The Swimming Pool Season (22 page)

“Yes, it's very harsh. This is the only way.”

Hervé sits down, tired. Larry feels like the Egyptian messenger, beaten for bringing bad news. Ahead of him stretches vainly an evening with Nadia. She's cooking a Polish meal. More vodka has been ordered from Mme. Carcanet.

“I'm sorry, Harve,” he says hopelessly. “She'll get over it, I suppose.”

“I can't bear tragedies.”

“She will get over it.”

“And this is tragic.”

A car sounds on the magnificent gravel. Agnès returning.

“Say nothing to Agnès,” Hervé says quickly.

“I must be going,” says Larry.

“No. Don't go. Agnès likes to see you.”

Yet he does leave. He feels punished and sad. His friendship with Hervé may have been jeopardised. In the dark hall, Agnès runs up to him and kisses him fondly like a dear parent, but he leaves her grimly, with scarcely a word to her.

Nadia is making what she calls her
snotty gulashnova
. Pork is boiled to silver shreds in a sauce of garlic, white wine, rosemary and prunes. She says it's a recipe she got from the wife of her one-legged neighbour on Wielkopolski Street. It's always looked disgusting, she admits. Everything that came out of those Wielkopolski Street kitchens looked disgusting but this stew always tasted good. You eat it with mashed potato.

While the
snotty gulashnova
simmers, Nadia re-tints her hair with a new bottle of Nice' n' Easy. Blueish paste runs out of the cling-film, in which it is suggested she binds her head, and trickles down her neck. She shivers, wiping this away. She wonders how grey or even white her hair is by now.

She has a bath and drinks tea. She enjoys preparations. Her hair looks yellow and clean. She tries on a new lipstick, makes an orange and chicory salad. I'm behaving, she thinks, as if a lover was coming to dinner, as if Hervé were coming. She changes from her candlewick dressing gown to a tweedy dress and from tea to vodka. She murmurs, badly, a sad Polish song: “
A girl came with a branch of whitebeam and lay her leaves in my true love's arms
 . . .”

The Pomerac clock has just struck seven when Larry arrives. Though he still feels choked by his conversation with Hervé, he bounds cheerfully into Nadia's room, determined, somehow, to be gentle with his hurting news, to make the unbearable bearable. One thing Larry has always been is kind.

“Oh,” says Nadia as soon as she sees him, “you are looking quite handsome tonight, you know. I don't know what you are living – on Gervaise's old beetroot or something – but you are getting so thin since Miriam leaves you. You know this, my darling?”

“Thin? Well that's good. I'm a middle-aged man . . .”

“But looking younger now. I think all this digging out your pool is good for your brawn.”

Larry smiles. It seems years since anyone paid him a compliment. Nadia's compliments, though they come out so peculiarly, are agreeable because he knows they're truthful.

“Thank you, Nadia,” he says gently.

“Well don't thank me, my dear. I'm saying true. Now I shall pour you some little vodka. Can you smell the
snotty gulashnova
? Not bad, no? You like it?”

“Yes. It smells delicious.”

Nadia hands Larry his vodka. He looks at her small, smiling face with its new-blonde hair and feels terror. She sees his look and asks anxiously: “You don't like my hair?”

“Your hair?”

“I'm doing my new preparation on my hair today, in honour of this dinner.”

“Oh, it looks very nice, Nadia.”

“I don't know how much is grey underneath. If I stop my preparation, maybe I am an old white Saint Niklaus – Santa Nadia!”

Larry laughs. Nadia smiles, but sits patting her hair anxiously.

“How time is our enemy, you don't think?”

“Yes. I suppose.”

“Though men aren't suffering so from beauty. You know that story,
La Belle et le Bête
? Every woman reading this story is loving this beast, no matter how he is so grizzly, you know. They feel his sorrow. They want to put this ugly head in their lap and be so gentle and reviving. But you think of this table turning round! Another question altogether, my friend! If you take some handsome young stripple and he meets in the rose garden this grey hag, no matter how she is kind and loving of him he won't cradle her poor head and say don't worry I am loving you anyway in spite of warts. You think he will? I don't think. Never in stories. Never in life.”

“You're probably right. But I don't think I've ever been really impressed by beautiful women.”

“Well, your wife is beautiful, no?”

“Miriam? No. Not beautiful. Striking. Proud-seeming, a bit like an animal, but not beautiful. Her mother was, of course, and traded on it for years.”

“That bloody Leni?”

“Yes.”

“And she put you off the beauties?”

“Maybe.”

“Yes, I think. Because most men are so greedy of this. You are some exemption, Larry.”

“Exception?”

“Even Claude, when he's starting to go, I can see how he sighs in the cafés, you know. He sees some thigh or a young bosom and he looks to me to say your thigh is not so-and-so any more, Nadia, and your breasts are not so-and-so and I think out there in the Pas de Calais poor old Claude is still sighing for some young tits. So stupid, no? Like in Poland where I am a girl and hungry and my Uncle Leopold tells me, you eat the moon then, Nadia, the moon is good cheese. And I believe him, you know? I look up at this winter moon and I see the blue holes where the worms go in.”

After two glasses of vodka, Nadia lights red candles on her little table and serves her gulash. She tucks a monogrammed napkin into Larry's shirt collar. The draping of things round him, as at the barbers', makes him feel helpless and he quickly pulls it away. Nadia reprimands him like a child: “You will spoil your very nice jacket, you know.” He avoids answering by complimenting her on the meal. She's made a great quantity of potato. The dish sits between them like a hillock. Larry can't climb this sticky white mountain to reach her and tell her to stop loving Hervé. Tonight her smiles, her little flushed laughs, guard and hide her sadder feelings. She's playing hostess. Her table is immaculately set. She's put out her best wine-glasses. Larry feels grateful for these attentions, just as he felt grateful to Gervaise for inviting him to her birthday feast, for taking him in. As the meal progresses and the mountain of potato diminishes a little, Larry feels more, not less, unwilling to spoil Nadia's evening by talking about Hervé. Another day, he thinks. On some cold morning, when there's no comfort of vodka and wine and this Polish meal. When there's nothing to spoil . . .

“So you're not infatuating the niece?” Nadia says suddenly.

“What, Nadia?” says Larry.

“This Agnès. You don't falling in love with this young beauty while Miriam is back to her mother?”

“No. Of course not.”

“You don't seeing her, even?”

“Well, I've seen her, yes. I met her fiancé the other day.”

“Ah, so she has some handsome young prince already?”

“Not a prince. A soldier.”

“A soldier. Well, is this suit her? She make love to his uniform?”

“No. She says she doesn't want to. Not yet.”

“And so she tells you this, my darling? You are acting so confidential?”

“Not really. I don't know why she told me. I was just there, I suppose.”

“Oh my dear, you don't be so modest.”

“It's not modesty, Nadia . . .”

“You English are so pretending this and this.”

“What d'you mean?”

“Pretending so bloody innocent, you know?”

“Nadia . . .”

“But you don't know this old game? I think you do.”

“What old game?”

“So, the innocent again! But you don't pull the yarn to Nadia. I do this in my time when I am young. I go to my Uncle Leopold, the one who is telling me so lies about the moon. And I tell him my troubles, how I am virgin and so afraid for my first time. But you know what I hope? Of course you do. He is so handsome man, my Uncle Leopold, and I hope he says okay, just don't worry about nothing, Nadia. You can come to my bed and I teach you.”

Larry stares at Nadia, who is laughing. He has never seen her dimpled pink face so happy or amused. She should be grey, he thinks, with her memories of Poland, grey with sadness for the lost Claude, grey in her hopeless love, yet she's golden and plump as a little partridge and rosy and hot.

“Oh, don't look so scolding!” she laughs, “You think some girls aren't doing this since time is beginning? You don't think some students don't go to their favourite teacher and tell this and this and cry in his handkerchief. Me, I was student in Paris and I know these girls are doing this, just as I was doing to Uncle Leopold and this niece Agnès is do to you.”

“She's done nothing to me, Nadia. She asked my advice, that's all.”

“Oh, you dear English! Never suspecting. Never understanding. I don't know how Britannia rules the bloody waves when she is so stupid.”

“She doesn't any more.”

“But how is she ever doing this, I don't know. You were never invaded I think. Not since some Norman days. If a people are invaded and oppressed as in Poland, they don't stay so innocent. I think this is why.”

“What happened with Uncle Leopold?” asks Larry without interest. He feels uncomfortable with Nadia's teasing and his first thought is to protect Agnès from it. Solemnly he remembers Hervé's instruction;
this house must be out of bounds to Nadia
.

“What happened? Well, he is not so stupid. He sees what I ask. But he is so generous man. He takes me alone to some teashop and buys all plates of cakes and chocolate and I'm gobbling these up because in my home we don't have any fancy pastry or what. So he says to me, look at you, Nadia, you are still a little girl, eating her cakes. You see? You are my niece and still a child in your heart even if you have some beautiful breasts, and your uncle is not touching a child, only to give a little kiss on her head or give his arm on the walk to the tearoom. So I feel a little ashamed, you know. I start crying, I think I see he was honourable and Nadia dishonourable. So I try not to think of him no more. And when I lose my virgin, I forget him.”

“Is he still alive, Nadia?”

“Uncle Leopold? I don't know. He was a banking man and never so for the Communists. I don't know what happen when I leave and go to Paris. I just forget that sad Wielkopolski Street and all the cold streets and doorways and one doorway I forget is Uncle Leopold's. But it was painted blue. I remember this blue. Some cousin is given a big consignment of blue paint, so all the whole family is painting everything blue, even my bed and the meat cupboard or what. I think maybe this lasts them all out till they die and they paint the Poniatowski mausoleum blue. So funny, no?”

The gulash is pressed on Larry until the large dish is almost empty. As Nadia serves fruit – tangerines and dried figs and chocolate-covered nuts – his belly feels cramped and he's glad to sit still at the table, sip his wine, watch the candles burn down and talk quietly of Nadia's past – of Paris, of Claude, of her children. The weight of the unasked question about Hervé lies as heavily in him as the food. Slowly, with a subtlety he didn't imagine her capable of, Nadia steers the conversation towards those icy shores and Larry feels himself shiver.

“So Hervé's going away?” she asks finally.

Larry takes a tangerine from a glass dish and begins peeling it.

“Why do you ask this, Nadia?”

“Because, my old bean, you are avoiding this subject of Hervé like in Russia they avoid to talk of Stalin. So I suspect something – some bad news.”

“Why would he go away?”

“I think he is.”

“Did somebody tell you this?”

“So it's true, no?”

“He's thinking of it.”

“Well, I knew. Running from his nightmares and now running from Nadia.”

“No. He just says he's tired. He wants some kind of a break.”

“But you talk to him of Nadia. I see this in your face, my friend.”

“Nadia,” says Larry solemnly, “you have been such a good friend to me I feel so grateful for how you've kept inviting me here, cooking meals . . .”

“Well, you think it's so difficult?”

“I'm not saying it is. What I'm saying is I'm very fond of you and I wish everything in your life could be what you wanted . . .”

“So there's nothing for Nadia, uhm? No hope?”

“Oh Christ, Nadia, I don't know if there's hope or not . . .”

“It's all right, my dear, you can tell me. I'm not crying tonight.”

“I'm very fond of Harve . . .”

“So. Fond, fond. Fond of me. Fond of Hervé. Just tell me, no?”

“He doesn't love you. He doesn't love anyone, not in a romantic way.”

She sits bolt upright at the table. Her eyes are bright like a kitten's.

“You're not saying he's pederastic?”

“No. I'm just saying he's a very . . . unemotional man. He believes love complicates life . . .”

“So? Of course it does, no?”

“And he doesn't like that kind of complication. It wouldn't matter who you were, Nadia.”

“If I am young, you mean?”

“Young or old, it wouldn't matter Harve has sworn never to get involved.”