The Standing Pool

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘It’s all context,’ she explained, rather needlessly. ‘While he was posing, it was acceptable. But he crossed the invisible line, he entered the real world. He should have put on the dressing gown supplied.’

  ‘How does this apply to our impromptu bather?’

  ‘Let me think, Dr Mallinson. OK, I suppose what I’m saying is that in an emergency, the rules change. You don’t notice. I didn’t actually notice I was still at the birthday-suit stage. It must have looked fairly weird, like a scene from Carry On Camping or something. And I can tell you: I could hardly pull my knickers back on for the goose-bumps.’

  Nick smiled: ‘I think you being naked makes it Greek and heroic, rather than comic.’

  ‘Wild differences of interpretation, as you would say yourself.’

  All she’d had time for was to shout out a warning as Jean-Luc had advanced like a drunk towards the water, going yai-yai-yai-yai.

  He’d toppled in like a felled tree; the splash had seemed to drill each of its white pips into the air in slow motion. She dropped her clothes – knickers, bra, shirt, socks, jeans, sweater – where she stood and darted forwards across the yard to try to help as the water slapped vigorously at the sides like applause. She was only aware of a film of cold covering her bare skin, particularly over her buttocks.

  He seemed to be below the level of the water, his hair like a giant black sea-urchin. He might well have been surfacing, he might have made it out onto the side himself, without her help. She nearly fell in herself, reaching from the side for his shoulders and clasping the thick wet cloth of his tunic, pulling as hard as she could.

  His hands began to move under the water, propelling him in the right direction so that his dead weight lessened. His face was above the water and somehow huger, like a giant’s face, sheened with water and bright with cold. It struck her as being repellently physical, perhaps because his bent nose was streaming and his eyes were shut and in his open mouth she could see old fillings, strings of saliva or water connecting his bruised-looking lips, the unshaven little bristle-patches under each nostril that careless men never bother with but look so awful.

  He was groaning rather than spluttering, so maybe in the end her efforts, which were in her view considerable and put at least one vertebra out in her back and strained a muscle in her right shoulder, were not essential. Whatever the facts, he didn’t drown, but by the time he’d heaved himself out she had gained an impression of great weight caused by the water soaking his clothes, which was what she remembered about her swimming lessons, when the whole class had had to swim in their old clothes and learn how to hold someone in difficulties under the chin.

  The real thing was confusing and messy, though; and embarrassing – not necessarily because she was starkers. She blushed when she thought about it, afterwards; the way she had shouted and flapped around him like a feeble bird, pulling not on his body but on his camouflage jacket so that it rose above his head until he’d managed to reach the side himself and she’d realised she was making things worse, and had let go, proffering only a hand in case he slipped back under.

  When he sat on the side and opened his eyes, she was shocked; his eyes were red and swollen from the chlorine, as unseeing as a blind man’s. For an instant of madness she thought she might have been too late, that he was in fact drowned and had turned into a zombie. He was in pain, though, and zombies never feel pain.

  ‘C’est les plantes,’ he groaned. ‘Merde, putain, ces putains de plantes! Yai-yai-yai!’

  She understood, eventually: there were purplish patches on his hands and his face, the purple moving around strangely on the fish-cold surface of his skin. He flapped his hand as if expressing amazement, over and over. He was being rather brave. Sarah knew about the toxicity of oleanders, but not about those big, innocent-looking weeds. Supposing the girls had tried to pick them? They were pretty enough, in a clumsy sort of way. No, they were quite ugly, from another angle. Now they were almost all dealt with, anyway.

  She told him in her turbid French that she was going to get dressed, and ran over to her clothes dumped near the door and pulled them on, while he just sat in a spreading glint of water on the side of the pool, shivering in the sharp, unpleasant gusts. He moaned as if in grief, forehead resting on his knees.

  Once she was decent, she came back to his side and made him stop rubbing his eyes by pulling his hands away. His fluttering eyelids were even more puffed up, the eyeballs filmed over. Holding onto his wrist as he stood, she then guided him to the house. He was whimpering, now, holding his head down. Her hair was wetting her sweater’s collar unpleasantly.

  She felt the stiffness in his whole body through his wrist, the way he resisted her and then relented, letting her guide him, trusting her like a little boy. But when she considered the way he had been with her little girls and then today, skulking in the underbrush while she was bathing naked, she thought of him again as menacing. It was odd, leading someone menacing by the hand, like a child.

  She didn’t say anything about the menacing side to Nick, who was scratching his head sleepily when she burst into the bedroom to announce the emergency. All she told him was that Jean-Luc had lesions in his eyes from cutting the wrong plant. She knew the word ‘lesions’ from her child’s emergency first-aid book, and it made her feel she was more in control of the situation.

  ‘He’s keeping his head under the kitchen tap, but it’s not getting better. I think the chlorine made it worse.’

  ‘Like sow thistles,’ Nick remarked, hastily pulling on his trousers. ‘I’ll always remember that from school. The old field behind the pavilion, cutting sow thistles with our penknives then flicking them at the enemy ranks. And that itching powder stuff from the hedges. Great fun!’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Sarah, suddenly desperate for tea. ‘That was boarding school, this is normal life.’

  * * *

  Nick drove him to the hospital in St-Maurice, while she had a hot shower. Jean-Luc had held his face under the kitchen tap for ages but his eyes were worse: the lids looked as if they were turned over and might burst in a spray of blood, while the eyeballs themselves were a filigree of tiny wriggling veins like an elaborate brooch in which the dark iris sat like a mute stone. His large knuckles were encircled in violent purple blotches, as if he’d been crushing blackberries.

  The girls had stayed asleep throughout. She’d had a vague hope that the action might have brought Jamie down to help, but it hadn’t. Jamie had been tenaciously semi-absent for the last two weeks, appearing at odd times to raid the fridge (they had padlocked the wine cellar). He’d carry a fragrance of woodsmoke, paraffin and cannabis, and would sleep for twelve hours in his cosy den of an attic: say, from nine in the morning to nine at night. He was living some parallel life. Reasonably friendly, he kept his other life a secret. The babysitting deal had been forgotten. Sarah was oddly unconcerned; she had placed Jamie in a part of her mind that was sealed off from the rest, like something boxed in lead.

  Right now he was up in the attic, in a sleep phase. One day soon, perhaps tomorrow, Jamie would leave entirely, only to pop up again at Helena’s cottage in Wales with wild stories of his father’s and his stepmother’s wickedness, merrily rewriting history, building castles of fantasy in some murky corner of his brain radioactive with jealousy and loathing. And Helena, as before, would write nasty, accusing emails to which the only possible reply was silence. Meanwhile they would have to clean up the mess in his den, empty the pan of stale piss, open the windows wide to release the stink. It was always like scouring out some underground animal’s lair. That one day he would grow out of it, find a job, become an upright citizen and make lots of money, seemed less of a forlorn hope than that they would succeed in embracing his present self with the arms of selfless, parental love.

  She occupied herself after the drama by cutting out paper fish with the girls, because it was April Fool’s Day later in the week and the French secretly stuck fish on each other’s backs with sellotape, shou
ting out Poisson d’avril when the victims realised. They were looking up names of fish and writing them on the cut-outs in both English and French as an educational addition. Sarah felt Alicia and Tammy were advancing in leaps and bounds with their erratic home-learning: they were doing no more than two hours a day of actual ‘classes’ with either her or Nick, but it was peculiarly effective.

  Goldfish. Poisson Rouge.

  ‘Red’s not gold,’ said Alicia. They looked up ‘gold’.

  Shark. Requin.

  She herself was walking about with a crab-shape that said I Hate Jamie scotched permanently on her back, and Jamie no doubt felt the same.

  ‘Hate is such a strong word,’ her hate-filled mother would always say.

  This ugly part of Sarah that hated her stepson caused her to doubt herself. It undermined her self-belief: the objective, dispassionate historian. Jamie lurked in her mind: deep, almost recondite. Compared to Jamie, Jean-Luc was a paper fish that could be torn off.

  ‘I met Georges Chambord in St-Maurice and had a wonderfully intense chat,’ said Nick, as they sat down to supper. ‘He said that life consists of three things, like a game of poker: luck, strategy and guile. Le hasard, la stratégie, et la ruse. I had to look up ruse, because “ruse” isn’t right. Guile, trickery. Good, hm? He’s invited us to dinner on Friday, by the way.’

  ‘Not with Des the Res, I hope.’

  ‘Oh, presumably not.’

  Jean-Luc hovered over their conversation, tainting it. By the end of the meal he was firmly squatting between them.

  ‘As I’ve reiterated several times,’ Nick sighed, ‘he may simply have been birdwatching. He was coming here to do some work anyway and arrived early to bird watch. And got incredibly embarrassed. Although the absence of his van or mobilette, that’s a weeny bit suspicious. Anyway, let’s not think about causation before the evidence is absolutely solid. Or as solid as anything can be in this world of apparence.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Sarah, after a moment, ‘I think Peter’s sobriquet for you is rather a good one.’

  ‘I don’t want to know.’

  ‘The Tortoise,’ she said.

  ‘I can think of worse,’ Nick sighed, after a moment’s silence. He was amazed at the way, whenever Peter Osterhauser’s name was mentioned, a kind of flat-fish of venom would flip in his chest. Occasionally he would imagine himself as a professor in somewhere like Freiburg in the late 1930s, and Peter as a Jewish colleague. How hard not to have denounced him, or at least watched the poor man being taken away and not felt relish. The Tortoise!

  He’d put a Yusef Lateef CD on the hi-fi: the sax skittered about over the urgent drums. Very urban, very somewhere else. He should, Nick thought, have become a jazz drummer. Jazz was utterly of the present moment. It was life itself. Professor Osterhauser played classical viola. Nick played CDs. The Smiths. The Bobo Stenson Trio.

  ‘I don’t see Tortoise,’ he said, eventually. ‘I don’t get it.’

  Sarah pulled a face, absently staring at the fire. She didn’t like jazz very much. She always saw polished Fifties cars gleaming in rain under streetlamps.

  ‘There isn’t worse,’ he all but pleaded. ‘Is there?’

  ‘Buttered Scone?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A play on Mallinson. It’s slang for number one in Bingo, apparently.’

  ‘And so?’ Nick’s heart was hammering in anticipation: he could hear Peter’s simpering laugh, like a bus’s air-brakes.

  ‘I’m not sure. A sort of cluster of subtle meanings, double-entendres. You know what he’s like.’

  ‘Like the Bourbons, like Jamie, he learns nothing and he forgets nothing.’

  ‘It’s not important, Nick. I think we should concentrate on the problem in hand. Can we change the music?’

  ‘We’ve concentrated all day,’ he replied, gloomily picturing his colleagues swapping nicknames for him in the buttery, spinning falsities about him in the dark corridors and dining halls of Fitzherbert College, panelled and floored with countless acres of English oak or plundered African mahogany. Really, it was just a miasma of jealous bickerings overlaid with a sheen of intellect. Dark castles of fantasy.

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘at the risk of you calling me more names, I still think we should sift the evidence first.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Holmes.’

  They had sketched out two plausible scenarios over the Jean-Luc incident. Either he was innocent, the binoculars merely for bird-spotting or hunting purposes and the machete-like knife for cutting underbrush; or he was guilty of, at the least, voyeurism. The horrible hunters had binoculars, they had noticed. They had found the binoculars and the big knife amongst the cut plants on Nick’s return from the hospital; they were careful not to touch the spattered traces of sap, still milky and wet in places.

  As Nick’s favourite phrase had it, history was 99 per cent lies and 1 per cent the awful truth.

  Whatever its truth was, there was an ominous feel to the drama. Genuinely ominous, not as in ‘That sounds ominous.’ Omen, omened, of good or ill omen, ominous, ominously, ominousness. From the Latin. He had once written a schoolboy talk on historical omens such as comets, and (in the days when he would sit for hours in the school library, wondering what to be, educating himself into donhood) had been struck by the change of letter from ‘e’ to ‘i’: why did it change? Such things would beguile him back then. A strange boy, he supposed now, if he could meet him.

  That’s why he’d put on the jazz. Jazz was the opposite of ominous.

  Jean-Luc would not be blind for ever, the hospital doctor had said. The poor man had to sport rather natty aviator-type dark glasses that changed his appearance entirely. He looked like a fashion victim, Nick joked. They had joked rather a lot about an incident that was full of pain and shame. Nick had been initially amazed to hear that Sarah had been secretly skinny-dipping.

  ‘Perhaps you were making love with the gardener in the spurge,’ he’d joked. ‘The Gardener in the Spurge,’ he repeated, in a breathy, dramatic manner.

  ‘Yup, and that’s why he fell into the pool.’

  ‘Water sports?’

  Not just ominousness, but unpleasantness. Something soiled, even in the jokes. Something lost for good.

  ‘There is this kind of burlesque side to it all,’ he mused. ‘There always is, somehow. Maybe not with the Holocaust or carpet bombing or slavery.’ He was nodding thoughtfully, frowning a little. Sarah felt shut out, as usual; he was doing this more and more. Prelude to bumbliness. ‘I have to say,’ he suddenly announced, wide-eyed, ‘that when you burst into the bedroom you looked like that famous scene in the James Bond film, when Britt Ekland, if it was Britt Ekland and not Raquel Welch, emerges from the sea with her tee shirt wet. An Aphrodite trope. It had me gagging as a schoolboy, anyway. It was James Bond, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I wasn’t that wet,’ she laughed.

  ‘Just the hair, maybe.’

  After a moment she said: ‘I’d already told you I had my doubts about Jean-Luc.’ The jazz had come to an end. The quiet was good.

  ‘Meaning?’

  She hesitated. Nick was suddenly ready to pounce: he had that glittering, raptor look in his eye. Or maybe it was just the candlelight.

  ‘There’s something unstable about him.’

  ‘Evil, you mean. Unstable is just a euphemism.’

  ‘It might not be. Evil is not a concept I trust. Unstable is.’

  ‘For now,’ said Nick.

  Fifteen love, she thought. Their marriage gave her tennis elbow, an overdeveloped forearm.

  Nick, digging in, wondered what she would call Mengele or Klaus Barbie. Unstable? Can you be icy and unstable?

  ‘I used to think,’ Sarah replied, deflecting his drive, ‘that history’s villains looked villainous. Then there was this silly thing on telly where they removed Hitler’s moustache and no one recognised him; they all thought he looked trustworthy and rather sweet.’ She chuckled, resting her chin on her knuckles. Nick nodded
thoughtfully, finding her particularly beautiful like that.

  ‘Hitler plus moustache definitely looks psychotic,’ he said. ‘Those eyebags. A bit like Saddam’s. The strain of gorging with Old Nick,’ he added, gamely smoothing his own pouches.

  ‘Mao?’

  ‘Baby face. Like a balloon with the features scribbled on. Creepy.’

  She relaxed: he was enjoying the game, now. She proffered Stalin – a tricky one. He got up to change the music. Although it was not yet the right day, he had a large red-and-blue fish sellotaped to his back, flapping rather realistically. COD, Alicia had written across it, unaware of the pun.

  ‘What you don’t see in black and white is his yellow eyes,’ he stated, sitting down again, the troubadours bewailing their impossible love behind. ‘Just the avuncular grin and Dunhill pipe. This is a bit like that Monty Python cricket match.’

  ‘Before my time,’ she said. Advantage Sarah. ‘Robespierre?’

  ‘A repressed homosexual, foppish, hated smells, finicky, very pale. Not nice, despite a good start.’

  ‘Whoo-er,’ she said. ‘Careful. Here’s the man who supported an elective called Queer Theory?’

  ‘Which brings us round to Jean-Luc,’ he declared, with a satisfied smile she didn’t like.

  ‘Actually, I think you’re way off beam there,’ she said, the wine filling her head with a pleasant devil-may-care attitude to the match. ‘I think he likes girls a lot, big or little, in skirts or out.’

  ‘Ri-ight,’ said Nick, nodding knowingly, with a possible tint of the sardonic that lit the electric grille in Sarah’s chest. His lips pursed as he pondered. She felt cheap, in some way. She felt like hitting him over the head: she hated it when he pondered. He seemed to retreat, become someone else completely unattractive. A turn-off. She heard her own words echoing: cheap magazine stuff. It was such an effort not to sound like a cheap magazine, day in day out. Not to be her natural self, if that was her natural self. Sometimes she wish she’d married a businessman.

  ‘So that’s the final conclusion,’ he murmured.