by Adam Thorpe
Sarah found it disturbing. ‘What’s he done that for?’
‘No idea,’ said Nick, from the sofa, as Sarah gazed into the darkness of the flue.
‘It’s hung on a wire,’ she reported. ‘Maybe it’s a local tradition. A welcome.’
He must have hung it up early, while they were lying in. Sarah didn’t like this idea at all, that Jean-Luc had been creeping about downstairs while they were all asleep. He did have a key, of course. They weren’t sure whether to light a fire, it might crack the bottle, but she lit one anyway, feeding it old, corklike logs scattered about in the barn. The fireplace smoked less. In fact, the bone-dry wood made it blaze ferociously, billowing a surprising degree of warmth over the room.
‘Clever,’ Nick commented. ‘I think the bottle’s creating some kind of mini-vortex.’
‘Clever old Jean-Luc,’ said Sarah, grappling with two Duplo pieces that had got stuck together. Beans clambered into her lap and stared at the fire, the moisture in her eyes glittering.
‘Fireguard,’ Sarah said. ‘Add it to the list.’
‘Along with firewood,’ said Nick. ‘I romantically assumed I’d be gathering firewood myself. Another delusion. It’s getting rather long, our list.’
‘I do think the Sandlers, for the amount they’re charging, could have supplied that,’ said Sarah, separating the two pieces at last, but splitting a nail in the process. Alicia said she didn’t need the arch now, and turned to her doll, a black infant called Moppet.
Tammy’s head was cocked over the Tate Britain colouring book as she kept perfectly within the complex of hem on the Tudor lady-in-waiting’s dress. She asked, with a kind of weary air: ‘Do you like this place, Mummy?’
‘Of course I do, Tammy,’ Sarah replied. ‘I think it’s very special. Don’t you?’
‘Sixteenth century or earlier, this house,’ Nick chipped in. ‘Same era as your colouring-in person.’
Tammy contemplated her work. The pretty young lady-in-waiting’s face was a drinker’s puce. She picked a dark blue for the dress.
‘It’s sort of a bit crazy,’ she said.
‘Crazy? The house?’
‘A bit.’
‘Only because you’re not used to it, Tammo,’ Nick said. ‘It’s a question of adaptation.’
‘Rorqual,’ said Beans, absently, tiny chin in tiny hand.
The fire had stopped blazing and smoke was once again seeping out.
‘Maybe the bottle’s a fetish,’ Nick suggested, adjusting his head on the sofa’s arm.
‘What’s a fetsheesh?’ asked Alicia.
Tammy snorted at her ignorance, although Nick’s reply surprised her with a new definition.
‘Something they use in Africa to protect a village or a house or a person,’ he said, gazing up at the old beams. He loved old beams. There were several magnificent specimens here, whole tree trunks barely squared off, with patches of bark like callouses.
‘That’s a fetish,’ said Sarah, nodding at the one-eyed mask above the fireplace. ‘See all the nails? It’s not just his beard. Each nail’s a kind of wish, like when you cut a birthday cake.’
‘Poor thing,’ said Alicia. ‘Bet it hurts him.’
Tammy snorted again, even more derisorily. ‘You’re a living quirk,’ she said, sadly shaking her head as her felt-tip worked its way up to the curving black line, like an incoming and unstoppable tide.
When Sarah had first attended Dr Nicholas Mallinson’s lectures in her third year, she heard him use the term ‘Festschrift’ –cleverly, out of its usual context. It was his way to describe the territorial carve-up of Africa after Germany’s defeat in 1918. ‘The white man’s Festschrift, printed by himself and stuck up in schoolrooms all over his various empires.’ Or words to that effect: the image recurred in his published essays. She had no idea what that key, repeated word meant, and had noted it down as fetish?. When he became her supervisor the following year (after her top First), this tiny rent in her knowledge was still unstitched. He used the word again, in a discussion of what she was planning to do for her PhD, and she asked him outright what it meant. He was amazed.
‘I’ve got these gaps,’ she had said, blushing. She pulled her skirt forward over her black tights, wriggling like a schoolgirl. ‘When you first used it in a lecture, I heard it as fetish.’
He had laughed. So had she. She was on top of things, with everything still to play for. She didn’t yet know what a PhD was like. She had a vague crush on Dr Mallinson, imagining long discussions about Fredric Jameson or Michel Foucault, about the abolition of the historical oppositional metaposition or the demise of class analysis before jumping into bed. Then he’d leaned forward after a long, lingering moment, tossed his fringe aside and said, ‘I’m thirsty, Sarah. How about we do this over a jar?’
And here they were now, with their children, a reasonably normal family with a small Victorian terrace back in Cambridge whose thin walls, built on a former cesspit, were cracking in half. The only house in England that hadn’t been printing money just by staying upright: Nick had bought it twenty-five years ago, when Gwydir Street was impoverished and bohemian, suiting Nick’s then-granitic Marxism, which remained like a worn, half-forgotten stele in the folds of his mind; like the embarrassing ponytail he’d abandoned after a year, but which he was always threatening to resurrect. An area which, though now full of earnest, middle-class couples like themselves and with one of the most active Natural Childbirth Trust groups in the country, plus a green-tinged steering committee committed to local issues who met over organic food in the family pub, and in whose expensive streets could be heard the faint drifting, like thistledown, of evening piano practices, he still saw as impoverished, bohemian.
She had just got back from checking the post: they’d decided to do this two or three times a week, but there wasn’t a lot. In fact, there was very little apart from the odd good-luck postcard. It was a lovely jog, though, if a touch oppressed by the thick holm oaks either side; when the sun wasn’t out and glittering on their leaves, they went a kind of dark and foreboding grey-green.
Alicia was jumping off the windowsill over and over. Tammy sat on its twin, looking through the dusty pane; Beans was asleep in Sarah’s arms, clutching her bottle. She was still on the bottle, but not on the breast. The breast was over. Soon there would be school for Beans. School, university, work, children, work, retirement. Sometimes Sarah felt she had stalled at the university stage. That the day she’d walked in to Nick Mallinson’s room was the day the spring had started to unwind. A wholly unreasonable reflection.
The house had draughts that knocked on its stable-like doors. There was a certain scruffiness about it, apart from the dining room; a certain calculated impoverishment in its internal furnishings and equipment. A plump old radio with dicky dials; a lumpen-grey dialling type of phone that was, of course, unconnected; the old video machine and defunct television; a dusty hi-fi that only hissed. Sarah admired the dog-scuffed sofa with its lovely patchwork throwovers and the soft, lumpy easy chairs: the type that were impossible to buy, that were only inherited, squabbled over. Even the refurbished kitchen was full of rejects – knives with chipped handles, a cracked salad bowl, forks with verdigris on the tangs. One bottle-opener, a single piece of metal, like something out of a cracker. And the African mask, although possibly priceless, would have looked at home in a flea market. Lucy’s taste, she thought; not Alan’s. Lucy was definitely class. Only the flashy modern prints from her gallery looked vaguely awkward, although hung crookedly on the uneven walls. One was all orange with a tiny spot of red and the word verdure in splashy white letters. It drew Nick’s eyes to it, for some reason. He found it comforting.
Alicia banged her head, inevitably, on the top of the window-space as she stood on the sill ready to jump. She held the hurt in concentrated silence, working out whether the pain dancing on her skull would fade. Of course, it didn’t. It got worse, wedging itself in. Out of the silence came the cry, furious and sorrowful.
‘Stupid girl,’ Tammy said, as if reading her mother’s unspoken words.
Beans stirred from whatever half-state she was in and dropped the bottle. Tiny spots of milk shimmered on the floor. Alicia’s bawling had no scruples: it swept them all up indiscriminately and deposited them on a steel platform out at sea.
Sarah suggested she stop. ‘Don’t make such a song and dance, Alicia.’
‘Shut up,’ said Alicia, suddenly, out of her arrested clamour. ‘I might have be died, Mummy,’ she explained, making Nick’s heart give a little salmon love-leap.
‘Oo-er,’ he said.
‘Don’t think so,’ said Sarah, as Tammy laughed. ‘You look very alive to me.’
‘Doide,’ said Beans, pointing at Alicia with wide-eyed certainty.
Sarah handed Beans over to Nick as if the child were still a baby and went upstairs to the loo. She sat on the wooden seat and felt a goldenness rising through her body and popping in her mind, as it would during childhood holidays in Wales with the horses in the field behind and the cat that slept in the lane. She was with her friend Madge and Madge’s mother, not with her own parents, and she went there three years running and there was Madge’s brother Mark and his schoolmate Rolly, and that’s when, aged eleven, a boy had first tried to kiss her and succeeded in the lee of a hedge: it was Mark, in fact, the experience marred only by his brace. And that’s when, aged twelve, she’d sat on the quay at Llangranog nibbling a sticky chunk of honeycomb, discussing horses with Madge, or perhaps love (or what passed for love at that age), and thought life could only get better and better.
Alicia’s wail began again, and she could hear Nick’s rumble of a voice like a hoarse foghorn, telling her to stop. Sarah couldn’t help resenting the guilt she felt, but it made no difference. This guilt was no one else’s fault but hers.
That night, Beans woke up and afterwards Sarah lay awake for ages. Nick snored gently. Otherwise, everything was quiet, that amazing quiet of the deep countryside in a country big enough to have such a thing. She crossed the landing to the loo again and heard a strange sound, a sort of insistent, repetitive brushing. She opened the small window and the noise grew louder.
She poked her head out into the clear, cold night. The sprinkler was turning and turning, a sporadic arc of glitter in the moonlight, sweeping the dark seed-bed. The pool was an ingot of silver, a wedge of mercury.
Oh, she felt good. The thought of all those long-dead engineers’ unread reports made her heart rise. They would be spotted with tropical flies, holed by African moths. Their dry texts would be a voyage of discovery under her gaze, revealing the wonders beneath. To analyse was to dive deep in a pressure-suit of intelligence, to uncover what no one else even knew was there. Alertness and wit.
What was that? That sudden hump of a shadow? It crossed the brilliant pool on the bottom edge and vanished. The window knocked in a gust, echoed by the door on its iron thumb-latch. A branch? The shadow of a branch? Moonlight was so strange, so blue and tricksy, in its pure form. She shivered and hurried back to bed; Nick’s warmth welcomed her like a summery bluff over a cold tide and she was asleep within minutes.
Alan Sandler was on the lavatory when the phone went. Ever since Syria, two months back, he’d had a gippy tummy and a bad skin complaint. He was expecting a call, an important call – as usual. He rushed out of the lavatory clutching his trousers to his groin with his left hand, grabbing at the cordless with the other. Sometimes Lucy would not replace the phone and he would track its muffled ring tone until, too late, the message service triggered. He would invariably find it under a drift of Lucy’s material, the wild, silkscreened patterns hemmed up with pins. This was a sideline of Lucy’s, her hobby, an offshoot of her dealing in modern prints. She even had exhibitions now and again: great drapes of cloth like frozen breakers, or rectangles of silk pinned austerely to the walls, like paintings.
‘Yeah? What?’
He sounded gruff. He was gruff. It impressed the clients. It made him look as if he was fielding several phone calls at once. It made him appear in demand and that he didn’t really need the work. What he felt like saying into the hush was, ‘Yeah? So?’
It was someone whose name he didn’t recognise at first. Mallinson? Nicholas Mallinson? His memory was faulty. It was the malaria, or maybe the curse. Years ago, when he was dealing in Central African stuff – village after remote village wangled free of its sacred fetish, a chief or a chief’s relative bribed and the worm-holed, ancient, ivory-fanged mask safely in his arms in the jeep, or swaddled next to him on the Pan Am plane bound for New York, mute and powerless – this guy had cursed him. So the guy claimed: a witchdoctor in flared flannels and with halitosis. Or maybe, if he took this particular one-eyed mask, he would be cursed. It was all in pidgin French. He took the mask.
He never stole anything, not outright. He worked to prise the stuff free. At times he worked alongside the God Squad, their beaming faces offering the snap judgement of the Lord instead of the slow, unnerving mysteriousness of the bush spirits. How could the natives refuse? Sucked free of its magic, the hidden ju-ju stuff was so much junk. Then it became art, pulsating with the glow of money, even before it had been dug out from its earth or hut or wherever it slept between ceremonies. How many curses had, in fact, rained down on his head? Not one of them so effective as his recurring malaria from that time in Dahomey.
Africa! He’d given up on her, on equatorial Africa. Wars, disease, corruption. It was Conrad minus the exciting story. You only have one life. So he closed down his gallery in Los Angeles and joined Lucy in London, turning his sights on the Arab lands.
Iraq. A goldmine for a year or so after the invasion. Now it was, frankly, debauched. The dealers – American, Arab, Indian, whoever – were lewd. Bloated on their riches. Some of them with half a museum in their safes and boxes. Old Saddam hands as middlemen. Clumsy, careless handling, as if the goods were plastic – or someone’s limbs. Alan was not happy with the situation, it made the hairs sit up on the back of his creased, sun-flayed neck. That was why he was waiting for it all to settle down, for the snoops to lose interest, before dealing any more of his Iraqi stock. Two little gypsum worshippers from Tell Asmar, a white marble head from Ur, an ivory plaque from Nimrud, a stunning alabaster statuette of Astarte, goddess of love – along with some Babylonian cylinder seals from East Berlin that had crossed the wall a few weeks before it fell, like so much else. Coming up to five thousand years old, most of it. It was his investment, secreted in a metal box in the smallest of the cellars in the French house. Every day he expected a call from some newt in the Foreign Office, making enquiries.
So when he heard this Mr Mallinson’s well-spoken English voice, Alan Sandler was momentarily hauled up by his nerves. When he realised who it was, and what it was about, he quoted poetry and yelled for Lucy.
Lucy had never really liked children. She’d had Walter and Suzie as adjuncts to her life as an artist, gallery owner and agent. She was always determined that the twins wouldn’t ‘take over’. Her first husband, Neil, was wealthy enough to enable them to be packed off to separate boarding schools at the age of seven. Now they were thirty, amazingly, and more trouble than when they were small. Suzie was an intensely miserable aid worker whom the Red Cross flung into places like Bosnia or Rwanda or Sierra Leone or Chad or post-tsunami Indonesia with a kind of cold, Swiss relish. After the Congo, over two years ago, she’d had a complete breakdown and Lucy had had to look after her. Suzie would not describe what terrible things she had seen over her Congolese stint, only admitting to their ‘banality’. Chop chop. It was the ‘banality’ of the chop chop that had got to her. She sat about and smoked incessantly and laughed at inopportune moments, which led to ructions with Alan, who had only just come onto the scene. Walter was either off heroin or on heroin in Vancouver, of all places. Whether off or on, he was a pain, writing long and rather poetic letters on yellow feint-lined paper that rustled and demanded an answer she felt unable to give, or give adequately.<
br />
Now these people, these tenants, were asking her for the code to the pool alarm. This ridiculous piece of EU-sponsored machinery was only purchased to avoid the Sandlers getting involved in tedious litigation. Its sole purpose, she felt, was to provide extra dough for some EU minister’s business-crony: namely, the manufacturers of this apparatus. Now, apparently, it was required to work. If a burglar or local yob (not that there seemed to be real yobs in France) or one of those horrible hunters fell in and drowned, and the apparatus wasn’t actually functioning, the chances were good of being screwed by the vindictive, money-grubbing family of the deceased. She half-suspected the locals were plotting to push in unwanted relatives deliberately, just to get the dosh off the wealthy foreigners. Smelly grannies; mumbling teenage simpletons. Peasants were like that.
The alarm had operated once, on the day it was installed, and made one of the most horrible sounds she had ever heard, leaving her with tinittus for a week. It was an insult to the glorious peace of the place. It was yet another attempt by the EU flunkies to destroy whatever opportunity remained of a decent quality of life beyond the European ‘norms’, which she always witheringly referred to as ‘normans’. The invading European ‘normans’ to match the immigrants and their mafias. It was laughable. So she had ordered it to be switched off –shouting at Jean-Luc over the hundreds of decibels – and entirely forgotten about it.
Now this Oxbridge professor was badgering her to get it up and running, whereas only two or three years ago it would never have occurred to him because such things didn’t even exist. One had a pool, one splashed about in it, one kept half an eye on one’s progeny, and that was it. But no – the normans of this world were in charge. Creeping into every crevice, into the very interstices of the grain, where primitive fear lurked and a childish lack of responsibility rejoiced. It was like vaccines. Measles was actually good for you. You couldn’t guard against every danger, or why live at all?
