by Adam Thorpe
He shook their hands and motioned to them to sit down. He was polite enough, if a little grim. You forgot he wasn’t a blind man. She’d half-expected him to yell at them. The kitchen was gloomy, so goodness knows how he saw anything. As far as she could make out, almost every surface had been covered in vinyl – but a very long time ago, with flowery washable wallpaper between the cupboards that ought to have been put in a museum of Sixties memorabilia. The table’s off-white vinyl was rippled, worn and holed by burns. Ditto the dark lino on the floor.
Then the darkness fled into dismal corners, banished by the neon above their heads. She blinked to adjust. One door on the wall cupboard was hidden behind faded coloured postcards from places like the Île d’Oléron and, surprisingly, a joke card from Guadeloupe with a row of palm trees under snow. Unless it snowed in Guadeloupe? The old, bulbous fridge gurgled and growled. There was a microwave, she noted, and a smell of coarse coffee and drains. She felt she had arrived, in some way. She would tell friends about it, how she had sat in the kitchen of a paysan, with nothing fake in it whatsoever. She wouldn’t mention the postcard from Guadeloupe. Her account would supersede the visit to the Hopi house on the Arizona bluff thirty years ago, where she had admired a Bang & Olufsen stereo – which she did mention, as the sort of comic highlight.
‘That’s better,’ she said, in French.
He hadn’t yet smiled. His proffered palm had been rough-skinned. He definitely had an air of the unwashed. He sat down with a scrape of the metal chair and folded his hands in front of him. She couldn’t see where exactly he was looking, he might have been sitting in a cave. He didn’t offer them anything, which was disappointing. It marred Lucy’s opinion of French hospitality. His mother was shouting in a high voice from up the very narrow, vertiginous stairs. He said something over his shoulder as if chucking it at her, an unintelligible rasping shout. The working classes were half-deaf: Lucy had always thought that. The mother shut up.
‘Well, Jean-Luc,’ she said, hearing the English words in her head before the French came out, simultaneously translating herself, ‘we must speak of these problems.’
He nodded. Then he asked what problems. She itemised the lawn and the pool, the fact that the water was green and the lawn a disaster. Her vocabulary was more limited than she’d realised, it was always the same. She’d rehearsed this several times, but now that she was on stage the script dried up. She could barely think of any words other than those homonymically parallel, like désastre, or beginner-simple, like vert. It all needed oiling.
Jean-Luc kept his head bent, his hands trembling a little. She didn’t think that was a good sign. His knuckles were raw as if gnawed and the skin blotched a cranberry red: not just the allergic reaction to the spurge, perhaps. Dry skin like laminate. Real poverty was ugly, she remembered. Jean-Luc was probably not even that poor: he worked for lots of people. At least a dozen. She’d met others at parties in the summer who joked about him, tolerating his foibles, one or two (certainly the very wealthy Danish couple with gilded skin and hair) who said he was indispensable, in so many words.
Jean-Luc explained about the pool and the lawn in his usual mumbled way, making no concessions with his accent. She nodded as Alan yawned and looked around him, an unhealthy colour under the neon: it was like sitting in an airport, where everyone looked ravaged, whatever their age. Alan didn’t like Jean-Luc, she reminded herself: jealousy, mostly.
She said, picking words from her French hoard like one of those claw-grabs in a funfair, her pronunciation turning them plastic and cheap: ‘I think there’s a problem also with the English family, with what passed three days ago, with your relationship with them. I think you know of what I talk, Jean-Luc,’ she added, smearing over an awkward sentence connection with something between a sigh and a mumble so that the effect was weakened – not quite what she’d intended. It was a mistake to come here. Alan was right: he would have been quite prepared for a simple call. She had culturally misjudged. The lady never visited the peasant.
He paused and then said, in clearer French than usual: ‘You should have had the alarm activated, Madame.’
It struck her in a flash, like a blow in the chest, what he was driving at. Alan, looking suspiciously at him, was sweating in his dark leather jacket, she could see the gloss on his cheese-white brow under the raised hat-brim.
‘Jean-Luc, that was your responsibility,’ she pointed out.
‘It’s always the responsibility of the owners, Madame.’
‘You were saved,’ she said, partly because it was the simplest way of saying it. If they’d been talking in English, she’d have said: ‘This is irrelevant. You were fished out unharmed. Don’t talk rubbish, mate.’
‘I could report you,’ he went on. ‘I could sue you for damages. I have been ill for three days, swallowing the water. The chlorine and other products made my eyes worse. I’ve lost work.’
‘What’s he saying?’ snapped Alan, in English. ‘Is he saying he’s gonna screw us? What a nerve.’
Lucy felt out of her depth: this wasn’t the Jean-Luc she’d expected. He had revealed a cold, calculating side which was new to her. This must be the French thing. The remorseless logic of the Napoleonic law and so on. She felt very threatened, she wanted to see his eyes. It was like talking to a Mafia hoodlum.
She waved at Alan to shut up and turned to see herself twice over in the double screen of the dark glasses. Tiny and withered, like a sad old lady on television. ‘You know there’s no point, Jean-Luc. I have to say that I will be looking for another gardener, now. I’m very sorry. But I’m sure there are other people who have need of someone. It’s best like that. Thank you for all you’ve done. I want to pay you –’ she searched for the equivalent of ‘properly’ but couldn’t find it, proprement might mean ‘cleanly’, so she petered out. ‘Up to now,’ she added, feebly. Lord, this was exhausting. Jusque or jusqu’à maintenant. Or présent, even, instead of maintenant? Oh, sod it.
His mother was calling again. He looked up as if cocking his ears, obeying a signal from beyond.
‘She wants to say hello to you,’ he said, with a faint smile. ‘We have to go up. Hello and goodbye.’
‘He’s not going to sue us, period,’ said Alan, staring at Lucy. He looked sillier in his hat, indoors. ‘I think we should go. I’m thirsty. You and your face-to-face.’
‘We have to greet his bedridden mother, Alan,’ said Lucy, in as even a tone as possible.
‘Why?’
‘Because this is France and the French have their customs. They are not uncouth like us. We met her when we bought the house, if you recall. She was only lame, then. She came along with Jean-Luc. She was going to clean for us. He’s accepted the situation, thank you.’
She turned to Jean-Luc; although he had kept his head very still, she felt he’d been listening. Listening without understanding. An upper-class Parisian friend had once told her that speaking English in front of a French person not in command of the language was the very pinnacle of rudeness.
‘Do you want to give us our key, before we visit your mother?’ she said, in French.
He stood with a scrape of the chair and reached up to an old, iron hook where a large number of keys hung on their strings. He handed over the one for the Mas des Fosses without a word.
Lucy thanked him neutrally, immensely relieved, and slipped the big key into her bag. It was a lot easier than she’d anticipated: it probably happened to him quite a lot. They went upstairs, Jean-Luc letting them go first. The stairs were very steep and the runner was loose. Alan was wheezing by the time they got to the room.
She went in all smiles. The air was appalling. The woman was clearly incontinent. She had a broad, unexpected grin cut into her face that reminded Lucy of the jagged splits in a Hallowe’en pumpkin. Her face was entirely grey and shiny, with undefined knobbles and swellings through which her main features struggled to be noticed. Her hair was white and thin and wild. She stared as if aghast at their royal bearing. They
shook hands with her in turn, Alan politely taking off his hat and booming a greeting in his hopelessly American accent that had her wide-eyed and marvelling. Jean-Luc was leaning against the wall, arms folded, with an odd expression of triumph.
Oh, Lord.
Madame Maille clutched Lucy’s hand in both of hers and held on. Her eyes were wide and watery and her hands had been pulled from a bucket of ice. The only decorations in the room were a piece of sampler work in lace, framed behind cracked glass, and some ghastly ceramic thing with a bamboo surround featuring a duck. The wallpaper would once have been very loud, with a spatter effect and the embossed vertical treads of tanks. She clearly worshipped her son’s employers. ‘Adored’ them, was how Lucy was going to put it back home.
‘I hope you get better soon, Madame Maille,’ said Lucy, conscious that this was special, a special moment she would share, embellished, with her friends.
She was also desperate to leave, to pull her hand from the icy grip and get into her car and speed away to a mug of builder’s tea at home in London with Radio 4 or 3 murmuring in the background. It was embarrassing. Jean-Luc had bested them. They were firing her son and his mother had no idea. They were the wicked landlords, the cruel foreigners, the wealthy, hypocritical tosspots. She hated this. She hated not being in control of her own perfidy. Cornwall would have been better. Wales, even. No, not Wales.
Alan, hatless, was wiping his brow on a tissue, looking awful. The air was virtually non-existent, crammed with odours and Lord knows what germs. There was a little table on wheels full of medications and creams and, next to it, a commode. The cloudy white plastic bottle on the bedside cupboard contained dark liquid she imagined would be yellow if poured out. She felt sick. She would be like this herself in under twenty years. Twenty years was nothing. She must join a gym and eat nothing but nuts and berries. Madame Maille let go of her hand and sank back on the bolster, a slight frown on her speckled forehead, broad with hair-loss. The corners of her lips held gum. Old people are so detailed, Lucy thought.
‘You’re so good to my Jean-Luc,’ said the loving mother. ‘He doesn’t deserve it.’
Jean-Luc laughed, a kind of yelp. ‘Ils m’ont viré, Maman,’ he said, so clearly that even Alain could understand. Viré: it sounded as if they’d injected him with a deadly disease. He pointed to his dark glasses. Of course they hadn’t sacked him because of that. Preposterous. It was at times like this that she desperately, desperately desired a cigarette, although it was five or six years since she’d stopped.
He went to the door and closed it. Then he leaned against it and folded his arms again with that menacing look his face took on in repose. Lucy’s heart began to race. Madame Maille’s frown deepened and her eyes, darkening, shifted their gaze from Lucy to Alan and back again.
‘C’est pas vrai,’ she said, in husky bewilderment.
Alan said, ‘Let’s go, Lucy. Excuse me, monsieur.’ He was attempting to reach the door-handle past Jean-Luc’s waist, without success. His hand hovered and fell. ‘Lucy, let’s go. He’s blocking the door. He’s bats. I told you.’ Alan’s hand was now up and shaking the air. ‘Lucy, he’s blocking the fucking door. Will you tell him? Will you tell him to stop fucking –to stop blocking the door? I’m thirsty. I can’t stay here. I have to go.’
‘I think we must go, Jean-Luc,’ Lucy said, addressing the over-large dark glasses. Looking him in the eyes, or at least where she guessed them to be, she added a ‘s’il vous plaît’, although she’d been tutoying him for years. It must have spoken volumes. Such an awkward language. She was not unafraid, she noted. The sickroom’s fug had overwhelmed her underarm deodorant and she felt the tickle of sweat on her ribs.
He comes away from the door without a word and keeps his arms folded and watches them leave behind the mask of his dark glasses; they mutter and chirrup like birds, like parrots. He watches them descend the stairs, dark shapes in the darker darkness, emerging into the square of light cast by the kitchen neon. He stays upstairs. It is the rudest, most offensive thing he can think of doing, not to show them out, not even to shake their hands goodbye. He hasn’t opened his mouth since he came away from the door. They were troubled, he could see that. Maman is talking away to him but he ignores her.
He slips quickly into his room because he wants to watch them go up the street, catch the way they look as best he can. He has power over them, still. They are running away. He has chased them away without raising his voice, without waving a gun at them as always happens in films.
Madame Sandler emerges in the street, and he concentrates hard on threading his vision through the hole in his lesions. His eyes burn, but on a low flame now. His eyelids scratch away at each blink, so he tries to blink as little as possible. She emerges, but her fat husband does not. She glances up, and Jean-Luc retracts his head from the net curtain, thick with plaster dust and gnats. Maman is talking away, as if to herself, accusing him of this and that.
He wonders why Monsieur Sandler has not appeared in the street below. Maybe he’s dared to use the toilet. He glances down at the sheeted monument and has an urgent desire to look at it. He carefully removes the stained cloth, which he throws onto the bed. Then – the hunter’s instinct – he glances over his shoulder at the door, which he hadn’t bothered to lock.
The door has swung open. Monsieur Sandler is standing in the bedroom doorway, staring at him. Staring not at him, in fact, but at the monument. Monsieur Sandler’s mouth is open.
Jean-Luc leaps to hide the monument with his body, biting his tongue in the shock. Monsieur Sandler says something in clumsy French about forgetting his hat, even though his hat is on his head. Jean-Luc shouts, now. He shouts at the man to get out. He can taste the blood from his tongue. Monsieur Sandler’s plump hands come up and he says something else. Something about seeing, wanting to see, stepping forwards and craning to see the monument.
Jean-Luc raises his own hands and rests them on Monsieur Sandler’s shoulders and pushes him towards the door. Monsieur Sandler resists, as heavy as a sleeping or even a dead man. He places his hands on Jean-Luc’s wrists. Jean-Luc has to push him hard so that the man totters with tiny backward steps until he is over the threshold, his eyes continually on the monument and the scribbled-over sheets of paper around it. He has a surprising strength for a fat man. Every second that his eyes are on the monument rouses an anger in Jean-Luc that is not so far from grief. Last night he dreamt of a fish gasping for water on a riverbank.
Jean-Luc slams the door and locks it, gasping for air.
‘He’s a murderer!’ screams his mother.
Jean-Luc doesn’t know whether she’s referring to him, or to the madman who broke into his sanctuary.
He looks at the monument.
Someone has swapped the original for a dead thing, a ridiculous contraption in which the toy pram is triumphant: just a toy pram stuck over with junk, with feathers and rubbish. No wonder Oncle Fernand has stopped talking to him: he must be disgusted and ashamed and angry.
Jean-Luc feels tears tickling his cheeks, causing him wasp-stings of pain. The salt mixes with the blood from his tongue. I can promise you the salt from the kisses of my mouth. Jean-Luc sings Johnny! The music’s still ringing in his ears.
There is no one to kiss, or to promise anything to.
He removes his dark glasses and waits until the pain subsides, creasing his eyes against the bright light. His mother is complaining to Monsieur Sandler, a chuntering through the door like an old engine. He looks down at the street. Madame Sandler has disappeared. Or maybe that is Madame Sandler next door and not his mother. Both at once, now. She must have come upstairs. No, she’s calling from downstairs. She appears to be angry with someone. Her husband replies, muffled, and the door rattles against its lock. How dare they? He would like to be alone in the hills, on the wooded and grassy heights, crunching on raw chestnut, talking to the birds.
Then there is quiet. Perhaps they have all torn each other apart, like rats in a sack. His name, onc
e: Maman’s voice. A question. Jean-Luc? She sounds worried. Maybe she thinks he’s about to blow his head off like Jules Fabre did next door after Sunday lunch, upstairs. His eyeball recovered in the corner by the wardrobe. But he hasn’t got his gun, his father’s gun. It’s in the cellar, needing an oil.
He looks down at the monument on the table and picks it up in both hands.
It is surprisingly light, as if he’d expected his efforts to have added weight. He waits for a while. Then he lifts it as high as he can over his head. A spoon drops off and bounces against his skull. He hurls Oncle Fernand’s monument against the sword-shaped rips of the stripped wall on the far side of the room. The water is hitting his ears again; it’s the same crash, as if the pool is entering his head and smashing through his body. Bibi goes flying up among the feathers and the spoons; a puff of plaster dust floats into the ray of sunlight and turns it into the solid arm of God. The sieve rolls to his feet. There is no sign of the fish-bone spider.
And then he sees it, leapt onto his bed.
The arm of God is as muscular as a body-builder’s. It squirms with a million souls. The fish-bone spider is a fish-bone: no, that’s his own tiny spine on the bed, plucked clean out. He’s got a new spine, now. With a slight feeling of alarm, he realises it is Oncle Fernand’s.
* * *
Something had gone awry with Jamie very early on. Before birth, perhaps. In the seed. Astrologically (Helena would reassure Nick), the moment of their son’s procreation was amazingly auspicious. He was a magical child. But Helena had also consulted her charts before choosing her house in Wales, a decommissioned, black-granite chapel regularly under two feet of water and downwind from a piggery. And what was she now, with the personal aid of the subtle forces? An agoraphobe who couldn’t go out to buy a box of matches without consulting the I Ching, and who regarded Nick as the nodal point of darkness in her hysteric’s cosmic scheme. The Saudi Arabia of her personal planet.
The nodal point of darkness was now outside the attic door, attempting to persuade the magical child to emerge. He and Sarah had decided that enough was enough after returning from their morning walk to find lunch mostly consumed and the freezer door slightly open, the fridge throbbing gallantly, ice already bunching up. Sarah threw a wobbly which impressed the kids so much they fell quiet, having ceaselessly nattered all the way to the rocks and back. Sarah throwing a wobbly meant shouting for two minutes, breaking a mug and then bursting into tears. It was always a mug, never a glass. Fortunately, there were not usually more than two wobblies a year.
