The Fountain in the Forest

by Tony White

  But what to celebrate? Nearby Tourrettes-sur-Loup already had a festival of violets, and Menton celebrated the humble lemon, while Villefranche-sur-Mer, with its sheltered bay, had an annual Combat Naval Fleuri – a maritime battle re-enacted by rowing boats bedecked with carnations and mimosa – so the motley villagers of La Fontaine-lès-Vence had to think of something else. The main problem being that it would have been to all intents and purposes impossible, in the political and social climate of the time (this was the early 1950s, after all), to celebrate the unique gay culture for which the village had become justly famous, and furthermore there were no local crops to speak of, unless you counted the stunted olive trees of Pascaressa; so none worth celebrating. One desperate suggestion that the village hold a festival of handmade wooden bowls and spoons was unceremoniously thrown out without a hearing.

  Eventually a concord had been reached, and the more generic and inoffensive idea of a Festival d’Eau settled upon. No matter that all of the water in La Fontaine-lès-Vence had been piped in – historically speaking – either from the springs at La Fontaine-en-Forêt, or more recently from far away in the mountains near Gréolières! The villagers of La Fontaine-lès-Vence had all agreed that here was a theme with popular appeal, an identity worth celebrating! La Fontaine would become the village of water, and why not? Because what was a fountain without water anyway? Besides, Élise might have said, the idea had stuck, and now, some thirty-odd years later, the annual Festival d’Eau was still being celebrated, and more grandly than ever. And what’s more, its founders had been right: the festival’s parades and water slides, its artificial rainbows and its food stalls, attracted hundreds if not thousands of tourists every year, most of whom would go back down the mountain drenched but happy in their rainbow T-shirts, a few hundred francs lighter in the pocket, but with their bellies full of good, hearty food and their new handwoven baskets laden with local arts and crafts.

  Could Élise really have told him this, or had JJ merely dreamed it?

  He pulled on his combats and a T-shirt then went and filled his mug with cold water from the fountain in the square, before holding his head beneath the waters for as long as he could. Above him, Sylvie’s first-floor studio windows were open. She was listening to a record while she worked: ‘Sinnerman’ by Nina Simone. It was a song that JJ knew because it was on a great old 1960s stereo LP that Pythag sometimes played in the evenings. It was also one of two records that Pythag said had lyrics based on lines from Psalm 78 in the Bible, the other being a particular favourite, the reggae song ‘Johnny Too Bad’ by The Slickers, which was on the soundtrack LP from the film The Harder They Come starring Jimmy Cliff.

  Pythag loved reggae music, and one time he’d told JJ that the rock mentioned in both of these songs was taken from the Old Testament story of the Exodus. The Israelites are still in the wilderness, having been led across the Red Sea from exile in Egypt, but they are sinning and being struck down, and then they remember that God is their rock and they run to him for forgiveness, but in vain because the rock won’t hide or rescue them.

  After being told this and listening to the lyrics of other songs, tuning in, it had suddenly seemed to JJ that most of the reggae records in Pythag’s collection had some kind of Old Testament or biblical connection. Perhaps it was understandable, too, that JJ couldn’t help associating the rock in both songs – whether Nina Simone’s or The Slickers’ – with the immense dolomitic limestone cliff behind the village, the Baou La Fontaine. Was that what they had all been doing here, in the mountains above Nice – looking for a hiding place? Had they been running to this particular rock for rescue, and if so, was that what was even being offered, or would it be more like the lyrics of the songs: no rock and no rescue, no hiding place?

  On another morning, when JJ had been sitting at the table on the veranda having some coffee, he had absently looked up at Sylvie’s open window on the opposite side of the square and almost jumped out of his skin to see her sitting there looking directly back at him. Their eyes had met across the distance and it was as if both of them had been taken aback for a second, but then she had smiled and waved – it was a smile that had seemed to transform and illuminate her face – before looking down and going back to whatever it was that she had been working on.

  JJ loved to watch Sylvie drawing. He had not yet been invited into her studio, a large room that occupied much of the first floor of her house, but he knew that this was where she stretched the canvases and mixed the pigments and made the paintings that she then sold during the summer season through a couple of small art galleries in Nice and Saint-Paul de Vence, making probably just enough to get by on, and to buy more paint and canvas. But even when she was out and about, Sylvie was constantly drawing. She would fill sketchbook after sketchbook, but also draw or paint on whatever materials she could get her hands on. It had taken JJ several weeks, for example, to notice that the complicated latticework designs on the table legs in Nos Resto had not been carved into the wood, but painted on to it. He loved the exploratory, feathery marks that she would make on paper, so tentative-seeming and yet so precise. It didn’t matter whether she was drawing a still life composed of whatever objects were close to hand – a candlestick or a jug on the table while they ate supper, Pythag’s chickens when she had thrown them the kitchen scraps – or conjuring some sort of rococo ornament or neoclassical figure from her imagination; he loved to see how an image would gradually coalesce on the page, appearing both solid and ephemeral at the same time.

  Milo had offered to cut JJ’s hair, so he went and knocked on his door, which was slightly ajar.

  ‘Oui?’ came the shout from inside. ‘JJ?’

  Pulling a chair out from the table, Milo gestured his friend to sit down, then picked up a pair of electric clippers and the various combs, the hair guide attachments, which he held up with a shrug. ‘Quel numéro?’

  JJ merely shrugged and said, ‘The shortest?’

  It turned out that the clippers were a souvenir from Milo’s army days, although JJ was surprised to learn that his friend hadn’t done his national service in France. He considered himself a French Jew, but, because his parents had emigrated to Israel shortly before he was born, he was also an Israeli citizen, so had had to do the much longer national service over there: ‘So thirty months instead of just twelve!’

  The way Milo told it, national service was crazy. One minute you are working in a kibbutz, playing cards and drinking, picking ripe avocado pears from the tree – and the beautiful women, oh my God – and the next it was the sheer bloody terror of fighting in the Lebanon. Then – if you survived, and many didn’t – you’d spend weeks at a time, he said, working as a building labourer on any of the many civil-engineering projects that attempted to turn desert into arable land or build houses. Either that or you were stuck in the barracks for weeks on end, counting rifles for inspection.

  While he gently buzzed away at JJ’s hair, they spoke some more about Stonehenge. JJ couldn’t tell if they were just chatting or actually making concrete plans. Did that matter? he wondered. Was there even a difference? Milo suggested that if one of Victor’s lorries was delivering to the UK, maybe they could take over some cheap wine. Milo and JJ could take Milo’s van on the ferry then meet up with Thomas – or whoever was driving for Victor – once they got to England. They could transfer the wine on to Milo’s van and then take it to sell at Stonehenge.

  Milo had clearly given at least some thought to this plan, and JJ was happy enough to go along with it. He didn’t want to be the one to ruin the buzz, for example by telling Milo the truth: that he was broke, that he didn’t actually have any money to contribute to buying the wine up front in the first place.

  Milo’s idea seemed to be that they would only be paying a few francs per bottle but selling them on for maybe two or three pounds each. That way, even giving Thomas or whoever a slice would leave them with a big profit.

  ‘But is that allowed? Wouldn’t you have to go through customs?�
�� asked JJ, uncertain whether some kind of import duty or tax might be due on alcohol. Wasn’t that why you had to buy it ‘duty-free’, after all?

  He found it relaxing, having his hair cut; the rhythm of it, Milo gently running the clippers across his scalp with one hand and then brushing away the cut hair with the other.

  ‘The douane?’ said Milo. ‘No way, man! Fuck them! They won’t be interested in a lorry full of bidets.’

  An adroit barber, Milo took the comb attachment off the clippers and spent a couple of minutes tidying up the edges, humming under his breath as he did it.

  Then he stopped. ‘Oh, but hey, not a word of this to Victor, okay?’

  JJ thought about it for a second, then shrugged. ‘Okay.’

  Sylvie was sitting on the wide stone rim of the fountain, with her back to JJ as she filled a jug with water. Hearing his footsteps behind her, she turned and seemed visibly taken aback by the brutal crew cut, his newly shaved head. It was as if she was seeing him for the first time.

  JJ enjoyed the moment of attention. ‘Do you like—’

  ‘Wow,’ she said, grinning broadly. ‘Come, let me …’

  He leaned forward; so close and yet so far. Close enough to feel strands of her long, wavy blonde hair in his mouth, close enough to look down her top, close enough to nibble her ear had they been on such intimate terms. He drank in Sylvie’s scent as she reached up to stroke the bristles on his scalp, to feel their nap: soft in one direction, catching like Velcro in the other. As far as JJ was concerned, she could do this all day. The proximity was electrifying.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  The feel of her breath on his cheek was making him hard. Could she tell?

  ‘À la cuisine,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the communal kitchen of Nos Resto.

  ‘I ’ave food,’ she said. Then got up and carried the jug into her house.

  JJ didn’t need any encouragement to follow her through the front room that he knew, with its bare wooden table and its olive jars, and into the smaller kitchen beyond. As Sylvie put the jug down on the side by the sink, she turned and they both exchanged a quick but knowing glance. There was a sudden recognition of mutual complicity and then they were kissing, JJ running his hands down her back and around her waist, Sylvie pushing JJ towards a kitchen chair, undoing his belt as she did so. Sitting down, he pulled her towards him, and she lifted her skirt to mount him there and then. JJ felt almost as if he was coming up, his nervous system opening up to the onrush of sensations: the smell of her hair or – seen close-up – the texture of the tiny dab of makeup that covered a small pimple beneath her lower lip. Looking over her shoulder, JJ could see an unframed photo that was pinned to the wall, of what could only be a teenaged Sylvie in hipster flared jeans and smock top, with a black pug on a leash. He was drawn back by the gentle touch of her hand guiding him towards her, then the arching of her back as she slipped down on to him. It seemed so natural that JJ couldn’t help wondering how it had taken them this long. Kissing her neck, he was struck by the slightly bitter taste of her skin, her hands on his shoulders, her tits in his mouth, first one and then the other, his hands on her arse as she rode him. There was a brief moment, no more than a fraction of a second, where they both suddenly looked at each other, each remembering that the front door was still open – the fear of being caught in flagrante delicto – but both were so caught up in the rough joy and surprise of the moment that they just laughed and carried on anyway, too far gone to stop now.

  * Alfred Hitchcock, To Catch a Thief, Paramount, 1955.

  III

  24: BETTE (CHARD)

  Rex had been at Sid’s ordering a takeaway jacket spud with grilled tuna-melt topping and a beetroot coleslaw on the side when his phone rang. Pulling the mobile out of his pocket and answering, there had been the kind of two-or three-second pause that usually signals an autodialled spam call, but then he had heard that voice from, what, thirty years earlier? Rougher than he remembered, but instantly recognisable. The note of mischief. ‘Bonjour, mon ami. Is this a bad time?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he’d said, coolly enough not to betray the sudden lurch of something like vertigo. That was the training kicking in: an anvil could have landed on his toe and he wouldn’t have squeaked! ‘Just buying lunch.’

  ‘So, do I gather that you remember our little bohemia on the Côte?’

  ‘How could I forget it?’

  ‘Well, you destroyed it, after all. But what surprises me is that you clearly seemed to think that you could just walk away’ – he paused for dramatic effect – ‘with impunity. Surely, you must have known someone would have been looking for you all this time, even if you didn’t imagine that it might be me.’

  ‘No, I’ve had you down for a copper for ages, mate. How else would you have got all that dope through customs? Besides, I saw you.’

  ‘Ah yes, you Anglons have a particular term for this, non? “It takes one to know one”?’

  ‘Oh, yeah? What took you so long, then?’

  ‘Well, you are like one of those special London houses, non? The one in the tourist books, that proves to be nothing more than a façade’ – he pronounced this last word with such French panache that Rex could practically hear the cedilla. ‘Let’s just say that you covered your tracks well, but perhaps not quite well enough. I saw a picture of you being pulled out of the tunnel at Newbury. Well, imagine my surprise! I recognised you even with the beard. You hadn’t changed very much in ten years.’

  So that was it, was it? Someone had certainly changed, though: where had this high and mighty attitude come from? The pompous persona seemed completely out of character. Or perhaps it had been there all along, and the more jovial and chatty left-wing banter had just been an act.

  Of course it had.

  Rex had indeed been at the ‘Third Battle of Newbury’ in 1995, but he’d been undercover; in deep with the protestors and the squatters at the Rickety Bridge and Quercus Circus camps. The campaigners had been trying to prevent the building of the Newbury Bypass, trying to protect ten thousand trees and several sites of special scientific interest – to ‘save the snail’, as some banners put it – and Rex had been doing his damnedest to prevent them from succeeding, whilst appearing not only to help, but to be central to the cause. The ‘twigloos’ and other tree houses – the whole aerial village – hadn’t worked, so a more hardcore crew had left the Mothership, climbed down from the branches and gone underground in their determination not to let the bulldozers pass. He had been one of the instigators, one of the tunnellers, burrowing into Snelsmore Common like death-watch beetles into wood, daring the heavy plant to crush them. The then Deputy Chief Constable of the Thames Valley force – a certain Ian Blair – had gained his stripes by hiring climbers, paying them good money to get the protestors out of the trees, and potholers for those protestors hiding underground. Of course, he had had Rex and a few others working on the inside too, but credit where it’s due, Blair had got the Queen’s Medal for it. He’d also received a knighthood and been promoted to Commissioner of the Met too: a stellar career for that particular graduate cop!

  Ultimately the Newbury protests had all been in vain, so it was mission accomplished. ‘Operation Prospect’ had been a success. But no invitations to become a Mason had landed on Rex’s doormat. There were no black-tie ballroom dinners, nor monthly meetings in civvies with secret handshakes in the upstairs rooms of anonymous Marylebone pubs. Instead, ten thousand trees had been chopped down as casually as cutting a hedge. While the real swampies, the snails, a rare species named Desmoulin’s whorls – amazing that Rex could remember his lines after all this time – down there in the wetlands and the long sedge, had been transported to a new location and promptly became extinct.

  ‘D’accord,’ the familiar French voice continued. ‘We must meet up while I am in town, eh? I’d love to catch up! I’ll give you a call, okay? Bon appétit, mon ami.’

  Fucking wiseacre, thought Rex, but just said,
‘Merci. Yeah, let’s do that. Maybe we can catch a show.’

  ‘Oui, I’d like that. Bonne journée!’ Then he’d hung up.

  Well, they’d been to the theatre, alright, although it might not have been quite the show that the Frenchman would have chosen to see.

  Thanks to Terence, he’d been the show.

  It would not have been the first ‘bare bodkin’ to be wielded behind the scenes at the Royal Palace, although this time it was not a prop, not a retractable stage dagger that had been so viciously and effectively deployed before being hidden under the workbench in the paint frame. Rex remembered how the knife handle had been sticky with blood, then thought the whole thing through in sequence once again, for the umpteenth time.

  He had suggested they meet at 1 a.m. under the arcade in Russell Street, near the stage door. Terence had confirmed that the stagedoor camera was ‘on the blink’, and he had long ago given Rex a spare key to the paint frame.

  And suddenly, there he was, as large as life.

  Still ruddy-faced and tanned, though bald now, with what was left of his hair close-cropped, and about Terry’s height – and weight, too, funnily enough. Much heavier than he had been before, then, and altogether more smartly dressed, but that nose was one in a million. There was no mistaking him, even after thirty-odd years.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ said Rex, reaching out to shake his old friend’s hand.

  ‘Well,’ said Milo. ‘You must be joking!’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Rex, gesturing towards the Long Dock door, which was unlocked.

  And it was this exchange that Gertrude Bisika’s friend and neighbour Iris had heard, carried by the breeze from an otherwise deserted corner of Drury Lane to her third-floor window in the Peabody flats over the road. French voices, she thought. Foreign men.

  ‘You must be joking!’