by Adam Thorpe
The sound fizzed abruptly and a dark bar descended over an image of a fluffy snow-white cat nestling in a washing basket. The bar, as it descended, compressed the picture comically, the bottom half appearing again at the top. The fizz was electronic and nastily harsh, as if someone was drilling nearby, drowning the voices. It was the perfect projection of what had just happened inside Nick.
‘Stupid telly,’ said Alicia.
‘We can always read instead,’ said her father, stretching. ‘You know, that strange activity called reading. Or play a brief game.’
They waited in a lazy way, but when the interference lessened, it left another channel overlapping what was now the chat show again: a dim, X-rayed face, no doubt a newscaster’s, took up most of the screen. He slid slightly to the left and then to the right, as if on a swing that had all but stopped. The pale lips were moving. He was looking straight out at them.
Obviously the dead builder, Nick thought, alarming himself.
‘Pearl’s on great form,’ murmured Sarah, who had been on her mobile ten minutes ago, up in the bathroom.
‘Really?’ said Nick. ‘How come?’
She looked mildly hurt. ‘Why shouldn’t she be?’
‘Why should she be?’
‘She usually is.’
‘Woman’s Hour, or something?’
She looked at him quizzically, with some concern. ‘Er, what?’
He said, ‘It’s not everyone who gets on Radio 4.’
‘On great form, I said.’
He stared at her for a moment. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Call me Professor Calculus.’
‘Professor Calculus!’ chorused the girls.
Sarah squeezed his hand. ‘Professor Conquest, I say.’
That was a surprise. It didn’t take much to cheer him up. He squeezed her hand back.
‘You’re like the stupid telly, Daddy,’ squeaked Alicia, shoving her head between his knees as her mother rested her own head on his shoulder. The insides of his knees found Alicia’s neck and squeezed it playfully. ‘Cut my head off, pleee-ease.’
‘Maybe we should put him in the recycling bin,’ said Tammy, chin on her hands, staring back at the dim face on the screen.
Nick switched off the telly with the remote. The idea that he was looking at the face of the dead builder had not evaporated. He was reminded of the faces of the torturers, bullies and other apparatchiks in Budapest’s House of Terror museum, about which he had written, for Past & Present, his last published paper: ‘Re(In)formation in the Disney Age: Selective Trauma in post-Communist Hungary’. Despite not knowing a word of Hungarian. It was a sortie out of his field. A refreshment. He got clobbered, quite justifiably, by a revered Central European specialist in the next issue.
Sarah’s head was heavy against his shoulder. Tammy prodded her elbow, presumably by mistake, in his stomach. Alicia was now trying to separate his knees further, exercising his flabby calf muscles. He pretended to complain. He loved them with a scattered intensity: not a single bright point but something dispersed that was still of the same property and energy as the single bright point. History had somehow escaped them all; had so far let them off. He’d heard it all his life, muffled, like a busy street through a closed window. Even in the Congo, with its street-mobs whirling chains and brandishing machetes, its bloodied faces and casually murdered neighbours, he had not felt the window open. He wondered if one day he would hear the high, unexpected smash of a stone in its glass.
Impossible, of course: history can never be present. It can never clamber over you and prod you in the stomach, exercise your calf muscles, lean on your shoulder. It is all words. It is only words. It has always happened, it is always a kind of ghost.
SIX
They found stale chocolate digestives in the back of a cupboard and rejoiced.
They decided to take them on a walk as supplies, and then decided not to, as they would go all gooey. When they got back! The weather was calm and spring-like. Yellow flowers, some like buttercups, some like small dandelions, had appeared in the woods in spread-out gowns, along with white star-shaped solitaries. ‘We must get a flower book,’ Sarah said.
She had noticed, while hanging out clothes, that the glossy-leaved bushes between the washing-line and the trees bore small globes of orangey fruit, even though the bushes’ flowers were only just beginning to open. They didn’t dare try the fruit, though. Anyway, they were hard, not yet ripe. Nick said that he had seen these laurel-like bushes in Ireland, where they were called strawberry trees; they had nice white flowers and the fruit turned red.
‘I believe,’ he said, as if accumulating points, ‘the Ancient Greeks made their flutes from the wood.’
‘They’re not strawberries, stupid,’ Alicia scoffed.
‘If they’re actually called strawberries,’ Tammy said, ‘they’re probably dee-lish.’
‘Yum yum,’ said Beans, reaching up with her right hand, which had entirely healed within a week.
‘It might be a trap,’ said Sarah, stopping her. She knew the names of hardly any wild flowers, unlike mothers in books. Her own mother’s garden was mostly gladioli and hydrangea and a big ornamental birch. There were huge fields of rape beyond, and the bright yellow along with the bright red of the gladioli gave them all headaches in summer.
They took another path forking off past the granite boulders and descended to an unexpected stream. It fell noisily over rocks into large, smooth-cupped pools as clear as glass. They had to shout.
‘Let’s go back and find the digestives tree,’ Nick joked. ‘The Famous Five ont faim. Are famished.’
They climbed up to the main track and tramped along, having ventured further than they’d meant to. Beans fell asleep on Sarah’s back. The others moaned like prisoners on a forced march.
‘We could buy a caravan,’ said Alicia, suddenly. ‘Then we could cook.’
‘Don’t like caravans. Or camper vans,’ said Nick.
‘You don’t like anything,’ she whined.
‘I like chasing you,’ he growled, and she immediately ran ahead.
He pretended to pursue her as a wolf. She jinked like a hare along the path, squealing. ‘Kill her and eat her up!’ shouted Tammy from behind. Alicia was gurgling and squeaking in both delight and terror. The delight of terror, he thought, pretending to lope fast, pursuing the small, jinking form and unable not to conjure the girl in the Dominici Affair, desperate to save her life.
‘Gotcha!’
When they arrived back, they found Jean-Luc nailing a new eye on the front door, just as dry but with all its lashes and still a coppery-gold colour. He left the old flower on, which now looked blind, wrinkled and jealous.
He told them that people round here called it a cardousso, and the old folk claimed it protected the house because it looked like a sun. It opened when it was dry and closed when it was wet.
‘Une symbole solaire,’ said Nick, nodding in approval.
‘Un baromètre,’ said Jean-Luc.
He hoovered the pool again while the girls watched. He sucked up the white stuff until the bottom was showing for the first time. It’s not as good as when it was hidden, thought Tammy: the bottom had stains and tiny cracks.
Sarah trusted they were safe as long as Jean-Luc was with them, but worried nevertheless. A child’s drowning is silent, she’d read on the Internet back in Cambridge. A child can drown in the time it takes to answer the phone. She kept peeping through the kitchen window. It was sweet, the way they watched Jean-Luc at work. They didn’t need gadgets, telly or computer games.
Afterwards, while they were all having tea, they heard a knocking sound. Nick investigated. Jean-Luc was splitting logs in the barn with a huge axe. He was taking logs off the stack Nick had made, setting each upright on the giant cheese of a chopping block and swinging the blade down unerringly almost every time so that the log in question flew into two parts; then each of these were chopped into two more. Four from one. Nick marvelled at the accuracy, the ease. A split log
jumped so far it hit his shin. He pretended it didn’t hurt. He felt he should have been doing this himself.
Better for the fire, Jean-Luc told him. Then you put on the unsplit logs. As if Nick had never lit a fire in his life. But he nodded gratefully nevertheless as Jean-Luc swung the polished blade up high and let it come down on its own gravity. It was his grandfather’s axe, he said. The bulky blade was hand-forged: its edge was fretted but razor-sharp. Only the red handle was new.
Nick asked him, in a pause, having mentally rehearsed the French, whether he was related to Fernand Maille, the man ‘memorialisé’ on the track. The axe’s blade was well bitten into the chopping block.
Jean-Luc seemed to give thought to the question, staring at the pale woodchips on the barn floor. Then he stated very firmly that, no, Fernand was nothing to do with his family. Nothing to do with his family at all. Pas du tout, monsieur.
The church in little Aubain was as cold as a fridge and decrepit. There were peeling eighteenth-century frescoes and the faded names on the backs of the choir-stalls were in thick-nibbed, italic script. A worm-eaten statue of a red-lipped Virgin with cheeks like pink marshmallows stood with raised arms in a piddle of water. Damp had etched, not just stained, one end of the nave on whose high half-dome a crude constellation of gold stars had been painted in a wash of deep cerulean blue. The windows were plain glass, with streaks of cobweb like thin leading. The echo was amazing.
A tiny woman in spectacles and blue frock was dusting the altar. Nick chatted to her while Sarah tried to stop the girls’ natural impulse to whoop. The woman informed them that the Protestant rebels had burnt the church a hundred years ago, leaving nothing of interest except the outside stones. Nick knew that it was two hundred years ago, but kept mum. The kids’ whoops, although parakeet-like, were undeniably English, but the woman gave them a friendly smile.
‘Elles sont mignonnes,’ she sighed, as if that justified everything.
They left at last and the outside flattened their voices like tin. The sun blinded and warmed: they had changed latitude in seconds.
‘Aren’t the French nice about children,’ Sarah remarked.
‘Even us,’ snorted Tammy, screwing her face up into cartoon ugliness.
‘Maybe I should ask her about Les Fosses,’ said Nick.
‘Why?’
‘Historical interest.’
The girls crouched around a hapless invertebrate under the plane tree. From the church came the high, moaning hoover sound in which devils laughed and the innocent groaned. Or vice-versa. Where faith was concerned, one could never be sure. The front door was a cleft in a cliff: Nick disappeared into its black pitch. Alicia ran up to the front steps and sat on them, shielding her eyes while Beans and Tammy hid behind one of the plane trees. The air was cool when it shifted into a gust. Sarah sat on a low, sun-warmed wall and felt a moment of absolute repose; life was good, really. It was really really good, in fact.
Nick reappeared like Orpheus climbing back into the land of the living. He had forgotten his sunglasses at home and squinted as he approached them with news of the dead.
‘Any lowdown on the house, then?’
‘No. Well, she didn’t react. I suggest we try the café. Girls,’ he called out, with a ham note of irony, ‘you don’t want a sirop, do you?’
‘No,’ Alicia shouted back, unexpectedly – and meant it.
They were the only ones making a noise outside for one simple reason: they were the only ones. Aubain could have been a ghost village, apart from the vacuuming. No barking dogs, even. The neat mairie, with its capital A of steps and its French flag above the door and its glassed noticeboard full of official decrees (Avis à la Population), was shut for the day. The redundant words Café du Louvre were just legible in pale brown across a shuttered house facing the church. The hand-coloured poster pinned to its door announced an art competition; Nick was surprised to see the closing date still in the future instead of the far past.
Sarah studied the war memorial while the girls panted theatrically next to her. It was nothing more than a tapering slab of stone inside a chained-off square of tussocky earth. The stone had a dozen victims etched in under 1914–1918 (several of the surnames recurring), while there were six under 1939–1944. Alicia asked if these were people’s birthdays. Sarah explained, while Tammy implored God to give her sister a brain.
‘Shut up, Tammy,’ Sarah uncharacteristically snapped.
‘Look!’ shrieked Tammy, regardless. ‘Fernand Maille!’
Faded flowers, still in their plastic, lay on the plinth.
‘There you go,’ said Sarah, already contrite. ‘Well done, Tamsin –’ and Tammy greeted the cheering hordes with a sardonic wave.
‘We’ll check him out in the cemetery,’ said Nick. ‘Let’s go to the cemetery, then, girls, instead of the café. We’ll go on foot. It’ll be a nice walk.’
‘Yippee,’ said Alicia, despite the mention of a walk.
‘Are there drinks in the cemetery?’
‘Erm, don’t think so, Tammy.’
‘You said we were going to the café and having a Coke.’
‘Not strictly accurate. I proposed the café and was met with a thumbs down. I never mentioned Coke.’
‘That’s just stupid Ali-Baba,’ Tammy scoffed. ‘She can go to the cemetery and we’ll go to the café and sniff coke.’
The hermeneutic key to this precocious joke consisted of one word: Jamie.
‘Coke, Coke,’ echoed Beans, slapping her hands.
Alicia said, tugging her mother’s sleeve: ‘Mummy, she called me stupid and a name.’
‘Cemetery first,’ Nick insisted. ‘It’ll give us a good thirst.’
‘That rhymes,’ Tammy pointed out. ‘Mrs Foster says poems shouldn’t rhyme.’
‘Does she?’
‘She gives you marks off if you rhyme. Oh, how grateful I am for jolly Mrs Foster. Especially her lovely smell, exactly like an old sock.’
‘Tammy, that’s enough,’ Sarah remonstrated. ‘She is your teacher.’
‘She does her best,’ Tammy sighed.
‘Mummy,’ said Alicia suddenly, in a worried, conspiratorial tone, tugging at her mother’s sleeve, ‘where’s all the CVV cameras gone?’
Jean-Luc sees Marcel’s big jeep pass below the window, going too fast as usual, the dogs yelping. It’s not that Jean-Luc has never hunted. He’d go out with his father and a few of his father’s mates from the age of ten, bouncing along in the old Renault van. But he was never a good shot, and something about killing animals doesn’t agree with him, although at the moment of the hunt his blood can get up as much as anyone else’s. He once shot a big hare and ran up to it and found it alive, but badly messed about in the rump. And before he picked it up to chop it on the neck and put it out of its misery, the hare looked him straight in the eyes – not accusingly, no, but wonderingly, as if wanting to know why. They’d warned him about that look: there’s something bewitching in it, they said, as if animals were sorcerers. But he hadn’t looked away in time, and after that he only hunted to please his father. He hasn’t hunted at all for at least ten years. He is glad.
His father would tell him how, in the old days, when he was a boy, they’d pedal out on their bicycles before dawn, their bare feet in wooden clogs pushing at the pedals up the hill in the darkness, each dog in a wire cage behind the saddle.
He’d once got a double kill, his father said, soon after receiving his permit at seventeen; posted as the furthest look-out behind a clump of gorse on the high, lonely hills between Aubain and Valdaron, he’d watched the dawn come up, the sky turn milky, the first robin fix him with its tiny black berry of an eye; he’d watched the buzzards circle and the rabbits feed and the hills turn pink, ‘like they were blushing, like they were pretty girls blushing’. He could have shot ten rabbits, but he wasn’t there for rabbits.
Sometimes Jean-Luc believes that his father’s whole life revolved around that morning just after the war. Elie Maille was four y
ears younger than his brother, Fernand. Poor Oncle Fernand. Had a limp, worked in the stinking tannery in Valdaron, never harmed anyone or got involved in anything: murdered by the Nazis on the way back from Les Fosses. And we all know why that was! Only Jean-Luc keeps him company, now, in his sad wanderings.
Elie was different. He was wilder. He became a messenger boy for the maquis, and saw terrible sights. Then the war was over and he was no longer a boy and there was no longer an enemy. And he got two magnificent seventy-kilo boars in four shots. After that, it was all downhill. Too much drink, a nag of a wife, a useless dreamer of a son; and never any money, or not enough of it – not enough to do anything more in life than exist, apart from the hunt and his handful of goats and the telly. He’d point at the telly with its flickering black-and-white pictures and say, ‘That’s my window on the world, Jean-Luc.’
Poor Jean-Luc. He often thought about his father at that time, just after the war, aged seventeen, before the phone or the telly – and how he must have got stuck, somehow, at that age. Because the way he behaved, until he died aged seventy-one, was not as a grown man should behave. So Jean-Luc, although he was afraid of his father until he was on his deathbed, tried to picture Elie just after the war: with his lame brother Fernand dead, his father Gabriel assumed dead (in fact, he was taking his time to get back from labour camp in Germany), his grieving mother Clémentine seeking comfort in Léon the blacksmith up at Valdaron, and nothing in the larder but chestnuts and old potatoes.
Jean-Luc can just remember his grandmother as a wasted skeleton, wandering about Aubain in black, muttering through toothless gums. ‘Fernand, Fernand,’ she’d mumble, as if talking to her eldest. Maybe she was! Maybe no one died, in the end. Maybe they all hung about like Oncle Fernand, just the other side of the glass, mouthing words at us, eyeless, with limbs like newts.
Elie Maille lived danger and excitement and sorrow too young, the priest said at his funeral. There was the massacre of the Resistance camp at Jallau, way up in the open hills above Aubain. It was a bush-camp, really: Jallau was just a few ruined walls and a shepherd’s hut with a roof of slates. The SS surrounded it after a tip-off and there was a shoot-out, thirty boys against three hundred Germans. Jean-Luc found a book in the flea market with photos of the dead Frenchmen lined up on the grass against a stone wall. There was a German in there, too: a deserter, a Communist, gone over to the Allies. His hands were up to his chin, as if cold. The label on the photo said ‘Karl Goldschmidt’.
