by Adam Thorpe
His eyes are inspected in the kitchen. They’re already healing, she says, and wipes them and squeezes in some eye-drops. ‘You’re a right pair,’ she says.
‘What, my eyes are?’
‘No,’ she laughs, ‘you and your mum.’
She’s young, early twenties, with big front teeth like the ends of celery stalks in a pretty, plumpish face; she smells of lilac scent, toothpaste and pure alcohol. She’s called Marion. She has the narrowest waist he has ever seen: he can spot it even under her uniform, even through his injured eyes. He would like to squeeze it as she bends over him and presses her thigh against his hip, breathes on his face, touches his cheek with her pointy finger-pads. He likes the way her big teeth rest on her lower lip. He likes her dimples.
Afterwards, he wonders if he imagined her waist, because Bibi’s waist is also very narrow, rising to sharp breasts. His eyes sting with the drops. Or maybe he’s crying. He’s sorrowing for the missing camera, he feels angry that they’ve kept it. It’s his business, what he takes photos of. And he can’t finish the monument. He needs the pictures of the English girls, their smiling faces, their pretty little flower-faces on the spoons. He seethes inside with frustration; he’s done nothing but mooch about for three days, not even able to watch telly.
He puts on his most recent Johnny Hallyday very loud, ignoring his mother’s wails. It’s the song about blood, about the lovers being the same in their blood, about exchanging silence and now we’re face to face we resemble one another, blood for blood, and he can see himself with the Englishwoman and how their blood’s 100 per cent the same – Johnny makes it possible, and Jean-Luc knows all the words, he sings along in a whisper, in a murmur, rocking his head and wanting to sob and wail like Johnny, full up with love.
The whole village must be hearing it, he thinks, but no one complains. They’re all dead. They’re all zombies, sitting there in the café and talking about him, because he’s the only one who’s still alive. The rest of the world is dead, apart from him and the animals and the plants.
‘Jean-Luc, you stupid oaf, turn it down!’
He shouts through the door, over the music: ‘You’re dead, Maman! The dead can’t hear!’ And then hits the door with his fist, because if he didn’t hit the door he’d open it and hit her instead, over and over again. He thinks of his father’s dog whose insides were ripped out by the boar, who went on whimpering and then lifted its head and smelt its own intestines, blood gleaming on its nose. He saw it for himself. He was ten or eleven.
This morning he sat in front of the monument and pleaded with Oncle Fernand to talk to him, but Oncle Fernand has gone silent. He is afraid of the Germans. The SS, not any old Germans. He’s hiding so he won’t have to take them to the Mas des Fosses. He didn’t hide when they kicked the door open in the café, looking for someone to take them to the Mas des Fosses, to take them to the boys. He didn’t hide because he didn’t have time. Or maybe because he didn’t think he’d be chosen. Of course he had time to hide! Everyone knew the SS were coming! They knew from three, four hours before! The news came up along the roads, the goat-tracks, over the hills from down below, all the way from Nîmes long before dawn, when the SS had left their barracks to cleanse the mountains of riff-raff, of trouble. Johnny Hallyday would have kept them at bay, singing his heart out. But Oncle Fernand was only twenty years old and had never heard of Johnny Hallyday. Johnny Hallyday was only just born, probably.
‘I told you, Maman, if you don’t shut your mouth I’ll shut it for you! For good!’
Oh, how she squeals! Then nothing. Muttering, maybe, her false teeth loose. She could choke on her teeth, the nurse said. Jean-Luc feels he’s smelling his own intestines, looking after Maman.
Let me think, he thinks, swaying as the next song starts, promising her his eyes if he can’t see any more, the salt from the kisses on his mouth, the honey from the touch of his hand.
Oncle Fernand is still afraid, that’s the trouble. He didn’t hide because he hadn’t any reason to; he’d done nothing, he’d always kept his distance from the Resistance boys, he just kept his head down and worked quietly at the tannery in St-Maurice, walking there and back with his limp, two hours each way. They waited for the SS to arrive and arrive they did, a hundred or more of them roaring into Aubain, ten times louder than Serge Faure on his big motorbike. And when they kicked open the door of the café, asking someone to show them the way to the Mas des Fosses, Oncle Fernand didn’t put his hand up. Although he did know the way, of course; he knew the way like the back of his hand from long before the boys made their camp there. He helped on the farm, that’s why, as a lad, when they needed an extra pair of young hands. No other reason. They were distant cousins, that lot. Blood thicker than water. By rights, Jean-Luc thought, I should be living at the farm. By blood rights.
So who volunteered Oncle Fernand for the job?
Old Père Lagrange, that’s who. Or that’s what Maman has always told him, via Tante Alice. Tante Alice being Oncle Fernand’s sister. Whom Jean-Luc never knew.
Old Père Lagrange, that’s who. He was pissed as usual on fig brandy fetched from the straw in his cellar for old François Bouillon’s birthday, who was eighty. They were all pissed, the old men, except for Oncle Fernand. Because he wasn’t old, then. He was twenty. You were younger than I am now, thought Jean-Luc. By sixteen years. Seventeen.
And when the Germans asked – waving their automatic rifles about, guns that had shot dead whole families elsewhere (Poland, he was told), lined up in rows and falling like ninepins in front of their houses and barns – old Pére Lagrange pointed at Oncle Fernand up at the bar, having his coffee after his Saturday morning at the tannery, and said, ‘There’s your man, Captain.’
There’s your man.
There’s your man, Captain.
Knowing the boys would be gone. The Resistance boys. Because Old Père Lagrange would supply paraffin for them, from his stores. Knowing how angry the Boches would be when they got there and discovered the boys had gone, had been gone for two days. Knowing that, most like. And still he pointed at Oncle Fernand, all innocent up at the bar, having his coffee in the very same café the great-grandson Marcel Lagrange goes to, and Raoul Lagrange used to go to, and all the other grandsons and great-grandsons and great-great-grandsons of old Père Lagrange still go to, unashamed. And signed Oncle Fernand’s death warrant with that pointing finger, as if it had a nib on the end of it. And yet old Père Lagrange was a bit of a hero, after the war, for helping the boys. Helping them at his age, and with a dent in his forehead from the trenches. An article in the paper, all yellow now, when he hit a hundred. On show in a frame, for a while, in the mairie. Jean-Luc saw it, as a kid. The hero of two wars. A piss-yellow clipping from 1970, the year Jean-Luc was born.
Prodded him over the edge. Old Père Lagrange, the good-for-nothing bully who was sozzled by noon whether it was anyone’s birthday or not, prodded Oncle Fernand over the edge with that pointing finger.
And Jean-Luc feels more and more enraged, reflecting on this for the umpteenth time, without Oncle Fernand’s voice to calm him down. He finds that he’s been scratching with the biro on the table. Faces, lines, bullets, circles and slits gushing blood. How many bullets did they pump into Oncle Fernand when they found the Mas empty? One, they reckon. Out of an automatic rifle.
They found the Mas empty, but there were potato and onion peelings in the kitchen and beds of bracken in the sitting room and cigarette stubs by the windows with the look-out views onto the valley and in the fireplace there was a big heap of ash, still warm in the middle when they kicked it.
They walked back with him halfway along the track to the lane and then they pressed the rifle to the back of his neck and the bullet came out through his look at the level of the nostrils, getting rid of it. Faceless Oncle Fernand, aged twenty. Did he cry when they jerked him round to look the other way? Did he cry and plead with them? Did he tell them, on the way back, that he’d had no idea the boys were ever even the
re? Did they kick him all the way back to where they shot him? Did they take his eyes out before they blew away his face?
Jean-Luc squeezes his own eyes tight, feeling the pain of it, of Oncle Fernand’s innocence and the foreigners’ guilt. Johnny Hallyday is singing his heart out at the song’s end, giving him courage, believing like an innocent child who believes in the sky, promising her fire instead of a gun, salt from the kisses of his mouth, honey from the touch of his hand. My mouth, my hand. Her.
If the Germans were to come into Aubain now – he imagines this clearly enough, with all the war films that have been on the telly – he would take them out before they took him out. He wouldn’t wait to be killed like a dog. He grips the monument and moves it from side to side so the spoons tinkle, empty except for one. The blind-eyed duck floating on the pond. This wouldn’t float, though.
The missing camera is an agony. He can no longer watch the Englishwoman bathing in the nude. His life is a mess, he thinks. Oncle Fernand has run away so the Germans can’t get him, leaving Jean-Luc to take his place, to face them alone. He wouldn’t have let old Père Lagrange point him to his death. He’d have whipped out his father’s hunting rifle and leapt up onto the bar and shot the SS captain – look at his surprised expression! – and then peppered old Père Lagrange, gurgling blood into his fig brandy, and then as many of the Germans as he could before their bullets tore him up like a hero, like all dead heroes, dead for France, dying on a sweet smell of fig brandy from the exploded bottle as Johnny’s song fades in turn, guitar and voice and drums all fading at the end of the song.
Jean-Luc, exhausted, fists clenched around the monument, sees his own soul disappearing like the scut of a hare escaping into the trees. He sees himself as a marble monument, naked, snow-white, draped on a sheet. He would like to end up like that, he thinks.
But the next song starts like a heart beat, like life coming back, just the drums on their own, and then the guitar, and then Johnny wailing into the dark: Oh, my pretty Sarah, how much more time?
And then Maman yells. He covers his ears. He can hear her yelling again through Johnny’s pain and desire. There’s someone at the door. He looks through the window and swears and leaps immediately to stop the music.
The Sandlers arrived at Jean-Luc’s at midday. They felt midday was good because all French people, in their estimation, scuttled back home to eat at that precise hour, if they didn’t have a rendezvous in a restaurant. It was unlikely Jean-Luc had a rendezvous in a restaurant, even if he hadn’t been half-blind.
They were surprised to hear loud music belting from his house. It was audible as a murmur from halfway down the narrow main street of Aubain, but it had never occurred to either of them (they’d walked from the parking place in front of the church) that it might be coming from Jean-Luc’s house. They had never, in the six years of employing him as a handyman and gardener, visited his house before. In fact, they weren’t even sure which one it was until they asked a young girl with piercings, carrying a letter: most of the houses had no numbers on their doors, and there was no Maille visible next to what doorbells existed. When they realised the music – some awful French type of rock or variété – was emanating from the indicated house, they doubted the girl, but by then she’d disappeared.
There was a bell to press, somehow furred-looking and green about the gills. Lucy tried it. Alan was standing a little apart, looking grumpy and red in the face, with his felt homburg tilted against the bright sun. He thought the hat made him look distinguished: it was a recent thing. He hadn’t wanted to come, but he was her minder. He couldn’t understand why a simple phone call wouldn’t suffice; if the key was the main issue, they could add a Yale to the door. He was tired from the travelling and the late night and felt there’d have been nothing wrong with a simple call.
Lucy believed in doing things face-to-face, however awkward; this stemmed from her gallery experience, working with difficult artists, dealers, members of the public. She visited studios and was loved for it, even by the many unattractive, sour-faced, linguistically challenged artists she had to deal with. She felt she could abate whatever anger or desire for revenge might rise in Jean-Luc simply by being present in front of him, carefully explaining the matter in her reasonable, accurate, schoolgirl French. She didn’t want to be a village pariah. She didn’t want to be put in the same box as those awful English types without a word of the language, using locals like pawns in some thoughtless game.
And the key worried her, in some deep way. It was a very old lock, the main lock to the house. Handing over the key would be a symbolic act of renunciation.
Behind it all, she wanted to see Jean-Luc’s house.
When their dishy and reliable builder had fallen off the roof – reliable if you were behind him all the time, that is – she’d felt a wall of hostility from the village. Nothing was said: it was just one great silent wall. The funeral happened so quickly that it was over before she and Alan could even book a flight. They were still in shock. The man should have been wearing a safety harness, following EU norms. When the family tried to sue, she left it all to the lawyer. Horribly, for a moment it looked as if the family might win, might claim untold amounts, simply because he had been employed on the black. It was like the burglar falling into the pool: everything was on the side of the victim. She saw them sitting around an oilcloth-covered table, formidable in shawls and baggy clothes, gradually eating her for breakfast. She was fifty, sixty years out of date. They probably had a dishwasher.
Then, at the height of the stress, it all went quiet. He should never have gone up in the wet, the deep-voiced lawyer told her. No roofer ever goes up on a tiled roof in the wet, not down here: there’s no grip on the curved barrel tiles, none at all. The sun was out that day, but it had rained in the night. The tiles hadn’t dried, they were greasy, they were a skating-rink on a slope. You didn’t push him to finish, did you? Put pressure on him? That’s the rumour, here.
‘No more than any other owner might,’ Lucy said, from her mobile in the back room of the gallery. ‘You know what it’s like.’
‘You put no pressure on him at all, OK? Madame Sandler? Nous sommes bien d’accord? No pressure at all.’
The lawyer’s sexy, chain-smoker’s voice was unutterably soothing. She could marry this man, see themselves safely into old age, leave Alan to his mad mullahs.
‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘It’s clear.’
And that was that. They flew over. Everything left in place for weeks, as if time had stopped: the old tiles still stacked on the ground, beautifully stained with moss and lichen, ready to hide the new ones. The finished part ending just where, she supposed, he’d started to slide three or four feet from the bottom verge; a few little stacks of tiles up there like miniature chimneys, ready to lay; one tile loose and crooked, like a dramatic clue. It was horrible.
Standing in the attic, under the transparent plastic sheeting, she was just inches away from the actual moment, she felt. She thought she could hear his last grunt of surprise. Then Alan spotted, near the ladder leaning on the beam, a flask of coffee and a plastic tub. The coffee was spotted with green slime; the tub was a writhing mass of maggots. The lunch, no doubt prepared by his wife, that he never tasted. It gave her the worst migraine of her life.
Because of the music upstairs, she had no idea whether the bell had worked. She was suddenly a lot more nervous and glanced at Alan, who was peering upwards from the empty middle of the street, scratching his brow under the hat like a film noir detective. The house was narrow, squeezed in between other narrow houses, and rendered in a sallow limewash that was peeling to stone in places; its net curtains were yellowed and shrunk-looking, gave nothing away except that there was mystery beyond the rows of little lace dairy-maids: the mystery of poverty and neglect. She felt faintly adventurous. She hadn’t had anything to do with poverty and neglect since her voluntary days with the soup kitchen in Paddington. The sunlight was bright as a polished knife; the street contrived to look sh
adowy.
Jean-Luc wouldn’t like them to visit: this was sacred ground, like a dark temple. For all she knew, domestic privacy might be a major tradition in this area, even more major than in England. No proper local with local roots had ever invited her to their home here, she realised. She felt like a trespasser. A snooper.
‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,’ she said, moving over to Alan.
‘Sounds like he’s having a ball,’ Alan replied. ‘Welcome to the discothèque d’Aubain.’
‘Aubain does not rhyme with pain, Alan.’
‘Doesn’t it? Looks pretty gouty to me. I think we should retire to Malibu. Somewhere in the third millennium, not the first. I think he might be bats.’
‘And get burnt up in a forest fire,’ said Lucy. ‘Forget it, sweetheart.’
‘I think the curtain just twitched, up there.’
The music stopped suddenly in the middle of a song and didn’t start again. Lucy had pretty well sprung for the bell before she’d had time to reflect. It sounded, decisively, from somewhere deep within. As if the house were clearing its throat.
‘You know the stories of Edgar Allan Poe … ?’ she murmured, with a wry grimace that Alan shared as a chuckle, folding his hands in front of the door and rocking back on his heels.
‘Ooh la la,’ he said, inconsequentially. He had little red shadows on each cheek, like blusher.
Jean-Luc received them in the kitchen, which the front door opened straight into. Steep stairs disappeared into darkness.
He looked as if he’d been awake for many nights, face stubbled around his off-putting wrap-around sunglasses in which no eyes were visible. Lucy didn’t smell drink off him, however: Jean-Luc was not a drinker, she knew that. Most other men in the village, of his age or older, were drinkers, she reckoned.
At least, when they got close (usually in the summer, which perhaps wasn’t fair) they carried with them a fragrance of alcohol, like walking gardenias.
