by Adam Thorpe
He’s always let the hunters in, though, that American. He’s smart enough to understand that. He’s smart enough to know how not to die.
His wire is cutter-proof. His wooden posts are rot-proof. The gates are metal and massive. It snakes over the hills, the land clear-cut for a ten-yard strip behind the wire so that the American can tour his territory in a fat-wheeled buggy, pretending to be Clint Eastwood.
Where we used to walk. That’s what Louis said.
Jean-Luc nods again. ‘We used to have good times up there, didn’t we, mate? The cave. The ruin. The field. That stream.’
Louis nods in turn, leaning on his hands on the bar. The music is disco, but slow and soft. ‘Good times,’ he says. It’s as though nothing has gone wrong, since. ‘That bastard of an American, spoiling our fun. No one ever used to put fences up. It’s only the foreigners who put fences up.’
‘That’s because no one has goats any more,’ says Jean-Luc, whose own father had a small herd up to the 1970s. In fact, there are still three flocks in the commune – two of goat and one of sheep – but both men remember the twenty or so flocks of their early years.
‘Yeah, that’s true. There were no fences before because of the flocks,’ says Louis Loubet, who knows this already; who’s had the same conversation about foreigners fencing a thousand times before, but feels each time as if it’s a fresh wound, and that if he says it enough times it might turn the clock back to what it was all like before.
Jean-Luc thinks: It wasn’t the American who spoiled his fun – he only bought it five or six years ago. It was the others in the gang, including Louis. But he doesn’t comment. He just says, smiling faintly, ‘That time you slipped and fell on your arse in the stream.’
And Louis smiles in turn and prods Jean-Luc’s arm with a plump, yellow-nailed forefinger. ‘Hey, the time we cooked the badger’s turd.’
Jean-Luc laughs, squeezing his eyes tight and nodding. And so does Louis, with a wheeze in his laughter from his short lifetime of smoke.
‘Good times,’ he says, as a ginger-haired walker with a rucksack on his back struggles to enter, the swollen café door resisting his efforts halfway. ‘Very good times, Jean-Luc.’
Hard to see how badly Beans was hurt, at first: she had mutated into a kind of red ball of agony in a pool of steaming milk. Nick yelled, Sarah ran in and shrieked, and Alicia and Tammy looked mutely saccharine until, in a demonstration of sangfroid that was bound to be recalled long after in the oral annals of the Mallinson family, Tammy produced the local doctor’s number as out of a hat.
On the very first day, the piece of paper pinned to the peg-board in the kitchen had attracted her attention: ‘She loves words,’ her bewildered teachers would always say, as if excusing her precociousness. Emergency Doctor – Dr Roger DEMARNE. The word ‘emergency’ had drawn her, like the word ‘schizophrenia’; or ‘torture’ in the newspaper.
It seemed the only area hit was the hand. There was an ice tray in the fridge that required the percussive force of the stone wall to release its load, and the plastic shattered in sympathy. The ice melted quicker in the burn’s heat than it could soothe Beans.
The doctor’s surgery was in Aubain, located in a low, faded house off the main street, its windows blurred by tatty net. Beans stopped crying as soon as they stepped out of the car.
Sonnez et entrez svp.
The bell rang huskily somewhere within, but the door wasn’t locked. It opened straight into the gloomy waiting room, which had a sagging Sixties-style sofa and highbacked easy chairs; it smelt of wet animal fur and vegetable soup. A faded poster showed the evolution of a melanoma like the birth of a galaxy, and another implored parents not to let their kids stay up late beneath a picture of a boy with spirals for eyes and flies circling round his head. The only reading materials were four-year-old numbers of Le Point and a slew of fishing magazines. The back of Beans’s plump little hand was swelling and reddening as if a toadstool was pushing up. Alicia kept talking in stage whispers and was told to pipe down, while Tammy surveyed in silence, sitting on her knuckles and moving them interestingly against the pressure of her thighs. It had been quite an experience for her, driving fast on the empty lanes in the front seat and on the wrong side of the road until her father realised. Her eyes were full of rushing trees.
The one other person waiting – an attractive, sharp-faced woman in her forties, soberly dressed in brown coat and jeans and with long hair dyed a discomfiting raven-black – asked them a couple of polite questions about the incident. Sarah couldn’t be bothered to participate, she was too caught up trying to turn a man holding a fishing rod, or a blurry shot of a prize-winning trout, into something remarkable enough to divert pain.
‘Look at that, Beans,’ she virtually whispered. ‘Look at that beautiful fish!’
‘Deaded,’ sighed Beans, with the pathos of a dying soldier.
She extended her hand and gazed upon it. The woman made a sympathetic remark, then turned to Nick with an alluring smile and asked him if he was English. He confirmed this with a comic shade of contrition.
‘On reste ici six mois.’
‘Six mois! Où?’
Alicia tugged her father’s sleeve and asked, in a stage whisper, what the lady was saying.
‘She’s asking us where we’re staying.’
The woman smiled indulgently at Alicia, eyes searching over the child’s face as if truly interested. ‘Qu’est-ce-qu’elle vous demande?’
This could go on forever, Nick thought, as he opened his mouth to explain, sweaty from the effort, his legs suddenly shaky from realising that they were all still alive only by some incredible stroke of luck or act of God that had removed all vehicles from the entire length of the lane.
‘Le Mast di Vos,’ Tammy provided, in a shy, velvety voice her parents were entirely unfamiliar with.
‘Le Mas des Fosses,’ Nick repeated.
The woman’s eyebrows, plucked and carefully painted, rose up as her mouth tightened at each furry corner. She nodded and went silent, flicking again through page after page of outworn political events, long-forgotten disasters and once-fashionable faces as if decorum depended on it. Nick guessed that the Sandlers had not made themselves popular. It occurred to him only then that the woman might think that they were the Sandlers themselves, darkened by reputation.
‘Nous ne sommes pas les Sandlers,’ he said, forgetting to pronounce their name in a French way.
The woman frowned at him, as if he had interrupted her sequence of thought, or said something peculiarly stupid, and returned to her magazine. This did not surprise him: he had particularly disliked Alan Sandler, but Lucy Sandler was also pretty objectionable. A mere association was tainting.
Suddenly the woman, without raising her head, mentioned someone called Monsieur Maille.
‘Monsieur Maille?’
‘Jean-Luc Maille.’ She said he worked there, at the Mas.
Nick felt stupid. He over-compensated, repeating Jean-Luc’s name while slapping his forehead. She did nothing more in response to this eccentric display than nod with a demure half-smile. The woman’s mobile growled and she answered it, chirruping in high-speed, sing-song French that made Nick feel thick-set.
He had never actually known Jean-Luc’s surname, but it rang a bell. Maille. He knew a Maille already.
‘It’s the name on the memorial plaque,’ Sarah said, wearily, when he murmured the question to her. ‘Look at that carp, Beans! France came fifteenth in the world carp-fishing championships! Wowee!’
‘Where’s the doctor?’ Alicia demanded.
‘In his inner sanctum,’ said Nick.
‘I’ve got a pain in my inner sanctum,’ Tammy joked.
‘And this one’s really special, Beans,’ said Sarah, pointing at a blurred photo of a man holding his catch. ‘Look at that incredible trout!’
‘Deaded,’ wheezed Beans again, her throat full of tears.
She extended her arm and gazed on her hand once more, her lowe
r lip projected right out, reminding Sarah of those indigenous women with huge discs in their mouths: another school project Tammy over-rose to with the help of her parents, providing a detailed coloured chart of Amazonian kin groups. The woman’s call finished. Alicia had begun to read a magazine; she was trying the French aloud, word by word. From the photos, it appeared that an entire family had been shot dead, one by one, in the Alps. Sarah suggested she read something else.
‘I haven’t finished, stupid.’
An elderly woman with a face like a badly wrapped brown-paper package emerged from the inner room, followed by the doctor. He looked at them over his spectacles, something Sarah was always telling Nick not to do. He spread his arms and said, ‘Toute la famille?’
But it was the raven-dyed woman’s turn. She was in there thirty minutes. They thought she would never emerge. Nick imagined being a doctor, receiving attractive women who allowed you to investigate their intimate parts. When the woman finally appeared, she looked faintly ruffled. Perhaps she’d been told she had cancer.
The inner sanctum was miniscule, shrunk further by an enormous Alsatian stretched out on the examining couch with its chin on its paws, as if at the vet’s. They all squeezed in, somehow. Dr Demarne was in his early sixties and mournful, with a moustache like a thatched roof that almost hid his lower lip. He spoke very slowly. He even had a few heavily accented English phrases like ‘Well, do you see?’ which he dropped in at odd moments like a marble into blancmange. He advised them to go straight to the hospital, seeing the burn as possibly too severe for him to deal with safely.
‘There is always the danger of infection,’ he said, his French somehow coinciding with English homonyms for most of the essential points so that even Tammy could understand.
The dog grunted, releasing the meaty whiff of its breath as she stroked its coat; it had exactly the same feel as the purple hair on her mother’s childhood troll, which Tammy had requisitioned. Sarah told them not to bother the dog – Alicia was poking its vast flank, checking it wasn’t dead. It opened one bewhiskered eye. The doctor told them it was called Rondpoint, because he was found on a roundabout.
‘Very funny dog,’ he said, again in English. It was as if he were two different people, one behind smudged glass, the other behind an open door. He was tapping their details into his laptop with studied effort: there was confusion when they explained, in both French and English, that ‘Beans’ was actually called Fulvia, the nickname derived from the expression ‘full of beans’. He had no idea what they were talking about. An unbridgeable linguistic gulf. When Sarah gave him the French address, his eyebrows lifted but his gaze remained on the screen.
‘Le Mas des Fosses,’ he repeated, in his ponderous manner, typing with two fingers. He sighed. ‘It is OK? Hm? Not roubles?’
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Sarah.
‘On loue,’ Nick hurriedly explained. He didn’t want to be regarded as a rich Brit.
Alicia and Tammy sniggered in unison. The doctor examined them over his spectacles as the snigger threatened to spread into a virulent fit of giggles.
‘Pour six mois,’ Nick went on, anxiously.
‘Loo means renting,’ Sarah whispered, which didn’t help at all. Their small forms were racked by the effort of stifling themselves. Dr Demarne said something in French and Nick translated: the doctor says he has this bitter syrup for such serious cases of fever. ‘It’s not a joke,’ he added, in a jokey voice.
As they left, the doctor shook the grown-ups’ hands and said bon courage, and stroked the children’s hair.
‘Yuk,’ said Alicia, back in the car, brushing violently at her head. No adults were allowed to touch her, normally, except her parents. It was as bad as taking photos of her, outside her family.
‘He’s a pervy,’ Tammy whispered in her ear.
‘What was that thing about roubles?’ Nick asked. ‘Or was that just my ears?’
‘Troubles, dumbo,’ Sarah explained. ‘He asked if we had no troubles.’
‘Dumbo!’ the kids chorused in the back.
Things were looking up, Sarah thought. The family had survived yet again, and genially. Her hands stank of wet dog fur.
‘Why should we have troubles?’ Nick asked, in a troubled way.
Jean-Luc turns the little nail-spotted doll over and over in his hands, deep in thought in his room. Until Marcel Lagrange came in, he was having a good time in the café, with Louis and their memories. Soon, he guesses, the Café de la Tour will close down. Half the houses in the village are shuttered, most of the year. The vacanciers don’t come to Louis’s place very much; it isn’t very welcoming, it isn’t their image of a picturesque French café. In the morning, under the coffee, there’s always a smell of wet mops.
The ginger-haired hiker (who’d had a German accent when ordering a beer) sat on his own in the corner, writing in a notebook. This reminded him, Louis Loubet said, of the time when the English mec on a horse had come in. On a horse? Louis laughed: no, he’d left the horse outside, like in the old days that neither Jean-Luc nor Louis were old enough to remember. Then the mec had sat down where the hiker was sitting and got out a polished wooden box and produced a quill with a real goose-feather, a leather notebook and a bottle of ink. The mec was dressed like a smart cowboy, with a dark leather hat, a leather waistcoat and leather riding boots. He’d written there with his quill for an hour or more. Louis had dared to ask him a question or two, when serving him: crossing France on a horse, he was, from top to bottom. Six months or more. When he left, everyone had felt a bit, well, disappointed. Disappointed with themselves.
Jean-Luc had never seen Louis Loubet like this: quietly telling a story, sharing something intimate. It wasn’t really intimate, but he made it sound as if it was. And Jean-Luc felt proud to be part of it. He felt almost happy, sitting there in the near-empty café, with Louis and his bloodshot eyes and yellow skin leaning towards him, elbows on the bar, talking like a brother, a friend. Even though Jean-Luc knew the story already, in its rough outline.
Then Marcel Lagrange came in with one of his hunter mates (an enormous barrel of a bloke with a sour expression called Aimé, whom Jean-Luc had once caught skinning a baby boar). He must have sensed, from wherever he was, that Jean-Luc was having a good time. The air turned cold, like outer space. Outer space without the stars. The swollen door shrieked over the lino as Marcel encouraged it with a violent kick, the German hiker looking up in alarm. And Jean-Luc was surprised to see Marcel; he should have been hunting. It was like a bad dream, because unexpected.
The hiker was even more alarmed when Marcel shook his hand and said bonjour in that high voice – always a shock. Marcel is one for the formal niceties. As long as the café isn’t too full, he always shakes everybody’s hand when he comes in. Not everybody’s: those he has some grudge against, he ignores. It’s a signal. If you’re one of those who don’t get Marcel’s lifeless handshake, you have to start worrying. Unless, of course, you’re a complete stranger. But he’ll shake a complete stranger’s hand before he’ll shake yours, if you’re on his grudge list. It’s been known to get men wetting themselves, that signal.
He shook Jean-Luc’s hand, though, the watery eyes skating over the younger man’s face without settling. Marcel’s hair is vigorous and messy, turning grey, and his head is bucket-shaped from the back. It tends to lean to one side, as if he’s being hanged. But his face, with its large mouth full of grey teeth and its fleshy lump planted instead of a nose in the middle, is not really wicked-looking. It isn’t mean-looking or rat-like. It’s a hearty, fifty-odd-year-old’s face, especially when spread over by a smile. It isn’t the face of evil, even when it gets angry. Then it’s a frightening face, but only in the way a bull is frightening. It isn’t a devil’s face, except perhaps in the eyes, because those watery eyes flash and spit when he’s angry. And his mouth expands, displaying the gums of his bottom teeth. And his skin looks as if someone has ground some black pepper over it, as over a slab of fish. He usually
has a cigarette or cigarillo stuck to the bottom lip, but today it was a toothpick.
Apparently, old Gérard Rodier had a bad turn getting out of the jeep and the hunt was called off.
‘Heart,’ said Marcel, glancing over the front page of the Midi Libre, which featured a terrible earthquake somewhere in South America.
Louis asked if Gérard was OK, now.
‘They don’t know,’ Aimé said, in his throaty bellow. ‘It was a bad one. He went blue.’
‘Thousands dead,’ said Marcel, huge head bent to the photograph. He sucked on his toothpick, making a squealing noise. ‘Terrible. Women and kiddies. Nothing left. We ought to send money. We could do a collection. Put a jar on the bar, Louis.’
Louis grunted, only half-listening. They talked weather: it was going to rain this week, maybe a storm, Marcel announced. To the German hiker, Marcel Lagrange must have looked like a colourful local, something off a calendar, or out of a Pagnol film. He probably noted it down in his book, in his neat German hand. What the hiker would never have believed was what Marcel Lagrange had once done to a German of about the same age, back in 1977. It might have been empty rumour, of course: the kind that hopped from door to door like a crow.
When Jean-Luc pictures the hippy they found on the side of the road, shot in the head, he could actually smell that sheepskin jacket, because it was so pungent. The hippy was part of the druggy, whacky group up at Les Fosses; no one warned him not to fall for one of the village girls, let alone plot to elope with her to Morocco.
