The dinner with the Chambords was memorable, not just because the meal – foie gras truffé, very bloody entrecôte and a fiery rum baba, washed down with, among other delights, a dark, twenty-year-old Saint-Estèphe and a trou normand of Calvados between the cheese and the dessert – made even high-table banquets at college feel paltry. It was the relief that life could spare you and then yield magical, carefree and stimulating moments like these. The company was delightful, of mixed ages, and entirely continental: a quiet lawyer and his elegant architect wife; a young Belgian poet with his older librarian boyfriend; and a homeopathic doctor whose glamorous Spanish partner was a well-known flamenco teacher. Georges and Claudine conducted the proceedings without help, wafting away dishes and the slight language barrier with the same charm and facility.
It made Nick and Sarah feel more civilised than they’d felt in years. Thankfully, when it came to the inevitable politics, the robust discussion was even-handed, and the English contingent contributed their piece without too many fits and starts, itemising the dangers of Blairite liberalism. This shifted into a discussion of the merits of Modigliani with practised ease, the join barely detectable. The girls ate with the adults, to the former’s astonishment – an astonishment so great that they did nothing but stare in vestal silence unless addressed, their eyes glittering in the candlelight.
‘God, I love France,’ said Sarah, on the drive back. ‘How much have you drunk, by the way?’
‘That’s why I’m going very slowly,’ said Nick. ‘I have my family on board.’
‘You’re not going slowly,’ said Sarah, who hadn’t even minded when two of the party lit up. ‘That’s exactly my point.’
‘They weren’t really locals, though.’
‘So?’
‘In my Marxist days, I’d have conducted a class analysis and not enjoyed it.’
‘Oh, who cares?’ said Sarah, ambiguously. ‘All we need is geniality and kindness. They were lovely to the kids.’
‘And truth and justice,’ declared Nick, over a silly song from the three at the back. ‘Whatever they are. They’re ideas. But we no longer need ideas, do we? Too difficult. All our leaders require is ego, massive self-esteem. And God, of course, their grins fed by God. Sssh, Tammy, I’m talking. So Blair can be mates with Berlusconi and Bono and not see any contradiction. Ditto Sarkozy. It’s the inevitable continuation of Karl Mannheim’s freischwebende Intelligenz. Emancipation from history and society, the old order, all that tricky oppositional crap. Hm? Very post-Sixties. Actually, I will tell you what truth and justice are,’ he went on, as if Sarah had specifically not wished him to. ‘They’re wanting a habitable future for my children and their children and their children in turn – please try to keep the volume down, girls! OK? Thank you. It’s called creation, not destruction. It’s called deep reflection. It’s called having ideas and convictions, then acting on them.’
Why so heavy? wondered Sarah, as they bumped onto the track. Why is he always so heavy against himself?
Fired by the Chambords, they realised they had never been to the local metropolis; that would be embarrassing in front of the Sandlers. So before the latter descended on them – Nick pictured a silvery UFO rippling the pool – the Famous Five (as Sarah put it) took themselves off to Nîmes for the first time since their arrival two months before.
Nîmes was hardly a city (let alone a metropolis) except in terms of antiquity, elegance and the usual surrounding fungi of big-box stores, car dealerships and (to the girls’ satisfying groans) oily McDonald’s.
They found a parking space in an underground car park playing Mozart and visited the huge Roman arena, watched the three-dimensional film in the intact Roman temple, regretfully gave the exhibition of neolithic burial customs in the Roman period a miss and climbed up through the Italianate garden to the Roman tower. The kids, by this time, were saturated in historical knowledge, bleeding it from the nose, and dreamed only of an ice lolly.
It was early April, but the sky was entirely clear and many of the surfaces in the old and rather lovely centre were of blindingly pale stone. Faced with the tower, a kind of vast molar with an inner spiral staircase and extraordinary views from a cramped balcony that caused Sarah much anxiety, Nick felt inspired. Maybe it was simple relief: that he wasn’t the parent of missing children, that the path had forked and he had taken the right one.
He stood by a twisted old olive tree and felt a desire to paint. Or rather, he completely understood why people developed a passion for art – something he had never really felt in his life before. He saw cubism in the myriad planes of the tower’s north-facing side, its south-facing, sunlit half turning the sky several shades of blue deeper. The same sky! He was actually thinking like a painter. Everything’s perspective, he thought.
He tried to point out the visual effect to the girls – ‘Look, look!’ – but they told him he was being boring again; they punctured his enthusiasm, deflated him. He all but sulked after his epiphany, heading for the ice-cream stall down below.
Even Tammy would probably remember very few of the innumerable nuggets of knowledge he and (to a lesser extent) Sarah had proffered. Jamie had no recollection of the trip to Delphi with Helena, for instance, when he was seven. Yet Helena had stuffed him with elaborate, pseudo-mystical information and stroked his forehead with sacred water from a grassy spring by the temple of Apollo that turned out to have been the runoff from a gardener’s hose.
The two youngest were treating Sarah like a washing line, pinning themselves to her in the busy streets, and Nick wondered if they hadn’t all become a little hick out there in the sticks; it was a strain, keeping an eye on the girls after their rural sanctuary, and the ambient noise was deafening. Beans kept pointing at the roofs and wanting to go up on them, which was sweet. She also needed changing. His eye caught the English newspapers’ headlines in an outside carousel, one of which – the Guardian Weekly – declared global warming to be ‘worse than feared’.
He bought a copy and read it aloud to Sarah as they sunned themselves at a café in front of the cathedral. Since 2000, the carbon count had considerably increased. It had been anticipated that, faced with planetary catastrophe, the West would have invested in expensive carbon-capping technology. It hadn’t.
‘I’ll read it later, Nick,’ Sarah assured him. ‘It’s embarrassing, the English.’
City bonuses were at a record high. A shell had exploded near a Baghdad playground and a father had found the head of his five-year-old girl. His own little girl, called Safia. The accompanying photograph showed only a small, blood-spattered shoe.
He looked up and saw Alicia’s head turning easily as she flicked the end of her straw at Tammy while Sarah was wiping Beans’s fingers. ‘Coco tummy touch Beans here,’ his youngest was insisting, her grammar fructifying by the hour. She prised the top of her nappy away from her belly and Sarah’s nose wrinkled. ‘Oh dear me,’ said Beans.
The newspaper ruined the rest of his day.
‘We’re possibly the most selfish generation ever to have walked this planet,’ he informed Sarah late that evening, after a resumé of the main article over supper. ‘No, forget the cautious historian’s qualification. The most spoilt, and the most selfish. The baby-boomers! Ugh. We had everything on a plate and grabbed even more.’
Sometimes he never stopped talking, Sarah thought. Like the girls. An isolation tank had a lot to recommend it.
‘Not counting yours,’ he went on. ‘The Thatcher brood now in their thirties and forties. We can’t go on blaming our parents, you see. What a shame. Not to be able to blame our parents any more. They saved the world from the Nazis. We’ve failed to save the world from ourselves. No, listen. We need to get enlightened here. A spot of critical transcendence. There’s this massive load-bearing wall in your house that’s about to collapse. What do you do? At the very least you shore it up with props, then you start to rebuild it from the bottom up. Why are we doing nothing except applying the odd trowel-load of Polyfilla? Because we are not in the least interested. Today, we’re having a ball.’
‘Maybe the wall’s a party wall,’ Sarah observed, turning her spoon over and over so her distorted face kept appearing and disappearing. ‘You know what neighbours are like. Noisy and selfish. Anyway, my parents were too young to fight the Nazis. They kept the peace in sandy pockets of the Empire.’
‘If your neighbour does nothing,’ Nick went on, ‘you go round and do it yourself. If there isn’t the time in hand to take him or her to court.’
‘Supposing your neighbour’s America, or China?’
Nick cradled his face in his hand. ‘You go round with a shotgun. OK?’
‘No, not really. It’s called war.’
‘Whatever, I feel completely and utterly ashamed. A waste of air-space.’
‘You’ve really caught the sun, Nick. It shows up the nobbles on your forehead.’
‘Are you listening, Sarah? I’m angry. I’m angry at myself.’
‘You’re writing. This is your field. Oil, oil and more oil.’
‘To be read by how many people? We fly to places like Fez or Gdansk, pretending to be doing our academic duty, and read our papers to seven bored colleagues, who read their papers in turn in incomprehensible monotones, and then we all go out and get drunk. It’s a farce.’
‘And what did you do in the war, Mr Joyce? I wrote Ulysses.’
‘You know the ones who win write the history,’ he persisted, each set of long fingers glued together and tracing circles on the table. ‘We’re a side-show. Everything is power. The best candidate never ever wins. Why? Weak power base. So. Direct action. It’s all that’s left to the powerless. Combat their desire with our desire. A theoretical case for assassination. Take out the godfathers.’
‘You sound horribly like a Bin Laden video strained through Marcuse.’
Nick said, in a mournful voice: ‘I met my past, today. He went by looking somewhat under par and sort of accelerated away when I hailed him.’
‘That’s not Dylan, is it?’
‘Praise indeed, I suppose. Thank you. Nicholas Mallinson, aged fifty-four.’
‘Shooting stars burn brightest in the darkest night,’ said Sarah.
‘That has to be Dylan.’
‘Sarah Allsopp, fifteen.’
‘Gosh, well done,’ he said, without mockery. He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Indignation and courage, that’s what we need. A chemical reaction between the two. An unstoppable fizz. Bring down the money markets. You realise the weather is a revolutionary?’
Sarah laughed and was about to call him a reborn Trot, but Nick stayed serious.
‘The Iraqi father found his little daughter’s head,’ he whispered, eyes open again and face thrust forward; he was fearful of small ears listening in. ‘Her name was Safia.’
‘I thought you weren’t supposed to whisper.’
‘It’s in the paper,’ he said, gesturing towards the sofa, where the Guardian Weekly lay like a crumpled charge-sheet of horrors. ‘Imagine that. The kid was five years old. And all completely avoidable. None of it ever had to happen. Nothing ever does. That’s the key! Safia could still be alive! They all could! And we let it happen! We could have stormed Downing Street instead of flaffing about in Hyde Park!’
‘Faffing,’ she corrected. ‘And it’s happening day after day,’ she admitted, slumping a little. No, she couldn’t imagine it. She could see it, but she couldn’t feel it. It broke all the circuits.
There was a brief pause. He watched the fire struggling against its own smoke. ‘You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Sheer exhaustion will calm it down and we’ll declare a victory, redeemed by history. The occupying forces staying on to keep the peace just as we’ll do in Darfur. The oil will be ours, lots and lots, like the Chad field so conveniently next to Darfur. Iraq will sink into obscurity. And the five-year-old called Safia? A forgotten skull.’
‘Nick …’ Sarah complained.
‘I’m haunted by my own helplessness,’ he pursued. ‘They gouge each other’s eyes out, for God’s sake.’
‘Nick, do we have to?’
‘And now we’ve got the deus ex machina descending on us tomorrow,’ he groaned, eyes hiding behind his hand.
‘Dei,’ corrected Sarah.
Nick got like this sometimes. She termed these ‘Nix fits’. It came of his having suppressed the early activist side with balance, footnotes and leak-proof substantiation. A side which had never been fulfilled beyond waving a fist next to his shoulder-length hair at cruise-missile demos and sitting on dull committees of regressive, sour-faced comrades.
She let it pass, stroking his knuckles on the table. They had polished off a whole bottle of strong Graves. He wished he hadn’t mentioned the kid’s head. She had her own unmentionables, too. Yesterday, collecting unwashed mugs from Jamie’s room while he was out, she had spotted a sheet of paper carelessly folded on the broken chest of drawers. On it was scrawled, below Cheap socks in market! and Must eat more fruit! (among other touching memoranda):
Here I AM again
I’m high up high uphighbird
knifing the water far below/you there
confectioning a stranger
don’t you remember?
one to ten
again again
bitch in the dawn cold
wannabe flesh
gonnabe gonnabe
now I’m lowdown a frown
a broken city
She always swam ten lengths, no more, no less. It was as if a curtain had been lifted on Jamie’s consciousness, stoned or otherwise. Oddly, instead of anger or even shame, all she felt was a momentary pity. Cheap socks in market! He’d only had to ask.
Anyway, she knew she had taken a calculated risk: this wasn’t a prelapsarian Eden, where nudity went unremarked. It was a fallen world, where you had to eat more fruit and wear socks.
Nick was saying, but calmly now: ‘Remember that Buddhist monk, immolating himself in the square against Vietnam? Or Jan Palach? Where are they now, eh? When there’s something far more serious?’
‘Not here, I hope,’ she grimaced.
When the smart, hired Audi arrived at the worst time (late, too near lunch, although the girls were playing happily in the barn), its tyres scrunchingly audible through the sitting room’s open window, she hurried to the main door and knocked the Scrabble box off a side table by the fireplace: the sitting room, lovingly restored to its pristine pre-Mallinson state, was suddenly littered with a spray of letter tiles and a multitude of used score sheets.
She tried to sweep the Scrabble tiles into the tipped box, but they were peculiarly recalcitrant on the woven rug. Nick was already outside: she heard his deep voice greeting the Sandlers, a peal of hearty laughter, footsteps over the gravel as she picked the squares up as fast as she could. B-L-A-Z-E-R, she read. O-N-Y-X. High-scoring words. Why did she feel so desperate, ready to burst into tears? What did it matter if there were Scrabble tiles on the sitting room floor? Why did she always have to prove something, claim the higher moral ground instead of relaxing into life, into life’s haphazard and human ways? What did she care if she scored low in the Sandlers’ eyes? It wasn’t a thesis!
‘I’ll do that for you,’ Jamie said, paused on the stairs.
Jamie never ever offered to help.
‘Righty-ho. Oh. Thank you, Jamie. If you could.’
She went into the kitchen, closing the door into the sitting room to give him a little more time, and greeted the Sandlers with a shy, slightly embarrassed bonhomie. In fact, she reckoned they should have come down here to check everything before letting the place, anyway. She didn’t feel all that guilty. And she felt more worried than guilty when it came to Jean-Luc. He lived alone with his ailing mother. He was a loner. He had spied on her naked body and photographed the girls, among other things. He had the right, sinister profile. She’d even begun to conjecture whether his impromptu plunge had not been quasi-deliberate, a piece of psychological theatre. The difficulty would be in the consequence: supposing he took revenge? Nick had dismissed that as paranoia, but it was easy to imagine him at the door, axe in hand: those deep-set eyes. The Dominici Affair all over again.
She’d always had her doubts about him: female instinct.
Lucy was chattering on emptily, and Lucy herself knew it. It was to cover a sudden feeling that her future was no longer something she could believe in; it had been obstructed, or taken over, by this family. Her idea had been that she and Alan would retire to the Mas des Fosses within the next two or three years, while they were still fit and compos mentis. It was now six years since they had bought it, but it felt like one or two. In six years she would be sixty-six, Alan an astonishing seventy. They would be officially old. The track was in an appalling state, it made the house seem even more remote. This family thrived here, however, she could see that. They all looked much healthier than back in December. They were still young. Even the senior Fusspot was relatively young beyond his hair-loss, his long-limbed, professorial awkwardness.
‘You all look as if you’re thriving,’ she said, not unsourly.
‘I think we might be,’ Sarah agreed, modestly, which infuriated Lucy even more.
Alan’s legs were aching, he had to jiggle them to restore circulation. ‘I have seen the future of democracy,’ he said, ‘and it’s called Ryanair.’
‘The future of the planet, surely,’ Nick ostensibly joked, beaming.
Lucy was surprised they hadn’t been to various places she brought up in conversation as the coffee brewed, including a sweets museum and a ‘jewel’ of a Romanesque church. Sarah pointed out somewhat defensively that they still had bags of time and Nick said more soothingly how they’d been busy ‘exploring’ the local walks. Sarah noted Lucy’s eyes noting the state of the kitchen (acceptable, surely).
‘Is it very strong?’ asked Lucy, as Sarah poured the coffee.
‘Oh no,’ said Sarah. It was decaff, but she didn’t let on.
‘In that case don’t bother with me. I only like it the way the French do it, small and very strong.’
‘That’s me!’ laughed Alan.
‘Isn’t that more Italian?’ parried Sarah.
‘No,’ chuckled Lucy, gamely.
After Sarah had made a special brew for the woman, cramming the coffee to a solid bulk in the little espresso’s filter, they all moved into the sitting room. Lucy was first through (she didn’t see why she shouldn’t treat the place as her own, when it was) and found herself brought up short by something on the tiled floor, directly in her path. It was a sentence made up of Scrabble letters.
I DIDNT FALL
I WAS
PUSHED
WHOOO OO OO
She stood stock still with her hand over her mouth, feeling a chill ripple through her over and over, very fast.
Nick was too used to seeing the kids’ rubble on the floor to make anything of it, but as he moved forward Lucy laid a hand on his arm.
‘Why in English?’ she breathed.
He vaguely took in the fact that she had turned sheet-white. ‘It’s English Scrabble,’ he said. Then Sarah appeared with Alan. They all looked down. The letter tiles were set a little crookedly, which made them curiously menacing, like a message snipped from newspaper print left by a killer.
‘It’s Jamie’s little joke,’ Sarah chuckled, sweeping the letters up with both hands. ‘Nick’s grown-up son.’ Again, the letter tiles seemed to have a life of their own. She was conscious of being bent right over in front of the Sandlers, of the top of her buttocks being exposed, as she struggled with the tiles and looked around for the box. There was no box. Jamie had surpassed himself.
‘Not so grown up,’ chuckled Alan Sandler, eyes glued to the strip of honey-pale ass above the belt, cloven into blue shadow.
‘Is he here?’ asked Lucy, weakly.
Nick ignored her and addressed Alan: ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, involuntarily stung by his presumption. ‘Jokes aren’t exclusive to children.’
‘He’s here for a short break,’ said Sarah, over her shoulder. ‘He’s a bit of a poet,’ she added, to Nick’s surprise.
Lucy sat down unsteadily in the cane chair as Sarah dumped the letters on the metal table with a clatter. She was cursing Jamie from her belly as she turned round and smiled.
‘“Exclusive to children”,’ Alan repeated, musingly. ‘Isn’t English a truly weird language? I mean, you expect that to mean it’s forbidden to children, but it means the opposite? Just on account of that little preposition?’
The reflection hung in the air for a moment as Nick grappled with the novel concept that Alan Sandler might be intelligent, might even be more intelligent than him.
‘One of those Janus words,’ Alan went on, hitting the sofa as only the owner could – with the insouciant force of his considerable weight. He had sat on the Scrabble game’s ‘Rules of Play’ leaflet, and pulled it out from under him. ‘Like, ah, cleave. Sanction. Doubt.’
‘Are your legs better?’ asked Nick, slyly.
‘They’re fine,’ Alan replied, in a sing-song voice.
The girls were in the barn, probably hiding from the gods. Sarah decided to leave them. The French would have insisted on all three coming in for an elaborate greeting, but she was not French.
She queried doubt as she perched herself youthfully on the low firestool beside Lucy.
Nick broke in before Alan could reply. ‘In Shakespeare, Sarah. To suspect and, well, to be undecided.’ He glanced at her with a disappointed, even embarrassed look. ‘Didn’t you do Hamlet at A level?’
Sarah pointedly ignored him and turned to Lucy, who was leaning her forehead on her hand and blinking at the rug. ‘Erm, are you all right?’
‘When one player has used all his tiles and the pool is empty, the game is at an end,’ read Alan from the buttock-creased ‘Rules of Play’. ‘I guess that’s pretty final, if somewhat melancholy, even morbid.’ His wheeze gave him the air of a campus poet. At any moment, thought Nick, he’ll be quoting Robert Frost.
‘Weather. Both wear away and endure,’ Nick said, planting himself on the sofa next to Alan. Who was flicking through the leaflet brusquely, as if finding secrets within and nodding. He pointed at the word horn in the example and embarked on a childhood story, an intricate Michigan farm tale involving a game of Scrabble and a freckled girl that seemed intended only for Nick’s ears, and so the latter felt privileged.
As this male session went on, Lucy stirred and asked Sarah, in a feeble voice, why her grown-up son thought the poor man was pushed.
‘What poor man?’
Lucy looked at her. Alan was nudging Nick in the ribs, now into the naughty bit in the barn. Nick was manfully holding onto his decaff and laughing too loudly, as he himself had noted Englishmen tend to do. ‘Hornier, very good,’ he bellowed, and laughed. In fact, with one ear he was listening in to the women, hoping Lucy wouldn’t tell Sarah about the builder who fell off the roof. He hadn’t yet got round to pummelling Jamie in his thoughts.
‘The poor man your son was referring to,’ said Lucy, edgily.
‘My stepson was only referring to himself,’ Sarah reassured her. ‘He has no other criteria to go by, I’m afraid.’ She wondered why she was being so disloyal to her clan. She had to stop herself pouring it all out to this hard, unattractive, superior woman. Sarah felt a need to divest herself, to sweep the surface free of struggling insects before they entered by her mouth and then came out again by her mouth, more and more of them, as if breeding inside her belly.
Lucy looked at her for a second with suspicious eyes. They were hooded by folds of skin that bore down on her eyelashes and would not have been there at all ten, twenty years ago. But she had not turned to fat, thought Sarah; the dreaded foot pump had not been connected. That was unusual, these days. It was almost to be admired. She was almost French in her slimline elegance, her sharpness. What poor man did she mean? Sarah had not really taken it in properly, she just wanted to get through it, reach the other side when they’d be gone: depressurise. What poor man?
‘Really?’ said Lucy, at last.
Sarah nodded, pulling a face. It was hard to keep the little sail of their conversation aloft in the gale from the men on the sofa. Jamie’s joke struck her as harmless, suddenly. She was much too tough on him. She hoped it was harmless. She hoped it wasn’t –
‘Oh. A mal entendu,’ said Lucy.
‘We’ve had a bit of a row,’ Sarah admitted, quietly. ‘Nick and Jamie don’t exactly see eye to eye. Jamie has not emerged from a tricky adolescence.’
‘He’s how old?’
‘Oh, erm, twenty-four? Twenty-four.’
‘I have two in their thirties who are equally irritating. Maybe I should meet him. You didn’t mention him before, did you?’
Sarah confirmed that they hadn’t and poked at the fire, whose unnecessary presence on this warmish spring day was intended to show the owners, via its ineffectual smokiness, the need to do something about it. The smoke ignited like dust in a mine-shaft, sparkling into vigorous flame, drawn up the chimney as if by some giant vacuum cleaner in the sky.
‘The fire’s always been terrific, of course,’ said Lucy. ‘Shall we take a tour of inspection outside, Alan? Look at those men.’
Alan’s hand was on Nick’s forearm and they were both in near-silent fits.
They toured the lawn, or rather the seed-bed. Sarah reminded them it had been completely ravaged by the boars. Alan began intoning a poem in an actorish lilt:
‘And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and – shit – uprooting that he may
come, ah,
Into the desolation of – reality.’
‘Impressive,’ said Nick. ‘Should I … ?
‘William Butler Yeats,’ said Alan, still actorish. ‘The great Yeats. A poem called “Meru”. Meru, the sacred mountain of the Hindus. He’s talking boars, for sure.’
‘Of course,’ said Nick, blinking rapidly. ‘Wonderful stuff.’
‘Mythologic,’ said Alan.
Lucy realised Jean-Luc had lied to her. And so had the tenant, who had described the lawn as ‘fantastic’ on the phone some time ago. She was surprised at the depths her heart had abruptly sunk to when they’d rounded the corner of the house and seen nothing that resembled a lawn inside the low, mean-looking electric fence. She now sealed her disappointment from view by rolling her eyes and exaggerating it: ‘Lord. All I want, for God’s sake, is a blasted bloody lawn. Oh, Lordie me. Oh really.’
‘Duck – and cover!’ laughed Alan, while Mr Fusspot reacted by kneeling on the ground like a knight begging forgiveness of his queen.
In fact, some of the seeds had sprouted after a few days, encouraged by the recent warmth, and he was showing them that, from a very low angle, the area appeared hazed in green. It was a clear sky, with that southern sleekness of blue to it, and the sun was almost burning on their northern skins. It had already dried out the seeded earth, well soaked that morning. The girls were very quiet in the barn, no doubt peeping on the visitors. Which felt vaguely unauthorised, Nick thought. Tallish white flowers like cow-parsley had come from nowhere and were scattered quite thickly around the yard. He disliked the Sandlers being here, despite Alan’s bonhomie. They smelt of interior furnishings in confined spaces, of stale urban perfume.
Nick was dressed in long, newly bought shorts and looked, to Lucy, ridiculous with his white legs, his bony shins, his sandalled socks. Only the English ever wore socks with sandals. He placed both hands on the ground, his chin almost touching the ground as he squinted.
Lucy was fed up. The Fusspots evidently felt bad, through their fusspottery, about dragging their landlord and lady all the way down here, and he was trying to cheer her up. It was a forlorn task: she saw, in her failure to grow a proper English lawn, far deeper failures. The tenants irritated her with their ingratiating smiles and genial falsities, although the wife (she felt) could pack a punch. They were like flies, to be swatted away. But she was nevertheless polite, diplomatic.
No one had yet mentioned Jean-Luc by name. She would have to see him in person. She would have to explain, like a mother to her son. This is what friends recognised about Lucy: that she was courageous and deep-feeling, in her own odd way. If she hadn’t been sent to boarding school at the age of six, she might (she would say) have been as sweet as glucose.
Alan volunteered to touch the electric wire, insisting it be switched on against Nick’s advice; and claimed – tapping the tape three times with a ‘Right?’ after each touch – it was a mere tickle. This was embarrassing, given the panicked phone call the other day. Nick marvelled and looked sheepish: he’d felt the shock had pretty well amputated his limb.
‘I was a farm boy, summers,’ Alan explained. ‘We played catch with balls of barbed wire.’
He tapped the tape again, looking at Nick with a boy’s crooked smile, head on one side. ‘Right?’ You could see the shock pass across his eyes like tracing paper.
They also contemplated the pool’s startling murk. Lucy groaned. Alan quoted Shakespeare, this time: ‘The green mantle of the standing pool,’ he intoned, waving a hand.
He glanced up at Nick as if throwing a ball. Nick fumbled it. ‘Hamlet. Fantastic.’
‘King Lear. Poor Tom and his foul fiend.’
‘You know your literature,’ said Nick. ‘I’m a history person, myself.’
‘And who ended up a crooked dealer?’ wheezed Alan, gripping Nick’s elbow again so it hurt.
‘He did his masters in Flann O’Connolly,’ said Lucy, flatly, without raising her eyes from the murk. ‘Harvard. And she was a fervent Catholic.’
‘Flannery O’Connor, doll. A genius,’ Alan went on. ‘She knows her evil people.’
‘Hey,’ said Nick, like a freckled junior in an American movie. He wasn’t quite sure whether he had heard of Flannery O’Connor. He felt he was threatening the reputation of the entire university. ‘The Irish are great storytellers, of course,’ he said.
‘What’s that got to do with O’Connor?’ asked Alan, mischievously.
‘Ah,’ said Nick, and he actually blushed.
‘My favourite story,’ Alan pursued, ‘is about the encyclopedia salesman who falls for this virginal spinster in her thirties with a wooden leg, and they sneak off to a remote barn and kiss and drink whiskey and she’s swooning with love and he asks her to remove her wooden leg so that she can be kinda purer. Then what happens? Huh? The salesman is very young, a Tennessee country boy, very sweet and lickspittle.’
‘I haven’t read this one,’ said Nick.
‘They elope and live happily ever after?’ suggests Sarah.
‘No way. He steals it. The wooden leg. He grins evilly and puts it in his travelling case and tells her he’s also stolen a girl’s glass eyeball, and then leaves her stranded up in the loft of the barn, betrayed. End of story. He’s the devil incarnate, you see. A liar and a villain. No scruples. O’Connor knew her evil. Given my own field, so do I,’ he added, with a wink. ‘And those people scare me.’
‘Sounds like a parable for the invasion of Iraq, that story,’ said Nick.
‘Someone, we couldn’t remember who,’ said Sarah, hastily changing the subject, ‘claimed swimming pools have no past and no future. We were discussing this the other day,’ Day – the vowel edging towards ‘die’ to conceal any hint of privilege: a process started in her teens, never let go of. She was shy of it now, in front of Lucy’s planed upper-middleness, the polish, the sheer towering wealth. She knew they were floundering in front of this couple, but this made her feel nicer as a person. ‘Somebody French, we thought. Camus? You know, that they’re pure present. Swimming pools. Not ordinary pools.’
‘Lord, I hope this one has a future,’ said Lucy.
Alan stood over the alarm with his hands on his hips, pursing his mouth.
‘Oh yes,’ said Sarah, ‘did you find the code? It’s probably best,’ she added, with an apologetic grimace.
‘’Tis sweet to hear the watch-dog’s honest bark,’ Alan proclaimed, ‘bay deep-mouthed welcome as we draw near home.’
Nick nodded. ‘You certainly know your Shakespeare.’
‘Did the silly man actually fall right in?’ asked Lucy, suddenly.
‘Byron,’ said Alan, with a smirk.
‘I had to rescue him, pretty well,’ said Sarah.
Lucy gave a little jerk of her head. ‘How can you rescue someone “pretty well”? You either do or you don’t.’
Sarah was mortified, as if she’d been unexpectedly ticked off by a favourite teacher. ‘Well, I have to admit he helped himself a bit,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve a slight suspicion, anyway, he kind of fell in on purpose.’
‘Silly man, spying on you like that. Taking photographs of little girls,’ Lucy added, with a faux-shocked look. ‘He’s lived with his mother and never gone anywhere, not even Paris. Cats go dotty if they live with their mother, you know. He’s gone stagnant,’ she added, with a touching sigh, as if talking about her own son.
Nick didn’t terribly like the generic, mocking appropriation of his children, but merely nodded. Sarah looked uneasy: Lucy was too much, a huge, thick dollop of meanings after the thin, two-month gruel of partly understood French. Alan was checking out the pool-shed, the pump, the system. The pool purred and clicked under the surrounding woodland murmurs.
‘We haven’t seen your children,’ Lucy exclaimed, as if startled by the fact.
‘No, they’re playing in the barn. Their favourite place. Let sleeping dogs lie,’ Sarah said, blushing for some reason, as if she’d committed a faux pas.
‘They’re remarkably quiet,’ said Lucy. ‘Are you sure they’re not crushed under the old waggon or something?’
Sarah laughed, though she was shocked at the callousness. She spotted a tiny hand clasping the side of the barn’s opening.
Lucy went on, in an altered, businesslike tone: ‘We’ve had trouble at the gallery over people taking photos of our photos of nudes, and then sticking them on the Internet with different faces or something. Very postmodernist, I don’t think.’
‘What people won’t do,’ said Nick. He felt life had taken on a new lustre since the panic over the girls, but he knew it wouldn’t last. The coin would be flipped again. It was flipping every day. Now London was sweeping through like a tidal flood, brown and dismal.
‘The man’s a disaster,’ said Lucy, staring at the water. In fact, she was almost relieved by its snot-green state: it made getting rid of Jean-Luc that much easier. She had clung onto him in a way she now saw as pathetic and needy. He was useless, she reflected. That’s all there was to it. He was useless and he was, in addition, creepy. He was probably into rubberwear or flagellation as well as little girls. You never knew with the French. She was lucky he hadn’t grappled her to the ground and screwed the living daylights out of her (or worse) when Alan wasn’t around. Oh, she was fed up, really fed up. ‘God, don’t you wish you were back in England?’
‘You must be joking,’ laughed Nick.
‘Yes,’ said Lucy, reflectively. ‘With everyone getting fat.’
‘Really?’ said Sarah, as if she didn’t know.
‘Lord, yes. Ugly and fat. Ugh. Fatter and fatter by the day. Special hospital beds and crematoriums. You’ve probably heard. I say throw them out for the crows on special hills.’ She talked of England as if they’d been away years; Sarah found it rather gratifying. In some ways, it did feel like years. Wasn’t Alan Sandler fat? Or did she mean obese? ‘Such awful middle-middle taste,’ Lucy went on. ‘Distinctly middle-middle, because that’s what most of these urban designers are, it’s all they know. I’ve met some of them. Twangy vowels. Middle-middle or lower-middle, even: style, I’m talking about. Design. All over the place, even in the trains. The whole of England carpeted with it, along with their ghastly music. Especially the countryside. I had to go up to Manchester last week.’
‘Oh, yes. I like Manchester,’ said Nick. ‘I was following Engels about,’ he added, chuckling.
‘Used to be so wonderfully sombre,’ Lucy pounded on. ‘Proper working-class sombre with that mournful smell of coke. Now it’s an indescribable municipal vulgarity. Giant screens, sex everywhere. Aspiring proletarian, I call it. Appetite. Everything has to be crammed. Crammed with flavour, crammed with goodness. That’s their favourite word. Crammed. More and more like that ghastly country Alan comes from, for whose sakes we’re all going to go to hell in a handcart, along with the lovely animals and trees and beautiful flowers.’
‘God bless America!’ called out Alan from the pool-shed door.
‘And now China,’ sighed Lucy, still gazing into the murk, alarmingly unstoppable. ‘The schlock shop of China. So seedy. Jettisoning the last shreds of their ancient wisdoms for the same old Americanised slush, without the freedom even to complain. Utter, utter vulgarity. Slush and sludge and slurry. Destroying nature for nothing but a dirty slurry of dollars. Greece is the same, of course, plus Greek men,’ she added, with a shudder. ‘Everywhere’s the same, pretty much. Even Islamic countries and that lovely Arabic curve – replaced by straight lines in concrete. Oh, Lord. Don’t you agree?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Nick, cocking his head like a parrot, unexpectedly warming to her. ‘This is very much my line. The last days of Babylon.’
‘We’re all guilty of it,’ Sarah interjected, conscious of her pedigree, that maybe it fell straight into the middle-middle category; thinking how all this was really an attack on them, the genteely impoverished Mallinsons. ‘We all have to make an effort. It’s not that we’re above it or innocent ourselves.’
Lucy looked at her as if she had popped up from somewhere lower down. Nick suggested jovially (perhaps unaware) that they’d better start thinking about lunch. Which was unsubtle code for: Sarah, get on with it.
Sarah went into the house while Alan checked the caves for whatever reason. Lucy and Nick entered the barn – where the girls were hiding, their position given away by snorts and giggles. Nick found it on the cusp of cheeky, but Lucy seemed reasonably amused. She discussed projects for the barn with him. He felt it would be a cinch, to be an architect. He was full of ideas and she told him he was very clever. Something about Lucy’s withering honesty attracted Nick, despite the snobbery. Or even, in the darkest depths of his soul, because of the snobbery.
Alan followed Sarah into the house, having inspected the cellars alone. One cellar in particular, its door yielding to his combination sequences like a djinn’s spell. He checked no one was watching, pushed his dark glasses up on his forehead and stepped in. The metal box was still in the corner, untouched. He didn’t unlock it. It excited him even more, not looking. The white-marble beauty concealed. Five thousand years pulsing unseen. It was a kind of magnetic core to all of life.
He talked to her in the kitchen about the history of Sumer, checking out behind his re-established dark glasses the inimitable slopes of her breasts as they descended into the fashionably low-cut top perilously close, by his calculation, to the nipple. They had a good, smooth shape, the colour of clover honey, and he wondered whether they were helped by a bra or were buoyed up naturally by their own muscle. Furtive sex acts shadow-played in the back of his head as he talked Gilgamesh, Ur, Uruk and the goddess of Love, Astarte. He bet her lanky, intellectual husband was no great shakes in bed. Even without Viagra, he would have been hard put not to try it on, not to break through the crust of her diffident, cerebral Englishness to the hot lava beneath. If only he had his life over again. If only he could halve his weight, suck out the flab with a pump.
She grilled thyme-sprinkled chèvres on toast and tossed the salad, criss-crossing it with honey: a light, tasteful, local-produce lunch, with rolls of expensive organic ham patterned with cornichons. Although she felt less uncomfortable than she’d expected to, the idea that the Sandlers had flown down to ‘sort things out’, like parents or teachers, preyed on her equanimity. She was worried about Jean-Luc, about what he would do when told he was fired; the Sandlers were not worried. Local handymen were always being relieved of their posts.
It was, nevertheless, like a visit by a ghastly royal couple, and it made Sarah feel she was a guest, suddenly. No, a skivvy preparing lunch, cleaning up, fearful lest something be in the wrong place or damaged by the kids. They hadn’t, for instance, replaced the bottle in the wine cellar – corked or no.
Alan Sandler was interesting on Sumerian art, although he was quite clearly eyeing her up. Or maybe that was just his manner. It was a burst of something other, suddenly, in their rural fastness. It was almost a relief. Lemon juice discovered an unknown scratch on her finger.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, interrupting him.
Alan cocked his head. A series of trills, warbles and sudden heart-rending wails, like something being torn, was dimly audible. Sarah opened the door and it appeared to flood the kitchen in unstoppable swirls.
‘Oh, that’s the crazy nightingale,’ said Alan. ‘Same place every year, just beyond the washing line. No volume control. That’s why we avoid April and May,’ he added, chortling wheezily.
‘I thought they sang at night. Wow. It’s lovely.’
‘All day, all night. Trying to get a woman. I know the feeling.’
The girls had emerged from the barn and she called them over; their interest in the nightingale’s performance lasted a few minutes. It seemed not to be bothered by them approaching and trying to spot it, although they were forbidden (on pain of horrendous reprisals) not to disturb it physically. It remained invisible in the undergrowth, as if by magic.
Lunch was a success, in the end, if tiring. The kids behaved, mostly, although Beans chose the moment of serving to go bright red, as if blowing up a balloon, and surreptitiously fill her nappy. Alan had descended to the wine cellar and, instead of running back screaming ‘Thief!’, emerged with a dust-shouldered bottle of 1987 Morgon. It was not corked. A mixture of fresh wet grass, crushed acorns and plum. Nick put a CD of Mozart string quartets on the stereo.
‘Of course, you barely need to touch these ingredients,’ said Lucy, cutting into her rolled-up ham, its crème fraiche fill spurting beyond the plate’s verge and the cornichon dice tumbling, too small to bother with.
Jamie was nowhere to be seen and continued thus, which was a relief. Sarah did not find his Scrabble joke funny, in the context. A few more days and he would be gone; he had actually agreed to this. The idea of resuming life here without Jamie was dream-like, filled her with anticipation. You repeatedly struck your head against a wall to know the pleasure of stopping. After a good few solitary joints in front of a camp-fire, he would decide to resume where he’d left off: depart, in other words. This had been the pattern, so far. He even had his own wind-up torch. He was, in some ways, resourceful.
The Sandlers, it turned out, were going to their favourite and very smart restaurant near Valdaron. They had not suggested the Mallinsons accompany them, nor accepted the offer of being cooked for again. The first would have been awkward whether they had picked up the considerable bill or not, but their refusal to sample Sarah’s cooking – duck à l’orange for the main dish, the zest having been soaked overnight in Grand Marnier – smacked of snootiness. Her efforts were a bit show-off in their complexity, she realised, as a banquet for the royal progress would have had to have been.
They held back the duck for the following day and retreated to pancakes, savoury and sweet, made with the girls’ help in what Sarah called a ‘dedicated pan’ bought in St-Maurice. Supper was early and felt vaguely bereft, although Sarah was growing weary of Alan’s friendly hand on various bared parts of her body. The Sandlers had enjoyed lunch, it seemed, but didn’t quite say so enough. It had looked a touch contrived, she now realised. Middle-middle, straining too hard. Only the wine was class. Unequivocal transcendence.
Now the guests were out and the Mallinsons were settling again, although the house felt curiously estranged from them, literally filled with the Sandlers’ respective scents. The master bedroom, to which they had retired to change, was the headquarters of the entire world perfume industry, Nick commented with a laugh. As for the pancakes, Beans and Alicia would only eat the sweet ones. Lemon squirted into the former’s eye. The latter part of supper was in the shadow of her intermittent screams. ‘Like living near Heathrow,’ Nick joked. He was strangely perky, tonight.
‘I prefer the nightingale,’ said Sarah.
‘Really boring, that bird,’ said Tammy. ‘It’s going to drive me mental.’
She asked why Jamie was staying so long upstairs.
‘He’s not upstairs, he’s out,’ said Sarah. ‘Making his camp.’
‘He is upstairs,’ Tammy insisted. ‘We heard him on top of us.’
‘Toppa toppa toppa toppa,’ Beans intoned. ‘Toppa toppa top –’
Sarah shushed her with an unthinking abruptness that froze her face in shock. ‘Are you sure he’s up there, seriously, you two?’
‘We did,’ said Alicia, thrusting her head forward, her lips glittering with sugar.
‘That’s a relief,’ said Nick, who tended to worry when Jamie was absent after leaving loaded messages. This one was particularly loaded, even though it must refer to the poor builder. I didn’t fall, I was pushed. Whooooooo. At the back of his mind, it had reminded him of the suicide note that poor Duncan Haighley had left last year: ‘No one’s fault. I climbed too high. Sorry.’
‘Shall I call him for supper?’ asked Sarah.
‘Why not?’
Beans, after meditating on the hurt, began to quiver her lower lip.
‘I’ll do it!’ Tammy and Alicia yelled, simultaneously. There was a brief scrap which ended in something underhand and possibly vicious, from which Tammy emerged victorious and Alicia in apparent agony, clutching her tummy. Tammy yelled up from the bottom of the stairs over Alicia’s wails, which had stymied Beans’s. There was no response.
‘Are you sure he’s there? Please, Alicia.’
‘I’m very very sure, Mummy.’
‘He’s sulking,’ said Nick. He went up to check, not by rattling the attic door but by standing in his and Sarah’s bedroom. There were creaks and thumps from the ceiling. He tiptoed up the crooked stairs. He had the suggestion of a headache from the red wine at lunch.
‘Jamie,’ he called through the attic door in a businesslike way, ‘it’s supper. Pancakes.’
Jamie loved pancakes. He can’t be asleep, Nick thought, listening to the silence. When he wasn’t asleep, he would always respond, if only with a grunt.
It was a strange silence. This was the silence, not of an empty theatre, but of a full theatre at a moment of suspense. Breathless. Except that it went on and on.
Jamie had shut himself away before – for five days once, in Cambridge – so they weren’t unduly worried. In the morning the three pancakes left over for the girls’ breakfast had gone. ‘The mouse has been,’ joked Sarah, who was nettled, especially as the mouse had left an empty glass of wine in the sitting room and the sticky, sugary plate on the kitchen table. There’d been a couple of creaks above their heads as they’d dressed, but otherwise neither had detected any sounds in the night, although the non-stop nightingale – joined by several others further off – hampered their listening.
There were no sounds, either, from the master bedroom, except an intermittent rumble through the ill-fitting door which they presumed was Alan, snoring.
The Sandlers had got back at midnight, moments before the Mallinsons had finished the washing up prior to heading upstairs to escape them. The nightingale, after a break in the afternoon, had been burbling, trilling and tearfully wailing all evening.
‘Take a break!’ Alan shouted.
Both couples had drunk too much, the Sandlers’ perfumes battling with a haze of expensive wine and a tint of cigars, the Mallinsons content with local plonk bought at the market, whose only merit was its organic nature. Alan had insisted on a nightcap – brandy – to round off a session that had begun with pre-supper whiskies; the conversation in the sitting room was equable, even after Nick, following a remark from Lucy about the French liking to be different from everyone else, had praised their tenacity over Iraq.
‘OK,’ Alan said, his white jacket impossibly crumpled, ‘you know what I think? I think life is a flowing stream and we all flow with it. I was at Woodstock, Nick, and I dreamed my dream, I thought the world was turning the corner; I saw Jimi Hendrix play the guitar with his teeth in the rain but I was wrong, the world is not full of nice, caring people, only the nice, caring people keep thinking it is and allow the crazy and evil guys all the mileage and complain –’ here he leaned forward menacingly, ‘complain when the realistic, practical guys go in and do more than just make caring noises, while cashing in on the liberal, democratic and capitalist miracle.’
Nick stared at him through a fug of alcohol and tiredness, astonished. ‘You were at Woodstock, Alan?’
‘You glimpse me in the film. You’ve seen the film? I am glimpsed by history. I am the thin, handsome, long-haired, bearded youth near the stage for one shot of approximately two seconds, only the world is not looking at me, it’s looking at Jimi’s teeth-work on his Fender’s A string.’
‘I am physically green with envy,’ said Nick.
The two women were smiling inanely, half-asleep. ‘Maybe the pool’s envious, too,’ said Lucy, dreamily. ‘Envious of the stream.’
As they were saying goodnight to each other – an awkward moment, as neither couple wished to go up simultaneously, although desperate for sleep – a whoozy Lucy had whispered to Nick in his ear, her hand firmly around his forearm, ‘Whatever you do, darling, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t mention Vietnam. Woodstock’s just fine.’
The girls woke up at seven o’clock the next morning; they’d been told to keep as quiet as possible, but their fierce stage whispers on the landing were almost worse. Bursts of giggles sounded like explosions. Nick and Sarah, feeling somewhat hungover, also kept whispering to each other, despite the thickness of the walls. The final decision over Jamie was to leave him be, saying nothing about it to the Sandlers; the latter were due to see Jean-Luc later in the morning – he was always home at midday ‘in true French fashion’, as Lucy had asserted the previous evening. They would pay him off with a bonus he didn’t deserve, and the Mallinsons would not be bothered again. Alan was to spend the rest of the day in the area’s various junk shops, mental hospitals and care homes.
This had intrigued the Mallinsons, as intended: he was, as he’d explained over the pre-prandial whiskies in the sitting room early the previous evening, branching out into a new and very profitable field.
‘Art Brut.’
‘Oh yes,’ Nick had said, vaguely. The twilight was purple through the window-glass. ‘Um, André Breton, was it? Or do you mean the aftershave?’ he joked, regretting this immediately.
‘Art that does not have any idea that it is art.’
‘It does really,’ Lucy slipped in, ‘it just pretends it doesn’t.’
‘That’s fake Art Brut, sweetie-pie. We are not interested in fakery, only in the true and the innocent. What I am talking about is the purest expression of the interior soul, the unmediated creative current splashing outward and unsullied by the intellect.’
‘Oh, the intellect,’ Nick said, in a mock-sepulchral tone, ‘that dreaded beast from the vaults.’
Alan Sandler dabbed his plump, shining face with a tissue, unsure how to take the irony. ‘You got it. How would you define history, Mr Oxford Professor?’
‘Cambridge. And not yet a professor. Only doctor.’
‘Cambridge. Doctor.’
‘Oh,’ said Nick, crossing his endless legs at the ankles, ‘as a series of vague and soiled snapshots you try to form a narrative from? Interpret? Will that do?’
‘Art Brut is art that is bashful of history,’ said Alan, creasing his eyes like a cowboy used to long horizons.
He took another gulp of the Glenlivet they’d brought along with them and sieved it through his teeth in a silent snarl. He was on his third. The hearth-fire roared as it had done from the moment they’d arrived and it was too hot. He had donned a white jacket and trousers and looked like a seedy, retired vice-consul somewhere tropical before the war.
Lucy said, ‘What he really means by “unsullied” is that he can acquire it for free and sell it for a fortune. It’s the latest craze in New York, you see. Feelings and intimacy are in. Amateur nonsense, actually.’
‘Amateur implies auteur,’ Alan objected, jabbing a finger at his wife across the rug. ‘Implies self-consciousness. Has meaning only in relation, be that of denial, with its twin – the professional. The fatal dialectic. This is much purer. This is as pure as cave art.’
Nick wondered how this sodden slob in the sofa could think so sharply and eloquently. It excited him, this contact with a corrupt intelligence, out there in the real world of wheelers and dealers.
‘Supposing I were to scribble on a newspaper with a biro,’ Sarah had said, flatly; she was snatching fifteen minutes while Tammy read to the other two upstairs: a fresh venture that had the merit of the novel.
Alan looked at her, wheezing through his nose. ‘You are not innocent. You have eaten of the tree.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘You most certainly have,’ he said. ‘I hope you have.’
‘Here we go,’ said Lucy. ‘Drink up, Alan. Din-dins. We’ve booked the table for seven-thirty. It’s Jean-Luc tomorrow, we don’t want to be knackered. I believe in face-to-face.’
‘You are afraid of it, Sarah,’ said Alan, scratching his pocked, bun-like nose. ‘Of your own opulence.’
‘Gosh,’ said Sarah, raising her eyebrows and setting her head back awkwardly, as if she’d just seen something unpleasant.
Nick wondered what he should say or even do as he kept on smiling inanely. Lucy was on her feet.
‘He’s a terror,’ she said, indulgently. ‘Come on, Mr Charm itself.’
‘Opulence,’ said Mr Charm itself, rising unsteadily with a brief, improvident noise like a flapped newspaper that might have been a fart or the sofa’s old springs. ‘Sheer unadulterated opulence,’ he reiterated, gazing for a second or two on Sarah’s modest cleavage. Any doubts about the noise were quashed by an additional sequence of reports, sounding as if someone were hammering steadily from within his considerable lower regions.
Lucy talked over it about keys while Sarah pretended there was a squall upstairs – when there was (for once) flat calm. Alan’s gaze followed her hungrily as she rose from the chair. Nick felt proud rather than annoyed. Both men watched her mount the stairs, a bustle of maternal bother, her best skirt rippling above her ankles as if in pursuit, the image only dampened by the gradual modulation of the air by Alan’s interior, long-suffering recesses. The smell seemed to putrefy Nick’s thoughts as effectively as a high-frequency scream.
‘Cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed,’ said Alan, quietly, still gazing up. ‘Hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there.’
History – or the interesting bit – is in the surplus luggage, Nick would tell his students; or what we call ‘legacy’. The snapshots image had come to him on the instant, it was entirely off the cuff. Or due to the whisky.
Just before the Sandlers went off to ‘deal with’ Jean-Luc, when Alan and Nick were checking the progress of the cherry tree (very poor) and some other dubieties under the hapless Jean-Luc’s aegis (the wood-treating of the pool’s shed; a short stone path from it to the pool’s tiles; the pool itself), Iraq came up again. It came up yet again because Alan said, staring at the uneven, un-cemented stones of the path, ‘I’ll tell you the real reason the French blocked the invasion. They don’t like hard work.’
Nick gave a stage-groan. Iraq’s bed of nails was the very definition of legacy. It made the Suez crisis look like a comfy old sofa; on the other hand, regarded from his position as an oil historian specialising in Chad, it was a triumph, pure strategic brilliance. Chad and Iraq: the same massive undrilled fields, the same trope. All the US had to do was dirty France’s name in Chad through some covert operation or other, then fight it out with China. In Iraq, there wasn’t even China – or Russia. A game of poker, yes – luck, strategy and guile – but the luck factor was a masquerade, the chaos a double-bluff.
Sometimes Nick was tempted to believe again in universal, transcendent laws, so distinct was the pattern in the carpet. As for justice: there was so little of it, but that was not the historian’s purview. Collecting the evidence and making sense of it, inductively and deductively, then turning it into coherent narrative, as close to the ‘truth’ as possible: that was all (post-Michelet) one was required to do. The rest had to be put in the deep-rage room, where it smoked and smouldered but never caught – must never catch.
That is to say: he no longer believed in the Revolution. Or in any kind of redemption, much. His very body felt ramshackle.
And he had this sense, more and more often, that this was a reflection of something greater, or perhaps deeper, than simple age. By carelessness more than design, he had accepted to play a minor role in the college’s links with the ‘Guild of Cambridge Benefactors’, shaking hands with owners of international construction companies, slick-haired property investors and corpulent oil sheikhs who had slid a considerable number of dinars into the university fund. Even closer to home – aware that no one was disposable these days – he helped to entertain wealthy alumni at small, fancy dinners in the Master’s Lodge; one of the Master’s current prospects was – according to the Internet – an arms dealer as well as a constructor of rigs. The bolts on Nick’s ideological framework were so loose as to be useless: in 1997 he had voted for Blair, the ultimate hollow man.
But when Alan claimed, after Nick’s pained groan, that the invasion would be judged as a fine, honourable decision in a hundred years’ time, and that any other view was a failure of historical imagination, Nick had to object. He was stung by ‘fine’, he was provoked by ‘honourable’, he kept seeing that little girl’s head rolling away to the father’s feet, or however it had happened. Safia.
They had moved over to the pool, looking for any improvement that might be the consequence of Nick’s half-improvised cocktail of shock chlorine and clarifier two days ago.
‘A smart, cold-blooded oil-grab, maybe,’ said Nick, ‘of vast advantage to the survival of America’s unfortunate lifestyle, but you just cannot say there’s anything fine or honourable about something that, if it hadn’t happened, would have left hundreds of thousands of people, including small children, with their lives intact and still, presumably, to be enjoyed.’
He was tired of Alan’s swaggering mind; he was worried about Jamie; his pseudopolyps had transformed into a soreness he felt might have tumorous ambitions.
‘What did you think of Star Wars?’ asked Alan, folding his arms by the filter. ‘And I don’t mean the film.’
‘Star Wars? Lunatic. A dim cowboy’s wet dream.’
Alan gave a low chortle. ‘First, Ronald Reagan was not dim, as his diaries prove. I’ve just read them. His dimness was a front and you swallowed it. Second, his policies broke the Soviets without a shot being fired. Yet I’ll bet my bottom cent you were manning the barricades against him with all those crazy lesbians, sure in your own virtue. Like Stalin. Like Hitler. Like Saddam. Like Bin Laden. Like Pol Pot. Actually, like Che Guevara. Che shot defenceless people. He shot prisoners in the back of the neck. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. Did you know that? In Cuba?’
‘He was a guerilla fighter,’ shrugged Nick. He knew so much about what his old hero had got up to that he didn’t know where to start, it would be embarrassing. ‘I wrote a book about it, actually. He was killed in Bolivia fighting a vicious drugs junta, a junta run by the likes of Klaus Barbie and backed to the hilt by the CIA.’
‘Let’s readjust that,’ said Alan, who seemed not to have heard the latter part. ‘He was a mass-murdering leftist guerilla fighter therefore we forgive him.’
‘Erm, not quite fair …’ Nick had never been able to handle arguments over intricate matters when they were slapped on with a wallpaper brush. He preferred to back off, even when (as now) his heart was thumping with rage.
Alan turned on his heel with a snort and walked away, joining Lucy at the door of the house. He had a hangover, he was cross, he was fat and grumpy. The nightingale abruptly switched itself on and he told it to shut up yet again, but yet again it ignored him.
‘Where are the hunters when you need them?’ shouted Alan, and the women laughed.
Nick stared into the murk, with the odd sensation that he was dressed in pyjamas. He breathed in deeply and blew out slowly. Reagan himself was not his field, that was the trouble. The diaries had not yet been published in Britain. He had skim-read the odd review in American journals; he’d been busy, deprived of sleep. Perhaps he would send Alan one of the numerous remaindered copies of his short book, The Violent Stage: Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. The shooting of the prisoners occupied a chapter unravelling and defining complex social and ideological forces: too general, he now thought.
The pool was an even deeper green, with khaki highlights and ringlets and curls of foam like patterns in wood. It smelt of old, damp belfries. The scum by the surface had rooted as slime, waving its tiny suckers on the sides. Every life, he considered, tends towards this murk. It is all such a huge and continuing effort, retaining clarity, keeping it running clean. Had they all been so wrong?
He watched Alan and Lucy Sandler heading for their car, Sarah nodding with Tammy at the kitchen door. The nightingale’s voice seemed to be growing in volume, ecstatic and heartbreaking at the same time, echoed by others beyond, so that he got a sense of a kind of conspiratorial desire to keep it all going, to trigger the seasons despite humanity.
He decided that, when Jamie finally emerged from his sulk, he would pour love onto him. He would not assume that his son was a hard-luck story. He would treat him like a miracle. More or less.