Jean-Luc likes himself in dark glasses.
He is preparing a mint tisane for his mother and the nurse, whom he likes to keep happy; he’s afraid the care would be withdrawn otherwise, the patient too difficult. Maman would never agree to moving to a home. Part of him is afraid of her moving to a home, anyway. He can’t picture himself alone in the house, for the first time in his life. However hard he tries, he can’t picture it.
He thinks dark glasses suit him. He’s never worn any in his life, and these are the medical type that go round the side and enclose your eyes entirely, but he likes them after a day or two, they change his face, they make him look powerful and strange in some way. His eyes still sting and feel as if they have crumbs under the lids, but each day they hurt less. It was so terrible to be blind, to think he had blinded himself, that when he realised he could see, in the hospital, he felt he had been given a second life.
She’d guided him by the wrist to the house. He barely recalled falling in the pool: the pain had smothered him and seemed to take him over. He’d felt the pain was a great hand wiggling his arms and bending his body and bursting out of his head.
Then a step that had met nothing and a terrible, icy blast of water so shocking he couldn’t breathe. Hands pulling his jacket up beyond his head, making things worse. The blindness and the water combining to hunt him down and kill him.
Then her softness, her smell, her voice. The angel. The guiding angel. Through the agonising fog he’d sensed her as being completely naked, but he now felt that must have been his imagination.
The husband had asked him no questions in the car, where Jean-Luc sat panting in the front, his whole head soaked, hair plastered to his head, red weals appearing on his skin where his body was reacting to the sap. Each time he’d opened his eyes the light was a long blade pressed into the eyeball. It wasn’t really light at all.
He’d still thought he was blinded and a terror took hold of him, and then a great sleepiness enfolded him. He’d been walked into the hospital through a galaxy of sounds that seemed to have nothing to do with him, they were voices and noises from somewhere else or from another time. He was entirely separate from everything but the pain, and the pain itself was a tiny beast shaped like the burr of a thistle, burrowing into him. Then the water and the special drops had sluiced it away, only for it to return as something worse, disintegrated into a million crumbs under his eyelids and under several places on his skin, where the burns were small but third-degree, the doctor told him, speaking as if he were deaf. His father had been right to warn him. He had reacted very badly, it was in the family.
He is reasonably sure they won’t find the camera. Why should they? It fell into the undergrowth and then he cut the spurge; it would be hidden in the cut stems. As soon as he is better, he will go back and search for it. And the binoculars.
Supposing they have found the camera?
The future is as dark as how I see things now, he thinks. It’s all up to the gods. The Virgin and the saints. Destiny.
He walks up the stairs carefully and knocks on the door. The nurse tells him to wait. He tries not to think of what is going on in there that is making him wait, but can’t help imagining the soiled flesh, the dark-purple rashes, the intimate horrors. He hopes they will open the window, after.
He stands on the little landing holding the two cups in one hand, looking down into the darkness of the steep stairs made darker by his glasses, blurred by the lesions. The ceiling bulb with its faded, fly-blown shade is a dim moon. He can’t distinguish the loose and worn lino runner his father had always talked about changing. The walls need a lick, but all he can see is a muddy swirl. His little finger is sticky from the sticky-back plastic that lines the cupboards in the kitchen. They are very old cupboards, painted dark brown, but his father, back in the Sixties, lined them inside – shelves and sides and back – with plastic patterned with big bright flowers. The plastic is peeling off in places, but the stickiness is still on the back. When you reach in, it catches you on the fingers or the side of the hand. One day he will empty the cupboards and strip the plastic away. It will take about half an hour. But then what? He can’t picture the cupboards bare of those flowers, those patterns of once-bright petals. The cupboards have been like that ever since he has been on this earth, in the same way their smell never changes: old bread smells mixed up with biscuits and herbs and mice. You can bottle that smell and put it on my grave, he thinks.
Once he dreamt he was following that scent like a hunting dog all the way home; home turned out to be a giant man-size bowl full of washing soda and drowned wasps.
Eventually the door opens. The stink is as thick as slurry, he all but gags. He can’t understand how the nurse puts up with it; today it is Colette with the curly orange hair and squashed nose. She takes the cups from him with a wink. She has a loud voice, broken by too much smoking, and a drinker’s eyebags. The orange is dye.
Six or seven years ago, before she was nursing his mother, she got drunk at an Aubain fête and pulled him from the back of the village hall, where he was helping with the lights in the shadows, and pressed him to her in a slow dance. He tried to free himself at first, but she had a nurse’s strong arms and he couldn’t use too much force because everyone was watching, and some of them were laughing, although he didn’t know if they were laughing at him. She was so drunk she asked him in his ear, after he’d stopped struggling, if he was afraid of women. It was a cool night in late February but he was sweating, his tee shirt clamped to his back. He felt her breasts on his chest, their moistness, and her breath was full of drink and bad teeth, roaring in his ear. He didn’t reply, he just waited for the music to stop, but it was a long song by an English singer he recognised from a few years back. His face was in the curls of her fake-orange hair, her thumb stroking the nape of his neck. He kept stepping on her toes.
She asked him to guess her age and he said sixty, because that’s what it felt like and because she was from Paris he had no history to go on. She pushed him away, staggering a bit, calling him names, but there were a lot of people about and no one noticed. Raoul Lagrange passed by on his way to the bar and she shouted at Raoul, her face flashing from green to blue to green like a witch’s under the coloured lights: ‘I’m forty-six! Do I look forty-six or what do I look?’ And Raoul Lagrange laughed and put his arm round her and gave her a kiss and said, ‘My sweetheart, my lovely, you look twenty-six.’ She hugged him back, tight, and he made a funny face. They danced for a bit under the flashing lights, their faces turning blue then green then blue. She had to be carried home. Raoul’s funeral was a week later.
Jean-Luc was back in the shadows while they were dancing. He felt sick, her cheap perfume on his clothes, a strand of orange hair on his shoulder, but he busied himself with the lights, the strobe. Fortunately, she has no memory of what happened that night. His own memory is of her warm, moist breasts and the thumb on the nape of his neck, but they are detached from the rest of her. The rest of her makes him want to run off, even now. But he has to keep her happy; she likes her mint tisane.
Now she is ribbing him in her usual way, just adding rubbish about how he looks like a sexy film star in his dark glasses. Or a gangster. She suggests next time he bring up a whisky as she smooths out the rubber sheet, his mother talking at the same time from the chair about how that would be a miracle, he hardly bothers to replace her glass of water – so that the two women’s voices overlap and go on and on and drive him into his room like a pair of squawking vultures.
He’s careful not to show his room when he opens the door. He’s careful to slip in sideways each time so that no one notices the state of the walls, half-stripped of wallpaper, plaster crunching on the floor.
‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do in there!’ shouts Colette through the door, and he hears his mother laugh. The door shivers as Colette tries the handle, but the lock is firm. There’s a silence. They are listening. Maybe they’re afraid he might be about to blow his head off. Jean-Luc all over the walls. But the gun is in the cellar, needing an oil.
He’s covered the monument with an old sheet. It is too big to hide anywhere, now. He sits on the bed and holds his head in his hand, easing the pain in his eyes, thinking of what his father would tell him about the Germans, how they’d put a beetle on each eyeball and stitch the lid over it, how you could hear the munching in your agony, munching back into the brain, how this happened to Resistance men his father knew before they were shot, how the shooting must have been a relief. Sometimes Jean-Luc is driven to think death must be a relief, even though he’s never been tortured like that.
There’s still a silence the other side of the door. He doesn’t like that silence.
He frowns, suspicious. The working lock replaced a much older lock which still has its keyhole exposed. He crouches down to look through it and sees a dim, wet eyeball. There’s an explosion of giggles through the panel. He searches about for something to stuff into the keyhole, furious, wanting to ram a sharp pencil in but settling for a page from his notebook, balled up and squeezed tight into the opening. He presses his ear to the door. Their voices are so piercing he can hear it all.
‘He’s got ten lovely girlfriends in there, your boy has!’
‘I don’t suppose they’re alive. I wouldn’t put it past him.’
‘You shouldn’t be saying that about your own son,’ Colette chirps, as if it is all a joke.
They begin to talk about the nasty rape and murder of a teenage girl that has been first item all week on the telly news, squawking away so that Jean-Luc half-expects to see feathers floating in under the door. He opens the window despite the cool to let the smell out; although the smell is mostly on his clothes, it seeps in. There is no one on the street. Then a hooded boy – one of the Rodier tribe – goes by on a bicycle with something pale on the back of his black top. Jean-Luc squints through the blurred spots and makes out the shape of a fish.
Of course! The first of April! Jean-Luc laughs, feeling sorry for the Rodier boy, then with a stab of horror he reaches back with his hand and feels paper.
He rips its Sellotape off his jacket, stares at it. It’s a fish cut out from pink card, with a red heart drawn in the middle. He feels his heart has dropped down to his stomach.
He never felt Colette stick it on. He hopes it was Colette, and that he hasn’t been walking about with it all day. He went twice into the village, keeping his head down, to buy bread and collect the eye-drops from Dr Demarne. His face is flushed with shame. He doesn’t remember anyone laughing at him, they just felt sorry for his eye allergy and made one or two jokes about the Mafia. It was bound to be Colette, the slag.
He looks out of the window again. No one, not for five or more minutes. Aubain might have been the victim of nuclear attack, or alien mass abduction. He takes the sheet off the monument and blocks the bottom of the door with it, like you are supposed to do in a fire. Then he sits on the bed and thinks about the missing camera, strange currents running through his body.
The photos of the girls are bound to be perfect, he’s sure. Most things are, when they’re out of your reach. He took the girls close up, not like the ones in the first film, when they’d been blurred or sticking their tongues out like frogs. Their faces would fit easily on the spoons. The only disappointment might be the eyes, reddened like a rabbit’s caught in headlights. He’s noticed that on wedding photos. The flash causes it.
He imagines cutting their heads out. The girls make him feel happy inside. What he likes most of all is that he can make them laugh, their brown eyes twinkling with happiness. He likes their fair hair, their pale skin, their strangely dark eyelashes, their chirrupy laughter like sparrows in the bushes. Suffer little children to come unto me. Their sweet little dresses and shoes. They would be perfect for the flowers, gazing out from the heart of each rose.
He thinks of himself snipping carefully round each face and sticking them onto the hanging spoons, pressing them into the spoons’ bowls so the brown glue bulges up around the edges. The garden of roses. It’s cruel, not to have the camera, not to have what it contains. He’ll have to go back and find it.
It is quiet next door, but not suspiciously so; he hears Colette leave, saying goodbye to him through the door with a silly voice off the telly. Then: ‘Poisson d’avril, Jean-Luc!’
And he sits there, frozen, not reacting. Like a dead man. Not even letting the bed squeak.
Maman might be having her afternoon doze. He reaches under the mattress for the envelope and takes out the photos. Closing his left eye and swivelling his right downwards he can avoid the lesions like crystals, his nose bulking large in his view. He doesn’t look at the one with Raoul’s ghost at the back; he keeps it underneath the others, his heart thumping.
The girls’ faces aren’t so bad, after all, and he snips them out, squinting through his dark glasses. The scissors are too big for their miniature heads and his eyes hurt. In the end, the cut-out faces are tiny pale counters, no good at all. He’s sliced one of them too low, so that the forehead’s gone.
He blows them off the table and they land on the floor like drops of milk, like white sap.
When he moves the monument on its wheels, just a few centimetres forwards and back, the spoons tinkle against each other. Oncle Fernand comes limping up behind and congratulates him. Once the girls’ faces are on the spoons, along with their mother, it will be the finest monument he can imagine, even though it does look like a big white-eyed duck. He’ll have to go back for the camera as soon as he can. Why not tonight? Because he can’t see well enough to drive. But if he closes one eye he can go up to where he hid his mobilette, slowly, steadily. He’ll take the big torch. He’ll smell his way to the Mas des Fosses.
Legless Bibi can’t run away from the fish-bone spider. The nails hurt her breasts, her navel. She complains. Ah, Jean-Luc! Ah! Ah!
‘That’s life,’ Jean-Luc tells her.
He catches his hand on a feather and it falls off. No glue is ever good enough, he thinks. Only soldering works. And even then.
He pulls the pile of Spirou out from under the bed, but his eyes hurt too much to read. All he can do is skate over the pictures in the cartoon squares, one after the other. He knows most of the words by heart, anyway. He knows how each story is going to end, even over two-months’ worth, as if he can predict the future. Spirou Présente les Nouvelles du Monde Entier: he even knows half of those articles by heart, and especially the one about the teenager crippled by polio who receives his lessons at home through a microphone and wires carried by a friend from class to class at Columbia University. He’d be in his sixties by now. Philip Smith, fat, with glasses. He’s like an old, reliable mate.
Maman is calling for water. He feels so good about things that he fetches some for her almost straightaway, breathing carefully through his mouth. She rabbits on to him but his mind is elsewhere. He wonders if the monument is finished. He can always make another one. As many as he wants.
The Englishwoman never saw him spying on her. Her husband was very sorry about the accident. People are always falling into swimming pools. In the car, the husband went on about the time his eldest kid, when she was a baby, threw sand into his face on some beach in England, how much it hurt. It was probably quite lucky you fell in the pool, he said, because it helped wash the sap out. No mention of his wife swimming naked, the binoculars, the camera. Jean-Luc told him through the pain, just to be polite, that the sap of fig trees can give you serious burns. You don’t want to saw a fig tree until the dead of winter. The husband didn’t know that: he was very surprised. He asked Jean-Luc if he could see anything at all. Just enough to know you’re driving on the left, Jean-Luc told him, peeping and feeling the light scooping his eyes out.
‘Sometimes I ask myself if you’re gaga,’ Maman snorts. ‘Didn’t you hear what I was saying? Madame Sandler is coming.’
‘Coming where?’
‘Here! To the Mas!’
‘The Mas isn’t here. It’s there.’
‘You know what I mean, stupid. She phoned her English friend in Valdaron, the one Gabrielle cleans for. Gabrielle told Colette. Later this week, maybe even tomorrow. Now that’s got your bowels turning, I can see that.’
‘So what? I’ve treated the pool. I did it last week.’
‘And her lovely lawn? Nice and thick and green, is it?’
His mother seems to want him to fail. She’s grinning over her glass of water. On the sill is a jar with a spray of dried flowers, including big teasels, their tiny hooks balled with dust and stray hairs and flies. He pulls one out, scattering the rest, and taps it on her nose, tickling her face. She squeals, because the teasel’s head is rough and prickly.
‘Promise you’ll be nice to me?’
‘Yes, yes! Oh, why were you ever born?’
‘Your fault, Maman.’
‘An accident. Yow! A mistake.’
‘No I wasn’t. You tried for years.’
‘But I never wanted you, did I? That’s what your father always said. He’d say: “Where did he come from? We never asked for him.”’
‘He never said that.’
‘He did. Where did he come from?’ she repeated in a hiss, her head forward like a snake’s.
‘It was a joke!’
He’s a little rough with the teasel, at this point. He doesn’t realise how fragile her skin is, these days. It seems to peel off her cheek in tiny strips. Strangely, she doesn’t notice. She just glares at him, now he’s stopped. Beads of blood well under her eye, on her grazed cheek-bone.
‘He never said that, Maman. Don’t lie.’
She nods, slowly, instead of saying anything. The blood begins to run down and she puts a hand to its tickle. Then she looks at her fingers.
‘You’re mad,’ she says. She seems to be pleased at the sight of the blood on her fingertips, as if it isn’t hers. ‘You ought to be locked up.’
Another day made it to the evening and Nick checked that the windows were properly closed, and locked the main door in the kitchen: leaving with her bedtime milk, Tammy heard the big key turn twice like someone starting to be sick. He’d never bothered to lock it before. She’d picked up that the gods were winging their way from London at the end of the week. And that locking up made no difference, as far as the Jean-Luc problem was concerned: Jean-Luc had a key. There were no bolts on the door.
After their bedtime story and the goodnight kisses, hearing her parents safely downstairs, Tammy produced the camera from under her pillow and took photos of her sisters with the flash. They stood on their beds and Alicia showed her tummy, and so did Beans; Tammy giggled so much she couldn’t take any more.
She allowed Alicia to take one of her; she pretended to be very afraid in her bed, clutching the sheet to her neck and moving her face around like plasticine until it was the most terrified she could make it and signalling with her hand when it was ready. She didn’t think the photo would come out, because Alicia moved the camera down a little when she pressed the button. ‘That’ll be blurred,’ she whispered. Beans watched with a very serious look from her metal cot. Then they got really scared, because they heard creaks from the attic, as if there was a monster or a ghost up there. Or perhaps Jean-Luc in his dark glasses.
‘It’s only Jamie,’ Tammy remembered.
But she knew, watching her father checking the windows and hearing him lock up, that Jean-Luc was the real danger. She pictured, drifting into slumber, the big stone house surrounded by CCTV cameras like the ones outside her school, keeping them safe from any old Tom, Dick or Harry who might be inclined to (and here the voices of her teachers and of the nice policewoman who came round to explain the dangers of the outside world spiralled gently together into sleep).
The house rose around them in its shuttered, night-time guise, indifferent to it all, creaking and shuffling through the decades, the centuries. Nick was standing on the vast roof with an urgent letter to post and the rain was falling in light swathes, rendering the tiles as slippery as ice. He had no idea that this wasn’t all as real as anything else, and was very afraid. Someone was about to push him, but he didn’t know who. He began to slide anyhow and surfaced with a start as the verge slipped away from under him, replaced by depth. There was depth in life, after all, he was demonstrating to his students. His lectures were renowned because he gave practical demonstrations on slippery roofs. This was why he’d been made a professor.
He hadn’t been. That was Peter Osterhauser. The darkness in the bedroom might have been the darkness of death, though they spoke of a point of light. His heart raced unevenly. The only light was the sickly green glow from the digital clock, recording the countdown with remorseless, if illusory, precision.
The point is, he heard himself thinking, who will know about your sacrifices, your trying to be good, to be just? There are no teachers in the sky, no end-of-term marks, no congratulations from the headmaster. It’s the bullies and the nasties who enjoy themselves, who gain, who seize the day and never pay for it, after, because there is no after. It’s Henton, Smythe and Rollick. It’s the greedy ones. The corporation rookers. The traffickers of politics. The Hummer-cruising sniggerers. Oile, oleum, elaia. Who cares about the judgement of history? They don’t, because they’ll be dead.
It was as if he’d never kicked free of being fifteen, sixteen.
Last April, a year ago almost to the day, his old schoolfriend Duncan drove all the way from Stafford, where he was a devoted poverty campaigner, with a rope, a camping stool and a piece of paper, to ancient Ickthin Forest in Devon, part of which bordered his and Nick’s old boarding school, Hilmorton Academy. There he parked the car and walked some fifty yards into the trees, unfolded the stool, and hanged himself from a mammoth oak tree’s lower limb, just high enough to take his feet off the ground when he kicked the stool away. He had told nobody. He was fifty-three. Everyone, as always in these circumstances, was left stunned, bewildered, and riddled with guilt. Nick had felt himself go cold inside.
Now, away from his work, away from the endless deadlines and hassles and urgent messages, he had time to contemplate. He stared, wide awake at three in the morning in a room in France that had scarcely lost its strangeness, its foreign smell, and contemplated the meaning of Duncan’s suicide. Duncan Haighley had been one of his closest and oldest friends. Why had he driven all the way down, back to school? Why had that been necessary? Duncan had not enjoyed Hilmorton, but neither had he hated it; failing to shine as Nick had shone, Duncan had been a quiet, unassuming boy of an underrated intelligence and a tremendous social conscience that extended to a sometimes tedious puritanism and tendentiousness, especially when he embraced green politics. But how right Duncan had been all along! And how wrong his friend!
Nick now imagined him hanging there like a flitch of bacon and felt nauseous rather than tearful. A small girl had discovered Duncan, by ill luck, and run back to tell her parents about the man with the crooked head staring at her from the sky. And so the damage branches out, tremors through the air, passes from person to person. She will carry a little particle of Duncan’s despair like a cancerous cell through her life, and maybe it will ruin that life, waking her in nightmare with an image she can scarcely trace – for surely her parents will never have mentioned it, hoping the growing mind would leave it behind, or not understand what it really meant.
But nothing is forgotten, Nick heard himself saying in the vaults of his own mind, staring into the blackness. Nothing is forgotten. What was that playful, slightly cocky phrase that opened his first important paper on the mandate system in Africa?
We would do well to remember that history is more about amnesia than memory.
He took half of one of his mild sleeping pills. Forced amnesia, he reflected.
When he woke up again, the clock face was in competition with a grey wash brimming the edges of the shutters. Nearly eight. Sarah was breathing gently, nothing visible but her glossy black-and-loganberry hair. He needed a pee.
Checking on the way back, he saw the girls had all got up: the bedroom was empty. It was like a trick of light, the kicked-back duvets about to become his daughters, sleeping.
He listened blearily at the top of the stairs for the sing-song murmur of Spot or Rupert or Thomas. Silence. Sarah stirred from under the duvet, seeking more air. He thought of waking her, saw her mouth open as if in sorrow or pain, her breath noisier, someone else’s dead hand protruding, hanging off the edge. It was hers: the sparse light glinted on her golden rings. Beans had woken her up several times in the night.
His heart inflated and beat its swollen hammer against his upper ribs, fighting the backwash from the sleeping pill.
He saw, at the top of the narrow stairs, the low attic door was open. He went up quietly. The fug brushed his face like a thick and familiar cloth. Jamie’s sleeping bag on the mattress was zipped open, and he was not in it. It was thrown back violently, exposing the ructions of the bottom sheet, a small litter of broken matches and pellets of dirt and his white iPod. Otherwise, the attic was surprisingly clean, its swept boards still witness to Jamie’s burst of energy. The parachute silk, strung between the far Velux and the door, gave the huge room a somewhat unearthly, luminous glow. A nice space.
The Velux window was slightly open, he noticed. It was speckled with raindrops: it must have rained in the night, but not much. He closed it in case it rained again. The window seemed to startle the attic with its rectangle of sky; through the slicked glass he saw the big new sun wobble in solution, like a soluble, orange tablet.
Nick wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or concerned. Now and again Jamie had done very strange things while on drugs: walked along the edge of a flat roof in Dunstable shouting at passers-by. Turned up to work in a despatch-rider’s office with only his helmet on. Plucked a dead bird in the middle of a dual carriageway near Southport. He was not 100 per cent reliable.
Ominousness.
They weren’t in the sitting room. They weren’t in the kitchen. He checked out the few remaining rooms in the house, including the scullery with Jamie’s Door, knowing that the silence made this all pointless. He wanted to burst into laughter, a fit of hilarity swelling in his belly. The kitchen door was unlocked, interestingly: a bird took off from a tree and flew away without a care in the world through the fresh morning air, which still smelt of wetness, of large wet clouds.
He said to himself: these things only happen in stories. His girls had been kidnapped. It would be in the news. Under the remorseless, lascivious, fantasising gaze of the British press, urging everything into simulacra. He really did have a desire to laugh. He dressed silently in two minutes flat, as he heard himself saying in the ensuing inquest. My wife slept on. I didn’t want to wake my wife. He thought he might be going mad, entertaining such absurd and almost evilly nasty thoughts.
The plump sun, still low and reddish-orange, was split in two by a black pencil-line of cloud. Other clouds were dashed higgledy-piggledy in long snakes and puffy ladders, as livid as bruises. A solitary red squirrel flew over the yard and rippled vertically up a trunk into the leaves, chattering angrily. He stared after it. The dawn birds were a sea of thoughtful mutterings, with the occasional loud burst nearby that startled him each time.
The swimming pool was a block of dark green, reflecting the dark green slopes beyond. Its tiles shone with wet. The barn and goatshed were empty, with the kind of nonchalant vacuity that only mindless objects can conjure. It annoyed him. The fresh morning sunlight was flooding the yard either side of the house’s broad shadow.
He stood by the pool, staring in. He wondered whether to shout. Jamie would be taking them on a harmless walk, that was all there was to it. Two sides of the same coin: one awful, one fine. It was a question of how life flicked it, how it fell.
He put his hand into the pool’s water and to his surprise his fingers disappeared. The very water was dark green, as though someone had poured in a bucket of dye. Pea soup. Robin Hood’s livery. Even darker than before it was cleaned.
An inch or so of transparency, then his hand vanished like a squid’s tentacles into the depths. Jean-Luc might have done this, he thought, switching it on and off like a light. A fly struggled in the skin of it, the first victim of the day. His old-looking and scaled-down face, pasted onto his silhouetted head and shoulders, scowled up out of the gloom. It was like staring into himself at bad moments, when he felt like disappearing, dissolving.
Was this a very bad moment? He looked up and wondered if he was being watched, not by security cameras, but by a pair of binoculars. It was only then that he noticed the shoes, abandoned by the metal steps: Alicia’s pink, unbuckled pair were sitting on the edge, placed carefully side by side as if someone had sucked her right out of them. Or as if, cartoon-like, she had taken a dive, leaving a little puff of exhaust.
He pulled his sleeve right back and swirled his hand about in the water for a minute or so, until his flesh turned too cold.
He loped in a sudden fit of excitement right round the house. As long as he kept scurrying about, he could keep his terror in check. He hurtled through the archway and circled the house once, scuffling on his long legs, panting audibly, glancing into the car then up the track. He called out their names in turn, but not wildly. Sensibly. As if playing hide-and-seek. The countryside, so much wilder here than cosy England, didn’t even bother to reply. He came back to the lifeless pool-hut and rapped on the window, as if they might have been hiding inside. His three girls. With Jamie. The pool began to scare him with glimpsed faces, white and sightless, pressed against the glass of the surface. He remembered the toad, mysteriously vanishing when the pool cleared.
The cellars! Hope flickered and burnt its little incandescent spot in his chest. He checked the three that weren’t padlocked, slipping on the worn steps down, looking behind and into vats and barrels and the grape-crusher with its massive wooden screw. A worm-chewed ladder disintegrated in his hands. A horse-collar fell, huge and heavy with a flurry of straps and hooks and powdered by dust. He hadn’t ever noticed the old bicycle, or the wooden hay-fork veiled like a bride in cobwebs. They were so motionless, and he was so busy. He coughed. He was wasting time. This was all plain silly.
The locked cellar, fastened by two combination padlocks on each bolt, had a tiny window with a thick grille at shin-level: there was nothing but blackness inside, like a solid cube.
He hurried across the yard and shouted into the woods, standing uncertainly on the tumbled wall. His voice rose and shattered against the quiet. He repeated their names politely and waited, wobbling on the loose stones. His pseudopolyps stirred like a frayed collar.
The intense callousness of foliage.
The absolute indifference of the natural world.
The dense self-absorption of the beasts, pitiless, specialised. No wonder we wanted to take our revenge on it all.
He waited in the stillness, speckled only by birdsong. All these strangely meditative moments in a life: the sigh of the withdrawing surf before the breakers’ crash, the anguish.
He came back to the pool, finding it harder and harder to breathe. The water gave nothing back. It was a screw-top lid. Jamie could swim, and Tammy too, but Alicia could only thrash with wings and Beans could only sink calmly, without any fuss.
He would have to wake Sarah. He couldn’t stand the idea. All that panic, that anxiety, that bother.
And the three of them would still be floating. Or maybe not. Why did they dredge pools and rivers to find the dead? He picked up Alicia’s pink shoes and smelt them like a tracker dog. Leather and sweat. No, plastic. He shouted their names again and his voice evaporated in his throat, already suffering.
He loped to the house and up the stairs in his shambling, long-limbed ungainliness. Sarah was standing in the bedroom in her nightie, blearily raising her eyebrows.
‘Did you sleep badly or something? What are you doing with Alicia’s shoes?’
‘I think,’ he said, hoarsely searching for breath, ‘they’ve gone for a walk with Jamie.’
‘Oh, he’s re-emerged, has he? You think? Have you been jogging?
‘Actually, I’m conjecturing.’ He took a deep breath and blew it out like smoke. ‘I’m attempting not to panic.’
‘I’m sure they’re fine,’ she said, already whipping off her nightie.
* * *
‘Jamie’s with them,’ he said. ‘I’m assuming.’
‘Can we assume?’ They were both hurrying down the stairs, if steadily. Sarah was white but calm. She was actually quite good in emergencies.
‘Will they have gone up the track, Nick?’
‘Which way?’
‘You take one way, I’ll take t’other,’ she said, oddly like her mother in a good mood.
‘We mustn’t give Jamie the impression we’re worried,’ said Nick, by the main door. ‘That we don’t trust him.’
‘He knows already, unless he’s really thick.’
‘He’s not thick at all,’ said Nick, surprised.
The house had them in its mouth, behind its teeth. It was grinning. But it was not biting. The yard looked like a great desert plain to be crossed without water.
‘I’ll go towards the road,’ said Sarah. ‘I’m going to shout their names.’
‘Done that.’
‘Of course everything’s all right, really. We’re all so paranoid. I’m in a state of dread most of the time. A waste of my life.’
‘Several times,’ he continued.
‘We’re completely over-dramatising,’ she snorted. ‘Did you check the barn properly, Nick? Check it again. Oh, shit.’
She shouted their names at the yard as if cross with it. He waited politely for the silence to draw down its curtain and confirmed he had checked the barn with great thoroughness. She pictured him picking through the barn’s clutter with tweezers, when he had in fact nipped in and out.
‘Oh. What’s happened to the pool?’
She was standing on the edge. He had the impression it had got worse in less than twenty minutes. A rim of scum was now visible where the water lapped at the sides. Where it entered the water, the alarm’s white pipe was smeared green. Nothing but shadows broke the surface as she dipped her hand in and swept it about, making the filters tut and mutter. He imagined her fingers touching something she wouldn’t want to touch, but he hadn’t yet told her exactly where he’d found the shoes.
‘Pools do that, apparently,’ he said. ‘Overnight.’
‘Jamie was floating in a pool in my dream last night and it was all murky,’ she said, looking very round-shouldered.
‘Sarah, don’t even begin to go that way. Everything’s fine. They’ve gone for a walk with Jamie.’
‘Great,’ she said, already moving off. ‘They’ve gone for a walk with Jamie. Just great. Just so consoling. And Alicia’s in bare feet. Scorpions? Snakes? Huge red ants?’
When he was four, Jamie would only do a poo if his father was present. This meant, when Nick had lectures, meetings or tutorials all day, his son would hold it in and develop stomach pains and scream and Helena would phone the college, leaving messages imploring him to come back home if only for ten minutes. Nick became a laughing stock among his colleagues: Sir John Seeley never suffered this. Helena would not use euphemisms, that was the trouble: she believed infants were closer to the arcane powers, that the planet should be run by children. Nick reckoned the planet run by Jamie would be proximate to the Third Reich, or perhaps the Central African Empire under Bokassa. But he would speed back on his bicycle from a seminar on ‘The Role of British Intelligence in Imperialist Statism’ and stand by the loo as Jamie, staring at his father with a strange little smile, would deliver the goods on his throne.
Now Jamie had the same expression, made more malignant by twenty-one years of practice. He was holding the tin with Alicia’s chocolate cake inside. Nick had just been up the rear track almost to the rocks and back, calling and calling, lonely between the trees, feeling as if climate change – which had recently begun to give him sleepless nights – had been toppled from its Olympian status and replaced by something far worse.
‘Jamie!’
‘Yo.’
‘Where are the girls, Jamie?’
‘The girls,’ Sarah echoed, unexpectedly just behind, the lid on her panic rattling.
Jamie said, putting the tin down on the kitchen table and raising his two hands in mock-placation, ‘Why so unhappy, man?’ They could smell him from the door. He must have been pretty much in the same clothes for the whole two-week sojourn in the attic.
‘Oh for God’s sake!’ shouted Sarah, her glasses misting up from her hot, shiny face.
‘The girls are missing,’ snapped Nick. There was a pause while the awful finality of this statement, like a newspaper headline, sunk in. ‘Alicia, Beans and Tammy,’ he added, weakly. He felt thirsty and sick and wanted to cry.
Jamie planted a chunk of cake in his mouth as if nervous of it being taken away.
‘Jamie,’ said his stepmother, striding forwards with her glasses off until she was inches from his face, ‘have you seen the girls this morning? Yes or no?’
‘Ja-meee,’ pleaded Nick.
His son nodded dramatically, his mouth full, indicating with his finger his inability to speak just at that moment.
They waited, Jamie ponderously chewing. He looked like a fox caught with a chicken in its mouth, his eyes looking up at them and yellowish. Sarah recommended that he stop arsing around. Her glasses were misting up again. She had never used that expression in her entire life, and it surprised her as much as Nick.
Jamie swallowed exaggeratedly as if it was incumbent on him to obey, his lips as dark as the one Goth in their Cambridge road. ‘Yeah, making this den in the woods,’ he said, looking off to one side, as if studying the fridge. ‘It’s called kids having fun.’
Nick felt a great flood of relief, which was why his voice went hoarse. ‘You mean you left them in the woods on their own?’
‘You want them back in their cage, right?’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’ Sarah declared, equally relieved to be given a second life.
‘Where did you leave them?’ croaked Nick. ‘We shouted. Didn’t you hear us shout? Didn’t you? We were both shouting.’
‘You were the Romans,’ Jamie explained, with an apologetic shrug. ‘And we were the Gauls.’
‘Jamie, you are a prize prick,’ said Sarah, holding his face and grimacing with relief. He pulled his squashed cheeks from her with a look of disgust.
Outside it had started to rain again in a very unEnglish way: drifts of gauze like a pencil-sketch of a tropical storm.
‘They must be getting wet,’ Nick said, turning distractedly to the open door. ‘Where are they playing, exactly?’
‘About twenty yards in front of the house?’ said Jamie, with an air of contempt.
They were crouched and sniggering on the third overgrown terrace below the house, just where Jamie had said they would be. The den was a circular wall of leaves, hidden from higher up by overhanging branches.
‘Were you really mega-worriered?’ asked Alicia, with a candid air of triumph.
‘Nah,’ Nick replied. He tossed her the shoes. She was in her socks, stuck all over with bits of nature’s floor. ‘You didn’t trick me one bit.’
‘Likkel window,’ said Beans, pointing at a spot in the ceiling of leaves. ‘Roof big voo!’
‘Ssssh,’ Tammy commanded with a threatening finger, unusually severe with her little sister.
‘It wasn’t a trick,’ Alicia complained. ‘I just took them off cos I’m a princess of the Gores.’
‘Gauls,’ said Tammy, who was suddenly embarrassed by the whole episode.
‘Me queen,’ shouted Beans, throwing up leaves.
Tammy was the sole witness at the court martial, during which Jamie fished a flat tin out of his pocket and prepared a roll-up on the kitchen table. He interrupted this to have a good scratch of his dirt-thickened hair. He’d wanted to be an astronomer at ten, Nick recalled. A golden boy with golden locks and a potentially golden future.
The girls had woken early – about six o’clock – and crept downstairs to rescue the baby boars from the electric fence. Jamie was on the sofa, taking a break from his self-imposed cell. The morning woods, the clear air, the great outdoors. The gift of life. The idyll. They’d built what Jamie called a ‘sanctuary’ out of dead leaves and heard their names being called out: it was the Romans, it was the colonisers, it was the beginning of the end. Jamie had slipped off to the kitchen for essential supplies and was caught by the unexpected return of Caesar’s patrol.
He grinned, looking cheerily haggard. ‘It was cool. A fun time was had by all. We kept our feet on the ground. They’ll tell their grandchildren, right?’
‘Not by all,’ said Nick, studying his thumbs.
‘You might have detected we were a teeny-weeny bit anxious?’ suggested Sarah, calmly, in a voice fretted to a stick by fury. Relief was a distant memory, now. ‘That’s what really bothers me. Not you taking them out to have fun, but ignoring our anxiety.’
‘A lot of anxiety,’ Jamie agreed, nodding his head before licking the cigarette paper; but it was a reproach.
Nick rolled his eyes to the ceiling: anywhere but his son, the impenetrable concrete wall of his son’s selfishness. ‘I think we all deserve the proverbial cup of tea,’ he said.
No one moved.
Tammy stared at a cleft in the table, into which crumbs had fallen. She was one of those crumbs. She had made her parents suffer. Never again would she do such a thing in her entire life, she decided.
‘Like, you know when you screamed your head off at me, Sarah?’ said Jamie, sticking the roll-up between his pouting lips.
‘I shouted.’
‘Screamed your head off. Not when you called me a prick, but the time before. Two weeks back.’
Sarah swallowed with difficulty. ‘Under intense provocation, yes.’
‘Provocation is an underrated instrument of power, historically speaking,’ commented Nick, in a jovial tone. ‘Underrated by historians, that is. As is not doing anything. Inaction as a form of violence.’
‘Shut up, Nick,’ Sarah muttered.
Jamie stood, ready to go outside and have his smoke. ‘That’s why I had to sort myself out on my own. Because of the shouting.’
‘Maybe talk about this at some other time?’ his father suggested, glancing Tammy’s way.
Tammy thought Jamie seemed sad as he nodded, but when he turned his head she saw the other half of his face was smiling.
They had seen the sea. They had seen further than anyone had ever seen. The roof’s slope had scared her, but it wasn’t slippery, it was just huge, like a different land, and dark. They had all held hands and reached the top, holding on to the cool ridge. A bird had passed them and then they had seen the sun rise. They were the first in the world to see it rise. It was like an explosion without any sound and the redness filled their eyes up. Then Tammy felt little drops on her face: it was raining! It made the tiles shine. Alicia started whimpering and they had to creep back slowly across the tiles on shivery legs into the attic. That was the one and only time, Jamie told them. His face had gone white. That’s because, on the way back, although it was only a few yards hand-in-hand, their shoes kept slipping on the tiles. The roof had changed. It wanted to throw them off.
Then they had fun on the ground. The ground’s different, Jamie said. The ground’s for kids. The air’s for ghosts, right?
No one had told a lie, either. That’s why half of Jamie’s face was smiling, now.