The Standing Pool

by Adam Thorpe

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, was published in 1992, and he has written eight other novels – most recently Hodd – two collections of stories and five books of poetry.

  He lives in France with his wife and family.

  ALSO BY ADAM THORPE

  Fiction

  Ulverton

  Still

  Pieces of Light

  Shifts

  Nineteen Twenty-One

  No Telling

  The Rules of Perspective

  Between Each Breath

  Poetry

  Mornings in the Baltic

  Meeting Montaigne

  From the Neanderthal

  Nine Lessons from the Dark

  Birds with a Broken Wing

  THE STANDING

  POOL

  ADAM THORPE

  JONATHAN CAPE

  LONDON

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446418925

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Jonathan Cape 2008

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Adam Thorpe 2008

  Adam Thorpe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is a work of fiction.

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

  Jonathan Cape

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at:

  www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781446418925

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Adam Thorpe

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Acknowledgements

  ‘Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the todpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool …’

  King Lear, III.4

  ‘History is what remains when myth has left the room.’

  Nicholas Mallinson

  Saint-Simon and the Pre-Socialists (London, 1992)

  PROLOGUE

  The house is massive, three floors of trouble.

  His father remembered its farming days, and it was trouble then. But all farms are trouble, Papa. We’re not talking farms.

  After the war, after the Germans had set fire to it and destroyed the wing that ran back towards the hill, the place was empty. Then it was lived in by mad Mamie Aubert and her goats, until she was found dead and rotting in her bed. Then it was empty again, and he used to come here with the gang to smoke and play records on a wind-up gramophone: the Beatles, Johnny Hallyday, rock ’n’ roll and the blues. He kissed his first girl in the old kitchen, trying to work his hand around her thick bra, pressing her up against the stone sink full of cobwebs. They used to scribble slogans on the inside walls, doodle naughty pictures in charcoal on the limewash. Fire their air-guns at the outside stonework.

  It was the gang that was the trouble, not the house. He loved the place. They’d squeeze through a hole they’d made in the attic, letting the rain in to rot and ruin it all, and lie up here like kings. Except then it was summer, and these very same tiles, cool and a bit wet now, burned their bare backs. They reckoned they were flying. He’d imagine staying here forever.

  Then a bunch of hippies from Paris moved in, fresh from the noise in ’68. They grew their beards long and pretended to be peasants, with a herd of goats scrawnier than Mamie Aubert’s. It took ages to get rid of them. One of them was German: that was a cheek. They changed the name of the place: from Mas des Fosses to Mas du Paradis, carving it onto an old cart-wheel with an orange sun painted on the hub. They painted everything in the house orange – even the beams, even the joists and the plaster between. Raoul and the other boys in the village gang would watch the hippies through binoculars; sometimes they danced about naked, flowers in their hair, one of them playing a flute. Half of them left after the first winter, straight back to their rich mamans in Paris; then the stragglers were dragged out by the police after a couple of years, sent scarpering in their beat-up hippy van. It was on the front page of the Midi Libre: the youngsters were trying to build a new society, the report said, but all they left was a mess.

  Not that anyone really cared about the house: it was too big, too old, too dark. All it had was a south-facing view that made you feel you were flying.

  Raoul thought, as he often did, how he might have bought Les Fosses at the time, dirt cheap. Just sat on it and all its land, while the prices shot skywards – he’d be laughing, now. Not stuck up here, laying tiles for foreigners. But Papa had said no. Bad investment. Wrong, yet again. He shouldn’t have listened.

  And now the old man’s telling him to get down off the roof. Raoul can hear the voice in his head, going on and on, just as it used to when he was still apprenticed, when the old man was alive and strong as a bull. It’s rained on and off this week and there’s a mistiness in the valley. The tiles are feeling greasy, their curves slippery with damp – even through his gloves.

  Get down off there, Raoul, you oaf!

  What you don’t understand, Papa, is that the new type of owner isn’t the same as the old type. They’re worse. They’re impatient. They’re beginning to panic, they’ve invited half of London and probably Her Majesty for the summer break: still more than four months away, and they’re running about like headless chickens, just because there’s no roof. They nag at him down the phone, like the others. You call them selfish and stupid, Papa, but it’s because they’re not on the spot, it makes them feel helpless.

  And he doesn’t cheat like a lot of the others, working for people too far away to know better, or too rich to care. Fixing a gutter in half a day and pretending it took three, or tiling a bathroom in two and chalking it up as a week. All he does is round off his hours a bit, half an hour here, forty minutes there. They can afford it. Wailing away on the phone as if they own him, talking in their three-year-old’s French. Raoul! Raoul! Like kids.

  I can’t help the weather, he told them. I can’t help the rain. But it’ll be done. You’ll have your roof.

  And it’s Monsieur Lagrange, to you. But he never says it.

  He lifts his head and sends a shivery gob flying over the verge. The mist fills the valleys spreading away below, turning th
e blue of the farthest mountains very faint. They remind him of a girl’s discarded see-through nightie, peeled off her and in a heap on the floor. They’re not the Alps, though – those are beyond, invisible; on a very clear day you can see the snowy line of the Alps to the west and the silver line of the sea to the south, but today’s not clear and the sea’s just a brightness thrown upwards.

  He wipes his face on his blue sleeve and removes his gloves and fishes a Marlboro out of his overalls’ top pocket, flavouring his lungs as he contemplates the nearer view where the land drops away in overgrown terraces he remembers being tilled for onions, leeks, potatoes, when he was a kid. He aches, but he still feels strong. He was a good footballer, captain of the village seniors until he did his knee in when he was thirty-five. Ten years ago. Out on the wing at first, then in defence. Then cheering from the sidelines. Allez, Aubain, allez! He feels the strength in his body like a cloudy liquid as he rests his forearm on his upraised knee, boot firm against the timbers, leaning forward a touch, against the angle of the slope, the pitch you wouldn’t want to fool about on. Working slightly against gravity, in case. Nobody can switch off gravity.

  He takes a deep drag and lets it out in a perfect, expanding smoke-ring that floats up to where he’s going to lay the ridge next week – then it melts into the sky. He’s on a level with the birds. He’s a big blue bird on the roof. A sparrow hops along the scaffolding that juts above the eaves below. The scaffolding’s hugged this place for two years. Imagine the cost of hiring that, that alone. And all those steel wall braces inside, keeping the old girl upright until they pin and cement.

  Birds only fall if you shoot them. This reminds him of that joke big François cracked during the hunt last weekend. Two blondes walking along a beach, boobs like watermelons, arses you could disappear into. One says, ‘Oh look, a dead seagull!’ The other looks up at the sky and says, ‘Where? Where?’

  Contentment, suddenly. That’s one thing you can say about this place, this area: no one really wants to leave, however much it gets you down at times. It’s paradise. It’s home. Off he went up north, for his military service, stayed on for a bit when they built all that concrete crap in Paris, then a spell in Lille, met the wife, passed his exams – and scuttled back home. Kids. Work. Papers. Life. A bit of hunting, though it wasn’t how it used to be, when he was a kid. Who needs to see the world? He can see all he needs to, here. And business has never been better: Dutch, Swiss, Americans, the English. Belgians. Germans, even: keeping their heads down, this time round. There aren’t enough days in the year, even when you work seven a week.

  It’s a bit more slippery than he expected, though. If he’d known, he wouldn’t have risked it.

  He remembers how his father used to say, when they first started roofing together all those years back, that no job was worth breaking your neck for. On the other hand, if he were to wait any longer then that Sandler woman would be at him again, pushing and prodding – wailing down the phone and making out he was diddling her and that she’d have to find someone else. Perhaps they don’t have weather in England. They fly over from London for twenty-four hours just to check up, scratching the wall and poking the plaster and finding fault, squeezing out more unpaid hours, then disappear. Just like that American couple with the place in the big field the other side of St-Maurice. Even they come over for the day, over the Atlantic, just to poke and scratch! When the rains turned the field to knee-deep mud last year, blocking access, they wouldn’t believe him. They phoned his mobile from New York and moaned. He was in the café, it was late. What do you want me to do, he chuckled, winking at Louis behind the bar: hire a helicopter? Good idea, they said.

  And she had her spies, did Madame Sandler. Jean-Luc Maille, for instance, supposed to be doing the grounds. Their lawn. Now that’s a joke. A lawn! In the hands of Jean-Luc! That weirdo.

  The fact is, the damp’s got into the tiles that were stacked by the barn, and the misty air’s settling on the tiles the moment he’s put them on. Not yet a skating rink on a slope, but he wouldn’t want to walk on it once the cover tiles are laid. There’s a glisten on the finished part spreading away from him like a lot of overlapping thighs that makes his heart beat a bit faster when he looks at it, but he knows how to be careful.

  And then again – you can take all the care in the world and tiptoe over like a ballet dancer, spreading your weight mathematically between each foot, and one tile will always break. Especially if the covers are the originals. There goes another, like a biscuit. Kneel on the battens, you clumsy oaf!

  I’m boss now, Papa. I’ve three men under me, you only ever had one: me.

  I made you too big and heavy, Raoul.

  But the girls like it that way, Papa. They always have. Go back to sleep.

  Five rows of pan tiles by ten across, then the covers. His men are up at the Swiss place today: foundation slab for a pool house. Only two on the job, with the new one sick. Yet again.

  He’s talking to himself, giving himself orders, hearing it. It can get lonely, when you’re working by yourself. He needs to hire a fourth man, but it’s not easy, you think you’ve got someone perfect and then they fall apart. They should be two at it, up here. He asked Marcel, but Marcel never helps; he thinks it’s beneath him, these days. His own brother! At least they’re talking, now. You can’t not talk to your own brother.

  The plastic sheets stir over the untiled third and make him think he’s got company. The winds ripped the last lot off – twice over. He couldn’t do much about it; he didn’t fancy being blown all the way to St-Maurice, he said to Madame Sandler. Who didn’t laugh. She must have been an affliction to men when she was younger: he could just about imagine it. That luscious type, quite a bit of flesh on her. Blonde, but clever. Cooled down now, like lava. Just old rock.

  He flicks his cigarette over the verge and gets back to work, conscious of the pale brightness towards the west, the gloomy shadows under the trees to the east. He’s saved half his lunch for later, because he’s going to work until he can only just see to get down. The wife’s double rations, beef cut a bit too thin, stowed in the attic below him, in the dry. The coffee always tasting of the flask’s plastic. But no regrets, when it comes to the wife. She knows how to turn a blind eye.

  He’s given the old, original tiles a hard scrub with soap and a bristle-brush, to remove the worst of the moss, the bird-shit, a century or more of soot. Lichen like fingerprints, bright green, like a kid’s been at them with paint. Now he gives the tiles a last go with a softer brush, laying them on his thigh, feeling the weight. As if he’s moulding them off his own thigh, like they used to in the old days: he can see the finger marks in most of them, long-dead fingers drawing themselves upwards towards the groin; smoothing out the clay. That’s history for you. Long-dead fingers.

  He’s not sure why he does this cleaning business, he doesn’t need to, but it’s what his old man did and the old man was a true artisan, no one can deny that. He likes the swish, swish of his brush on the terracotta, as if he’s polishing a shoe, a smart one of patent leather. It’s to show the foreigners (though they’ll never know it) that he’s an artisan, not just a builder. A job well done. If they ever bother to look.

  They might not have paid well in the old days, but at least they looked, Raoul.

  I know, Papa. Now leave me alone, I’m in a hurry. It’s cold up here, I have to keep moving.

  He whistles softly through the gap in his teeth in time with the swish of the brush. It’s never a proper tune: but it keeps him relaxed, even when he’s fighting against time.

  ONE

  It was better than the photographs because of the air, the silence, the silent sweetness of the air, the sky, the proud beauty of the house. It was not as good as the photographs because the house no longer looked like a Mayan monument. Or a farm, all sweat and toil. Its tawny-hued, sandblasted stones gave the place an almost spruce quality.

  But the view was the same, and stupendous. The slope descended from the buildi
ng in a series of overgrown terraces. First there were the tops of bunched trees, both leafy-dark and wintry-bare, then the narrow valley falling away, then beyond that the flanks of hills and, to the left (they hadn’t yet worked out their compass points), folding in ever-paler contours, the more distant mountains, blue upon blue like a screenprint. A far-off glow of light, they surmised, was the presence of the sea.

  Nick Mallinson would have shouted for joy except that he had a voice complaint; his vocal cords had been thinned and inflamed, not by overuse in lectures (as people thought) but by acid rising from his stressed stomach, churned by college and departmental politics, his work as a member of the history faculty board, the dreaded Research Assessment Exercise, wranglings over everything from pay scales to information-communication strategies – and, above all, his failure to be appointed a professor. This was why he was here with his family. He hadn’t been very good for the last year or so.

  He’d had a dream a few weeks back in which his core lecture was invaded by the geography department – by the likes of Sue Jacobs and Jeff Michaels, scattering papers and turning over tables and backed up by their geography students who were screaming over his words, victorious, having the last laugh. What is history but the effect of the weather, the soil, the hidden minerals in the rocks, the relief of the land?

  He pointed to the huge, oilcloth map of the Chad oilfield in desperation as they closed in on him with their drills, but to no avail. History was over. It was all to be biblical torment, now. He woke up shouting about geology.

  Sarah had pushed him into taking the sabbatical early on grounds of ill health. He felt vaguely fraudulent, watching the poor and the sick scrabbling for survival in countries no one took any notice of these days, except to plunder. What did he suffer from? The affluent West’s disease. It wasn’t throat cancer, although he’d had all the symptoms as described on medical websites. It was ‘life in the academic fast lane’, as his departmental colleague Peter Osterhauser, newly-made Professor, put it. Not without a twist of ironic glee.