The Standing Pool Read online

  The five of them had set off from Cambridge on a grisly morning in early February and would not be back, if all went well, until late summer. The drive down the length of France, to the accompaniment of ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and other nursery favourites, was broken only by a dreadful night in a cheap hotel in a village somewhere near Limoges. The interior of the charming old building had been sucked out and replaced by a motorway motel smelling of wet paint in rooms with, instead of pictures, huge wall-clamped TVs tuned to global laughter and disaster. The girls loved it.

  They reached the track that left the lane half a kilometre after the little stone humpback, as directed, and passed the American-style letter box on a stout pole: Sandler, it said.

  ‘Checking the post should keep us fit,’ Nick observed.

  Two kilometres of bumps, the owners had said. A late, particularly fierce rainstorm in November had pinpointed the wood-covered valley at the head of which stood the house and the track had been badly mauled – criss-crossed by what were, effectively, the dry beds of flash streams. The three Mallinson daughters swayed and squealed in the rear seats as the car bounced along over hole, rock and rut. The car was the same age as Alicia: five and three-quarters. Tammy was a precocious eight. Beans was nineteen months. They were disco-dancing to the music of an unmetalled road.

  ‘Girls, please,’ Sarah pleaded, clutching the glove compartment and peering anxiously forwards, although she had her glasses on. ‘Hey, this track goes on for ever and ever.’

  Nick gripped the jittery steering-wheel and said, ‘Nothing goes on forever except delusion.’ He was fifty-four.

  Sarah, eighteen years younger than her husband, laughed too loud – mainly from nervous excitement. ‘And sleazy politicians!’

  ‘Lord, spare us sleazy politicians. Youch!’

  A series of metallic clangs sounded as loose stones – rocks, possibly – struck the chassis. The track widened into an open gravelly area and the house was sprung on them by the trees: it was like a great flat cliff, soaring three stories to a fretted verge.

  ‘Please keep your seat belts fastened until the plane has come to a complete stop,’ said Nick, pinching his nose with two fingers.

  Alicia said she wanted to be ‘let off’ and blew a raspberry.

  ‘Wowee,’ said Sarah, peering up through the windscreen. ‘Look at that. Here we are. Blow me away. Look, girls!’

  Alicia yelped. ‘Tammy hit me with her elbow, Mummy. Really hard.’

  ‘Yeah yeah,’ said Tammy, still struggling with her seat belt.

  ‘Look, girls!’ their mother insisted. ‘This is it!’

  ‘Likkel window,’ said Beans, clouding the glass with her tiny nose.

  ‘You don’t even love me,’ Alicia groaned.

  Tammy unbelted Beans and waited for the child-lock to be neutralised, the gaoler to come with his keys. The three girls spilled out as from a helicopter in a war zone. The house was now an even higher cliff eaten out of granite, with windows for handholds. There was a cold wind, despite the southern-ness, and Sarah stepped straight into a spindly stand of heather.

  Not a bad view, they all agreed, exhilarated and amazed by the blueness. The very air itself was blue, despite a whitish sky. Sheer, clear-eyed promise.

  As the children raced off round the corner of the house, Nick Mallinson stretched his drive-weary spine and spread his arms out either side, as if embracing the infinite space before him. In a film of their adventures he would have leapt up and punched the air in slow motion, thought Sarah, already jogging gamely after her brood.

  Who were skidding round the house and hurtling over weeds in what must have been the old farmyard, a considerable flatness half-enclosed by walls and outbuildings and overgrown with dried husks, tiny bristly weeds and matted tufts of grass in intermittent blotches. A long section of the back wall had tumbled, revealing a swarm of dry bracken spilling down the slope from the woods. A shard of porcelain sky had dropped into the middle of the yard and was framed by terracotta tiles. Sarah called out to the girls to be careful, vaguely wondering which one to save first if they were all three to fall in.

  ‘Where’s the garden?’ Tammy shouted.

  They were on the edge of the pool, which was large enough (Sarah calculated) to do about five breaststrokes per length. It was surrounded on only three sides by tiles: the fourth was rough earth to the concrete lip. The water was the colour of lime jelly.

  ‘Yuk, it’s ill,’ said Alicia.

  A set of metal steps descended into the murk and she gripped the rails and swung herself between them; the steps were slightly loose at the bolts and ticked. Tammy pulled off her shoes and sat on the edge and lowered a toe in.

  ‘Freeeezing!’ she announced.

  Dead leaves were suspended inside the jelly, like bits of rind; the ones still floating were huddled together in a corner. Alicia continued to swing on the steps’ rails, panting excitedly as they ticked and tocked.

  Sarah, out of breath, surveyed them all in one efficient glance – especially Beans. ‘Well well,’ she panted. ‘So this is the pool. We’ve got to be very aware of the dangers, kids,’ she added, with an apologetic lilt.

  Tammy stirred the water with her hand. After a minute or so the filters started to cluck like the farmyard’s missing hens.

  Beans clutched her mother’s thigh and stared at the liquified, wobbling light. Alicia had found a stick and was hitting a white plastic object clipped to the edge with an extension running into the water. It resembled a commode.

  ‘Carry on like that, sweetheart,’ said Sarah, ‘and you’ll be going straight back home.’

  ‘Goody good,’ said Alicia. She hit the object again.

  ‘Oh, what a lovely little house,’ Sarah cried, indicating the shed.

  ‘Wowee,’ Tammy said, drily, using her mother’s favourite word. ‘Let’s get a postcard of it.’ Nevertheless, she crushed her wet feet back into her trainers and ran to look.

  The shed was padlocked. They could make out a giant vacuum cleaner nestling among half-deflated crocodiles with popping eyes; an enormous duck with a toothy grin (did ducks have teeth?); folded deckchairs; and something technological with dials and pipes.

  ‘We’ll have to dust that lot off in the summer,’ said Sarah. ‘Exciting. That must be the pool’s pump thingie or whatever.’

  The two older girls were already scampering away into the outbuildings – a big stone barn and something dark and low for animals; maybe a goatshed. Between these and a stone arch leading back to the front lay a long, wide strip of tangled briars with big charred stones among them. Sarah wondered if a wing of the house had burnt down.

  Moments later they were back at the pool where Alicia leaned over the edge at an alarming angle, waving at her reflection.

  ‘There’s a frog!’ she screamed. ‘Yuk.’

  Beans, still holding her mother’s hand, exploded with astonishment when she spotted the frog, which was in fact a toad. Sarah told them. It had stuck its nostrils above the water and turned into a knot of slimy wood. ‘Come on, you lot, let’s help Daddy,’ she said. Alicia threw a pebble and the toad vanished. Tammy was annoyed and belted her sister so she nearly toppled in.

  ‘Tammy, don’t you dare hit Alicia on the edge of the pool like that.’

  ‘OK, I’ll hit her when she’s not on the edge of the pool, then.’

  Alicia pretended to cry, balling her eyes with her knuckles.

  ‘Fwog! Toe!’ screeched Beans, pointing at a greenish bird in the sky as it passed over them calmly and into the trees.

  Le Mas des Fosses.

  The Mallinsons had advertised in History Today, the Times Higher Education Supplement and the London Review of Books:

  FRANCE: Two Cambridge academics and their three well-behaved girls seek quiet rustic house in South for six-month sabbatical, preferably in Languedoc.

  They had received thirteen replies, and had fallen for the Mas des Fosses. A converted farm in a remote and stunning location; art-collec
ting owners; the fact that the swimming pool was mentioned in passing instead of, as elsewhere, being trumpeted as the main feature to which the house was a mere backdrop. In addition, the rent was very reasonable compared to the others: the owners wished to retain use of the master bedroom for the odd weekend, as needed. A minor compromise that dovetailed happily with the Mallinsons’ meagre income.

  Secretly, they were pleased there was a pool. They imagined post-meridian slumbers in the shade while the girls gambolled and splashed. They made vows to carve the water each morning. To keep fit. To grow more alive.

  The owners were a Mr and Mrs Sandler; they lived in Chiswick, in a house full of ancient pottery. Visitors had to take off their shoes and select furry slippers from a linen set of shelves in the hall. Alicia and Beans were not present, in case they misbehaved. Tammy was old enough to understand: the representative Mallinson child. She tended to be either quiet (locked into her own thing) or extremely ‘verbal’, as her teacher put it, so she’d been told that this was a kind of interview and that if she wanted she could tell the Sandlers about previous trips to France but otherwise to let Mummy and Daddy do the talking.

  This was early December, two months before the Mallinsons were to set off. The Sandlers had only spent summers in ‘Les Fosses’, but there were electric radiators and a ‘fantastic’ fireplace with simply ‘heaps’ of dead wood lying about. They’d had the place sandblasted last year, so it was even better than in the photos (which, to the Mallinsons’ delight, had shown a beautifully unkempt place, whereas the others all looked blow-dried). And – the husband chortled – a great wine cellar, but the contents were not part of the furnishings, naturellement.

  The Sandlers were dealers rather than collectors, but the Mallinsons, who were academics and knew no better, did not feel cheated. Alan Sandler was American and dealt, not in antiques, but antiquities. Lucy owned a print gallery in Chelsea. Alan found Sarah Mallinson small, dark and attractive, like a fine little chocolate left last in the box only because people are greedy. He asked straight out why she was so much younger than her husband. He liked her small, oval glasses. They were coy.

  ‘Nick supervised my doctorate,’ she replied, taking his candour as a colourful national trait. ‘Usual story.’

  Alan whistled. Lucy wondered what the doctorate’s subject was.

  ‘Fairly grim,’ Sarah admitted.

  ‘Oh go on, tell, tell,’ laughed Lucy, whose beauty was taking affectionate leave of her features behind a screen of cosmetics. She had very short grey hair and fingernails painted dark plum.

  Lucy tried to concentrate but was distracted by the way the tip of Sarah’s nice nose was affected by certain consonants. ‘M’, mostly. Lips coming together. Something to do with Africa, ideology and technological development. The reticence of the French. Copying British engineering projects. Or not.

  ‘Basically,’ Sarah continued, noticing Lucy’s intense interest, ‘for fear of replicating the perceived despotism of the British Empire. So it’s mostly about water control, forest clearance and oil. Any the wiser?’

  Lucy raised her eyebrows and affirmed she was, miffed at the suggestion that she might not be.

  ‘An under-researched area, both in the geographical as well as the intellectual sense,’ Nick commented. The otolaryngologist had advised him to speak at low volume but never, ever to whisper. And to take a break. ‘Basically lots of juicy, unread documents,’ he added, as if this was the most exciting thing in the world.

  Lucy looked sharply at Sarah. ‘You don’t teach, then?’

  ‘I stopped for the kids,’ she fibbed. In fact, the completion of her thesis, delayed by the usual part-time tutoring and an active social life, had melded straight into Tammy. She’d never really launched herself on a career, and this bothered her. ‘I’ve spots of supervision and so on. I do plan to go back,’ she added, a little too forcefully. ‘I hope to turn the thesis into a book while I’m in France.’

  Lucy turned to Nick. ‘Which college in Cambridge?’ she asked, somewhat querulously.

  ‘FitzHerbert’s,’ he replied, trying not to sound apologetic.

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘It’s one of the smaller ones, founded in the sixteenth century,’ Sarah broke in. ‘Beautiful chapel and lovely little front court. I mean really exceptional.’

  ‘So what’re you going to be up to, Professor?’ asked Alan, apparently wincing at Nick. ‘Stirring the pool while your good woman slaves?’

  ‘I’m not a professor,’ said Nick. ‘I’m a reader. My title is Doctor.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to demote you,’ said Alan.

  ‘You did the opposite. A sensitive area,’ he went on, candidly. ‘Anyway, as a colonial and post-colonial specialist I’m editing a collection of essays written mostly by fellow historians, the theme of which is oil, oil in Africa. And working on a more popular book about reactions to Suez, targeted at students and people like yourself, which was meant to be done for the anniversary, alas. One will hardly be read and the other might earn me a little bit extra.’

  ‘Oil, huh?’ grunted Alan, eyeing Nick suspiciously.

  ‘Principally.’ The role of oil in post-war African politics and the dirty, viscous tricks of the United States: but Nick kept that to himself.

  Alan sucked on a tooth, sizing him up. ‘Do you know, Nick, that the energy in a single barrel of oil is equivalent to 25,000 hours of manual labour?’

  Nick looked politely nonplussed – although he did know this, in fact. There was nothing he did not know about oil and its lamentable history. ‘Well, that’s why we’re hooked,’ he said, although he had not wanted to raise sparks. ‘We’re dependent on something that’s destroying the basis of our existence, like a heroin addict.’

  ‘So oil is heroin, huh?’

  ‘Metaphorically, yes. For the last hundred years or so. A mere blink. There are analogies: potency, vicious effects, rapid decline of health.’

  ‘And oil companies are the drug dealers?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Nick, head cocked apologetically. They were being assessed, after all.

  Alan smiled mischievously. ‘Are you walking to Languedoc?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Nick, raising his hands as if surrendering. ‘We’re all addicts, whether we want to be or not.’

  ‘Take out shares in biofuels,’ said Alan, with a knowing sigh.

  Nick and Sarah simultaneously, if somewhat murmuringly, protested. This conflictual debate was not what was supposed to happen.

  ‘The thing is,’ Nick insisted, crossing his legs and leaning forwards as he would have done in a seminar (the legendary ‘Mallinson slant’), ‘only the human race would dream up a solution that’s even worse than the problem. Stuff like palm oil requires massive forest clearance.’

  ‘Trees are trees,’ said Alan, with a smirk.

  Nick drew in his breath as if hurt and Sarah pulled a face. This is the enemy, she thought. We can’t take this house. We’ll be cursed.

  Lucy, as if reading her mind, said the Mas des Fosses was an utterly fab place for kids. ‘And what are you planning to do when you’re not at school, Tabby?’

  ‘Tammy.’

  ‘Tammy.’

  ‘Just being grateful.’

  ‘Grateful?’

  Despite her brightness, she couldn’t quite remember what her parents had said she should be grateful for. She sipped her Coke to fill the gap. The ice rang against her prominent front teeth. She was worried about missing her friends.

  ‘She’s going to have some quality free time,’ her mother filled in. ‘In the countryside. She’s ahead at school, anyway.’

  ‘You’re bunking school?’ said Alan, provocatively again. ‘That sounds neat.’

  ‘We’re not supposed to by French law, but I don’t think anyone will bother,’ chuckled Nick.

  ‘We’ll be home learning,’ Sarah assured them, as if she needed to.

  ‘They certainly won’t bother,’ said Luc
y. ‘No point in educating them in the midst of a ploughed field. As long as they don’t play with matches. From May onwards it’s a tinderbox. Bone dry. No barbecues, either. Look what happens in Australia.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Nick, siding quickly with a phantom group of sophisticates against the mass of vulgarity she’d conjured. ‘Actually we do know the Languedoc quite –’

  ‘And why the south of France,’ she interrupted, turning to Sarah, ‘apart of course from the sun and the wine?’

  Sarah told her, with an inward relish, that the Centre des Archives d’Outre Mer was in Aix and held original documents relating to major French engineering works in the African colonies. Apart from the sun and the wine, she added, pretending to laugh. She really wanted to pull out of this deal, to leave this awful couple.

  Nick, battling his weakening voice, mentioned his sojourn at the Centre many years ago, rummaging in the archives for his paper on forced labour under the librarian’s stern, owl-like gaze (the account exaggerated, of course). Tammy, having heard all of this many times before, rolled her eyes to the plaster grapes on the ceiling and began wiggling her feet. At her mother’s whispered instigation, she settled down on the carpet to the felt-tip pen drawing she’d been told to do if she got bored, leaning on a picture book brought along for the purpose.

  ‘What a genial family,’ said Alan, eyes flicking from one to the other.

  Possibly by association, he started on about the village mayor, who was a Communist. ‘Organic farmer. He can’t stand anyone earning more than him, and no one earns less. Up to his eyeballs in agricultural grants. That’s Yurp for you. But what he hates most of all are you English folks.’

  ‘And Parisians,’ said Lucy. ‘But don’t let us put them off, Alan.’

  ‘Perhaps he’ll share my fascination for obscure Trotskyite splinter groups,’ Nick chortled. The furry slippers at the end of his tallness made him look like a daddy-long-legs.

  ‘Now I’ll bet you’re the type that uses words like incommensurable,’ said Alan, leaning forwards good-humouredly and tapping Nick’s knee.