The Swimming Pool Season (36 page)

But he only stares at her helplessly, his eyes glassy with fever and through his pale lips repeats: “It's not me who's to blame.”

She goes back to the kitchen, feeling cold, and banks up the fire. Tired from her worries, she makes a soup for her supper and stands over it, hugging the kitchen-warmth to her.

At five, she forces herself out into the freezing dark to milk the cows, disliking this task, on this day, more than she's ever done and promising herself, in some kindly future, the modern milking parlour she's so often imagined. If a pool can come to Pomerac, then any miracle can occur. Though Mallélou is useless now, old long before his time, she and Klaus will work and save for the milking parlour. Then, in her old age, there won't be this ritual. “I will,” she says to the warm udders, “have earned the rest.”

When she comes in, the milking done, the churns lugged to the bottom of the hill for collection by the de la Brosse milk pasteurising company, she goes up again to the Maréchal's room, listens for a moment to his snores, then returns to the kitchen, eats her soup, parks her body in its straight chair and is lulled quickly to an exhausted sleep by the warmth of the soup in her belly and the grey, flickering coming and going of subtitles on an American TV movie. It's a movie about truckers. A vast convoy of juggernauts rolls in to a mid-western town. In a grinding of gears and a scream of engines the trucks smash up the town to set free a prisoner. The noise fills Gervaise's head and wakes her. She opens her eyes, stares at the screen. The revving trucks remind her of the huge sewage tankers thundering down the Ste. Catherine road and of her time on the edge of the city. “God save my son,” she thinks and closes her eyes again and sleeps and the noise of trucks goes on in her head.

Upstairs, the Maréchal wakes and hears the convoy and feels relieved, for a moment or two, that the house is filled with noise and no longer with silence. But then, outside his window, he sees a light. This room looks out onto the edge of Larry's garden, not onto the lane and the Maréchal questions the existence of this light beyond the thin curtains. Unless, they've moved me, he thinks. But the room with the painted bed is familiar in all its detail. Even the pink box of Turkish Delight is there on the table. He stares at it, remembering the tight features of Mme. de la Brosse as she sat tidily on a chair, out of reach of his breath, talking about community responsibility and her friend the Mayor . . .

“Gervaise!” he calls urgently, “Gervaise!”

He waits. He knows the noise is too loud and she hasn't heard him. He looks back at the window. The light jolts, recedes, returns. He measures the distance from his bed to the window: three metres perhaps. He can't walk three metres. For his feeble excretions Gervaise brings a flat pan and sits him on it. He'll never leave his bed.

“
Gervaise
!”

He wants to pummel the floor. Though he tries to call loudly, he knows his voice is feeble. But then he hears her coming, her sabots on the wooden stairs, a galumphing tread for this thin woman. She flies in to the room, one side of her face red where it's rested against the chair, her eyes wide and startled.

“What is it, Maréchal? You need the pan?”

“Look, Gervaise!”

He points a frail finger at the window.

“What?”

“Lights. Something happening. I told you . . .”

“What is it?”

“Go and look. I can't tell what it is.”

She's at the window. It's panes are icy, frost forming at the edges. Out in the night she sees two lamps like searchlights moving close to the ground. They shine towards her, moving forwards at first then stopping. Downstairs the television is still noisy but now she can hear, outside where the lights are, what sounds like tractor engines. Her breath frosts the glass. She rubs impatiently at it. She thinks, Pray to God I'm dreaming. Pray to God it's part of the television dream – Robert X, the man even Klaus admires, altering lives . . .

But she's out of the Maréchal's room and down the stairs in her clogs and snatching up her coat before the Maréchal, his heart full of fear, has time to implore her one more time, “Don't blame me, Gervaise!” He twists in the bed and stares helplessly at his door left ajar. His feverish brain remembers with shame the blue spruce tree.

Run, Gervaise urges herself, as the night cold fastens itself round her . . . up the lane, turn left past Larry's house, over the rubble-strewn garden round to the back . . . run and it will still be there, smooth, pale, silent, its mosaic shimmery even in the darkness, waiting for summer, waiting for the water . . . But she knows she's too late. She knows, of course, as she stands and watches the digger moving backwards and forwards and the vast mounds of earth go tumbling in, that all the months of Larry's work are brought to nothing – the reward (yes, the same one they gave her in the city) the reward for his struggle to belong – and that within seconds, as she scrambles in her clogs over the frosty mud, Klaus's foolish vision of a black and white cathedral will be obliterated by the terrible tireless clay of Pomerac – earth returning to earth, a burial.

She stands and weeps. Upstairs in his agony, the Maréchal picks up the box of Turkish Delight and hurls it with all his strength at the window.

Larry lies in his wife's arms and pretends to sleep.

I have missed, Miriam thinks as she holds him, the weight of Larry. Leni's element was air while she breathed: words fluttering off, like paper or leaves. Dr. O.'s is fire: his scarlet longing spilling over like lava. But Larry's is earth: his close-packed legs, his patient ploughing of his dreams. With Leni gone – a speck now, Leni's life like a kite miles up in the blank white sky – she's felt a longing to be taken back by Larry, to be held down as he holds her now, his woolly heavy head on her breast and shoulder. What had made her long for him in recent days was not merely Leni's going, but a sudden fear that the vain ringing and ringing of Nadia's telephone somehow signalled a withdrawal of his love for her. No less than you deserve, she told herself. You withdrew your love for a time. Now he's punishing you. When, finally, she had heard his voice on the telephone, she had wanted to say to him, Please try to forgive me.

Carefully and with a quiet feeling of excitement, she had moved herself out of the child's bedroom and spread her things round the guest room as if in a hotel, enjoying its luxury. Larry was on his way. She was free to love him generously now, no part of her withheld in obedience to Leni. She expected to feel old at Leni's death. Instead she felt free. The snow ceased and began to thaw. Flowers and cards started arriving. Gary stayed in his room and cried silently to Ella Fitzgerald. And eventually, inevitably, Dr. O. turned up.

Looking grave, he came into the hall, stood staring not at Miriam but at the three-quarter moon face on the grandfather clock and started to say how he felt, at this death, empty handed.

“What do you mean, Dr. O.?” said Miriam. He was wearing a dark suit. He held himself apart from her, stiff and formal. His poor pasty face seemed painted with sadness.

“I wanted,” he said forlornly, “to offer something to Leni. She seemed to ask it. The thing I wanted to offer most was my love for you . . .”

“Please don't say that, Dr. O.,” said Miriam more brusquely than she intended, “I've told you very often this isn't possible.”

“Yes. I know. I know. Don't worry. I'm not going to pester you any more. It's just that, without this, I do . . . well . . . feel I can't come to the funeral because I have nothing to
offer
. Do you understand?”

“No,” said Miriam. “Not really. Because offering anything isn't important now. Send flowers if you like. But even that . . . She won't see them, will she?”

“I admired her so,” he said with despair.

“Yes, I know you did,” Miriam said more gently.

“She once taught me to dance, you know,” said Dr. O. and stared forlornly down at his weighty pelvis. “I should have kept on with dancing.”

“As an
offering
?” Miriam said spitefully and Dr. O. looked up, hearing the acid in her voice.

“Yes,” he said, “as something.”

Now Larry opens his eyes and finds, very close to them, a hank of Miriam's hair. He gazes at it, counting the grey threads. His mind travels to Nadia's blonde head, a head so tiny he seemed able to hold it to him with his palm. She'll be alone now in Pomerac, poor Nadia, making tea, turning on the little fire, remembering Claude, remembering Arras and the fair outside the window and him . . .

This thought makes him feel suffocated, slightly breathless. He props himself up and watches Miriam's face. She smiles at him – the smile he thought he'd lost. I want to be strong for her, he thinks. He flicks away the spectre of Nadia to the furthest corner of his mind. Nadia's so light and insubstantial, its not difficult to push her away. Larry's finger touches Miriam's brow, still hot after his hungry, celebratory embraces, a love-feast so abundant it reminded them both of their first years together. It was their passion which defied Leni then, just as now, on the day before her funeral, it's their passion which buries her.

“Bitch!” he says suddenly. “Why did you stay away so long?”

“Well, it was good I did.”

“Why?”

“Because look at you – you're well again.”

“It was the pool that did that.”

“And you wouldn't have started the pool if I hadn't gone.”

“Maybe. But you didn't stay away for me, Miriam. You stayed away for you.”

“Yes. Mainly.”

“And you had a lover, did you? One of Leni courtiers?”

“No. There was an offer. I declined.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Isn't that odd? He was so kind to me. Bought me expensive suppers. But I didn't want him.”

Larry lowers his head and kisses Miriam's face. He wants, after this odd confession of hers, to tell her about Nadia, but the smell of his wife's body is too heady and he can't find the words.

That evening Thomas and Perdita arrive. Thomas's grief for Leni has given him a startled look. Trying not to shed tears, his eyes look bulgy and blue, like a rabbit's.
Bright Eyes
, Larry privately christens him; Leni's last mourner. Yet Thomas, with his flaxen girl to smooth his starting troubled hair, seems a more gentle, a more manageable son to Larry than he's been for years. When they walk in, Larry feels moved to embrace them both and wants to say to the corn-coloured Perdita, Stay with Thomas. Have his children. Give me, one day, a granddaughter. And it's very quickly clear to Larry that his son's glad to see him. This is surprising and Larry feels an unexpected gratitude. Perhaps it was Leni's witch's spell that kept them apart. He imagines her forging it with her rouges and her wrinkle cream, vulgar little pots they'll bury with her like the balms and unguents of the old Egyptians, all the power gone out of them.

Red-eyed and peculiarly resembling a Mosleyite with his short hair and his black shirt, Gary is persuaded out of his room by Miriam and sits quietly with the family through a meal of chicken casserole and jacket potatoes, Larry's first taste of bland English food. The question of Gary's future lurks anxiously in Miriam's mind but she won't discuss it yet, just as she's decided to postpone discussion of her own plans. Since inhabiting David's attic, she's reattached herself to the house of her childhood so completely, it's almost as if she'd never left it. Now, with Leni gone, it's hers and she inhabits it gratefully, letting a little pride into the smile she gives the diners at her table. All – except Larry – are here for Leni, yet it's in Leni's chair that Miriam chooses to sit. Half way through the meal, she thinks, when will I start to miss Leni? When will I shed some of my famous tears?

After supper, Gary, with ghostly quietness, goes back to his lilac room. He bathes his eyes with Optrex. Downstairs, he hears Larry laugh and thinks, it's over. I must move on, whatever they decide, whatever Leni has put in her will. And he starts to imagine, as he tugs on his coat and wraps his empty neck in his red scarf, the little flat he will buy, the lovers he will receive there. As he's about to leave his room, he sees, on a peg, the grey hat that was Leni's gift and with which he covered her face. To defy death, to defy his own predicament, he snatches it up and sets it carefully on his head. He creeps silently downstairs and lets himself out into the cold night. The walk from here to the Playhouse stage door takes exactly eight minutes. He knows because he's timed it.

Perdita goes early to bed. She lies and listens to the chimes and traffic of Oxford and feels her Australian soul has travelled to the heart of something, though she's not sure what. She just knows she's glad to have come this far. Outside in the drive, her new Mercedes is parked next to Gary's rusting Mini and the juxtaposition of these two cars is slightly vexing to her. For the first time, she wonders if the Mercedes isn't rather vulgar.

Miriam, Larry and Thomas drink red wine and hold a kind of unspoken wake for Leni. They don't talk about the future. Thomas describes his trip to Brussels. Miriam talks about the exhibition. Success is what they're showing me, Larry thinks, and with a pang of sadness he sees, robed in flat winter light, his swimming pool. This, he wants to say to his wife, to his son, is all I've got to offer. I designed it along the lines of a cathedral. Klaus understood my vision and has started to make it beautiful with his mosaic. It's a work of art, or at least that's what I want it to be. Long after I'm gone, the people of Pomerac will be proud of it: the St. Front pool. An Englishman built it, they'll say. He had this wonderful idea.