The Fountain in the Forest

by Tony White

  Or that was what Iris thought she had heard the gentleman say.

  At least, that was what she had told Gertrude Bisika she had heard, and that was what Gertrude had then phoned in turn to tell Rex: ‘A foreign voice, a foreign gentleman saying, “You must be joking!”’

  Only that isn’t what the Frenchman had said.

  He hadn’t said, ‘You must be joking!’

  What he’d said was: ‘You must be Joe King.’

  25: BOULEAU (BIRCH)

  Milo was right. Rex had changed his name, or rather JJ had. Back then it had been so easy – practically standard practice, in or out of the force – to send away a birth certificate and attach a new passport photo, henceforth to be known as whatever it was. They’d all seen or read The Day of the Jackal. But even if he did know about Newbury, how had Milo tracked Rex down here, and made the connection from those days to this? How had Milo managed to follow him all this way, from the junction of the A338 and the A303 in – what was it? Hampshire? Wiltshire? – to the junction of Theobalds Road and Lamb’s Conduit Street in Holborn; from the Beanfield to the beat?

  Rex had not thought about La Fontaine-en-Forêt for many years. For the sake of his own sanity, he’d actively suppressed the memories and got on with his new life. He’d got good at it too; compartmentalising, and unthinkingly performing whatever role was required. But now here was Milo in London – well, a bald guy in a fat suit who was still somehow unmistakably Milo – and although Rex had rehearsed some sort of confrontation with him many times in his imagination, particularly in the months and years immediately following that terrible June day, it had never been this way around. In those imaginary encounters it had always been Rex confronting Milo and dictating the terms, not Milo confronting Rex on his. Now that his old— no, his former friend was standing right in front of him, those long-buried memories came rushing back in with all the subtlety of a scud missile, and Rex realised that he was not as prepared as he’d thought he might be.

  Béatrice – poor, beautiful Béatrice, it didn’t bear thinking about – had said she would throw Milo and JJ a leaving party the night before they set off, and that night had arrived too suddenly. Reluctantly JJ had got up, leaving his beautiful love, Sylvie, in her rumpled bed, where they’d been enjoying a last siesta. What was he doing? When JJ had agreed to go to Stonehenge with Milo, he and Sylvie hadn’t really been a thing yet. Now that they were, he was going to miss her like crazy. JJ wanted to abandon the whole thing, but naive as he was, he felt that he couldn’t let his friend down, didn’t want to stitch him up. He wasn’t putting any money into Milo’s crazy scheme, so the least he could do was lend a hand and keep him company during the long drive north. And anyway, he’d be back in less than two weeks.

  ‘It will be fun,’ Sylvie had said. ‘I will miss you, but you will have fun and I ’ave to make lots of paintings for the summer.’

  Milo’s door was ajar, and when JJ knocked and walked into the converted cow-house, he found his friend packing. Milo was evidently more organised than JJ, for whom packing meant grabbing fistfuls of clothes and shoving as much seemingly random junk as possible into his rucksack. Milo’s bag was about half the size of JJ’s, and his approach was far more scientific. JJ watched as Milo picked a shirt up delicately by the yoke and with two hands, so that it hung there, dangling like a flag on a windless day. Then he gently shook it out to get rid of any creases before folding it in half, shoulder to shoulder, and – tucking the collar in first – deftly rolling and gathering it into a tight and space-saving sausage. Milo repeated this well-practised routine – hang, shake, tuck in and roll up – with a couple of T-shirts and a spare pair of trousers. It reminded JJ of his grandparents’ asparagus-growing ex-army neighbour, long dead now, but for whom even the smallest task – lighting a pipe, or putting biscuits on a plate – was executed with military precision.

  ‘Wow,’ said JJ. ‘Wanna do mine?’

  ‘I learn this in the army. It means the clothes are straight, your uniform, when you take them out, oui?’ said Milo, laughing. With a brief turn of the head, he lifted his chin to point: ‘Help yourself.’

  JJ turned and looked. There was an unlit joint in the ashtray. Next to it were two small glasses, a jug of water and an open bottle of Ricard. One glass was full of the milky liquid, and some splashes of water had begun to soak into the wooden tabletop at its base, darkening it and exposing the grain. JJ poured some of the clear and golden aniseed spirit into the empty glass and then poured in a little water to watch the chemical reaction before taking a sip and reaching over to pick up the doobie.

  ‘A few years ago Victor would have killed you,’ Milo said, matter-of-factly. ‘He and Sylvie, they were inseparable. They were that kind of couple who everyone love because they are so much in love?’

  ‘Oui,’ said JJ, passing the joint to Milo. ‘Sylvie told me, but she said that after a while it was too much. She felt as if she could not breathe.’

  ‘C’est vrai,’ said Milo eventually, ‘et because ’e love ’er so much ’e ’ave no choice but to let ’er go. That is when ’e move out of their place.’

  Sylvie had told him more than this, in fact – much more – but JJ was not about to share those confidences with Milo. One afternoon after they had made love, she told JJ how, when they’d lived in Victor’s apartment on the Avenue de la Résistance in Vence, he had been obsessed not only with her but also with watching other men’s reactions to her. More than that, he got off on it. She told him that Victor was a voyeur. That in their erotic games he would ask her to go out dressed in her shortest skirt and her highest heels, sans bra or knickers, with her nipples outlined in dark lipstick so that they would show through her blouse or top. She told JJ how, dressed like this, she would have to go to the market in the Place du Grand Jardin while Victor watched from the window of their flat, masturbating furiously, transfixed by her beauty even at this distance, but also aroused and tormented by everyone else’s reactions, by the libidinous chaos that, thus attired, she would inevitably leave in her wake. From his second-floor vantage point, Victor could watch her every high-heeled step of the way there and back, clocking every sideways glance, every double take at her big, dark nipples, every catcall and wolf whistle, every man who crossed the street to try to say hello, every man who sped up to take another look, everyone who stared at her freely bouncing breasts, everyone who slowed down to follow her, everyone who angled themselves to see up her skirt, just for that millisecond-glimpse of buttock or bush when she bent over to pick up her basket, every kerb crawler, every driver who came around again, everyone who brushed past her or tried to grab her arse or who put their hand between her legs, everyone who reached out to grope or touch her breasts, every man who implored her to stop, who proposed marriage, who tried to lure her into an alleyway, every group of young men that swarmed around her, all of these reactions, this multiplication and proliferation of sexual energy, only magnified Victor’s desire, only sped the blood-flow into his big hard-on, until the moment when, walking back, passing Monoprix and the steps up to the Chapelle des Pénitents Blancs, she would look up and catch his eye and nod, before – feeling almost bathed in his gaze – crossing the road and letting herself into their building and walking up the stairs clip-clop-clip to the open door of their flat, where, if he hadn’t come already, shot his load at the moment their eyes had met, she would walk over and put her hands on his shoulders and lift a leg to mount him and they would fuck for hours in every room, on the floor and against the wall and from every angle and on every item of furniture that could take the weight, and they would fuck and fuck and fuck like that until tired and sore and spent they simply could not fuck any more.

  Nestled in the security of her new lover’s arms, Sylvie had told JJ that she’d thought these games would stop once they found this place and moved out to La Fontaine-en-Forêt. In fact the difficulty that they now faced, living where they did, in enacting such erotic scenarios, only served to intensify Victor’s voyeuris
tic appetites. But for Sylvie, being roughly jostled by farmers in the more restricted space of the crowds at the weekly Tuesday market in the square at La Fontaine-lès-Vence or Wednesdays in Tourrettes left her feeling more bruised and bewildered than aroused. The game suddenly lost its erotic charge, and with that loss she found that her relationship with Victor was also kaput. In retrospect, the attention she had received amidst the relative decorum of the Avenue de la Résistance in Vence seemed practically courtly by comparison with the groping proximity of the market crowd, where someone might roughly grab both of her breasts or lift her skirt and finger her with impunity as they squeezed past in the throng. And on top of that, to then have to walk home along the verge, dodging traffic before clambering up through the undergrowth by the side of the Route de Grasse in her high heels, batting away the horseflies, while Victor followed trying to look up her skirt. She had rolled her eyes and shrugged. ‘I was tired, and I realise that I didn’t love ’im any more, so I ask ’im to move out.’

  Propping herself up on her elbow and pulling the sheet across her hip as if it offered some protection against the memory of those former sad times, Sylvie had told JJ that it had taken both of them, but Victor especially, a while to come to terms with what they had lost. For Victor, to have gone from prospective bridegroom to bachelor in the blink of an eye was not an easy thing to take, and for a while he had gone off the rails: drinking and fucking anything that moved, including the big-titted old whore in La Fontaine-lès-Vence who only came out at closing time in her still head-turning halter-neck tops and miniskirts, and in whom for a while at least – with his cock between her breasts, say, or pulling her tits out of her top to suck and pinch her big nipples, or watching them swing back and forth while she bent over for some toilet-stall knee-trembler – Victor had found some faint refracted glimmer of the reaction that Sylvie had inspired.

  What had eventually shaken him out of this downward spiral, what had stopped Victor from ending up like every other drunken farmer in the Alpes-Maritimes region, was the death of his mother up in Strasbourg. Sylvie and the others had waved him off in the car park at La Fontaine-lès-Vence as he’d set off, solemn and red-eyed, on the long drive home for her funeral. Sylvie had told JJ that, in the boyishness of his behaviour, his bereftness in the face of such a primal loss, she had almost fallen in love with him all over again, but then he had accelerated out on to the road and with a slight squeal of brakes and a beep of the horn turned the corner and down the mountain to hop along the coast road to Genoa, then up through Switzerland and on to Strasbourg.

  And even this trip had not been without event, including an inexplicable drunken detour a couple of hundred miles north into Germany on the day before the funeral, where Victor got himself arrested in a fight in some Dortmund bier-keller. Luckily he had been released without charge the next day, and with just enough time to drive back to Strasbourg.

  It was the money that Victor inherited from his late mother, Sylvie had explained as she kissed JJ’s belly and as he gently stroked the soft and petal-like skin of her inner thigh, that enabled Victor to start the business, to invest in the plant he needed for the factory and to begin the process of restoration here at La Fontaine-en-Forêt. By the time she had finished telling the story, JJ was hard again and all thoughts of Victor had been forgotten as he and Sylvie made love once more.

  Walking over to Nos Resto, Milo and JJ were pleasantly stoned. By JJ’s natural rule of thumb it was still daytime; that is, the cry of swifts in flight and the all-pervasive cicada chirrup that filled the sun-warmed air had not yet given way to screech of owl or the constant nocturnal croaking of the myriad frogs that lived far below along the watercourses that had carved these great tree-lined gorges.

  Béatrice had baked a large, circular loaf, which was out on the olive-wood breadboard with a bread knife, some butter and a bowl of olives. She was in the kitchen next door, so JJ popped his head around the door and asked if there was anything he could do. He had to shout because she had the music up really loud. It was a record that she often listened to while she cooked: a box set of harpsichord concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach. JJ had come to love it too. Even though he knew next to nothing about classical music, there was something about the way that Bach seemed to be able to carve time itself into such impossible patterns that appealed to him. He shouted again, but Béatrice was in the middle of inspecting something in the oven and it was only as she closed the door and stood up that she saw him there.

  Suddenly JJ caught a fragrant waft of whatever was cooking.

  ‘Wow,’ he said, taking a pantomime sniff. ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’

  Looking up at Pythag’s blackboard as he buttered a thick slice of Béatrice’s bread, JJ realised that the dish that smelled so good, so sweetly spiced and aromatic, was merely the appropriate fruit for the revolutionary season: by Pythag’s reckoning, today’s date – 25 May 1985 to the rest of the world – was the fifth day of Prairial 193, a day that was dedicated to the life-giving canard. Perhaps the big, red-faced ducks he’d seen in many of the farms that he and Milo had driven past, which he had grown up in the UK referring to as Muscovy ducks, but which Milo had told him were known here as canard de Barbarie.

  Over the months that he had been staying here in La Fontaine-en-Forêt, JJ had grown to love the way that his new friends – Béatrice and Pythag, Victor, Milo, Élise and Sylvie – took great delight in observing the Republican Calendar, and taking some daily cue from the plant or animal, the tool, perhaps, or practice that each day embodied. This might mean eating an Algerian-style pigeon filo pie, or making mushroom soup on the appropriate day. It might mean something as minor as sprinkling freshly snipped chives on to their scrambled eggs, or as major as slaughtering a pig, or putting on the beekeeping suits to repair the hives, or cleaning out Pythag’s beloved chicken coops in order to compost down their ammonia-smelling and nitrogen-rich manure for use on the gardens in the following spring. All of this, each of these thoughts-turned-conscious-actions, constituted a form of joyful adherence to, or a living out of, the revolutionary principles by which they had chosen to live their lives. The fact that today was a special occasion, that tomorrow JJ would set off to ride shotgun with Milo on their two-week road trip to Stonehenge, meant that, rather than simply feeding the ducks in the public gardens off the Promenade des Anglais in Nice or buying a big tin of cassoulet au confit, Béatrice was instead cooking her and Pythag’s favourite: duck à l’orange. JJ felt really touched; honoured. Since he had arrived in La Fontaine-en-Forêt— No, since he had got off the train at Cagnes-sur-Mer, JJ had been made to feel nothing but welcome, and it was Pythag and Béatrice who had initially made him feel most welcome of all. Pythag who had suggested that he stay, and then nominated him as a new member of the commune. JJ really appreciated that they had taken on an almost parental role with their English visitor, their pet punk, even though they were only a decade older than him at most.

  Perhaps he was a little stoned, but looking out over the gorge from the terrace at Nos Resto, it almost seemed as if there was a relationship between the games that Bach’s concertos were playing with time and the impossible geometries that the thousands upon thousands of swifts were carving through the air. The frills and rushes of Bach’s music seemingly equal to the impossibly swift – duh! – choreographies of the tiny birds.

  Sitting there, as he was, on the eve of a trip to Stonehenge, with forty cases of wine already on their way to England in a consignment of Victor’s high-end toilet ware, with a piece of fresh bread and butter in his hand, with Béatrice cooking in the old bar-tabac next door, and knowing that right now Sylvie, his golden-skinned and tousle-haired lover – trop, trop belle Sylvie! – was still naked in her bed on the other side of the square, JJ had what he would later come to recognise as a dangerous thought: that he had never been happier.

  ‘What’s this?’ Susan asked, propping herself up in Rex’s bed and smoothing the sheet across her breasts.

  ‘Bac
h,’ said Rex, coming back in with two cups of coffee and a couple of glasses of orange juice on a tray. ‘Concerto number one for harpsichord and strings, second movement. Sorry, I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I thought I might as well make us some coffee.’

  Rex might have woken early, but at least he had slept soundly, at least he hadn’t been dreaming about Tennyson. Susan had taken his mind off that, alright.

  On his bedside table was what the trendy shop on Lamb’s Conduit Street had called a ‘ewer’, a tall and knobbly 1970s water jug in shades of red and orange, into which Rex – making an effort once it was clear that Susan would be coming back – had stood a few birch twigs from the florist, resplendent with their young green leaves and catkins. He put the tray down next to it.

  ‘I didn’t have you down for a classical music fan,’ said Susan.

  ‘I’m not really,’ said Rex, handing her a glass, ‘but for some reason I’ve always loved this, and a few other things; bits of Mozart. Just that it’s taken me years to actually buy it. I’ve had a real yen for it these past few days. Do you mind?’

  ‘Not at all, I love it,’ said Susan, smiling. ‘I’m enjoying finding out things about you, you know.’

  ‘Ha! Thanks,’ said Rex, holding her gaze. ‘Me too. Finding out what makes you tick.’

  ‘Now, then,’ said Susan, taking a long sip of juice and looking at him over the top of the glass, ‘you’re making me blush. But listen, Rex, you’ve been such a great help this past week or so. What with Ashley in hospital and everything, I don’t know how I’d have coped without you; our time together.’

  ‘Well, the feeling’s mutual,’ Rex said. And it was. More than just a romantic interest or a bit on the side, knowing that he’d be meeting Susan after work, whatever time that might be, had helped him get through what might otherwise have been an impossible time. ‘I’m glad I bumped into you, you know that.’