The Standing Pool Read online

  ‘Oh, I guess so,’ said Nick. ‘Right on this spot.’

  ‘Oo-er,’ said Alicia, stepping back and looking at the ground, fearful of her new shoes. ‘Lots of goodgy blood.’

  ‘Why did they do that?’

  ‘Now thereby hangs a tale, I suspect, Tamsin.’

  ‘For oil,’ said Alicia, which made her parents laugh.

  ‘A very simple tale, I should think,’ suggested Sarah. ‘Fernand Maille was in the Resistance.’

  The term beat dully in Tammy’s head, but would not take flesh. ‘What’s that?’ she asked, reluctantly.

  ‘A kind of cupboard,’ said Alicia, nodding. ‘Like my Frosties are in the cupboard.’

  ‘Good guess,’ said Sarah, as Tammy covered her face in dramatic despair.

  ‘Not necessarily in the Resistance,’ said Nick, raising a finger. ‘Let’s not jump to conclusions on the basis of slender evidence.’

  ‘Very likely to have been,’ Sarah insisted, a little piqued at being treated, yet again, as if she were still one of his students.

  He explained the term as they got back into the car.

  ‘Coco here,’ interrupted Beans, as Sarah strapped her back in her car-seat for the half-kilometre left. Beans was poking her round belly again. ‘Coco touch renisance here tummy.’

  ‘And Charles de Gaulle, in London –’

  ‘That’s not renistance!’squealed Alicia, snorting into her palm. ‘You blinking fat pussy! That’s a big fat –’

  ‘Alicia,’ Sarah broke in, ‘where on earth did you get that word from?’

  ‘What word?’

  ‘It just means a cat, sweetie,’ Nick said. ‘So when de Gaulle, in London, Tammy, gave a speech –’

  ‘Cats kill stupid little mice,’ Tammy said, spreading her claws wide and baring her teeth.

  * * *

  They had got the Sandlers’ stereo to work, despite its outdated Jumbo Jet console, flashing and winking and bobbing green-lit levels that meant nothing, even to the initiated. Troubadour music: all harps and girly voices, Sarah thought. It was Nick’s choice. She had brought along Bach and Sibelius and Ravel and he had brought the Smiths, the Cure and Joy Division as well as his difficult jazz, so she counted herself lucky. The former trio dated from his early teaching years when he sported a radical’s superior gloominess, nudging thirty and desperate not to be. Helena, the parti-coloured New Ager, had fallen for his all-black look. The fusion was Jamie. Or confusion, as Nick would put it.

  They were having a candlelit supper, the kids in bed. They had started with fresh oysters. Tomorrow they would definitely start work, and lessons for the girls. The fireguard looked fine, if a touch flimsy. Nick looked a lot younger in the soft light.

  ‘I’m quite pissed,’ she said, although she wasn’t. They’d been talking about Fernand, the ‘man on the plaque’. Sarah couldn’t get him out of her head. Only twenty years old!

  ‘You can ask around, I suppose,’ said Nick. ‘What exactly he did to upset the Boche. Maybe nothing. Then you can check all the oral stuff against the documentary evidence. Archives, the town hall files. Then you’ll find, to paraphrase Anatole France, that the evidence is, as ever, contradictory and irreconcilable. Then you’ll write your report.’

  ‘Like a war report. A field report.’

  ‘We’re heading towards the bottom of the bottle, look.’

  ‘We’re English,’ Sarah observed, looking up at the ceiling, the knotted cross-beams, whole thick branches with curves in them. ‘The English drink like fish. It’s the only way we can let go.’

  ‘Tell me why this very ordinary wine tastes so much nicer than its equivalent would over there,’ Nick said, swilling it a little in the glass.

  ‘Over there,’ Sarah repeated. ‘And far away.’

  They were sitting near the fireplace at a round metal café table they’d rescued from the goatshed and covered in a Provençal-yellow tablecloth. The dining room was too cold, too frigid. The one-eyed mask gazed blindly at them, unidentifiable in its mournful dignity. It certainly wasn’t Benin, although Nick hazarded a guess at Anyang or maybe Bakongo, while Sarah went for Dogon.

  Nick emptied his glass. ‘Beats off the cold,’ he said, only warmed on one side, like a flitch of bacon, by the blaze of the fire over the last of the dry wood. It made the shadows dance in the corners and Sarah look even prettier. She was smiling, drawing her hand through her loganberry hair.

  ‘I didn’t think the south of France got very cold,’ Sarah said. ‘I guess that was slightly dunce of me.’

  ‘Must ask Jean-Luc about logs. Oh, and the cherry tree.’

  ‘If you were a real man, you’d be hewing and sawing away in the woods.’

  ‘I know,’ Nick sighed, bowing his head. ‘I’m top heavy with mind. I’ve got a bad back. And I’m in my mid-fifties.’

  ‘At your intellectual peak.’

  ‘Fugh.’

  She placed her hand gently on his. ‘Love you, you old goat,’ she said.

  ‘God knows why.’

  ‘Because you’re incredibly special.’

  ‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘And you,’ he remembered, cocking his head to one side.

  ‘And the girls.’

  ‘Yup, they’re not bad either,’ he nodded. ‘And not forgetting, in our loving embrace, the son of me and my ex.’

  ‘I’ll give it a go,’ Sarah laughed, although she felt he’d squirted a touch of lemon on her brain.

  ‘Basically,’ he added, in Alan Sandler’s American twang, ‘we’re genial. We’re the genial family.’

  ‘Did he mean that in a totally nice way?’

  ‘Oh, why? Do you think it might not have been?’ He looked genuinely surprised.

  Sarah had prepared the supper with exaggerated care. Even including the market oysters (such a pain to open) it was nothing fancy, but she was determined not to mistreat the fresh market veg, or the roll of pork tied up in string like a gladiator’s muscular forearm. She underdid the greens, if anything, and was careful to place quarters of tomatoes in the oven dish the pork sat in, for their moisture. She’d kept edging her knife into the broccoli stalks, consulting the potatoes before setting them around the meat to roast; she’d docked the courgettes and sliced them lengthways, cut the indigo aubergine as thinly as possible and laid out the divisions on paper towel before frying them in what Françoise, her cookery teacher in Cambridge, would call ‘no small garlic amounts’. The garlic bits had been sliced thin and were nicely browned.

  The girls had partaken first, and spent most of their meal holding the garlic bits to their faces and pretending they’d extracted them from their noses, which all but put Sarah off the dish entirely. They’d been favoured with two oysters each, relishing the pained retraction of the flesh as they squeezed their quarters of lemon. Inevitably, an eyeball had been hit: Tammy’s, fortunately. She was very grown-up for her age, most of the time.

  Sarah hadn’t attended the full twelve classes, for various child-related reasons, which meant that the series proved somewhat expensive in the end, but it had been a stimulating preparation, a crash course not so much in ‘what to do’ but in ‘what not to do’ – what never, ever to do, in fact, if you were not to embarrass yourself in front of your French guests. Nimble-fingered, slender-legged Françoise was from Paris, and her anecdotes conjured a chic Parisian dining room quivering to the haut-bourgeoisie and their elegant reign of terror.

  If nothing else, Sarah had learnt to keep greens al dente, beef bloody. And to make crème brûlée with a crust that was fissile and all but snapped at the pressure of a spoon, subsiding into the light, buff-coloured custard (though never call it custard, please), like a tectonic plate into lava. She’d followed the oysters with melon, filling the scooped hollows with chilled white wine.

  ‘This is a feast, and not even that expensive,’ said Nick, who worried about money. ‘Ten out of ten, sweetheart.’

  He had put the girls to bed himself, as usual. A bath had been in order, which had res
ulted in the bathroom floor getting wet; Tammy slipped and knocked her head on the basin. The Sandlers had not laid the bathroom with non-slip tiles, but with something marble-like and no doubt very expensive. Wet, it glistened like fish flesh. Nick found a herbal salve in the medicine cabinet and let Tammy rub it into the bruise. He noticed, while searching through the cabinet’s crowded contents, the same blood-pressure pills his father had taken before the end.

  ‘Look, Poppa’s pills,’ he said, although they hardly remembered Poppa except as a grey mass of smells. It surprised him to see what it took to keep a holiday couple alive, if not well, when they were not that much older than himself. Not much more than five or six years older, maybe. He pictured himself as a cartoon figure walking out on a beetling cliff-edge that stretched over the sea and grew thinner and thinner, hollowing out under him, under the innocent, solid-seeming turf until the edge was pencil-sharp.

  He tucked them in and read them Winnie the Pooh, entertaining himself in the scent of their clean pyjamas and washed hair. Beans made sucking noises on her bottle and it whistled, surprisingly empty. She will wet herself in the night, he thought, despite the nappy (changed by him): she’ll wake up with a sodden pack at about six. She dropped the bottle ruminatively over the edge of the iron cot as he delivered an Eeyore monologue in suitably lugubrious tones. This, he thought, is what their deepest memories will be founded on.

  Now all that was blissfully over. He emerged from bedtimes as after a particularly difficult academic colloquium: tousled, the begrimed survivor, weary of limb and in urgent need of a Scotch and its uncompromisingly adult deglutition. The sheer outrance of a straight Scotch.

  The light was down to a flicker of firelight and the honeyed candles they’d bought at the market from a smocked woman, her hair dyed an erratic ginger. The music seemed to hold each moment rapt – although, as Nick pointed out, the style of playing and even the basic count ‘is always guesswork’. The candles, which were not cheap, burnt down surprisingly quickly and smelt slightly acrid under the sweetness. The crimson Fitou, giddyingly reasonable at under five euros, had subsided in the bottle with like speed.

  ‘What I wish,’ said Sarah, ‘is that life could be more – no, that life could be guaranteed to be like this for the foreseeable future.’

  ‘It’s going to be.’

  ‘For six months?’

  ‘That’s quite a long time,’ said Nick. ‘Half a year. No, that sounds less.’

  ‘Yes, but we always complicate things, it’s bound not to stay this simple,’ Sarah insisted, puzzled by her own pessimism.

  She sighed and went for it, pouring herself more wine, imagining the disapproving look of Françoise the teacher of haute cuisine. Françoise seemed odd and vaguely exotic in Cambridge – out of place, like an actress playing a Frenchwoman. Today, in the market, in the swirl of French locals, it had been Sarah’s turn to feel odd. Nobody seemed to be acting French, they were French. Very French. That had suddenly struck her, in front of a cheap shoe-stall, as an extraordinary, even dislocating fact. She had felt a dislocation of her own Englishness, its reticular complexity tearing.

  Now the medieval harp was weaving her into a heartfelt past she had never known – she honestly had the feeling, as Nick was taking out the dishes with a thoughtful expression, that she might travel back weightlessly into this far past, seeing no reason not to, because the far past was in fact only a transparent soap bubble’s thickness away, it was simply a matter of yearning. Of will. No, just of yearning. It was all just a matter of yearning, pressing against the bubble’s wall. That’s what this music was saying, plucking its simple twelfth-century melody, its impossible love song. If you allowed your yearning to carry you, it would carry you, back and further back and through the wall, popping it. Popping the separation, the division. Nothing really died. How could it? What would be the purpose of anything, if everything was allowed to die?

  ‘I think I’m rather sloshed,’ said Sarah, as Nick came back with the cheese.

  ‘Sloshed,’ Nick repeated, laying the board on the table. Sometimes he repeated what Sarah said as if rolling it in his hand, marking it out of a hundred. They had decided to eat cheese before dessert, the French way.

  ‘Sloshed is good. One better than tipsy.’

  ‘I haven’t really drunk much for ages and ages. I shouldn’t have had the whisky.’

  ‘It’s a five-course celebration,’ Nick smiled, parting dried leaves from the peppered, mould-coloured pat they enclosed. To be honest, the oysters had made him feel slightly surcharged from the beginning. ‘There’s this tiny little window of opportunity, this very narrow gap, this kind of potholer’s cleft, between the kids being put to bed and one of them coming down babbling of monsters. And we’re going for it, babe.’

  He had to admit that he was a little bit merry himself. They started on the salty chèvre, melting onto the board despite the chilliness still in the air. Sarah mentioned how Françoise had told her that if a cooked goose-bone turns blue it means rain. The four-by-four incident was circled briefly and then left alone, obscured by affectionate remarks about the kids, the daily music hall of their growth and change, before the conversation drifted onto work, inevitably. It settled for some time on Nick’s prospective capstone to the essays he was editing: a long piece on the Chad oilfield. History nudging current events, as he put it: the urgency of the times, the world wasted by corporate crooks, political conmen. Sarah would sometimes picture the Chad oilfield as a sticky black meadow in which the odd gooey horse or cow forlornly stood, surrounded by desert and a swarm of evil people in dark glasses. She preferred it when he remembered Lake Chad as it was some thirty years ago, waving its reeds all the way to the horizon. The nomads who lived beside it, ignored by the world, watching the waters shrink to cracked earth.

  Alicia had buried the remains of Boris under a holm oak, while Tammy helped her plait a cross out of twigs. Which Sarah had found touching.

  ‘If only we could somehow take over,’ she said, equally worked up now, her face flushed, still upset by the incident with the four-by-four. ‘All the right-thinking people like us. There are loads of them out there and we don’t do anything. I mean, Bush is completely …’ She wanted to say ‘evil’, but knew how ontologically dangerous that was in front of a rationalist like Nick. ‘Look at his expression, OK? It’s barely human. He’s exactly what clones are going to look like. And we allow him to do anything he wants. It’s just so annoying. How can we? How can we allow him? We don’t do anything. Look at us now. We’re not doing anything while they’re just ransacking the planet, it’s just so annoying.’

  ‘The Genial People’s Revolution,’ said Nick, nodding calmly as if all his rage had been siphoned into her. ‘And who has all the guns?’

  After their fancy supper, they removed the fireguard and stared into the flames. They lay on the rug together. Nick whispered into Sarah’s ear. The heat from the fire had temporarily banished the chilliness.

  ‘My back’s ace,’ he said, to her voiced worry.

  ‘The girls?’ she murmured.

  ‘We’ll hear their door open. It’s got one of those old iron thumb-latches on it.’

  Their words turned into sighs and giggles. Nick kissed the knuckles on Sarah’s neck, undoing her buttons from the back, unthreading the cord that bound her skirt, revealing the long and miraculous flesh of her. He ran his hand along its landscape, its proud hills and hollows, until he reached in to find the place that always reminded him of the spot between his pet rabbit’s ears when he was small. His fingers crept under the hem of her knickers, finding the warm, invertebral pulp as she let out a tell-tale sigh.

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Oh shit,’ Sarah sighed. Apart from the knickers, she was completely naked.

  Alicia was at the top of the stairs, peering down at them like an inquisitive old lady. They were nestled into each other like a pair of spoons in a drawer, the firelight stroking their flanks with complicated shadows and golden tones. As Nic
k slid his hand out little by little, with a deliberate languor, he ordered Alicia back to bed.

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ she said, as if they were stupid to think otherwise. She leaned forwards from the curve of the staircase, one hand on the creaking banister, dangling her bare foot over the next step down. ‘Why’ve you gone all nude?’

  ‘We were fast asleep,’ said her father.

  ‘Especially me,’ Sarah added. ‘Darling, go back to bed and I’ll come up in a minute.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Alicia, lowering her foot arthritically onto the next step and bringing her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Monsters. Like that one.’

  She pointed to the one-eyed mask.

  ‘Alicia,’ said Nick, ‘go straight to bed and stop that monster nonsense.’

  She considered this, as if it were an intricate argument on which she had to adopt a viewpoint. Her parents did not move, not even reaching for their clothes. The shadows fumbled over them as the flames danced. His hand was free. He rested it on her thigh, the forefinger slightly glistening.

  ‘I really can’t, Daddy,’ she said, finally; and lowered herself onto the step, sitting there in her nightie and shivering slightly, looking at them slyly out of the corner of her eye. ‘What’s Ram-a-dan?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s in my book.’

  ‘Oh God, Alicia,’ said her father. ‘Please, please go back to your nice warm bed.’

  ‘Or,’ said her mother, ‘we won’t buy you any nice things at the market next week.’

  An inadequate threat. Alicia cupped her chin in her hands and rocked her head from side to side, like a doleful guardian in the flickery gloom.

  ‘I want to go home next week,’ she said. ‘I don’t like monsters.’

  ‘The monsters were in your dream,’ said Nick, Sarah’s warm heat salty on his lips, the top of her vertebrae beaded with sweat. ‘Now go to bed.’

  There was a short, victorious pause.

  ‘Not without Boris,’ Alicia said, looking to the side and splaying her hands as if rebuking a diffident companion on the stairs.