“
You
didn't stick at it.”
“I worked my way up.”
“There's no such thing these days.”
“Of course there is.”
“Signalmen. You know what signalmen are now? They're computer operators.”
“You could have trained . . .”
“I didn't have the fucking education!”
“No. But that's not my fault. Don't look at me. If we'd stayed on in the city, you and Philippe could have done okay. They don't give children the right start in the country schools. They don't teach them the right things.”
The door of the bar opens. Three young men, collars turned up against the rain, come in. Xavier's heart lifts. Some of his friends at last. But they're not his friends. They're strangers. They walk past his table to the far end where the oysters are served.
Mallélou is beginning to be drunk. He feels that sliding of his blood which is both exciting and futile. His mind imagines for his body feats it will never manage. He gazes at Xavier. When the drink begins to get to him, other people's faces seem to move and stretch. He feels he could take them apart, like unstitching rags.
“There's a limit to what one man can do.”
He hears himself say this. What he meant was, two men are better than one when it comes to teaching a woman a lesson. But the words echo, as if shouted in a tunnel: there's a limit, limit to what one man can do . . . Dark echoey excuse trapped in a tunnel. The excuse for all the things he will never be, all the women he will never have. He sees Xavier shrug.
“Suit yourself. I don't want to go near her.”
“You fuck her, did you?”
“What?”
“You screw her? I told you not to.”
Xavier makes a disgusted face. “I'm not so desperate. There're women in this town, you know.”
“I know, son. No one knows better than me.”
“And not just German tarts, either.”
Mallélou looks at his son with the scared eye of a ratty dog. Handsome though Xavier's face always was, he could unstitch it.
“You know nothing about the Germans. You didn't live the war as I did.”
“Thank God.”
“What you hear in France is mostly lies.”
“What lies?”
“About what they did.”
“What the Germans did? Well documented lies, then.”
“They would have run this country well.”
“Oh shut up, Papa.”
“No one likes to admit it, that's all.”
“I'm not interested in your perverted crap. Just because you banged that stinky old woman . . .”
“Beautiful you mean.”
“What?”
“She was beautiful. Marisa. She was beautiful.”
“Go
on
.”
“I used to bugger her. Come in her arse. That's what she liked.”
“So?”
“So it was beautiful.”
“Yeh?”
“Yes. Better than anything you've ever done.”
“You're pathetic.”
Xavier gets up, goes to the bar and asks for change for the telephone. Tired though he feels, he's half decided to ring his friend, Pozzo, and get him to join them. Mallélou suffocates him. His filthy hands. His turgid sex talk. Earlier, he'd resigned himself to giving the old man his bed for the night and sleeping on the floor with a blanket. Now he decides he'll put Mallélou on the floor. After six nights in a cell, he can at least sleep in his own bed. Unless he gets rid of him and he and Pozzo go and look up some girls. One thing feels good anyway: his fear is going. He snatches up the change from the bar counter and orders more
pastis
. Perhaps, if he keeps the drinks coming, he can send his father to “tidy up” Motte, give her a scare, just enough so that she agrees to drop the case, to tell the police she made a mistake. “I defend my own,” the old idiot bragged. So let him show that he can. Xavier glances behind him at Mallélou. His father is looking people over with sad, glassy eyes.
Now, into Gervaise's mouth, where her songs fly out in the cold of morning, Klaus pours his red tongue like an eel. Her own tongue first makes way for it, then curls under it, pushing against its beautiful weight.
For all his strength, he holds her lightly, carries her aloft on him to her bed, where they subside onto the featherbed coverlet she once filled with the down of her own barnyard birds. It amuses and delights Klaus to make love to Gervaise riding on the bleached feathers of squabbling geese and ducks that have, in time past, fed her and kept her alive. The coverlet is noisy with these goose-ghosts, these duckling-ghosts, and Klaus sets them all squawking, quacking and gobbling with his rollicking love.
Peeping from his gold-fleeced head, Gervaise sees in the wardrobe mirror the great happy rump of him butting and burrowing and her laughter streams out past his eel tongue. Her legs climb his back. They are the white stems of flowers, she thinks. He parts them to give in return not some insubstantial blossom, but the thick, hard root of himself and all the sweet earth of her being slips and tumbles as it reaches down, further into her than she knew there was space and feeling.
Out in the dark of Pomerac, widows and wives, and even Mme. de la Brosse shuttered and safe behind her limes, furtively dream of such a gold embrace and don't dare to imagine with what royal thrusting and dancing of tongues it's given to Gervaise. Gervaise, the wife of Mallélou. Gervaise, in her old coarse scarves. The thin flesh she keeps hidden under clothes that slumber with age and rinsing and sunshine, how is it woken? How has it deserved?
The curtains are drawn, tonight, on a private loving. The grey, greedy stare of Mallélou at the door is blessedly absent and Gervaise lets tears of happiness and laughter flow onto the hot skin of her lover's shoulder. And he holds her with such gladness. His love sings and trembles in him. He lifts her high, high onto the bleached and noisy pillows. He's on his knees now and his head is wild and shouting on her bony breast. Love shivers, love trembles, love bursts in her and pulses to a sweet and blissful end. Rain tears at the darkness, but the bodies of Gervaise and Klaus rock silently in a gentle calm.
Along puddled streets, soaking in sour light, Xavier steers Mallélou towards the rue St. Francois where Mme. Motte is wiping tables. The two men are drenched by squalls and Mallélou is cursing: “Let's find another bar, Xavier. I'm not pissed enough for this business.”
Yet he knows he's drunk too much. His gut feels heavy and sick. If he lay down somewhere warm, he'd pass out. And forget. Forget the prison. Forget what the courts are going to say. Forget this promise to settle things his way. He wants to say to Xavier, I'm too old, son, I was old when you were born. I fought in the war as a stripling. And these days the city's too vast, too freezing. Even with this bellyful of booze, I'm not up to it. But he stumbles on, Xavier's arm pushing him, rain pricking his neck and drenching his collar.
They turn into a long, dead-seeming street. Far down it, a single square of light falls onto the pavement. Above this a boxed sign, strip-lit from within, says
Restaurant les Mimosas. Bonne Table
.
Xavier pulls Mallélou into the shadow of some scaffolding. The older man senses he's being controlled like a kid, tugged here and there, ordered about, when it should be him . . .
“Okay?” hisses Xavier. “That's her. Where the sign is.” Mallélou stares up and down the street, numb, dumb â too old, too afraid. Xavier wants to hit him, to wake him up. “
Okay
?”
“Sure, sure. But I'm not drunk enough. I need something . . .”
“No you don't. It's a woman. She can't hurt you. Why are you scared?”
“Not scared, Xavier . . .” His speech is slurred. He can hear it. So long since he was pissed like this, he'd forgotten how it makes you weak. Time was when a few
pastis
were good, good and he'd arrive at Marisa's place with a hard heart and a stiff cock, not weak then or afraid or frozen, but ready to do business his way, Mallélou's way . . .
“
Allez
!”
Xavier pushes him out from the scaffolding and he totters across the cobbled road. He feels his son's eyes at his back like a gun and he doesn't turn. He takes breaths of cold air, tries to send this clean knife of air up into his brain to clear it of muddle and fear, and ancient thoughts of city days when he was young, before there were sons, before there was Gervaise, when he was king of the signal junction. What's one muddling old widow? What's a place like hers, with a few poor tables and a crammed yard at the back? He knows this kind of woman, this kind of place. Rusty boilers, beer crates piled up, stinking tiles like a public toilet, vermin. There's a sour taste in his throat. Drink is futile. Sons grow to thugs of men and make you impotent. He should have stayed in his own cot with his face turned to the wall. Stayed by Gervaise's fire. Let Xavier weep and rot in that scum-filled jail, let him find out for himself that in the end whatever you do you pay, you pay and pay . . .
But he's there now. He's brought himself to the front of the restaurant. He stares in. The glass is fugged from the hot breath of the kitchen. Water drips down it inside and out. A sign dangling on the door says
fermé
. He notes that this is hand-inked in feeble, illiterate writing. He sways and his forehead knocks the icy glass. This small sound brings Mme. Motte back through the plastic fly-curtain that separates the restaurant from the kitchen. Mallélou sees her approach, a small scuttling woman with a flat mutt's face and black dyed hair. He doesn't move. He knows that Xavier is still at his back like a revolver, but distant now, too far to kill, someone shadowy. Mme. Motte stops, one hand holding a soapy dish cloth. She bends and wipes the plastic cover of one of the tables. Her arms are red and fleshy, her bosom tight in her floral overall. She looks up, sees Mallélou still staring at her and points to the
closed
sign.
Mallélou stares and tries to make the right connections: this woman will put Xavier back inside; this woman has control over what happens; he's here to alter these things; if he fails to alter these things, his son will despise him always.
He turns the handle of the door and falls against it as it opens. Mme. Motte, quicker than a rat, comes darting to him waving her damp cloth and shouting. Mallélou sees her little puckered mouth, topped with a faint moustache, opening and closing and hears shrill sounds aimed at him. Something damp flicks his face and he feels his legs shudder. She's pushing him now, trying to push him back into the freezing street, but he holds fast to the door, leans all his weight on his arm on the handle and knows that his legs are going, bending, collapsing. He breathes, tries to straighten himself, but the air he breathes is suffocating and hot like the air of a greenhouse. Waves of nausea come. He swims in them, swaying, toppling. At his feet a pattering of lino sends brown and orange whorls into his brain and he follows these down, down, like a dead body chucked in a well and falling miles and miles into darkness.
Waiting by the scaffolding, tiredness robbing his body of its feeble resistance to the rain and cold, Xavier paces and stamps. Light from the restaurant still floods the pavement and he knows Mallélou is in, but he can hear nothing. He expected shouting and the sound of things being broken. He wants a table to come flying through the glass.
He decides to cross the street, to go nearer. He can't wait here all night. He'll die of cold and exhaustion. He remembers an American film where two cops gobble flabby pizza in the street while two rich villains eat lunch in a warm restaurant far into the winter afternoon. He liked this scene. Life is like that, he thought. Unfair. The rich guys ride around in the Cadillacs. They know there are these millions of other guys getting cold in bus queues and this is part of their pleasure. One day, he will be in a Cadillac. One day he will be in the warm, plushy restaurant.
Xavier doesn't cross the street because a police car comes hurtling down it, blue light turning but no siren going. It pulls up in front of the
Mimosas
and two policemen get out, unhurriedly, and wander in. Xavier presses himself back into the shadows. A red sign slung on the scaffolding says
DANGER. TRAVAUX
. He waits. The rain eases off. Bits of paper and leaves gust round him in the wind. He's dying to go back to his room, to see his own things, to light his gas fire, to smell his own pillow, to sleep. His mind barely questions what is happening when he sees the two policemen come out again carrying the inert body of his father and then hurling it like a sack of vegetables into the back of the car. He thinks merely, well, it's over for now, sees the restaurant sign go out and the car drive off, and walks quickly away in the direction of his lodgings.
October comes. Larry buys a map of the St. Front basilica. He makes drawings of the ground plan, trying to simplify it and make a shape that fits his vision of his new pool. When he's satisfied with the shape, he cuts a template of it out of some hardboard he finds in Miriam's studio, then calculates the measurements of this to square with a basic 36â² by 18â² dimension. He feels excited. He goes out and stands by the walnut tree. Through its thinning leaves comes a lovely dappled light. Larry regrets the need to cut it down but decides that he must do this now, straight away, before Miriam returns. A tug of love over a tree strikes him as unnecessarily stupid.
Larry then gets out from the dusty attic his Aquazure Pool Definition Kit. This consists of a long coil of blue nylon rope, a bunch of sharp wooden pegs and a forty-foot flexible measure. With these ordinary tools Larry “defines”, on empty lawns, on unsightly briar patches, the shape of the miracle to come. He measures off each angle and inserts a peg till the basic shape is stitched out in pegs. Then he ties the blue nylon rope to one of these and winds it on right round all the pegs, thus “defining” the pool. At this point, prospective pool buyers tend to pace round the blue lines, talking to each other: “Gosh, you get the impression now don't you, Jessica?” “Golly, I'm dying to see Emma's face when we tell her, Edward.” Larry smiles, remembering these long-ago small excitements and sets to work in the sunshine, hammering pegs into the flinty earth.