The Standing Pool

by Adam Thorpe

  The pool is crystal clear, now, better than a mirror. There is a toad, sitting at the bottom as if surprised. ‘Pools are like that,’ says Jean-Luc, studying his own face. ‘Dirty as hell one day, transparent as heaven the next.’

  The girls are playing in the middle of the dark barn, beyond the chopping block. This is the hardest part, he thinks, but Oncle Fernand urges him on. It is for the sake of the monument. Without the faces, it would not be complete. Jean-Luc wonders whether it matters if it is not complete, but he is not the commander, he has to obey. They fire cannon and spit fire and blast buildings to smithereens. They destroy whole cities for the sake of the monument. They get rid of the riffraff.

  The girls laugh at him because he is talking to Oncle Fernand, saying Yes, of course, you must do it for the sake of the monument. They think he is here to play, they clutch his trouser legs and pull on his hand and he has to shield the axe with his body, putting it behind him because the blade is greased and sharp. Oncle Fernand doesn’t know the girls, he doesn’t even like children. This is a surprise, because Jean-Luc’s father always said how good Fernand was with children in the village, showing them simple tricks with cards in his timid way. How his eyes would light up and he would put on funny voices like an actor and make them laugh.

  Oncle Fernand puts on one of his funny voices and tells them to hide in the barn, only in the barn; but they must hide so well that they can’t see each other. Then he’ll try to find them. They run off separately, squealing, as Oncle Fernand counts up to ten.

  ‘The key to it all is this word interpretation,’ Nick said, anticipating supper by several hours and chopping up veg. He was on the courgettes, slicing them lengthways into four then, holding the four parts together, slicing them crossways so he ended up – theoretically, at least – with four small quarters per section. ‘Interpretation can be transparent or opaque. When it’s transparent, it’s like a top interpreter translating from another language. When it’s opaque – shit.’ He had cut his finger. No, he hadn’t. Not even a bead of blood.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Yup. I thought I’d cut my finger. Blood with the stew, but no. So when it’s opaque, it’s like when someone says, “You’re interpreting my thoughts.” With negative implications, usually. You’re actually imposing something. History can’t exist without interpretation. Actually, nothing does. We’re interpreting all the time. But with history it’s very fraught. It’s not just a matter of translating from another language, transparently. It’s imposing your own order on a confusion of facts. Hm?’

  Sarah grunted, half in her book. ‘Who said that originally? History’s a confusion of facts?’

  ‘Isn’t that mine?’

  ‘’Fraid not,’ said Sarah. ‘I mean, someone said it before you. Vico?’

  She was looking through Exciting Things To Do With Nature in a rare moment of quiet while Nick prepared supper early so it could stew happily while they went for a walk before (if the girls let them!) an hour or two of work. She was succeeding in not fretting too much about the girls when they were out of sight and sound. She was not a security-camera operator. She would, she thought, put that in her secret journal later this afternoon. They were imbibing the freedom of a natural environment. Tammy could be trusted, she was nearly nine, after all. Nine! Impossibly mature. She herself was left hours on her own in Aden, with pool and all. As long as the faint squeals were there, like the tiny bubbles in the kitchen window’s original glass, she would not worry. She was even successfully forcing herself not to look through the glass every two minutes. She was letting go of her anxieties, media-fed, manipulated by the status quo.

  The journal was secret because it was emotional, not intellectual; it went against the Nick Regulations. It was growing more and more honest.

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, untroubled by Vico, ‘a historian is always opaque, but strives for transparency. How do you think all that pans out, for the intro?’

  ‘Pretty good,’ said Sarah, wondering whether the pine-cone mobile would be feasible, given past experience. They’d found some very dry pine cones in the attic, before clearing it out for Jamie. She thought they were in one of the caves, now, for extra kindling.

  ‘Where are those pine cones we found in the attic, Nick?’

  ‘Pine cones? I burnt them last week.’

  ‘Oh bother.’

  ‘There are plenty in the pine wood, beyond the holm oaks.’

  ‘They need to be very dry and light. It doesn’t matter. The kids sound as though they’re having a wild time,’ she observed. ‘I think it’s your turn to check, Nick. I caught Beans really devouring one of the picture books, by the way. She’s obviously going to be a reader, like Tammy. Alicia’s more into the spatial, physical thing. But it’s early days.’

  ‘When I’ve done this last courgette,’ he muttered, somewhat miffed that she hadn’t listened properly to what was so important to him.

  Oncle Fernand hunts them down, one by one.

  He finds the youngest first, who has not really hidden at all. She’s standing behind the huge, old, orange-painted beam dumped there by the builders years ago. He brings her gently to the chopping block and lays her head on it and tells her to listen to the wood, it’s telling her something deep inside. As she presses her ear to the grain, excited, the axe blade swings down with its own full weight and bites through the neck with a snap. The head’s expression is still excited as it bounces, rolling to rest at Oncle Fernand’s feet.

  He kicks it away. The blood pumps out of the torso in little snuffles, sounding like a hedgehog.

  They find the next youngest crouched behind a mouldering bale with her eyes tightly shut; she looks up at Oncle Fernand with a mischievous smile, as if he’s only pretending to be cross. He swings the axe down on her skull and it bursts open, exploding like a shot-at watermelon, like a bull Jean-Luc once saw pierced messily in the corrida in Nîmes. Another two swings remove the head. Then he looks up and sees the eldest in the hayloft, staring down. She has the worst look of terror and shock Jean-Luc has ever seen. But Oncle Fernand is used to this, he was in the war. He has been in every war since then, he says. They’re all the same.

  He climbs up the ladder to the hayloft. The old ladder squeaks like a trapped rabbit. The eldest is now crouched in the corner, screaming with her small fists pressed to her chin. The noise is too loud for safety, but Oncle Fernand acts swiftly. His hands are like a boxer’s red gloves. They close white-knuckled on the axe and bring it swirling low round his body as she scampers off, catching her deeply on the tendons under the right knee, so that they whip up like elastic bands. She falls and starts to wail. The axe handle is slippery with sweat, it looks like. It takes three swings, unfortunately, to remove her head, and the head has the same look of terror as it did when she was staring down. It only stopped making a racket on the third swing.

  He hears a man’s voice from the yard. The father is calling out their names like an alarm – running towards the barn, from the sound of his voice. Oncle Fernand makes it down to the ground off the ladder as the father appears in the entrance, a silhouette in the huge bright blazing square of the missing doors. The father hesitates for a moment, probably blinded by the barn’s shadow after the sunlight, or maybe seeing the small head by the chopping block and not understanding it.

  They can hear his breath, he must have run hard. Not good at his age. He stretches his arms out either side, as if to greet them.

  Afterwards, Oncle Fernand will tell Jean-Luc that you must never hesitate in war. The father understands the head and opens his mouth but his huge, high AAAAAAAH is interrupted before it gets to the H. The axe cleaves him through on one side with a single stroke, with no time even to bring his arms up to shield himself. Jean-Luc hears the blade crack on the hip-bone, from what he can see of the angle. A hand flies up and lands on the ground by Jean-Luc’s feet. He’s not sure how the writhing man is finally despatched, but it reminds him of the time his father’s dog was gored by the b
oar, steam rising from the warm entrails.

  He and Oncle Fernand slip in them a bit as they leave the barn and cross at a hop to the pool and splash their hands and faces, the blood snaking away in threads; then Oncle Fernand grabs the gun by the shed and they run together to the house. There is no time to lose. The boys have gone and the foreign riff-raff are still in occupation. If a single person is left, Oncle Fernand will be forced back up the track and shot through the nape once more. The only monument will be a sad, stupid stone with plastic flowers on top.

  The Englishwoman is in the kitchen, reading a book. Of course, she screams and screams when she sees Oncle Fernand with blood all over his jacket, pointing the gun at her. She has to be whole, Jean-Luc reminds Oncle Fernand. She has to be naked and whole.

  She runs off into the sitting room and up the stairs, but it is not difficult to hunt her down. Jean-Luc knows the rooms in the house back to front. Jean-Luc is scared of meeting his rival in love, Raoul Lagrange, because ghosts are not like flesh and bone, an axe or bullet or pellets go straight through them like fog. Raoul does not appear, though. He’s probably scared stiff himself, because Oncle Fernand is more powerful than most ordinary ghosts, staring through his tank-captain’s goggles. It’s the difference between a pig and a wild boar, Jean-Luc reckons.

  They corner the Englishwoman in the attic, hearing the creaks from the landing. The big space is still nothing but dust and spider webs and a sack of pine cones for the fire, dry as bone by now, and a couple of ancient crates full of empty bottles. The attic’s dust rises in clouds and makes Oncle Fernand cough, and Jean-Luc hits his head on one of the low beams. He swears and kicks at some old newspapers the colour of piss. He glances at the big black headlines on the nearest one. The Allies Bomb the Northern Ports, he reads. France-Soir, March 1943. The window in the roof is glazed over with dust and bird-muck. There’s bracken heaped on the floor: Jean-Luc knows what that is. The Englishwoman sobs.

  They force her out at gunpoint all the way to the pool. She is wringing her hands and pleading with them, weeping so much that her nose runs and her nice black top is soaked at the collar. She is calling for her husband, whom she hasn’t realised is the pile of red rubbish in front of the barn. She has the attic’s dust on her skirt. As Jean-Luc watches, Oncle Fernand makes her take off her clothes down to the undies and then her undies, too. He doesn’t misbehave as she stands there, clasping herself and shivering: he prods her with the gun until she half-falls, half-jumps into the pool. Each time she swims to the side and holds it, pleading, he stamps on her fingers. The water is cold. She is gasping. Oncle Fernand can’t shoot her or she would not be whole. Now and again she calls out for help in English. She calls out her husband’s name, then her children’s. The woods take no notice. Birds sing in the pauses. Blackbirds, wrens, chiffchaffs.

  After less than half an hour she turns quiet; she wearies and lies on her back instead of paddling. She is blue with cold and shivering, making little ripples that finally hit the sides. She lies on her back and slowly the clear, clean water covers her mouth, her nose. A bubble touches the surface and bursts, and then another, smaller, rising from her mouth. Then nothing. She is stretched out flat on her back, eyes wide open, naked from head to foot, and the water covers her completely like a plastic sheet. She is dead, thinks Jean-Luc. It is better than the photo he used on the monument.

  He bends his head and cups the clear water in his palm and sucks it up between his lips, noisily. It doesn’t taste of chlorine: it tastes of her – her sweat, her hair. His throat welcomes the water.

  This is all Oncle Fernand’s achievement. The last square is always her naked body, stretched out under the surface, with the water rippling over her and making her body quiver. It melts at the edges like ice. He uses the heel of his hand to make it melt more and still more. As he does so there is a distant boom, suddenly, like a bomb has been dropped or a plane has broken the sound barrier. The water trembles a little over the white flesh. Oncle Fernand lifts his head, and so does Jean-Luc. A patch of dark, low cloud drifts into view over the trees, smudging the clear sky.

  ‘That’s smoke,’ says Oncle Fernand.

  ‘That’s Marcel Lagrange,’ Jean-Luc grins.

  And they both laugh fit to bust.

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘We had absolutely no alternative,’ says Lucy.

  The bright, burning sun is full on her face, the pool’s reflection rippling on the creamed-up skin. She suits being a widow, that is the general view. The melancholy of it, the depth. ‘He was a danger to himself, in the end, let alone to others.’ There is the odd gust of wind that seems even hotter than the still air in which even bare concrete wilts. Not that she can see any bare concrete here, of course. The tiles are like upturned flat-irons turned to max. They make one’s unsandalled feet hop.

  The cicadas are quieter, today. Sometimes they are so loud one has to shout. They go on and on, indefatigably: insanely repetitive. All sexual, apparently, rubbing their back legs up in the trees in desperation. However would you paint that noise? It washes over you, shutting itself out, and then you wake up to it again and want to gnash your teeth.

  There is a splash and she half-squeals, half-laughs as the drops scatter on her bared legs, unfortunately growing varicose and slightly swollen under the knees. She can’t believe her thighs, these days. They have enlarged themselves without her permission; they have the consistency and texture of old butter left out of its dish in the fridge. She misses Alan greatly. She wonders if her headaches are simple grief, or a deadly tumour caused by grief. The grief surprised her. It still seems to have nowhere to go, and from that point of view is probably causing mischief. She talks to Alan, which means she talks to herself. She’s gone a little dotty. Or even dottier, her friends would like to say. That’ll be a good sign, when they say it. Unravelling his deals was the worst. In the end, he was too soft, too sweet.

  It’s the middle daughter who’s jumped in, attempting to dive. She keeps getting the names muddled up. Alicia, Tammy, Beans. Now whichever – Alicia or Tammy – is squealing with delight because Nick is bearing down on her, the long stretch of him flat out on the inflatable crocodile.

  ‘It’s really quite frightening, that crocodile,’ she says, because Sarah hasn’t replied to her statement about Jean-Luc, which in itself was a rejoinder to something Sarah had said: ‘I feel so bad about Jean-Luc,’ she’d sighed. ‘It was probably all my fault.’

  And although Lucy had felt an immediate stab of pain because Alan might still have been here had they not come over to sort things out (yet Sarah had made no mention of him, only Jean-Luc), she had kept her reply studiously diplomatic. It was, in some ways, all the Mallinsons’ fault. But so much is really one’s own fault, in the end, willy-nilly. For instance, she absolutely drew the line at being in any way implicated in the other business, the falling-off-the-roof business. That poor, dishy man was simply careless, he should’ve known better. They take on too much, that’s the trouble. It’s greed, really. Everyone likes to find someone to blame.

  The Greeks had it right. Hubris. Fate. The awful, spoilt gods.

  But the Mallinsons were very good to her, after Alan’s death. It must have been exhausting, organising his return to London. In the hold instead of in the cabin. Who would ever have guessed, just days before? She carried on, somehow, in a sort of fog. Completing his deals, selling most of his collection, even the ones he never wanted to part with. The two little gypsum worshippers from Tell Asmar and the white marble head from Ur turned out to be exquisite Saddam-era fakes, as did half the Sumerian pots. The rest nearly got her into very deep waters, although she pleaded ignorance. Maybe it was just as well he didn’t live to see all that.

  It wasn’t so much Jean-Luc picking up the hunting rifle and handing it to Alan, anyway, as Alan’s excitement over that wretched Art Brut business. Alan was American: he was used to guns, especially in the kitchen. He’d been in Vietnam as a nineteen-year-old. Even when Jean-Luc placed the barrel ag
ainst his own nape and asked Alan, holding the butt, to press the trigger, Alan had looked more excited than scared.

  ‘I can’t do that, Jean-Luc,’ said Alan. ‘Assisted suicide is a punishable offence. Even in France, I guess.’

  When Lucy translated, Jean-Luc laughed. Then he sat down and removed his dark glasses, head sunk on his folded arms.

  ‘You can’t kill a man twice,’ he rumbled. ‘Only once.’

  ‘That’s correct, Jean-Luc,’ Lucy said, butting in and feeling scared.

  Jean-Luc turned to his left and began talking in a low mumble to the air, but there was no sign of a mobile or an earpiece.

  ‘Alan, let’s go,’ Lucy murmured, in English (she remembered every word, more or less). ‘I’m going to let the doctor know someone here is keen on self-harm. Or worse.’

  ‘Already? When it’s just getting interesting? The gun’s not even loaded, by the way. It’s a game. Tell him I want to take just the tiniest little peep at his art, Lucy. Seriously tiny. A glimpse.’

  ‘Alan, that’s enough,’ she said. Quite firmly. Perhaps too firmly. That’s enough!

  Jean-Luc was muttering again into his shoulder, pausing as if on the phone. The name ‘Jean-Luc’ came up several times, with a sense of urgency. Alan leaned forwards across the table, slightly off the chair, straining to listen. His face lit up, as if the French was comprehensible. There was a pause – was there really a pause? – and then what sounded like a long growl of pleasure from his throat; his head tipped forwards and struck the table like a knuckled call to order before he slid backwards and sideways and onto the floor in a muddle of limbs.

  Lucy thought, completely illogically, he was reaching for a dropped pen or his wallet. Jean-Luc looked up, frowning, his eyes creased against the light. He was fumbling for his dark glasses.

  By the time Lucy was crouched down in the cramped kitchen, Alan had opened his eyes as if startled, along with his mouth. His hands were tucked into his groin. She lifted his head and called his name because she saw that he was a very long way away and he was not blinking. Jean-Luc stared through his dark glasses, saying nothing.