Jean-Luc has not found the camera. Three days ago he set off long before dawn on foot, with the big key to the Mas in his tunic pocket. He hadn’t brought his dark glasses because it was dark anyway, but the small patch in the blur he could see through was not really enough, it was hard to make out the road, what was surface and what was ditch. He nearly tripped over a badger, a big black-and-white fuzz crossing the lane in the usual spot, lit by the shivering beam from his torch. When he was a kid it was the same spot, same time – but not the same badger, he assumed.
They have a nasty bite, Janno. Their back paws step exactly where their front paws have been, see? Their setts are hundreds of years old, boy, like myself.
He misses his father, suddenly.
The walk through the woods, once he’d found his mobilette in the usual place and cut across, was possible only because the sky was lightening up, a deep green flushed with blue that danced about like fireworks in his head. Not having his dark glasses, he kept his eyes almost shut. The dawn chorus was set off by the loud whirr of a wren, probably his doing. The nightingales would be here any day. He liked them talking to him, over and over.
The house was a black cliff, approached from the north. He thought he heard kids’ voices over the chirps and trills and kept very still, crouched in the undergrowth under the holm oaks. When the high voices faded (if that’s what they were), he advanced slowly towards the area where he’d cut the spurge, the light and the shadows fusing in his creased-up eyes, soldered together then splitting apart. This is probably how animals see, he thought. Sounds and smells, sharper. Sometimes he was on all fours.
He would have liked to have been an animal. A big cat. A puma. Light on his paws.
It was hopeless. There was no camera, although he peered all around by the pool-shed, crouched, fearful of being spotted from the windows. A blackbird yelled out suddenly and made him jump. He had the key to the house but he didn’t feel like sneaking in, disturbing someone.
He made it back to Aubain on the mobilette by seven-thirty and a woman shouted at him in the main street, but he didn’t see who. He just slipped back into the house as if he hadn’t heard. The street already smelt of coffee and bread, and he’d detected shampoo from the neighbour’s steamed-up bathroom window, one floor up: his nose was hunting-dog sharp.
Three days later, and he’s lying on his bed as if he’s crash-landed from off a roof. They must have found it, along with the binoculars and the brush knife. Maybe the film is being developed right now, exposing him. Three or four days: that’s enough. He lies on his bed in his room and sees himself sprawled broken on the ground. People are coming up to him, running, and he can’t move. Maman is still asleep: he put an extra sleeping pill in her tisane and she never tasted it. She is knocked right out. He does this more and more often, especially when he needs to slip out early. He didn’t, not this morning, but who cares? It’s a mercy for everyone.
When the new nurse comes, she has trouble waking Maman up.
His eyes are inspected in the kitchen. They’re already healing, she says, and wipes them and squeezes in some eye-drops. ‘You’re a right pair,’ she says.
‘What, my eyes are?’
‘No,’ she laughs, ‘you and your mum.’
She’s young, early twenties, with big front teeth like the ends of celery stalks in a pretty, plumpish face; she smells of lilac scent, toothpaste and pure alcohol. She’s called Marion. She has the narrowest waist he has ever seen: he can spot it even under her uniform, even through his injured eyes. He would like to squeeze it as she bends over him and presses her thigh against his hip, breathes on his face, touches his cheek with her pointy finger-pads. He likes the way her big teeth rest on her lower lip. He likes her dimples.
Afterwards, he wonders if he imagined her waist, because Bibi’s waist is also very narrow, rising to sharp breasts. His eyes sting with the drops. Or maybe he’s crying. He’s sorrowing for the missing camera, he feels angry that they’ve kept it. It’s his business, what he takes photos of. And he can’t finish the monument. He needs the pictures of the English girls, their smiling faces, their pretty little flower-faces on the spoons. He seethes inside with frustration; he’s done nothing but mooch about for three days, not even able to watch telly.
He puts on his most recent Johnny Hallyday very loud, ignoring his mother’s wails. It’s the song about blood, about the lovers being the same in their blood, about exchanging silence and now we’re face to face we resemble one another, blood for blood, and he can see himself with the Englishwoman and how their blood’s 100 per cent the same – Johnny makes it possible, and Jean-Luc knows all the words, he sings along in a whisper, in a murmur, rocking his head and wanting to sob and wail like Johnny, full up with love.
The whole village must be hearing it, he thinks, but no one complains. They’re all dead. They’re all zombies, sitting there in the café and talking about him, because he’s the only one who’s still alive. The rest of the world is dead, apart from him and the animals and the plants.
‘Jean-Luc, you stupid oaf, turn it down!’
He shouts through the door, over the music: ‘You’re dead, Maman! The dead can’t hear!’ And then hits the door with his fist, because if he didn’t hit the door he’d open it and hit her instead, over and over again. He thinks of his father’s dog whose insides were ripped out by the boar, who went on whimpering and then lifted its head and smelt its own intestines, blood gleaming on its nose. He saw it for himself. He was ten or eleven.
This morning he sat in front of the monument and pleaded with Oncle Fernand to talk to him, but Oncle Fernand has gone silent. He is afraid of the Germans. The SS, not any old Germans. He’s hiding so he won’t have to take them to the Mas des Fosses. He didn’t hide when they kicked the door open in the café, looking for someone to take them to the Mas des Fosses, to take them to the boys. He didn’t hide because he didn’t have time. Or maybe because he didn’t think he’d be chosen. Of course he had time to hide! Everyone knew the SS were coming! They knew from three, four hours before! The news came up along the roads, the goat-tracks, over the hills from down below, all the way from Nîmes long before dawn, when the SS had left their barracks to cleanse the mountains of riff-raff, of trouble. Johnny Hallyday would have kept them at bay, singing his heart out. But Oncle Fernand was only twenty years old and had never heard of Johnny Hallyday. Johnny Hallyday was only just born, probably.
‘I told you, Maman, if you don’t shut your mouth I’ll shut it for you! For good!’
Oh, how she squeals! Then nothing. Muttering, maybe, her false teeth loose. She could choke on her teeth, the nurse said. Jean-Luc feels he’s smelling his own intestines, looking after Maman.
Let me think, he thinks, swaying as the next song starts, promising her his eyes if he can’t see any more, the salt from the kisses on his mouth, the honey from the touch of his hand.
Oncle Fernand is still afraid, that’s the trouble. He didn’t hide because he hadn’t any reason to; he’d done nothing, he’d always kept his distance from the Resistance boys, he just kept his head down and worked quietly at the tannery in St-Maurice, walking there and back with his limp, two hours each way. They waited for the SS to arrive and arrive they did, a hundred or more of them roaring into Aubain, ten times louder than Serge Faure on his big motorbike. And when they kicked open the door of the café, asking someone to show them the way to the Mas des Fosses, Oncle Fernand didn’t put his hand up. Although he did know the way, of course; he knew the way like the back of his hand from long before the boys made their camp there. He helped on the farm, that’s why, as a lad, when they needed an extra pair of young hands. No other reason. They were distant cousins, that lot. Blood thicker than water. By rights, Jean-Luc thought, I should be living at the farm. By blood rights.
So who volunteered Oncle Fernand for the job?
Old Père Lagrange, that’s who. Or that’s what Maman has always told him, via Tante Alice. Tante Alice being Oncle Fernand’s sister. Whom Jean-Luc never knew.
Old Père Lagrange, that’s who. He was pissed as usual on fig brandy fetched from the straw in his cellar for old François Bouillon’s birthday, who was eighty. They were all pissed, the old men, except for Oncle Fernand. Because he wasn’t old, then. He was twenty. You were younger than I am now, thought Jean-Luc. By sixteen years. Seventeen.
And when the Germans asked – waving their automatic rifles about, guns that had shot dead whole families elsewhere (Poland, he was told), lined up in rows and falling like ninepins in front of their houses and barns – old Pére Lagrange pointed at Oncle Fernand up at the bar, having his coffee after his Saturday morning at the tannery, and said, ‘There’s your man, Captain.’
There’s your man.
There’s your man, Captain.
Knowing the boys would be gone. The Resistance boys. Because Old Père Lagrange would supply paraffin for them, from his stores. Knowing how angry the Boches would be when they got there and discovered the boys had gone, had been gone for two days. Knowing that, most like. And still he pointed at Oncle Fernand, all innocent up at the bar, having his coffee in the very same café the great-grandson Marcel Lagrange goes to, and Raoul Lagrange used to go to, and all the other grandsons and great-grandsons and great-great-grandsons of old Père Lagrange still go to, unashamed. And signed Oncle Fernand’s death warrant with that pointing finger, as if it had a nib on the end of it. And yet old Père Lagrange was a bit of a hero, after the war, for helping the boys. Helping them at his age, and with a dent in his forehead from the trenches. An article in the paper, all yellow now, when he hit a hundred. On show in a frame, for a while, in the mairie. Jean-Luc saw it, as a kid. The hero of two wars. A piss-yellow clipping from 1970, the year Jean-Luc was born.
Prodded him over the edge. Old Père Lagrange, the good-for-nothing bully who was sozzled by noon whether it was anyone’s birthday or not, prodded Oncle Fernand over the edge with that pointing finger.
And Jean-Luc feels more and more enraged, reflecting on this for the umpteenth time, without Oncle Fernand’s voice to calm him down. He finds that he’s been scratching with the biro on the table. Faces, lines, bullets, circles and slits gushing blood. How many bullets did they pump into Oncle Fernand when they found the Mas empty? One, they reckon. Out of an automatic rifle.
They found the Mas empty, but there were potato and onion peelings in the kitchen and beds of bracken in the sitting room and cigarette stubs by the windows with the look-out views onto the valley and in the fireplace there was a big heap of ash, still warm in the middle when they kicked it.
They walked back with him halfway along the track to the lane and then they pressed the rifle to the back of his neck and the bullet came out through his look at the level of the nostrils, getting rid of it. Faceless Oncle Fernand, aged twenty. Did he cry when they jerked him round to look the other way? Did he cry and plead with them? Did he tell them, on the way back, that he’d had no idea the boys were ever even there? Did they kick him all the way back to where they shot him? Did they take his eyes out before they blew away his face?
Jean-Luc squeezes his own eyes tight, feeling the pain of it, of Oncle Fernand’s innocence and the foreigners’ guilt. Johnny Hallyday is singing his heart out at the song’s end, giving him courage, believing like an innocent child who believes in the sky, promising her fire instead of a gun, salt from the kisses of his mouth, honey from the touch of his hand. My mouth, my hand. Her.
If the Germans were to come into Aubain now – he imagines this clearly enough, with all the war films that have been on the telly – he would take them out before they took him out. He wouldn’t wait to be killed like a dog. He grips the monument and moves it from side to side so the spoons tinkle, empty except for one. The blind-eyed duck floating on the pond. This wouldn’t float, though.
The missing camera is an agony. He can no longer watch the Englishwoman bathing in the nude. His life is a mess, he thinks. Oncle Fernand has run away so the Germans can’t get him, leaving Jean-Luc to take his place, to face them alone. He wouldn’t have let old Père Lagrange point him to his death. He’d have whipped out his father’s hunting rifle and leapt up onto the bar and shot the SS captain – look at his surprised expression! – and then peppered old Père Lagrange, gurgling blood into his fig brandy, and then as many of the Germans as he could before their bullets tore him up like a hero, like all dead heroes, dead for France, dying on a sweet smell of fig brandy from the exploded bottle as Johnny’s song fades in turn, guitar and voice and drums all fading at the end of the song.
Jean-Luc, exhausted, fists clenched around the monument, sees his own soul disappearing like the scut of a hare escaping into the trees. He sees himself as a marble monument, naked, snow-white, draped on a sheet. He would like to end up like that, he thinks.
But the next song starts like a heart beat, like life coming back, just the drums on their own, and then the guitar, and then Johnny wailing into the dark: Oh, my pretty Sarah, how much more time?
And then Maman yells. He covers his ears. He can hear her yelling again through Johnny’s pain and desire. There’s someone at the door. He looks through the window and swears and leaps immediately to stop the music.
The Sandlers arrived at Jean-Luc’s at midday. They felt midday was good because all French people, in their estimation, scuttled back home to eat at that precise hour, if they didn’t have a rendezvous in a restaurant. It was unlikely Jean-Luc had a rendezvous in a restaurant, even if he hadn’t been half-blind.
They were surprised to hear loud music belting from his house. It was audible as a murmur from halfway down the narrow main street of Aubain, but it had never occurred to either of them (they’d walked from the parking place in front of the church) that it might be coming from Jean-Luc’s house. They had never, in the six years of employing him as a handyman and gardener, visited his house before. In fact, they weren’t even sure which one it was until they asked a young girl with piercings, carrying a letter: most of the houses had no numbers on their doors, and there was no Maille visible next to what doorbells existed. When they realised the music – some awful French type of rock or variété – was emanating from the indicated house, they doubted the girl, but by then she’d disappeared.
There was a bell to press, somehow furred-looking and green about the gills. Lucy tried it. Alan was standing a little apart, looking grumpy and red in the face, with his felt homburg tilted against the bright sun. He thought the hat made him look distinguished: it was a recent thing. He hadn’t wanted to come, but he was her minder. He couldn’t understand why a simple phone call wouldn’t suffice; if the key was the main issue, they could add a Yale to the door. He was tired from the travelling and the late night and felt there’d have been nothing wrong with a simple call.
Lucy believed in doing things face-to-face, however awkward; this stemmed from her gallery experience, working with difficult artists, dealers, members of the public. She visited studios and was loved for it, even by the many unattractive, sour-faced, linguistically challenged artists she had to deal with. She felt she could abate whatever anger or desire for revenge might rise in Jean-Luc simply by being present in front of him, carefully explaining the matter in her reasonable, accurate, schoolgirl French. She didn’t want to be a village pariah. She didn’t want to be put in the same box as those awful English types without a word of the language, using locals like pawns in some thoughtless game.
And the key worried her, in some deep way. It was a very old lock, the main lock to the house. Handing over the key would be a symbolic act of renunciation.
Behind it all, she wanted to see Jean-Luc’s house.
When their dishy and reliable builder had fallen off the roof – reliable if you were behind him all the time, that is – she’d felt a wall of hostility from the village. Nothing was said: it was just one great silent wall. The funeral happened so quickly that it was over before she and Alan could even book a flight. They were still in shock. The man should have been wearing a safety harness, following EU norms. When the family tried to sue, she left it all to the lawyer. Horribly, for a moment it looked as if the family might win, might claim untold amounts, simply because he had been employed on the black. It was like the burglar falling into the pool: everything was on the side of the victim. She saw them sitting around an oilcloth-covered table, formidable in shawls and baggy clothes, gradually eating her for breakfast. She was fifty, sixty years out of date. They probably had a dishwasher.
Then, at the height of the stress, it all went quiet. He should never have gone up in the wet, the deep-voiced lawyer told her. No roofer ever goes up on a tiled roof in the wet, not down here: there’s no grip on the curved barrel tiles, none at all. The sun was out that day, but it had rained in the night. The tiles hadn’t dried, they were greasy, they were a skating-rink on a slope. You didn’t push him to finish, did you? Put pressure on him? That’s the rumour, here.
‘No more than any other owner might,’ Lucy said, from her mobile in the back room of the gallery. ‘You know what it’s like.’
‘You put no pressure on him at all, OK? Madame Sandler? Nous sommes bien d’accord? No pressure at all.’
The lawyer’s sexy, chain-smoker’s voice was unutterably soothing. She could marry this man, see themselves safely into old age, leave Alan to his mad mullahs.
‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘It’s clear.’
And that was that. They flew over. Everything left in place for weeks, as if time had stopped: the old tiles still stacked on the ground, beautifully stained with moss and lichen, ready to hide the new ones. The finished part ending just where, she supposed, he’d started to slide three or four feet from the bottom verge; a few little stacks of tiles up there like miniature chimneys, ready to lay; one tile loose and crooked, like a dramatic clue. It was horrible.
Standing in the attic, under the transparent plastic sheeting, she was just inches away from the actual moment, she felt. She thought she could hear his last grunt of surprise. Then Alan spotted, near the ladder leaning on the beam, a flask of coffee and a plastic tub. The coffee was spotted with green slime; the tub was a writhing mass of maggots. The lunch, no doubt prepared by his wife, that he never tasted. It gave her the worst migraine of her life.
Because of the music upstairs, she had no idea whether the bell had worked. She was suddenly a lot more nervous and glanced at Alan, who was peering upwards from the empty middle of the street, scratching his brow under the hat like a film noir detective. The house was narrow, squeezed in between other narrow houses, and rendered in a sallow limewash that was peeling to stone in places; its net curtains were yellowed and shrunk-looking, gave nothing away except that there was mystery beyond the rows of little lace dairy-maids: the mystery of poverty and neglect. She felt faintly adventurous. She hadn’t had anything to do with poverty and neglect since her voluntary days with the soup kitchen in Paddington. The sunlight was bright as a polished knife; the street contrived to look shadowy.
Jean-Luc wouldn’t like them to visit: this was sacred ground, like a dark temple. For all she knew, domestic privacy might be a major tradition in this area, even more major than in England. No proper local with local roots had ever invited her to their home here, she realised. She felt like a trespasser. A snooper.
‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,’ she said, moving over to Alan.
‘Sounds like he’s having a ball,’ Alan replied. ‘Welcome to the discothèque d’Aubain.’
‘Aubain does not rhyme with pain, Alan.’
‘Doesn’t it? Looks pretty gouty to me. I think we should retire to Malibu. Somewhere in the third millennium, not the first. I think he might be bats.’
‘And get burnt up in a forest fire,’ said Lucy. ‘Forget it, sweetheart.’
‘I think the curtain just twitched, up there.’
The music stopped suddenly in the middle of a song and didn’t start again. Lucy had pretty well sprung for the bell before she’d had time to reflect. It sounded, decisively, from somewhere deep within. As if the house were clearing its throat.
‘You know the stories of Edgar Allan Poe … ?’ she murmured, with a wry grimace that Alan shared as a chuckle, folding his hands in front of the door and rocking back on his heels.
‘Ooh la la,’ he said, inconsequentially. He had little red shadows on each cheek, like blusher.
Jean-Luc received them in the kitchen, which the front door opened straight into. Steep stairs disappeared into darkness.
He looked as if he’d been awake for many nights, face stubbled around his off-putting wrap-around sunglasses in which no eyes were visible. Lucy didn’t smell drink off him, however: Jean-Luc was not a drinker, she knew that. Most other men in the village, of his age or older, were drinkers, she reckoned.
At least, when they got close (usually in the summer, which perhaps wasn’t fair) they carried with them a fragrance of alcohol, like walking gardenias.
He shook their hands and motioned to them to sit down. He was polite enough, if a little grim. You forgot he wasn’t a blind man. She’d half-expected him to yell at them. The kitchen was gloomy, so goodness knows how he saw anything. As far as she could make out, almost every surface had been covered in vinyl – but a very long time ago, with flowery washable wallpaper between the cupboards that ought to have been put in a museum of Sixties memorabilia. The table’s off-white vinyl was rippled, worn and holed by burns. Ditto the dark lino on the floor.
Then the darkness fled into dismal corners, banished by the neon above their heads. She blinked to adjust. One door on the wall cupboard was hidden behind faded coloured postcards from places like the Île d’Oléron and, surprisingly, a joke card from Guadeloupe with a row of palm trees under snow. Unless it snowed in Guadeloupe? The old, bulbous fridge gurgled and growled. There was a microwave, she noted, and a smell of coarse coffee and drains. She felt she had arrived, in some way. She would tell friends about it, how she had sat in the kitchen of a paysan, with nothing fake in it whatsoever. She wouldn’t mention the postcard from Guadeloupe. Her account would supersede the visit to the Hopi house on the Arizona bluff thirty years ago, where she had admired a Bang & Olufsen stereo – which she did mention, as the sort of comic highlight.
‘That’s better,’ she said, in French.
He hadn’t yet smiled. His proffered palm had been rough-skinned. He definitely had an air of the unwashed. He sat down with a scrape of the metal chair and folded his hands in front of him. She couldn’t see where exactly he was looking, he might have been sitting in a cave. He didn’t offer them anything, which was disappointing. It marred Lucy’s opinion of French hospitality. His mother was shouting in a high voice from up the very narrow, vertiginous stairs. He said something over his shoulder as if chucking it at her, an unintelligible rasping shout. The working classes were half-deaf: Lucy had always thought that. The mother shut up.
‘Well, Jean-Luc,’ she said, hearing the English words in her head before the French came out, simultaneously translating herself, ‘we must speak of these problems.’
He nodded. Then he asked what problems. She itemised the lawn and the pool, the fact that the water was green and the lawn a disaster. Her vocabulary was more limited than she’d realised, it was always the same. She’d rehearsed this several times, but now that she was on stage the script dried up. She could barely think of any words other than those homonymically parallel, like désastre, or beginner-simple, like vert. It all needed oiling.
Jean-Luc kept his head bent, his hands trembling a little. She didn’t think that was a good sign. His knuckles were raw as if gnawed and the skin blotched a cranberry red: not just the allergic reaction to the spurge, perhaps. Dry skin like laminate. Real poverty was ugly, she remembered. Jean-Luc was probably not even that poor: he worked for lots of people. At least a dozen. She’d met others at parties in the summer who joked about him, tolerating his foibles, one or two (certainly the very wealthy Danish couple with gilded skin and hair) who said he was indispensable, in so many words.
Jean-Luc explained about the pool and the lawn in his usual mumbled way, making no concessions with his accent. She nodded as Alan yawned and looked around him, an unhealthy colour under the neon: it was like sitting in an airport, where everyone looked ravaged, whatever their age. Alan didn’t like Jean-Luc, she reminded herself: jealousy, mostly.
She said, picking words from her French hoard like one of those claw-grabs in a funfair, her pronunciation turning them plastic and cheap: ‘I think there’s a problem also with the English family, with what passed three days ago, with your relationship with them. I think you know of what I talk, Jean-Luc,’ she added, smearing over an awkward sentence connection with something between a sigh and a mumble so that the effect was weakened – not quite what she’d intended. It was a mistake to come here. Alan was right: he would have been quite prepared for a simple call. She had culturally misjudged. The lady never visited the peasant.
He paused and then said, in clearer French than usual: ‘You should have had the alarm activated, Madame.’
It struck her in a flash, like a blow in the chest, what he was driving at. Alan, looking suspiciously at him, was sweating in his dark leather jacket, she could see the gloss on his cheese-white brow under the raised hat-brim.
‘Jean-Luc, that was your responsibility,’ she pointed out.
‘It’s always the responsibility of the owners, Madame.’
‘You were saved,’ she said, partly because it was the simplest way of saying it. If they’d been talking in English, she’d have said: ‘This is irrelevant. You were fished out unharmed. Don’t talk rubbish, mate.’
‘I could report you,’ he went on. ‘I could sue you for damages. I have been ill for three days, swallowing the water. The chlorine and other products made my eyes worse. I’ve lost work.’
‘What’s he saying?’ snapped Alan, in English. ‘Is he saying he’s gonna screw us? What a nerve.’
Lucy felt out of her depth: this wasn’t the Jean-Luc she’d expected. He had revealed a cold, calculating side which was new to her. This must be the French thing. The remorseless logic of the Napoleonic law and so on. She felt very threatened, she wanted to see his eyes. It was like talking to a Mafia hoodlum.
She waved at Alan to shut up and turned to see herself twice over in the double screen of the dark glasses. Tiny and withered, like a sad old lady on television. ‘You know there’s no point, Jean-Luc. I have to say that I will be looking for another gardener, now. I’m very sorry. But I’m sure there are other people who have need of someone. It’s best like that. Thank you for all you’ve done. I want to pay you –’ she searched for the equivalent of ‘properly’ but couldn’t find it, proprement might mean ‘cleanly’, so she petered out. ‘Up to now,’ she added, feebly. Lord, this was exhausting. Jusque or jusqu’à maintenant. Or présent, even, instead of maintenant? Oh, sod it.
His mother was calling again. He looked up as if cocking his ears, obeying a signal from beyond.
‘She wants to say hello to you,’ he said, with a faint smile. ‘We have to go up. Hello and goodbye.’
‘He’s not going to sue us, period,’ said Alan, staring at Lucy. He looked sillier in his hat, indoors. ‘I think we should go. I’m thirsty. You and your face-to-face.’
‘We have to greet his bedridden mother, Alan,’ said Lucy, in as even a tone as possible.
‘Why?’
‘Because this is France and the French have their customs. They are not uncouth like us. We met her when we bought the house, if you recall. She was only lame, then. She came along with Jean-Luc. She was going to clean for us. He’s accepted the situation, thank you.’
She turned to Jean-Luc; although he had kept his head very still, she felt he’d been listening. Listening without understanding. An upper-class Parisian friend had once told her that speaking English in front of a French person not in command of the language was the very pinnacle of rudeness.
‘Do you want to give us our key, before we visit your mother?’ she said, in French.
He stood with a scrape of the chair and reached up to an old, iron hook where a large number of keys hung on their strings. He handed over the one for the Mas des Fosses without a word.
Lucy thanked him neutrally, immensely relieved, and slipped the big key into her bag. It was a lot easier than she’d anticipated: it probably happened to him quite a lot. They went upstairs, Jean-Luc letting them go first. The stairs were very steep and the runner was loose. Alan was wheezing by the time they got to the room.
She went in all smiles. The air was appalling. The woman was clearly incontinent. She had a broad, unexpected grin cut into her face that reminded Lucy of the jagged splits in a Hallowe’en pumpkin. Her face was entirely grey and shiny, with undefined knobbles and swellings through which her main features struggled to be noticed. Her hair was white and thin and wild. She stared as if aghast at their royal bearing. They shook hands with her in turn, Alan politely taking off his hat and booming a greeting in his hopelessly American accent that had her wide-eyed and marvelling. Jean-Luc was leaning against the wall, arms folded, with an odd expression of triumph.
Oh, Lord.
Madame Maille clutched Lucy’s hand in both of hers and held on. Her eyes were wide and watery and her hands had been pulled from a bucket of ice. The only decorations in the room were a piece of sampler work in lace, framed behind cracked glass, and some ghastly ceramic thing with a bamboo surround featuring a duck. The wallpaper would once have been very loud, with a spatter effect and the embossed vertical treads of tanks. She clearly worshipped her son’s employers. ‘Adored’ them, was how Lucy was going to put it back home.
‘I hope you get better soon, Madame Maille,’ said Lucy, conscious that this was special, a special moment she would share, embellished, with her friends.
She was also desperate to leave, to pull her hand from the icy grip and get into her car and speed away to a mug of builder’s tea at home in London with Radio 4 or 3 murmuring in the background. It was embarrassing. Jean-Luc had bested them. They were firing her son and his mother had no idea. They were the wicked landlords, the cruel foreigners, the wealthy, hypocritical tosspots. She hated this. She hated not being in control of her own perfidy. Cornwall would have been better. Wales, even. No, not Wales.
Alan, hatless, was wiping his brow on a tissue, looking awful. The air was virtually non-existent, crammed with odours and Lord knows what germs. There was a little table on wheels full of medications and creams and, next to it, a commode. The cloudy white plastic bottle on the bedside cupboard contained dark liquid she imagined would be yellow if poured out. She felt sick. She would be like this herself in under twenty years. Twenty years was nothing. She must join a gym and eat nothing but nuts and berries. Madame Maille let go of her hand and sank back on the bolster, a slight frown on her speckled forehead, broad with hair-loss. The corners of her lips held gum. Old people are so detailed, Lucy thought.
‘You’re so good to my Jean-Luc,’ said the loving mother. ‘He doesn’t deserve it.’
Jean-Luc laughed, a kind of yelp. ‘Ils m’ont viré, Maman,’ he said, so clearly that even Alain could understand. Viré: it sounded as if they’d injected him with a deadly disease. He pointed to his dark glasses. Of course they hadn’t sacked him because of that. Preposterous. It was at times like this that she desperately, desperately desired a cigarette, although it was five or six years since she’d stopped.
He went to the door and closed it. Then he leaned against it and folded his arms again with that menacing look his face took on in repose. Lucy’s heart began to race. Madame Maille’s frown deepened and her eyes, darkening, shifted their gaze from Lucy to Alan and back again.
‘C’est pas vrai,’ she said, in husky bewilderment.
Alan said, ‘Let’s go, Lucy. Excuse me, monsieur.’ He was attempting to reach the door-handle past Jean-Luc’s waist, without success. His hand hovered and fell. ‘Lucy, let’s go. He’s blocking the door. He’s bats. I told you.’ Alan’s hand was now up and shaking the air. ‘Lucy, he’s blocking the fucking door. Will you tell him? Will you tell him to stop fucking –to stop blocking the door? I’m thirsty. I can’t stay here. I have to go.’
‘I think we must go, Jean-Luc,’ Lucy said, addressing the over-large dark glasses. Looking him in the eyes, or at least where she guessed them to be, she added a ‘s’il vous plaît’, although she’d been tutoying him for years. It must have spoken volumes. Such an awkward language. She was not unafraid, she noted. The sickroom’s fug had overwhelmed her underarm deodorant and she felt the tickle of sweat on her ribs.
He comes away from the door without a word and keeps his arms folded and watches them leave behind the mask of his dark glasses; they mutter and chirrup like birds, like parrots. He watches them descend the stairs, dark shapes in the darker darkness, emerging into the square of light cast by the kitchen neon. He stays upstairs. It is the rudest, most offensive thing he can think of doing, not to show them out, not even to shake their hands goodbye. He hasn’t opened his mouth since he came away from the door. They were troubled, he could see that. Maman is talking away to him but he ignores her.
He slips quickly into his room because he wants to watch them go up the street, catch the way they look as best he can. He has power over them, still. They are running away. He has chased them away without raising his voice, without waving a gun at them as always happens in films.
Madame Sandler emerges in the street, and he concentrates hard on threading his vision through the hole in his lesions. His eyes burn, but on a low flame now. His eyelids scratch away at each blink, so he tries to blink as little as possible. She emerges, but her fat husband does not. She glances up, and Jean-Luc retracts his head from the net curtain, thick with plaster dust and gnats. Maman is talking away, as if to herself, accusing him of this and that.
He wonders why Monsieur Sandler has not appeared in the street below. Maybe he’s dared to use the toilet. He glances down at the sheeted monument and has an urgent desire to look at it. He carefully removes the stained cloth, which he throws onto the bed. Then – the hunter’s instinct – he glances over his shoulder at the door, which he hadn’t bothered to lock.
The door has swung open. Monsieur Sandler is standing in the bedroom doorway, staring at him. Staring not at him, in fact, but at the monument. Monsieur Sandler’s mouth is open.
Jean-Luc leaps to hide the monument with his body, biting his tongue in the shock. Monsieur Sandler says something in clumsy French about forgetting his hat, even though his hat is on his head. Jean-Luc shouts, now. He shouts at the man to get out. He can taste the blood from his tongue. Monsieur Sandler’s plump hands come up and he says something else. Something about seeing, wanting to see, stepping forwards and craning to see the monument.
Jean-Luc raises his own hands and rests them on Monsieur Sandler’s shoulders and pushes him towards the door. Monsieur Sandler resists, as heavy as a sleeping or even a dead man. He places his hands on Jean-Luc’s wrists. Jean-Luc has to push him hard so that the man totters with tiny backward steps until he is over the threshold, his eyes continually on the monument and the scribbled-over sheets of paper around it. He has a surprising strength for a fat man. Every second that his eyes are on the monument rouses an anger in Jean-Luc that is not so far from grief. Last night he dreamt of a fish gasping for water on a riverbank.
Jean-Luc slams the door and locks it, gasping for air.
‘He’s a murderer!’ screams his mother.
Jean-Luc doesn’t know whether she’s referring to him, or to the madman who broke into his sanctuary.
He looks at the monument.
Someone has swapped the original for a dead thing, a ridiculous contraption in which the toy pram is triumphant: just a toy pram stuck over with junk, with feathers and rubbish. No wonder Oncle Fernand has stopped talking to him: he must be disgusted and ashamed and angry.
Jean-Luc feels tears tickling his cheeks, causing him wasp-stings of pain. The salt mixes with the blood from his tongue. I can promise you the salt from the kisses of my mouth. Jean-Luc sings Johnny! The music’s still ringing in his ears.
There is no one to kiss, or to promise anything to.
He removes his dark glasses and waits until the pain subsides, creasing his eyes against the bright light. His mother is complaining to Monsieur Sandler, a chuntering through the door like an old engine. He looks down at the street. Madame Sandler has disappeared. Or maybe that is Madame Sandler next door and not his mother. Both at once, now. She must have come upstairs. No, she’s calling from downstairs. She appears to be angry with someone. Her husband replies, muffled, and the door rattles against its lock. How dare they? He would like to be alone in the hills, on the wooded and grassy heights, crunching on raw chestnut, talking to the birds.
Then there is quiet. Perhaps they have all torn each other apart, like rats in a sack. His name, once: Maman’s voice. A question. Jean-Luc? She sounds worried. Maybe she thinks he’s about to blow his head off like Jules Fabre did next door after Sunday lunch, upstairs. His eyeball recovered in the corner by the wardrobe. But he hasn’t got his gun, his father’s gun. It’s in the cellar, needing an oil.
He looks down at the monument on the table and picks it up in both hands.
It is surprisingly light, as if he’d expected his efforts to have added weight. He waits for a while. Then he lifts it as high as he can over his head. A spoon drops off and bounces against his skull. He hurls Oncle Fernand’s monument against the sword-shaped rips of the stripped wall on the far side of the room. The water is hitting his ears again; it’s the same crash, as if the pool is entering his head and smashing through his body. Bibi goes flying up among the feathers and the spoons; a puff of plaster dust floats into the ray of sunlight and turns it into the solid arm of God. The sieve rolls to his feet. There is no sign of the fish-bone spider.
And then he sees it, leapt onto his bed.
The arm of God is as muscular as a body-builder’s. It squirms with a million souls. The fish-bone spider is a fish-bone: no, that’s his own tiny spine on the bed, plucked clean out. He’s got a new spine, now. With a slight feeling of alarm, he realises it is Oncle Fernand’s.
* * *
Something had gone awry with Jamie very early on. Before birth, perhaps. In the seed. Astrologically (Helena would reassure Nick), the moment of their son’s procreation was amazingly auspicious. He was a magical child. But Helena had also consulted her charts before choosing her house in Wales, a decommissioned, black-granite chapel regularly under two feet of water and downwind from a piggery. And what was she now, with the personal aid of the subtle forces? An agoraphobe who couldn’t go out to buy a box of matches without consulting the I Ching, and who regarded Nick as the nodal point of darkness in her hysteric’s cosmic scheme. The Saudi Arabia of her personal planet.
The nodal point of darkness was now outside the attic door, attempting to persuade the magical child to emerge. He and Sarah had decided that enough was enough after returning from their morning walk to find lunch mostly consumed and the freezer door slightly open, the fridge throbbing gallantly, ice already bunching up. Sarah threw a wobbly which impressed the kids so much they fell quiet, having ceaselessly nattered all the way to the rocks and back. Sarah throwing a wobbly meant shouting for two minutes, breaking a mug and then bursting into tears. It was always a mug, never a glass. Fortunately, there were not usually more than two wobblies a year.
The attic was not responding. Nick was giving it an ultimatum along with a generous offer of financial aid, but with an air of helplessness, because the attic remained silent. He would have loved to have got inside Jamie’s head at some point in his childhood and readjusted the connections, like a nanoengineer. Now it was too late. Jamie’s aim was to shipwreck this little domestic enterprise called the Mallinson family. There he stood, on the rocks, flashing his lamp. The original wrecker.
Nick remembered that this morning he had decided to love his son unconditionally. To pour love onto him. It had seemed a great idea at the time. To embrace him. To see him as a miracle and not – how had he put it to himself …? Somebody to be pitied. Was that it? He was Jamie’s only father. He looked down at his feet. He’d changed back into his sandals from his walking boots. Maybe he shouldn’t ever wear sandals, with or without socks. He needed the permanent authority of boots. But the Roman army had done pretty well in sandals. The Indian sages in nothing at all. Maybe he needed to frighten Jamie. Put the boot in. As his own father had done with his lanky, over-cerebral son. Damaged by the war, his father. The effects of shell-blast. Head with a continual miniscule wobble. At least he’d kept his head, unlike the five-year-olds in Iraq. How his dad had seen the world, life, living history! The noise of war had damaged his ears, a tin whistle in each one; as he’d put it to Mum – long-suffering, diminutive Mum, the ultimate domestic ritualist: ‘At least I can’t hear you give me orders.’
What had damaged Nick’s ears? Rock music. Led Zep at full volume one famous day in Duncan’s room.
All he had done was bleed his life away in words. Bearded Che still up in his study, as on Malcolm McDowell’s wall in If…; only now it was ironic, a referential wink for the young men and women passing through. His whole generation a façade, a film set. Indulgent mannequins. Baby-boomers continually squalling for attention. Somewhat on the fag-end of it, he was, but still a member of the club. He’d watched If… again recently and sided with the teachers, the well-meaning headmaster. It was terrifying.
‘Jamie? I don’t blame you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I really am. Let’s try to move on?’ he added, adopting that same upwards inflection and sounding fake.
Silence. He had always been apologising to Jamie, come to think of it. Or worse: for Jamie.
He wasn’t unusual. Thousands of Japanese teenagers shut themselves in their rooms, sometimes for decades. It had a name. Kiryoko or something. A modern condition.
Suddenly the door opened, just missing Nick’s nose. Jamie might have been standing there the whole time. The attic beyond him looked rather snug: reasonably tidy, even. The headquarters of the mission, scented with dope. Cosy, warm from the sun on the tiles and the paraffin heater.
‘You’re selling something?’
‘Toothbrushes,’ said Nick, grimly. ‘No, insurance.’
The floorboards were bare, swept clean. Maybe Jamie had hoovered when they were out. Or used a broom. Maybe he was, after all, monkish. His eyes were a little red.
‘Life insurance?’
‘Life can’t be insured,’ said Nick. ‘It’s priceless.’
‘Wow, thought for the day again.’
Nick was nettled by this. His voice hardened. ‘Just to say, Jamie, that our guests did not appreciate your Scrabble joke and we did not appreciate finding our fridge raided.’
‘It wasn’t a joke. It was serious. They were upset?’
‘Why, Jamie? What’s the point?’
‘Because they pushed him.’
Nick looked pained. ‘What?’
‘That’s what the shepherd said, and at least two other people in the village. Original research, Nick. The Sandlers pushed him. Poussé.’
‘Not literally,’ said Nick, with an exasperated snort.
‘Like, we’re not literally pushing the planet over the edge?’
Nick sighed, easing the grey force flowing from his chest straight to the knuckles of his right fist. ‘So they just put pressure on him to finish, like you have to, generally. With builders.’
‘With builders. Listen to yourself, Nick. I’d have had more respect for you if you’d started out a total fucking Tory.’
‘Hey, that’s –’
Jamie slammed the door in his father’s face, genuinely angry, so that Nick had to retract his stabbing finger an instant before it got broken. Out of order was what he had been going to say. He saw the words swinging on the door, like a sign nailed to its wood.
Nick waited a moment, until his own rage subsided. It was no doubt mostly his fault, anyway: Jamie had always been tricky, he was born tricky, but had been made even trickier by their hopeless parenting – the fads and fetishes, the careless self-seeking disguised as revolt. He went downstairs feeling utterly mortified and defeated. He dreaded a confrontation with Sarah: she would accuse him of weediness, as usual. Of not standing up to his son. And she’d be right to accuse him. He only ever went so far. In everything, probably.
Fortunately, the Sandlers were back. They were in the kitchen. Alan Sandler was sweaty, red-faced, very excited, a walking exclamation mark. Nick thought, as he waved hello: they pushed the man to finish, to finish the roof. It was their doing. Regrets.
‘The guy’s an artist! I saw it on the table! This – what do we call it, Lucy? –’
‘Assemblage,’ said Lucy, who looked depressed.
‘Assemblage! An incredibly genuine example of raw art! Art Brut! Worth thousands, tens of thousands! A photo of your wife was on it! A nude study, stuck to a soup spoon? I recognised the hair. On the head, I mean! Did she pose for him?’
‘No, she did not,’ Sarah sighed.
‘Sorry,’ said Nick, confused, ‘this was something Jean-Luc had made himself?’
‘He’s seeing Art Brut everywhere,’ said Lucy, gloomily. ‘One does, when one starts. Like seeing faces in a blot. It’s really just Bad Art, capital B, capital A. And Bad Art is everywhere. He even saw it in Luton airport, not surprisingly. Braques don’t grow on trees, darling.’
‘Lucy, this had a title. A real whacky title. It was a self-conscious act. I wrote the title down in the car.’
‘I know you did, sweetheart. You’ve told me already. Jean-Luc manhandled him, by the way,’ she told them. ‘Really manhandled him.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Sarah, who even through her dismay realised that these types’ lives were probably always like this: dramatic, hysterical, rather interesting.
‘Exaggerated,’ said Alan, pulling a bit of paper from his coat pocket. ‘Here it is, translated from the French by my loving wife: The Resurrection of the Mutant Chicken. It was on the assemblage. On a strip of cardboard. That guy is a genius. He’s bats, but he’s a genius.’
‘It seems Jean-Luc’s an artist in his spare time,’ Sarah explained, addressing Nick. ‘There was this sort of eccentric sculpture of a chicken on the table in his bedroom. With a photo of me skinny-dipping, it appears. Proof he was spying.’
‘On a spoon,’ repeated Alan.
‘How very unscrupulous of him,’ said Nick. Jamie’s words boomed through his head: Listen to yourself. ‘What was the title again?’
‘The Resurrection of the Mutant Chicken,’ Alan cried, flapping one hand. ‘Genius! Another Damien Hirst!’
‘That man is very much not Art Brut,’ said Lucy, sourly. ‘That is calculated Saatchi and Saatchi art. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Exaggerated,’ said Alan, pointing at her.
Sarah waited for the tea to brew, standing by the sink with folded arms, manufacturing a sympathetic look as the Sandlers argued. She had the curious impression that she was unclothed, again. That Jean-Luc had permanently stolen her clothes and left her naked and vulnerable, even though she was no longer worried. He was creative; creativity was an outlet for darker forces. She had always been fascinated by really creative people, people who didn’t worry about the mesh of argument and substantiation, about everything having to be tucked in and ticked off, folded in on itself, concluded. Jean-Luc wasn’t a disturbed voyeur, he was an artist. Things made sense, now. She didn’t mind hanging from his spoon, she thought: feeling magnanimous in thinking it. She herself had painted in her first year at Cambridge, but it was terrible: the life models looked like shop mannequins, in her versions. It takes all sorts, as her mother would say.
Lucy wanted to leave Jean-Luc alone, having sacked him: Alan wanted to solicit him, or at least investigate further. Sarah wanted lunch, but Jamie had consumed all the bread apart from half a baguette in the freezer; the Sandlers had gone out for a ‘bite’ after seeing Jean-Luc, to a restaurant near the village that the Mallinsons’ budget would never match. They were wreathed in the fragrance of wine and garlic and looked slightly too big. All they wanted now, they said, was a good old English cuppa. Sarah had the feeling that two parallel timetables had entangled themselves. She’d come here to escape timetables. On the hob simmered an apologetic pan full of pasta shapes.
The sun seemed to have gone in. The kids were hunched in front of a video next door, stopping up their hunger with a bowl of French crisps (which, they complained, tasted ‘boring’). She had not yet completed so much as a leaf collage with them from Exciting Things To Do With Nature. What she had to do was find her inner space, a calm within, or she would scream. But she was too tired to find her inner space. And if she did succeed in finding her inner space, smiling benignly inside it as tall as a house, one of the kids would be found floating face-down in the swimming pool. Or whatever.
Lucy kept referring to their meeting with Jean-Luc as an ‘escapade’. He might have done much worse than just shove Alan out of the bedroom! ‘He didn’t really shove, doll,’ Alan interrupted, ‘he just pushed.’ She’d been genuinely frightened. Her eyes were bright. Supposing you’d been stabbed, with that awful poor bedridden woman looking on? Like something out of your own Fanny Connor, sweetheart. Flannery O’Connor, he corrected.
Their voices trailed over Sarah’s mind like jets. ‘But he didn’t stab him,’ she pointed out, pouring the tea.
‘But he might have done,’ Lucy insisted, with an element of relish.
‘You can say that about anything. Milk?’
‘We historians call them counter-factuals,’ Nick proffered, clocking Sarah’s irritation and wanting to deflect attention. ‘The great what if?’
‘I can’t believe what I saw,’ Alan insisted. ‘The truly genuine article.’
‘What if the United States had not joined the Allies,’ Nick went on, regardless, ‘in 1917? And so on. What if young Hitler had not failed to enter the Vienna Arts –’
‘Weird, to be secretly photographed,’ said Sarah, with a slight shudder.
‘Or Bobby Kennedy – this is very interesting – had survived the shooting in Los Angeles?’
‘Ah, dear Bobby Kennedy,’ said Lucy, sipping her tea.
‘Exactly.’
‘I am so excited,’ Alan crowed. ‘So excited.’
‘But Bobby Kennedy didn’t survive,’ said Sarah, quietly. ‘Jean-Luc didn’t shoot Alan.’
‘Stab,’ said Lucy. ‘There was no gun.’
‘He just snapped me in the pink,’ Sarah finished, almost inaudibly.
But it did frighten her, sometimes, considering the hypotheticals, the infinity of possibilities branching out like neural pathways, fired finally on only one track. And this idea she had at the back of her mind that everyone was, in the end, theoretically defenceless against the very worst possibility – that it was all purely a matter of chance; that you really were one tiny mote among billions, as the Earth itself was one tiny mote among billions. Was this all that coming here had done? Exposed a void at the back of her mind, open to the bottomless plunge of the over-starry nights?
Jean-Luc had threatened to sue because he’d fallen in and there was no alarm. Nick didn’t know that. She looked across at him as the Sandlers rabbited on like uncharitable academic colleagues would do at meetings designed for everyone to participate; she saw, from the way he moved his eyebrows at her, that he’d got nowhere with Jamie, either.
‘I’m forbidding you to go anywhere near him, sweetheart,’ said Lucy.
Alan stared her down. They were alone by the liverish pool, which nevertheless smelt of bleach. ‘I’m forbidding you to give me such orders. Hey, I’m going to offer him money, a career, fame and fortune. Without him moving.’
‘I don’t suppose that’s the point,’ she said.
‘The point, as you know, is that he keeps on being Jean-Luc. The genuine article of gouty Aubain. There were drawings all over the table. The walls were half-stripped and he had scribbled on the plaster. The whole room was art. The room of an artist who doesn’t know he is one.’
‘Or the room of a psychotic,’ she suggested, already losing the argument.
‘I’m surprised at you,’ he said. ‘In suggesting there might be a difference.’
This time, she would be his minder. He promised not to pursue things if they turned threatening. He mopped his brow and looked up at the sky, which had a murky vapour over it that wasn’t quite cloud. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘as his hands were on my clavicles, pushing me out, I felt our fates were intertwined. And I loved him at that moment.’
‘Alan sweetheart,’ Lucy groaned, ‘please, whatever you do, don’t do American.’
They drove to Aubain in almost total silence. The holm oaks on the way were horribly gloomy, a kind of gunmetal grey. They needed sunlight, in which their leaves shone and all but glittered. She was rehearsing what she had to say. ‘Happened’: se passer. She was considering the idea that this offer of Alan’s might neutralise any tendency towards revenge in the unknown part of Jean-Luc. The main street was just as empty as before.
She had the vague idea that they were re-running the same scene, as in an experimental film. The weather didn’t help: it seemed to have turned English. Bad continuity.
This time, when he opened the door, he kept a blank, expressionless face around his dark glasses. Lucy stuck all sorts of worrying possibilities onto it, as she remembered sticking plastic features on potatoes long ago. He didn’t seem surprised to see them, anyway. Alan beamed at him, clutching his homburg. Jean-Luc retreated to the other side of the table. He appeared to have hurt his foot. At least, he had a pronounced limp.
‘Sorry, Jean-Luc, but we have a very interesting offer to discuss with you,’ she said, feeling ridiculous. ‘A very interesting offer.’
Alan beamed some more, nodding.
Again, Jean-Luc wordlessly motioned them to sit around the vinyl-covered table. It was four o’clock. It seemed like a different day but it wasn’t.
On Alan’s behalf, Lucy explained what he had realised, when he had gone back upstairs for his hat (Alan raised the hat from the table, still beaming and nodding, his breath audible in his throat): that what he had seen upstairs in the room proved that Jean-Luc was an artist.
Un artiste. Or was it une? She stuck with un.
Jean-Luc kept very still behind his wrap-around dark glasses.
That although there was a lot of sous in that sort of art, they realised this wasn’t why he made his art. ‘Les dollars,’ put in Alan, rhyming with ‘bars’.
The man still didn’t move, not even to nod; this wasn’t how any artist she had ever known behaved, especially at the mention of money.
That Alan would very much like to see what else Jean-Luc had done. Everything that had ‘happened’ (ce qui s’est passé) was explained: it was all for the purpose of creation: pour la création. Throughout her discourse Jean-Luc retained his expressionless expression, hands folded in front of him. It was to do with the eyes being hidden, the mouth so firmly set in the dark stubble. But she saw the beat of the vein on the side of his neck; the muscles of his unshaven throat detach and settle separately from his swallowing.
Finally, she stopped. Jean-Luc waited a few moments and then he opened his mouth and began to laugh, but very softly, like a duck heard in the far distance. Then he shook his head once and said something extraordinary.
‘Oh,’ said Lucy.
Alan asked for a translation. He’d heard something about being ‘nuked’ and was confused.
‘“You remind me of the Germans when they shot me in the back of the neck,”’ said Lucy. ‘I believe that’s what he said, sweetheart.’
‘They shot him in the back of the neck? Hey, that’s serious. Maybe it was Che Guevara did it.’
Lucy translated somewhat apologetically from Jean-Luc’s static mumble: ‘He lost his face. On the way, they promised Jean-Luc a woman. Instead, they shot him in the back of the neck and the bullets came out at the level of his nostrils. I don’t think,’ she added, with a meaningful look, ‘this actually happened.’
Jean-Luc said some more.
‘Hm,’ said Lucy, nodding. ‘Here goes, Alan. They shot away everything but my eyes. Not the eyes, but everything below. The jaw, the mouth, the nose. Everything but my eyes. I’m translating as precisely as I can. He’s definitely saying “my”, Alan. Perhaps we should leave?’
‘He’s bats,’ said Alan, quietly. ‘He’s beautifully, beautifully bats.’
‘Bats in the belfry, definitely,’ Lucy agreed, behind a mask of agreeableness. ‘N’est-ce-pas?’ she added, inconsequentially.
And then she saw the gun, leaning against the soiled cooker. Its slim, metallic barrel shone, its wooden parts gleamed. Perfectly normal, she thought, in hunter land. Jean-Luc had caught her looking at it, that ripple of shock. He tensed minutely in his chair.
‘Vous partez à la chasse?’ she asked, sweetly and benignly. Dread filled her torso like a dark-green liquid mounting higher. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t be here,’ she said, in a high voice, out of the corner of her mouth, as Jean-Luc rose without a word and picked up the gun by its dark barrel.
‘What do they call it in Japan?’ asked Nick, washing up after their unsatisfactory, late pasta lunch. ‘You know, this modern phenomenon of teenagers locking themselves in their room for years.’
‘Until they’re no longer teenagers,’ Sarah pointed out, wearily. ‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Something beginning with K,’ he said. ‘I think.’
‘We know too much,’ she sighed, pondering Beans’s porridge-encrusted bib. Could it last another day without being washed? What was the point of life? Interrupted nights are the seed-bed of depression: she remembered the phrase from the Guardian. ‘We know far too much, and comprehendeth nothing.’
‘The global democracy of knowledge,’ he observed. ‘Horror stories from the war zones, in your living room now. And every day and every night, 24/7. Depthless surface. A sort of unicellular murk. Unembraceable; as, of course –’
‘Jameson said. Probably. Or maybe we’re just seeing it through the dominant paradigm,’ she added, with a slight mocking lilt.
She binned the bib. It was frayed. It had been Tammy’s, then Alicia’s. There was already a history, artefacts, evidence. Destruction and obliteration and forgetting. ‘The Sandlers are exhausting,’ she said, after a moment. She checked she hadn’t put Nick into a sulk. She hadn’t. ‘I can’t wait for them to go back. It’s the pressure.’
‘They are. Tomorrow. We’ll breathe again.’
‘Sounds as though Jean-Luc’s sorted, anyway. One less worry.’
Tammy asked if they could go out and play. As usual, Sarah gave them strict orders to go nowhere near the pool, and to keep a permanent eye on Beans. She was so annoyed with the Sandlers and their nonchalance about the alarm. The girls ran out. She approached Nick from behind and hugged him around the waist. This calmed her, so she hung on as he scrubbed the dishes.
‘That’s nice,’ he said. ‘You’re not too traumatised, then?’
‘About what?’
‘Oh, then you’re clearly not.’
‘The nude photo? I think I’m sticking to the Carry On Camping perspective. This is my new resolution. To be lighter on my feet.’
‘Fantastic, Sarah.’
She squeezed him again as the dishes clattered.
‘I hope they don’t come back too soon,’ she murmured.
‘Oh, they have to give Jean-Luc time to knock something up for Tate Modern,’ he joked, keeping in the spirit. In fact, he was deeply troubled by Jean-Luc’s snooping. He would have liked to have confiscated the photos of his naked wife, but was fearful of the consequences. Not a single action was without consequences, despite each generation’s mass delusion that it was otherwise.
He placed a spoon on the back of a plate, then the scrubbing-brush across the spoon, then a tea-strainer. ‘There we go. It’s called Thinking About Lenin on a Rainy Day. One of Nick Mallinson’s earlier works. Yours for a million.’
‘Wowee, genius.’ Sarah squeezed him tighter. ‘I’m the one who’s always saying I could do it better myself.’
‘But you do everything well,’ he said, meaning it. ‘And I mean it,’ he added, in case she had in fact taken it the wrong way, despite his voice being full of love.