by Rose Tremain
“I’m off then, Miriam,” says Larry. He wears shorts and a sweat shirt. His sturdy, short legs beneath these move him rather jerkily to the hook where he hangs his car keys.
“Off where, Larry?”
“Périgueux. It’s time I looked up those pool suppliers.”
“I thought we were going to wait till the spring now.”
“I don’t want to wait. I want to get on with it.”
Miriam goes to the fridge and takes out a carton of orange juice. The orange juice in France tastes of sugar and chemicals. Miriam mourns her Unigate delivery.
“Well. What time will you be back?”
“Oh, not sure. Car needs a spin. I’ll go via Harve’s and see if he wants anything. You’ll be working, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Remind me, when I get back, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“Talk to me now.”
“No, no. It’s not that important. Just a thought I’ve had about the car.”
“The car? You’re not thinking of changing it in are you?”
“We should trade it in this year. But I don’t think there’s any question. Next year perhaps, after the pool’s in.”
“So what about the car?”
“Nothing, Miriam.” Larry is agitated now, wanting to leave. The Périgueux road goes past a waterfall. Perfect spot, this, he always thinks, for a car commercial, and imagines himself in a spanking new Datsun Cherry or a VW Scirocco. “It’s just a little scheme which, like all my schemes, will come to nothing.”
“What are you upset about, Larry?”
“Upset?”
“Yes. You seem upset.”
“I’m not upset, Miriam. I’m just keen to press on.”
“You’ll get a beer and a sandwich or something for lunch?”
“Yes. Don’t worry about me.”
Miriam smiles. “Larry, you’ve still got that tea towel over your shoulder.” Larry doesn’t smile. He seems fussed with rage. He snatches the towel off and leaves without another word.
In the lane, his passage to his Granada is temporarily blocked by Gervaise’s cows slipping and swaying past his house on their way back to the fields. Mallélou with his stick and Larry with his car keys exchange a silent greeting.
Miriam sits down at the heavy wooden table – bought in Eye, Suffolk, for six pounds – and opens the letter. It is, after all from Leni Ackerman, but written in black biro by someone else.
25 Rothersmere Road
Oxford
Dearest Miriam,
Kind Gary – you remember my lodger, Gary? – is going to help me with this letter because at the moment my silly hands refuse to do anything practical, like holding a pen.
I’m not writing to worry you, but I have been ill. Dr. Wordsworth talks about a “respiratory infection” but the old rascal means pneumonia and I was in hospital for a while. Now I’m home and a nurse comes. She gets paid with that BUPA thing I’ve kept on since your father’s death. I think they rake it in, those private insurance schemes, but now I’m grateful for it and my nurse is called Bryony which I like as a name, don’t you?
I hope I shall be up soon and back at my desk. And perhaps at Christmas you might afford the trip over. I do miss you, Miriam darling, and have thought of you so much in this recent time. I hope those plans you had for a new exhibition are going on well. With love and blessings from your loving mother, Leni.
P.S. Where is Thomas? I’ve forgotten where he is or what he’s doing? If he’s in England, please ask him to come and see me.
Miriam reads this letter twice and tears gather quickly in her grey eyes and begin to fall. When Miriam cries, she cries copiously: “Look at Miriam’s tears!” Leni used to say delightedly. “They’re so round and perfect!” And Miriam can still feel the scented dabbing of Leni’s lawn handkerchiefs and hear her screechy laugh. Leni. Impossible to imagine you dying. Impossible. Miriam wipes her eyes with the sleeve of la robe. Get well, Leni. Get strong again. Don’t leave me. Don’t.
But Miriam’s mind has already heard, in some hard and buried part of itself, this certainty: Leni is dying. She pushes away the orange juice, lays her arms on the table and weeps. Outside, she dimly hears the Granada start up and thinks for a moment of calling Larry back to comfort her, and tell her it isn’t so. Yet it is so. Miriam knows. She prefers to be alone with this knowledge and let it bow her.
Gently, on her bed in the spacious old Oxford house, Miriam lays out her mother’s dead body. At her back, out of sight behind the door, students fuss and whisper, boys mostly, bringing flowers. Miriam selects a dark dress, thin with time, with clusters of sleek, soft feathers at each shoulder. The Crow Dress. A hat used to go with it: more feathers and a velvet-flecked veil. She finds this and lays it down while she touches the fine, fine contours of the face, eyes vast in their sockets, a nose like Napoleon’s in the Delacroix painting, angular and fierce. Leni Ackerman. So beautiful.
At the waterfall, Larry turns left up the steep drive that leads to Harve’s house. There’s a mush of chestnut leaves on this track and the green husks of conkers. Autumn begins, then the winds come and it starts to feel like winter. Harve’s house is two centuries old, with a stone turret and brown, echoing cellars. He’s been alone in it but for a maid, Chantal, for years now. He’s fifty-one and a bachelor: Docteur Hervé Prière, known to Larry affectionately as “Harve”. He’s a slim and careful man with a proud forehead and slow exquisite speech. Larry loves him for this, his care with language. He was the first Frenchman Larry could understand.
He’s in a room he calls the bureau with his straight, dry legs resting on a hard sofa. These legs are in plaster from heel to knee, the vulnerable imprisoned feet covered with woolly socks like egg cosies. His long hands flurry with a medical journal but he’s not reading it; the broken legs disturb and reproach him. Where will the next years lead him? To what precipice? He’s become so somnambulist. The night he broke his legs, he flew down the stairs.
Chantal is away. Some dying parent or cousin in Paris. Poor old Harve slithers round the wood floors of his mansion on flat, sinewy buttocks, wearing a dark shine into his grey trousers. He prefers this slithering to walking with crutches, believes it’s quicker, doesn’t mind if he looks like a seal. And he says people in the village are kind: Nadia Poniatowski cooks him chicken with chestnuts; the de la Brosse widow lends him her maid to make his bed and do his washing. The practice is suffering, though. The young locum sitting in Hervé’s consulting chair is too shy of bodies; has let slip he’d rather be a vet.
Larry parks the Granada on the gravel sweep. Harve’s home, in its high isolation, always impresses upon Larry the lowliness of his own house, its hopeless nearness to Gervaise’s south wall, the pretensions of its terrace. He feels diminished by Hervé’s turret, by his sundial, by the wistaria dressing the stone with mauve cascades. This is elegance. This is nobility and money and roots. Larry has begun to fear that life led without the comfort of these is oddly futile.
“How are you, Harve?”
Larry has walked past dusty leaning suits of armour in the impressive hall and found his friend in the bureau, staring at his legs.
“Oh, Larry. Good. Good of you. So bloody boring all this. Imagine the war-wounded. What do they do? Restricted motion kills. It’s killing me.”
“Yes. Or the man chained to his desk.”
“The man chained to his desk! That’s good. Yes. What does he do? Dies. Have a drink, Larry. Sherry or something? A little morning cassis?”
Hervé waves feebly at a mighty oak cupboard where these drinks are kept. Larry has had no breakfast. He feels hollow and slightly unsteady. He imagines Miriam poaching her solitary egg, making a small pot of coffee, taking these into the sunshine.
“Well, a cassis . . .”
“Yes. Me too. I like cassis in the morning. Gets the stomach nice and warm. You pour them.”
Sunshine comes in the flat squares the colour of amontillado on th
e polished floor. Larry sits a few inches from Hervé’s woolly toes and they sip gently at the strong blackcurrant. Hervé says, “Did I tell you, I’ve sent for Agnès?”
“Agnès?”
“My niece. The elder one. Didn’t get her place at the music school. All upset and mopey. So I told her mother, send her to me. She can play that old Bechstein and help me about. She’s a sensible girl, not one of those young frights. She’ll like these woods and this autumn air.”
“I’m glad, Harve. You need someone . . .”
“Yes. Another three weeks in this armour. My heart’s not used to an invalid life. My blood pressure’s up, I can tell without taking it. That’s Agnès in that photograph. The one on the right.”
Hervé points to a picture on the mantelpiece of two windswept girls with their arms round each other’s shoulders, smiling in what seems to be a Welsh or Scottish landscape, craggy and cold. They wear warm patterned jerseys; their hair is the colour of weak tea; they are clearly sisters. Larry is surprised by how English these fresh faces look. They could be English princesses on holiday at Balmoral.
“They look like princesses,” Larry remarks. Hervé smiles and sips his drink.
“Agnès was about seventeen then and little Dani fifteen or sixteen. Their mother is English. They speak the two languages very well.”
Larry looks at the photograph. Pale light on the smooth skin. No blemish anywhere. Better these radiant daughters than poor old Thomas going grey at twenty-seven with a pocked and crazy face the colour of a blanket. “Oh, I would have liked a daughter,” Larry says.
“You have just the boy, Larry, haven’t you?”
“Yes. Thomas. We don’t see much of him.”
“If I remember, he has some antiques business.”
“Antiques? No. Wish it was. Modern. Marxist furniture, he calls it.”
“Cheap stuff?”
“No. There’s the irony. Not cheap. Sick jokes for millionaires.”
“Oh yes?”
“One’s a lamp. It’s a giant naked bulb on a flex with a great piece of plaster attached to it. So it looks as if your ceiling’s falling down. Don’t ask me to explain the logic. Don’t ask me why anyone would want that, but they do, it seems.”
“Well. Very odd. Comfort of course has always been regarded as bourgeois. As corrupting even. Perhaps your son believes the rich might buy broken ceilings as a kind of absolution.”
“Beats me, Harve. Miriam pretends to understand what he’s doing, but she doesn’t really. She’s as baffled as I am.”
“Sad for her. Most sad. How is Miriam?”
“Working hard. Got this exhibition coming up, did I tell you? A gallery in Oxford.”
“I admire those watercolours. Would she bring a few paintings to show me before they go to England? I could buy some little flowers or a scene to put in Agnès’s room.”
“When’s Agnès arriving?”
“The end of the week.”
“Who will meet her, Harve?”
“Oh, she’ll get the train to Thiviers. Then I shall pay a taxi.”
“No, no. Don’t pay the taxi. I’ll go and fetch her.”
“No, Larry. The taxi can come . . .”
“I’d enjoy it. Be a pleasure. I like to feel useful.”
“Have some more cassis, Larry. This is kind of you. But the Paris train’s a late one. Nine-ten, something like that.”
“I’d like to do it, Harve. Any excuse to get out in the car.”
So, as the Granada takes Larry on to Périgueux, he finds himself dreaming of this princess of a girl, this Agnès. What would he have called his own daughter? Harriet? Emily? He likes names that sound like the names for stern-faced china dolls. Agnès he likes very much: old-fashioned, simple and fierce. He feels his heart lift. If a young person is going to arrive, all the more reason to press ahead with the pool. Then, next spring, he will invite her to sit among the urns, on the first hot days. He imagines the imprint of her wet feet on his terrace.
Nadia Poniatowski has dreamt of her French husband Claude Lemoine, incarcerated still in his “Adjustment Home” in the Pas de Calais flatlands. He begged her, with sticky stewed eyes, to release him and take him back, him and his name and the thousand insanities busy inside his skull. No, she said, no, Claude. I changed my name back to Poniatowski, and the children’s names, they’re Poniatowski now and I’m teaching them about their Polish ancestors. You must stay where you are.
Nadia was grey at thirty-five with the madnesses of Claude Lemoine. Now, at forty-eight, she dyes her fine hair champagne blonde. She uses an English preparation called Nice ’n’ Easy. She detests hairdressers. They complain about the thinness of her hair. And she’s a proud woman. She won’t listen to complaint about herself. She’s reached the plateau beyond the murky valleys of her marriage and must not be dislodged from it.
Once, she and Claude owned two properties in Pomerac. When Claude finally went, she sold one of these to Larry and Miriam and lives in a small flat above the garage of the other house, empty now after another English family tried and failed to plant their hearts in it. She’s got used to the flat. Her bed folds away into the wall. She cooks behind a Japanese screen on a second-hand Calor gas cooker. Polish recipe books are on a stained shelf above this. When she gives dinners, the silverware is still grand.
Talking is what Nadia Poniatowski loves. The details of lives, their longings and tragedies. She envies marriage counsellors their daily glut of private knowledge. “Tell me, tell me,” she implores. She, alone in the village, knows that Hervé Prière has started sleepwalking. Secrets spill out to her in sighs and shivers and she breathes them in through a fine sensuous nose. Yet in her sympathising, in her giving of advice, as she lifts her white neck and pats her hair, she makes errors of grammar and syntax, gets the carefully learned colloquial phrase exquisitely wrong. People have momentarily forgiven and forgotten the most wounding betrayals trying not to grimace at Nadia’s language. Claude in his infirmary still carries tender basketfulls of his wife’s peculiar sentences in his drugged and dopey brain.
Towards noon, as old Mallélou sits on his step, staring at the yard where chickens and guineafowl disdainfully scratch, Nadia in white slacks and a tight turquoise blouse comes down the lane to Miriam’s door. Miriam, still wearing la robe, has anaesthetised her grief with strong black coffee, but sits at the table still with an unwritten letter to Leni inside her head and a feeling of weariness in her hunched shoulders.
“Miriam!” calls Nadia, and taps with little stubby fingers on the heavy front door. From the south window of her flat she has seen Larry drive off in the Granada and knows that Miriam is alone. In the past – but never when Larry’s there – Miriam has talked about the failures that brought them to their peculiar exile, about the birth and death of Aquazure, the swimming pool company, brainchild of the hot summer of ’76, the one-time jewel in the plumbing of Larry’s heart. But Nadia knows she hasn’t been told all. Behind Miriam’s dignified quiet, there’s more. A breakdown, goes the delicious rumour. Larry has a nervous breakdown.
“Miriam!” Nadia taps and taps.
“Who is it?” Miriam’s voice is barely raised.
“Nadia, darling. Can I pop in? Aren’t you working?”
Old Mallélou lifts his head. What a woman, that Poniatowski. Puts her husband in a nuthouse and never so much as visits him.
The door opens slowly on Miriam. Even to a less practised eye than Nadia’s, the recent crying would be visible. Miriam turns away. Nadia follows her. Sometimes, Nadia reminds people of a shrill little dog.
“Sorry, Nadia, I’m not dressed . . .” Miriam’s voice tails off. The presence of another person chokes her.
“Well, my God, Miriam, what’s happened?”
“Nothing. Just a letter from Leni.”
“Leni, your mother?”
“Yes.”
“To tell you what for?”
“She’s ill.”
“Oh my God, so serious?”
Miriam goes back to her chair. She folds her arms round herself, as if for protection from this intrusion.
“I don’t really know, Nadia. I think it may be. She’s seventy-eight.”
“Oh and you the single child, Miriam. You must go to England of course.”
Miriam sighs. “Well, that’s what I’ve been trying to decide. I don’t want her to see me and be frightened, but on the other hand . . .”
“Who is looking at her?”
“Nursing her, you mean?”
“Yes. Looking at her.”
“A nurse. And Gary’s there. He wrote the letter for her.”
“Who is this Gary?”
“Her lodger. He’s been there for years. She mothers him.”
“Well at least she has some companion. But if I were you, Miriam, I would go there. Let me come with you.”
“Oh no. I’d be perfectly all right.”
“But this is too upsetting, I know. Like the terrible one time I visit Claude and see all those people round their rockers . . .”
“Leni isn’t ‘round her rocker’, Nadia. She’s just getting old.”
“And what does the doctor saying?”
“She’s had pneumonia. Badly, I think, because she’s too ill to write. Perhaps her heart is weak. I don’t know. I think maybe I should go to England.”
“Yes. And let me come, Miriam. I can do all these arrangements.”
“No, Nadia. Larry can fix the travel. He loves this kind of little chore, and he’s very good at it.”
“Oh but I must come.”
“No, no. You stay and keep Larry company.”
“Poor Larry also.”
“Why ‘poor Larry’?”
“With the swimming pool question.”
“That’s in the past, Nadia.”
“But these such things are never past, Miriam, I don’t think. Even now Larry would be dreaming of all that swimming pool disaster.”
“Dreaming of it? Well, perhaps he does. But he’s thinking of trying to start the business again, out here. The climate’s a lot better here.”