The Human Pool by Chris Petit Read Free Book Online Page A

recognised nothing of Frankfurt. I had been away so long it didn’t even feel like coming back, more the case of the arriving stranger. My hotel was adequate in its steak-and-fries and patterned-carpet way, but a little desperate. The windows didn’t open, and a card on the TV offered me porno if I wished to pay.
    The most noticeable thing about coming back was how nothing smelled anymore. Everything had been assimilated and conditioned. Warmth and coolness had replaced smell. Where I had grown up in Liège, the smells had always been pungent—black tobacco, leaded gasoline, drains, and that particular café mixture of liquor, baking, and coffee. As a child I associated them with the adult life that awaited me. They were evocative of a whole world I wanted to be part of, and still miss. All Florida smelt of—apart from the baby talc odour of American old age—was warm tarmac and hot car-metal, and the level, semichilled smell of supermarkets.
    Nineteen forty-five was the stink of bomb damage, sewage and drains, and, with the warmer weather, bodies decomposing in the rubble. Being back, it was impossible not to think of death, given the proximity of the present foundations to the charnel house. No doubt Norman Mailer would equate it all with buggery.
    In the flesh Hitler’s master race had on the whole been unimpressive. Most looked more like their leader—short, plain, and sallow—than the Aryan ideal. Americans, by comparison—black and white—were a different breed: taller, languid, and with much better dental work. There was also a established commercial beauty programme, a whole industry devoted to the improvement of people’s looks, and a cult of hedonism, the insistence on having a good time, that gave Americans a quality of being in the moment that has always struck me as quite un-European.
    For me, the abiding image of the second world war was a smiling GI slouched in a jeep, cigarette in hand, behind him an old German town square. Memorable because it was like a snapshot of the shock collision of two cultures. The GI in the foreground made everything else redundant. In crude terms it struck me as an image that was marketable in a way that what Hitler and Goebbels had tried to peddle was not. With hindsight, I would say that what I identified was a shift away from ideology towards product. As for the GI slouched in his jeep, we saw his successor a decade later in the form of Elvis Presley (another marketable product), who duplicated on a universal level that sense of alien newness I had sensed, but not fully understood at the time, in that image of the GI.

Vaughan
    LONDON
    DORA WAS FATHER’S SECRET, one that had lasted until his funeral. Most of the mourners were unfamiliar, golf club members or Rotarians. I had seen Dora and wondered who she was. Tall, slim, younger than the rest, wearing a smart black coat with a hood. When I knew, I could see nothing of my father in her.
    After the service she walked up with no hesitation, took off her glove to shake hands, and said, ‘I’m your father’s daughter, the one he didn’t tell you about.’ I liked the brisk way she said it, as though sharing a joke, which, given how we stood out from the rest, we already were.
    The lilt to her voice came from her mother, Irish (too upset to attend). Her mother was the daughter of Father’s housekeeper, Mrs Shannon, who had been responsible for raising me after my own mother had disappeared to Canada with a client of Father’s. It was these overlaps Father had worked so hard to keep separate. He, too, was a professional keeper of secrets, a bank manager, a man of security who became a victim of recession, dismissed two months short of the forty years that made him eligible for a full pension. Within a year he was dead of cancer. I had failed to see behind the fussy neatness, the silences, and the discretion.
    I had left his funeral with my newly acquired