The Standing Pool Read online

  The husband comes up to him and says something he doesn’t understand, in French so bad it might be English. To Jean-Luc, it sounds as if he wants to close the lawn down, like a factory or a brothel. Then he understands: the husband is suggesting they put a fence around.

  Jean-Luc makes out that he’s thought of this already. It is a good idea, because it gives him an excuse to spend a whole day or even two here, erecting a chicken-wire fence. He will tell Madame Sandler that the lawn is doing well, but that it needs protecting from animals. Then, when the fence is erected, he can resow the lawn. It’s late to sow a lawn, the dryness will be starting soon, or the April frosts might come early in a month or so and shrivel the seedlings, but at least there is very little risk of rainstorms now. The idea is crazy, anyway; these people are full of crazy ideas, but that isn’t for him to judge. The world itself is crazy. She will have her damp green English lawn, and the water table will be too low for the pipe, eighty metres down. Sucked dry.

  The Englishman asks him if the boars are dangerous. Jean-Luc snorts. He folds his arms and recounts how the official hunting body introduced pigs to the indigenous wild boar population to bump up numbers some time back and the result is a lot of big hairy pigs because pigs breed faster. There are hardly any pure-blood boars left, he says, like you got in his father’s day. The type that’d gouge out a dog’s stomach just like that. He clicks his fingers. Intestines everywhere. He slipped in a dog’s intestines himself, when he was a boy, out hunting. His father’s best dog.

  These new boars are soft, nothing but sweet little girls.

  Nick felt good about this conversation. It appeared that someone, perhaps Jean-Luc himself, had suffered from a stomach-ache after drinking and tripped over a dog belonging to someone’s granddaughter. He smiled and asked about logs. Jean-Luc knew a man in Aubain. The wood was a year old, holm oak, the best for burning. Sixty euros for two tons. Then Nick remembered about the cherry tree. Jean-Luc nodded without saying a word. He was at the pool now, holding a plastic canister marked CLARIFIER and pouring its liquid contents into the cloudiness, which foamed a little as it was struck.

  Nick strolled round to the front view, satisfied. Small stone steps built out from the wall led down to the terrace below, which was choked with leafless brambles. A hyacinth pushed up out of the leaf-mould at his feet, and there was a scent of violets. The deciduous trees’ buds were faintly swollen, encouraged by the warm, wintry sun. The trunks of the holm oaks, covered in lichen, were a sign of clean air, something one hardly ever saw in England. Perhaps before the Industrial Revolution all tree trunks were painted in these complex patterns of green and grey. Halcyon days! Like his youth!

  Clarifier. That’s what we all need. A dose of clarifier.

  His life seemed ridiculously short, incomplete, as if it had only just got going. Always a terrible shock, in bed, to wake up to the fag end of middle age, into the later years of the empire and its crumbling frontiers instead of the dynamic beginnings of its apogee. He had never had an apogee! Day had followed day, tutorial after tutorial, lecture after lecture, exam supervision after exam supervision, paper after paper, meeting after meeting, holiday after holiday – and somehow the whole process had cheated on him; it had eaten up most of his working life, without him really noticing. He was pure product, in the end. Fragment of some vast time-and-motion study. Everything, everything had to be accountable, these days, even in the cosy antique splendour of FitzHerbert’s.

  He settled himself before the view’s immensities and took a deep breath of the clear air, as if to re-establish his own reality. He had the kids, which was something. He was still celebrated (was that the right word?) within the narrow confines of his profession, as a Suez Crisis specialist; his fresh interpretation, circling as it did around concepts of power, control and hegemony, caused some controversy twenty-odd years back. But who now cared about Suez? Who now talked about power and control? Or used words like ‘hegemony’? His book was almost certainly a waste of paper and ink, although he could write it with his eyes closed. And he was planning to.

  He’d already wasted too many years on Suez. He’d poured his life-blood into that wretched canal and watched it flow away into the shimmering heat, just as now he was pouring it into the dry scrubland of the Chad basin, its vast, mostly concealed pool of viscous dollars – billions and billions of them, while thin-ribbed goats snuffled about the pylons. Suez meant nothing to his students, it was arcane – more so, even, than something chronologically further back: the Balfour Pact, the Congress of Vienna, Peterloo. The Third Crusade. Suez was impervious to the electroconvulsive shocks of gender studies, or queer theory, let alone the faded glories of post-structuralism. Suez was a black hole of foolishness, like the invasion of Iraq, with a whimpering and anti-climactic end (unlike Iraq, which was monumental tragedy). And Chad? He felt outnumbered by the grim faces in dark glasses, the scuttling rats of power, the melancholy elephants of the wells.

  Oil was his heffalump trap, and he was falling into it again. The mammoth in the black tar-bog.

  Nick dug his palms into his eyes and rubbed: an old habit, with him since student days, the years spent writing essays in the early hours because his days were full of fun – the fun never to be admitted to, though, in the thaumaturgical theatrics of the hard Left.

  He saw it all differently, now. A man crouched over a brass engine in a Glasgow yard, shrouded in steam. Threads, threads. Spinning all the way to the future: the skeletal longshoremen, the toothless hags, the scrabbling in the dust amidst clouds of thistledown. The hoarded, precious sheets of paper. The terror they’ll have of the sea.

  This was not yet history, it was only on the very marge of history, merely approaching through the fog. But they were already shouting at him from the future, from behind the thick pane of unbreakable glass that surrounds the present tense like a bubble. Help! they were shouting. Do something! Now! While there’s still time, for pity’s sake! Do something!

  The pressure of his palms on his eyes left his vision blotched and blurred.

  There was a growl of engines and a thumping of wheel on rock from the direction of the track. He turned, but all he could see through his blotches was soldiers and invasion: half-track troop carriers coated in dust; slit-eyed assault vehicles; the Krupps 1,500-ton tank powered by four massive submarine engines roaring like a miracle from its design stage; a howitzer bouncing on its panzer chassis. Strange, for a man of peace, this expertise in armaments. It dated from his boyhood: the massed ranks of Airfix models, the carnage caused by a fired pencil, the care with which he crippled his Junkers’ wing with a match: that evil plastic stink, that elation.

  He watched like that small boy as the hunters passed. A convoy of twelve four-by-fours with chrome nudge-bars like gates; some were the polished black of a hearse, others ivory white, one – monstrous, like a nightmare pastiche of itself –completely silver. An ordinary white estate van bumped past in the middle, looking miniature. Off into the forest like outlaws, one Little John towing a cage full of bouncing canine muzzles. He glimpsed stubbled, bloated faces topped by fluorescent orange caps or the odd stetson with a bandanna wrapped round of the same shrill primary-warning colour; more snouts poking through bars; slim rifles. Surprisingly, his hand went up in greeting. Equally surprisingly, several of the hunters waved back. The others glanced at him with a blank, faintly contemptuous air. One laughed. He was left standing in a swirl of diesel fumes.

  Sarah came around the house with Alicia and Tammy as the last vehicle disappeared between the trees.

  ‘Who on earth was that?’

  ‘The local warlords.’

  He had to be careful not to strain his throat again, because he felt like yelling.

  ‘Did you say anything to them?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he laughed, feeling soured. ‘No problem. Flag ’em down and take their numbers. A little too nippy there, sir. Blow into this, please.’ He glanced at Sarah. She wasn’t finding it funny. Neither were the girls, wh
o were clearly nervous about stepping out in front where the huge tyres had rutted the gravel back to the original ground. ‘How’s Beans? Still in the land of the living?’

  ‘Daddy kissing it better would make her even better. She’s in the kitchen.’ She strolled past him to where the ground dropped away. ‘Oh shit,’ she called out, over her shoulder; ‘I’ve left the milk on to boil.’

  ‘I’ll see to it, I’ll see to it,’ Nick called, making silly siren noises as he trotted past the two girls at a dignified speed on his long legs, diluting his anger and humiliation by playing the genial dad. Embarrassingly, Jean-Luc was kicking his mobilette into life near the door; he sped off up the track in the lane’s direction with no more than a glance. His lack of expression annoyed Nick.

  The kitchen was dark after the bright sunlight. He heard a faint bubbling and then Beans’s dwarf form emerged from the aqueous uncertainties; she was standing by the cooker and reaching up on tiptoes for the milk pan. Her fingers were touching its wooden handle. It had begun to rock in a satisfying way, the boiling milk spilling over the rim already, but she couldn’t quite bring it all the way down before her father hurled himself forwards, advancing against the air at what seemed to be the speed of an Ice Age glacier.

  FOUR

  Jean-Luc stops off at the café on the way home. The café, on the end of the main street, is not his favourite haunt: it belongs to a distant branch of the Lagrange family and the nastier blood-members are almost always inside – or (worse) sitting at the dented metal table in the street, under the faded Drambuie parasol, ready with their quips. He did, however, spot Marcel’s massive silver Cherokee in the hunt convoy passing in front of Les Fosses and so knows that the worst member, at least, is absent. Also, he needs some advice about fencing. He’s never had to keep boars out: some posts and a roll of chicken wire might not be enough.

  As it turns out, it’s a dead time and not even old Pierre is there in his usual spot, let alone the doyen of the village, Léonard Vallet, who knows all the traditional ways of doing things.

  Louis Loubet, the youngish owner – a cousin of the Lagrange brothers via his aunt’s marriage – is alone behind the bar, settled over the day’s Midi Libre, his big shoulders rearing over his head as he peruses the sport. He looks like a tortoise, Jean-Luc thinks (not for the first time). Louis has yellow teeth and a sallow skin stippled by black warts, and smokes a lot of roll-ups that have given his nostrils a charcoaled look and turned his voice deep and hoarse. His favourite subject of conversation, these days, is the forthcoming ban on smoking in cafés and restaurants.

  ‘So that’s the Republic,’ he sneers, when the topic has been exhausted yet again. ‘That’s our famous sodding Republic.’

  He wears the same faded blue tee shirt day in, day out: Helsinki City of Delights, it says. Somebody must have given it to him, because he’s never been to Finland. Louis Loubet has never been anywhere, in fact. Not even Toulouse, or Marseille.

  When Jean-Luc comes in, the rain-swollen café door scraping over the lino, Louis lifts his head to check who it is. Jean-Luc feels annoyed and somehow ashamed by Louis’s indifference: the café-owner returns to his perusal of the paper with only a grunted greeting. So Jean-Luc settles on the stool and waits, both dismayed and relieved by the café’s emptiness.

  He pretends to watch the television. The volume is low and the usual compilation is playing over the stereo – top hits from the Eighties that go round and round one’s head. The telly’s chatter is audible under it, like knobbles under a blanket. The wordlessness between them presses down on the blanket and grows heavier and heavier, but Jean-Luc isn’t going to be the first to break it. It is a duel, played out many times before.

  Some kind of terrorist atrocity in India or maybe Pakistan, with shots of bloodied shoes and men running with their arms up and their mouths wide open; Sarkozy, looking even more like a cartoon wolf; an advertisement for an intimate female article he’d rather not think about. It all washes through his head without leaving a trace. The pictures flicker and sway, reflected in the one big glass window that gives onto the street, the world, the universe.

  Louis looks up at him, finally, as if he has walked in without asking permission. Jean-Luc keeps his gaze on the telly, pretending not to notice he’s being looked at in case it shows that he cares about not being looked at. This tribe is all the same. Fuck them.

  ‘Beer?’

  ‘Why not? Yeah. A boc.’

  ‘A boc,’ Louis repeats, heaving himself away from the paper. He reserves a special contempt for people who order bocs: if everyone did the same, he’d go out of business. Jean-Luc knows this, but he can’t drink coffee here: it is the worst coffee in France. He’d like to know just where Louis buys his coffee from. The sewage depot, probably. Dried and powdered shit, it is. And it’s not yet midday. Jean-Luc, who never drinks much anyway, can’t contemplate a demi at this hour, let alone anything stronger. And what else is there? Petrol-flavoured wine. Chocolate with tepid milk. Fluorescent syrups. Coca-Cola five times the price of a bottle from Champion, and totally flat.

  If Oncle Fernand hates this place, it’s for other reasons.

  Louis Loubet fills the small, stemmed glass, wipes its base with a cloth and places it in front of his only customer with the hint of a thud, the beer rocking up to the rim. Louis reckons Jean-Luc is one of those types who’ll go off his head one day and kill half a dozen people in the village, including his mother, before doing himself in. It’ll be on the news. They’ll film the café, where the owner was found bleeding to death behind the bar, and then the mairie. Louis has thought this about Jean-Luc ever since primary school, when he saw Jean-Luc, at the age of nine (Louis was the year above, although three years older) stroking a flower. It was a big purple iris, half-wild on the edge of the meadow where the villas now stand, and Jean-Luc was stroking it with the flat of his hand and (from the look of his lips) talking to it. Louis and some of the other lads watched him secretly from the verge, on their way to school, and reckoned this was the weirdest thing they’d ever seen anyone do, at least at that age. After that, they took to teasing Jean-Luc mercilessly, without giving away the fact that they’d spied on him. They were just trying to make him normal.

  Now the school is closed and some foreigner is living in it, making pots.

  The café smells, in its emptiness, of bleach. This always surprises Jean-Luc, as the place is filthy, especially in the corners. Most evenings, in defiance of the forthcoming regulations, a litter of cigarette butts lines the floor at the base of the bar, as if a tide has washed them up. Jean-Luc can never believe so many have been smoked in a single day, just dropped there so casually, and wonders if Louis has a bucketful behind, scattering them himself when no one’s looking.

  Jean-Luc once made a good joke about this, in fact: ‘Ah,’ he said, looking down beyond his feet, ‘I see you’ve been scratching your scalp again, Louis.’

  The others, or some of the others, chuckled. Louis asked him to repeat it: the noise had drowned it out, he claimed –although that was a lie. And Jean-Luc repeated it but not well, and felt stupid. Then Louis made a low, obviously cutting remark to Marcel Lagrange, further along the bar, and Marcel guffawed in his usual high-voiced way, slapping his knees and glancing in Jean-Luc’s direction. Jean-Luc felt his stomach collapse like a house in a flood.

  It took a lot of courage on Jean-Luc’s part, to make that joke. He still doesn’t regret it.

  The boc glass has what looks like detergent stains on the side, a kind of chalky smear. Louis has always been a lazy sod: at school he’d lounge in the back row, rolling ink pellets or dismembering a cicada. He’s not bothered to rinse the glass. Jean-Luc makes sure he drinks from the part of the rim that is clear.

  The silence presses onto the blanket like a corpse. Louis lights up and returns to reading the sports without saying a word.

  Jean-Luc wishes he smoked, sometimes. It gives you something to do. The beer tastes good, it oils his mind. The first s
ip is always the best.

  ‘I need some fencing,’ says Jean-Luc.

  Louis chortles. ‘To keep you in, or everyone else out?’

  ‘Big pigs,’ Jean-Luc replies, ignoring it.

  ‘Boar?’

  ‘Yeah. Up at the English place.’

  ‘Les Fosses?’

  Jean-Luc nods. A chill descends at the mention of Les Fosses, as it always does. Jean-Luc quite enjoys the effect; it makes him feel powerful, in some way. Like someone who has ventured into the deepest, darkest part of the cave where no one else has dared to go. Alone. He’s spent hours up there, alone. Nobody else in the village will stay up at Les Fosses alone, not even for a few minutes. Especially over the last six years. As if Uncle Fernand had anything to do with it! Coincidence, that’s all.

  Louis pours himself a small pastis, the first of the morning. He never drinks before eleven o’clock, then keeps it down to no more than one an hour, with a break for lunch. This gives him the illusion that he is hardly drinking at all, that he won’t go the same way as his father, who gradually dissolved into a puce-faced, flabby sot behind the bar, insulting customers and belching fumes until his sudden death the day before France won the World Cup. (The fact is, Louis drinks around ten pastis a day, half of them offered by customers. When he was small, running around the clientele’s flared flannels or playing with cigarette butts between the stools, his father was on exactly the same dosage. But Louis does not know that; he was too young.)

  He takes a sip of the pastis. The first sip is always the best.

  ‘Electric,’ he says, smacking his lips.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘That Australian stuff the other American’s put round his place, wired up to a transformer. Where we used to walk. Perfect for big pigs.’

  Jean-Luc nods, thinking of when he was small, before things turned bad, when Louis and he would walk with the gang up over the hill through the woods and scramble to where the stream went wiggly over the rocks, to what was now the property of the other American, the younger one, the millionaire with the Chinese wife: a hundred hectares or more. There is a cave there, and a ruin. Paradise for boys. The millionaire has fenced it like an Australian cattle ranch, blocking a couple of old rights of way on some technicality. Or because he’s greased the mayor’s palm. Or both. Even though the mayor, Robert Papel, is a Trot. Jean-Luc hates him. In fact, the whole village hates him. But it is either the mad Trot, or Marcel Lagrange. Nobody else wants to be mayor of Aubain.