The Swimming Pool Season (39 page)

As Hervé plays host at his farewell party, Nadia lies in her monogrammed frayed linen and listens to the silence all around her. There's something eternal, tonight, about the quiet, as if, far away on his roof at Rouigny, Father le Sueur had stared through his telescope and seen, in their clusters and shoals, the stars wink out and all the universe blanketed in darkness.

I'm alone. Finally.

Je suis seule. Finalement
.

Ich bin alleine. Letztens
.

Jestem sama. Nareszcie
.

She doesn't feel afraid. She's remembering, with a little laugh inside her, her passion for Uncle Leopold, how she'd lie in the dark of her Wielkopolski Street room and hear the night choked with sounds of neighbouring lives and make a secret pathway through all this rumpus to Uncle Leopold's blue door and imagine him holding out his hefty arms to her and taking her in. “Nadia,” she used to pretend she heard him say, “you are my princess!”

She wonders if Uncle Leopold is still alive, if his door is still blue, if the teashop exists where he bought her pastries, if, in his ancient eyes, he sometimes imagines the moon is cheese. She's led so many lives since then. Now, all of them have brought her here, to this stillness.

Under the soft bedcoverings, she lays her stubby-fingered hands on her breasts, which are still round and full with mauvish nipples the colour of plums. Claude, when he felt fretful, liked to suck her breasts like a baby. “Your sad Polish milk is good,” he'd say and at one time in her life with Claude she began to lactate a little and Claude's lips would pull and pull at her nipples, drinking the last drop out of her and she'd start to feel the tug of him in her womb. She wonders if, in his dormitory, he remembers the taste of her body.

Since her visit to Rouigny, she's thought about Claude almost constantly. Claude Lemoine. The handsome man she met as a poor student in Paris. Claude in his fine neckties. The father of her children. Claude locked up, making baskets, gabbling about the end of the world, remembering he once owned two houses, repeating and repeating the three syllables of her name: Na-di-a, Na-di-a . . .

Like Gervaise, she senses, in this colossal silence, the nearness of the first winter snows. Winter, in Wielkopolski Street
was
snow. You lived with it piled it up against the basement steps from November to February. Here, it snows and thaws, snows again, freezes for a week or two, crystallising the forests, then slowly melts. She likes its obliterating cleanness. She likes the sound of the children laughing in their snowball games. She puts on her ancient fur-lined boots and walks down to the Ste. Catherine woods. And now, this year, it's coming before Christmas. Claude, she asks soundlessly, do you remember Christmas, my dear?

She's made a plan. Tonight, in this final aloneness, she's made it. She will telephone Father le Sueur and ask that this year Claude be allowed home for Christmas.
Home
. To the small flat she will decorate with fir and the mistletoe that grew in all the ancient apple trees torn out by the de la Brosse manager. Home. She will make the flat into a home for Claude, just for a time. She'll cut his hair and tidy him up. She'll roast a goose with apricots. She'll bargain with Mme. Carcanet for some good claret. She'll set a place for Claude with his own family silver . . .

“Look,” she will say, as they come up the stairs and into this room he's never seen, “how my life is small now, Claude. You see? No bigger than yours, my dear. Just one small place and my small bed I fold into the wall. Some small kitchen space here where I shall cook your goose, and this little Japanese screen you remember from our bedroom in Paris?

“Now, sit down, my darling, and take some breath after this so long journey and Nadia will make tea and put on the fire. You think I forget what you like, Claude? Well, I don't. I am breaking myself to buy you some delicacies – truffles you see here and some rillettes with armagnac and of course one pot of salmon eggs for Nadia's famous blinis. So please relax, my dear, and we won't be sad or regretting for this short time.
N'est ce pas
? I think you are so long with those monks and with your baskets, you're forgetting what is in the world. So I will show you. I will show you the forest, Claude, and the frozen river where the pike fishing men used to go. I will show you the old lanes of Pomerac and the clock which still chimes and the Mallélou yard and tell you the story of all what happens in our old house we sold to the English couple, the Kendals. This is a long story, my dear, so you must be patient and not intervene me with your talk of the world's end or the astronomical thoughts of Father le Sueur. In fact this story is too long for now, Claude. I shall tell it to you later, when I unfold my bed from the wall and I undress you, my darling, and you put your head here, where I think you used to like to be, on Nadia's breast . . .”

She's busy in her head with her preparations, like a small-snouted animal slowly gathering its solitary winter hoard. Near morning, it starts to snow and she sleeps and dreams of Claude's white head beside hers on the pillow. When she wakes, late, and sees the bright and dazzling landscape, she catches her breath with wonder. “So you don't be some gloomy Pole today,” she instructs herself, “the world is beautiful, Nadia.”

Xavier Mallélou is back in his old room in the city. The students next door have gone to their families for Christmas and he finds on his table an envelope containing two keys – the key to his own room and the key to theirs. A note in clear, energetic handwriting reads:
Thanks for the loan of your room. We had a party one night and several of your glasses got broken. As recompense, please use our room till Jan 3rd if you want, but make sure no books or records are taken
.

It's cold in the building. He goes down to the communal telephone in the hall and calls Pozzo's number. He must get out to one of the warm bars, order some oysters, start tapping the grapevine for some work, any kind of work, something to keep him fed while he tries to sort out his life. Pozzo doesn't answer. Xavier fingers the cash in his pocket, almost a thousand francs – money he's earned working on the pool. He must try to make it last. It'll soon go if he starts treating Pozzo and his friends. But he needs their company. In the bar-talk, he'll start to forget Agnès. Crazy-headed virgin. Cunt of a debutante. Love is for the middle classes. Romantic crap. Forget it. Get yourself laid, Xavier. Get a piece of hard-working city arse. Ride that till it doesn't hurt any more. Forget the river. Forget that time you first saw her in the church. Forget your pathetic high-and-mighty notions of dignity. Dignity. Humanity. They're just
words
. Life's about making it through. Get a job. Get a woman. Forget her.

He can't manage it yet, though. There and then in the dark hallway by the pay-phone, he remembers the sweet smell of her, that beautiful, sad sweet scent of her hair, her breasts, her breath, her cunt. He closes his eyes. Above them is the drip-drip of the winter forest. Her skin, lit by pale sunlight, is as fine as the skin of a child.

He goes back to his room and lies down on his bed which the students have left made and tidy. How can he forget her? Just the smell of her will haunt him all his life. He'd give his future for a night in her bed. Go and find her, says his terrible longing. Get on the Paris train. Kidnap her. Snatch her out of her society wedding. Marry her. But then he remembers the suits of armour, her ancestors staring at him from Hervé Prière's hall, they in the warm house, polished and oiled and tended, he with the night at his back, out in the cold. To go to Paris would be futile. Just a waste of his precious money. When he got there, if he even found where she lived, there'd be some grand stairway to climb, some smart brass bell to ring. She'd stare at him coldly, like she'd stare at a florist's driver come to bring her flowers. “Go away, Xavier,” she'd say. “It's over. Can't you understand?”

With the students gone, it's silent in the sooty apartment block, as if he's the only person left in it. Perhaps even Pozzo and his other friends have gone away for Christmas. Christmas is in all the shops – big, lighted displays of chocolates and wristwatches and leathergoods and toys. Tinsel and trees and dyed greenery outside the flowershops and in the markets. Everyone shoving and spending. Old women pushing home jars of expensive liquor-soaked fruit, whole cheeses, tins of paté in plastic wheeled baskets. Carol music through megaphones tied to the lamp-posts. A one-legged man selling wrapping paper from a clothes horse on a street corner. Christmas all around. In Xavier's cruel imagining, Agnès puts on her coat and her gloves and goes shopping for expensive presents for Luc. “You've left me nothing,” he wants to say to her, “not even my strength. Just a memory. A feeling of pain.”

Though he's heard them, so close to him on the other side of the wall, he's never been inside the students' room. For something to do, something to take his mind off his hopeless yearnings, he takes the key they've left him and, with a slight sense of being an intruder, a voyeur, opens their door. In size, the room is almost identical to his, but it faces out to the street and has a tall balcony window curtained in rough-weave, brightly coloured fabric. Similar fabric covers the bed. Shiny cushions are bunched against the wall and make the bed seem like a wide couch. A desk with a worklamp has been placed in front of the window and by the desk an umbrella stand has been filled with tall dried flowers. On all the available wallspace – even above the bed – bookshelves have gone up and these are crammed with books and papers and records and a Japanese stereo system. The kitchen corner – in his room greasy and dirty – is clean and tidy. More dried flowers have been hung up here. There's a spice rack and a vegetarian calendar and a shelf of pretty china jars. Xavier stares at it. Compared to this, his own room is a dingy hole. And just as he used to envy the students their contented love, so now he envies them their ability to transform their room. There are ten days till they come back. He walks to their bed and sits down on it, fingering the satin cushions. I'll move in, he decides.

There's no point in fetching his things. He hasn't got much, anyway. His clothes can stay where they are. He turns on all the lamps and lights the gas fire and the room seems cosier and warmer than any room he's ever slept in. He thumps the bed. He feels happy. For ten minutes, in his pleasure at the room, he hasn't thought about Agnès. He sits down at the desk. Papers and notepads are arranged tidily on it. Pencils and pens are stuck into a glass jar. He takes up a biro, the only kind of pen he's familiar with, and writes on a blank, lined sheet the word
Begin
. He underlines it.

He goes to bed without his oysters, without phoning Pozzo again. He goes to bed hungry and light in his head with relief that he's here in this peculiar room that smells of paper and joss sticks and not, thank Jesus, thank Mary, thank the plaster-of-Paris Christ at Ste. Catherine, in a cell, covered with a grey blanket, shitting his prison-issue pyjamas with fear at all the hopeless days to come. The pain of Agnès is sharp, a deep wound. In prison, though, it'd be ten times worse. Here, he won't die of it; there, he might have died.

Near sleep, he thinks of his mother, Gervaise. Her trust in him. Her loyalty. Her refusal to criticise or condemn. She'd be proud of me, he decides, if she came to visit me in a room like this. She'd see I was getting on, making something of my life. I'd make her a nice meal in that clean kitchen space and explain to her very patiently all the things I'm studying: the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, the fall of the Tsar in Russia, the conduct of the English Revolution I never knew existed till a short while ago . . .

He dreams, of course, of his lost girl. He's brought her to Bordeaux and they're walking arm in arm in the smart middle of the city. I'm hungry, she tells him, so he steers her towards an expensive restaurant where, in its soft light, she will say to him: “Take your shoe off, Xavier, and make me come with your foot, under the table.” They start to run. He can feel, at his shoulder, her desire for him. They run and run, but the restaurant recedes. When they get there, it's Mme. Motte's greasy place and she starts to bray at them: “Pigs! Animals! Scum!” And he wakes, full of tribulation.

It's the middle of the night. The streetlights are on outside the curtains he's forgotten to draw, the ugly sodium lights they don't put in the posh boulevards. Above him, the spines of the books stare out at him. Knowledge. The power of knowledge. The thought he could acquire it teases and torments him. Does learning make people happy? He doesn't know. The students seemed happy, but then they had each other. With Agnès, he would have been happy. Or would he? How long could he have loved this spoilt child of a dry and dusty aristocratic past? Would she have changed or does class and custom prevail even against passion? Do these books contain the answer to this? He suspects, if he could once understand them, they would.

In the morning, with snow falling hard on the scurrying Christmas crowds, he stares at the word
Begin
he wrote on the pad and takes up the biro again. Underneath
Begin
he writes:

 
1.   Enroll college. Jan. Semester
.

2nd Phase. Bac
.

 
2.   Find part-time work

 
3.   Use Corrine
.

He sits back. His heart's beating very fast. Corinne was the dark-haired girl who worked in the babyshop opposite the
Mimosas
. She was dying, she said, of her infatuation for Xavier. For the touch of him, she'd do anything he asked. Women. They “die” for the touch of you, or they destroy you. It's all enigmatic, stupid, hopeless. But fleetingly, in the quiet of this borrowed room, with the books and papers hedging him round, he sees the faint flicker of a chance for his future: he'll make use of Corrine. Make her crazy with that feeling he once described, lying by the river with Agnès in his arms, lying with his bare bum butting the sky, as love. Then get Corinne to support him. Let her earn, with her no-hope job selling prams and matinée jackets and plastic bibs, enough money to see him through college.