by Adam Thorpe
‘Yes?’
Has she called him? She must have nodded off. ‘I feel like an orange,’ she says.
‘There’s apples.’
‘No oranges?’
‘I’ll get some tomorrow. I’m going to Champion tomorrow.’
‘I’m stuck with an apple then. Cut it for me. My teeth won’t take it, otherwise.’
‘Yes, Maman.’
‘You’re like a robot,’ she says, grinning. ‘That’s what you’re like. A robot. What are you watching downstairs?’
The noise of television laughter underneath them, like the rumble of a lorry filled with imps. Jean-Luc seems to be considering it.
‘The news,’ he says.
‘The news? It’s not time. They don’t laugh on the news.’
‘Then why ask, if you don’t believe me?’ says Jean-Luc, as he takes the gleaming plate away. Its mush of lasagne has been wiped clean by the hunk of bread that has also gone – swallowed up like everything is swallowed up, in the end.
Maman asks him about the English people up at Les Fosses.
He has brought her the apple cut in eighths, white newish moons that are already browning as they rock on the plate in a circle. He bought a crate of them a month ago, fifteen kilos for ten euros, and has kept them in the stone shed in the yard, but they’re looking faintly wrinkled now, like amputated bollocks. There are loads of them left. They were off Monsieur Bernard’s trees. He’d been hoping his mother would make an apple pie, but she’s been up and about too little since he bought the crate.
‘The English people are nice,’ he tells her.
He knows this will get her going.
‘Nice? How can they be nice?’
‘Just because someone isn’t French, doesn’t mean they’re not nice.’
‘It’s not that. The English helped us in the war. It’s that they’re friends of the Sandlers.’
He sees the English woman briefly appear in his head, but not clearly. Staring at him beside the pool as he explains about the boars coming down to drink and setting off the alarm. Nice smile. Bright black eyes, like a squirrel’s or a bird’s. Small and slim, not plump and red-faced like the other English. Dark hair loose, if a little thin, naturally curled below the ears. Not blonde and bobbed like Marie-Sylvaine Vidal’s.
‘Maybe they aren’t friends,’ he says. ‘Just tenants.’
He is chewing on an apple himself. He peeled the skin carefully in one spiral with his Opinel, then bit into the flesh. They look tasty, but aren’t so good in the end. The skin lies like a bedspring on the plate.
‘Why don’t you cut it up, Janno?’
‘Cut what up?’
‘I’ve never seen anyone peel a whole apple then eat it. It looks queer. It’s too white. It makes me feel like making the sign of the Cross over you, I don’t know why.’
She laughs her hoarse, weak laugh. She has already swallowed all of her apple sections. She often asks him why he does this – a hundred times in his life, if you count it all up. That’s why he enjoys eating an apple in front of her. The part he most enjoys is popping the core in his mouth and crushing it with his teeth. It sets her own teeth – not that she has many real ones left – on edge.
‘You’ll get appendicitis doing that,’ she says.
‘No, Maman, I’ll get an apple tree growing out of my arse.’
He’s lying in bed, now. He has managed to coax the image of the Englishwoman out from the blur of inattention and given it flesh. He isn’t sure of its accuracy. Her face has a soft, motherly vagueness apart from the gleam of the eyes: an elder sister’s lack of definition. He’s always been envious of those with elder sisters, like an extra mother; not having a brother, older or otherwise – or a younger sister – doesn’t bother him so much. He might have ended up with someone like Marcel Lagrange! Marcel’s boy, Serge, although almost as nasty as his father, is quite a few years younger than Jean-Luc, so he can’t picture Serge Lagrange as an elder brother. A younger brother, maybe.
Imagine: he might have been buried in brothers, like the Lagrange family. Big, vicious brothers (not that the Lagrange brothers are all vicious, of course; but the vicious ones dominate, most of all Marcel – and the nicest of them, Raoul, is dead). He’s better off, being on his own. There’s no one to nag him, to hit him about the head. To kick him out of bed.
But he wouldn’t mind a soft, kind, gentle elder sister. Marie, she’d be called. He indulges in a brief fantasy in which Marie, looking very much like his memory of the Englishwoman up at Les Fosses, is reading to him at bedtime. A picture book. Stroking his forehead, because he has a little fever. He even hears himself whimpering. In fact, it is more than a little fever. He is very ill. He is possibly dying. No, he is dying. His invented sister, Marie, cradles him, lies in his bed next to him and cradles him in her arms. His face is buried in her nightdress, he can feel the hem of the neckline against his mouth, the smell of her warm, brown flesh. But he won’t die; onto his brow fall her salt tears, and her tears have healing properties. Marie’s tears cool his brow, dribble down over his cheek to the corner of his mouth, where his parched tongue licks them and feeds on their saltiness. He is already recovering, miraculously, although Marie doesn’t know it, she is weeping over him silently, weeping for her little brother, squeezing his hot form to her soft and giving body that smells of talc and strawberries and sweat in the dim candlelight.
Jean-Luc gives a shuddery sigh as he lies there, the sheet drawn up to his chin, his head straight on the bolster; a faint smile has settled on his face, its eyes closed and staring up into their private dream. When he opens them, he is back in his own, unsatisfying present. Oncle Fernand hasn’t talked to him properly for days. Just a glance now and again, a rattle in the throat.
The bedside light is on. His eyes creep over the walls. Years ago, so long ago he can scarcely recall it happening, his father smoothed the rough walls and hung patterned paper. The paper has faded, its green splashy dots now blue, its red zigzags a fleshy pink. The water from the leaks in the roof crept down and found its way into his old bedroom, carrying with it tannin from the chestnut beams; so now there are dark vertical streaks along two of the walls, some of them making it all the way down to the lino, like long icicles the colour of dried blood. His eyes can’t help straying over these streaks: they are like faults in his own life, somehow deathly. They say: no matter how hard you try, we’ll dirty you. We’ll smear your dreams with our shit-coloured filth.
One of the streaks disappears behind his old, black-and-white poster of Johnny Hallyday, its trace visible on the paper as a raised, cancerous welt that cuts right across the pop star’s face. He’s still where he always was, in the same narrow bed with its oxidised brass rods, staring at the same poster he’d stare at as a youngster. And he sees in it decay, his own decay. He is thirty-five. Or is it thirty-six? His elder sister would have known his age. Marie would have known. He could have buried his face in her body and still remained unblemished, completely innocent. The Englishwoman looked at him as he was talking by the waters of the swimming-pool; a lovely, lost expression he can’t quite recapture in his memory, her eyes shyly sliding away from his. So very different from the way most women look at him, with their hard, closed faces; or mocking faces; or faces filled with only one animal thought. Her look was not like that. He struggles, lying there in bed, to recapture it. He switches off the light and curls around the expression, nestling it back into life.
But he can’t. He sees the green, leaf-crowded water and his dipping rake more clearly than he can see her. But this doesn’t bother him; the English family are there for six months. He will have plenty of time to fix her in his mind. An expectation wells up in him at the thought of it. He can go there whenever he wants – every day, if needs be.
‘Marie,’ he murmurs, stroking the cool, hard bolster between his fingers as he has always done, even as a child: ‘It’s all right. I’m well again. I’m right as rain, Marie.’
Sarah spotted the pla
que first.
They were on their way to the nearest weekly market: there was a Champion supermarket recommended by Lucy in St-Maurice-de-Cadières, the nearest proper town (which she’d affectionately called ‘Saint Morris’), but one of their aims was to shop small and local. Supplies were very low after several days of meals, including the freezer-kept bread. They’d been in virtual retreat, like monks or nuns. It was the first time they had gone anywhere and it felt adventurous. Nick’s back was much better, he just had to avoid sudden movements. They had decided not to bring the camcorder, as it would make them look like tourists.
The car was bumping and swaying along the track between the house and the lane when she noticed the plaque, discreetly embedded in a flat-topped stone.
‘Look, what does that say?’
‘It’s a milestone,’ Tammy suggested, having recently done a project on the Romans, bringing back a vitrified, paint-splattered lump meant to be the Pantheon and returning to school on Monday with a detailed felt-tipped map of the Forum at her parents’ insistence.
‘Kilometres in France,’ said her father, peering forward at the track as they struggled on.
‘I was only joking,’ Tammy fibbed.
‘We’ll stop and check on the way back,’ said Sarah, pushing her glasses up when they didn’t need to be.
The market was in Valdaron, about fifteen minutes’ drive away. There was a broad and surprisingly green river-valley in the hills which abruptly narrowed to a kind of gulf, and Valdaron was squeezed into the gulf. It had a narrow main street that wound on and on, pressed either side by gaunt, unbroken houses. The market was in the square which bordered the river, busily foaming between its smoothed rocks like a mountain stream. The one modern note was an old people’s home, berthed like a vast cruise-liner near the school the children were not going to, despite the law.
It was half-heartedly raining and the shadowed street felt damp and cold. The market filled the square with awning-covered stalls, diesel-generated meat-vans and redolent bread-trucks that were open all along one side. And people.
The people were badly, even clumsily dressed: Sarah remarked on it, although she was no fashion parade herself. She approved, in fact: it was a sign of authenticity. There was a host of fur-lined anoraks, long dull coats and baggy trousers. Some of the older women had consigned themselves to the identical type of blue, mid-length working coat (with lots of pockets) that Nick recalled from old French films. Spotted skirts or thick-stockinged legs protruded, finishing in the modern equivalent of clogs. Their owners had staunch, browned faces, rather closed. Both men and women were on the short side, with some very wrinkled specimens only coming up to Tammy’s chin as they passed – or that was her impression.
There were hippies, too. Or what Sarah called ‘ex-hippies’. She could tell by their ponytails (the men) and long beaded skirts (the women). One of them stood behind a trestle-table selling organic jams and pickles. She had piercing blue eyes. There were even some younger people with piercings and dreadlocks and combat trousers who would get on well with Jamie.
‘There was a kind of youth revolution in 1968,’ Nick explained. ‘And some of the youth came down here from Paris to make pots and look after goats, after they’d lost.’
‘Why did the goats lose?’ asked Alicia.
He explained in more detail but they weren’t listening. They were subdued, for once. The bustle, the smells, the colours had shut them up: Beans pegged herself to Sarah’s skirt with white-knuckled determination, refusing the pushchair. The hocks of meat on the butcher’s stall looked dauntingly raw. The multitudinous cheeses, the tender heaps of greens, the peppery smell of dried sausages hanging like fat tentacles, the shouts of the burly stall-holders – it was peculiarly loud and confusing after their four-day retreat.
There was a stall full of shiny fossils and dim skeletons of prehistoric fish, tens of millions of years old. A small trestle-table with a clutch of orange and yellow gourds and three tired salads. A very long stall bursting with plenty, apples and lemons rolling carelessly over the ground every time a huge lettuce was fished for. The Mallinsons wandered about in a daze past plump, glossy fish heaped up in polystyrene boxes, a small, twisted mouth in a sole’s white flatness drawing Tammy to touch it. How cold and wet it felt, as if drawn from the unimaginable depths!
The familiar sound of bongos floated over the market chatter; two men pounding away as a girl played vague scales on a wooden flute. They were dressed in patchwork minstrel attire and their faces looked dirty. In Cambridge, they would have been perched in front of M&S and Sarah would not have given them a second glance; here, they delighted her. One of the drummers caught Alicia’s eye and started juggling three coloured balls. He looked as if he had been out in all weathers. Almost a gargoyle face, with frizzy hair. He glanced at Sarah, who responded with a look of elation.
‘I’m going to get the bread. You can watch this with the kids,’ said Nick, from under his floppy hat. He looked different from everyone else, and might as well have had a sign round his neck saying ENGLISH PERSON. In Cambridge, she thought, he looked tall, handsome, even debonair.
‘You don’t need your hat,’ she laughed, although she wouldn’t have wanted him any other way, right now.
Beans, affixed to Sarah in two different places on the skirt, refused to take one of the balls when offered and caused the minstrel to cry – to pretend to cry, knuckling pretend tears.
‘Go on, Beans,’ Sarah encouraged in a sing-song tone, ‘take the ball. Don’t be clingy,’ she pleaded, unpinning a small and complicated hand.
‘I’ll take it,’ said Alicia.
‘It’s not to keep, stupid,’ said Tammy.
‘Didn’t say it was.’
‘My name ees Coco,’ the minstrel announced, settling on his heels.
‘His name’s Coco,’ Sarah explained to Beans, who was gawping at him with her fingers in her mouth, still pressed against Sarah’s thigh and with her bean-frog, Wally, pressed in turn against her own. ‘That’s a nice name. What’s yours?’
‘You know what it is, Mummy,’ Alicia said.
‘What’s ees your name?’ asked Coco the juggler.
Beans mumbled something through the bean-frog, now squashed to her mouth. Coco smelt as if he could do with a wash and wasn’t a very good juggler. The other two performers had stopped playing and were rolling a fag. Coco offered the ball again. It was a bean-ball in coloured leather, to go with the bean-frog. He had white hairs in his frizziness and red spots on his neck.
He said something funny and poked Beans’s tummy. They left, waving goodbye, as Beans screamed in apparent agony, making people look their way with troubled expressions.
Nick was also the subject of glances; talking to a rat-faced man selling bread, his height was exaggerated by the need to keep his fragile back stretched. His floppy hat shook as he laughed. Tammy gazed at the stall next door, hung with plastic gewgaws: mini bagatelle-boards, water-pistols, butterfly hairgrips that would break at the first go. The Made in China stall. Beans had calmed down, looking at it with her.
‘Don’t even think about it, Tammy,’ said Sarah.
‘I was just telling him how we were escaping English weather,’ said Nick, coming up with a grin, a week’s worth of baguettes and chunky loaves in the basket. ‘Weather a bit like this!’
‘No wonder he was splitting his sides,’ Sarah said.
‘You never buy me anything,’ Tammy grumbled, as they headed back to the car.
‘Let’s redirect that one to the Truth Department,’ Nick said.
‘Nor me,’ said Alicia, seeing the advantages of a sudden, unusual alliance.
‘Actually,’ said Sarah, as they passed a stall with stitched-leather slippers and shoes, ‘you do need new casual footwear, Alicia.’
‘What?’
The young Moroccan woman behind the stall cooed over her, all smiles. Alicia chose, naturally enough, the pinkest and least handmade pair there, with buckles that were bound to b
reak.
‘Ve-ery trendy,’ said Nick, gallantly.
There was a shop in the street full of bric-a-brac, which included a fireguard with brass knobs. It was, Nick thought, overpriced and fake-looking, but Sarah insisted. Apart from the child factor, sparks could pop out a long way and burn a house down.
‘Coco,’ said Beans, in the car, as if a penny had dropped. ‘Touch Beans here,’ she added, lifting her top and thrusting a finger into her rotund belly, then bending her head and investigating the pressure point with a concentrated gaze.
Tammy reminded them about the plaque. They had some difficulty in remembering where it was, because the overgrown woods either side made one length of the track look much the same as another. ‘My plaque’s on my teeth,’ Nick joked, so they all groaned. Alicia spotted it on a curve.
‘There!’ she screeched.
The car stopped and they all got out. The plaque was embedded in a large boulder at chest height, near the flat top.
‘Ici le 28 février 1944 le jeune Fernand Maille âge de vingt ans a été assassiné par les Nazis,’ Nick read out. ‘Which means, girls: “Here on the twenty-eighth of February 1944, the young Fernand Maille, aged twenty, was, er, murdered by the Nazis.”’
‘Am I one of the girls?’ asked Sarah. She had taken off her glasses to examine the words chiselled in, bending to them as if they might have other words hidden inside them.
‘Nasties!’ shouted Alicia.
‘Alicia, quietly,’ her mother remonstrated, as the cry echoed through the trees. Alicia had an extraordinarily loud voice, when required.
‘Was it right actually here they killed him?’ asked Tammy, stabbing her finger towards the leaf-strewn ground in front of the boulder.
