The Standing Pool

by Adam Thorpe

  It steeled her for Jamie, somehow. If she could ritually immerse herself thus, galvanising her body and thus her spirits, she could even cope with Jamie for as long as he was around.

  Nick left and her text leapt back. She finished her piece and lay on the bed diagonally for a read. One consolation of Jamie’s presence was that he could occupy the girls, keep an eye on them if they were near the pool. She was reading an absorbing book on Grotius, Hobbes and Locke by an old and brilliant friend, Jennifer Wiles, who couldn’t have children. She was allowing Jennifer’s elegant chapter on the church debate between political and pastoral power to sponge her worries up when there was a sudden howl from downstairs, an unearthly howl of agony and despair that had her out of the door well before the terrible sound was interrupted by the need for its generator to take breath.

  Alicia had stamped on the plastic bottle, which, like a broken violin, now refused to reproduce the sound of Coco’s bongos, Congolese or otherwise. Jamie rescued the situation by taking Beans and going outside and whirling her around by the arms, higher and higher, the leather boots turning and turning on the gravel until they’d worn a hole in the earth beneath.

  Sarah recalled something she’d read about unsocketing the arms of a child at the shoulders, doing that. Beans squealed with delight, virtually horizontal, the centrifugal force pulling her little arms dead straight; a small shoe flew off, and Sarah smiled anxiously from the door.

  ‘Supposing he lets go?’ murmured Tammy.

  Jamie found something ‘negative’ about the house, something that wanted to be freed, something trapped and in pain.

  ‘Negative,’ reiterated Nick, flatly.

  ‘In pain,’ reiterated Sarah, just as flatly.

  ‘Really kind of needy, yeah?’

  ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have removed the solar symbol,’ said Nick. ‘Protector against the dark forces.’

  ‘Can’t have it both ways, Mr Rationalist,’ Jamie said, shaking his head.

  ‘Maybe I was joking.’

  ‘Hey, a real cracker.’

  ‘No jokes in a dictatorship,’ said Sarah, with an ironic lift of her eyebrows.

  ‘That’s what they say, but it’s erroneous,’ Nick declared. ‘Take Stalin. He used jokes to trap people in queues. Someone would crack an anti-Stalin –’

  ‘Hey, I like this,’ said Jamie, interrupting as usual.

  He lifted the fetish mask off its hook and placed it over his own face. His voice sounded deep and hollow behind and it was creepy; it was nothing like him, even though the mask was small and Jamie’s ears stuck out behind. The fact that he was dressed head-to-foot in Nick’s blue denim, familiar from ten or more years back, made it even stranger. The mask, as Jamie jigged up and down, tried to keep its dignity. The girls whooped and fled temporarily into the kitchen.

  ‘Thanks, Jamie,’ said their mother, raising her eyes to the ceiling.

  The mask looked very fed-up, back on its hook. To make up for his tactlessness, Jamie promised to take the kids white-water rafting.

  ‘That’s a promise, is it?’ said Nick, cheerily.

  ‘You know me.’

  ‘Your dad’s togs suit you, Jamie,’ said Sarah, in a half-involuntary flash of cruelty.

  Jamie studied the rolled-back, frayed sleeves of the denim jacket that had once been Nick’s tenacious lecturing gear. ‘I’m not really struggling,’ he said, ‘to rip ’em off me.’

  Waiting every morning in the woods, on the edge, for the last four days, where a clear view of the washing-line at the side of the house opens between the bushes, he has worn a little circle of presence in the dead leaves.

  He’s been arriving early because of what he has noted when working here: the Englishwoman hangs out washing in the mornings. Not every morning, of course, but it seems there is always new washing on the line whenever he comes: the miniature clothes of the girls, especially, and now, on the fourth day, some hippy clothes.

  He is kitted out in his old frayed hunting gear, a camouflage of green and brown, military-style, a little tight around his waist because he hasn’t worn it for years. He has waited three hours or more each time, settled among the thick arbutus bushes with their shiny leaves. He’s always loved their little round red fruits, hanging like goolies in the white flowers. The local nickname, among his mates at least: goolie bushes. The fruits are sweet and rough in the mouth and he’s gorged himself. They take two years to ripen. He and his father would help pick them for distilling when he was a kid, and the old folk would say, ‘one is enough’. But Jean-Luc was different.

  On the first day he stripped this side of the bush, waiting. The fruit went down as easily as when he was a little boy. Back then, Louis Loubert would hold two against his groin, then squeeze them to pulp and squeal and open his mouth wide in agony: a member of the Maquis in the hands of the SS. Louis was OK, back then. But Jean-Luc was always afraid because the others would say they were going to do it to him and for real, one day, just as an experiment. A medical experiment. So when the fruits ripened he always used to be a bit scared, in case it reminded them, and tried to eat them all up before the others remembered.

  On the second day, a gusty day without sun which had him shivering a little, his patience was rewarded: but she looked tiny in the viewfinder, and her face kept being covered by the flapping sheets she was pegging out. He dared not approach nearer. And then he had a brainwave, based on experience: he’s responsible, these days, for much of the washing at home. She would have to collect them. He sniffed the air and judged its humidity. The sky was cloudy, the sun unlikely to break through and the gusts now dying down. Five, six hours?

  He would come back in the late afternoon, after working on what was overdue at the Dutch people’s place. There was an arbutus bush not five metres from the washing-line, more to the left and on its own: dangerous, on the very edge, but possible. It was overhung by holm oak branches and still in the shadows. He could darken his face with earth. If she spotted him, he would say he was clearing brush.

  This is why, when he does return in the late afternoon, he brings the big curved knife with the twine-bound handle. It belonged to his grandfather: the old handle is smooth and polished, the blade-edge nicked with use but as sharp as a razor. His face is soiled, like a soldier’s. He wouldn’t have minded being a soldier, even if his year of military service was not all fun and games. Cleaning out toilets. Squatting in wet trenches in freezing winds.

  She doesn’t appear. The air is cool and damp because there are storms on the coast and the wind is blowing up into the mountains. The girls come out on their own, run about a bit, look at the pool, run into and out of the barn. Then he notices a suspicious-looking character, suddenly, at the side of the house. A hippy. There are lots of them in Valdaron, banging on drums and smoking cannabis and having sex everywhere, just like the old times. They must be the second generation and Jean-Luc hates them. This is a young type, in his twenties, dressed in one of those long Arab coats with a hood. A new wave to replace the ones with long grey hair and creased faces. Maybe he’s a hippy Arab.

  He thinks, as he watches the young no-gooder loitering at the side of the house, of Madame Sanissac up at Les Pins, who at the age of eighty-five was stabbed to death during her siesta. A passing hippy did it; in fact, he lived in the next hamlet, the one with all the ruins. He tried to burn her body and the smoke got people running, but he’d gone by then. The firemen took ages to come, it was so remote, and meanwhile the neighbours (all three of them) had a job keeping her blazing body in the bedroom under control, because there was no running water and the well was low and the bucket took ages to creak down and up. The room was black, afterwards; even the beams were scorched so badly they had to be pulled out, in the end. Jean-Luc saw it and wanted to be a fireman. And now Madame Sanissac’s house is the Swiss place, done up to the nines with three bathrooms and a jacuzzi and not even haunted. It takes Jean-Luc half an hour to drive up there, but it’s an easy job, keeping the lawn down on the sit-u
p mower.

  He grips the brush-knife’s handle as the no-gooder joins the girls in the yard. They appear to know him.

  Jean-Luc crouches lower as they pass, their voices like twittering bats, except for their hippy friend. The kids might still be getting kidnapped, though. The hippy might have fooled them, given them sweets. You hear a lot about it on the news, these days. Jean-Luc is on full alert, as if the horns are blowing and the dogs are going mad, out on full stretch. They all go into the house.

  He waits until it’s almost dark, then makes his way back through the trees to where he’s hidden his mobilette. All this military-style operation excites him; he’s not too dejected. Staking out in his military togs. Better than watching telly with Maman moaning and shrieking upstairs.

  He returns the next morning, at dawn, sure of seeing her now. His heart leaps when he sees the phantom shapes of the sheets through the dark trees. And then it begins to rain. Although the rising sun was a red ball and there were rays at the bottom of it, he didn’t think the rain would blow all the way up here, but it does. She might run out and try to rescue the sheets, but she doesn’t. The rain gusts against his face, pattering on the living leaves and the dead leaves. He shivers, beginning to feel the wet reach his skin. He doesn’t want to be ill. He gives up.

  It rains on and off all day. He watches the weather on the telly: little golden suns cover the south, the rain-clouds now over the Alps. His heart lifts. During the night he wets his hand and sticks it out between the shutters: a brisk easterly wind. A drying wind. He hears it skittering along the street like small kids.

  He’s waiting again behind the leading arbutus bush. From one side of it he can see a wall of white cotton and the door of the house: from the other, he has a view of the swimming pool, the trampled fence around the seed-bed, the half-uprooted cherry tree and the huge black square in the barn wall where the old doors creaked before someone nicked them: Marcel Lagrange, probably.

  The side and rear of the house are tall and full of small windows like prison windows, so he has to be careful of his movements, even behind the goolie bush on the wood’s edge. The brush-knife is tucked away safely under the bush’s lower branches, in case he steps on it. The hippy’s trousers and Arab coat are hung next to the sheets. Perhaps they’ve bumped him off.

  Half an hour passes, the sun rising up just clear of the trees. The high clouds are the fish-scale type that mean good weather, and the birds are going mad as if he isn’t there. It makes him want to go hunting again, the way he can lose himself, become like a beady-eyed animal or even a plant, watching nothing but the new light growing on the leaves, so slowly he can’t see it move. Every sound as if it’s not accidental. The ants on their business. The rustlings. The freshness. The little red squirrel not even realising he’s there, snuffling away to itself. He hasn’t done this for years. It’s when he’s at his happiest, he realises. His whole problem was being born human. The breeze bringing smells, including a smell of burnt toast.

  Something swoops out of the side of the barn and he realises what it is: the swallow. The swallow’s arrived. It’s come back to the same nest ever since he was a boy, exploring the ruins after the hippies had been chased out. It’s a touch early, this year. It must be twenty-five years old, at least.

  Once he watched a hedgehog for hours; he kept so still it sniffed his foot, making little grunts and snorts like an old man. He didn’t find it again.

  He shifts to release the cramp in his haunches. No one has yet come into the yard. The house stays silent. Usually, the little girls play in the barn or just in front for a while in the morning and the Englishwoman comes in and out to check, but it’s still too early. It is just like waiting for a rabbit or a boar. He raises the throwaway camera to his face and looks through the viewfinder.

  He has never taken a photograph in his life, except once when some hikers asked him to, with their own camera. It’s like a gun: you shoot with it. Without killing anything. This is why he’s wearing his fingerless hunting gloves.

  He’s surprised this time when the sheets swell in the little eye, look bigger, although not as big as they would in the binoculars hanging round his neck. His father found them in the woods after the war, a German pair still in their leather case, and only used them when out hunting. Apart from a rainbow effect in one eyepiece that surrounds bright objects like coloured fur, they’re in good condition.

  He’s holding the camera the wrong way, that’s why everything’s swollen up. The lens is pointing towards him. The view-finder magnifies the view, in that position. He looks again the same wrong way round and amazingly, as if he’s attracted her, the Englishwoman appears in the little rectangle. She has on a bright yellow sweater that makes her look about nineteen. His heart beats just as it did in the hunt. The sheets hide her progress. He waits for her legs to appear below them. Nothing. She disappears behind the sheets and he waits for her legs to show up, her feet. Nothing.

  He takes little crouched steps to the other edge of the bush, where he can see the yard in full.

  She’s squatting at the edge of the pool, dipping her hand in from the look of it. It’s too far to take a picture. The sheets clap in a sudden gust and she lifts her head towards him. He stays very still. He’s in the shadows, in camouflage.

  He waits for her to come back and take down the washing. She stands by the side of the pool hut and takes her glasses off and puts them down next to a lump of coloured cloth. She puts her arms over her ears as if she can’t bear some noise or other. No, she’s taking off her yellow sweater – it comes off over her head, showing her tummy. And then she pulls off the top, too, which is a dark red tee shirt. And then she unbuttons her jeans, from the look of it, and steps out of them. Maybe she’s a nympho and an exhibitionist and knows he’s here: he saw something on the telly recently about people with strange compulsions.

  She scratches her back with both hands and leans forward and her bra comes off, dropped on the little heap of clothes by the coloured cloth that he now recognises as a towel. He turns his head away for a moment, feeling guilty and full of sin, although he hasn’t been to church since he was eighteen.

  She’s bending down and lifting each knee in turn: her underpants join her bra. She takes her pulse: no, she’s taking off her watch. He has stopped breathing. He starts again. Her body is paler than expected: from this distance it might be covered in a pale body suit as tight as a toreador’s, she might not be nude at all – except for the two brown eyes on her chest and the spot of black fur below her tummy, which he knows smells gamy because, when he was a kid, the others picked up an empty sardine tin they said smelt exactly like Francine Sellier’s pussy.

  She hugs herself in the cool air, turning her back on him to show two white uncooked chestnuts of buttock that, even from this distance, surprise him, because they look bigger than when they were inside her jeans.

  He’s sweating, giving off a stink from under his old gear, which itself stinks of boar’s fur and smoke. His frog wants to croak under his trousers but he ignores it. Carefully, silently, as he used to do when out hunting, he backs off into the trees and makes his way round, losing sight of her for a few painful moments, to where the wood turns into bracken behind the tumbled wall.

  He uses the standing part of the wall to creep even closer, as far behind cover as he can go, to the wild growth near the back of the hut where the builders dumped their sand. It is mostly spurge here, the heavy-headed type that starts off early and before you know it, before you’ve got used to spring, it’s flowering at the height of your belly. He sees his father towering over a clump of spurge and warning him never to break it, never to cut it or he’d blister and burn on its bitter milk. He was about four or five. He misses his father. He doesn’t like crouching in the spurge, he’s fearful of spurge, but it’s good cover, with its heavy toilet-brush heads, its fat stems full of their deadly juice.

  A twig cracks underfoot as he shifts his big boots. He keeps very still, crouched, becoming veg
etation, a shadow. Tiny black ants crawl over his boot, following each other up one of the laces and then onto his leg. It’s a good thing his trousers are tucked into his thick socks, or they’d crawl inside. He’s forgotten his brush-knife over behind the washing line.

  She’s squatting by the pool halfway up along the side, still holding herself with her arms. She’s definitely naked as Eve. He’s so close he can see a red mark on her back where the bra’s strap must have pressed; a mole above the cleft of her back parts. He hopes the water’s pH levels are not too high or too low.

  He turns the camera round to take a picture and she shrinks; what he wants is her face, and he only has the side of her face, the breeze moving strands of black hair in front of it. He is only about five metres from her, but she seems very small in the viewfinder. He thought the camera would have enlarged her, her body being the most important object in the picture. But she stays small.

  It isn’t like pictures in a magazine, when the person being photographed is always large and clear. He doesn’t press the trigger.

  This is the greatest gift he has ever been given in his life. He is like God, seeing what normal people never see. He lifts the binoculars to his eyes and her pale, crouched body slides into view and obliterates everything else; he closes one eye to stop the rainbow blur covering her skin. The German binoculars are so good he can see a vaccination mark on her upper shoulder, a glint of moisture in her eye. That’s sometimes all you can see of an animal, that glint. She’ll get a cold just staying there, he thinks.

  And then she stands up, as if hearing his thoughts. She turns towards him and walks along the edge of the pool in his direction, but looking to the side, at the water. The kitten clinging on upside-down between her legs is very black and has a thick coat. He lowers the binoculars and lifts the camera just clear of the spurge heads and sees her swinging into it and presses the trigger. The camera’s little click scares him, sounding very loud. But she doesn’t have the ears of an animal. Nor the nose. The wind, anyway, is very light at the moment and blowing in his direction. He thinks there might have been a flash when he took the picture, like the flash of sun on a gun-barrel that warns the quarry, but she hasn’t reacted.