by Adam Thorpe
‘There may be other unthought-of possibilities,’ she said, quoting one of Nick’s staple reflections as an historian. He smiled, and they caught each other’s eye.
Of course she loved him. Together they had developed their own past, their own history. They could refer to it, even in irony, and no one else would understand. The silly little things, not just the earnest discussions about Fredric Jameson or Foucault.
‘By the way,’ said Nick, taking her hand, ‘you’ve got what looks like a rotten turbot stuck on your back.’
Alan called out from the kitchen, where he had taken the call.
‘Jean-Luc’s had an accident.’
‘Why? I mean how? Oh Lord.’
‘Not fatal,’ he cried. ‘Just uncomfortable. A work accident. Hey, like the Crucifixion. That was also a work accident.’
He appeared in the doorway, beaming. ‘Great joke, huh? This ex-Jesuit told it me. The Crucifixion –’
‘Alan, breathe deeply. Think of your heart. Start again. Jean-Luc.’ She was working on a gallery poster at the dining room table; she enjoyed the interruption.
‘They think he was spying on Mrs Fusspot taking a skin-dip.’
‘And? Oh God. Fallen off a ladder?’
‘He was out with his brush knife, cutting back that plant that spits milk in your eyes and burns them hollow.’
‘Spurge?’
‘Or so he said. Do you need a pair of binos for clearing brush?’
‘Oh, he’s so silly. Silly man. They’re all so ignorant.’
‘They had to call an ambulance. He also had a brief encounter with the pool, unconnected with any leisure activity.’
‘Lord, not drowned?’
‘I think if he had been drowned I would have said that first, Lucy my lovely.’
‘Not necessarily. Oh, shit. Blinded?’
‘Temporarily. Burns to both eyeballs. The punishment matches the crime, I say. It’s mythical. That goddess spied on. Jesus, which one? Begins with A. I’m losing it.’
‘Arachne.’
‘She’s spiders.’
‘Sounds more like a Mills & Boon,’ said Lucy, who had once tried her hand at writing one in a financial lull and miserably failed. ‘Isn’t that how they’re always punished in Mills & Boon?’
‘You’re thinking of Shakespeare,’ said Alan. ‘Or maybe Charlotte Brontë. Anyway, the goddess pulled him out, this time.’
Lucy stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘Did he fall in? Or jump in?’
‘Maybe he’s Narcissus,’ said Alan, brightly. ‘Or Tiresias. Tiresias was blind, with wrinkled dugs.’
He stepped behind her and cupped his wife’s breasts.
‘Mine are not wrinkled,’ she said, kissing his wrists. ‘They have just seen better days.’ The options for the new gallery poster were cool or violent. Neither pleased her. A third way – tasteful – was boring. It was vital to get it right. No artist was good enough, that was the trouble. Not one had any sincerity, it was all fake. ‘Alan, you’re teasing. It’s too cold to swim, even for goddesses, naked or otherwise.’
He gave each concealed husk a gentle squeeze, as best he could, then moved away. In the old days she’d go without a bra and you couldn’t tell.
‘I am not teasing you, my angry queen. For once I am deadly sérieux.’
Lucy leaned forwards in the chair, hands between her thighs, sloping-shouldered. ‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘More detail, please.’
Blindness terrified her. She required a cigarette. She had given up years ago, but the craving came and went and came again. It was a poison in her blood. It would never go completely. She had once, as a child, pricked her eyeball cutting roses, prior to boiling the petals in a forlorn attempt to make perfume for her mother, and had seen double for several days.
‘There is no more detail,’ said Alan, flipping an eraser on the back of his hand. ‘There’s only broad-stroke. I had the husband on the phone. He’s crazy but he’s a bright guy. He was very diplomatic, très discret.’
‘Please stop talking French when you can’t.’
‘I have to start somewhere. Hey, he also claimed that Jean-Luc was pretty forward with their little girls. Picking them up and so forth. Nothing dramatic, though. They just had this hunch and then the voyeur struck.’
‘What drivel,’ said Lucy, as if Alan had filled her in minutely. ‘Jean-Luc is French. The French admire attractive women and smile at children. It’s normal. That’s why I like going to France – men look at me.’
‘Do they?’
‘Don’t sound surprised, Alan. Any moment now the last one will stop looking at me and no man will ever look at me again. Mrs Fusspot is pretty in an unambitious way, you said so yourself. It doesn’t mean they’re all rapists and paedophiliacs.’
‘Paedophiles. I think this was more than Jean-Luc being avuncular. I think this was a lot like Jean-Luc being a complex of sinister, concealed desires.’
Alan was enjoying himself. He enjoyed the way the phrase about sinister desires moulded itself in his mouth, reminding him of his fine-tuned intelligence, his mastery of the word. He had long wanted to get rid of the guy, of whom he was weirdly jealous. Lucy was obsessed; he sometimes wondered if she and the handyman didn’t fuck like monkeys in the barn when he – Alan – was out doing some dull, manly chore like taking out garbage to the end of the dirt road. The eraser bounced on the floor in that manic way of erasers and disappeared under the desk.
Lucy said nothing. She was staring down at a blood-red, silkscreened slice of apple with moral indignation and good intentions serendipitously scrawled across it in lime green. All so retro. Everything went in circles. Nothing progressed. Almost no men, in fact, now looked at her. She tapped the blank part of the mock-up where Lucinda Gallery was to appear in civilised dove-grey. She imagined the gendarmes arriving with squealing tyres, screams and yells, Jean-Luc bundled away under a blanket, the dreadful, soppy English family simpering in the house, clutching each other, so fiercely righteous and Victorian.
A harp played gently from the speakers, the sun was falling on polished surfaces, Alan had been grinding his coffee beans and sweetening the air, but elsewhere an angry knot of disaster scribbled itself. She lacked the thew to deal with it. She was fifty-nine. Her entire female reproductive apparatus had been removed five years ago. There was now nothing but air between her and sixty.
‘I lack the thew,’ she murmured. ‘Did you mumble something about binoculars, Alan?’
‘You know I never mumble, my sylph. Apart from maybe or maybe not molesting their little threesome, he had these binos. He spied on Mrs Fusspot taking a dip, stark naked. Imagine that. Imagine that woman stark naked. Svelte and small and dark. Yum yum.’
‘State what happened again, sweetheart,’ said Lucy, glumly, ‘but without the lasciviousness. There are facts that have escaped me.’
Alan told her. Jean-Luc had watched Yum-Yum with his hunting binos and she’d spotted him and so he’d pretended to be cutting back the undergrowth with his brush knife. Yum-Yum pretended she believed him, because she was scared he might go crazy and chop her up into juicy pieces. And then he’d got splashed by the milk. ‘That was not pretending,’ he added, with a throaty chortle.
And then he’d fallen in, but only temporarily.
Alan thrived on this sort of thing. He hadn’t even bothered to dress this morning. He took calls in his long Arab pyjamas that hung off his stomach like a frock. He was on great form. He was moving out of Sumeria and Babylonia and Assyria as fast as his camel would take him, he’d joke, even if a little man were to offer him the equivalent of the Royal Graves of Ur in a backstreet shack.
He had always been nimble, despite his belly. If you follow the money you have to dance. He had started his career at high school, not in pictures but in books. He bought old childrens’ books for peanuts and dismembered them, framed the illustrations and sold them at great profit: ten, twenty dollars. Then, later, it was older books. Really old books. Seventeenth century and e
arlier. Parchment. Medieval manuscripts. A wealth of illuminated pages turned to pictures for the walls of the rich. Collectors flocked over Alan like terns over herring.
You have to swerve in a ball game: he swerved, sprang out of medieval, scored with modern. His pure abstract period was a ball. He just followed the dollars. All-white canvases. Canvases that were just that: canvas. The world could not be fooled forever; he knew the bottom would fall out of abstract before it happened: he swivelled into Central African for about two days – it was too late, too many fakes – then into Near and Middle Eastern. Jackpot every time. You pulled the handle and stuck your hand out and something ancient dropped into it: cylinder seals, mostly, but who cares? It was an income stream. And then one day you see the most beautiful woman you have ever seen, in white marble. From Ur.
But even she was not worth his life or losing parts of his body for.
In the world according to Zig, Art Brut was beginning to smell of crisp new bills of serious denominations. Get these words, Alan: figurative, emotion, narrative, honesty, natural, weird. Alan had worked the Art Brut scene for a week and was already more of an expert than Zig. At least when it came to prices, sources, contacts, and the names that mattered. The prices were stirring, on the rise, about to soar.
‘Oh,’ he kept saying to Lucy, ‘there is something so comforting about artists who do not know they are artists.’
‘That’s because they aren’t,’ she’d reply.
It was Oz instead of LA. Art Brut was a kind of paradise filled with shaggy-haired mutes, wise-eyed grandmas and apple-pie hermits with lovable obsessions. There was once a postman who built a full-size imperial palace out of pebbles picked up on his round.
You discovered it for free. One hundred per cent profit on your returns. He had clients for whom he was only investing, buying and selling, who had no interest in art; they would leap at this. They would really leap.
She had never seen Alan so animated. It was second-life syndrome. He’d gone from hell to heaven, from Iraq to Oz, in so many hours. No mysterious midnight calls, no threatening emails, no heart flutters. Just a call from the wretched fusspots at Les Fosses, which seemed to delight him even more.
‘We’ll have to go down for a couple of days and sort them out,’ she sighed. ‘A break from London and its intrinsic malaise. We’ll have to extract the key from the silly man.’
‘I believe you can hire a contract killer for £2000,’ Alan wheezed. ‘Five hundred extra for a touch of torture beforehand. Bullets thrown in. Seriously.’
‘And where did you find that out?’ she smiled, stroking his hand.
‘My friend from Bucharest.’
She pursed her lips before planting them on his knuckles. ‘Bucharest. Now which part of London is that?’
‘It used to be called Hammersmith.’
‘No no, that’s Cracow. Maybe it’ll be on the news,’ she continued, now squeezing his hand quite hard, ‘and there’ll be shots of Les Fosses. Maybe she’ll bring charges and the cops will have to search the house from top to bottom. Take it apart. Lots of attention. You know what they’re like.’
She felt Alan’s hand quiver under hers. He was deathly pale around the jowls. In one of the caves, the smallest one, locked with a combination padlock, lay the large metal box marked BOOKS. He muttered about it in his sleep. One layer of lousy novels and then the treasure, nestling there in Lucy’s silk off-cuts; most of it having seeped, like scent gathered from the steam of boiled roses, out of the National Museum of Iraq about a month before the invasion. Chucked down the stairs, actually, judging from the fresh chips. His chief Dubai contact, the guy with the glass eye, had watched it happen. And was now dead.
‘Promise me you are joking, Lucy.’
‘Now there’s a change of weather,’ she said, on top of things again. ‘That’s why we need to go down, my big baby. Apart from paying poor Jean-Luc a visit and pinching him all over, silly boy.’
‘Go down?’
‘Go down Moses, go down,’ she began to sing, smoothing out the poster mock-up unnecessarily.
The truth was, she was not surprised. The way Jean-Luc would look at her out of the corner of his eye when she was lying by the side of the pool, or bathing in her black two-piece. Flattering, at her age. ‘Damage limitation. A little talk. Anyway, I want to see how my lovely English lawn’s getting on. Before it’s trampled by the media hordes.’
Alan groaned theatrically, drawing his bunched hands down his face as if peeling off a mask. ‘Now I’m tense as hell,’ he admitted. Over London’s hum, a distant cluster of sirens sounded and swelled.
‘Here they come,’ joked Lucy, breaking into one of her more appealing laughs.
* * *
Apart from the casual information that Jean-Luc had hurt his eyes, the children had been kept entirely in the dark, which made Tammy’s interrogation of her parents all the more surprising. A couple of days later she fell on their bed face forward before Beans and Alicia woke up, and talked into the bedclothes. They were sipping their tea in bed, reading.
‘Has Jean-Luc stolen something, Mummy?’
‘Why on earth do you say that?’
‘Because I think he’s done something naughty.’
‘What makes you think that, sweetie? The poor thing’s just had an accident.’
‘It’s the way you say his name. You don’t feel sorry for him.’
Nick rolled his eyes.
‘Rubbish,’ said Sarah. ‘Go down and watch a cartoon and stop being silly, Tammy.’
‘Want Jamie.’
‘He’s sleeping, as usual.’
Having inadvertently overheard her parents discussing Jean-Luc in the kitchen, Tammy toyed with the idea of mentioning the big knife, but decided not to. Seized, nevertheless, with a reckless ardour she would not have been able to explain, she asked if he had shown his naughty bits. Since her eight-year-old mind believed babies emerged from the tummy-button, this gave a mistaken impression: her mother looked scared, suddenly.
‘Why do you say that, Tammy?’
‘Cos.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
Her father said, with an awkward grunt: ‘You’re not basing your suggestion on previous observation, I hope?’
‘Wha’?’
There was a tense pause. Sarah’s hands were nestled around her mug as if it had to be clung to in the whirlpool. Then Tammy started bouncing on the bed on her knees, waggling her head about and singing breathily, all but unvoiced: ‘Jean-Luc, Jean-Luc, is showing his poo. Jean-Luc, Jean-Luc …’
Nick snapped at her – an unusual occurrence. He told her to act her age. As she slid off in an unceremonious bundle of hurt, her foot caught on Sarah’s tea and spilt it over the duvet.
Soundly yapped at, Tammy plodded down to the sitting room and sobbed on the sofa. Nick eventually joined her, holding her hand and explaining that if Jean-Luc ever showed his naughty bits, she was to say straightaway, but he was sure Jean-Luc would never do something like that.
‘He took our photographs.’
‘Well, he’s allowed to. We’re not in your school, here.’ He told her that Jean-Luc was out of hospital and staying at home while the lesions got better, that he had to wear special dark glasses like an aviator’s goggles.
‘What’s an aviator?’
‘An old-fashioned pilot.’
She withdrew her hand and curled up against the cushions. It was cold. Nick covered her in a throw-over that smelt of dust and smoke and kissed her on the crown of her head, as thoroughly confused as she was.
He had just settled back in bed, reassuring Sarah, when Alicia came in and announced that Beans had jumped out of the window.
‘April Fool!’ she added, quickly, over the thumps of grown-up feet hitting the floor simultaneously either side of the bed.
Later that day, Tammy was wandering around the pool-shed imagining it as her hovel surrounded by toadstools, to which the prince was about to come and fall in love with her. She s
aw what she thought was a small box under the raised shed.
It was Jean-Luc’s camera, wrapped in its jacket of goldeny card with Fabriqué en Chine on the bottom. It rattled when she shook it. The excitement she felt was that of someone who had made a great and secret discovery. She looked through the viewfinder, studied the lens. For some reason the camera had a rubber band round it. She felt she might be rewarded enormous sums, but on second thoughts decided not to tell anyone. She had a small camera of her own, not a digital but a chunky pink waterproof object with which she managed dissatisfying pictures taken so far apart she’d forget what most of them were of. This camera was like the ones they were supposed to take on school trips, because it didn’t matter if you lost it. Somewhere inside it were her and her sisters, like miniature people, small as germs. She pointed the camera at the house and pressed the button. When it clicked, she gasped.
She checked Jamie wasn’t watching from the roof; he’d wave to her from up there, sometimes. She wasn’t to tell her parents he went up on the roof from his window, or they’d stop him. And he could see the sea. He could see further than anyone had ever seen. One day he’d take her up there, too, he’d promised.
He wasn’t up there.
She ran into the barn with the camera and showed her sisters. It wasn’t an April Fool, it was real. This was the most exciting event in her life so far: even Beans was frozen in wide-eyed appreciation, while Alicia was already contemplating the vast chest they’d have to use to bury it in on the desert island far from home, once they’d worked out a way to get there and back in time for tea and cream cakes. Their urgent whispers were furry little animals that crawled away and hid in the barn’s most secret corners.
FOURTEEN
Jean-Luc likes himself in dark glasses.
He is preparing a mint tisane for his mother and the nurse, whom he likes to keep happy; he’s afraid the care would be withdrawn otherwise, the patient too difficult. Maman would never agree to moving to a home. Part of him is afraid of her moving to a home, anyway. He can’t picture himself alone in the house, for the first time in his life. However hard he tries, he can’t picture it.
