by Adam Thorpe
‘Don’t worry about it, Sarah.’
‘I’m trying not to.’
But he was worried as well. It was like staying with your parents. He had never been a real rebel. His only vice these days was watching High Stakes Poker on his laptop. He was too terrified of the consequences even to touch any porn, quite apart from the ideological angle. It was as if sleeping with the odd student and eventually marrying one had blown all the naughty fuses. He looked aghast at the viciousness of the world’s powerful and went limp. Being genial wasn’t enough. Stalin was fairly genial, behind his Dunhill pipe and yellow eyes. Bush, too, behind his spellbinding lack of the grey stuff, his creepy smirk.
‘I just think we’re all here to chill out,’ he said, ‘and not fret so much over minor things.’
‘Maybe minor things are all we have,’ Sarah said, nettled. She was attacking a recalcitrant mark on the catering sink’s placid steel. ‘Maybe everything else is just concept. Hm?’
Nick grunted and opened Le Monde, bought yesterday in St-Maurice, and pursed his lips, as he always did when facing the world’s cupidity and suffering. This is difficult French, he thought. There are no eye-catching, over-egged stories. Everything in England is story. Instead of analysis. Infantilism, really: keep ’em hooked. What isn’t a fleshy yarn is ignored. This, however, is bony, holding back on the fat, the extraneous stodge. He struggled to feel nourished by it. A child had been murdered, but it was dispassionately recorded, without the lip-smacking details that what passed for British journalism would have conjured (conjured being the key word). A bit of a busman’s holiday, he thought, working his way through the multiple classical arches of the words, the steady murmurings of the long, comma-stitched phrases. But he felt his intelligence was being addressed. That made a change.
Sarah squeezed the sponge out firmly and settled it behind the tap. She leaned back on the sink’s frigid metal and folded her arms.
‘I think I’m going to go to Aix tomorrow,’ she said. ‘And leave you with the kids.’
‘We could all come. Aix is interesting.’
‘Nick, it’ll be a two-hour trip. I’ll be leaving rather early. I’ll need the whole day in the archives without interruption.’
‘The world belongs to those who get up early,’ Nick quoted, with a hint of irony, his finger in the air. ‘No, correction: to those whose workers get up early.’
‘And what kind of a world?’ murmured Sarah.
‘As long there’s some lunch,’ he said. ‘I won’t have the car to go and get anything.’
‘You’ve got the car today.’
‘Oh, I’m sure we won’t starve,’ Nick said, returning to the paper, its major things. A full-page article on Fra Angelico and the anti-Humanist influence of Giovanni Dominici on the young artist. Never a medievalist, what in fact flashed up was that awful scene in the film about the grisly Dominici Affair; he’d watched it, enthralled, as a teenager: the little girl running desperately away through the trees, the black-and-white shot taken from the axe-man’s point of view, hand-held and jerky. Her parents had already been dealt with in their holiday caravan somewhere in the backwoods of Provence, and now it was her turn. At least this wasn’t Provence. Run! Run!
‘Supper?’ asked Sarah. ‘I’ll be hungry.’
‘Oh. Ah. Supper,’ he intoned, turning the page. ‘Omelette? I’ll do an omelette.’
She had these moments when she wanted to take her shoes off and throw them at her husband’s head. She was wearing soft espadrilles, today.
At least Jamie wasn’t here. She had once screamed at her stepson as she’d never screamed at anyone in her life before and then left the house. All he’d done, Jamie had complained, with an air of bewilderment, was mention that the fruit had run out. Nick had asked (he later reported) if that was all. Jamie admitted to complaining about the loo seat being wet, but it had been meant as a joke. Nick had then asked if he –Jamie – had any idea what it was like bringing up two small kids, with a third on the way.
‘That’s her choice,’ Jamie had replied, with irreproachable logic. ‘Nobody forced her. You dig your own grave, man.’
One of the most difficult aspects of Jamie was that he was superficially a replica, or perhaps a pastiche, of his father as he was in his own student years: same language, same look, same smell, with a touch here and there of the new: an earring, a bead in his nose, the occasional variation into matted dreadlocks or, as if a gremlin had gone mad with a miniature lawn mower, an erratically shaven scalp. So Nick found it hard to act the straight-laced, authoritarian father. Anyway, Jamie was a grown-up, at least officially.
As a result, Sarah had gone to a psychiatrist, to get her relationship with her stepson ‘sorted’ (in the stepson’s words). She admitted that she could have done him bodily harm. The psychiatrist unravelled her difficult childhood and the general idea emerged that she was projecting an ancient animosity towards her absent father onto Jamie.
‘How about he just learns some manners,’ she said, embedded in a leather wing-chair that reclined in five positions, ‘to start with?’
But the psychiatrist wasn’t paid to discuss someone’s manners, he was paid to go into the abyss. He’d repeated ‘manners’ with a hint of ridicule. Manners was probably the arch enemy of psychiatry: a bourgeois relic. Sarah felt herself turning into a starched Victorian maid.
‘I reckon manners,’ Sarah persisted, ‘is about thinking of other people. Manners are actually quite deep. Manners maketh man. Or woman.’
‘Ah,’ said the psychiatrist, who was in his forties and quite dishy, ‘now we’re getting somewhere.’
Nick had asked how it was going, after the first three sessions. Sarah had told him that she was, essentially, a starched Victorian maid and it would take a lifetime to unstarch her. No more sessions.
‘I’ll phone the Centre on the mobile to let them know I’m coming,’ said Sarah, already moving towards the door. She wondered what the Centre d’Archives d’Outre Mer would look like, already seeing herself mounting a flight of stone stairs into a beamed and panelled hall, with French intellectuals in scarves and rimless glasses dotted about. She didn’t feel like asking Nick, who had been there many years ago.
‘Don’t fall off the bathroom stool,’ Nick muttered, while unravelling a never-ending sentence in the editorial that appeared to have no object or main verb, with the flash of the Dominici Affair not quite sluiced away.
With Mummy off for the day, the girls plunged into the Daddy-only scenario with exceptional zeal. It took him back to the days after his divorce, when he would take Jamie to the park every second weekend, joining other sad-looking single dads at the swings. The girls weren’t like this in Cambridge – when, in fact, he was hardly ever with them alone for more than half a day. Sarah would be back at about eight tonight. He worried about the drive, whether she’d remember to stay on the right, and kept involuntarily picturing a wreck, fire engines and ambulances flashing – much like the accident they’d passed on the way down, between Le Puy and Brioude. How would he tell the kids?
How were such things even possible, he mused, as he made faces out of the bits-and-pieces lunch, disguising its salady nature; how did they fit into a world of minor, everyday things, burning into them like that heavy knuckle of shell fragment he’d spotted, years ago, perched on a furrow in the Somme?
‘Ugh,’ said Alicia, grimacing at her plate, ‘don’t like cucumber or vegetables.’
After lunch he read to them from Tammy’s ‘lavishly illustrated’ book of Greek myths, a present from her godfather. Beans sat on his knee as he started on the chapter dealing with Persephone, snatched down to Tartarus by Pluto. He read to them about Tartarus, about Charon and the Styx and the ghosts waiting to be judged, about the pool of memory and the pool of forgetfulness called Lethe, and how the clever ones drank from the pool of memory. Why? Because it was vital to remember: that’s what historians do, he added. They remember that we should not forget and do stupid things over again.
It was quite a grown-up book, he realised, but they listened without a murmur. Beside the pool of memory grew a white poplar, with fluttery leaves. Alicia said she wanted to see one, and Nick suggested they go in search of one – he had seen what he reckoned were poplars down in the cleft of the valley where the river ran, although the leaves weren’t yet out. The white poplar’s male catkins turn reddish, he informed them excitedly, looking it up.
Never had he experienced such a perfection of fatherhood: they were behaving like children in an Edwardian novel. He thought of Sarah crouched over documents two hours’ drive away and felt vaguely guilty at his suspicion that all this was due to her absence. Next week he would start on the Norse myths, thickening their knowledge, laying the cultural sediment. He’d had to discover it all by himself.
On the walk, Tammy asked him whether praying hard to Jesus can take you out of ‘Taratarus’. He emphasised that it was just what the Greeks believed and that it wasn’t true, anyway. This Jesus thing bothered him; it was the new teacher. Beans leaned over to one side in the backpack and he told her to keep straight, but she was in fact asleep, her hand clutching a sucette. There should be a law against preaching religion in English schools, he thought, as there was in France.
Alicia said she didn’t want to die. Nick began telling lies, stuff he didn’t believe. Reincarnation rather than the afterlife, but still. He was a confirmed atheist, but could hardly tell them that. Tammy reckoned being reborn was frightening, you might be reborn as someone really fat like her school enemy Lucilla Bales or a beggar or someone without legs.
‘Oh I don’t know, I think it’ll be pretty nice being reborn,’ he said, unable to find a decent eschatological rejoinder to her remorseless logic. ‘It’ll make a change.’
Strange, to think of his kids dying. Of being able to die at all.
It was a bright day, with a peculiarly sharp, cold light that blanched everything and gave it a kind of varnish. They were heading for the granite rocks on the heathy stretch from where you could see the river valley and a row of leafless but poplar-shaped trees, like a painter’s fine brushes. On the way, in the chestnut wood, a brown-and-white troop of goats came towards them like a flash flood, bleating and jingling. The shepherd, walking in the middle, had a jacket over his shoulders and a crook that had a nobble instead of a curved top. His dog padded about at the back, rounding up stragglers. One of the goats had a limp. Nick regretted not bringing the camcorder, then realised it would have been embarrassing, the wrong image entirely.
It was the same shepherd they’d seen passing the house, but had never met. He was somewhere between thirty and sixty, a lined, browned but boyish face with moist eyes that seemed to have two silvery points in the middle from the bright light. He stopped to talk to them, for the first time. He reminded Tammy of the funny man who would stand outside the swimming baths back home, humming to himself. Beans insisted on getting down to meet the goats.
Afterwards, Nick refused to give Tammy a précis of their conversation. The girls had been rubbing the goats on their hard, bristly foreheads: they were slightly scared of their horns and their jostling nervousness.
‘Oh, it was just a chat. About the weather,’ he said. ‘He can tell what the weather’s going to be without watching it on the telly.’
‘So can I,’ said Alicia mockingly, looking up at the clear sky. ‘It’s going to be all sunny.’
‘Wrong,’ said Nick. ‘He said it’ll rain tonight. Coming from the north. He can smell it and he says it’s too bright. That’s a shepherd for you. It might rain heavily, so let’s hope Mummy’s back before it does.’
‘That’s only what you talked about?’ confirmed Tammy.
‘Yup. All we talked about, pretty well.’
Tammy didn’t believe him. She’d picked up the word ‘accident’ in its French version, repeated several times, and the fact that her father’s face looked shocked at one point. What her father did add was that the shepherd was called Bruno and his greatest wish was to visit Greenland.
‘Weirdo,’ Tammy said.
‘Not really. Not that weird. Shepherds are traditionally a little on the strange side, spending so much time on their own.’
The girls’ palms smelt sharply of goat: they made him smell it.
‘Ah, the smell of Pan,’ he intoned, still in the classical swim.
Alicia snorted, smelling hers again. ‘That’s not like bread!’
‘Daddy,’ said Tammy, after Nick had explained about Pan, ‘didn’t the shepherd say something about an accident?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘That’s what I heard.’
‘You don’t understand French, Tammy.’
‘I do,’ said Alicia. ‘Ang, doh, twa, craa, sank …’
‘It wasn’t Beans’s accident, then?’
‘Oh, probably,’ said Nick. ‘Sorry, yeah, it was.’
They were growing like speeded-up coral. He was fading away.
‘You’re not telling the tru-uth,’ Tammy chanted, and Alicia joined in.
‘Sorry, you don’t always get the right end of the stick when you’re seven.’
‘I’m eight.’
‘I mean eight,’ he said, starting to walk on with Beans in one hand and Alicia in the other, their faces turned back to smile triumphantly at their sister.
As they entered the yard on their return, Nick saw what looked like a mysterious stack of broken white crockery or perhaps crumpled balls of paper against the back wall next to where the zinc guttering finished in a stone drain. Alicia ran up to it and yelled so that her voice bounced back off the barn: ‘Look, someone’s brung us nice flowers!’
The white and creamy lilies, roses and chrysanthemums were set against dark glossy leaves and lighter sprays of fern. A pale, silky ribbon bore the single word REGRETS, which Nick assumed was to be read the French way, without sounding the last two consonants, although he mentally failed to.
‘Oo-er,’ Tammy said. ‘Someone’s died again.’
‘Why?’ asked Alicia.
‘No doubt,’ said Nick, somewhat rattled, ‘Jean-Luc will throw light on it. Don’t touch, Alicia.’
Alicia cocked her head like a bird and asked if it was like the thing on the track with the name in it and them flowers on too, her mind almost audibly whirring.
Nick nodded. ‘Sort of.’
What Bruno the shepherd had revealed was that his brother had fallen off the roof of Les Fosses exactly six years ago today, but not that flowers had been left. Maybe it was another relative. Or the wife.
‘When did this one die?’ essayed Alicia again, all but breathless with excitement.
‘I think it’s very pretty,’ said Nick, stalling.
‘Film it,’ Alicia suggested. ‘What’s regrets mean?’
Nick demurred. ‘Something too sad to film,’ he explained.
‘Maybe it was Jean-Luc again,’ Tammy said. ‘He’s pretty strange.’
‘Is he?’
‘He’s nice,’ said Alicia.
Beans broke into earnest chatter, like a little bird, tugging his trouser-leg. Nick nodded and repeated really? but couldn’t be bothered to make out what she was saying, although the word ‘cruck’ kept appearing.
‘Or maybe someone conked out on this very spot,’ Tammy interrupted, also excited now. ‘Not Fernando but someone new, Daddy.’
Nick looked at her uncertainly. This was no doubt the very place where the builder had landed with a thump, a crack of neck-bone. He looked up. The edge of the roof was a long way up, falling slowly backwards against a small, complicated wisp of dark cloud in the blue.
‘Or in the house,’ Tammy went on, tossing the hair out of her eyes. ‘Of something like choleric or turbo locust. And whoever left this couldn’t get in, or didn’t even want to.’
‘Why?’ asked Alicia, lost.
‘Likkel window,’ said Beans.
‘We can go on speculating forever,’ Nick said, eyeing the barn. Turbo locust was good. He wo
uld tell Sarah about Tammy’s turbo locust, but not about the accident.
‘We can throw the flowers away when they wait, Daddy.’
‘When they wilt. Of course, Tam-tam.’
‘Hope it doesn’t upset Mummy too much. She doesn’t like deathie thingies.’
‘No, she certainly doesn’t,’ he agreed.
And thought, as his daughter stood there in her diminutive pensiveness, how much could be crammed into the small-size sock of eight years.
Alicia nodded when she was told not to tell Mummy because Mummy ‘doesn’t like deathie things just as she doesn’t like hamburgers’. Nick found his explanation as unsatisfactory as the subterfuge itself.
Away from the others, Tammy was instructed in a whisper to carry the floral offering not too far into the trees and hide it respectfully. She was proud of the responsibility.
The flowers were stuck in wet sponge that soaked her sleeves, and were heavier than she’d expected. She laid them at the foot of a tree, in undergrowth, and scratched her ankles. It didn’t feel good, though, doing this. She thought she’d gone quite far into the woods but when she turned round there was the house beyond the washing-line. There was something big and round at her feet, like a big root. She brushed the prickly stuff to one side with her foot, bravely. The root carried on until it came back and met itself. She suddenly saw it as a cartwheel, like the ones in the barn. Its spokes were broken and its orange paint was peeling off and there were words carved on the rim, almost overflowing its thinness: MAS DU PARADIS.
She threw dead leaves over the flowers and pricked her finger. Like in a fairy story, she realised, and hurtled back before the wheel rose up with a grin and rolled on top of her.
Sarah came back from Aix a little earlier than expected, at seven-thirty. The return trip had been very quick, but she’d also been warned about the rain. The air was wet-smelling and close, despite the coolness.
The Centre d’Archives d’Outre Mer was a dull, modern building with a municipal look to the pine and metal shelving, but the librarians had been highly efficient in finding what she was looking for: records relating to the forced dispersion of French-colonised West Africans to French Guyana as labourers. She was expanding on a footnote in her thesis: Nick, who’d been her supervisor, had advised her to do so nine or ten years back.
