The Swimming Pool Season (20 page)

For a few days he thought Miriam's absence would be short. He trusted Leni to die. Now, he senses he's been abandoned. Miriam's voice (so cold, he shivered by Nadia's fire) on the telephone first told him this. It also told him that she didn't know why she'd done it or even how it had happened. “It was an accident,” her flat voice seemed to say, “an accident that just happened.” All the digging he does and the ordering of pipework is, of course, for her return: the pool will be finished; Miriam will come home to Pomerac. But Larry can't see either of these things. His loss of faith extends suddenly to his marriage and he gasps with fear at the thought of being alone through the winter. When Gervaise comes round bringing turnips, he feels grateful relief: he's not forgotten by everyone and everything. He keeps an anxious watch out for the eagle. “My friend, the eagle,” he says to himself boastfully. But it doesn't come. More and more as darkness creeps on in the afternoons, he scuttles up to Nadia's. Between them, she and Gervaise, by giving him food and warmth and their bizarre companionship, seem to keep him from despair.

These days, Nadia's longing to be loved by Hervé is no secret from Larry. This pent-up love of hers is catching at her smile and carving channels of hurt from her fine little nose to her crab-apple chin. “What,” she asks, as the dark settles round Pomerac and the children are called in to the blackened ranges, “is this old bean to do?”

Larry is doggy-dumb. Life, at present, refuses to provide him with answers. Nadia gets cross: “I don't know what is the English heart made of? Waste I'm thinking. You live in the constipated heart!”

Larry nods, feeling the lead-weight of his own chest. “I'm sure you're right, Nadia. But there's no logic in love, you know, and as a nation we tend to be rather good at logic. What you lose on the swings . . . you see?”

“Swings? What is this swings, Larry? You mean
balançoires
?”

“Yes. But never mind. Shall I go and talk to Harve for you?”

“Oh no. This is a lost cause, my friend. To Hervé what I am but an old Pole? He has this clean Agnès, so what he need some old Gulashka for? I am only some dirty fly he swats away with his handkerchief from Simpsons of Piccadilly, no?”

“No. He's very fond of you, Nadia.”

“Fond? Fond? So he treat me like some sister or mother! I don't want his fond, Larry. I want his desire of me.”

Desire of her. With her fluff of dyed hair and her pink, stubby, restless hands, Larry can't imagine she stirs the gentlest whisper of blood in Hervé's aristocratic groin. His body seems fitted out for tall fashionable women with the cool smiles of cats. This week his plaster casts were cut and fell open like conker husks, revealing his mended legs within, still shapely, hairless and at the ankles royally tinged with blue. He walks on them fearfully, as if they were stilts he hadn't got the hang of. This revealing of his new legs increases Nadia's sighings.

“How I am a fool for elegance, Larry! My Claude is once so elegant a man. We order all his shirts at Sulka in the rue Royale. And when I walk with Claude on his arm, in the Champs Elysees, I'm thinking, my God Nadia, you would be back in Warszawa now this minute with some one-legged neighbour on the landing snitching or snimping food, and, I know what a lucky woman I'm being with my beautiful Claude in his neckties. And how could I imagine his rocker would go? I ask you. If you had seen my Claude at the Tour d'Argent, at Laperouse, you would never have guessed, this man is getting bananas . . .”

“It's very sad, Nadia. I'm so sorry about Claude.”

“But destiny, no? First I'm getting a madman. Then it's my fate to lose my stupid Polish heart to a man of stone. You know this fashionable Polish director, Wajda, is making movies about men of stone and this is my Hervé.”

“No, I don't think so, Nadia. His men are factory workers or shipyard people.”

“Well, what it matter? All the men in Nadia's life are notty or iron.”

“Notty?”

“Notty, nutty, nitty. I don't know what's the difference? Or men of ice, like my poor Hervé with his precious little niece. Look at his legs! When he fell down, they packed his legs in ice.”

She's drinking a lot, these cold nights. Mme. Carcanet who owns the épicerie at Ste. Catherine, gets the vodka she orders, but Nadia's too poor to buy the crate all at once. She saves on electricity and nail varnish and butter to buy the bottles one by one. She's generous with the liquor, seeming to forget what it costs. Larry drinks gratefully and notices the way Nadia has begun to fling her small, plump body round the flat, throwing it onto chairs like a dancer, gathering cushions into her short arms and pressing them into her face, sending her shoes hurtling to the ceiling, then kneeling and weeping against her Japanese screen. He's uncomfortable with these performances and yet grateful for them. She doesn't often ask him about himself. In her pink-faced lamentations, he forgets the hole he's making in his garden and the void around which his self-respect now seems to be constructed. One night, he dreams he's become a swimming pool, become this cold, empty space. Someone has filled him not with chemically treated water, but with vodka. In Nadia's warm flat he feels protected from dreams like this. Her grief shields him from his. He feels an affection for her which now and again surprises him. He longs to comfort her, yet knows he never will. On and on goes her little tragedy. On and on goes his listening.

On a mild morning, when a soft rain has chased away the cold front, with a vodka hangover pressing on his forehead, Larry climbs wearily into the Granada and drives past the waterfall to Hervé's mansion. The wistaria leaves are gone. Even the Michaelmas daisies he remembers Agnès picking are dying down and all the summer grandeur of the garden has disappeared. Larry gets out of the car and breathes the wet air. He's come determined to do or say whatever he can, as inconspicuously as he can, for Nadia. Agnès sees him standing in the drive and comes out. Over her neat little skirt she wears an apron. She's laying fires, she says, and smiles. Then she puts a hand on Larry's arm and says, “Luc, my fiancé, is here. I would like to introduce you,” and leads Larry down the armoured hallway to the sitting room. There is no sign of Hervé. He's not in the house, is Larry's immediate thought, when he sees the boy, Luc, lounging on one of Hervé's expensively covered sofas, reading a magazine. The doctor, on his newly knit legs, has gone back to his surgery. Agnès and her young soldier have the house to themselves.

The conversation is brief. Luc isn't interested in Larry, looks at him insolently through long dark lashes and barely tilts up off the sofa to shake his hand. Silence hangs in the big room. Larry moves to leave. To his surprise, Agnès sounds flustered when she says: “Don't go. Stay for some coffee, or tea. I could make Lipton's tea.” Luc stares at her. The boy's body is leggy and soft, like a colt's. Of this soft sinew, the army is trying to fashion red muscle. It's to annoy Luc that Larry agrees to the tea. To find a disdainful, lazy animal in possession of Agnès is vexing. He wants to say to this obedient girl, don't marry yet. And with these words almost on his lips he follows Agnès to the kitchen, abandoning the soldier to his magazine.

She fills a heavy kettle and lights the gas. Larry imagines her grown old, making these identical movements from sink to stove. And in between, time slips and vanishes. It's as if she has no life through thirty years. Larry wants to catch her arm and shake her, but he just stands still, watching her. He's aware that this is what he does these days when he comes here: he watches Agnès. It doesn't seem to bother her at all. It's as if she expects it. Like the protecting regard of a parent. She doesn't shrug off his watching of her or push him away but rather brings his look closer by treating him fondly and seeming to share with him thoughts she keeps from her Uncle Hervé. Reaching for a tray, which she begins to set with pink and white cups and saucers, Agnès says quietly and without self-consciousness: “Luc wants me to sleep with him. Today. He wants me to do it today. Do you think I should?”

Larry stares at her over the teacups. Her green eyes address him calmly. She's not nervous, only perplexed. Larry aches for summer and the finished pool. By this, he would find Agnès a protected little corner in the sun. Say to Gervaise and Klaus, this is my adopted daughter.

“Do you want to? If you want to, then it's all right.”

“I'd like it if . . .”

“What?”

“If it was going to be right.”

“Why wouldn't it be right?”

“Because he knows nothing. He's never had a woman. Only whores.”

“You'll learn together.”

“No.” She says this with force, then looks down at her hands, setting out the tea tray.

“Why not, Agnès?”

“Because I know what this means. You learn the man's way, just the selfish way, and later you have to find out what's right for you. So you betray your marriage. But I love Luc. I don't want to betray our marriage. You see?”

Larry feels astonished not so much at the dilemma but that Agnès, with her strange old-fashioned ways, should understand it so well. Momentarily, he's sorry for Luc. What twenty-year-old boy understands that he, the best of lovers, can be, for his first woman, the worst lover she will ever have? His pride, his youth, his potency all deny this. He laughs and struts away. His woman runs crying, following, begging him not to go. She loves him. Yet in time she'll betray him. He understands neither the quality of her love nor her reason for betraying it.

Before Larry can find in himself anything by way of advice for his wise-child, he discovers Luc standing silently in the kitchen doorway. Agnès flicks her soldier a look of sudden sorrow and turns away to the kettle. Larry stares helplessly at the back of her sweet head that he wants to protect with his hands.

Since Bordeaux, Mallélou sleeps with a light burning in his narrow room and his hands tucked between his legs. He feels so cold and defeated in his head, he thinks his brain's becoming dry like a tuber. He's grown forgetful. His legs are weak. Measuring barbed wire, setting posts, shovelling leaf-swamp from the ditches – soundlessly through these November tasks creeps a certainty of death. He stands in Gervaise's fields and feels afraid. He hopes God is a German, his rightful master, and will forgive him his cowardly life. He weeps hot tears that fly in the harsh wind for his leaving of Marisa. “I loved you, Marisa!” he bleats across time. “With you I was a man.”

Gervaise discovers him crying like a baby in an empty corner of the meadow and asks him again, “What happened in Bordeaux?” But he's told her everything that happened: his visit to the prison, his round of Xavier's sad bars, his arrest at Mme. Motte's, his night in a police cell, his release. What he can't admit is his old-man's terror. When he was kicked out of his cell at dawn, grey with sleeplessness and smelling of puke, he sat in an empty café and watched life wake up and pass him by with disgust. He wanted to cry then. He saw he was finished. Irrelevant. They tore down the old signal hut and built a concrete palace of flashing squares and digits. He had been superseded. He warmed and warmed his shaking hands on a bowl of coffee. Buses clinked and hissed outside the café. People got on and were whisked off to city jobs his own sons had never been educated to do. There was nothing left for him but to go back to Pomerac and wait to roll over dead one night like a sick sow. Winter's coming, say the hunched backs of the city workers clambering on their buses. Keep the light burning, says Mallélou. Keep the frost from turning your balls to ice.

One mid-November day is Gervaise's birthday. It's become her custom, over the years, to receive very little, but to give the kind of feast that warms up the blood and sets Klaus singing German lullabies far into the night. The Maréchal is invited and normally eats so much he falls asleep by Gervaise's fire. They cover him with a rug and leave him to dream his dreams of the old days of the pike fishing or the days of his April chivvying of women. This year, the heads fly off four ducks and their livers are mashed with bacon and garlic and sweet wine into a rich paté before they're scented with dried tarragon and fresh bay and roasted in their own fat. Trout are brought up from Ste. Catherine and poached with fennel. Bottles of apricots and damsons come down from the larder shelves and are arranged by Klaus in two flans as big as bicycle wheels. Cheeses are unwrapped from their muslin. There is food enough for eight or ten (all the more because Mallélou only picks at meat these days) and Gervaise decides, scraping turnips and carrots for a vegetable compote, to break with custom and invite Larry. Mallélou complains: the English don't know how to enjoy themselves; you can't feel at home with a stranger. But no one listens. Larry is invited and readily accepts. He drives to Périgueux in search of a gift for Gervaise and comes back with a tree.

Setting her table with linen, Gervaise feels as happy as a child. Let Mallélou sit down and die if he wants to. Through her hard soles of feet, Gervaise feels her plantedness on the earth. She is strong. Her cows are healthy. Her lover shows no wish to leave her but rather on this very morning has tossed forty-nine kisses into her hair, one for each year of her life. If her sons are absent, this is only because she's never tried to keep them by her at Pomerac, knowing this was vain. She believes they love her. Even Xavier with his petty thieving will remember this is her day and pause in his city life to think of her. She smiles, folding her best napkins. Her kitchen smells of roasting and wine. She thanks her Maker for this gift of life.

At six in the evening, Klaus walks the lanes to the Maréchal's house. The old man has shaved and put on a tie the colour of a bilberry. He's as hungry as a lion, he tells Klaus. Klaus guides him gently through the dark farmyard to the warm kitchen lit now with twenty candles, the table decorated with ivy and fir, six bottles of wine open on the sideboard. He shakes Mallélou's hand, then pulls Gervaise to his nightfrosted cheeks and holds her face against his. Then he tugs a crumpled little parcel from one of his many pockets and presses it into Gervaise's hand. It's a brooch he gave his wife when she was fifty. Mme. Foch used to wear it on Sundays clipped to a velvet hat. Gervaise recognises it at once and feels it should never belong to her, but the Maréchal anticipates her protests and says sternly: “If I had a daughter, Gervaise, she would have it. You're the nearest damn thing I've got to a daughter, so you take it, and if I don't see it on you at Christmas, there'll be hell to pay.”