The Standing Pool

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘It’s in the paper,’ he said, gesturing towards the sofa, where the Guardian Weekly lay like a crumpled charge-sheet of horrors. ‘Imagine that. The kid was five years old. And all completely avoidable. None of it ever had to happen. Nothing ever does. That’s the key! Safia could still be alive! They all could! And we let it happen! We could have stormed Downing Street instead of flaffing about in Hyde Park!’

  ‘Faffing,’ she corrected. ‘And it’s happening day after day,’ she admitted, slumping a little. No, she couldn’t imagine it. She could see it, but she couldn’t feel it. It broke all the circuits.

  There was a brief pause. He watched the fire struggling against its own smoke. ‘You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Sheer exhaustion will calm it down and we’ll declare a victory, redeemed by history. The occupying forces staying on to keep the peace just as we’ll do in Darfur. The oil will be ours, lots and lots, like the Chad field so conveniently next to Darfur. Iraq will sink into obscurity. And the five-year-old called Safia? A forgotten skull.’

  ‘Nick …’ Sarah complained.

  ‘I’m haunted by my own helplessness,’ he pursued. ‘They gouge each other’s eyes out, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Nick, do we have to?’

  ‘And now we’ve got the deus ex machina descending on us tomorrow,’ he groaned, eyes hiding behind his hand.

  ‘Dei,’ corrected Sarah.

  Nick got like this sometimes. She termed these ‘Nix fits’. It came of his having suppressed the early activist side with balance, footnotes and leak-proof substantiation. A side which had never been fulfilled beyond waving a fist next to his shoulder-length hair at cruise-missile demos and sitting on dull committees of regressive, sour-faced comrades.

  She let it pass, stroking his knuckles on the table. They had polished off a whole bottle of strong Graves. He wished he hadn’t mentioned the kid’s head. She had her own unmentionables, too. Yesterday, collecting unwashed mugs from Jamie’s room while he was out, she had spotted a sheet of paper carelessly folded on the broken chest of drawers. On it was scrawled, below Cheap socks in market! and Must eat more fruit! (among other touching memoranda):

  Here I AM again

  I’m high up high uphighbird

  knifing the water far below/you there

  confectioning a stranger

  don’t you remember?

  one to ten

  again again

  bitch in the dawn cold

  wannabe flesh

  gonnabe gonnabe

  now I’m lowdown a frown

  a broken city

  She always swam ten lengths, no more, no less. It was as if a curtain had been lifted on Jamie’s consciousness, stoned or otherwise. Oddly, instead of anger or even shame, all she felt was a momentary pity. Cheap socks in market! He’d only had to ask.

  Anyway, she knew she had taken a calculated risk: this wasn’t a prelapsarian Eden, where nudity went unremarked. It was a fallen world, where you had to eat more fruit and wear socks.

  Nick was saying, but calmly now: ‘Remember that Buddhist monk, immolating himself in the square against Vietnam? Or Jan Palach? Where are they now, eh? When there’s something far more serious?’

  ‘Not here, I hope,’ she grimaced.

  When the smart, hired Audi arrived at the worst time (late, too near lunch, although the girls were playing happily in the barn), its tyres scrunchingly audible through the sitting room’s open window, she hurried to the main door and knocked the Scrabble box off a side table by the fireplace: the sitting room, lovingly restored to its pristine pre-Mallinson state, was suddenly littered with a spray of letter tiles and a multitude of used score sheets.

  She tried to sweep the Scrabble tiles into the tipped box, but they were peculiarly recalcitrant on the woven rug. Nick was already outside: she heard his deep voice greeting the Sandlers, a peal of hearty laughter, footsteps over the gravel as she picked the squares up as fast as she could. B-L-A-Z-E-R, she read. O-N-Y-X. High-scoring words. Why did she feel so desperate, ready to burst into tears? What did it matter if there were Scrabble tiles on the sitting room floor? Why did she always have to prove something, claim the higher moral ground instead of relaxing into life, into life’s haphazard and human ways? What did she care if she scored low in the Sandlers’ eyes? It wasn’t a thesis!

  ‘I’ll do that for you,’ Jamie said, paused on the stairs.

  Jamie never ever offered to help.

  ‘Righty-ho. Oh. Thank you, Jamie. If you could.’

  She went into the kitchen, closing the door into the sitting room to give him a little more time, and greeted the Sandlers with a shy, slightly embarrassed bonhomie. In fact, she reckoned they should have come down here to check everything before letting the place, anyway. She didn’t feel all that guilty. And she felt more worried than guilty when it came to Jean-Luc. He lived alone with his ailing mother. He was a loner. He had spied on her naked body and photographed the girls, among other things. He had the right, sinister profile. She’d even begun to conjecture whether his impromptu plunge had not been quasi-deliberate, a piece of psychological theatre. The difficulty would be in the consequence: supposing he took revenge? Nick had dismissed that as paranoia, but it was easy to imagine him at the door, axe in hand: those deep-set eyes. The Dominici Affair all over again.

  She’d always had her doubts about him: female instinct.

  Lucy was chattering on emptily, and Lucy herself knew it. It was to cover a sudden feeling that her future was no longer something she could believe in; it had been obstructed, or taken over, by this family. Her idea had been that she and Alan would retire to the Mas des Fosses within the next two or three years, while they were still fit and compos mentis. It was now six years since they had bought it, but it felt like one or two. In six years she would be sixty-six, Alan an astonishing seventy. They would be officially old. The track was in an appalling state, it made the house seem even more remote. This family thrived here, however, she could see that. They all looked much healthier than back in December. They were still young. Even the senior Fusspot was relatively young beyond his hair-loss, his long-limbed, professorial awkwardness.

  ‘You all look as if you’re thriving,’ she said, not unsourly.

  ‘I think we might be,’ Sarah agreed, modestly, which infuriated Lucy even more.

  Alan’s legs were aching, he had to jiggle them to restore circulation. ‘I have seen the future of democracy,’ he said, ‘and it’s called Ryanair.’

  ‘The future of the planet, surely,’ Nick ostensibly joked, beaming.

  Lucy was surprised they hadn’t been to various places she brought up in conversation as the coffee brewed, including a sweets museum and a ‘jewel’ of a Romanesque church. Sarah pointed out somewhat defensively that they still had bags of time and Nick said more soothingly how they’d been busy ‘exploring’ the local walks. Sarah noted Lucy’s eyes noting the state of the kitchen (acceptable, surely).

  ‘Is it very strong?’ asked Lucy, as Sarah poured the coffee.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Sarah. It was decaff, but she didn’t let on.

  ‘In that case don’t bother with me. I only like it the way the French do it, small and very strong.’

  ‘That’s me!’ laughed Alan.

  ‘Isn’t that more Italian?’ parried Sarah.

  ‘No,’ chuckled Lucy, gamely.

  After Sarah had made a special brew for the woman, cramming the coffee to a solid bulk in the little espresso’s filter, they all moved into the sitting room. Lucy was first through (she didn’t see why she shouldn’t treat the place as her own, when it was) and found herself brought up short by something on the tiled floor, directly in her path. It was a sentence made up of Scrabble letters.

  I DIDNT FALL

  I WAS

  PUSHED

  WHOOO OO OO

  She stood stock still with her hand over her mouth, feeling a chill ripple through her over and over, very fast.

  Nick was too used to seei
ng the kids’ rubble on the floor to make anything of it, but as he moved forward Lucy laid a hand on his arm.

  ‘Why in English?’ she breathed.

  He vaguely took in the fact that she had turned sheet-white. ‘It’s English Scrabble,’ he said. Then Sarah appeared with Alan. They all looked down. The letter tiles were set a little crookedly, which made them curiously menacing, like a message snipped from newspaper print left by a killer.

  ‘It’s Jamie’s little joke,’ Sarah chuckled, sweeping the letters up with both hands. ‘Nick’s grown-up son.’ Again, the letter tiles seemed to have a life of their own. She was conscious of being bent right over in front of the Sandlers, of the top of her buttocks being exposed, as she struggled with the tiles and looked around for the box. There was no box. Jamie had surpassed himself.

  ‘Not so grown up,’ chuckled Alan Sandler, eyes glued to the strip of honey-pale ass above the belt, cloven into blue shadow.

  ‘Is he here?’ asked Lucy, weakly.

  Nick ignored her and addressed Alan: ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, involuntarily stung by his presumption. ‘Jokes aren’t exclusive to children.’

  ‘He’s here for a short break,’ said Sarah, over her shoulder. ‘He’s a bit of a poet,’ she added, to Nick’s surprise.

  Lucy sat down unsteadily in the cane chair as Sarah dumped the letters on the metal table with a clatter. She was cursing Jamie from her belly as she turned round and smiled.

  ‘“Exclusive to children”,’ Alan repeated, musingly. ‘Isn’t English a truly weird language? I mean, you expect that to mean it’s forbidden to children, but it means the opposite? Just on account of that little preposition?’

  The reflection hung in the air for a moment as Nick grappled with the novel concept that Alan Sandler might be intelligent, might even be more intelligent than him.

  ‘One of those Janus words,’ Alan went on, hitting the sofa as only the owner could – with the insouciant force of his considerable weight. He had sat on the Scrabble game’s ‘Rules of Play’ leaflet, and pulled it out from under him. ‘Like, ah, cleave. Sanction. Doubt.’

  ‘Are your legs better?’ asked Nick, slyly.

  ‘They’re fine,’ Alan replied, in a sing-song voice.

  The girls were in the barn, probably hiding from the gods. Sarah decided to leave them. The French would have insisted on all three coming in for an elaborate greeting, but she was not French.

  She queried doubt as she perched herself youthfully on the low firestool beside Lucy.

  Nick broke in before Alan could reply. ‘In Shakespeare, Sarah. To suspect and, well, to be undecided.’ He glanced at her with a disappointed, even embarrassed look. ‘Didn’t you do Hamlet at A level?’

  Sarah pointedly ignored him and turned to Lucy, who was leaning her forehead on her hand and blinking at the rug. ‘Erm, are you all right?’

  ‘When one player has used all his tiles and the pool is empty, the game is at an end,’ read Alan from the buttock-creased ‘Rules of Play’. ‘I guess that’s pretty final, if somewhat melancholy, even morbid.’ His wheeze gave him the air of a campus poet. At any moment, thought Nick, he’ll be quoting Robert Frost.

  ‘Weather. Both wear away and endure,’ Nick said, planting himself on the sofa next to Alan. Who was flicking through the leaflet brusquely, as if finding secrets within and nodding. He pointed at the word horn in the example and embarked on a childhood story, an intricate Michigan farm tale involving a game of Scrabble and a freckled girl that seemed intended only for Nick’s ears, and so the latter felt privileged.

  As this male session went on, Lucy stirred and asked Sarah, in a feeble voice, why her grown-up son thought the poor man was pushed.

  ‘What poor man?’

  Lucy looked at her. Alan was nudging Nick in the ribs, now into the naughty bit in the barn. Nick was manfully holding onto his decaff and laughing too loudly, as he himself had noted Englishmen tend to do. ‘Hornier, very good,’ he bellowed, and laughed. In fact, with one ear he was listening in to the women, hoping Lucy wouldn’t tell Sarah about the builder who fell off the roof. He hadn’t yet got round to pummelling Jamie in his thoughts.

  ‘The poor man your son was referring to,’ said Lucy, edgily.

  ‘My stepson was only referring to himself,’ Sarah reassured her. ‘He has no other criteria to go by, I’m afraid.’ She wondered why she was being so disloyal to her clan. She had to stop herself pouring it all out to this hard, unattractive, superior woman. Sarah felt a need to divest herself, to sweep the surface free of struggling insects before they entered by her mouth and then came out again by her mouth, more and more of them, as if breeding inside her belly.

  Lucy looked at her for a second with suspicious eyes. They were hooded by folds of skin that bore down on her eyelashes and would not have been there at all ten, twenty years ago. But she had not turned to fat, thought Sarah; the dreaded foot pump had not been connected. That was unusual, these days. It was almost to be admired. She was almost French in her slimline elegance, her sharpness. What poor man did she mean? Sarah had not really taken it in properly, she just wanted to get through it, reach the other side when they’d be gone: depressurise. What poor man?

  ‘Really?’ said Lucy, at last.

  Sarah nodded, pulling a face. It was hard to keep the little sail of their conversation aloft in the gale from the men on the sofa. Jamie’s joke struck her as harmless, suddenly. She was much too tough on him. She hoped it was harmless. She hoped it wasn’t –

  ‘Oh. A mal entendu,’ said Lucy.

  ‘We’ve had a bit of a row,’ Sarah admitted, quietly. ‘Nick and Jamie don’t exactly see eye to eye. Jamie has not emerged from a tricky adolescence.’

  ‘He’s how old?’

  ‘Oh, erm, twenty-four? Twenty-four.’

  ‘I have two in their thirties who are equally irritating. Maybe I should meet him. You didn’t mention him before, did you?’

  Sarah confirmed that they hadn’t and poked at the fire, whose unnecessary presence on this warmish spring day was intended to show the owners, via its ineffectual smokiness, the need to do something about it. The smoke ignited like dust in a mine-shaft, sparkling into vigorous flame, drawn up the chimney as if by some giant vacuum cleaner in the sky.

  ‘The fire’s always been terrific, of course,’ said Lucy. ‘Shall we take a tour of inspection outside, Alan? Look at those men.’

  Alan’s hand was on Nick’s forearm and they were both in near-silent fits.

  They toured the lawn, or rather the seed-bed. Sarah reminded them it had been completely ravaged by the boars. Alan began intoning a poem in an actorish lilt:

  ‘And he, despite his terror, cannot cease

  Ravening through century after century,

  Ravening, raging, and – shit – uprooting that he may

  come, ah,

  Into the desolation of – reality.’

  ‘Impressive,’ said Nick. ‘Should I … ?

  ‘William Butler Yeats,’ said Alan, still actorish. ‘The great Yeats. A poem called “Meru”. Meru, the sacred mountain of the Hindus. He’s talking boars, for sure.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Nick, blinking rapidly. ‘Wonderful stuff.’

  ‘Mythologic,’ said Alan.

  Lucy realised Jean-Luc had lied to her. And so had the tenant, who had described the lawn as ‘fantastic’ on the phone some time ago. She was surprised at the depths her heart had abruptly sunk to when they’d rounded the corner of the house and seen nothing that resembled a lawn inside the low, mean-looking electric fence. She now sealed her disappointment from view by rolling her eyes and exaggerating it: ‘Lord. All I want, for God’s sake, is a blasted bloody lawn. Oh, Lordie me. Oh really.’

  ‘Duck – and cover!’ laughed Alan, while Mr Fusspot reacted by kneeling on the ground like a knight begging forgiveness of his queen.

  In fact, some of the seeds had sprouted after a few days, encouraged by the recent warmth, and he was showing them that, from
a very low angle, the area appeared hazed in green. It was a clear sky, with that southern sleekness of blue to it, and the sun was almost burning on their northern skins. It had already dried out the seeded earth, well soaked that morning. The girls were very quiet in the barn, no doubt peeping on the visitors. Which felt vaguely unauthorised, Nick thought. Tallish white flowers like cow-parsley had come from nowhere and were scattered quite thickly around the yard. He disliked the Sandlers being here, despite Alan’s bonhomie. They smelt of interior furnishings in confined spaces, of stale urban perfume.

  Nick was dressed in long, newly bought shorts and looked, to Lucy, ridiculous with his white legs, his bony shins, his sandalled socks. Only the English ever wore socks with sandals. He placed both hands on the ground, his chin almost touching the ground as he squinted.

  Lucy was fed up. The Fusspots evidently felt bad, through their fusspottery, about dragging their landlord and lady all the way down here, and he was trying to cheer her up. It was a forlorn task: she saw, in her failure to grow a proper English lawn, far deeper failures. The tenants irritated her with their ingratiating smiles and genial falsities, although the wife (she felt) could pack a punch. They were like flies, to be swatted away. But she was nevertheless polite, diplomatic.

  No one had yet mentioned Jean-Luc by name. She would have to see him in person. She would have to explain, like a mother to her son. This is what friends recognised about Lucy: that she was courageous and deep-feeling, in her own odd way. If she hadn’t been sent to boarding school at the age of six, she might (she would say) have been as sweet as glucose.

  Alan volunteered to touch the electric wire, insisting it be switched on against Nick’s advice; and claimed – tapping the tape three times with a ‘Right?’ after each touch – it was a mere tickle. This was embarrassing, given the panicked phone call the other day. Nick marvelled and looked sheepish: he’d felt the shock had pretty well amputated his limb.

  ‘I was a farm boy, summers,’ Alan explained. ‘We played catch with balls of barbed wire.’

  He tapped the tape again, looking at Nick with a boy’s crooked smile, head on one side. ‘Right?’ You could see the shock pass across his eyes like tracing paper.