by Adam Thorpe
They seed their miniature lawns, the youngest throwing hers up into the air so that most of it settles in her hair. He imagines their lawns as just big enough for their small bodies to stretch out on. Already the black ants are transporting the seeds one by one down a tiny crater in the dry earth. He could put insecticide in, but he is like his father, who hated all the rubbish they’d pour into the vineyards and still do pour, so that nothing lives that should live.
He fills the watering-can and dampens the kids’ seed-beds; they chatter to him and he feels he can understand it in the back of his mind. They have a little hoard of nissoun roots, like a pile of marbles. They are very excited.
By the time he’s finished, it is late enough to water properly. He sets the timer again and watches as the big sprinkler sputters into life. Swish, swish, swish, it goes. He likes the expression of wonder on the kids’ faces.
The middle one comes up to him and smiles and he pats her hair and thinks how much he’s enjoyed the day. Her hair is very soft, soft and golden over the hard skull. He can feel the wintry sun on it turning into spring.
He swivels and sees a face in one of the upper windows of the house, pulling back. It is her face, the Englishwoman’s face behind its spectacles. His heart leaps in his chest like a salmon and his face burns. He knows her face is gone, now. He sees the small black window out of the corner of his eye, high up.
Why is she shy about looking down at her children? He folds his arms and looks out at the watering. She is watching him, not the children: he is sure of it. She gave him a big wave when she passed him on the track, running. A nice smile. All these foreigners run instead of cycle. Cycling’s harder, he reckons.
The late afternoon light. Shy, she is.
He feels good about her watching him. She makes him feel good about himself. She is as perfect as a flower. He pictures her face stuck on a flower with petals all around, bare of her spectacles. Over and over.
The middle one takes his hand and they watch the sprinkler together. Her hand moves like a tiny baby rabbit in his.
* * *
Nick was attempting to read one of his oldest essays (on the Balfour Declaration) in front of the fire. It was too fresh to sit outside, despite the sun: March had turned cool, cooler than when they arrived. The essay’s wince-count was pleasingly low – some of the Marxisms apart. They were like a series of rusty hooks.
He looked at Sarah over his reading glasses. She had short sight, he had long, like Jack Sprat and his wife when it came to fat. She was telling him that it may be her paranoia but they should keep an eye on Jean-Luc vis-à-vis the girls.
‘Vis-à-vis.’
‘You look about ninety doing that,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’
He had not been abused at his boarding school, unlike others. They didn’t call it abuse, then. He was trying to remember what they did call it. The notorious Malcolm Fettlewick was said to do it: the slurpy Head of Classics, with the beard that ran down his neck. Malcolm XX, they called him.
‘I don’t think he’s that type,’ he said.
‘No, it’s probably just very sweet and touching, like an Edwardian novel. But I’ve suddenly gone anxious,’ she admitted. ‘Here I am, in Paradise, and I’m all nervy.’
‘Might I make a judgement on the Paradise bit, as being a touch exclusive of reality?’
She didn’t reply and Nick went back to his reading. Strange how his forehead took up most of his face in that position, as if it were a visor that could be drawn up when needed.
‘Maybe Midgard would be ontologically better,’ he added, all but murmuring to himself. ‘The Eden of Norse myth. As being earthy rather than heavenly, I mean.’
‘He gave them wild bulbs or something to eat,’ she said, impatiently. ‘I presume he knows what he’s doing.’
‘Wild bulbs?’
‘Like little prunes. Nissow or something. The French name. They said he told them that’s why the boars dug everything up. They understood his French, it seems.’
‘If pigs can eat them, so can we.’
‘They eat anything.’
He went back to his reading. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, eventually, in a soothing tone. ‘Old one-eye’s looking after us.’
‘Old one eye?’
He waved a hand at the African mask. Oh really, she thought, keeping her expression blank as she stared at the flames feebly licking the new logs. Oh really and truly just give me a long, wild night on the razzle.
Jean-Luc finds the baby pram while pissing in the underbrush behind the Mas, out of sight of the girls. It is nestling in the dead bracken, on the side of an animal-run (badger, most like). All that’s left apart from the handle is the undercarriage, four wheels in rusted metal. He thinks it is a toy pram, but he can’t be sure. The long handle has a pink bit of plastic on, moulded to small fingers, and a real pram is usually bigger, but it might be a very old pushchair. He’s seen photos of women pushing babies in four-wheel pushchairs with long handles next to old-fashioned cars in Paris.
Straightaway he knows he will take it back home. He feels that excitement in his belly. Luckily, he has brought the van today. He gingerly reaches into the undergrowth, tugging at the metal struts, which are wrapped round by those thorny creepers he hates. Ugly scratching tentacles, thin as wire, much thinner than brambles. As they release their hold they whip over his hands, leaving beads of blood on his knuckles and the fat underbit of his left thumb. The scratches sting; there is something in the thorns that irritates the skin. But he’s holding the find free, now. It’s his.
The wheels have bits of rubber left on them, dried out and crumbling. Maybe this belonged to one of the hippy kids. Or even before, before crazy Mamie Aubert and her goats. Before the war. Before Oncle Fernand was shot on the track. When there was a working family and the fields were cleared and the terraces put to onions and potatoes and leeks. But it can’t be that old, not with the moulded handle of pink plastic, loose on its metal rod.
He’s putting it in the back of the van and the English girls run up. From the sound of it, they think he’s got the pram for them.
He slams the doors shut and fastens them with the rope. He shakes his head and says ‘no’, in English. It isn’t a toy any more. He has the excitement in his belly. The girls pretend to cry, knuckling their eyes. Why do they like him so much? It’s a kind of mistake. His fingernails are black from the day’s work. He can smell his own sweat, the sharpness of it. He picks up the youngest one. She squirms, so he squeezes her tighter in the crook of his arm, then jigs her up and down. She likes that. All kids like that. He walks up and down by the van, jigging her. She’s chuckling, her hands spread wide and moving in time. She’s amazingly light, almost weightless. He wishes she was his kid. Her nose needs wiping, but he leaves it. The middle one wants the same game but not the eldest, who just watches with her hands on her head. The middle one is heavier, plumper. She squeezes his waist between her legs, squeezing him with her knees as he jigs up and down by the van making snorting noises. She throws her head back and watches the sky. She reminds him of his second cousin, little Priscilla. His back hurts from the raking. Their mother is walking towards them. He sweeps the one who is like Priscilla back onto the ground, her legs curling up so she rolls over, laughing. His face is burning, because the mother is coming up. He avoids her eyes, this time; he’s already opening the driver’s door.
‘Teatime!’ she says, stretching out her hands.
He knows that word. It makes him want to laugh. But when he glances at her face, it looks anxious. Her eyes meet his. His hand is on the door, he is ready to climb into the van. Her eyes are angry. He can feel it, as if they are spitting at him. She has dark, brown-black eyes and they are spitting at him over her smile, over her saying teatime in a stupid, high voice.
He has taken something off their land – off the land of the Sandlers, at any rate. The children chatter to their mother, tugging on her trousers and her sleeves, no doubt telling her ab
out the old toy pram he’s taken without permission. It’s just scrap, he thinks, but he feels shifty. He still avoids her eyes. The sun turns her black hair reddish. He climbs into the driving seat and closes the door.
‘Merci,’ she cries out, as the engine coughs into life, as his seat squeaks and bounces under him. ‘Merci beaucoup!’
Why does she need to say that, when she doesn’t mean it? He raises his hand and nods through the open window. She has her arms around the two younger kids, as if protecting them from harm, pressing them against her and frowning at him.
They wave as he drives off. Even the mother waves. As if he isn’t coming back tomorrow, or the next day. All this troubles him. He stops by Oncle Fernand’s memorial and asks him for his advice. The flowers haven’t been nicked.
‘Just wait,’ the low voice says in his head. ‘Just wait and be patient, my little Jean-Luc. Go and have a pastis in the café. Have it on me.’
‘Thank you, Oncle Fernand,’ Jean-Luc murmurs, before he drives on too fast over the holes and bumps of the track, so that the rear-view mirror falls off onto his lap.
After he was cremated and turned into a ghost, people who saw him said he had a loose head, a dangling head, a head like a dead rabbit’s or hare’s, and he couldn’t lift it up however hard he tried. That’s what terrified them. Trying to look at them through his eyebrows, but he could never lift his head up high enough, or at all. His chin rolling against his breast-bone, but no noises, not even a moaning. Just his loose neck. Worse than a bull after the picadors have been at it and it can’t lift its horns higher than its tail.
That’s why no one local goes to Les Fosses, these days. Not even Gabrielle, the sister-in-law, who is supposed to be the cleaner.
But Jean-Luc knows it’s all rubbish. Oncle Fernand has told him so. It’s all stories. It had nothing to do with Oncle Fernand, the anniversary. It was the wet, the pressure.
He goes to the café before dinner, as instructed. The usual crowd, a good dozen of them, and they make him nervous, even though Marcel isn’t there. But once Jean-Luc opens the door, scraping its bottom edge over the lino, he can’t back off. Oncle Fernand would be disappointed. Jean-Luc even thinks he can feel him in the back of his head, a vague brown shape; a bit like the only photograph of him (taken in front of the new tractor) that Jean-Luc has ever seen. Maybe there are more, but if so they can’t be found – and Jean-Luc has looked in the cupboards, in all the suitcases and drawers. Oncle Fernand is thin and wiry in the photograph, with a sheepish smile, hand on the tractor’s tyre. Half his face is in the shadow of his hat, as the sun was bright, so Jean-Luc has never been able to tell what he really looked like. The tractor was purchased in 1938, by the cousin Oncle Fernand worked for, so he couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Jean-Luc never pictures him as young, though; just old and wise. Not as old as if he were still alive –he’d be in his eighties, now – but around the age of Papa when he died. Seventy. Still fit enough to work in the vegetable patch.
Jean-Luc feels proud of his relationship with Oncle Fernand. Sometimes, when he passes the spot on the track, there is nothing. Not even a wink in the back of his mind. He imagines Oncle Fernand out in the hills, hunting. Even though he was never much of a hunter, according to Papa. ‘Fernand never liked guns,’ he’d say. ‘Too soft, soft as a girl. That’s why he helped in the bakery before he worked in the tannery. Fernand liked making cakes. Made a change from the fields. Don’t get blisters making cakes.’
Jean-Luc would always nod, then, because he understood why Oncle Fernand had preferred that job in the baker’s to labouring in the fields or hunting with his brother. If only Papa had been the one shot on the track! – but then there would have been no Jean-Luc. Might have been better like that, he’d think. Especially after Marcel Lagrange had pushed him about; because Jean-Luc, instead of seeing red, felt limp and useless, as if he didn’t have the right to exist.
Now, though, he is an object of interest; they want to know about the English up at Les Fosses. The English have been seen in the village, they went to the church and the cemetery the day before yesterday – no, three days back, how time flies –and then came in here. Louis nods in confirmation behind the bar.
‘They asked me questions,’ Louis says. ‘About the house. I pretended not to know.’
‘We’ll all be speaking sodding English soon,’ one of Marcel’s mates growls.
‘In French,’ says Louis. ‘The husband speaks French. The woman never opened her mouth. Never so much as opened her mouth. Not to me, at any rate.’
Jean-Luc shrugs. ‘They’ve got a problem with boars,’ he says, to deflect them onto a problem that was shared by many. ‘I need to put a proper fence up.’
‘That’s right,’ says Louis.
‘We can go looking for them,’ says Petit Gaston, who used to work on the railways but now putters about on his mobilette all day, rifle over his shoulder, with some mysterious, state-supported invalidity. ‘We’ll take the dogs up there next week. The whole gang.’ He draws deeply on his yellow roll-up and coughs. ‘We haven’t done Les Fosses for a while. Didn’t think there was anything there.’
Jean-Luc curses himself for mentioning the boars. But it’s usually Marcel who decides where the hunt is to be, not a little runt like Gaston.
‘They were only babies,’ Jean-Luc fibs. ‘I saw them.’
‘How big?’ asks Gaston, creasing his eyes up suspiciously. He is a nasty, yapping terrier who never lets go. He starts drinking at eight in the morning; completely pickled inside, he must be. He floats in alcohol like a specimen.
Jean-Luc spreads his hands no more than a realistic metre. ‘About so. They’ll be fine in a year or two.’
‘They’ll have a mummy and a daddy,’ Gaston persists, picking tobacco off his invisible lips. ‘And big brothers and sisters.’
‘Hey,’ Aimé yelps, an enormous lump further down the bar, ‘has she opened her mouth to you, Jean-Luc?’ And Aimé, because it has taken him a few moments to think this one up, makes sure everyone understands what he meant by waggling his tongue.
They laugh. Jean-Luc blushes, unfortunately. Louis hands him his pastis, sliding it across the bar, and Jean-Luc blushes deeper and his hand trembles around the glass. Because everyone is looking at him. His left eyelid starts to twitch and he has to pretend to scratch it. All those private, naughty thoughts are dancing up and down for everyone to see. Scribbles, drawings like cartoons, a whole comic strip. The others, bunched in a line against the bar, wait for him to speak and make dirty remarks that trigger further laughter and cat-calls. Their smoke circles him, makes him crave a fag for himself. He sips his drink and lifts his eyes to the bottles behind the bar. One of them, almond syrup, has not shifted its level in twenty years.
Emile of the massive eyebags says that Jean-Luc has dug for all the Englishwomen in the commune. How many is that? someone asks. Others are snorting with laughter because of the age of some of these women. Louis, perhaps out of kindness, is having a serious go at counting. ‘It’s well into double figures,’ he says, wiping the bar with a cloth and trying to be serious about the number in order to calm it all down, ‘but they hardly ever come in here.’
This would have deflected the regulars into having a go at the English, normally; how they were too rich and too mean, while a defender would always put their case either because –like Jean-Paul Rohr the plumber or Yves Plantier the plasterer – they were making money out of them, or – like Jacques Evrard – they were old enough to remember the war. But not tonight. Marcel’s mates make sure of that, even in his absence. It isn’t often they have Jean-Luc Maille on the end of a fork. By the time Marcel himself comes in, Jean-Luc is ready to leave, although there’s something about the attention that he appreciates, deep inside. Only Marcel would turn it really nasty – which he does.
‘Here’s to Jean-Luc,’ he says, in his high, piercing voice, raising his glass. He stands two customers away, his huge, rough-cut face the focus of attention. Today h
is bottom lip has only the blister where the cigarette usually fits. ‘And his dear old mum. Who still rocks his cradle too close to the wall.’
‘At least I sleep in my own bed,’ Jean-Luc replies, without thinking, oiled by two pastis. It provokes a nervous scatter of laughs. Oncle Fernand is clapping in his head. Attaboy, he’s saying, you tell him. Let’s get our own back.
Marcel drinks and puts the glass down with a click on the zinc. Jean-Luc feels his gut beginning to liquefy. He thinks of the German boy and the way Marcel kills stray dogs with his iron bar, beating their skulls in – or so the rumour goes. But nothing more is said. Marcel turns silent and thoughtful, lighting up and blowing out the smoke as if he’s not fussed either way.
Louis changes the subject by bringing up the football results; and then nice Françoise, married to Aimé for some unknown reason, comes in with her well-educated friend Sophie, who works in a bank and never stops nattering about health scares. Tonight it is the dangers of batshit.
Jean-Luc slips out, pretending to look at the Ricard clock and be shocked by the time. When Marcel goes quiet, it’s best to get away, as far away as possible – even if that’s just a few houses up the street and not New Caledonia. Then hope it will all blow over.
EIGHT
A great plain, tiny figures waving desperately at the helicopter for a moment of attention, even rescue. The helicopter most often hovering over the wicked or the insane, rescuing them from the oblivion they otherwise deserve while their victims remain on the ground, largely anonymous. What was it Emerson said? ‘The first lesson of history is the good of evil.’ That’s a mystical positivist for you. Actually, history is tragic. No one ever learns from it.
But at least there is a helicopter.
Almost everything escapes attention. One forgets that, Nick was thinking. Most of life falls off the edge like millions of ball bearings on a continually tilting tray. The few little balls that remain are formed into patterns, as people in families or firms or villages make up stories about each other. Contradictory stories.