by Adam Thorpe
Lucy called her darling husband’s name again, as if over a phone connection that had been cut off. Then she started shouting at Jean-Luc to call an ambulance. Alan’s head lolled heavy in her hands and she was positioned badly so her back ached. He was obviously dead and her chief reaction was one of annoyance. She shook him as if to snap him out of it. She was aware she was shouting again, but she was still annoyed, even furious. He had done it on purpose. He had left without saying ‘thank you’ or even ‘goodbye’. In a minute he would wake up and say, ‘Hey, being dead was interesting.’
Jean-Luc was just sitting there, staring into space.
She yanked open the door and screamed up the empty street. ‘Au secours! Au secours!’ was all she could muster. But it had the desired effect. Boots came running, she pictured medieval boots and people in cloaks in her blotched, half-blinded vision. She kneeled again next to Alan. There were other shouts. Dr Demarne appeared, like a great dog. Or perhaps it was his dog. Someone had placed a pillow under Alan’s head. His eyes were still open. Time was swirling along, either slowly or very fast. She was surrounded by a forest of chair-legs and awful shoes, there was no room to move her feet where cramp was biting. Whoops, she wanted him to say. A stethoscope was coming out of his chest with Dr Demarne’s ears at the other end of it. How could you look jolly with such a moustache? She was a widow, she thought. Someone from Iraq or Saudi Arabia or Washington had given Alan a lethal injection as Dr Demarne was giving him a lethal injection, right now. Madame Maille was standing on the stairs, wild-haired, as if risen from the grave. She looked exultant. Lucy could smell her even above the injection.
Now Lucy was sitting in a chair outside, visible to all the world. The fresh air was a shock. As were the bystanders, concerned-looking. She was the centre of attention in the village. It was the most important event in the village, possibly ever. Dr Demarne was pumping her darling’s chest inside the house, she could hear it, she could hear a kind of thumping that may have been her own heart. ‘Oh dearie me,’ she said, just like her mother. She had a bottle of lavender essence in her hand, she didn’t know why, and a woman’s arm was on her shoulder. She was completely integrated into the life of this charming village. She smiled faintly at the people standing about, watching, not knowing what to do. She felt great love and affection for them, for all of humanity. She counted ten, eleven living members of the human race, including the man who ran the café. What was his name? She felt faintly heroic and fulfilled. Laurence or Loopy or something. He had a tea towel on his shoulder, as they always do. Not very hygienic, she thought.
The ambulance came like a horrid disappointment, its erratic siren bouncing in dread spasms off the winding street’s walls. After a kerfuffle of apologies she followed Alan, who was calm on a stretcher, into the vehicle. She was supposed to sit with him. They did all sorts of urgent electrical things in the back of the ambulance. Alan juddered under the oxygen mask, but refused to play the game. It was embarrassing.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. Je m’excuse.’
It was so completely annoying, having to speak French. It was an extra punishment. The medical staff in their white coats looked about twenty-three, with smooth, shiny faces. They ignored her when she said sorry, they were too busy or perhaps shy. She wondered if they were trained or were just pretending. One, of course, was very handsome. The vehicle was surprisingly roomy. She felt thirsty, she felt like having a swig of pure vodka. Funny, Jean-Luc never offering them anything to drink. Them! She felt tears welling up right behind her jaw, and couldn’t stop herself.
Alan did not react at all. Not a twitch. Her poor sweetheart was a wordless, voiceless, mindless smudge, whose last word was ‘enough’. No, that was her word. The last word he heard, then. His was ‘peep’. Was it?
Enough! You couldn’t put that in a novel. The pretty nurse gave her a tissue but it was a meagre bulwark against the floods.
She has spent the last half an hour, while the girls splashed about (the eldest is now sitting wrapped in her towel on the edge, slightly shivery despite the temperature, like a serious-minded Buddha), describing her visit to Jean-Luc’s ‘new place’ in Nîmes, which is much better than the previous one in St-Maurice. A very nice man called Xavier with a bald patch like a monk’s tonsure showed her round; the walls are gaily painted, and the inmates each have a largish room they can decorate as they please. Great emphasis is laid on self-expression, she tells Sarah, who is keeping half an eye on Beans, paddling happily with her Mickey Mouse water wings in the big-eyed duck inflatable, her little elbows resting on the swollen ring. ‘A healthy emphasis, to my mind.’
‘Jean-Luc’s room,’ she goes on informing Sarah, in a lower voice (Alicia – Sarah has just called her name – plump Alicia is ready to dive nearby), ‘Jean-Luc’s room was covered, absolutely plastered, in his drawings.’ Xavier told her they were always the same, done in the same order, with very little variation, tending to the apocalyptic, the violent. ‘They are basically cartoons,’ says Lucy, as Alicia delivers another cool sprinkling on the legs stretched out on the recliner, legs Lucy has difficulty recognising as her own.
‘Basically cartoons,’ repeats Sarah, sleepily, adjusting her bikini at the nipple.
She wishes Lucy would stop talking. The bikini top might as well be a thick cardigan: the cloth feels starchy with heat, the hem actually all but burning her. The air smells faintly, for some reason, of caraway seeds. She has, she reminds herself, plastered the girls with total sunblock, and it is past four o’clock. The water blinds her in flashes as it moves.
‘Yes,’ says Lucy, ‘most of them coloured with crayons or chalks, the kind of big fat chalk pastels I still adore to use myself. He never uses paints. He absolutely refuses to use paints. Xavier says he always depicts the same story, because it is like a cartoon story. He thinks the ladder with the head next to it is symbolic of the afterlife. I mean, Jean-Luc’s subconscious take on the afterlife. They have to spray his efforts with fixative when he uses chalks – actually, hairspray. So his room smells like a cheap hairdresser’s, it’s very disconcerting.’ Poor Alan, she wants to say: he’d have been so intrigued. But she can’t trust herself not to crack, and the sun and the heat, the spangle and glitter of the blue water, are so delightful and happy.
‘Certainly like cartoons,’ Sarah says.
She knows what the pictures look like, in fact, because she visited Jean-Luc herself with Jamie a few times last year, when they were properly here. Pretty brave of her, but therapeutic on all sides, too: she felt a sense of responsibility – and he was on antipsychotics, so there was no danger. He looked a bit like a teacher, with silver-rimmed spectacles and very short hair and a clean jaw, but never spoke, just fiddled with things on the table or drew his cartoons. Now and again, his mouth made bizarre, contorted movements and he flicked his tongue like a lizard. Apparently, this was just a side effect of his medication.
She never thought, however, to ask much about the pictures themselves, not even with Jamie.
Jamie, to everyone’s surprise, rose to the occasion.
He emerged from the attic one morning during the post-Alan crisis and visited Jean-Luc every day for the remainder of the sabbatical, hitching or taking the bus to St-Maurice or, sometimes, a lift with his father: they talked together alone in the car, Nick and Jamie, and it was all very positive. The perfect training, anyway, for her stepson’s present incarnation as a geriatric care assistant in Devon, clearing up vomit and making the old girls laugh with his silly jokes. Long may it last, Sarah thinks. ‘Don’t we get the Poles to do that sort of thing, these days?’ was Lucy’s sole remark.
Perhaps it was the fact that Jean-Luc never said anything, never judged; he and Jamie sitting there in the home’s lounge like a couple of Carthusian monks, mute as stone, each sporting their dark glasses.
Anyway, the so-called art just looked like a primary kid’s scribbles to her, except for a weirdly sexual and violent content in places. Nudes and guns and ax
es and fire, blood spurting out of necks, scrawled words over and over in French, a big MIEL SUR MES LÈVRES in block capitals over what resembled a hammer and nails next to something like a dartboard or a round whirlpool. Prams. Huge round eyes. Spoons. Aaaaaahs, of course. A bubble from a mouth with nothing written in it, covered over in wriggling snakes of blue chalk. The last square always a huge explosion, clearly sexual. The staff just say that, whatever the content, the work in the art room is an integral part of the treatment.
Neither she nor Nick have ever exactly wished to examine them closely, anyway. Strip-cartoons or no, they’re fairly distressing. Certainly not art, Brut or therapeutic or otherwise.
‘Always in the same order,’ Lucy repeats, as if obsessing about it herself.
‘What exactly is the story, though?’ asks Sarah, who feels she isn’t engaging enough in Lucy’s never-ending conversation.
She really doesn’t want Lucy to feel she’s being used, that she’s not getting the company the poor woman no doubt craves out here, staying six months at a time now she’s sold the gallery. Or that is the plan. The kids have been very tiring and noisy, overexcited by the familiar place. Somewhat disconcerting, it’s been, coming back.
‘There’s the rub, darling. As he never speaks, as he’s gone mute, partly bcause of the drugs, no one knows what the story is,’ Lucy replies. ‘But woe betide anyone trying to change it. Xavier received a black eye, you know, attempting to suggest to Jean-Luc that he draw a tree in the cartoon square where there’s usually a dog on a chain before the page with nothing but ovens and lots of Ss. Obviously to do with the war.’
‘And the end’s still the same? The explosion?’
‘Always the same. A blue rectangle in crayon, with a sort of tiny female figure in the middle, and then the big bang overflowing its square. They changed his drugs because of some potentially fatal reaction to do with blood cells, but the pictures stayed the same and in the same order. Make of it what you will,’ she sighs.
‘I couldn’t, much.’
I could certainly understand the photos, though, Sarah thought to herself.
She had discovered the camera under Tammy’s bed. A throwaway type. She was vacuuming a few days after Lucy had returned to London with the coffin and a metal box from one of the caves – Alan’s stuff, was all she’d say. Vacuuming and polishing and cooking were good therapy, for some reason. Tammy denied any knowledge with great fervour and the camera was sent off to be developed.
It wasn’t the indistinct nude shots of herself bathing – more than twenty of them – that disturbed her most, it was the images of the girls: not the ones he’d taken in the yard (which she had already known about, having spotted him), but the ones in their bedroom, showing their tummies; and ending on a terrified Tammy, crouched on her bed. The fact she was blurred from camera-shake made it worse. To spare the children more trauma, they decided not to approach them, assuming that Jean-Luc hadn’t taken it and that Tammy was fibbing. What was alarming was not only that tiny seed of doubt but the fact that Tammy could fib so successfully.
They burnt the photos in the fire: acrid smell and hallucinogenic colours.
‘There goes the evidence,’ Nick had said. ‘And good riddance, too.’
‘All terribly Freudian, obviously,’ Lucy went on, stirring Sarah from semi-consciousness. ‘Symbolic totems and so forth. He won’t let me take a single one away, and no one else can either. Xavier – I call him Frère Xavier, he’s so like a monk – says the poor man knows where every page of drawings is, and he’s done hundreds. When each series is finished, he stacks it on the pile before raiding it for his walls a week or so later. One page of squares takes him five days to finish. What are we now: a year and three months, is it, since he was incarcerated?’
Sarah nods, her eyes closed. She is half-drifting off again, deliciously – despite the drone of Lucy’s low-pitched voice and the squeals from the girls. Nick is with them, she thinks: she can relax, let go. Beans has this habit of slipping through the hole in the duck, then tipping it onto herself and disappearing under. But Nick is with them in the water.
Lucy’s mobile rings: an irritating fragment of Verdi. Sarah relaxes, thinking for a moment it was theirs, with its similar start to the ringtone. She remembers, as Lucy natters impatiently, their first sight in June last year of the new mast, rising from the trees a few kilometres away, utterly tactless in its white boniness.
‘We can’t have that,’ she remembers Nick saying, aghast at the bedroom window.
As if they owned the beauty that had been spread before them for months; absorbed it as part of their birthright. ‘It’s the work of Satan,’ he added, half-seriously. And then shouted this out, so that it echoed over the valley and the view, its perfection split like schist at a single, casual tap; the lines running all the way back to a child sloshing in mud in the Congo, to dead gorillas. Life was all about compromise, as her mother would say, fanning herself in Aden.
She briefly checks Tammy with a shift of the head, feeling the sun find the shadowed half of her face: Tammy is very all right, performing somersaults on the lawn.
Lucy has come off the mobile and watches the girl, smiling. Oh, the softness of the lawn. The success.
The new gardener – a dishy young Parisian called Damien, employee of a big landscaping company, a younger version of poor careless Raoul – hired an excavator and dug out the whole yard to a depth of ten centimetres, then shoved in fresh earth and compost and the richest black peat from (apparently) the diminishing bogs of Estonia. Although there was no seed sown until the autumn storms had been and gone, the sprinklers worked night and day keeping the soil fresh right through the late summer until the water table got sucked too low, so Lucy – thanks to Alan’s life insurance – hired a water-lorry up to when the rains came, rather late, at the end of November.
The result is a lush sward from barn to house to pool, kept thus by a complex web of pipes watering four hours a day and framed by huge pots sporting luxurious mounds of English lavender (so much prettier) and thick sprays of jasmine, red geraniums and others she’s forgotten the name of, with an oleander hedge on one side – every single bit of which is highly poisonous, she heard Sarah telling her girls. A new cherry tree has flourished, and already given a modest crop. The tumbled wall is now a perfectly pointed and levelled-off stone bulwark against the woods. Lucy feels she has achieved something of a miracle, and the boars are kept from mischief with the same fence Jean-Luc installed, simply enlarged. She had the men add a little gate. It isn’t perfect, the fence looks silly rather than civilised, the gate twee, but there was no choice. The boars love lushness, especially in the dry scorch of July and August, when the hills themselves seem to shrivel up, the air cracks like a wafer. She can’t even paint in the summer, under the trees: the cicadas drive her insane.
‘One day we might know what the story is,’ she says, as Nick’s thin, mottled body emerges into view, varnished with wet. She closes her eyes, politely smiling as the white flesh passes her to find its towel spread out on the succulent lawn.
She feels very generous, anyway, inviting the Mallinsons back for a fortnight, only a year after they left, given what happened to Alan. But it would have happened anyway, probably: his heart worse than she’d thought – a sieve, they told her: full of leaks. He was overweight and never took exercise, had chain-smoked as a younger man. You can’t escape the punishment of your own history. Not these days.
And she likes the Mallinsons. The collection of essays Nick edited has been quietly successful, won some prize or other, caused a brief stir to do with African oil and Esso or whatever, but no one tried to bump him off, as they’d threatened to with Alan. My poor sweetheart.
As for Sarah! Her published ‘journal’, French Lessons in Skinny-Dipping, has shot her into overnight prominence as one of the favourite reads of whatever that book-club couple are called on the box. Fortunately, all the names are changed. Except for Alan’s, in the dedication. That was touching.
And the end of the Jean-Luc business was, happily, rejigged – out of consideration for the poor man’s feelings. The reviewers thought the book was exaggerated, made up. But of course it wasn’t, it was honesty itself, and the end was charming: the placing of real, fresh flowers on that memorial plaque on the track as they left for the last time. Completely withered, now, but the same ones.
One never quite knows where any story will end, if there ever is an end. Certainly not where you expect it to, Lucy thinks, as a sudden commotion in the water makes her look up, as if startled.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My grateful thanks to Zoë Swenson-Wright for her unerring eye and detailed advice; to Jas and Sylvie Elsner for the inspiration; to my editor Robin Robertson and my agent Lucy Luck for support and suggestions; to Nick Miedema for his reflections; to Mike Lewis for allowing me to plunder his paper on imperial hydraulics; to Alexis Abbou, Bernard Pignero and Didier Goethals for their help and friendship; to Alex Bowler, Hannah Ross and all at Jonathan Cape; to Sylvie Wheatley for her last-minute advice; to all those who gave me technical help on everything from swimming pools to electric fences; to Aimé Vielzeuf, ancien Résistant, for his published war memories –and to those who have, over the years, recounted similar experiences to me in conversation; to my late father Barney Thorpe for his Francophilia and much-missed enthusiasm; to Josh, Sacha and Anna for the guidance of youth; and above all to my wife Jo for her patience and wise counsel.