by Adam Thorpe
They also contemplated the pool’s startling murk. Lucy groaned. Alan quoted Shakespeare, this time: ‘The green mantle of the standing pool,’ he intoned, waving a hand.
He glanced up at Nick as if throwing a ball. Nick fumbled it. ‘Hamlet. Fantastic.’
‘King Lear. Poor Tom and his foul fiend.’
‘You know your literature,’ said Nick. ‘I’m a history person, myself.’
‘And who ended up a crooked dealer?’ wheezed Alan, gripping Nick’s elbow again so it hurt.
‘He did his masters in Flann O’Connolly,’ said Lucy, flatly, without raising her eyes from the murk. ‘Harvard. And she was a fervent Catholic.’
‘Flannery O’Connor, doll. A genius,’ Alan went on. ‘She knows her evil people.’
‘Hey,’ said Nick, like a freckled junior in an American movie. He wasn’t quite sure whether he had heard of Flannery O’Connor. He felt he was threatening the reputation of the entire university. ‘The Irish are great storytellers, of course,’ he said.
‘What’s that got to do with O’Connor?’ asked Alan, mischievously.
‘Ah,’ said Nick, and he actually blushed.
‘My favourite story,’ Alan pursued, ‘is about the encyclopedia salesman who falls for this virginal spinster in her thirties with a wooden leg, and they sneak off to a remote barn and kiss and drink whiskey and she’s swooning with love and he asks her to remove her wooden leg so that she can be kinda purer. Then what happens? Huh? The salesman is very young, a Tennessee country boy, very sweet and lickspittle.’
‘I haven’t read this one,’ said Nick.
‘They elope and live happily ever after?’ suggests Sarah.
‘No way. He steals it. The wooden leg. He grins evilly and puts it in his travelling case and tells her he’s also stolen a girl’s glass eyeball, and then leaves her stranded up in the loft of the barn, betrayed. End of story. He’s the devil incarnate, you see. A liar and a villain. No scruples. O’Connor knew her evil. Given my own field, so do I,’ he added, with a wink. ‘And those people scare me.’
‘Sounds like a parable for the invasion of Iraq, that story,’ said Nick.
‘Someone, we couldn’t remember who,’ said Sarah, hastily changing the subject, ‘claimed swimming pools have no past and no future. We were discussing this the other day,’ Day – the vowel edging towards ‘die’ to conceal any hint of privilege: a process started in her teens, never let go of. She was shy of it now, in front of Lucy’s planed upper-middleness, the polish, the sheer towering wealth. She knew they were floundering in front of this couple, but this made her feel nicer as a person. ‘Somebody French, we thought. Camus? You know, that they’re pure present. Swimming pools. Not ordinary pools.’
‘Lord, I hope this one has a future,’ said Lucy.
Alan stood over the alarm with his hands on his hips, pursing his mouth.
‘Oh yes,’ said Sarah, ‘did you find the code? It’s probably best,’ she added, with an apologetic grimace.
‘’Tis sweet to hear the watch-dog’s honest bark,’ Alan proclaimed, ‘bay deep-mouthed welcome as we draw near home.’
Nick nodded. ‘You certainly know your Shakespeare.’
‘Did the silly man actually fall right in?’ asked Lucy, suddenly.
‘Byron,’ said Alan, with a smirk.
‘I had to rescue him, pretty well,’ said Sarah.
Lucy gave a little jerk of her head. ‘How can you rescue someone “pretty well”? You either do or you don’t.’
Sarah was mortified, as if she’d been unexpectedly ticked off by a favourite teacher. ‘Well, I have to admit he helped himself a bit,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve a slight suspicion, anyway, he kind of fell in on purpose.’
‘Silly man, spying on you like that. Taking photographs of little girls,’ Lucy added, with a faux-shocked look. ‘He’s lived with his mother and never gone anywhere, not even Paris. Cats go dotty if they live with their mother, you know. He’s gone stagnant,’ she added, with a touching sigh, as if talking about her own son.
Nick didn’t terribly like the generic, mocking appropriation of his children, but merely nodded. Sarah looked uneasy: Lucy was too much, a huge, thick dollop of meanings after the thin, two-month gruel of partly understood French. Alan was checking out the pool-shed, the pump, the system. The pool purred and clicked under the surrounding woodland murmurs.
‘We haven’t seen your children,’ Lucy exclaimed, as if startled by the fact.
‘No, they’re playing in the barn. Their favourite place. Let sleeping dogs lie,’ Sarah said, blushing for some reason, as if she’d committed a faux pas.
‘They’re remarkably quiet,’ said Lucy. ‘Are you sure they’re not crushed under the old waggon or something?’
Sarah laughed, though she was shocked at the callousness. She spotted a tiny hand clasping the side of the barn’s opening.
Lucy went on, in an altered, businesslike tone: ‘We’ve had trouble at the gallery over people taking photos of our photos of nudes, and then sticking them on the Internet with different faces or something. Very postmodernist, I don’t think.’
‘What people won’t do,’ said Nick. He felt life had taken on a new lustre since the panic over the girls, but he knew it wouldn’t last. The coin would be flipped again. It was flipping every day. Now London was sweeping through like a tidal flood, brown and dismal.
‘The man’s a disaster,’ said Lucy, staring at the water. In fact, she was almost relieved by its snot-green state: it made getting rid of Jean-Luc that much easier. She had clung onto him in a way she now saw as pathetic and needy. He was useless, she reflected. That’s all there was to it. He was useless and he was, in addition, creepy. He was probably into rubberwear or flagellation as well as little girls. You never knew with the French. She was lucky he hadn’t grappled her to the ground and screwed the living daylights out of her (or worse) when Alan wasn’t around. Oh, she was fed up, really fed up. ‘God, don’t you wish you were back in England?’
‘You must be joking,’ laughed Nick.
‘Yes,’ said Lucy, reflectively. ‘With everyone getting fat.’
‘Really?’ said Sarah, as if she didn’t know.
‘Lord, yes. Ugly and fat. Ugh. Fatter and fatter by the day. Special hospital beds and crematoriums. You’ve probably heard. I say throw them out for the crows on special hills.’ She talked of England as if they’d been away years; Sarah found it rather gratifying. In some ways, it did feel like years. Wasn’t Alan Sandler fat? Or did she mean obese? ‘Such awful middle-middle taste,’ Lucy went on. ‘Distinctly middle-middle, because that’s what most of these urban designers are, it’s all they know. I’ve met some of them. Twangy vowels. Middle-middle or lower-middle, even: style, I’m talking about. Design. All over the place, even in the trains. The whole of England carpeted with it, along with their ghastly music. Especially the countryside. I had to go up to Manchester last week.’
‘Oh, yes. I like Manchester,’ said Nick. ‘I was following Engels about,’ he added, chuckling.
‘Used to be so wonderfully sombre,’ Lucy pounded on. ‘Proper working-class sombre with that mournful smell of coke. Now it’s an indescribable municipal vulgarity. Giant screens, sex everywhere. Aspiring proletarian, I call it. Appetite. Everything has to be crammed. Crammed with flavour, crammed with goodness. That’s their favourite word. Crammed. More and more like that ghastly country Alan comes from, for whose sakes we’re all going to go to hell in a handcart, along with the lovely animals and trees and beautiful flowers.’
‘God bless America!’ called out Alan from the pool-shed door.
‘And now China,’ sighed Lucy, still gazing into the murk, alarmingly unstoppable. ‘The schlock shop of China. So seedy. Jettisoning the last shreds of their ancient wisdoms for the same old Americanised slush, without the freedom even to complain. Utter, utter vulgarity. Slush and sludge and slurry. Destroying nature for nothing but a dirty slurry of dollars. Greece is the same, of course, plus Gre
ek men,’ she added, with a shudder. ‘Everywhere’s the same, pretty much. Even Islamic countries and that lovely Arabic curve – replaced by straight lines in concrete. Oh, Lord. Don’t you agree?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Nick, cocking his head like a parrot, unexpectedly warming to her. ‘This is very much my line. The last days of Babylon.’
‘We’re all guilty of it,’ Sarah interjected, conscious of her pedigree, that maybe it fell straight into the middle-middle category; thinking how all this was really an attack on them, the genteely impoverished Mallinsons. ‘We all have to make an effort. It’s not that we’re above it or innocent ourselves.’
Lucy looked at her as if she had popped up from somewhere lower down. Nick suggested jovially (perhaps unaware) that they’d better start thinking about lunch. Which was unsubtle code for: Sarah, get on with it.
Sarah went into the house while Alan checked the caves for whatever reason. Lucy and Nick entered the barn – where the girls were hiding, their position given away by snorts and giggles. Nick found it on the cusp of cheeky, but Lucy seemed reasonably amused. She discussed projects for the barn with him. He felt it would be a cinch, to be an architect. He was full of ideas and she told him he was very clever. Something about Lucy’s withering honesty attracted Nick, despite the snobbery. Or even, in the darkest depths of his soul, because of the snobbery.
Alan followed Sarah into the house, having inspected the cellars alone. One cellar in particular, its door yielding to his combination sequences like a djinn’s spell. He checked no one was watching, pushed his dark glasses up on his forehead and stepped in. The metal box was still in the corner, untouched. He didn’t unlock it. It excited him even more, not looking. The white-marble beauty concealed. Five thousand years pulsing unseen. It was a kind of magnetic core to all of life.
He talked to her in the kitchen about the history of Sumer, checking out behind his re-established dark glasses the inimitable slopes of her breasts as they descended into the fashionably low-cut top perilously close, by his calculation, to the nipple. They had a good, smooth shape, the colour of clover honey, and he wondered whether they were helped by a bra or were buoyed up naturally by their own muscle. Furtive sex acts shadow-played in the back of his head as he talked Gilgamesh, Ur, Uruk and the goddess of Love, Astarte. He bet her lanky, intellectual husband was no great shakes in bed. Even without Viagra, he would have been hard put not to try it on, not to break through the crust of her diffident, cerebral Englishness to the hot lava beneath. If only he had his life over again. If only he could halve his weight, suck out the flab with a pump.
She grilled thyme-sprinkled chèvres on toast and tossed the salad, criss-crossing it with honey: a light, tasteful, local-produce lunch, with rolls of expensive organic ham patterned with cornichons. Although she felt less uncomfortable than she’d expected to, the idea that the Sandlers had flown down to ‘sort things out’, like parents or teachers, preyed on her equanimity. She was worried about Jean-Luc, about what he would do when told he was fired; the Sandlers were not worried. Local handymen were always being relieved of their posts.
It was, nevertheless, like a visit by a ghastly royal couple, and it made Sarah feel she was a guest, suddenly. No, a skivvy preparing lunch, cleaning up, fearful lest something be in the wrong place or damaged by the kids. They hadn’t, for instance, replaced the bottle in the wine cellar – corked or no.
Alan Sandler was interesting on Sumerian art, although he was quite clearly eyeing her up. Or maybe that was just his manner. It was a burst of something other, suddenly, in their rural fastness. It was almost a relief. Lemon juice discovered an unknown scratch on her finger.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, interrupting him.
Alan cocked his head. A series of trills, warbles and sudden heart-rending wails, like something being torn, was dimly audible. Sarah opened the door and it appeared to flood the kitchen in unstoppable swirls.
‘Oh, that’s the crazy nightingale,’ said Alan. ‘Same place every year, just beyond the washing line. No volume control. That’s why we avoid April and May,’ he added, chortling wheezily.
‘I thought they sang at night. Wow. It’s lovely.’
‘All day, all night. Trying to get a woman. I know the feeling.’
The girls had emerged from the barn and she called them over; their interest in the nightingale’s performance lasted a few minutes. It seemed not to be bothered by them approaching and trying to spot it, although they were forbidden (on pain of horrendous reprisals) not to disturb it physically. It remained invisible in the undergrowth, as if by magic.
Lunch was a success, in the end, if tiring. The kids behaved, mostly, although Beans chose the moment of serving to go bright red, as if blowing up a balloon, and surreptitiously fill her nappy. Alan had descended to the wine cellar and, instead of running back screaming ‘Thief!’, emerged with a dust-shouldered bottle of 1987 Morgon. It was not corked. A mixture of fresh wet grass, crushed acorns and plum. Nick put a CD of Mozart string quartets on the stereo.
‘Of course, you barely need to touch these ingredients,’ said Lucy, cutting into her rolled-up ham, its crème fraiche fill spurting beyond the plate’s verge and the cornichon dice tumbling, too small to bother with.
Jamie was nowhere to be seen and continued thus, which was a relief. Sarah did not find his Scrabble joke funny, in the context. A few more days and he would be gone; he had actually agreed to this. The idea of resuming life here without Jamie was dream-like, filled her with anticipation. You repeatedly struck your head against a wall to know the pleasure of stopping. After a good few solitary joints in front of a camp-fire, he would decide to resume where he’d left off: depart, in other words. This had been the pattern, so far. He even had his own wind-up torch. He was, in some ways, resourceful.
The Sandlers, it turned out, were going to their favourite and very smart restaurant near Valdaron. They had not suggested the Mallinsons accompany them, nor accepted the offer of being cooked for again. The first would have been awkward whether they had picked up the considerable bill or not, but their refusal to sample Sarah’s cooking – duck à l’orange for the main dish, the zest having been soaked overnight in Grand Marnier – smacked of snootiness. Her efforts were a bit show-off in their complexity, she realised, as a banquet for the royal progress would have had to have been.
They held back the duck for the following day and retreated to pancakes, savoury and sweet, made with the girls’ help in what Sarah called a ‘dedicated pan’ bought in St-Maurice. Supper was early and felt vaguely bereft, although Sarah was growing weary of Alan’s friendly hand on various bared parts of her body. The Sandlers had enjoyed lunch, it seemed, but didn’t quite say so enough. It had looked a touch contrived, she now realised. Middle-middle, straining too hard. Only the wine was class. Unequivocal transcendence.
Now the guests were out and the Mallinsons were settling again, although the house felt curiously estranged from them, literally filled with the Sandlers’ respective scents. The master bedroom, to which they had retired to change, was the headquarters of the entire world perfume industry, Nick commented with a laugh. As for the pancakes, Beans and Alicia would only eat the sweet ones. Lemon squirted into the former’s eye. The latter part of supper was in the shadow of her intermittent screams. ‘Like living near Heathrow,’ Nick joked. He was strangely perky, tonight.
‘I prefer the nightingale,’ said Sarah.
‘Really boring, that bird,’ said Tammy. ‘It’s going to drive me mental.’
She asked why Jamie was staying so long upstairs.
‘He’s not upstairs, he’s out,’ said Sarah. ‘Making his camp.’
‘He is upstairs,’ Tammy insisted. ‘We heard him on top of us.’
‘Toppa toppa toppa toppa,’ Beans intoned. ‘Toppa toppa top –’
Sarah shushed her with an unthinking abruptness that froze her face in shock. ‘Are you sure he’s up there, seriously, you two?’
‘We did,’ said Alic
ia, thrusting her head forward, her lips glittering with sugar.
‘That’s a relief,’ said Nick, who tended to worry when Jamie was absent after leaving loaded messages. This one was particularly loaded, even though it must refer to the poor builder. I didn’t fall, I was pushed. Whooooooo. At the back of his mind, it had reminded him of the suicide note that poor Duncan Haighley had left last year: ‘No one’s fault. I climbed too high. Sorry.’
‘Shall I call him for supper?’ asked Sarah.
‘Why not?’
Beans, after meditating on the hurt, began to quiver her lower lip.
‘I’ll do it!’ Tammy and Alicia yelled, simultaneously. There was a brief scrap which ended in something underhand and possibly vicious, from which Tammy emerged victorious and Alicia in apparent agony, clutching her tummy. Tammy yelled up from the bottom of the stairs over Alicia’s wails, which had stymied Beans’s. There was no response.
‘Are you sure he’s there? Please, Alicia.’
‘I’m very very sure, Mummy.’
‘He’s sulking,’ said Nick. He went up to check, not by rattling the attic door but by standing in his and Sarah’s bedroom. There were creaks and thumps from the ceiling. He tiptoed up the crooked stairs. He had the suggestion of a headache from the red wine at lunch.
‘Jamie,’ he called through the attic door in a businesslike way, ‘it’s supper. Pancakes.’
Jamie loved pancakes. He can’t be asleep, Nick thought, listening to the silence. When he wasn’t asleep, he would always respond, if only with a grunt.
It was a strange silence. This was the silence, not of an empty theatre, but of a full theatre at a moment of suspense. Breathless. Except that it went on and on.
Jamie had shut himself away before – for five days once, in Cambridge – so they weren’t unduly worried. In the morning the three pancakes left over for the girls’ breakfast had gone. ‘The mouse has been,’ joked Sarah, who was nettled, especially as the mouse had left an empty glass of wine in the sitting room and the sticky, sugary plate on the kitchen table. There’d been a couple of creaks above their heads as they’d dressed, but otherwise neither had detected any sounds in the night, although the non-stop nightingale – joined by several others further off – hampered their listening.
