by Rose Tremain
“But not the people, I don’t see. Larry will not sell any swimming pool to those Mallélous!”
Miriam laughs. For a moment she imagines Gervaise, Mallélou and the mighty Klaus standing and staring with awe at this wonder Larry has sunk in their chicken yard.
“No. Not to the Mallélous. But there are a lot of holiday houses . . .”
“But mostly British, no? You hear them all at Riberac: ‘Sorry old bean, chippy-choppy old buffy bean.’ Old bean all the time but not money for pools I’m thinking. Anyway, Miriam, we must talk of your mother.”
“Sit down, Nadia.”
“Thank you. You are loving your mother a good much, Miriam?”
“Yes I do.”
“I think the single child is always loving the parent.”
“Maybe? Love or hate. But Leni is . . . like a rare species. Something beautiful going forever. I used to think when I was little, she had a kind of magic, because everyone seemed to love her and want her to like them.”
“And your father is Don?”
“He was a history professor, yes.”
“And dead?”
“Yes, he’s dead. He died in ’75 very suddenly.”
“So your Leni is so on her own now.”
“Well she’s not entirely. She’s never moved from Oxford, so she has a lot of friends. There’s even this man who wants to marry her.”
“And seventy-eight, my God! Why is there no kind rich man wanting to marry Nadia?”
“You’re not divorced from Claude, are you?”
“No. But I get this divorce any time. Just I say look where he is in this loony bowl and the judge divorces me straight away.”
“Would you want to marry again?”
“My God yes! Where I am I have no money. Down on my bum end, you might say. Perhaps in Oxford there is some old choppy bean for Nadia.”
And so an hour passes. The sun is hot on the terrace, the geraniums in need of water. But Miriam and Nadia sit on at the table and talk of Oxford and madness and marriage and death.
Larry reaches Périgueux and parks the Granada in a square behind the St. Front cathedral. The ornate shoulders of this building appeal profoundly to Larry’s sense of design. He has already decided to offer a “St. Front Pool” as part of the new range he has nervously planned for his reconstituted company. The thing is to build his own first – the show pool. Use the St. Front colours in the mosaic trim on the side and steps. Maybe use the ground plan of the basilica as a kind of template for the shape. Put in two or three sets of steps at different angles. Give the customers the idea of something utterly new. Let them see that pool-building is art. He feels light-headed with hope. The sky above St. Front is azure and the domes gleam. Larry wonders fleetingly whether this surge of optimism comes direct from God.
It takes him almost half an hour to locate the pool suppliers’ ramshackle premises, designated Piscines Ducellier Frères, by which time it it is mid-day and a blue-coated employee is tugging a sliding grille across the shop front. Larry curses the way, in France, twelve o’clock hangs like a guillotine over the galloping hours of the morning. No matter how early you wake, the slam of mid-day always sounds too soon. And then time slows and drags. You sit in a café waiting for life to start again. You drink beer and fill up with wind. You feel randy and sad.
It has been market day, but the market, too, is over: the meat and cheese wagons have gone, the ground by the fish stalls is slushy with ice; a tired woman, making pancakes since dawn, snatches down her sign: crêpes sucrées; chocolat confiture grand marnier; men with wide, tattooed arms pack boxes of women’s underwear and overalls and blouses; an elaborate display of bridal sweets, smelling of burnt sugar, is taken down and loaded into a car; crates of live chickens ride away in a caravan.
Larry finds a pizza stall and carries his wedge of pizza, wrapped in a paper napkin, to a sunny café with orange plastic chairs. He orders a demi. The pavement at his feet mills with people. One man carries a larch tree in a heavy tub. He seems to walk jauntily nonetheless and in time to a sweet, long-ago song that surfaces in Larry’s head as he sips the cold beer: Hello Mary-Lou, goodbye heart. The larch-carrier passes out of sight, but Larry can still see the tip of the tree bobbing above the heads of the people. He likes this busyness. He likes the hard commercial buy-sell brightness in the women’s eyes. Perhaps this is where he and Miriam should be, in the city. Consumers. Consommateurs. With so much to have, to wear, to swallow. Consommations.
But then he remembers the eagle. He’s seen it twice now. A week ago on the roof of Gervaise’s milking barn, then this morning there on the boundary wall, his wall. On the barn roof, high up, it didn’t look so vast. A hawk, he told himself, a kestrel, a buzzard . . . But close to him, no higher than his head, you couldn’t doubt it. The first eagle he’s seen in his life and it sits on his wall like some tame sparrow! Miraculous things occur so disappointingly seldom, Larry has come to believe you have to make them happen. That feeling of shivering, of the self becoming small. Superb. The eagle dwarfed him. He was afraid to watch it take off and reveal the great width of its wings. No wonder these birds are a protected species. If we let all the wonders go we’ll become crazy with our sense of loss. When Aquazure collapsed, Larry was wounded so much less by the sad reproaches of his employees, by the grim sighings of the bankers and solicitors, than by the loss of the thing itself, the pools. The pools became so magnificent, after he’d lost them. He remembers his first pool: oil-heated in the days before electric heat exchangers had become the thing; a Roman-end pool, concrete, no vinyl anywhere, real mosaic tiles, dive board and slide, non-slip surround, underwater light, and a pool house converted from eighteenth century stables, fitted with kitchenette, changing rooms with basins and mirrors, a toilet with a rainbow blind. He’d looked at this finished miracle like God upon creation and was well-pleased. But, unlike God, he couldn’t alter the weather. The summer after that pool went in, it was used for less than three weeks. The same year, building other pools by then, the work hampered and made difficult by rain, Larry met an American meteorologist on a London tube train. This meteorologist said English scientists should be exploring the possible use of the Rosenblum Crystal in weather control. “Ah, the Rosenblum Crystal,” said Larry, as if he knew, “yes. Why aren’t they exploring it?” The meteorologist shrugged. “Dunno. Perhaps they like this climate.” Larry never discovered what the Rosenblum Crystal was but there were many days, hundreds even, when he thought about it: a magical particle, roseate, he imagined, dispersing cloud like tear gas, making pathways for the sun.
The café fills up. Near Larry, a dominoes game begins. The men shout. Larry marvels at how quickly they get into the game. The comfort of routine, repetition. He has no routine now. No one waits for him, watching a clock. He waits for no one. Next only to the pools, he mourns his office. It was a functional place, never beautiful, never plush, yet it constantly reaffirmed an order of things with which he felt content. Larry envies the men not only the domino game but the day-to-day patterning of time that brings them to this café at this hour. He senses that they never miss a game. Just as he, well or ill, never missed one day at Aquazure. Not one. So no wonder, when it all went, he felt helpless, like a rape victim, fouled up and helpless. And it was Miriam who decided one day, it’s enough. We must try a new start. The new start was France. The house at Pomerac. Now, a year after that start, Agnès Prière is arriving. And an eagle perches on the wall. Larry orders a second beer and waits patiently for two o’clock.
There are fifteen houses in Pomerac. The grandest is the Maison de la Brosse, a square, gated house, nicely settled behind pollarded limes. The other houses seem to have grouped themselves round this one without attempting to form a street. Lanes pass round them, through them. Dogs sleep in these lanes, sidle crossly away when cars hoot. It’s a village without a centre, a hamlet which expects no visitors, no traffic, and no map-makers. There is no shop, no church and no café. The forty or so residents possess betw
een them seven motor cars, twelve mopeds and twenty-two bicycles. There are few children. Animals outnumber children by far. Mainly, it’s a village of people growing old, people born there like Gervaise and just carrying on. When they die, an ugly hearse takes them down a main road to the great squat church of Ste. Catherine les Adieux to be buried in unfamiliar soil. They buy their plots at Ste. Catherine in advance and the frequent visiting of relatives makes them feel, perhaps, that they “belong” there. Yet this church is badly sited, near a sewage plant. Huge tankers scream past. You can imagine the bones jiggering in their shaken graves.
The oldest living inhabitant of Pomerac is M. Foch, known to all the villagers as “The Maréchal”. He’s a stooped and serious person with springy white hair and eyes like owls’ eyes, circled by time. He’s been widowed for years now, lives out each day in fumbling solitude, sucking down the broth that keeps him alive, sucking on a blackened pipe. He makes baskets. Mme. de la Brosse arranges the sale of these for him in Périgueux and Angoulême. His baskets are neat and strong. You can’t recognise the ninety-year-old Maréchal in them. He knew Gervaise’s father and grandfather. Gervaise cooks a hen for him at Christmas and Easter and on All Saints Day. Mallélou is afraid of him because he mistrusts strangers and, to Foch, Mallélou is still a stranger. When the English started to come to the village, he raised his hooded eyes to glance at their shiny, big cars and their marble faces and merely shrugged with despair and disbelief: “C’est la comédie humaine, non?” Larry, deviating from village custom, always refers to the Maréchal as “La Comédie Humaine”. He has the notion that the sight of a swimming pool in Pomerac would cause the old man’s heart to cease.
Gervaise dreads this death. The Maréchal is in her first memories: looking for cèpes in the forests behind Ste. Catherine, the Maréchal wearing a sacking apron with a big pouch, putting her child’s hand inside this pouch and feeling the warm cèpes like minute limbs of flesh, smelling of leaves and earth, and feeling afraid, as if she’d touched something private and forbidden. Then her grandfather’s funeral: crying for Grandpapa, not knowing where he’d gone, not believing they’d boxed up his body. The Maréchal took her out of the church and she sat with him in the cold November graveyard with a light snow beginning to fall. “He went to America,” he told her. “All spirits go there because there’s room for them there on the prairies. When the prairie grass whooshes and sings, that’s the spirits calling.” But the word “prairie” sounded lonely, far too lonely for Grandpapa, with his wine-breath and his chatter about governments, so she wept and the Maréchal gave her his handkerchief, which was red and white and smelt of lavender. The Maréchal was perhaps fifty then. His wife, Eulalie, was a seamstress from Thiviers. To Gervaise, this couple always seemed old and, when Eulalie died, she wasn’t really surprised. But she got used to the permanence of the Maréchal. His going would tug deep at her heart.
The Maréchal owns no land now. Bit by bit as he aged he sold it off to his neighbours. The de la Brosse family bought most of it and Mme. de la Brosse is now the largest landowner in Pomerac. She also owns a milk pasteurising plant. Gervaise has always thought of the de la Brosse family as being rich. A maid is employed at the house. Mme. de la Brosse buys her clothes in Paris. Yet the house has a neglected feel. Most of its rooms are shuttered. For long periods of the year, Mme. de la Brosse is away. Only at Christmas does she offer hospitality: after Mass on Christmas Eve, the villagers are given hot wine and cinnamon cakes. For the children, there are lollipops and sugar angels. Some don’t bother to turn up. “To another year, Mme. de la Brosse!” someone says and the slim little widow raises her glass and answers: “To another year!” But you sense she’s tired. She’s not more than sixty – young enough to be the Maréchal’s daughter – but exhaustion seems to hang in the limp folds of her eyelids, in the vexed lines at the corners of her mouth. “Life,” says this creased and bedraggled skin, “has never been much.” The only person in the village who seems to interest her is Klaus. Perhaps their mere size difference astonishes her. Last Christmas, Klaus made a sumptuous Bûche de Noël, decorated with holly, and brought this to the Christmas Eve party, carrying it aloft in his wide, red hands. Mme. de la Brosse clapped and blushed: “How kind, how kind . . .” She stood and admired it like a statue. Klaus put a knife into her neat white hand and held his own over it, like a bridegroom. Mme. de la Brosse laughed a trembling laugh. As the knife cut into the rich chocolate cream, she felt ecstatic. And many of the Pomerac women, it seems, yearn for Klaus. None can understand why he’s there among them or in what way he belongs to Gervaise. Is it true that he’s her cousin? None remember him in her childhood. Or is he part of the years when she was away, living in the railway house outside Bordeaux? Was he her lover then? Has old Mallélou turned a blind eye? Could Klaus be the father of her sons? Is this why he stays with her, handsome Klaus, with old Gervaise, nudging fifty? Mallélou isn’t saying, nor Klaus, nor Gervaise. When you call on them on a winter evening, there they sit, very close to each other, the three of them by the fire. So the question of Klaus remains the most potent mystery in Pomerac, a community so obedient to the seasons it has little heart or time for concealment. Birth, death aspiration, longing, failure, love: the knowledge of these things passes from mouth to mouth like the giving of kisses. Only the English newcomers are not embraced in this way.
When Larry returns from Périgueux, oddly depressed by his afternoon struggles with Piscines Ducellier Frères, he finds Miriam in her studio, not painting, but staring critically at pictures already finished. It’s careful work. The brush strokes are quick, clean. You sense Miriam’s love of sky, of churches, of wild flowers. Larry enjoys the quiet artist in his wife, feels proud. Miriam looks up from a watercolour of Pomerac seen from the main road, a little huddle of stone on the shoulders of a green hill. She stares at Larry without quite focusing her eyes and says blankly: “Leni’s dying.”
Larry sits down on a corner of paint-spattered work table. Leni Ackerman was never much to him. She disapproved of him, in fact. Seemed to enjoy making him feel stupid. But none of this counts now. He knows the quality of Miriam’s love for her. More obstinate love for a parent he has never encountered. “Shit,” he says, and sighs.
Miriam looks down at the picture of Pomerac. She’s changed out of la robe and wears a faded blue skirt and a blue and yellow blouse. Her eyes are dry but the skin around them seems stretched and grey, as if with fatigue.
“You won’t mind if I go to England?”
Larry feels panicky. Yes, he minds. Winter’s coming. The bed, without her, will be a tomb.
“When?”
“As soon as possible. I’d get a flight from Bordeaux, if we can afford it. Or, if not, the Thiviers train to Paris, then on to Boulogne and the ferry. I thought you might fix it tomorrow, Larry.”
“Yes. I’ll fix it.”
“Nadia offered to come with me, but I don’t want anyone.”
Larry recognises this statement for what it is, a warning. He understands. If Leni must die, then Miriam wants to be the sole custodian of that death.
“What’s she dying of, Miriam?”
“Heart. Her heart.”
“Is she being cared for?”
“Yes. There’s a nurse. And Gary will be there.”
“Oh, Gary, Still calls Leni ‘Mother’, does he?”
“I don’t know, Larry.”
“I suppose it flatters her. What a trial he must be to live with, though. Worse than a house plant.”
“She’s fond of Gary.”
“Is she? I’m amazed. Still, better, old Gary at her bedside than me, I suppose.”
He didn’t mean to say it. Christ. Why couldn’t she have died one spring? It’s the winter that makes it bad.
“Sorry, Miriam. Sorry.”
“I know you don’t like me going. For anything else, anyone else I wouldn’t.”
“I know. Yes, I know . . .”
“I couldn’t live with myself if she died and I was
n’t with her.”
“I know, Miriam.”
“I may only be for . . . quite a short time.”
“Yes.”
Useless. He feels useless. When they talk about Leni, it’s as if there’s some faceless higher authority, some Politburo kind of thing slamming them each in separate cubicles. Leni waits in the corridor, listening, knowing. It’s so lonely in his cubbyhole, he could die.
“How did Nadia get to know?”
“She called in. She saw I’d been crying.”
“Have you cried?”
“Of course I’ve cried.”
There’s silence in the small room outside, Larry can hear one of Gervaise’s guineafowl screech.
“Best if you fly, Miriam. I’ll telephone Air France from Nadia’s.”
“Thank you, Larry. How were the pool people? Helpful?”
He’d forgotten Ducellier Frères. He feels too anxious to reveal the subtle ways in which this firm showed its mistrust of him.
“So-so. I’ll work something out with them.”
“Oh, I meant to ask you, have you got a name for the new company?”
“Oh, Aquazure again. I’ll stick with that. No danger of anyone here pronouncing it ‘Aquaisha’.”
“I think you should change the name altogether.”
“What’s wrong with Aquazure?”
“It’s tainted.”
“With what?”
“With the bad luck.”
Larry gets up. He must go and pour himself a gin. He’s seasick with this day. Up, down, up, down. God Almighty. He could kill Leni Ackerman. Stick a knife in her bony chest. He hopes, as he goes down the stairs, that she’ll die quickly, before Miriam can reach her bedside.
That evening, towards six o’clock, the wind settles and dies and the air seems suddenly warm, like a summer night. Gervaise watches the pale, bulky shapes moving slowly in the dark field and feels grateful that time has brought her to this meadow, to this September.