fernand isn’t talking today, or he’d have congratulated him. There was nothing said, even by the plaque. There are often days like that. Of rest. Yesterday Oncle Fernand chattered away, boring his nephew. Who has bought another throwaway camera, but not at the same shop. It’s in one of the pockets against his thigh in his military-style hunting trousers: light, but he can feel it. He is armed.
A jay warns the others from the woods.
His ears prick to it, as in hunting days. He still has his gun at home, not touched now for four or five years, not even for the rabbits. It belonged to his father. One day he’s going to dismantle it and oil it and put it back together again and shoot Marcel Lagrange. This is the fantasy he plays with in his thoughts for the fifteen minutes it takes him to fiddle about with the fence and the watering and the pool. The pool is slipping back to being green, a very diluted menthe, even though the filtering system is working. The English haven’t done what he asked. He tests it: normal. That’s not good, if it goes green for no reason. If it gets worse, he won’t see her swimming for a few days at least. He thinks he sees tendrils of slime waving around the base of the filter.
He wants to see her again, suddenly – not close up and clothed, but secretly and distant and naked. It is the most valuable thing in his life, apart from the monument. And the two are linked by her. He can barely stand the idea of sinking to the normal level of life and talking to her about the house, jobs, the lawn, the pool, her mouth struggling with her bad French, her eyes looking impatiently at him.
The pool is in the balance, if he doesn’t pour the chemicals in it might turn to pea soup by tomorrow and then take several days to return to transparency. As it is, he’ll have to warn her not to swim for the next two days.
He stares at the water from the end of the pool nearest the woods: most of the liquid rectangle is white sky, interrupted by the dark line of the roof further up, the blackness of the house tipped upside down. He remembers swimming in the rivers, the pools that streams make, when he was a kid; there was something in him that was afraid of the depths, the slimy weeds that clung to your legs, the deep invisible pike. The same spots are no good now, there’s less water and the rivers are lower and the pools are mostly standing and stagnant by early July. He hasn’t swum in years.
He could give it a dose of copper sulphate and shock it with granules of chlorine, but he’s no expert. That would condemn it for a couple of days. He can’t not tell her. She might swallow some, or get a rash on her beautiful face. But how can he tell her without his voice trembling, giving away the fact that he knows she’s been using the pool?
A breeze gets up and gusts over the water, combing all the shapes away in one sweep. When it settles he notices a big bird on the upside-down roof, a hunched silhouette like a vulture.
He looks up. It’s not a bird: it’s a human being.
He can’t move a finger. His neck has seized.
The silhouette surveys him. His heart and lungs are confusing themselves. He forces himself to lower his head and looks only at the reflection. The main thing with ghosts is never to catch them in the eye, even if the eyes are not visible. He calls on Oncle Fernand and the Virgin to help him, to keep him from harm. But he has abandoned her Son. He doesn’t know if the Virgin would want to help him. Oncle Fernand is out.
Someone (he noticed earlier) has taken the new cardousso off the front door: only the old, broken one is left. That’s not enough. That’s no protection at all.
But he prays, nevertheless, and the ghost of Raoul disappears, seems to grow smaller and melt into the roof. Jean-Luc lifts his head slowly to check. Nothing but the crest of the roof against the white sky. Jean-Luc squints to see better, to lighten the shadow. The bird has flown. He has trouble swallowing. He glances all around him and looks up again and then something, some pale and spectral movement, catches his terrified attention lower down, where the sunlight deepens the shadow over the back of the house: the cobwebs on the back door are fluttering, half-broken. This scares Jean-Luc almost more than the ghost of Raoul Lagrange, because Raoul was always nice to him. As nice as his brother is nasty.
Except that now, Raoul is Jean-Luc’s rival. Jealousy is a bitter thing.
There’s a munching of tyres on gravel as the car stops. The family are back.
The girls play near him as he stacks stones by the tumbled wall: he plans to attack it before the summer, but time is running out. They are building a hide-out on the edge of the woods, with their father’s permission. He thinks they look healthier than when he first saw them. They wave to him, chattering, a few metres off.
He strolls up to look. The girls stand in the camp, a ridge of dead leaves, as if posing for a photograph. His new throwaway camera is in his pocket and he takes it out, surprising them. They laugh and so does he. The two eldest stand like policemen, the youngest is hiding her face. Two, three, four clicks, just a simple press of the finger: it thrills him, the way it works again, the way he shoots them and they get sucked into the camera to wait there until the laboratory does its bit and sends him the plastic envelope to open like the best present in the world. The middle one grabs the young one by the wrist, shaking it, trying to get her to look at the camera. They all laugh and then the youngest one points.
Their mother is walking towards them slowly from the house with her arms folded. Her face is divided in two: the top half is frowning and the bottom is smiling. He is embarrassed to see her, of course. He avoids her eyes as he goes back to stack the stones. She stands at a little distance and watches the children, who continue making the den. He is conscious of the sound of the stones clipping on each other as he stacks them in their various piles, small and medium and large, like the uneven beat of his own heart.
He remembers he has to tell her about the chemicals in the pool. He hurries up to the shed and takes out the plastic canisters and starts tipping the chemicals into the pool before she goes back inside; as the copper sulphate gurgles out of the bottle and spreads in curls of blue through the water, she turns and watches. He knows she’ll come over and she does. She’s like the little inquisitive robin. His heart warms to her, but all he does is acknowledge her with a nod. He can’t help it, he’s flushing so hot he has to wipe his brow on his sleeve.
She says, in her poor French, how toxic the chemicals look. All he has to do is say yes, they are, but after a couple of days the poisons are dispersed. So he says it. Then it’s fine to swim, if we have to do this in the summer? Yes, he says. Come the summer, he goes on, he’ll make sure he tells her when the treatment is done. His ears feel blocked with the rushing of blood: it’s as if this conversation is not taking place right here and now.
He looks after her as she walks away, her arms still folded, the body he’s so familiar with hidden by her clothes. The worst and best part being that she doesn’t know.
He grows closer and closer to her over the next couple of weeks; especially when using the binoculars, with their nice leather smell reminding him of the animal skins stretched out at home in his father’s time. Most days he has come up to the thickening spurge behind the hut, even if she only swims two or three times a week. He never forgets his brush knife, laying it within easy reach in case he needs an excuse for being here, ready to act the gardener and start cutting. One day she came out early but got straight into the car. She didn’t come back, although he waited two or three hours. He wondered if she had left her husband. But no, two days later he watched and she came out of the house as good as new and swam. The ghost of Raoul Lagrange has not appeared again on the roof, although he keeps checking.
Today there is a violent, cold mistral and her appearance is unexpected. The overloaded stems of spurge splay and shift in the gusts. He has to be careful. The wind excites him. She strips, shivering, and he takes another picture to add to his collection as he’d once collect pebbles or moths.
There is an explosion of glitter and the sound of splashing, faint on the wind. It must be very cold in there, he thinks. It must be very cold against her bare skin, against the nipples on her breasts and the soft furry kitten below that he strokes in his dreams so that it purrs and purrs.
The low, uncertain sun flares off the water as it moves, so all he can see of her body is a dark shape among the flashes, a shadow that changes to white then back to black, until she turns at the end and swims in his direction, towards the woods. Then he can see her face chinning the water. It always looks surprised, happy and surprised at the same time. Ten lengths, no more nor less.
He takes another photograph as she climbs out. He takes no more than one or two each time. There are twenty-seven exposures and there are only thirteen remaining. Soon, he thinks, he won’t bother at all and just take them with his brain.
She gleams all over, hugging herself. Then she straightens up side-on to him and spreads her arms wide like wings, with the sun full on her. She is still shivering, though. He can see tiny droplets winking all over her pale body. She has her eyes closed. The spurge sways again in a violent buffet and she gives a little delighted gasp. The kitten has glittery droplets on its head.
When the stems that hide him shift, he feels the early sun glancing off his face, spotting it and leaving dark marks on his vision. He wants to see the goosepimples on her skin and grabs the binoculars too eagerly before he’s properly put the camera back in his top pocket; the camera falls down the front of his jacket as if down a cliff and clips a big stone with a surprisingly sharp report. His father always warned him about getting careless, when they were hunting together: in all the excitement of it.
She looks up and her mouth drops open under a puzzled frown.
She’s looking straight at him with her black eyes, right through the swaying stems of spurge as if she’s taking time to understand. She hides her breasts with an arm, squashing them. He is stupefied. His heart pounds in his head, on the side of his head in the vein which is the only part of him moving, the rest of him hunter-still. Then her creased-up eyes shift slightly to the left and a bit further and he realises she has not separated him out from the plants after all, despite the early sunlight spotting him. He lets his breath out soundlessly. He must be invisible, he must have become the plants.
He sees her bend down to where her towel lies in a heap and reach for something spindly, putting it on her face; she straightens up with her spectacles on her nose, one lens flashing the sun in his eyes as she turns towards him.
He twists round and reaches for the brush knife in one dazed movement and then bursts clear with his back to her and begins hacking at the undergrowth behind the hut, at the tall, heavy-headed, milk-fat spurge.
He’s the gardener. He ignores the clots and dribbles landing in gobs on his clothes and face as if he’s being spat at. Never in his life would he normally have cut into spurge like this and the milk-sap is everywhere, as if a goat’s udder has exploded. Beyond everything he can hear his father shouting at him, furious and scared, as he pants and grunts.
He waits for her voice behind him but it doesn’t come. He goes on hacking without thought until that which is stinging is just that and storms into his brain and becomes the serpent.
Can eyes hiss? Jean-Luc’s are hissing. He presses the flat of his palms against his sockets and bends right over but nothing quietens them and yet he still doesn’t howl. It is something else that is howling into the air from his mouth.
Sarah grabbed at her little heap of clothes and pressed them against her as she backed off.
The undergrowth beyond the pool-shed had exploded into a man.
She wasn’t sure who the man was but he was dressed like a soldier and he was crazed, he was swinging something like a machete with his back to her. She wanted to run but her legs had jellified, all she could do was back off step by step towards the house with her clothes pressed against her nakedness. It was so extraordinary, the sudden irruption of this terrible figure, that she considered herself in a kind of parallel existence from which she was observing the action unfold.
She could hear him grunting with effort, the plants falling with a rustle, the light smack of the blade as it flashed and made contact over and over; she could hear her own breathing as she walked backwards on trembling legs, leaving the poolside and reaching the rough ground that was uncomfortable against her bare feet in this other universe. She felt she might reach the house unseen, that the man hadn’t yet seen her although she knew elsewhere that he had been watching her, that this was as old as myth and would end badly for one or the other of them. She had met women in the Congo who had been raped by rebels or government troops or coltan miners, who had colostomy bags tied to their waists because of the damage done to their insides with bayonets or pieces of wood, and now they came vividly into her mind and she felt terrified again. She’d loved the forest in the Congo, it might have been a kind of teeming, humid paradise, but instead it had been made a hell.
This paradise had also been made hell in a matter of seconds – it was all the same: paradise, hell. Her legs were weak but she was almost there, crouched and stepping backwards with her clothes bundled against her, the huge stone wall of the side of the house beside her, the door just a few yards further, her children inside and the madman with the machete without.
She must scream for Nick, he must phone the police from the chair in the bathroom, she had forgotten the number, she should have written the number down precisely for this kind of eventuality in this remote place.
The man like a white mercenary had stopped swinging his machete. He was very still, bent over with his back to her –even from this distance she could see him clearly because the plants were now gone and the early sunlight splattered his tunic.
And then something between a whoop and a howl went up, freezing her before she got to the door.
The man went yai-yai-yai-yai, covering his face, and then howled in short, angry bursts, like a monkey defending its territory. He was mad. He had dropped his machete. He wasn’t a killer or a rapist, he was Jean-Luc the handyman, staggering out with his hands pressed to his face, stumbling out towards the pool, blinded as if by some unearthly force of retribution.