The Standing Pool

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ shouted Sarah, her glasses misting up from her hot, shiny face.

  ‘The girls are missing,’ snapped Nick. There was a pause while the awful finality of this statement, like a newspaper headline, sunk in. ‘Alicia, Beans and Tammy,’ he added, weakly. He felt thirsty and sick and wanted to cry.

  Jamie planted a chunk of cake in his mouth as if nervous of it being taken away.

  ‘Jamie,’ said his stepmother, striding forwards with her glasses off until she was inches from his face, ‘have you seen the girls this morning? Yes or no?’

  ‘Ja-meee,’ pleaded Nick.

  His son nodded dramatically, his mouth full, indicating with his finger his inability to speak just at that moment.

  They waited, Jamie ponderously chewing. He looked like a fox caught with a chicken in its mouth, his eyes looking up at them and yellowish. Sarah recommended that he stop arsing around. Her glasses were misting up again. She had never used that expression in her entire life, and it surprised her as much as Nick.

  Jamie swallowed exaggeratedly as if it was incumbent on him to obey, his lips as dark as the one Goth in their Cambridge road. ‘Yeah, making this den in the woods,’ he said, looking off to one side, as if studying the fridge. ‘It’s called kids having fun.’

  Nick felt a great flood of relief, which was why his voice went hoarse. ‘You mean you left them in the woods on their own?’

  ‘You want them back in their cage, right?’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’ Sarah declared, equally relieved to be given a second life.

  ‘Where did you leave them?’ croaked Nick. ‘We shouted. Didn’t you hear us shout? Didn’t you? We were both shouting.’

  ‘You were the Romans,’ Jamie explained, with an apologetic shrug. ‘And we were the Gauls.’

  ‘Jamie, you are a prize prick,’ said Sarah, holding his face and grimacing with relief. He pulled his squashed cheeks from her with a look of disgust.

  Outside it had started to rain again in a very unEnglish way: drifts of gauze like a pencil-sketch of a tropical storm.

  ‘They must be getting wet,’ Nick said, turning distractedly to the open door. ‘Where are they playing, exactly?’

  ‘About twenty yards in front of the house?’ said Jamie, with an air of contempt.

  They were crouched and sniggering on the third overgrown terrace below the house, just where Jamie had said they would be. The den was a circular wall of leaves, hidden from higher up by overhanging branches.

  ‘Were you really mega-worriered?’ asked Alicia, with a candid air of triumph.

  ‘Nah,’ Nick replied. He tossed her the shoes. She was in her socks, stuck all over with bits of nature’s floor. ‘You didn’t trick me one bit.’

  ‘Likkel window,’ said Beans, pointing at a spot in the ceiling of leaves. ‘Roof big voo!’

  ‘Ssssh,’ Tammy commanded with a threatening finger, unusually severe with her little sister.

  ‘It wasn’t a trick,’ Alicia complained. ‘I just took them off cos I’m a princess of the Gores.’

  ‘Gauls,’ said Tammy, who was suddenly embarrassed by the whole episode.

  ‘Me queen,’ shouted Beans, throwing up leaves.

  Tammy was the sole witness at the court martial, during which Jamie fished a flat tin out of his pocket and prepared a roll-up on the kitchen table. He interrupted this to have a good scratch of his dirt-thickened hair. He’d wanted to be an astronomer at ten, Nick recalled. A golden boy with golden locks and a potentially golden future.

  The girls had woken early – about six o’clock – and crept downstairs to rescue the baby boars from the electric fence. Jamie was on the sofa, taking a break from his self-imposed cell. The morning woods, the clear air, the great outdoors. The gift of life. The idyll. They’d built what Jamie called a ‘sanctuary’ out of dead leaves and heard their names being called out: it was the Romans, it was the colonisers, it was the beginning of the end. Jamie had slipped off to the kitchen for essential supplies and was caught by the unexpected return of Caesar’s patrol.

  He grinned, looking cheerily haggard. ‘It was cool. A fun time was had by all. We kept our feet on the ground. They’ll tell their grandchildren, right?’

  ‘Not by all,’ said Nick, studying his thumbs.

  ‘You might have detected we were a teeny-weeny bit anxious?’ suggested Sarah, calmly, in a voice fretted to a stick by fury. Relief was a distant memory, now. ‘That’s what really bothers me. Not you taking them out to have fun, but ignoring our anxiety.’

  ‘A lot of anxiety,’ Jamie agreed, nodding his head before licking the cigarette paper; but it was a reproach.

  Nick rolled his eyes to the ceiling: anywhere but his son, the impenetrable concrete wall of his son’s selfishness. ‘I think we all deserve the proverbial cup of tea,’ he said.

  No one moved.

  Tammy stared at a cleft in the table, into which crumbs had fallen. She was one of those crumbs. She had made her parents suffer. Never again would she do such a thing in her entire life, she decided.

  ‘Like, you know when you screamed your head off at me, Sarah?’ said Jamie, sticking the roll-up between his pouting lips.

  ‘I shouted.’

  ‘Screamed your head off. Not when you called me a prick, but the time before. Two weeks back.’

  Sarah swallowed with difficulty. ‘Under intense provocation, yes.’

  ‘Provocation is an underrated instrument of power, historically speaking,’ commented Nick, in a jovial tone. ‘Underrated by historians, that is. As is not doing anything. Inaction as a form of violence.’

  ‘Shut up, Nick,’ Sarah muttered.

  Jamie stood, ready to go outside and have his smoke. ‘That’s why I had to sort myself out on my own. Because of the shouting.’

  ‘Maybe talk about this at some other time?’ his father suggested, glancing Tammy’s way.

  Tammy thought Jamie seemed sad as he nodded, but when he turned his head she saw the other half of his face was smiling.

  They had seen the sea. They had seen further than anyone had ever seen. The roof’s slope had scared her, but it wasn’t slippery, it was just huge, like a different land, and dark. They had all held hands and reached the top, holding on to the cool ridge. A bird had passed them and then they had seen the sun rise. They were the first in the world to see it rise. It was like an explosion without any sound and the redness filled their eyes up. Then Tammy felt little drops on her face: it was raining! It made the tiles shine. Alicia started whimpering and they had to creep back slowly across the tiles on shivery legs into the attic. That was the one and only time, Jamie told them. His face had gone white. That’s because, on the way back, although it was only a few yards hand-in-hand, their shoes kept slipping on the tiles. The roof had changed. It wanted to throw them off.

  Then they had fun on the ground. The ground’s different, Jamie said. The ground’s for kids. The air’s for ghosts, right?

  No one had told a lie, either. That’s why half of Jamie’s face was smiling, now.

  FIFTEEN

  The dinner with the Chambords was memorable, not just because the meal – foie gras truffé, very bloody entrecôte and a fiery rum baba, washed down with, among other delights, a dark, twenty-year-old Saint-Estèphe and a trou normand of Calvados between the cheese and the dessert – made even high-table banquets at college feel paltry. It was the relief that life could spare you and then yield magical, carefree and stimulating moments like these. The company was delightful, of mixed ages, and entirely continental: a quiet lawyer and his elegant architect wife; a young Belgian poet with his older librarian boyfriend; and a homeopathic doctor whose glamorous Spanish partner was a well-known flamenco teacher. Georges and Claudine conducted the proceedings without help, wafting away dishes and the slight language barrier with the same charm and facility.

  It made Nick and Sarah feel more civilised than they’d felt in years. Thankfully, when it came to the inevitable politics, the ro
bust discussion was even-handed, and the English contingent contributed their piece without too many fits and starts, itemising the dangers of Blairite liberalism. This shifted into a discussion of the merits of Modigliani with practised ease, the join barely detectable. The girls ate with the adults, to the former’s astonishment – an astonishment so great that they did nothing but stare in vestal silence unless addressed, their eyes glittering in the candlelight.

  ‘God, I love France,’ said Sarah, on the drive back. ‘How much have you drunk, by the way?’

  ‘That’s why I’m going very slowly,’ said Nick. ‘I have my family on board.’

  ‘You’re not going slowly,’ said Sarah, who hadn’t even minded when two of the party lit up. ‘That’s exactly my point.’

  ‘They weren’t really locals, though.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘In my Marxist days, I’d have conducted a class analysis and not enjoyed it.’

  ‘Oh, who cares?’ said Sarah, ambiguously. ‘All we need is geniality and kindness. They were lovely to the kids.’

  ‘And truth and justice,’ declared Nick, over a silly song from the three at the back. ‘Whatever they are. They’re ideas. But we no longer need ideas, do we? Too difficult. All our leaders require is ego, massive self-esteem. And God, of course, their grins fed by God. Sssh, Tammy, I’m talking. So Blair can be mates with Berlusconi and Bono and not see any contradiction. Ditto Sarkozy. It’s the inevitable continuation of Karl Mannheim’s freischwebende Intelligenz. Emancipation from history and society, the old order, all that tricky oppositional crap. Hm? Very post-Sixties. Actually, I will tell you what truth and justice are,’ he went on, as if Sarah had specifically not wished him to. ‘They’re wanting a habitable future for my children and their children and their children in turn – please try to keep the volume down, girls! OK? Thank you. It’s called creation, not destruction. It’s called deep reflection. It’s called having ideas and convictions, then acting on them.’

  Why so heavy? wondered Sarah, as they bumped onto the track. Why is he always so heavy against himself?

  Fired by the Chambords, they realised they had never been to the local metropolis; that would be embarrassing in front of the Sandlers. So before the latter descended on them – Nick pictured a silvery UFO rippling the pool – the Famous Five (as Sarah put it) took themselves off to Nîmes for the first time since their arrival two months before.

  Nîmes was hardly a city (let alone a metropolis) except in terms of antiquity, elegance and the usual surrounding fungi of big-box stores, car dealerships and (to the girls’ satisfying groans) oily McDonald’s.

  They found a parking space in an underground car park playing Mozart and visited the huge Roman arena, watched the three-dimensional film in the intact Roman temple, regretfully gave the exhibition of neolithic burial customs in the Roman period a miss and climbed up through the Italianate garden to the Roman tower. The kids, by this time, were saturated in historical knowledge, bleeding it from the nose, and dreamed only of an ice lolly.

  It was early April, but the sky was entirely clear and many of the surfaces in the old and rather lovely centre were of blindingly pale stone. Faced with the tower, a kind of vast molar with an inner spiral staircase and extraordinary views from a cramped balcony that caused Sarah much anxiety, Nick felt inspired. Maybe it was simple relief: that he wasn’t the parent of missing children, that the path had forked and he had taken the right one.

  He stood by a twisted old olive tree and felt a desire to paint. Or rather, he completely understood why people developed a passion for art – something he had never really felt in his life before. He saw cubism in the myriad planes of the tower’s north-facing side, its south-facing, sunlit half turning the sky several shades of blue deeper. The same sky! He was actually thinking like a painter. Everything’s perspective, he thought.

  He tried to point out the visual effect to the girls – ‘Look, look!’ – but they told him he was being boring again; they punctured his enthusiasm, deflated him. He all but sulked after his epiphany, heading for the ice-cream stall down below.

  Even Tammy would probably remember very few of the innumerable nuggets of knowledge he and (to a lesser extent) Sarah had proffered. Jamie had no recollection of the trip to Delphi with Helena, for instance, when he was seven. Yet Helena had stuffed him with elaborate, pseudo-mystical information and stroked his forehead with sacred water from a grassy spring by the temple of Apollo that turned out to have been the runoff from a gardener’s hose.

  The two youngest were treating Sarah like a washing line, pinning themselves to her in the busy streets, and Nick wondered if they hadn’t all become a little hick out there in the sticks; it was a strain, keeping an eye on the girls after their rural sanctuary, and the ambient noise was deafening. Beans kept pointing at the roofs and wanting to go up on them, which was sweet. She also needed changing. His eye caught the English newspapers’ headlines in an outside carousel, one of which – the Guardian Weekly – declared global warming to be ‘worse than feared’.

  He bought a copy and read it aloud to Sarah as they sunned themselves at a café in front of the cathedral. Since 2000, the carbon count had considerably increased. It had been anticipated that, faced with planetary catastrophe, the West would have invested in expensive carbon-capping technology. It hadn’t.

  ‘I’ll read it later, Nick,’ Sarah assured him. ‘It’s embarrassing, the English.’

  City bonuses were at a record high. A shell had exploded near a Baghdad playground and a father had found the head of his five-year-old girl. His own little girl, called Safia. The accompanying photograph showed only a small, blood-spattered shoe.

  He looked up and saw Alicia’s head turning easily as she flicked the end of her straw at Tammy while Sarah was wiping Beans’s fingers. ‘Coco tummy touch Beans here,’ his youngest was insisting, her grammar fructifying by the hour. She prised the top of her nappy away from her belly and Sarah’s nose wrinkled. ‘Oh dear me,’ said Beans.

  The newspaper ruined the rest of his day.

  ‘We’re possibly the most selfish generation ever to have walked this planet,’ he informed Sarah late that evening, after a resumé of the main article over supper. ‘No, forget the cautious historian’s qualification. The most spoilt, and the most selfish. The baby-boomers! Ugh. We had everything on a plate and grabbed even more.’

  Sometimes he never stopped talking, Sarah thought. Like the girls. An isolation tank had a lot to recommend it.

  ‘Not counting yours,’ he went on. ‘The Thatcher brood now in their thirties and forties. We can’t go on blaming our parents, you see. What a shame. Not to be able to blame our parents any more. They saved the world from the Nazis. We’ve failed to save the world from ourselves. No, listen. We need to get enlightened here. A spot of critical transcendence. There’s this massive load-bearing wall in your house that’s about to collapse. What do you do? At the very least you shore it up with props, then you start to rebuild it from the bottom up. Why are we doing nothing except applying the odd trowel-load of Polyfilla? Because we are not in the least interested. Today, we’re having a ball.’

  ‘Maybe the wall’s a party wall,’ Sarah observed, turning her spoon over and over so her distorted face kept appearing and disappearing. ‘You know what neighbours are like. Noisy and selfish. Anyway, my parents were too young to fight the Nazis. They kept the peace in sandy pockets of the Empire.’

  ‘If your neighbour does nothing,’ Nick went on, ‘you go round and do it yourself. If there isn’t the time in hand to take him or her to court.’

  ‘Supposing your neighbour’s America, or China?’

  Nick cradled his face in his hand. ‘You go round with a shotgun. OK?’

  ‘No, not really. It’s called war.’

  ‘Whatever, I feel completely and utterly ashamed. A waste of air-space.’

  ‘You’ve really caught the sun, Nick. It shows up the nobbles on your forehead.’

  ‘Are you li
stening, Sarah? I’m angry. I’m angry at myself.’

  ‘You’re writing. This is your field. Oil, oil and more oil.’

  ‘To be read by how many people? We fly to places like Fez or Gdansk, pretending to be doing our academic duty, and read our papers to seven bored colleagues, who read their papers in turn in incomprehensible monotones, and then we all go out and get drunk. It’s a farce.’

  ‘And what did you do in the war, Mr Joyce? I wrote Ulysses.’

  ‘You know the ones who win write the history,’ he persisted, each set of long fingers glued together and tracing circles on the table. ‘We’re a side-show. Everything is power. The best candidate never ever wins. Why? Weak power base. So. Direct action. It’s all that’s left to the powerless. Combat their desire with our desire. A theoretical case for assassination. Take out the godfathers.’

  ‘You sound horribly like a Bin Laden video strained through Marcuse.’

  Nick said, in a mournful voice: ‘I met my past, today. He went by looking somewhat under par and sort of accelerated away when I hailed him.’

  ‘That’s not Dylan, is it?’

  ‘Praise indeed, I suppose. Thank you. Nicholas Mallinson, aged fifty-four.’

  ‘Shooting stars burn brightest in the darkest night,’ said Sarah.

  ‘That has to be Dylan.’

  ‘Sarah Allsopp, fifteen.’

  ‘Gosh, well done,’ he said, without mockery. He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Indignation and courage, that’s what we need. A chemical reaction between the two. An unstoppable fizz. Bring down the money markets. You realise the weather is a revolutionary?’

  Sarah laughed and was about to call him a reborn Trot, but Nick stayed serious.

  ‘The Iraqi father found his little daughter’s head,’ he whispered, eyes open again and face thrust forward; he was fearful of small ears listening in. ‘Her name was Safia.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t supposed to whisper.’