by Adam Thorpe
The police put it down to accidental death. It was the hunting season, it happened, his sheepskin and dark trousers made him look like a – what? A boar? But the crows cawed from the tree-tops: you know those hotheads from Aubain, relatives of the girl? Caw! Lads like Marcel Lagrange? Well, we’ll say no more. Caw caw!
A kind of honour killing, a hangover from the war. All those German atrocities. Sins of the fathers. The police conveniently lost the file. Washed their hands. Heil Hitler.
Whenever someone goes to their successors in St-Maurice-de-Cadières and makes an official complaint about Marcel Lagrange, all he does is laugh and ask: ‘Who built the fucking police station? I built the fucking police station!’ It’s as if, having laid the foundation slab and cemented the breeze blocks and fitted the plasterboard, it belongs to him, that he’s above the law. Anyway, most of the police in St-Maurice are his hunting mates.
He is above the law, in a way.
Jean-Luc has no idea which girl it was had wanted to elope with the hippy. A dozen candidates, back then, most of them related to Marcel. His mother won’t ever say. Even his mother is scared. Sometimes, he feels the whole village conspired together. The whole of Aubain. Or, at the very least, it took a vow of silence, like a village in Sicily or somewhere. It was only a German, after all; wasn’t it the Germans who had shot poor old René Dessilla by the stream: stone-deaf René, who couldn’t hear the armoured car and the soldiers,’ shouts to get out of the way? Rausch! Rausch! They threw the bullet-peppered body over the bridge. Poor old René. He was much loved in Aubain. Even Jean-Luc’s mother feels tearful, when she thinks of René Dessilla. Even more than when she thinks of Oncle Fernand, because Fernand was only her husband-to-be’s brother, and quite a bit older than her. She was only ten when he was shot.
Over sixty years back, now!
Jean-Luc was even younger, back in 1977. He didn’t even notice the crow hobbling through, with its nasty, biting fleas. He’d already been rejected by the gang, that’s why. He was already a loner, dreaming and miserable. He was already fucked up.
As a result, whatever the actual facts, there’s this general idea among the villagers that Marcel Lagrange can kill. It floats around him, like a cloud of gnats. He has this temper, this sudden temper. It flares up in seconds.
Jean-Luc knows all about it. When he was nineteen, Marcel was a powerful oaf in his early thirties: once, in the café, he knocked Jean-Luc’s tooth out when Jean-Luc had physically objected to being called a pederast. Jean-Luc told his mother he’d fallen off a wall.
‘Like a picture,’ his mother sneered.
Marcel Lagrange can’t stack five bricks straight. All he does is throw in concrete, tons and tons of it. Concrete: his solution to everything.
Unlike his brother, Raoul. Craftsmanship, not concrete. And so Raoul Lagrange had been getting more of the lucrative jobs than Marcel, right up to the accident. But Jean-Luc prefers not to think about Raoul Lagrange. After all, he has to spend days up at Les Fosses on his own. No one else in the village will do that. They’re a superstitious lot. Jean-Luc is used to being alone, even in the company of phantoms. In which, of course, he doesn’t believe. Not for a minute. If the house is troubled, it’s not because of Raoul Lagrange’s ghost. It’s more thick-skinned than that.
He turns the slim little doll over and over, like an expert examining it for faults. He’ll call it Bibi. Everything has to have a name. The twelve pieces of gravel are in a neat circle on his table. The little girls pretended they were sweets. It pleases him, seeing how white they are, even in the dim room. They watch him as he examines the doll. Little white eyes, watching.
When he takes a break, he reaches under the bed for his pile of Spirou.
They feel different, these days; they feel like dry leaves. The yellowing pages turn with a dry rustle and tear easily. His father bought them for him in the flea market in St-Maurice when he was nine. It was the one and only time his father bought him anything, as a kid, outside his birthday. He just walked in with a pile of old comics and said, ‘The complete set from February 1957 to January 1958.’Jean-Luc was so pleased he didn’t know what to say, and Maman clipped him on the ear for ingratitude, but not hard. She was pleased, too. She could read them, and she did. She still told Papa off for bringing back rubbish, though.
He knows them back to front and sideways, every comic strip in them: each cartoon square, each speech bubble, each black line. Buck Danny. The Knight Without a Name. Tom and Nelly. Alain Cardan. Gil Jourdan.
They were only twenty-two years old, then. That already seemed more than a lifetime. Now they are fifty years old. They look it. They’re disintegrating, the edges are fraying, the colours are going. They can be buried with me, he thinks.
He finds the one with the page on ‘Curious Little Facts’ about the Elysée Palace: ‘a resident clockmaker deals with its 130 clocks’. He remembers wanting that job, as if it were yesterday, and his father laughing at him. Laughing and laughing.
‘Jean-Luc wants to be the President’s clockmaker, and he can’t even get up on time!’
His mother’s calling him. He ignores her and searches for the Spirou for today. What is the date today, exactly? He glances up at his St-Maurice firemen’s calendar with its glossy photo of a horrible car crash. The shock of the number punches him in the chest. Oncle Fernand never spoke a word about it all morning, staying sad in a corner. That’s the trouble when someone else dies close to your date, however long after: you get overlooked.
‘I didn’t forget all last week,’ Jean-Luc murmurs. ‘It’s what happens when you have too much to do.’
He’ll just have time to buy the flowers before the place closes for lunch. The last lot were nicked – probably by the Lagrange widow, who’s kept herself to herself ever since, gone a bit funny in the head. At some point you have to pick yourself up.
He doesn’t even look at Maman as he whips through her bedroom, her shrieks following him all the way down the stairs.
FIVE
The hospital was in St-Maurice, which was circled by scrubby hills and announced on a tatty, peeling board as the ‘Centre Mondial’ for portable fire extinguishers. If the town itself looked impoverished, down-at-heel and about as interesting as tarpaulin, its hospital was immaculate, nicely decorated and hummed like a well-oiled, technological marvel. They hardly waited more than ten minutes, with only a bruised young man and his furious mother for company. He was leaning forwards and nursing his wrist. He had fallen off his mobilette. His mother kept shaking her head and snapping at him. The girls watched as if it were on television. The odd stretcher passed down the corridor, bearing its obscure load while the bearers chatted gaily.
Although the burn was superficial, the nurses sighed a lot over Beans, giving her a magnificent dressing which Alicia envied. And rubbery crystal-sprinkled sweets, not one of which Beans gave away. Sarah was vaguely annoyed with the nurses for creating an inevitable scenario of division and fractiousness. She found it thoughtless of them. Nevertheless, she tried to chat away, all smiles. The portable fire extinguishers were now made in China, they were told. This area had the highest unemployment rate in France.
They decided to kill three birds with one stone and not only ‘pop in’ to the supermarket recommended by Lucy, but check their emails in the Internet café, which they did as quickly as possible – given the dejected interior with its one sheepish customer riddling Russians to a bloodied dismemberment under the girls’ fascinated gaze. Still, it took them an hour, at the end of which Nick felt the residual lump of undissolved FitzHerbertitis had grown like an ulcer; despite having put up an Out of Office deflector with the appropriate snailmail address before they’d left, certain messages were unignorable. Professor Peter Osterhauser’s, for instance. Minute, barbed tangles of fuss. The latest news from the Vice Chancellor’s Guild of Benefactors, that circle of millionaire largesse to which he was bi-annually tied by some obscure administrative duty, and whose natural popularity quite unfairly irke
d him.
‘We’ll make that a monthly visit,’ he said. ‘Maximum.’
The supermarket’s layout, being unfamiliar, foxed them into using up another hour of their lives while the girls squabbled under the quilt of lights; the two oldest were conducting frenzied negotiations for the last of the rubbery sweets, enforced by threats of shootings and bombings. It would end in some corporeal brutality or other. Beans’s face wore an expression of benign munificence, like an oligarch’s, as she clutched the treasure. The queue was almost motionless and Sarah imagined spending the rest of her life there, chronically embarrassed by the girls and their loud, English voices, emphasised by Nick’s stooped tallness. Packets of lollipops were handed out like aid packages the moment they quit the cash-desk, toppling Beans from her throne.
‘They’re called sucettes,’ Sarah informed them.
‘Which literally means suckies,’ Nick footnoted in a small voice.
‘Likkel window,’ said Beans, urgently, pointing to the huge plate-glass front.
As they drove out of Champion’s car park, Sarah scribbled something on an old envelope fished from the detritus in the passenger well and stuck it under the sun-shield on Nick’s side.
AM I DRIVING ON THE RIGHT?!?!?
Nick found the parade of exclamation and question marks unnecessary. It fell down a minute or two later.
‘Leave it,’ said Nick. ‘It’s burnt deep into my cerebellum.’
‘Hey, a great title for my book,’ said Sarah.
‘What? Burnt Deep Into My Cerebellum?’
‘No. Am I Driving On the Right? A book about our six months. Light-hearted, comic. Awesomely bestselling.’
‘You have to be joking.’
‘Have to be? On whose orders?’
‘Oh no,’ Nick groaned, checking Sarah’s seriousness with a quick sideways glance. ‘Spare us.’
All he wanted, though, was for life to be just that, light-hearted and comic. History was far too dark, a damn dark candle over a damn dark abyss. As some wretched historian once wrote.
The plaque on the track had sprouted big flowers set in garden pots on the stone.
‘Of course,’ said Nick, stopping the car this time; ‘it’s the anniversary. It’s the twenty-eighth of Feb. Those could well be Jean-Luc’s doing. He’s got the same name. He’s probably family. Ergo –’
‘Oh they’re really pretty,’ Alicia sighed, pointing with her glistening sucette. ‘I bet it’s his Mummy and not Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc’s too ugly.’
‘Alicia,’ Sarah snapped, ‘that’s enough! Anyway, she’d have to be about a hundred. Fernand Maille would be well into his eighties, now.’
‘But he’s dead,’ Alicia said. ‘They shooted him.’
Tammy groaned dramatically. ‘Would be, she said!’ The conditional had begun to interest her, although she didn’t have that term for it. It seemed to multiply over her like a canopy of leaves.
‘Plastic,’ said Sarah. ‘I’m afraid to say I find them pretty lurid. Bathroom mauve and yuk yellow.’
‘Mummy,’ Tammy said, ‘let me put the window down.’
Sarah released the window-lock. The glass slid down and Tammy leaned right out of the window, taking a deep breath.
‘They smell really sweet,’ she fibbed.
A shot, with a little comet-trail of echo. She knocked her chin in surprise. Then a second, spraying invisible pellets of sadness through the trees.
‘Oh no, it’s the Nazi men,’ said Alicia.
‘The Nazis have long gone,’ said her father. ‘It’s just the hunters.’
‘Or a squirrel with a really bad cough,’ said Alicia, making her parents laugh admiringly. She tried to think up something else.
‘Bung,’ said Beans, through the plastic spout of her cup.
‘Horrible hunters,’ Tammy called out into the air – but not that loudly, she was not bold enough. Nevertheless, she was told off.
‘We’re guests here,’ Sarah pointed out, cleaning her glasses. ‘We should show respect.’
‘Respect for the fascists,’ murmured Nick.
‘Like Mr Elephant banging on the ground,’ said Alicia, but there was no response this time and she settled back into her seat, dejected.
The woods indicated no sign of human activity. Instead, there was a numbness about the aftermath of the two shots, as if even the trees were taken aback but were pretending not to show it. If trees could hear, Sarah mused, they would have heard the shots that killed Fernand, too; the shots that had thudded into him from some nasty German weapon, or weapons. As they drove slowly on, she pictured it quite clearly: the young man with his pistol or hunter’s rifle, taking pot-shots at the advancing soldiers, then running up the track to warn the others, then falling as the bullets tore into him, his body rolling to a stop where the memorial stone now stood.
Nick made tea as soon they got in. They had brought along six months’ supply of good, strong, builder’s tea. ‘I don’t know how anyone copes without tea,’ he said.
‘Shakespeare coped,’ Tammy observed, sitting down at the far end of the table, lingering while the other two watched something babyish next door.
Sarah was wondering to herself why the plaque said ‘assassiné’. Murdered. That implied he wasn’t fighting them. And why ‘le jeune’, when his age was marked anyway? Because of the anger, the emotion, the grief. In any historical analysis, one had to take account of the anger, the emotion. She could see the material of the boy’s shirt or country jacket pockmarked by the bullets as he ran; it was as clear as a film. She could even hear his grunt, the thump as he fell. Perhaps he fell on his face and cut his lip. She felt she was in contact with the death in some way, probably because of the coincidence of the day, the anniversary that a relative – yes, most likely Jean-Luc – had obediently, touchingly marked. It made her feel more positive towards Jean-Luc, even tender; she liked to think it was him, although he couldn’t possibly have known the dead man. One day the flowers would stop coming and the plaque would be forgotten, an occasional curiosity to a hiker. That was sad. But that’s what happened to history; it congealed. It dried up to facts and opinions. Occasionally it withered to a lethal little point, used by troublemakers long after, stirrers full of hate and prejudice.
‘The thing is, Sarah sweets, you left the handle sticking out.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Sticking out and on the front ring. Asking for it.’
Sarah said: ‘Whip me, then. Go on.’
‘No, sorry, but I thought I ought to mention it. Prevent it happening again.’
‘So sorry. What a useless mother.’
Nick spread his hands. ‘Look, why do you have to get like this?’
‘Get like what?’
‘All this overdramatic business. You know perfectly well you’re not a useless mother, so why say it?’
‘Nick, if I want to say it, I can say it.’
‘Fine. Go ahead. I don’t care what you say, actually, as long as you put the pan on the back burner next time. You learn from your mistakes, it’s not a judgement. It’s empirical progress.’
‘Oh put a lid on it, grumpy.’
‘I’m not in the least bit grumpy,’ he declared, raising his voice and straining it.
‘Sounds it,’ said Sarah, recovering old tea leaves from the sink.
Tammy left a little pause and then said, ‘Please don’t shout at Mummy, Daddy.’
‘Tammy,’ snapped her father, ‘this is none of your business. Go on. Leave us alone, please.’
‘Why is Lake Chad drying up, Daddy, in fact?’
And then, for some mysterious reason, they both flared up at her and she had to bury her face in her folded arms.
Sarah wiped the kitchen table with a sponge as Tammy read The Sword in the Stone for the third time, just as Sarah had at the same age. Her family was not particularly intellectual. She always said she came from Kent, because more precision would have been pointless – her childhood consisted of trailing after her army f
ather: Germany, Aden, Hong Kong, Belfast, Bahrain. The family had a small pied-à-terre in a development near Ashford, looking out on flat, undistinguished fields once teeming in the summer with hop-pickers from the East End and now put to desultory cows or slashes of yellow rape. She would stay there for weeks in the holidays with her mother, getting bored, while Colonel Allsopp did whatever he did with tanks far away. She read masses, uncorking book after book and shovelling the contents down past her eyes as her mother did with the whisky.
Even when, in Bahrain, there was a swimming pool as warm as a bath and secretive cocktail parties and young red-faced men who would finger her shoulder-straps under the scissor-like shadows of palm leaves, she read more books than her father thought healthy. She was reading Tolstoy at fourteen, and then again at seventeen, because she remembered nothing of what she had read before. She was plodding diligently, not flying, towards her single aim, which was to read History at Cambridge. Her parents never talked, or not about anything beyond the terrible, tight purgatory of their mutual recrimination. So –unlike Tammy – almost everything she knew was from books, not discussion. It was all printed in tiny letters she digested in swarms, like gnats flying into a great mouth.
Beans and Alicia were having a nap, still worn out by yesterday’s hospital drama.
‘I’m assuming this table doesn’t object to getting wet. Lift your T.H. White, Tam-Tam.’
‘They’d have protected it,’ said Nick. ‘They’re that type. Anyway, it’s only a butcher’s block.’
‘Not if he’s really into antiques. That type just wax.’ She studied some worrying circles where the kids’ drinks had been. There were no coasters in the house, only antique iron rests for hot pans. The circles might have been there before, like marks of ancient enclosures, but she couldn’t be sure. The wet sponge seemed to leave a pale comet-trace after it. Tammy pointed this out, but was not thanked for it.
