Half Broken Things (26 page)

Turning back on his bare feet, he could feel as soon as he reentered the pavilion that the sun was already striking the terracotta tiles of the floor and stirring up the faint reek of warming earth. Michael's body tingled as he breathed it in. He liked the way the smell seemed to come to him almost through the soles of his feet. It was both fresh and fertile, so
new,
and made him think of earthy things that were workaday and practical, the slap of water over clay, human sweat, and the later, sweet baking of the sun on bricks and tiles. Yet the smell carried in it also a dank note, a threat from the sour underground it came from. Heavily and inexpressibly ancient, it was also lifeless, and although dead, it was at the same time so darkly erotic that Michael felt simultaneously animated and destabilised. It was not an unpleasant feeling. He smiled, thinking of Steph, picturing her unpeeled from her solid nursing bra and engrossed in the steady nursing of Charlie. She had become capable and authoritative on every practical detail of childcare and breastfeeding but if, when Charlie was nuzzled up and sucking from her, her attention would wander, a look of such distant, private sensuality would come over her face that Michael would find himself staring like a voyeur. Watching her made him feel quite helplessly joyful, as well as aroused. She did not seem to mind.

But the matter in hand was to get the pool working, and first he had to locate the machinery. He was hopeful that there would be some sort of instruction book that would tell him what to do, but if there wasn't he had another idea. It would be well within his capabilities to ring up a pool maintenance outfit, posing as Oliver Standish-Cave of course, and get somebody round to do it for him. The idea rather appealed to him, in fact he had already rehearsed the mock-exasperation he would express at being ‘just hopeless I'm afraid' at this kind of thing himself, and ‘a bit too snowed under to see to it personally'. But both Jean and Steph had looked worried when he had suggested it, and it would be, he had to admit, intensely satisfying to manage such an unfamiliar job by himself. He could see the admiration in their eyes already. He had discovered since coming here not just that he had a definite practical streak but that there was pleasure in having something to accomplish; he liked having a few projects on the go. So although his mind was quite ready to take him off further into his reverie, perhaps to the mental picture of Steph and Charlie naked in the water together, he turned his attention back to the place where he was standing.

Most of the room had been made into a space for lounging around in and was furnished in a kind of green and faded English garden style that he imagined Jean would like. Steph would like it less; perhaps once she had finished the nursery mural (she had said this morning that it would be ready by the end of the day, and was up there now painting, while Jean looked after Charlie) she might fancy doing something here. Something to do with water would be better than these white walls with prints of ferns, he thought, looking round at the bamboo sofas with their white and green cushions.

Against one wall, set into a long, white-painted kitchen unit, stood a sink with worktops on each side. A row of glass-fronted cupboards, containing nothing but ice buckets and tumblers, was fixed along the wall above. On either side of the cupboards were two identical doors. Through one he found a large, neglected bathroom with corroded taps and chilly white tiles covering the floor and walls. The other door led into a bare, stone room like a scullery where the pool machinery was installed. Here, on a shelf next to several tubs and bags of chemical-looking cleaners, Michael found what he was looking for: a damp notebook with the words
Pool Maintenance Checklist
on it, and a colour brochure entitled
Enjoy Your Pool.
He picked them up, returned to the green and white room, stretched himself out along one of the sofas and began to read.

It turned out to be quite complicated, but with the book in his hand Michael eventually identified the pump, filters, motors and heater. He cleared out the valves and pump head, charged the filters with water, primed the filter pump and checked for leaks. Back outside he re-installed the water surface skimmer baskets and, following the measurements prescribed, gave the water a dose of chlorine. Then he tested and adjusted the alkalinity and calcium levels. He felt like Einstein.

It was while he was hosing down the paving round the pool that he heard a shout from Jean. Looking up, he saw that she was approaching across the grass, moving as fast as she could, and if she had not been holding Charlie she would have been waving her arms. Her hair had shaken free of its clasp and the few clumps of it that Charlie had not managed to grasp in his fists flew out behind her. Her usual serenity had vanished, not a vestige of poise remained; she was jabbering and distraught—only a few jerking steps away, it seemed to Michael, from complete breakdown. Just then Charlie, jiggled almost insensible by the dash across from the house, got enough breath back to start up with a high-pitched, bewildered bleating. Michael dropped the hose, turned off the tap on the wall and strode towards them across the grass. He took Charlie from her a little roughly, which upset him even more. He pulled round from Michael's arms and stretched back to Jean, wailing louder. His confused eyes scanned the space around and behind, looking for Steph, and then he arched his back and screamed. His brown arms pumped up and down in rage. Jean was shouting incoherently above him, but Michael was too busy struggling to get a better hold of the writhing Charlie and keep his face clear of his waving fists to hear what she was saying.

But how, he was managing to wonder,
how
had this happened? Two minutes ago he had been calmly working on the pool. He had left Jean a little over two hours ago, baking bread in the kitchen while Charlie gurgled and watched her from his reclining seat, happily flinging his rabbit to the floor from time to time. Steph had been painting upstairs and presumably still was; she would be up a ladder, humming to herself and too far away to hear that once again their peace had been obliterated. How? What had gone wrong this time? Why could they not be left alone?

‘Come on, sit down. Sit here on the grass and tell me what's the matter,' he said, in his most coping voice, pulling her down. He set Charlie gently on the grass and Charlie, perhaps bamboozled by being plonked in yet another unexpected location, stopped crying and stared up at the sky instead.

‘What's up, then?' Michael was managing to sound calm, but oddly, he realised that he was not just putting on the right voice, it actually
was
his voice, and he really did feel the way he sounded. Jean needed him to be this way. Whatever the matter was, he would put it right for her.

Jean was rocking to and fro on the grass. ‘I've just had a call. From Town and Country, the agency, the house sitting people.' She raised frantic eyes to Michael. ‘I don't know what to do! Shelley's coming. Shelley, she runs the agency, she says she's on her way. Here! I couldn't stop her!' She buried her face in her hands and moaned. Charlie, kicking on the grass, gurgled and gave a short wail.

‘Oh, Christ. Christ,
when
?'

‘Now! In about an hour. She phoned from the car—she said she wrote and gave me the date and to tell her if there was any problem with it. She said, “Well, Jean, since you didn't object I assumed it was fine, and now I've scheduled it in”!'

‘But did she? Write and give you the date?'

Jean burst into loud sobs. ‘I don't know! You know what we're like! We don't bother with the post anymore, it's never for us. I ignore it, I just shove it in the library desk, I hardly look at it!'

‘Oh Christ.' Michael got to his feet and stood looking round wildly.

‘Michael, I tried to stop her, I really did. I said I'd be out, but she just said that's why she was ringing, to make sure I'd be here. Oh,
Michael
!'

‘But why? Did you ask her
why
she's coming?'

‘I couldn't! She's so definite and so, I don't know, so
official
. I couldn't exactly
demand
to know. I did say, oh you've never done that before, visited when I'm doing an assignment, and she said it was a new company policy, it was all in the letter. Oh Michael, I don't believe her! She knows! She knows, and she's coming to spoil everything! She'll ruin everything!'

‘Oh no, she won't,' Michael said quietly. He took a few steps away, leaving Jean sitting on the grass. He had to think. Crying softly, Jean collected her hair and twisted it anxiously into a tight bundle at the back of her head. Then she picked Charlie up from the grass and rocked him gently as his little voice creaked in unconvincing half-complaint.

Michael turned away, trying to think, but found himself considering the house, wondering for one wild second if it might be looking back at him. It never changed in itself, but he liked the way it wore the changing colours of the light so transparently, remaining always the same behind them however varying the cloaks of certain times of the day or year. Though the hours and seasons changed, the light this summer must be the same as in summers past, and come the next one after this, it would be no different. In the early afternoon in summertime, the same warming light would glow on these walls, always like this.

Now the sun was slanting across the stone tiles of the roof and glancing off the glass of the upper windows. Light fell and dappled the wall behind the wisteria whose boughs hung in their motionless, frozen writhing as they had done for hundreds of years. Perhaps in the droop of the leaves there was a touch of complacency that flowers would come again next year and every year after that, and that time would bleach the colour from them by such tiny degrees that the blossom would not so much lose its purple as grow graciously towards whiteness, as if acquiring dust. And while the wisteria would flower with or without Michael's attention, he felt that his admiration was somehow necessary; it was as if he were being shown some important small treasure that lay in the scooped palm of the house, something fragile and elusive in this play of light and shadow on flowers and leaves, of summer sunlight on stone. He must not neglect the privilege.

It seemed that with the same slow, quiet skill of insinuation that bound the wisteria to its walls, this house had woven itself in and among them—Jean, Steph, himself, even Charlie—had gathered them all in towards itself and to one another, and it seemed also that whole centuries of summers and winters were caught in along with them, trapped, stilled, and kept tight in its web. The house seemed to be saying, do not struggle, and do not move from here. Every important thing that ever was, or could be, is here. Like you, it is held in the very stone, it lies under the brushstrokes of the pictures on the walls, it sits on the pages of books and is woven in with every thread. It grows in the garden, is warmed in the sunlight, rests in the darkness. Stay.

Of course. How could he ever have doubted it? He returned across the grass and crouched down next to Jean. She looked up. Her eyes were still frantic.

‘Michael?'

Michael said, ‘Shelley—she can't
know
. How could she? Tell me exactly what she said.'

‘She said they were introducing Management Visits. A friendly drop-in, she said, just to see there are no problems.'

She began to cry again. Michael got up, swung Charlie up into his arms and helped Jean to her feet.

‘Oh Michael, what are we going to
do
?'

‘You're not to worry. We'll do whatever we have to.' He looked back at the house. ‘We're staying.'

 

Jean came out from the back of the house at the sound of Shelley's car on the gravel, patting her tidied hair and intending to give the impression that she knew her place and never used the front door. She had an idea that Shelley would notice and appreciate that sort of observance. But all of Shelley's attention was concentrated on heaving herself out of the hot car. She moved with a sense of grievance, as if she were being made to carry a weight that she considered privately was heavier than anything she should reasonably be expected to shift. As she straightened up, puffing herself into composure, she took in the courtyard, stables, outbuildings and the front of the house. She gave a breathy whistle.

‘Oo-ooh. Well Jean, you've landed on your feet here, haven't you?' she said. She made a face. ‘Look at all this. Just your thing, I should say.
Very
cut above.'

Jean winced as her words rang round and bounced off the walls of the courtyard. She had forgotten how loud Shelley's voice was.

‘I didn't get a chance to tell you,' she said, ‘on the phone. There are other people here. I tried to tell you on the phone but I didn't get a chance and then all of a sudden you'd gone. The owner's cousin's here.'

‘Oh? Nothing was said about
that
.' Shelley drew herself up. ‘In fact, Jean, nothing's been said,
period
. You're meant to ring in once a month.'

‘No, well,' Jean said.

‘Slipping down on the details, we don't like it.'

‘Yes, but—'

‘No way do I like slipping down on the details, Jean. Not in this company. You're getting paid to take sole responsibility, and now you're saying—oh sugar.' A rising burble of
Yankee Doodle Dandy
was sounding from inside her bag. She fumbled and found the mobile phone and began to prod at it with fingers too large for the tiny keys.

‘It's the office.' Shelley cast her eyes heavenwards. Jean took her chance to wander off a distance while Shelley shouted at the caller. The ringing of the mobile phone was silently noted by each of them as proof of a slight superiority over the other.

Shelley rang off, turned to Jean and made another face. ‘Sorry about that! Sometimes they do need to access me. Technology!'