The Swimming Pool Season (31 page)

“I don't know, Monsieur.”

“We'll feel, then.”

His long, cold fingers press the Maréchal's stubbly neck and his almost hairless groin. There is some swelling. Hervé nods his head at his own diagnosis, knowing as he pronounces it that the old man's life is numbered in weeks or even days.

“He has mumps,” he tells Gervaise, “
la parotidite
. There's an epidemic at the school.”

“Oh,” says the Maréchal, as Hervé begins to pack away his things, “that's why the boys came to the window. To give me their diseases.”

An hour later, the Maréchal is carried up to Gervaise's house in Klaus's arms and laid gently in the hand-painted bed from Heidelberg. With a three-day beard on him, Mallélou shuffles in and stares at him. We're paying him back finally, he thinks, for all the years of borrowing. He'll have the last word by dying in our house. But the ghosts have gone. The Maréchal's sleeping. Gervaise has taken charge. The German bed is soft and large and the clean sheets smell of lavender, reminding him of Eulalie's petticoats. He doesn't see Mallélou staring. He sleeps in the knowledge that when he wakes, he'll only have to lie still and listen to hear, not far away, the sound of Gervaise's voice.

When two o'clock sounds on the Pomerac hill Xavier is driving furiously in Mallélou's old
fourgon
down a silent, sandy track in the heart of Ste. Catherine's woods. A plantation of pines bends and sighs in the slight wind. Where the track turns left, these give way to oaks and chestnuts and beeches, and it's here in the belly of the forest, where only the woodmen come, that he expects to see Agnès waiting for him at the wheel of Hervé's car. She isn't there. Xavier's first thought is, she came and went and didn't wait for me, and his next thought is, she's decided against me. She's gone back to Paris and her soldier-boy.

He drives the
fourgon
off the track and the dead beechleaves fly up round the wheels. He switches off the engine, gets out of the car and stands anxiously listening for the sound of Agnès's approach. He lights a cigarette. He can still hear the sighing of the pines, though the larger trees are motionless, damp, exhausted in their year's leafcrop that now lies all around them, waiting sternly for spring. In Xavier's own heart is a similar extraordinary expectation. Like them, he waits. His Bordeaux life, the pettiness, the hopelessness, he treads these down, kicks them into the past. Even his prison-dread falls away, as if the crime was years ago, already forgotten and forgiven, a thing he did as a boy. His eczema is healed. His work in the fields and on Larry's pool has brought back his strength. If Nadia at her window saw him coming up the Pomerac hill she would see, in these days of his passion, a fine and proud face, the pretty colt grown to a handsome and sharp-eyed man, a lover to make her little foreign heart stop as it stopped in the pastry shop when Uncle Leopold laid his big paw on her head. But what does Agnès see as she bounds in Hervé's car towards Xavier, waiting under the silent trees? She's running to him fast, wildly. Her eyes aren't lowered in their usual obedience to orderly things, they're wide-open, pleading eyes.
Devour me
, they say.
Break me
. They see a fleeting grandeur of love, a feast to snatch and swallow.
Kill me with love. Kill me before the future comes!

He's at her car door. He helps her out and binds her to him. The smell of her steals away his breath. No woman he's ever held has had this sweet, irresistible smell.
I want it forever
, says his entranced mind.
Marry me
. She kisses him so hard, his lip is bruised. Her body hurries him. Her desire and not his love, which is a slower thing, a marvelling spectator, hauls him swiftly to his male buck's antics, butting up into her, the pushing, braying, blunt-snouted animal while her legs flail his back, while she screams and bites and twists her head on its bed of earth and yells to heaven in her pleasure and tears his seed from him like an explosion of flowers.

He stays in her but his head falls. He wants to love her more slowly than this, love her with words and small caresses, with his humanity. He's not her stud, her buck, her bull. He adores her with the core of his being. He cups her head in his arms and holds it in the hollow of his shoulder.
Marry me
. The air is freezing on his naked bottom and legs.
The wind at my back
. This phrase and the cold December ground fill him with a longing for spring and a house of his own and Agnès with him in a high bed.

“Marry me, Agnès.”

“Don't talk, Xavier.”

“Why, ‘don't talk'?”

“Because.”

“Tell me why. I want to talk to you.”

“But I just want to hold you.”

Obediently he lies down again and she begins to nibble at his neck and lick it and he laughs. Hearing no answering laugh from her, he looks down at her face and it's serious and frantic as she says, “I want to come again. I need to come.”

He kisses her gently and asks, “Do you love me, Agnès?”

“Don't I show it?” she says.

“I can't live without you.”

“Yes. I think about it all the time.”

“Think about what?”

“This. Fucking.”

“Am I good? Am I a good lover?”

“Yes. Make me come, Xavier. It's so fantastic.”

“Why won't you marry me?”

“I didn't say I wouldn't.”

“Will you?”

“I don't know. Please make me come.”

“You won't marry your soldier, will you?”

“I don't know.”

“Agnès . . .”

“Oh, hurry. I need to come. I have to.”

“Just tell me there's some future, Agnès . . .”

“Of course there is.”

“You're not lying?”

“No.”

So slowly and tenderly and with an anxious kind of hope Xavier gets onto his knees and buries his worshipping head between her spread legs.

No more than an hour passes before she's back in the car and driving away from him. He watches her till she's out of sight, then stares at the track that's taken her away. This is all we have, he thinks, this hurried ritual. And suddenly, he's no longer content with these brief, wild meetings. He wants more than anything he's ever wanted, to be with her in her bedroom in Hervé's house and hold her in his arms all night, easy and intimate and slow, like the student couple to whom he gave the key to his cast-off room. Strange how they've become his model. He suspects it's because they, with their books and their difficult music and their odd knowledge of other countries' wars, understood in private what each was giving and what, in the easy logic of their particular love, each took.

He drives, without hurrying, wrapped in his plans for his future with Agnès, back to Pomerac. Halfway there, he notices that his lip is bleeding.

She's home by this time, running in, preparing tea for Hervé before the evening surgery. She feels dizzy and tired from her own pleasure. She sits gratefully by the fire in the bureau and takes up the letter from Luc that has arrived that morning. She learns from it that her mother has invited him to stay for Christmas.

Foot by foot, the big sunken box that the pool now is, is growing. Klaus and Larry, wearing baggy
bleus
from the Pèrigueux market, seem to be fighting back the descending winter, fighting back each afternoon's earlier and earlier sunset with their busy mixing and shovelling and pouring and smoothing of concrete. Gervaise, hurrying from the Maréchal's bedside, chivvying Mallélou to dress himself and not shame her by flopping round the house all day in pyjamas, scuttles over the earth mounds with bowls of coffee and looks fondly at the new straight walls and the high colour in Klaus's cheeks:

“
Mon dieu, c'est formidable, quand même
!”

“We're not far from the mosaic, Gervaise,” says Klaus with huge pride. His confectioner's soul and his easy love of God make him long for this magnificent challenge. The thousands of black and white facets waiting for his attention in cardboard boxes mesmerise him and urge him on. He works as hard as two men. Larry is amazed at the speed now being achieved and senses that the German has brought to his vision a kind of superstitious luck. Larry's no longer building the pool for Miriam, not even for Agnès though his mind still seats her at its edge, but for the thing itself, for Pomerac. On certain days, he hears the water already in it, sees its satisfying reflections, Nadia's “loops of brightness” made even more dazzling by the cathedral colours under the surface. Though darkness breaks further into each day, and up and down the village families are making Christmas garlands, Larry no longer feels cold. His house is dusty and neglected. He's stopped imitating the way Miriam used to care for it. Let it sit and wait for her. Let it bear the burden of her neglect, not him. He's forging
Aquazure France
. He's doing what was asked of him: beginning again.

Only his nights are sad. Miriam. Agnès. Neither of them are with him, nor even thinking of him. This suspicion that he's been let go even from the thoughts of his wife makes him feel small. You can hold people as tenderly in your head as in your arms. He tries his sleep trick, the inventions. But the anxious, commercial, opportunistic Larry of the
Aquazure
days is going; and gone, with the moderating of his ambitions, is the old knack of inventing that bludgeoned his brain to sleep for so many years. Instead he finds himself remembering Miriam's habits and gestures. The stern way she looked at herself in the mirror. The old fashioned daily brushing of her hair. Her peculiar wearing of la robe. The way she drove the Granada, sitting bolt upright. The hardness of her chest as if, under her breasts, she was made of steel. Her fat tears. Her unfussy way of waking. Her Ackerman pride. Her eyes in the landscape. The feel of her tongue in his mouth.

In the direction of Agnès he tries not to glance. But there she is at his mind's edge: her soft clothes, her skin of an English schoolgirl, her plump hands folding, straightening, gathering, arranging, polishing, patting, smoothing, touching. He's caught between Miriam's familiar mouth and Agnès's unfamiliar caressing hand. What heaven to take both these women in his arms. What peace.

He's up as early as Gervaise now, keen to shrug off the hopeless nights. He makes coffee the French way, very strong, with boiled milk, and eats hungrily from the loaves Klaus brings him every second day. He sees the sun come up and the cows come bumping up the lane. He puts on his
bleus
and feels impatient to start work. Some mornings the frost is so hard he's afraid he'll find cracks in the new concrete but the sides are holding. He pats the pool walls like the neck of a faithful horse.
Good girl. Keep going. Keep going
. The lean-to he's made for the filter plant is topped out with a smart little roof of coral tiles. As he sits up there, putting them on, he remembers Miriam had a favourite dress of this exact colour.

Then, one afternoon, the concreting is finished. Klaus looks at the smooth walls, the two sets of perfect, gently curving steps (one set under the main cupola, one in the apsidal chapel) and throws his trowel in the air with joy. “
Ich liebe dich, Larry
!
Ich liebe dich
!”

“Tomorrow we start the mosaic, Klaus.”

“Oh, my God, this is so wonderful!”

“We could finish by Christmas.”

“Look at this! All with our hands!”

It's almost dark. Only the faces of the two men stand out palely. With the blue dusk falling on them in their pit, they feel acutely both the ridiculousness and the wonder of their achievement. They sit down at the deep end wall and laugh.

That evening, after drinking a celebratory schnaps with Klaus, while Mallélou sits and watches the television and ignores them and Gervaise spoons broth into the Maréchal's fever-cracked mouth, Larry drives down to Mme. Carcanet's and buys two bottles of vodka. Tonight, a landmark night in the rebirth of
Aquazure
, he has decided he and Nadia will for once drown their sorrows in style.

There's no
snotty gulashnova
simmering behind the Japanese screen when Larry arrives and Nadia apologises.

“If you had tell me, my darling, we were celebrating, I could have make you some blinis with salmon eggs.”

“Oh, it doesn't matter, Nadia.”

“But you know all I have is a little saucisson.”

“I didn't come for a meal.”

“Well, I tell you, I'll put out the saucisson and we can nobble it.”

“Nibble, Nadia.”

“Nibble, nobble, I don't know you're so pedantical . . . Now you pour the bloody vodka and I'm tell you some important decision I make.”

As Larry pours the drinks he remembers that until he met Nadia he'd never even tried vodka. Now, because it's her one luxury, he's come to reverence the taste of it. He passes Nadia her glass and raises his own.

“To us!”

She looks at him quizzically. “To
us
, Larry? You think we are coupling?”

“Well, to you and me, perhaps I should have said. Because we're the ones here.”

“And we don't drink to our absent friends?”

“If you like.”

“Well, I think.”

“To them, then.”

“Yes. To them. Though I tell you what I'm think this morning when I wake up: I think we never see them again, and you know I feel so desolated I just hug in my bed and not get up.”

“We will see them again, Nadia.”

“No. I don't think.”

“You mean Hervé and Miriam?”

“Yes. And not only these two.”