Afterwards, Nick was to ask her why she hadn’t at least pulled her knickers on. He was intrigued, not worried. ‘I mean,’ he added jocularly, ‘I’m only asking from my metaposition as objective historian, not as interested husband.’
‘I didn’t have time, is the short answer. I thought the priority was to get him out of the water. And there is no metaposition. Only overlap.’
‘Problematised metaposition,’ he clarified.
The fact is, she didn’t think. There were no priorities. There was only the action, the instinct. She had been in the netball team at school: the instinctive dart forward, the thrust, the body calculating height with its labyrinth of muscle and tendon before you knew you even had to jump. Nick had been bad at sports, shambling about the muddy field on his long legs. Even the running track had foxed him: he’d thought too much on the way instead of blanking everything out but the finishing line.
Once, while taking the art-club painting class in her enthusiastic first year at Cambridge, the stark-naked life model – a good-looking guy in his late twenties with an improbably large willy – had wandered about in the breaks checking out the efforts, munching on his apple among the clothed without a care in the world. No one commented or turned a hair: but he didn’t come back – the more radical feminists in the group had decided he was an exhibitionist, taking advantage of them, appropriating their space.
‘It’s all context,’ she explained, rather needlessly. ‘While he was posing, it was acceptable. But he crossed the invisible line, he entered the real world. He should have put on the dressing gown supplied.’
‘How does this apply to our impromptu bather?’
‘Let me think, Dr Mallinson. OK, I suppose what I’m saying is that in an emergency, the rules change. You don’t notice. I didn’t actually notice I was still at the birthday-suit stage. It must have looked fairly weird, like a scene from Carry On Camping or something. And I can tell you: I could hardly pull my knickers back on for the goose-bumps.’
Nick smiled: ‘I think you being naked makes it Greek and heroic, rather than comic.’
‘Wild differences of interpretation, as you would say yourself.’
All she’d had time for was to shout out a warning as Jean-Luc had advanced like a drunk towards the water, going yai-yai-yai-yai.
He’d toppled in like a felled tree; the splash had seemed to drill each of its white pips into the air in slow motion. She dropped her clothes – knickers, bra, shirt, socks, jeans, sweater – where she stood and darted forwards across the yard to try to help as the water slapped vigorously at the sides like applause. She was only aware of a film of cold covering her bare skin, particularly over her buttocks.
He seemed to be below the level of the water, his hair like a giant black sea-urchin. He might well have been surfacing, he might have made it out onto the side himself, without her help. She nearly fell in herself, reaching from the side for his shoulders and clasping the thick wet cloth of his tunic, pulling as hard as she could.
His hands began to move under the water, propelling him in the right direction so that his dead weight lessened. His face was above the water and somehow huger, like a giant’s face, sheened with water and bright with cold. It struck her as being repellently physical, perhaps because his bent nose was streaming and his eyes were shut and in his open mouth she could see old fillings, strings of saliva or water connecting his bruised-looking lips, the unshaven little bristle-patches under each nostril that careless men never bother with but look so awful.
He was groaning rather than spluttering, so maybe in the end her efforts, which were in her view considerable and put at least one vertebra out in her back and strained a muscle in her right shoulder, were not essential. Whatever the facts, he didn’t drown, but by the time he’d heaved himself out she had gained an impression of great weight caused by the water soaking his clothes, which was what she remembered about her swimming lessons, when the whole class had had to swim in their old clothes and learn how to hold someone in difficulties under the chin.
The real thing was confusing and messy, though; and embarrassing – not necessarily because she was starkers. She blushed when she thought about it, afterwards; the way she had shouted and flapped around him like a feeble bird, pulling not on his body but on his camouflage jacket so that it rose above his head until he’d managed to reach the side himself and she’d realised she was making things worse, and had let go, proffering only a hand in case he slipped back under.
When he sat on the side and opened his eyes, she was shocked; his eyes were red and swollen from the chlorine, as unseeing as a blind man’s. For an instant of madness she thought she might have been too late, that he was in fact drowned and had turned into a zombie. He was in pain, though, and zombies never feel pain.
‘C’est les plantes,’ he groaned. ‘Merde, putain, ces putains de plantes! Yai-yai-yai!’
She understood, eventually: there were purplish patches on his hands and his face, the purple moving around strangely on the fish-cold surface of his skin. He flapped his hand as if expressing amazement, over and over. He was being rather brave. Sarah knew about the toxicity of oleanders, but not about those big, innocent-looking weeds. Supposing the girls had tried to pick them? They were pretty enough, in a clumsy sort of way. No, they were quite ugly, from another angle. Now they were almost all dealt with, anyway.
She told him in her turbid French that she was going to get dressed, and ran over to her clothes dumped near the door and pulled them on, while he just sat in a spreading glint of water on the side of the pool, shivering in the sharp, unpleasant gusts. He moaned as if in grief, forehead resting on his knees.
Once she was decent, she came back to his side and made him stop rubbing his eyes by pulling his hands away. His fluttering eyelids were even more puffed up, the eyeballs filmed over. Holding onto his wrist as he stood, she then guided him to the house. He was whimpering, now, holding his head down. Her hair was wetting her sweater’s collar unpleasantly.
She felt the stiffness in his whole body through his wrist, the way he resisted her and then relented, letting her guide him, trusting her like a little boy. But when she considered the way he had been with her little girls and then today, skulking in the underbrush while she was bathing naked, she thought of him again as menacing. It was odd, leading someone menacing by the hand, like a child.
She didn’t say anything about the menacing side to Nick, who was scratching his head sleepily when she burst into the bedroom to announce the emergency. All she told him was that Jean-Luc had lesions in his eyes from cutting the wrong plant. She knew the word ‘lesions’ from her child’s emergency first-aid book, and it made her feel she was more in control of the situation.
‘He’s keeping his head under the kitchen tap, but it’s not getting better. I think the chlorine made it worse.’
‘Like sow thistles,’ Nick remarked, hastily pulling on his trousers. ‘I’ll always remember that from school. The old field behind the pavilion, cutting sow thistles with our penknives then flicking them at the enemy ranks. And that itching powder stuff from the hedges. Great fun!’
‘Whatever,’ said Sarah, suddenly desperate for tea. ‘That was boarding school, this is normal life.’
* * *
Nick drove him to the hospital in St-Maurice, while she had a hot shower. Jean-Luc had held his face under the kitchen tap for ages but his eyes were worse: the lids looked as if they were turned over and might burst in a spray of blood, while the eyeballs themselves were a filigree of tiny wriggling veins like an elaborate brooch in which the dark iris sat like a mute stone. His large knuckles were encircled in violent purple blotches, as if he’d been crushing blackberries.
The girls had stayed asleep throughout. She’d had a vague hope that the action might have brought Jamie down to help, but it hadn’t. Jamie had been tenaciously semi-absent for the last two weeks, appearing at odd times to raid the fridge (they had padlocked the wine cellar). He’d carry a fragrance of woodsmoke, paraffin and cannabis, and would sleep for twelve hours in his cosy den of an attic: say, from nine in the morning to nine at night. He was living some parallel life. Reasonably friendly, he kept his other life a secret. The babysitting deal had been forgotten. Sarah was oddly unconcerned; she had placed Jamie in a part of her mind that was sealed off from the rest, like something boxed in lead.
Right now he was up in the attic, in a sleep phase. One day soon, perhaps tomorrow, Jamie would leave entirely, only to pop up again at Helena’s cottage in Wales with wild stories of his father’s and his stepmother’s wickedness, merrily rewriting history, building castles of fantasy in some murky corner of his brain radioactive with jealousy and loathing. And Helena, as before, would write nasty, accusing emails to which the only possible reply was silence. Meanwhile they would have to clean up the mess in his den, empty the pan of stale piss, open the windows wide to release the stink. It was always like scouring out some underground animal’s lair. That one day he would grow out of it, find a job, become an upright citizen and make lots of money, seemed less of a forlorn hope than that they would succeed in embracing his present self with the arms of selfless, parental love.
She occupied herself after the drama by cutting out paper fish with the girls, because it was April Fool’s Day later in the week and the French secretly stuck fish on each other’s backs with sellotape, shouting out Poisson d’avril when the victims realised. They were looking up names of fish and writing them on the cut-outs in both English and French as an educational addition. Sarah felt Alicia and Tammy were advancing in leaps and bounds with their erratic home-learning: they were doing no more than two hours a day of actual ‘classes’ with either her or Nick, but it was peculiarly effective.
Goldfish. Poisson Rouge.
‘Red’s not gold,’ said Alicia. They looked up ‘gold’.
Shark. Requin.
She herself was walking about with a crab-shape that said I Hate Jamie scotched permanently on her back, and Jamie no doubt felt the same.
‘Hate is such a strong word,’ her hate-filled mother would always say.
This ugly part of Sarah that hated her stepson caused her to doubt herself. It undermined her self-belief: the objective, dispassionate historian. Jamie lurked in her mind: deep, almost recondite. Compared to Jamie, Jean-Luc was a paper fish that could be torn off.
‘I met Georges Chambord in St-Maurice and had a wonderfully intense chat,’ said Nick, as they sat down to supper. ‘He said that life consists of three things, like a game of poker: luck, strategy and guile. Le hasard, la stratégie, et la ruse. I had to look up ruse, because “ruse” isn’t right. Guile, trickery. Good, hm? He’s invited us to dinner on Friday, by the way.’
‘Not with Des the Res, I hope.’
‘Oh, presumably not.’
Jean-Luc hovered over their conversation, tainting it. By the end of the meal he was firmly squatting between them.
‘As I’ve reiterated several times,’ Nick sighed, ‘he may simply have been birdwatching. He was coming here to do some work anyway and arrived early to bird watch. And got incredibly embarrassed. Although the absence of his van or mobilette, that’s a weeny bit suspicious. Anyway, let’s not think about causation before the evidence is absolutely solid. Or as solid as anything can be in this world of apparence.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Sarah, after a moment, ‘I think Peter’s sobriquet for you is rather a good one.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘The Tortoise,’ she said.
‘I can think of worse,’ Nick sighed, after a moment’s silence. He was amazed at the way, whenever Peter Osterhauser’s name was mentioned, a kind of flat-fish of venom would flip in his chest. Occasionally he would imagine himself as a professor in somewhere like Freiburg in the late 1930s, and Peter as a Jewish colleague. How hard not to have denounced him, or at least watched the poor man being taken away and not felt relish. The Tortoise!
He’d put a Yusef Lateef CD on the hi-fi: the sax skittered about over the urgent drums. Very urban, very somewhere else. He should, Nick thought, have become a jazz drummer. Jazz was utterly of the present moment. It was life itself. Professor Osterhauser played classical viola. Nick played CDs. The Smiths. The Bobo Stenson Trio.
‘I don’t see Tortoise,’ he said, eventually. ‘I don’t get it.’
Sarah pulled a face, absently staring at the fire. She didn’t like jazz very much. She always saw polished Fifties cars gleaming in rain under streetlamps.
‘There isn’t worse,’ he all but pleaded. ‘Is there?’
‘Buttered Scone?’
‘What?’
‘A play on Mallinson. It’s slang for number one in Bingo, apparently.’
‘And so?’ Nick’s heart was hammering in anticipation: he could hear Peter’s simpering laugh, like a bus’s air-brakes.
‘I’m not sure. A sort of cluster of subtle meanings, double-entendres. You know what he’s like.’
‘Like the Bourbons, like Jamie, he learns nothing and he forgets nothing.’
‘It’s not important, Nick. I think we should concentrate on the problem in hand. Can we change the music?’
‘We’ve concentrated all day,’ he replied, gloomily picturing his colleagues swapping nicknames for him in the buttery, spinning falsities about him in the dark corridors and dining halls of Fitzherbert College, panelled and floored with countless acres of English oak or plundered African mahogany. Really, it was just a miasma of jealous bickerings overlaid with a sheen of intellect. Dark castles of fantasy.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘at the risk of you calling me more names, I still think we should sift the evidence first.’
‘Yes, Mr Holmes.’
They had sketched out two plausible scenarios over the Jean-Luc incident. Either he was innocent, the binoculars merely for bird-spotting or hunting purposes and the machete-like knife for cutting underbrush; or he was guilty of, at the least, voyeurism. The horrible hunters had binoculars, they had noticed. They had found the binoculars and the big knife amongst the cut plants on Nick’s return from the hospital; they were careful not to touch the spattered traces of sap, still milky and wet in places.
As Nick’s favourite phrase had it, history was 99 per cent lies and 1 per cent the awful truth.
Whatever its truth was, there was an ominous feel to the drama. Genuinely ominous, not as in ‘That sounds ominous.’ Omen, omened, of good or ill omen, ominous, ominously, ominousness. From the Latin. He had once written a schoolboy talk on historical omens such as comets, and (in the days when he would sit for hours in the school library, wondering what to be, educating himself into donhood) had been struck by the change of letter from ‘e’ to ‘i’: why did it change? Such things would beguile him back then. A strange boy, he supposed now, if he could meet him.
That’s why he’d put on the jazz. Jazz was the opposite of ominous.
Jean-Luc would not be blind for ever, the hospital doctor had said. The poor man had to sport rather natty aviator-type dark glasses that changed his appearance entirely. He looked like a fashion victim, Nick joked. They had joked rather a lot about an incident that was full of pain and shame. Nick had been initially amazed to hear that Sarah had been secretly skinny-dipping.
‘Perhaps you were making love with the gardener in the spurge,’ he’d joked. ‘The Gardener in the Spurge,’ he repeated, in a breathy, dramatic manner.
‘Yup, and that’s why he fell into the pool.’
‘Water sports?’
Not just ominousness, but unpleasantness. Something soiled, even in the jokes. Something lost for good.
‘There is this kind of burlesque side to it all,’ he mused. ‘There always is, somehow. Maybe not with the Holocaust or carpet bombing or slavery.’ He was nodding thoughtfully, frowning a little. Sarah felt shut out, as usual; he was doing this more and more. Prelude to bumbliness. ‘I have to say,’ he suddenly announced, wide-eyed, ‘that when you burst into the bedroom you looked like that famous scene in the James Bond film, when Britt Ekland, if it was Britt Ekland and not Raquel Welch, emerges from the sea with her tee shirt wet. An Aphrodite trope. It had me gagging as a schoolboy, anyway. It was James Bond, wasn’t it?’
‘I wasn’t that wet,’ she laughed.
‘Just the hair, maybe.’
After a moment she said: ‘I’d already told you I had my doubts about Jean-Luc.’ The jazz had come to an end. The quiet was good.
‘Meaning?’
She hesitated. Nick was suddenly ready to pounce: he had that glittering, raptor look in his eye. Or maybe it was just the candlelight.
‘There’s something unstable about him.’
‘Evil, you mean. Unstable is just a euphemism.’
‘It might not be. Evil is not a concept I trust. Unstable is.’
‘For now,’ said Nick.
Fifteen love, she thought. Their marriage gave her tennis elbow, an overdeveloped forearm.
Nick, digging in, wondered what she would call Mengele or Klaus Barbie. Unstable? Can you be icy and unstable?
‘I used to think,’ Sarah replied, deflecting his drive, ‘that history’s villains looked villainous. Then there was this silly thing on telly where they removed Hitler’s moustache and no one recognised him; they all thought he looked trustworthy and rather sweet.’ She chuckled, resting her chin on her knuckles. Nick nodded thoughtfully, finding her particularly beautiful like that.
‘Hitler plus moustache definitely looks psychotic,’ he said. ‘Those eyebags. A bit like Saddam’s. The strain of gorging with Old Nick,’ he added, gamely smoothing his own pouches.
‘Mao?’
‘Baby face. Like a balloon with the features scribbled on. Creepy.’
She relaxed: he was enjoying the game, now. She proffered Stalin – a tricky one. He got up to change the music. Although it was not yet the right day, he had a large red-and-blue fish sellotaped to his back, flapping rather realistically. COD, Alicia had written across it, unaware of the pun.
‘What you don’t see in black and white is his yellow eyes,’ he stated, sitting down again, the troubadours bewailing their impossible love behind. ‘Just the avuncular grin and Dunhill pipe. This is a bit like that Monty Python cricket match.’
‘Before my time,’ she said. Advantage Sarah. ‘Robespierre?’
‘A repressed homosexual, foppish, hated smells, finicky, very pale. Not nice, despite a good start.’
‘Whoo-er,’ she said. ‘Careful. Here’s the man who supported an elective called Queer Theory?’
‘Which brings us round to Jean-Luc,’ he declared, with a satisfied smile she didn’t like.
‘Actually, I think you’re way off beam there,’ she said, the wine filling her head with a pleasant devil-may-care attitude to the match. ‘I think he likes girls a lot, big or little, in skirts or out.’
‘Ri-ight,’ said Nick, nodding knowingly, with a possible tint of the sardonic that lit the electric grille in Sarah’s chest. His lips pursed as he pondered. She felt cheap, in some way. She felt like hitting him over the head: she hated it when he pondered. He seemed to retreat, become someone else completely unattractive. A turn-off. She heard her own words echoing: cheap magazine stuff. It was such an effort not to sound like a cheap magazine, day in day out. Not to be her natural self, if that was her natural self. Sometimes she wish she’d married a businessman.
‘So that’s the final conclusion,’ he murmured.
‘There may be other unthought-of possibilities,’ she said, quoting one of Nick’s staple reflections as an historian. He smiled, and they caught each other’s eye.
Of course she loved him. Together they had developed their own past, their own history. They could refer to it, even in irony, and no one else would understand. The silly little things, not just the earnest discussions about Fredric Jameson or Foucault.
‘By the way,’ said Nick, taking her hand, ‘you’ve got what looks like a rotten turbot stuck on your back.’
Alan called out from the kitchen, where he had taken the call.
‘Jean-Luc’s had an accident.’
‘Why? I mean how? Oh Lord.’
‘Not fatal,’ he cried. ‘Just uncomfortable. A work accident. Hey, like the Crucifixion. That was also a work accident.’
He appeared in the doorway, beaming. ‘Great joke, huh? This ex-Jesuit told it me. The Crucifixion –’
‘Alan, breathe deeply. Think of your heart. Start again. Jean-Luc.’ She was working on a gallery poster at the dining room table; she enjoyed the interruption.
‘They think he was spying on Mrs Fusspot taking a skin-dip.’
‘And? Oh God. Fallen off a ladder?’
‘He was out with his brush knife, cutting back that plant that spits milk in your eyes and burns them hollow.’
‘Spurge?’
‘Or so he said. Do you need a pair of binos for clearing brush?’
‘Oh, he’s so silly. Silly man. They’re all so ignorant.’
‘They had to call an ambulance. He also had a brief encounter with the pool, unconnected with any leisure activity.’
‘Lord, not drowned?’
‘I think if he had been drowned I would have said that first, Lucy my lovely.’
‘Not necessarily. Oh, shit. Blinded?’
‘Temporarily. Burns to both eyeballs. The punishment matches the crime, I say. It’s mythical. That goddess spied on. Jesus, which one? Begins with A. I’m losing it.’
‘Arachne.’
‘She’s spiders.’
‘Sounds more like a Mills & Boon,’ said Lucy, who had once tried her hand at writing one in a financial lull and miserably failed. ‘Isn’t that how they’re always punished in Mills & Boon?’
‘You’re thinking of Shakespeare,’ said Alan. ‘Or maybe Charlotte Brontë. Anyway, the goddess pulled him out, this time.’
Lucy stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘Did he fall in? Or jump in?’
‘Maybe he’s Narcissus,’ said Alan, brightly. ‘Or Tiresias. Tiresias was blind, with wrinkled dugs.’
He stepped behind her and cupped his wife’s breasts.
‘Mine are not wrinkled,’ she said, kissing his wrists. ‘They have just seen better days.’ The options for the new gallery poster were cool or violent. Neither pleased her. A third way – tasteful – was boring. It was vital to get it right. No artist was good enough, that was the trouble. Not one had any sincerity, it was all fake. ‘Alan, you’re teasing. It’s too cold to swim, even for goddesses, naked or otherwise.’
He gave each concealed husk a gentle squeeze, as best he could, then moved away. In the old days she’d go without a bra and you couldn’t tell.
‘I am not teasing you, my angry queen. For once I am deadly sérieux.’
Lucy leaned forwards in the chair, hands between her thighs, sloping-shouldered. ‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘More detail, please.’
Blindness terrified her. She required a cigarette. She had given up years ago, but the craving came and went and came again. It was a poison in her blood. It would never go completely. She had once, as a child, pricked her eyeball cutting roses, prior to boiling the petals in a forlorn attempt to make perfume for her mother, and had seen double for several days.
‘There is no more detail,’ said Alan, flipping an eraser on the back of his hand. ‘There’s only broad-stroke. I had the husband on the phone. He’s crazy but he’s a bright guy. He was very diplomatic, très discret.’
‘Please stop talking French when you can’t.’
‘I have to start somewhere. Hey, he also claimed that Jean-Luc was pretty forward with their little girls. Picking them up and so forth. Nothing dramatic, though. They just had this hunch and then the voyeur struck.’
‘What drivel,’ said Lucy, as if Alan had filled her in minutely. ‘Jean-Luc is French. The French admire attractive women and smile at children. It’s normal. That’s why I like going to France – men look at me.’
‘Do they?’
‘Don’t sound surprised, Alan. Any moment now the last one will stop looking at me and no man will ever look at me again. Mrs Fusspot is pretty in an unambitious way, you said so yourself. It doesn’t mean they’re all rapists and paedophiliacs.’
‘Paedophiles. I think this was more than Jean-Luc being avuncular. I think this was a lot like Jean-Luc being a complex of sinister, concealed desires.’
Alan was enjoying himself. He enjoyed the way the phrase about sinister desires moulded itself in his mouth, reminding him of his fine-tuned intelligence, his mastery of the word. He had long wanted to get rid of the guy, of whom he was weirdly jealous. Lucy was obsessed; he sometimes wondered if she and the handyman didn’t fuck like monkeys in the barn when he – Alan – was out doing some dull, manly chore like taking out garbage to the end of the dirt road. The eraser bounced on the floor in that manic way of erasers and disappeared under the desk.
Lucy said nothing. She was staring down at a blood-red, silkscreened slice of apple with moral indignation and good intentions serendipitously scrawled across it in lime green. All so retro. Everything went in circles. Nothing progressed. Almost no men, in fact, now looked at her. She tapped the blank part of the mock-up where Lucinda Gallery was to appear in civilised dove-grey. She imagined the gendarmes arriving with squealing tyres, screams and yells, Jean-Luc bundled away under a blanket, the dreadful, soppy English family simpering in the house, clutching each other, so fiercely righteous and Victorian.
A harp played gently from the speakers, the sun was falling on polished surfaces, Alan had been grinding his coffee beans and sweetening the air, but elsewhere an angry knot of disaster scribbled itself. She lacked the thew to deal with it. She was fifty-nine. Her entire female reproductive apparatus had been removed five years ago. There was now nothing but air between her and sixty.
‘I lack the thew,’ she murmured. ‘Did you mumble something about binoculars, Alan?’
‘You know I never mumble, my sylph. Apart from maybe or maybe not molesting their little threesome, he had these binos. He spied on Mrs Fusspot taking a dip, stark naked. Imagine that. Imagine that woman stark naked. Svelte and small and dark. Yum yum.’
‘State what happened again, sweetheart,’ said Lucy, glumly, ‘but without the lasciviousness. There are facts that have escaped me.’
Alan told her. Jean-Luc had watched Yum-Yum with his hunting binos and she’d spotted him and so he’d pretended to be cutting back the undergrowth with his brush knife. Yum-Yum pretended she believed him, because she was scared he might go crazy and chop her up into juicy pieces. And then he’d got splashed by the milk. ‘That was not pretending,’ he added, with a throaty chortle.
And then he’d fallen in, but only temporarily.
Alan thrived on this sort of thing. He hadn’t even bothered to dress this morning. He took calls in his long Arab pyjamas that hung off his stomach like a frock. He was on great form. He was moving out of Sumeria and Babylonia and Assyria as fast as his camel would take him, he’d joke, even if a little man were to offer him the equivalent of the Royal Graves of Ur in a backstreet shack.
He had always been nimble, despite his belly. If you follow the money you have to dance. He had started his career at high school, not in pictures but in books. He bought old childrens’ books for peanuts and dismembered them, framed the illustrations and sold them at great profit: ten, twenty dollars. Then, later, it was older books. Really old books. Seventeenth century and earlier. Parchment. Medieval manuscripts. A wealth of illuminated pages turned to pictures for the walls of the rich. Collectors flocked over Alan like terns over herring.
You have to swerve in a ball game: he swerved, sprang out of medieval, scored with modern. His pure abstract period was a ball. He just followed the dollars. All-white canvases. Canvases that were just that: canvas. The world could not be fooled forever; he knew the bottom would fall out of abstract before it happened: he swivelled into Central African for about two days – it was too late, too many fakes – then into Near and Middle Eastern. Jackpot every time. You pulled the handle and stuck your hand out and something ancient dropped into it: cylinder seals, mostly, but who cares? It was an income stream. And then one day you see the most beautiful woman you have ever seen, in white marble. From Ur.
But even she was not worth his life or losing parts of his body for.
In the world according to Zig, Art Brut was beginning to smell of crisp new bills of serious denominations. Get these words, Alan: figurative, emotion, narrative, honesty, natural, weird. Alan had worked the Art Brut scene for a week and was already more of an expert than Zig. At least when it came to prices, sources, contacts, and the names that mattered. The prices were stirring, on the rise, about to soar.
‘Oh,’ he kept saying to Lucy, ‘there is something so comforting about artists who do not know they are artists.’
‘That’s because they aren’t,’ she’d reply.
It was Oz instead of LA. Art Brut was a kind of paradise filled with shaggy-haired mutes, wise-eyed grandmas and apple-pie hermits with lovable obsessions. There was once a postman who built a full-size imperial palace out of pebbles picked up on his round.
You discovered it for free. One hundred per cent profit on your returns. He had clients for whom he was only investing, buying and selling, who had no interest in art; they would leap at this. They would really leap.
She had never seen Alan so animated. It was second-life syndrome. He’d gone from hell to heaven, from Iraq to Oz, in so many hours. No mysterious midnight calls, no threatening emails, no heart flutters. Just a call from the wretched fusspots at Les Fosses, which seemed to delight him even more.
‘We’ll have to go down for a couple of days and sort them out,’ she sighed. ‘A break from London and its intrinsic malaise. We’ll have to extract the key from the silly man.’
‘I believe you can hire a contract killer for £2000,’ Alan wheezed. ‘Five hundred extra for a touch of torture beforehand. Bullets thrown in. Seriously.’
‘And where did you find that out?’ she smiled, stroking his hand.
‘My friend from Bucharest.’
She pursed her lips before planting them on his knuckles. ‘Bucharest. Now which part of London is that?’
‘It used to be called Hammersmith.’
‘No no, that’s Cracow. Maybe it’ll be on the news,’ she continued, now squeezing his hand quite hard, ‘and there’ll be shots of Les Fosses. Maybe she’ll bring charges and the cops will have to search the house from top to bottom. Take it apart. Lots of attention. You know what they’re like.’
She felt Alan’s hand quiver under hers. He was deathly pale around the jowls. In one of the caves, the smallest one, locked with a combination padlock, lay the large metal box marked BOOKS. He muttered about it in his sleep. One layer of lousy novels and then the treasure, nestling there in Lucy’s silk off-cuts; most of it having seeped, like scent gathered from the steam of boiled roses, out of the National Museum of Iraq about a month before the invasion. Chucked down the stairs, actually, judging from the fresh chips. His chief Dubai contact, the guy with the glass eye, had watched it happen. And was now dead.
‘Promise me you are joking, Lucy.’
‘Now there’s a change of weather,’ she said, on top of things again. ‘That’s why we need to go down, my big baby. Apart from paying poor Jean-Luc a visit and pinching him all over, silly boy.’
‘Go down?’
‘Go down Moses, go down,’ she began to sing, smoothing out the poster mock-up unnecessarily.
The truth was, she was not surprised. The way Jean-Luc would look at her out of the corner of his eye when she was lying by the side of the pool, or bathing in her black two-piece. Flattering, at her age. ‘Damage limitation. A little talk. Anyway, I want to see how my lovely English lawn’s getting on. Before it’s trampled by the media hordes.’
Alan groaned theatrically, drawing his bunched hands down his face as if peeling off a mask. ‘Now I’m tense as hell,’ he admitted. Over London’s hum, a distant cluster of sirens sounded and swelled.
‘Here they come,’ joked Lucy, breaking into one of her more appealing laughs.
* * *
Apart from the casual information that Jean-Luc had hurt his eyes, the children had been kept entirely in the dark, which made Tammy’s interrogation of her parents all the more surprising. A couple of days later she fell on their bed face forward before Beans and Alicia woke up, and talked into the bedclothes. They were sipping their tea in bed, reading.
‘Has Jean-Luc stolen something, Mummy?’
‘Why on earth do you say that?’
‘Because I think he’s done something naughty.’
‘What makes you think that, sweetie? The poor thing’s just had an accident.’
‘It’s the way you say his name. You don’t feel sorry for him.’
Nick rolled his eyes.
‘Rubbish,’ said Sarah. ‘Go down and watch a cartoon and stop being silly, Tammy.’
‘Want Jamie.’
‘He’s sleeping, as usual.’
Having inadvertently overheard her parents discussing Jean-Luc in the kitchen, Tammy toyed with the idea of mentioning the big knife, but decided not to. Seized, nevertheless, with a reckless ardour she would not have been able to explain, she asked if he had shown his naughty bits. Since her eight-year-old mind believed babies emerged from the tummy-button, this gave a mistaken impression: her mother looked scared, suddenly.
‘Why do you say that, Tammy?’
‘Cos.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
Her father said, with an awkward grunt: ‘You’re not basing your suggestion on previous observation, I hope?’
‘Wha’?’
There was a tense pause. Sarah’s hands were nestled around her mug as if it had to be clung to in the whirlpool. Then Tammy started bouncing on the bed on her knees, waggling her head about and singing breathily, all but unvoiced: ‘Jean-Luc, Jean-Luc, is showing his poo. Jean-Luc, Jean-Luc …’
Nick snapped at her – an unusual occurrence. He told her to act her age. As she slid off in an unceremonious bundle of hurt, her foot caught on Sarah’s tea and spilt it over the duvet.
Soundly yapped at, Tammy plodded down to the sitting room and sobbed on the sofa. Nick eventually joined her, holding her hand and explaining that if Jean-Luc ever showed his naughty bits, she was to say straightaway, but he was sure Jean-Luc would never do something like that.
‘He took our photographs.’
‘Well, he’s allowed to. We’re not in your school, here.’ He told her that Jean-Luc was out of hospital and staying at home while the lesions got better, that he had to wear special dark glasses like an aviator’s goggles.
‘What’s an aviator?’
‘An old-fashioned pilot.’
She withdrew her hand and curled up against the cushions. It was cold. Nick covered her in a throw-over that smelt of dust and smoke and kissed her on the crown of her head, as thoroughly confused as she was.
He had just settled back in bed, reassuring Sarah, when Alicia came in and announced that Beans had jumped out of the window.
‘April Fool!’ she added, quickly, over the thumps of grown-up feet hitting the floor simultaneously either side of the bed.
Later that day, Tammy was wandering around the pool-shed imagining it as her hovel surrounded by toadstools, to which the prince was about to come and fall in love with her. She saw what she thought was a small box under the raised shed.
It was Jean-Luc’s camera, wrapped in its jacket of goldeny card with Fabriqué en Chine on the bottom. It rattled when she shook it. The excitement she felt was that of someone who had made a great and secret discovery. She looked through the viewfinder, studied the lens. For some reason the camera had a rubber band round it. She felt she might be rewarded enormous sums, but on second thoughts decided not to tell anyone. She had a small camera of her own, not a digital but a chunky pink waterproof object with which she managed dissatisfying pictures taken so far apart she’d forget what most of them were of. This camera was like the ones they were supposed to take on school trips, because it didn’t matter if you lost it. Somewhere inside it were her and her sisters, like miniature people, small as germs. She pointed the camera at the house and pressed the button. When it clicked, she gasped.
She checked Jamie wasn’t watching from the roof; he’d wave to her from up there, sometimes. She wasn’t to tell her parents he went up on the roof from his window, or they’d stop him. And he could see the sea. He could see further than anyone had ever seen. One day he’d take her up there, too, he’d promised.
He wasn’t up there.
She ran into the barn with the camera and showed her sisters. It wasn’t an April Fool, it was real. This was the most exciting event in her life so far: even Beans was frozen in wide-eyed appreciation, while Alicia was already contemplating the vast chest they’d have to use to bury it in on the desert island far from home, once they’d worked out a way to get there and back in time for tea and cream cakes. Their urgent whispers were furry little animals that crawled away and hid in the barn’s most secret corners.