by Adam Thorpe
So she fobbed him off. It was somewhere in a drawer, she said. Really, she had no idea there was even a code to punch in.
‘Sometimes, Alan darling, I think you might need a code to punch in.’
Alan, half-asleep in his chair, grunted. She twirled her third malt in her long fingers. There had been a very attractive young man in the gallery this afternoon, wearing a homburg and an equally retro coat. He was taken with the ‘hydroelectric’ sequence of prints by Philippa Wanberg-Ketch – faint, cutaway diagrams of inner organs superimposed on hydroelectric plants in silhouette with scribbled German words in pencil underneath. She had desired him in a straightforward, lustful way, imagining wrapping her thighs around his face, but he had remained imperviously young and himself. She was past it, at fifty-eight. Even the face-to-face gymnastics of it all.
She hoped that was the last of it, from the tenants. At least for a month or so. The whole point was for them to take over, to chivvy Jean-Luc, to enable the Sandlers (or at least, her) to take a break from the worry. The house was a big, ramshackle ship battered by storms; it apparently needed continual attention. It was vulnerable, far more vulnerable than they’d imagined. They had spotted the cracks on their first visit, even through the romantic ivy, and the estate agent had laughed dismissively, although you could have put a hand into one of the fissures if it hadn’t been for the spider-webs in it. It’s been there for five hundred years, he laughed, I don’t think it’s about to fall down now. Liar. The moment they’d signed the deeds, it started. It started to crumble, to weaken at the knees, to go all effeminate. Even the lovely ivy was catastrophic, wedging cracks wider with its hideous, nobbly strength. Of course, houses fell down like cliffs if you didn’t continually maintain them, seal them, succour them.
And that poor, wretched man had slipped off the roof. What was he doing up there, when it was still wet? Why had they needed to replace the whole roof, anyway? Because half those great, immortal beams were rotten. The house had claimed its victim. Now and again she thought of him, over the six years since it had happened, seeing his face grinning at her, his deep-voiced dishiness above the blue overalls, his lithe body and huge hands that she had trusted with the work, with the walls and the roof. With their bolt-hole from London. Their refuge. Pure man, he was. One of those big Roman noses like Serge Gainsbourg’s, rakishly broken on the bridge.
‘Our marvellous builder’s gone and had an accident,’ was how she’d put it to friends. ‘Oh?’ they would reply, not very interested. ‘Yes. Out of action. We’ll have to find another one. We’ll have to go all the way down there and start the whole process all over again. Meanwhile, the rain’s coming in.’
Hardly anyone knew he had actually died. And so, oddly –at least until the widow started trying to blame them for her husband’s carelessness – she didn’t really know it, either. It remained a kind of abstraction. She refused to go into the village cemetery to check – that would have been morbid. And so sometimes she wondered if it was all another French ruse, a way to screw money out of the foreigners – that one day she would meet dear wotsisname, Raoul, walking down the village street, or strolling with his gun in the forest, and say, ‘Bad luck, didn’t work, did it?’ But as time went on, and it dwindled into the past, she believed in it more and more. It became this concentrated point of intensity in her life, a point so tiny she could mostly avoid looking at it. And then suddenly, in the middle of the night, it would drift into view and she would wake up all but crying out in a kind of blind terror, as if she were the one scrabbling for a hold on the wet tiles, slipping inexorably towards the verge.
‘I told them it was in a drawer somewhere downstairs,’ she said again. ‘Alan. The code. For the pool alarm. Alan!’
‘OK,’ he replied, nodding in his chair, his double chin like a spotted cravat on his chest. He scratched at his belly through the shirt. Something in Syria – maybe a prawn in Damascus –had given him this skin complaint. The doctor had examined his face and then asked him to lift his shirt and had proceeded to write his doctorish name in the skin of the belly. It was exfoliating as they watched. Crumbling away. Cantab., the doctor added with his nail-pared finger, grinning.
‘The young,’ she sighed. ‘They’re so frightened of it all.’
There was a pause, embroidered by a faint police siren.
‘He’s not that young,’ Alan pointed out, suddenly alert. ‘I didn’t even know it had a code.’
‘Like a security door. Like a safe. Do you have to scratch? It’s all over the sofa.’
Alan smiled. ‘I need to put the cream on. The steroids are no longer working. Maybe it was the CIA. Or the Saudis. Maybe I’ve been poisoned. The radioactive Russians.’
‘Alan, don’t be so romantic.’
He chuckled indulgently. Nevertheless, he was afraid at times.
‘I think they’re going to be fussing,’ said Lucy, with a sigh. ‘They’re that type. I asked about the cherry tree. He’s going to investigate. I can’t really believe Jean-Luc hasn’t planted it.’
‘Planted what?’
‘The cherry, you oaf! I kept reminding him. It was one of his priorities, along with the lawn. He should have planted it in the autumn. Do you have to slump? Being an ex-ballet dancer, I don’t know what it means to slump. We’ll have to have a word, face to face. At some point we’ll have to descend.’
‘They’re a nice English family,’ murmured Alan, not moving, one eye half-closed like a toad’s. ‘They’re genial. Filled the house up. An empty house attracts the wrong people. We agreed. We don’t want that Trot mayor snooping.’
‘If one of them drowns, clever boy,’ said Lucy, leaning forwards tipsily, ‘the police will come. It’ll be in the papers. As with Raoul.’
Alan grunted and said, ‘The guy didn’t drown.’
Lucy’s mobile rang.
‘My Lord, no, wow, frightening,’ was all she appeared to say for ten minutes, in various combinations.
He’d been offered two silver Assyrian lions the size of his thumb by a dealer from Dubai this afternoon: their provenance was dubious. He had said ‘no-no’, as he had said ‘no-no,’ to the scarlet ware jar from Khafaje, c.2900 BC, because in two minutes he had found it on Google under ‘Stolen Treasures from Iraq’. The place was an El Dorado no longer. Or at least, it was now minimally patrolled. Bedouins with guns guarded Uruk. Deadly guys. Dealers could be undercover agents. Sites were still getting bulldozed, but the guys doing it were terrorist killers, they were way beyond his remit. He may have to wait years before releasing his stock – releasing it piece by piece, like a leaked report, an elimination so gradual no one would notice. Geological erosion. The silt of gain. Vases, cylinder seals, statuettes. That white marble head of a woman, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, five thousand years old. He was in love with her, this woman from Ur. She hovered over his dreams. You just had to imagine the half of her nose that was missing.
Suspicion was the watchword. He would sit it out, as still as death. Lucy came off the phone, looked glazed.
‘You know what the Chinese say?’ growled Alan, barely moving his mouth, his body still slumped like an overstuffed dummy’s. ‘Or used to say when they were civilised? Have patience: one day the grass will become milk.’
‘Oh the Chinese,’ said Lucy, coming back to life. ‘Now there’s where we’re really talking scary.’
‘He didn’t recognise my name,’ said Nick, up on one elbow on the sofa. ‘He was basically unfriendly. He doesn’t know anything about an alarm. He called it “the watch-dog’s honest bark”, twice. Is that Shakespeare? Sounds like it. He didn’t strike me as the literary type. Anyway, she’s phoning back. Lucy Sandler.’
He confirmed that he’d been recognised eventually. The people renting the farmhouse. Your place in France. Then Alan Sandler had whooped, as if relieved. ‘Oh, it’s the genial family!’ he’d said.
‘Oh,’ Sarah sighed, wondering if there was irony in this; ‘I thought you meant he didn’t know w
ho you were at all. I’d have felt really weird, if he hadn’t known you at all. They did say to ring, didn’t they?’
She remembered Alan saying as they were leaving, in a loud and hectoring tone: ‘It’s called le Mas des Fosses, but I call it le Mas des Fesses. You know why? Because it’s in the butt of beyond.’ And he gave a big American roar.
‘Fesses means backside,’ Lucy had explained.
‘Oh I know,’ Nick had assured her.
Lucy then gave him the keys; the main key being black and enormous, like something stripped from a steam engine.
‘There won’t be,’ Sarah recalled her saying, ‘but if there are – problems, I mean – don’t wait.’ They were descending the porch steps. ‘Mobile, if I’m not in. Just buzz.’
Sarah also remembered the fuzzy, hemmed-in image of the house she’d had then, the impossibility of imagining themselves there at all. And now they were there. Here. A simple translation in the mathematical sense. She’d be in Sainsbury’s right now, feeling anthropological. Or trundling Beans through the Grafton Centre in a short-cut to FitzHerbert’s, navigating huge dogs and hoodies, beleaguered under the endless thrash of what passed for public music. Or walking back home under the grey lid of an East Anglian sky, negotiating the cracks in the pavement with those wretched little pushchair wheels swivelling backwards at every opportunity.
Nick was wondering aloud why Alicia had her giant, inflatable hammer down in the sitting room. It was called Boris. Boris was a present from Alicia’s half-brother, Jamie – difficult Jamie giving the difficult present for Alicia’s fifth birthday. It was not only enormous, this hammer – almost the size of an adult – but undeflatable. Jamie, apparently at Alicia’s request, had dripped Superglue around the nozzle so that the hammer wouldn’t ‘die’. Alicia used it mainly to bash the rest of her family on the head with; Tammy put up with this only because she found it quite fun pretending to have a serious head injury – keeping up brain damage for several hours and frightening her sister until she’d plead with her to be normal. Alicia had insisted on bringing it, which involved dismantling (‘deconstructing’, as Nick put it) the luggage-stuffed car at the last moment. ‘Insisted’ was a euphemism: Alicia’s wails made passers-by pause, wondering whether to call the police. The hammer grinned through the rear window all the way down like something out of a Jacques Tati film.
Alicia now lay sprawled across the hammer in a star shape, thumb in her mouth.
‘She’s not doing anything with it,’ Sarah observed, sitting with a shopping list in the scruffy wing chair by the smouldering fire. ‘She’s promised to be very careful.’
‘I’m sure she has,’ said Tammy. She turned a few pages of the Tate Britain book and reached Holbein’s King Henry the Eighth. She studied the black-lined, colourable version, its appetising white spaces.
‘Shut up, or I’ll hit you wiv it,’ mumbled Alicia around her thumb, staring at the ceiling.
‘Blairite,’ Tammy replied, reaching for her father’s arsenal of insults. ‘Tory by another name.’ She toyed with ‘Porkie’ but decided that would bring down trouble on her head. Alicia was on the podgy side.
‘By any other name,’ corrected her father, already deep in a report about Chad, his favourite subject.
‘Please, kids,’ said Sarah. ‘Beans is trying to nap.’
‘Not,’ said Beans, from under a blanket on the rug. Sarah crouched over onto her hands and rested her lips for a few seconds on the silken cheek under the wood-shaving curls. A tell-tale smell emanated from the blanket’s recesses.
After a few minutes Alicia made a raspberry noise as she propelled herself and the giant hammer in a circle with her feet, catching the colouring book and sending the felt-tip pen’s reposed progress awry. The King’s face had a green streak across it, now, leaping from the half-done collar like the record of a massive earthquake. Tammy stood up and, with the colouring book, began to hit Alicia about the head, silently, with the stapled end first. The victim made a squealing noise. Sarah told them to stop, as ineffectually as ever.
Nick crawled out from the kitchen. He was crawling more easily. They hadn’t even noticed him disappear. He had one half of a plastic blue salad-shaker wobbling on his head. ‘Here’s the UN,’ he cried, in a silly voice. ‘Here’s the UN come to save the day. Stop quarrelling! Be nice to each other! Oh, please do! I’m the UN!’
The helmet fell off his head and bounced and then rolled to Tammy’s feet. Only then did they laugh. Nick’s face was bright red and his thick grey hair was wild behind his ears. He neighed and whinnied. His pseudopolyps were already better, along with his back.
Now he stood up, inch by inch. ‘Et voilà,’ he said, towering above them at last. ‘All is not over with the republic.’
‘Excellent,’ said Sarah. ‘Just in time to change Beans, my Caesar.’
Jean-Luc hoovered the pool, which was now less green near the surface but was opaque towards the bottom. The girls were sailing their boats of stick or leaf and had to stop. The widesnouted monster had a long, flexible neck that travelled to its squat body confined to the shore. It cruised beneath the girls’ frail craft, stirring the muck; it was famished and deadly. Jean-Luc smiled at them as they tried to tell him about the toad. His mouth was as wide as the monster’s, and his teeth were crooked and probably never brushed.
He didn’t take them seriously. They went ribbit, ribbit, ribbit in unison; he didn’t understand. Tammy ran into the house but her father was on the mobile in the bathroom upstairs. She asked her mother what ‘toad’ was in French. Sarah searched through the drawers in her head and came up with ‘crapaud’. Tammy laughed, not believing her, and checked in the French-English dictionary for confirmation.
By the time she’d made it back to the pool, Jean-Luc had finished. No toad, it seemed, had been swallowed. She was out of breath.
‘Crappo?’
He laughed and shook his head. ‘Pas de crapaud.’ His singlet smelt of sweat, with a patch on his back the shape of Chad.
She went back to the house with her sisters to look for more words in French that sounded rude. Their father came downstairs as they entered the sitting room; he was holding the mobile. He turned to Sarah, reading in the chair.
‘She claims she’s remembered that the code’s written down on a piece of paper in a drawer, somewhere.’
‘Somewhere. Oh. Grrr-rreat!’
‘And I’ve got to ask Jean-Luc about a cherry tree.’
‘Are we allowed to look in all the drawers?’
‘The ones downstairs.’
‘Can I?’ yelled Alicia.
‘Fine,’ said Sarah. ‘And supposing it’s upstairs?’
They opened every drawer, downstairs, pulling a few right out to sift through on the floor. Nothing that might have been a code. Scraps of paper with numbers on that Alicia squealed at, but they were telephone numbers with country codes and names. Sarah went especially carefully through an old clerical cabinet in the hallway. Some of its twenty drawers, small and square but deep, smelt sweetly of wax. In most there was nothing more than rusty clips and drawing pins. A scrap of serge with a set of needles stuck in. An epaulette trailing black thread, as if torn from its owner’s shoulder. The usual ephemera of trapped insects, reduced to tiny black knots or varnished hulls.
They did find a few maps, including an official one of the property from the 1930s, showing the extent of the farm’s terrain and the buildings marked in italics with their functions: grenier, bergerie, poulailler, écurie, remise, soue, pailler, maison principale, caves. Several of these had disappeared, mostly sited where the charred stones now lay. It was an entire universe that had vanished, in the end, with all its voices, its sensations, its smells. Stretch out and you touch it, thought Sarah.
They checked the attic and Nick got caught up in the old yellowing newspapers, redolent of the war and l’après-guerre. There was a strong breeze outside and it whistled in the roof, as if someone was trying a tune through their teeth.
&
nbsp; Sarah hauled him down to help her poke through the five caves under the house: one of them was fastened by no less than two combination padlocks, which was intriguing; Nick reckoned it was the passageway down to the centre of the earth. The others, dusty and unlit, reached by a few stone steps from the outside, were full of rustic rubbish and rather heavy scuttling noises.
‘This is bonkers,’ said Sarah, back in the sitting room. ‘I mean, to buy an alarm and not even know how to use it. They’re just so incredibly casual. Like the non-existent heating system. Did she sound as if she cared?’
Nick reflected for a moment. ‘No,’ he admitted. His hands were dusty, although he hadn’t scrabbled about that much.
The girls watched another video over tea, Alicia draped over Boris the inflatable hammer as Thomas and Gordon puffed up and down the branch line, bickering like lovers. It was four o’clock. The hammer’s toothy mouth looked stretched back in pain as Alicia’s bulk made the trapped air denser, squealing the taut plastic. They had all got up late this morning, their parents letting them bounce around on the high parental bed.
‘It’s Sun – day – to – day,’ Alicia had announced, bouncing on the unsteady mattress.
‘It’s Tuesday, in fact,’ said her mother. ‘It just feels like Sunday. We ought to start classes soon.’
‘That’ll be fun,’ said Nick, without irony, stroking Beans’s hair as if it were a pelt.
Tammy asked to be pushed off the bed. Sarah pushed her, but not hard enough.
‘Push me,’ she insisted.
Sarah gave her a shove and immediately tried to grab her as she fell backwards. Of course, Sarah thought to herself: they are cats. They fall backwards and land on their paws. All part of the weaning process, to shove them off the bed to the ground – from where they will always clamber back, laughing like pretend ghosts.
