by Adam Thorpe
There were no sounds, either, from the master bedroom, except an intermittent rumble through the ill-fitting door which they presumed was Alan, snoring.
The Sandlers had got back at midnight, moments before the Mallinsons had finished the washing up prior to heading upstairs to escape them. The nightingale, after a break in the afternoon, had been burbling, trilling and tearfully wailing all evening.
‘Take a break!’ Alan shouted.
Both couples had drunk too much, the Sandlers’ perfumes battling with a haze of expensive wine and a tint of cigars, the Mallinsons content with local plonk bought at the market, whose only merit was its organic nature. Alan had insisted on a nightcap – brandy – to round off a session that had begun with pre-supper whiskies; the conversation in the sitting room was equable, even after Nick, following a remark from Lucy about the French liking to be different from everyone else, had praised their tenacity over Iraq.
‘OK,’ Alan said, his white jacket impossibly crumpled, ‘you know what I think? I think life is a flowing stream and we all flow with it. I was at Woodstock, Nick, and I dreamed my dream, I thought the world was turning the corner; I saw Jimi Hendrix play the guitar with his teeth in the rain but I was wrong, the world is not full of nice, caring people, only the nice, caring people keep thinking it is and allow the crazy and evil guys all the mileage and complain –’ here he leaned forward menacingly, ‘complain when the realistic, practical guys go in and do more than just make caring noises, while cashing in on the liberal, democratic and capitalist miracle.’
Nick stared at him through a fug of alcohol and tiredness, astonished. ‘You were at Woodstock, Alan?’
‘You glimpse me in the film. You’ve seen the film? I am glimpsed by history. I am the thin, handsome, long-haired, bearded youth near the stage for one shot of approximately two seconds, only the world is not looking at me, it’s looking at Jimi’s teeth-work on his Fender’s A string.’
‘I am physically green with envy,’ said Nick.
The two women were smiling inanely, half-asleep. ‘Maybe the pool’s envious, too,’ said Lucy, dreamily. ‘Envious of the stream.’
As they were saying goodnight to each other – an awkward moment, as neither couple wished to go up simultaneously, although desperate for sleep – a whoozy Lucy had whispered to Nick in his ear, her hand firmly around his forearm, ‘Whatever you do, darling, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t mention Vietnam. Woodstock’s just fine.’
The girls woke up at seven o’clock the next morning; they’d been told to keep as quiet as possible, but their fierce stage whispers on the landing were almost worse. Bursts of giggles sounded like explosions. Nick and Sarah, feeling somewhat hungover, also kept whispering to each other, despite the thickness of the walls. The final decision over Jamie was to leave him be, saying nothing about it to the Sandlers; the latter were due to see Jean-Luc later in the morning – he was always home at midday ‘in true French fashion’, as Lucy had asserted the previous evening. They would pay him off with a bonus he didn’t deserve, and the Mallinsons would not be bothered again. Alan was to spend the rest of the day in the area’s various junk shops, mental hospitals and care homes.
This had intrigued the Mallinsons, as intended: he was, as he’d explained over the pre-prandial whiskies in the sitting room early the previous evening, branching out into a new and very profitable field.
‘Art Brut.’
‘Oh yes,’ Nick had said, vaguely. The twilight was purple through the window-glass. ‘Um, André Breton, was it? Or do you mean the aftershave?’ he joked, regretting this immediately.
‘Art that does not have any idea that it is art.’
‘It does really,’ Lucy slipped in, ‘it just pretends it doesn’t.’
‘That’s fake Art Brut, sweetie-pie. We are not interested in fakery, only in the true and the innocent. What I am talking about is the purest expression of the interior soul, the unmediated creative current splashing outward and unsullied by the intellect.’
‘Oh, the intellect,’ Nick said, in a mock-sepulchral tone, ‘that dreaded beast from the vaults.’
Alan Sandler dabbed his plump, shining face with a tissue, unsure how to take the irony. ‘You got it. How would you define history, Mr Oxford Professor?’
‘Cambridge. And not yet a professor. Only doctor.’
‘Cambridge. Doctor.’
‘Oh,’ said Nick, crossing his endless legs at the ankles, ‘as a series of vague and soiled snapshots you try to form a narrative from? Interpret? Will that do?’
‘Art Brut is art that is bashful of history,’ said Alan, creasing his eyes like a cowboy used to long horizons.
He took another gulp of the Glenlivet they’d brought along with them and sieved it through his teeth in a silent snarl. He was on his third. The hearth-fire roared as it had done from the moment they’d arrived and it was too hot. He had donned a white jacket and trousers and looked like a seedy, retired vice-consul somewhere tropical before the war.
Lucy said, ‘What he really means by “unsullied” is that he can acquire it for free and sell it for a fortune. It’s the latest craze in New York, you see. Feelings and intimacy are in. Amateur nonsense, actually.’
‘Amateur implies auteur,’ Alan objected, jabbing a finger at his wife across the rug. ‘Implies self-consciousness. Has meaning only in relation, be that of denial, with its twin – the professional. The fatal dialectic. This is much purer. This is as pure as cave art.’
Nick wondered how this sodden slob in the sofa could think so sharply and eloquently. It excited him, this contact with a corrupt intelligence, out there in the real world of wheelers and dealers.
‘Supposing I were to scribble on a newspaper with a biro,’ Sarah had said, flatly; she was snatching fifteen minutes while Tammy read to the other two upstairs: a fresh venture that had the merit of the novel.
Alan looked at her, wheezing through his nose. ‘You are not innocent. You have eaten of the tree.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘You most certainly have,’ he said. ‘I hope you have.’
‘Here we go,’ said Lucy. ‘Drink up, Alan. Din-dins. We’ve booked the table for seven-thirty. It’s Jean-Luc tomorrow, we don’t want to be knackered. I believe in face-to-face.’
‘You are afraid of it, Sarah,’ said Alan, scratching his pocked, bun-like nose. ‘Of your own opulence.’
‘Gosh,’ said Sarah, raising her eyebrows and setting her head back awkwardly, as if she’d just seen something unpleasant.
Nick wondered what he should say or even do as he kept on smiling inanely. Lucy was on her feet.
‘He’s a terror,’ she said, indulgently. ‘Come on, Mr Charm itself.’
‘Opulence,’ said Mr Charm itself, rising unsteadily with a brief, improvident noise like a flapped newspaper that might have been a fart or the sofa’s old springs. ‘Sheer unadulterated opulence,’ he reiterated, gazing for a second or two on Sarah’s modest cleavage. Any doubts about the noise were quashed by an additional sequence of reports, sounding as if someone were hammering steadily from within his considerable lower regions.
Lucy talked over it about keys while Sarah pretended there was a squall upstairs – when there was (for once) flat calm. Alan’s gaze followed her hungrily as she rose from the chair. Nick felt proud rather than annoyed. Both men watched her mount the stairs, a bustle of maternal bother, her best skirt rippling above her ankles as if in pursuit, the image only dampened by the gradual modulation of the air by Alan’s interior, long-suffering recesses. The smell seemed to putrefy Nick’s thoughts as effectively as a high-frequency scream.
‘Cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed,’ said Alan, quietly, still gazing up. ‘Hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there.’
History – or the interesting bit – is in the surplus luggage, Nick would tell his students; or what we call ‘legacy’. The snapshots image had come to him on the instant, it was entirely off the cuff. Or due to the w
hisky.
Just before the Sandlers went off to ‘deal with’ Jean-Luc, when Alan and Nick were checking the progress of the cherry tree (very poor) and some other dubieties under the hapless Jean-Luc’s aegis (the wood-treating of the pool’s shed; a short stone path from it to the pool’s tiles; the pool itself), Iraq came up again. It came up yet again because Alan said, staring at the uneven, un-cemented stones of the path, ‘I’ll tell you the real reason the French blocked the invasion. They don’t like hard work.’
Nick gave a stage-groan. Iraq’s bed of nails was the very definition of legacy. It made the Suez crisis look like a comfy old sofa; on the other hand, regarded from his position as an oil historian specialising in Chad, it was a triumph, pure strategic brilliance. Chad and Iraq: the same massive undrilled fields, the same trope. All the US had to do was dirty France’s name in Chad through some covert operation or other, then fight it out with China. In Iraq, there wasn’t even China – or Russia. A game of poker, yes – luck, strategy and guile – but the luck factor was a masquerade, the chaos a double-bluff.
Sometimes Nick was tempted to believe again in universal, transcendent laws, so distinct was the pattern in the carpet. As for justice: there was so little of it, but that was not the historian’s purview. Collecting the evidence and making sense of it, inductively and deductively, then turning it into coherent narrative, as close to the ‘truth’ as possible: that was all (post-Michelet) one was required to do. The rest had to be put in the deep-rage room, where it smoked and smouldered but never caught – must never catch.
That is to say: he no longer believed in the Revolution. Or in any kind of redemption, much. His very body felt ramshackle.
And he had this sense, more and more often, that this was a reflection of something greater, or perhaps deeper, than simple age. By carelessness more than design, he had accepted to play a minor role in the college’s links with the ‘Guild of Cambridge Benefactors’, shaking hands with owners of international construction companies, slick-haired property investors and corpulent oil sheikhs who had slid a considerable number of dinars into the university fund. Even closer to home – aware that no one was disposable these days – he helped to entertain wealthy alumni at small, fancy dinners in the Master’s Lodge; one of the Master’s current prospects was – according to the Internet – an arms dealer as well as a constructor of rigs. The bolts on Nick’s ideological framework were so loose as to be useless: in 1997 he had voted for Blair, the ultimate hollow man.
But when Alan claimed, after Nick’s pained groan, that the invasion would be judged as a fine, honourable decision in a hundred years’ time, and that any other view was a failure of historical imagination, Nick had to object. He was stung by ‘fine’, he was provoked by ‘honourable’, he kept seeing that little girl’s head rolling away to the father’s feet, or however it had happened. Safia.
They had moved over to the pool, looking for any improvement that might be the consequence of Nick’s half-improvised cocktail of shock chlorine and clarifier two days ago.
‘A smart, cold-blooded oil-grab, maybe,’ said Nick, ‘of vast advantage to the survival of America’s unfortunate lifestyle, but you just cannot say there’s anything fine or honourable about something that, if it hadn’t happened, would have left hundreds of thousands of people, including small children, with their lives intact and still, presumably, to be enjoyed.’
He was tired of Alan’s swaggering mind; he was worried about Jamie; his pseudopolyps had transformed into a soreness he felt might have tumorous ambitions.
‘What did you think of Star Wars?’ asked Alan, folding his arms by the filter. ‘And I don’t mean the film.’
‘Star Wars? Lunatic. A dim cowboy’s wet dream.’
Alan gave a low chortle. ‘First, Ronald Reagan was not dim, as his diaries prove. I’ve just read them. His dimness was a front and you swallowed it. Second, his policies broke the Soviets without a shot being fired. Yet I’ll bet my bottom cent you were manning the barricades against him with all those crazy lesbians, sure in your own virtue. Like Stalin. Like Hitler. Like Saddam. Like Bin Laden. Like Pol Pot. Actually, like Che Guevara. Che shot defenceless people. He shot prisoners in the back of the neck. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. Did you know that? In Cuba?’
‘He was a guerilla fighter,’ shrugged Nick. He knew so much about what his old hero had got up to that he didn’t know where to start, it would be embarrassing. ‘I wrote a book about it, actually. He was killed in Bolivia fighting a vicious drugs junta, a junta run by the likes of Klaus Barbie and backed to the hilt by the CIA.’
‘Let’s readjust that,’ said Alan, who seemed not to have heard the latter part. ‘He was a mass-murdering leftist guerilla fighter therefore we forgive him.’
‘Erm, not quite fair …’ Nick had never been able to handle arguments over intricate matters when they were slapped on with a wallpaper brush. He preferred to back off, even when (as now) his heart was thumping with rage.
Alan turned on his heel with a snort and walked away, joining Lucy at the door of the house. He had a hangover, he was cross, he was fat and grumpy. The nightingale abruptly switched itself on and he told it to shut up yet again, but yet again it ignored him.
‘Where are the hunters when you need them?’ shouted Alan, and the women laughed.
Nick stared into the murk, with the odd sensation that he was dressed in pyjamas. He breathed in deeply and blew out slowly. Reagan himself was not his field, that was the trouble. The diaries had not yet been published in Britain. He had skim-read the odd review in American journals; he’d been busy, deprived of sleep. Perhaps he would send Alan one of the numerous remaindered copies of his short book, The Violent Stage: Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. The shooting of the prisoners occupied a chapter unravelling and defining complex social and ideological forces: too general, he now thought.
The pool was an even deeper green, with khaki highlights and ringlets and curls of foam like patterns in wood. It smelt of old, damp belfries. The scum by the surface had rooted as slime, waving its tiny suckers on the sides. Every life, he considered, tends towards this murk. It is all such a huge and continuing effort, retaining clarity, keeping it running clean. Had they all been so wrong?
He watched Alan and Lucy Sandler heading for their car, Sarah nodding with Tammy at the kitchen door. The nightingale’s voice seemed to be growing in volume, ecstatic and heartbreaking at the same time, echoed by others beyond, so that he got a sense of a kind of conspiratorial desire to keep it all going, to trigger the seasons despite humanity.
He decided that, when Jamie finally emerged from his sulk, he would pour love onto him. He would not assume that his son was a hard-luck story. He would treat him like a miracle. More or less.
SIXTEEN
Jean-Luc has not found the camera. Three days ago he set off long before dawn on foot, with the big key to the Mas in his tunic pocket. He hadn’t brought his dark glasses because it was dark anyway, but the small patch in the blur he could see through was not really enough, it was hard to make out the road, what was surface and what was ditch. He nearly tripped over a badger, a big black-and-white fuzz crossing the lane in the usual spot, lit by the shivering beam from his torch. When he was a kid it was the same spot, same time – but not the same badger, he assumed.
They have a nasty bite, Janno. Their back paws step exactly where their front paws have been, see? Their setts are hundreds of years old, boy, like myself.
He misses his father, suddenly.
The walk through the woods, once he’d found his mobilette in the usual place and cut across, was possible only because the sky was lightening up, a deep green flushed with blue that danced about like fireworks in his head. Not having his dark glasses, he kept his eyes almost shut. The dawn chorus was set off by the loud whirr of a wren, probably his doing. The nightingales would be here any day. He liked them talking to him, over and over.
The house was a black cliff, approached from the north. He
thought he heard kids’ voices over the chirps and trills and kept very still, crouched in the undergrowth under the holm oaks. When the high voices faded (if that’s what they were), he advanced slowly towards the area where he’d cut the spurge, the light and the shadows fusing in his creased-up eyes, soldered together then splitting apart. This is probably how animals see, he thought. Sounds and smells, sharper. Sometimes he was on all fours.
He would have liked to have been an animal. A big cat. A puma. Light on his paws.
It was hopeless. There was no camera, although he peered all around by the pool-shed, crouched, fearful of being spotted from the windows. A blackbird yelled out suddenly and made him jump. He had the key to the house but he didn’t feel like sneaking in, disturbing someone.
He made it back to Aubain on the mobilette by seven-thirty and a woman shouted at him in the main street, but he didn’t see who. He just slipped back into the house as if he hadn’t heard. The street already smelt of coffee and bread, and he’d detected shampoo from the neighbour’s steamed-up bathroom window, one floor up: his nose was hunting-dog sharp.
Three days later, and he’s lying on his bed as if he’s crash-landed from off a roof. They must have found it, along with the binoculars and the brush knife. Maybe the film is being developed right now, exposing him. Three or four days: that’s enough. He lies on his bed in his room and sees himself sprawled broken on the ground. People are coming up to him, running, and he can’t move. Maman is still asleep: he put an extra sleeping pill in her tisane and she never tasted it. She is knocked right out. He does this more and more often, especially when he needs to slip out early. He didn’t, not this morning, but who cares? It’s a mercy for everyone.
When the new nurse comes, she has trouble waking Maman up.