The Standing Pool Read online

  Tammy was allowed to read for another twenty minutes. She was very bright: even (at least in reading and writing) a ‘prodigy’. She had finished The Sword in the Stone and was now deep in a book about the sea and had reached the chapter on tide gauges. Her parents’ chief terror was that she might run out of books, as an aquarium shark might run out of meat. She reassured them that she could always consume what she’d already digested: following her starring role in the school version of the Odyssey, she had read T. E. Lawrence’s translation twice. Although not all of its meaning had sunk in, it had given her many useful words: ‘steading’, ‘wainscot’, ‘cleave’, ‘merchantman’, ‘perforce’, ‘bloom’. She did not mind a third go, if the spine held out. Or a ninth reading of The Jolliest Term on Record by Angela Brazil, near to disintegration on the top of her pile, and which had Grandma’s name written inside in italics. Or a second of The Myths of the Norsemen, a thick old book which had belonged to Daddy and had frightening black-and-white illustrations.

  ‘You looked so like a horrible monster doing that, Mummy,’ she declared, idly flicking the book on the sea to find her page. ‘Like at Hallowe’en.’

  ‘Nightie-night you lot,’ Sarah said, having smothered their soft, smooth, sweet-smelling cheeks in kisses. ‘Sleep well.’ She was trying her best to sound dully managerial, despite suddenly feeling full to the brim with love. She marvelled at the beauty of their lustrous fair hair, a blondeness that was temporary because their eyelashes were dark. Tammy’s was already turning – autumnal, Sarah smiled inside herself.

  ‘Like a skelington,’ Alicia lisped, pushing her bedding down to her waist. The word heronshaw was embroidered on her nightie, a cream garment reminiscent of Edwardian illustrations. She lifted it up to reveal a rather corpulent stomach. Sarah was trying not to be too worried about Alicia’s roundness: Tammy was bony, if anything, while there was still something miniaturist about Beans (three weeks premature).

  Who now picked up the word ‘skelington’ and repeated it with an ear-shattering shriek.

  ‘All you could see was your mouth and glasses,’ Alicia went on, sitting up in bed and pulling the duvet back to her chin. ‘Like really thin people.’

  ‘Like ghouls,’ Tammy added, relishing the rare chance to use the word, and stretching the syllable as taut as it would go.

  Sarah had another bash with the fire. Until she succeeded, they’d all have to wear thick sweaters. Smoke curled over the plaster chimney piece, curved like a huge clamshell.

  ‘No luck?’

  ‘Some of it’s going up.’ Her upper body was fully in the fireplace, twisted to look.

  The small heap of tinder suddenly caught, flaring like a miniature oil-well. Nick gave a hoarse shout of warning. Sarah scrambled out and ticked him off for ‘panicking’. There was soot streaked over her face, like a rescue worker’s. The little blaze sent its ghostly fingers of smoke creeping up over the chimney breast and past the long-suffering mask. The room was hazed once more: gauzy levels wavered under the ceiling as though the two of them were submerged.

  ‘I never panic,’ Nick said, closing his eyes. ‘I simply react.’

  TWO

  When the Sandlers bought the property back in 1995, the interior of the house was all orange: orange beams, orange joists, orange plaster. Orange beds, orange cupboards. Orange doors. It had been a hippy colony for a while, was the explanation. But they had fallen in love with it, and with the view. A coup de foudre, according to Monsieur Soulier, the bespectacled estate agent – with the customary hint of wonder, as if he had never seen such a love affair before in the whole of his life. Far more serious than the orange paint was the ivy, its knuckles dug deep into the stonework and straining even the capstones in the arches, but he kept quiet about that.

  He had shown them the house reluctantly, insisting they wouldn’t be interested, that it was too old and remote: an abandoned farmhouse, empty for years. ‘Almost a ruins,’ he insisted in his office, in his decent English. ‘Almost a ruin, ’Lucy Sandler repeated. ‘Like being almost avant-garde.’ ‘À peu près,’ laughed Monsieur Soulier, with a rocking motion of his hand. He didn’t tell them that the Germans – the Waffen SS, no less – had burnt down part of it. You never knew what might put people off.

  Monsieur Soulier waited for the end of the three-day search, when the evening light would be gilding the ivied walls. He showed them, with great enthusiasm, three modern villas of mounting ugliness, climaxing in a musty bungalow with a huge plate-glass window like a fish-tank, concealed behind a cypress hedge near the public toilets of a village stade. He cultivated an air of bemusement at their reaction. Then he drove them up the winding road to the Mas des Fosses, like an angler reeling in a fidgeting line, shaking his head all the while.

  It had reared before them in the golden dusk, ivy-clad and impossibly lovely after the horrors of the afternoon. The doorless front looked out upon misty blue mountains and a glow that was the light bouncing off the Mediterranean. A forested hill rose behind, stuffed full of evening birdsong – including nightingales. Monsieur Soulier kept looking at his watch and pulling a face. He squealed open the shutters as best he could, apologising for the musty smell more than for the orange paint. Monsieur Soulier reacted to the huge, ghostly barn owl that flew at them in the kitchen as if he had never seen it before. Then he showed them the outbuildings – with a comically overdone air of shame. The barn, strewn with mouldering hay, revealed a threshing-machine, wine-barrels, hung tools cocooned in cobwebs, a two-wheeled carriage and a farm-cart with massive spoked wheels. Monsieur Soulier shook his head mournfully. On the end of the line was a very fat fish. All he had to do now was reach out his hand and grab it.

  ‘It is normal they demand for so small a price,’ he lisped. ‘It is a complete ruin. And twenty-three hectares of savage land! Who wishes for that?’

  There was only one snag, apart from the house’s unfortunate recent history (about which, as about the fatal grip of the ivy, he also kept very quiet): a young French couple from Normandy wished to farm it traditionally, with the help of a grant. Organic mushrooms and onions, he believed, with a gîte d’étape for walkers. The paperwork was finished, the compromis de vente was to be signed the following week. But of course the owners were open to negotiation.

  ‘Then we’ll negotiate,’ said Alan, with a relaxed smile.

  ‘We want it,’ said Lucy, who was tall and could look down on Monsieur Soulier’s bald patch.

  ‘But the young couple …’Monsieur Soulier began, his fingers all but touching the cool, scaly flesh.

  ‘Can go to hell,’ murmured Alan.

  The scaffolding stayed in place for at least five years. The roof had lost many of its old, mossy tiles over the two decades of abandonment, and the subsequent rain damage was serious. When it rains in those dry mountains, the Sandlers were told, it can do so with a ferocity that is unequalled except in tropical areas subject to monsoons. The equivalent of half of Paris’s annual precipitation might fall in a few hours, gouging craters in roads, turning paths into streams, swelling rivers, swirling over bridges, sweeping away houses and people, bulldozing heaps of cars through village streets with a strange grinding and groaning that, once heard, is never forgotten. Three of the main beams were, in places, indistinguishable from wet peat. An expensive red crane was hired. It became a part of the landscape, visible from far off; folk in their dotage will still recall it in decades to come, Lucy joked.

  The picturesque ivy had made such appalling inroads that it was, to all intents and purposes, keeping the house upright. Alan compared it to his grandfather’s hernia belt. An expert was called in, more expensive than the crane. Everyone underestimated, he said, the destructive powers of Nature, the need to keep her at bay. He gestured with his smooth hands as he described where the concrete had to go, tons and tons of it, keeping it tight. The house is a web of stresses and strains, he said: the beams and the walls are mutually interdependent. Ironically, Monsieur Soulier had been right. Even the
orange paint was a stubborn distemper.

  And the price they’d paid was, to any local, the stuff of madness. There, Monsieur Soulier had been misleading. But that price paled into insignificance before the cost of restoration. The house gobbled it up. Fortunately, business was brisk for Alan Sandler, dealer in antiquities: Sumer and Assyria and Babylonia.

  Around 2003, there was a sudden glut. A pity, he would think, the site at Uruk was guarded, these days; but there were plenty others that weren’t. And in any case, who was doing the guarding?

  By the time the Mallinsons arrived, only the finishing touches were lacking. The crumbling drystone wall around the farmyard. The pool’s surrounds. The English lawn. All the province of Jean-Luc.

  ‘Oh. Who’s that man?’

  The way he just carried on standing there, watching them, not moving from the edge where the big flat area in front of the house fell away in broad, grassed-over terraces like steps into the valley, made Sarah uneasy. She tried not to act uneasy. She was sure he was perfectly normal.

  ‘Bonjour!’ she called out, heartily.

  She and the girls were returning from their first great voyage. They had taken their new ‘sabbatical’ camcorder and climbed the slope at the back of the house, through laurel-like bushes with glossy foliage and into the woods, proceeding through deep drifts of leaves fallen from trees they couldn’t identify and deafening themselves with the rustling, and then on into a denser, darker forest of holm oaks interspersed with granite outcrops. Not being able to make headway through this, they’d turned back to join the main track. It narrowed and curled up and up through skeletal-looking chestnut trees in great skirts and swathes of more dead leaves (in which Beans all but disappeared), only to dip through a scented hollow of very tall pines, the ground soft with needles.

  Tammy had asked if there were wolves in this forest.

  ‘Probably!’

  It almost helped that Nick wasn’t with them, but she didn’t dwell on that: Sarah felt truly happy at last. In the bright, low, prismatic light, the pines fell away to a bare moorland area of springy grass and rocks that dropped steeply down on one side, revealing a patchwork of orchards and meadowland, with a tumbling stream at the bottom which had pretensions to river status further along, snaking mercurially between creamy shoals. The steep hills on the far side of the valley – she called them ‘mountains’– were draped in a dark-green pelt of woods, relieved by smoke-coloured patches of something deciduous and bare. There was a black streak they assumed was a fire’s scorch, and the odd mas, the odd little fleck of humanity, with a refractory air of silent resistance under its barrel-tiled roof. Nothing else. They were entranced, even stupefied.

  ‘There’s too much space,’ Alicia had cried, twirling about on the summit of a rock.

  The rocks were great granite lumps inlaid with hornblende and feldspar, spattered with lichen and dried mosses. The mosses felt like toothbrushes. On some the moss was really velvet, Tammy noted, cloaking the boulders’ northern flanks.

  ‘We have to show poor Daddy how beautiful it is,’ Sarah said, filming Alicia. She swung the camera round to catch the other two. Beans hid her face, which was annoying. Sarah panned slowly over the landscape and back to Alicia, still prancing on the pocked summit in which tiny pools of rain reflected the sky like eyes.

  ‘Be careful,’ her mother had called, conscious of how unyielding granite was, how unlike the woodchips under the climbing frame in their boring Cambridge park, its liminal safeties. Sometimes she would see her chosen discipline, history, as a park. No, as a curious kind of wedge, a carved artefact stuck in a nameless, aimless and boggy wilderness. It was all about limits, in the end.

  Right now, however, back in the yard – back in the place that already, after three days, felt like home – she was wondering who this man was. There was also a very battered green van, its back doors fastened by rope. The children had stopped skipping about and watched guardedly as the man came alive and approached. He might have been a teenager in his long-limbed awkwardness against the light. He aged as he neared them, like a speeded-up film: his close-cropped hair began to grey over the temples, and the lines around his mouth deepened. The peppery stubble darkened a chin that looked as if it had been punched to one side and poorly reset. Or replaced entirely, even, his whole face reassembled from different bits, like a potato man with plastic stick-on features.

  His grip was strong and very rough – Sarah felt this as soon as he shook her hand, explaining that he was Jean-Luc, the jardinier. Lucy had called him the ‘handyman’. Large but rounded shoulders he didn’t quite know what to do with. Early thirties, maybe. Bags under his eyes that added another three or four years. At this rate, he would soon wither and crumble to dust like an old apple.

  Sarah’s French was quite good, but Jean-Luc’s syllables were tumbled along by the local accent like pebbles in a fast-flowing stream. He also had a faint stutter. She nodded, standing there and catching whatever she could, like a primitive freshwater mollusc waiting for whatever crumbs of sustenance flowed past.

  One thing was clear, however: it would be better if no one walked on the area seeded to grass. The Sandlers must have their English lawn. Sarah turned to the girls and instructed them never-ever-ever to go on that area there (pointing, wagging a finger). ‘Ils seront interdit, strictement,’ she laughed. They had walked all over it already: he must have been able to see that. The sprinkler system worked at night, he said, pointing to the yellow spider in the middle. As he talked, the children stared at him; they followed the grown-ups around in a little knot.

  He began to clean the pool; that’s what he was here for, today. The girls sat on the tiles and watched him. He didn’t look at them much, he seemed slightly discomfited. He had an extendable rake and a net on a bendy pole. Sarah wondered with a sagging feeling if he came every day. She asked what the white object on the side was and he told her with a snort that it was an alarm, required by European law. It detected any sudden disturbance of the water. If the water was perturbé, for instance by a child falling in, its siren went off. Jean-Luc was raking the water while explaining this, so the machine was clearly not switched on. Sarah wondered aloud how it was activé. She could see the child dropping down and down like a plumb bob without a line.

  Jean-Luc looked at her, puzzled. Then he pronounced something entirely incomprehensible: it could have been in Hungarian. The only major word Sarah recognised was ‘anglais’. He gestured towards the woods and pointed up at the surrounding hills then back to the pool, as if ‘les anglais’ came lumbering in heavy hordes out of the wilderness. Well, they did, in a way, at the purchasing rate (she had read this in a Guardian article that began with ‘Sacré bleu!’) of fifty thousand houses a year.

  She felt good they were only renting. She would have liked to have revealed their meagre academics’ salaries, their modest house with structural problems off Gwydir Street, distancing herself from the wealthy Brit hordes. Instead, she folded her arms and nodded sympathetically, his French weaving a pleasant web of foreignness around her.

  She told him the chimney didn’t work. It never has worked, he said. He was pouring in liberal quantities of a liquid from a large plastic canister marked ALGICIDE.

  They went inside to have a look, Sarah carefully explaining that her husband suffered a bad back and had to rest for a few days on the sofa. Embarrassingly, he was lying on the floor under a blanket with his eyes closed and began talking before she’d had time to signal Jean-Luc’s presence.

  ‘The apposite phrase is helplessness,’ he groaned. ‘Which fatally encourages introspection. And envy of those able to embark on inspiring walks. Go on, tell me. I’m incredibly cold down here. We haven’t even managed a bloody fire.’ When he opened his eyes and saw Jean-Luc standing there with a shy frown, his face was a picture of astonishment. And by the time Jean-Luc had bent down cautiously to shake his hand, Sarah found herself burbling in a French that had completely disintegrated into sitcom Franglais, while flutt
ering her hands.

  However, once Nick had levered himself onto the sofa, apologising profusely, he did a much better job than Sarah at the oral comprehension. Nothing could touch Nick’s brain.

  After Jean-Luc had left, his sharp sweaty smell lingering in the air like a faint reproach, it was all explained. There was a code to activate the pool alarm, but Jean-Luc didn’t know the code; the Sandlers would. The fireplace was useless, but Jean-Luc would try to sort out the smoke problem (Jean-Luc had a key to the house, of course, which made them slightly uneasy). Even when the code was found, the alarm couldn’t be switched on at night because of the boars, who came down to drink nocturnally. The water would be thoroughly perturbed, Nick added, grinning.

  Sarah was startled. ‘The boars? What, real boars? Or boring locals?’

  ‘Sangliers. Wild pigs, with tusks.’

  She clapped a hand to her forehead. ‘I thought he was saying les anglais. I thought he was saying that loads of English people came in the summer and perturbed the pool by swimming in it, but I couldn’t work out why he was getting so excited.’

  Nick laughed, then clutched the sofa.

  ‘Anyway,’ Sarah said, ‘we can switch it on until we go to bed. The kids aren’t going to be on walkabout at night. Are you? Eh, you lot?’

  They were too absorbed in Thomas the Tank Engine to reply.

  ‘There’s one slight drawback,’ Nick sighed. ‘If a burglar falls in and perturbs the pool by drowning in it, it’s the owners’ responsibility. The victim’s family could sue them. Or any night visitor. A drunk, for instance. According to Jean-Luc.’

  ‘The gospel according to Jean-Luc,’ Sarah said, drawing a cross in the air. ‘We won’t get night visitors,’ she added. ‘No one’s going to be perturbing us out here.’

  The champagne bottle was found hanging inside the chimney a couple of days later, concealed from everything but a two-year-old’s sight-line. Beans squealed with delight and thought it was a rorqual. That was what her word sounded like and no one took any notice of her bobbing on the polished slates of the hearth in time with the repeated word until, trying to concentrate on colouring in, Tammy investigated.