by Adam Thorpe
Nick wondered aloud, quite a few minutes after passing the Zone, what Jean-Luc would say to Lucy Sandler about the failed lawn. Jamie gave a short, sharp laugh: although he had not yet met the ‘handyman’, he found the subject amusing, for some reason. Nick had set the cherry tree upright and covered its roots again, a ten-minute spell of gardening which made him feel he should leave his job, sell up, retire to France and become a rural backwoodsman writing bestselling historical novels (while he hadn’t written a line of fiction since school, his later essays had their moments).
There was the hint of a greenish tinge to the pool, they’d noticed in passing – its surface ruffled in spasms by the wind, blackened bits of nature floating within. We have not been assiduous enough, thought Sarah. There was a special vacuum in the shed, with a coiling, python-like pipe, but that was Jean-Luc’s sphere. Nick begged the pool not to be naughty, which amused the girls.
‘It needs a sacrifice,’ said Jamie. ‘Like a sacred lake.’
‘After you, Jamie,’ Nick cried in a jolly manner that produced only a mew of distaste in his son.
Following a good stretch, the poor elephant’s fifty-four-year-old body taxed by several kilos of Beans who rode in the backpack like a stately Maharajah (Maharanee, Sarah corrected him), they stopped at a rock in the middle of the high heathy area with its wastes of broom and heather, munching on bread, dried sausage, sticks of celery, market cheese and ripe cherry tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes were a mistake, of course: one bite disembowelled them, their contents shooting out like shrapnel.
Slicing a nobbled saucisson with his curved, very sharp Thai knife, Jamie asked, after an unusual lull in their chatter: ‘So what’s in this murder deal at the house a few years back?’
Nick blinked in surprise. ‘Come again, Jamie?’
‘Yeah, this guy who was pushed off the roof at Les Fesses?’
‘Les Fesses’ was, in fact, Jamie’s joke and not copied off Alan, whom he had never met; elucidating it to the girls (that ‘Fesses’ meant ‘bottom’ in French) had resulted in an entire afternoon of instability and near-insurrection.
‘Pushed off the woof?’ squealed Alicia, as if anywhere else might have been acceptable.
Tammy left a mouthful of celery half-chewed in her mouth because the noise might have drowned out something important.
‘Yeah,’ said Jamie, with an oracular smile.
Sarah suggested he meant the young member of the Resistance shot on the track.
‘No, that’s being shot and this is being pushed off the roof.’
‘Sounds like a bit of local Gothic,’ Nick said, deciding not to admit his prior knowledge.
‘The shepherd told me. He’s wiser than all of you Cambridge guys put together. He told me a lot about how to raise goats and sheep. Like, eating chestnuts helps them build up grease on their skin for the winter?’
‘I didn’t know you spoke French that well, Jamie.’
Sarah sounded genuinely surprised. She’d meant to emphasise that, in fact: a subtle difference. That well. It was a minor slip.
Jamie seemed to crouch, suddenly, without moving a muscle. He said fuck so quietly it might have been something else, a sigh or a groan. Then he looked up at her with a smile, emphasising his comments with the Thai knife. ‘GCSE grade A French at fourteen but I’m not all up myself about it. I was really good at school until I was fourteen. Right up until the day of the triffid,’ he added, because no one had said anything in between.
Triffid! Tammy’s ears pricked. At fourteen Jamie had caught Helena’s nickname for Sarah and run with it for several years until his father had exploded. Jamie had told Tammy all about it: the glass in the front door smashing, her father out of control, throwing things, hitting him. She could barely imagine it, because her father hardly ever lost his temper, and then he only shouted. Each time Jamie recounted it, it got worse, more violent: broken bones, by the end. The police. There was a secret Daddy she didn’t know about, he implied. Tammy didn’t want to know about it, but Jamie’s version of the story was planted deep in her consciousness, nevertheless.
‘No, sorry, sorry, correction,’ said Nick, raising his hand and sounding like someone in Parliament. ‘You started smoking cannabis before the separation. Dates, dates.’
‘Wha’?’ Jamie’s face looked as if he were trying to make something out in a fierce wind.
‘Is “murder” killing someone or just putting them in the junjun?’ asked Alicia. She had a tomato-pip on the end of her nose.
Tammy pretended to laugh and it came out in a hideous cackle: ‘Putting them in the dungeon! Bear with no brains.’
‘Shall we change the subject?’ suggested Sarah, brightly. ‘Who’s for an apple?’
‘Not if it’s got crumbs and earwigs and catkins all over it, as usual,’ Tammy said, wrinkling her nose. She’d surprised herself with ‘catkins’. Her brain was growing every day and it was wondrous to behold: she just let it.
Jamie watched his stepmother, only about twelve years older than himself and young-looking for her age (‘the perpetual student’, his mother would call her), peeling the apple for Beans. The wastes of broom stirred in a sudden gust all around them. Tammy was picking the skin off a slice of saucisson. Beans uncurled her fist to show a crushed splodge of Camembert peppered with the rock’s grittiness and said, ‘Shop. Maramama Beans.’ It didn’t ease the tension.
Sarah’s eyes glinted with wet. ‘Triffid’ always did something intimately nasty inside her, like a school nickname.
‘Girls, why don’t you play hide-and-seek in the bushes?’ she said, finding strength from somewhere, she never knew where. The broom was chest-high, it was a good idea. ‘But Tammy, you’ll have to hang on to Beans the whole time. OK?’
‘Then that’ll only be two of us doing it,’ Tammy complained, already off the rock.
Alicia started counting down from thirty in her usual breathless dirge; Beans and Tammy had already vanished. To the adults on the rock, there was nothing but the dark-green sprays of massed broom, shifting like a cartoon sea. In fact, Tammy was just behind the rock and she had her hand over Beans’s mouth. The broom sprays covered them. It was like a small arched room. The dirge ended on minus three, as Tammy had just been doing minuses at school and they were a fascination to her sister, who was also said to be advanced for her age, although Tammy found her stupid.
‘I’m coming, ready or not!’ Alicia shouted; her voice, despite its decibels, taken by another gust. She also seemed to her parents to vanish, kept track of only by glimpses of her yellow hooded cardie, moving further and further away.
Now the adults thought they were alone. Tammy could just hear them over the wind rustling in the broom.
Jamie asked if they wanted him to carry on with the murder story.
‘If you have to,’ said Nick.
‘That’s it,’ Jamie chuckled. ‘That’s all he’d say. Il était poussé. Kind of chatty guy?’
Although Nick knew the dead man was Bruno the shepherd’s brother, and called Raoul Lagrange, he pretended not to for Sarah’s sake. ‘Better that way,’ he said.
‘So you’re not interested, Mr Historian?’
‘I don’t frankly believe it.’
‘Because it’s me telling you.’
‘Nothing to do with you per se, Jamie. It’s just that the evidence follows a conviction. Dangerous. You started out with a conviction that the house was negative and lo and behold here be the evidence. Remember Iraq and WMD?’
Jamie glared at his father with undisguised venom.
‘He saw it happen. J’était là. Je I’ai vu. Il était poussé. I was there. I saw it or him. He was pushed. Original research. Peter’s always said that’s your weak point, Nick.’
‘Peter can go fuck himself,’ said Nick, in a quiet, defeated tone.
There was a pause in which Sarah felt she might start trembling.
‘That explains the funerary bouquet,’ she said, in a jolly voice.
Bleak, comp
licated stories trailed away around her, leading to huddled figures in cowls in the middle of fields, to want and famine and disease.
The shepherd had made it clear to Nick that it was an accident: the man had used that very word. Jamie infuriated him with his elaborations and dramas, his embellishments, his fabulations. He cleared his throat, intent on dampening it all down, avoiding conflict. Jamie would win if there was outright conflict; he would destroy the sabbatical, the idyll. This was undoubtedly his twisted aim – on a mission from Helena, probably.
‘You sure, Jamie, he wasn’t talking about the young man murdered on the track by the Nazis?’
He could be so obtuse, Sarah thought.
‘Found you!’ came faintly from afar, desperate now.
‘Even I know,’ said Jamie, ‘that a guy in his forties – that’s roughly the shepherd’s age, right? – is too young to have seen a guy being shot by the Nazis. It’s like Helena says, you have to position everyone around you as stupid. Maybe not Sarah but Sarah’s just the skivvy, so that’s OK.’
Ah, thought Nick. Helena is, after all, behind this one. He would go Zen. He would not let her win.
‘I don’t think skivvy’s quite the word,’ laughed Sarah, her eyebrows right up like a clown’s.
The girls had all disappeared. Could Tammy be trusted with Beans? Voices were snatched away in the wind. The broom was a slur of wildness. The clouds were grey-black and piled up over the horizon, over the sea. Her hair was unmanageable, the shifting broom made her think of her hair, made unmanageable by the water here. She ought to do it every month, she reflected, but that’s expensive. Everyone else has money. She had noticed silver threads in her comb, like a character in a fairy tale. Jamie was pathetic, in the end. He had nothing but his own wounded pride. He was to be pitied.
‘’Course I asked whodunnit,’ Jamie pursued, ‘but he kind of shrugged and held his lips between his fingers?’
Sarah nodded. ‘So why did he mention it in the first place?’
‘I told him the house was really, really negative.’
‘Right,’ said Nick. ‘OK. That’s nice to know.’
‘That’s bats,’ muttered Sarah.
‘Maybe we should ask the Chambords about this,’ Nick suggested. ‘On second thoughts, maybe we should just let it drop, if you’ll excuse the pun.’
‘He grabbed my elbow and was pretty excited,’ Jamie pursued. ‘He thinks you’re all disgustingly rich and maybe American.’
‘You put him right on that one?’
‘’Fraid my French isn’t good enough.’ This came with a self-consciously sly grin.
‘Where are the girls?’ asked Sarah, sing-song.
Tammy removed her hot hand from Beans’s mouth and waited for release. Beans didn’t make a sound, as if caught in a spell. The broom made its own swaddle, as in swaddling clothes. Tammy had already decided where the TV room would go, and the bunk-bedded bedroom. A wail went up from far away, barely carried to them on the wind.
‘The lost soul,’ said Nick, standing and waving.
‘Essentially,’ he said, on the plod back home – all of them anticipating a nice mug of tea and the chocolate cake Sarah had made with Alicia – ‘history’s made up of little bits sort of strung together, but each little bit isn’t the past itself, it’s only a memory of the past, and strictly verbal at that, so it’s all pretty provisional and somehow loose, and my job – our job – is to tighten it up as far as it’ll go. But the past – the living present of the past, I mean – is gone. Kaput. Finito. All that’s left of the great lady is a necklace. Or a bit of the necklace. That’s what people forget. Especially the archaeologists,’ he added, checking Jamie was still listening.
Now and again father and son managed a truce in which messages were exchanged by carrier pigeon rather than crow. It often followed one of the nastier skirmishes. This present truce had begun with Jamie stating that his father’s job was a waste of time, breath and money, and completely divorced from reality. Nick had asked him what he meant by ‘reality’, apart from Beans using one’s head as a Congo bongo drum. Jamie had reckoned real ‘reality’ was something hidden behind what we think of as reality; he was into solitude, he said, because other people got in the way of real reality. The discussion then swerved into the meaning of history. Tammy was holding her father’s hand and letting the words flow in and out of her head without capturing many. She was too low down to be heard: she’d tried, pulling on her father’s large hand, but kept being interrupted.
Incessant gull-cries from behind: Alicia was tormenting Sarah by dragging back in her foot-slogging misery, describing in medical detail the state of her blisters (she hadn’t any, her feet were as smooth as a peeled onion). Sarah, while irritated, was also marvelling. Only yesterday, it seemed, Alicia was not constructed, knew nothing of anything, not even pain or the pleasure of sleep overwhelming you at the end of a day. She was not, full stop. Sarah had made her so well that she could fabricate, fib, flirt.
‘I wanted to be an archaeologist, yeah?’ said Jamie. ‘But the steering wheel kind of came off.’
He walked in a strange way. He dragged his feet and failed to keep a straight line. The bottoms of his trousers hit the ground around his boots and were scuffed to threads and shreds, or were maybe bought like that. You could see his underpants. His tee shirt had tiny holes in it and a large one exposing an underarm when he swung his hand up, and bore a discreet logo that said Sticky Marks.
‘There’s still time,’ Nick suggested, without enough conviction. He’d never heard anything about Jamie wanting to be an archaeologist. ‘Bags of time.’
‘And you can open the bags when you need more time,’ Tammy remarked, in a loud enough voice for once.
The trees either side were silent. Sometimes a track between trees could be menacing. There was only the crunch of their footsteps, now, as if they were eating their way to the house through a line of biscuits.
Did French birds sing in French?
These faint springtime whiffs of woodland darknesses were not English – even the resin from the pines was a foreign epiphany.
Yes, Sarah thought: there are these bad moments when you feel you are nothing but an intrusion. After we are all over, the creatures and the plants and the endlessly moving waters will breathe easy again. The historyless sigh of the seas.
The afternoon weather had turned: the gusts smelt of rain, while cracks of light sheathed the dark clouds so they resembled high, glistening cliffs towering to infinity. She looked up and was glad she was here, after all.
As soon as she was set down in the yard, Beans ran towards the new fence in her splay-legged, two-year-old’s way. Alicia and Tammy began to send out rescue craft in the form of leaves to insects failing to swim in the swimming pool, feebly battling against extinction.
‘I don’t suppose that’s electric,’ said Nick. ‘The new fence there. He wouldn’t go to that extreme.’
‘There are these like really small magnetic forces,’ Jamie continued, ‘you measure with something called a torsion-balance?’ He nodded at his own words. ‘We’ve got the equivalent in our brains.’
Beans stopped within inches of the wire and turned round, grinning at them. ‘She knows she shouldn’t touch,’ said Sarah, smiling. ‘Cheeky thing. She’s a terror.’
Nick agreed. ‘Beans!’ he called out, a touch snappishly. ‘Don’t touch the fence, will you? I know just that feeling,’ he added.
Beans picked up a pebble and threw it in the air and grinned at them. Jamie was rolling a cigarette; Sarah assumed it wasn’t a spliff. She was looking forward to the next trip to Aix, to the Centre des Archives d’Outre Mer, to the grown-up, polished haven of pinewood tables and stacked shelves, the order and the quiet, the secretly enthralled scholars, the oiled precision of a space in which no children were permis.
She started walking towards Beans. Nick followed her, the empty baby-chair at his side, spilling its straps and buckles and almost tripping him up. Beans ran
away from the fence, teasing them, and her mother trotted after her, playing catch. Beans squealed in the full agony and delight of being chased as Tammy and Alicia played by the pool. The skin of the water prevented the insects – types of winged beetles or ants – from clambering aboard the rescue craft that were too far from the girls’ hands to guide, although they stretched their arms as far as they could over the water.
They were told to stop and Tammy joined her father by the fence. He was contemplating the two low wires strung through the moulded hooks on each short post. He was listening. A soft, regular click, like someone tutting in their heads. He bent down and touched the upper wire with the tip of his finger.
The slight, if disagreeable, furry sensation he was used to from long-ago games of dare was not what happened. He’d fallen out of a tree and hit the ground shoulder-first. He was still doing so.
‘Bloody hell!’ he yelled, flapping his hand. ‘That could kill someone!’
Sarah had caught Beans a few yards off and was squeezing her. ‘You are joking, Nick. Tammy, don’t touch.’
‘I am not joking. I feel ill.’ He took his pulse on his wrist. It was steady. ‘He’s mad. Completely insane. If the kids touch that, they’ll be shot across the yard. Fried for breakfast.’
‘You nearly let Beans touch it,’ Sarah said, wonderingly.
‘I didn’t let her! I didn’t know!’
Tammy was dying to touch it, but was told to retreat.
‘What’s the big issue?’ asked Jamie, ambling up.
‘The big issue,’ said Sarah, as if ticking him off, ‘is that the idiot French handyman has put up a massively powerful, potentially lethal electric fence knowing there are small kids around, with no warning, to keep wild boars off the owners’ stupid prospective lawn.’ She shook her head and snorted like a pony, she was so cross.
