by Rose Tremain
Peeping from his gold-fleeced head, Gervaise sees in the wardrobe mirror the great happy rump of him butting and burrowing and her laughter streams out past his eel tongue. Her legs climb his back. They are the white stems of flowers, she thinks. He parts them to give in return not some insubstantial blossom, but the thick, hard root of himself and all the sweet earth of her being slips and tumbles as it reaches down, further into her than she knew there was space and feeling.
Out in the dark of Pomerac, widows and wives, and even Mme. de la Brosse shuttered and safe behind her limes, furtively dream of such a gold embrace and don’t dare to imagine with what royal thrusting and dancing of tongues it’s given to Gervaise. Gervaise, the wife of Mallélou. Gervaise, in her old coarse scarves. The thin flesh she keeps hidden under clothes that slumber with age and rinsing and sunshine, how is it woken? How has it deserved?
The curtains are drawn, tonight, on a private loving. The grey, greedy stare of Mallélou at the door is blessedly absent and Gervaise lets tears of happiness and laughter flow onto the hot skin of her lover’s shoulder. And he holds her with such gladness. His love sings and trembles in him. He lifts her high, high onto the bleached and noisy pillows. He’s on his knees now and his head is wild and shouting on her bony breast. Love shivers, love trembles, love bursts in her and pulses to a sweet and blissful end. Rain tears at the darkness, but the bodies of Gervaise and Klaus rock silently in a gentle calm.
Along puddled streets, soaking in sour light, Xavier steers Mallélou towards the rue St. Francois where Mme. Motte is wiping tables. The two men are drenched by squalls and Mallélou is cursing: “Let’s find another bar, Xavier. I’m not pissed enough for this business.”
Yet he knows he’s drunk too much. His gut feels heavy and sick. If he lay down somewhere warm, he’d pass out. And forget. Forget the prison. Forget what the courts are going to say. Forget this promise to settle things his way. He wants to say to Xavier, I’m too old, son, I was old when you were born. I fought in the war as a stripling. And these days the city’s too vast, too freezing. Even with this bellyful of booze, I’m not up to it. But he stumbles on, Xavier’s arm pushing him, rain pricking his neck and drenching his collar.
They turn into a long, dead-seeming street. Far down it, a single square of light falls onto the pavement. Above this a boxed sign, strip-lit from within, says Restaurant les Mimosas. Bonne Table.
Xavier pulls Mallélou into the shadow of some scaffolding. The older man senses he’s being controlled like a kid, tugged here and there, ordered about, when it should be him . . .
“Okay?” hisses Xavier. “That’s her. Where the sign is.” Mallélou stares up and down the street, numb, dumb – too old, too afraid. Xavier wants to hit him, to wake him up. “Okay?”
“Sure, sure. But I’m not drunk enough. I need something . . .”
“No you don’t. It’s a woman. She can’t hurt you. Why are you scared?”
“Not scared, Xavier . . .” His speech is slurred. He can hear it. So long since he was pissed like this, he’d forgotten how it makes you weak. Time was when a few pastis were good, good and he’d arrive at Marisa’s place with a hard heart and a stiff cock, not weak then or afraid or frozen, but ready to do business his way, Mallélou’s way . . .
“Allez!”
Xavier pushes him out from the scaffolding and he totters across the cobbled road. He feels his son’s eyes at his back like a gun and he doesn’t turn. He takes breaths of cold air, tries to send this clean knife of air up into his brain to clear it of muddle and fear, and ancient thoughts of city days when he was young, before there were sons, before there was Gervaise, when he was king of the signal junction. What’s one muddling old widow? What’s a place like hers, with a few poor tables and a crammed yard at the back? He knows this kind of woman, this kind of place. Rusty boilers, beer crates piled up, stinking tiles like a public toilet, vermin. There’s a sour taste in his throat. Drink is futile. Sons grow to thugs of men and make you impotent. He should have stayed in his own cot with his face turned to the wall. Stayed by Gervaise’s fire. Let Xavier weep and rot in that scum-filled jail, let him find out for himself that in the end whatever you do you pay, you pay and pay . . .
But he’s there now. He’s brought himself to the front of the restaurant. He stares in. The glass is fugged from the hot breath of the kitchen. Water drips down it inside and out. A sign dangling on the door says fermé. He notes that this is hand-inked in feeble, illiterate writing. He sways and his forehead knocks the icy glass. This small sound brings Mme. Motte back through the plastic fly-curtain that separates the restaurant from the kitchen. Mallélou sees her approach, a small scuttling woman with a flat mutt’s face and black dyed hair. He doesn’t move. He knows that Xavier is still at his back like a revolver, but distant now, too far to kill, someone shadowy. Mme. Motte stops, one hand holding a soapy dish cloth. She bends and wipes the plastic cover of one of the tables. Her arms are red and fleshy, her bosom tight in her floral overall. She looks up, sees Mallélou still staring at her and points to the closed sign.
Mallélou stares and tries to make the right connections: this woman will put Xavier back inside; this woman has control over what happens; he’s here to alter these things; if he fails to alter these things, his son will despise him always.
He turns the handle of the door and falls against it as it opens. Mme. Motte, quicker than a rat, comes darting to him waving her damp cloth and shouting. Mallélou sees her little puckered mouth, topped with a faint moustache, opening and closing and hears shrill sounds aimed at him. Something damp flicks his face and he feels his legs shudder. She’s pushing him now, trying to push him back into the freezing street, but he holds fast to the door, leans all his weight on his arm on the handle and knows that his legs are going, bending, collapsing. He breathes, tries to straighten himself, but the air he breathes is suffocating and hot like the air of a greenhouse. Waves of nausea come. He swims in them, swaying, toppling. At his feet a pattering of lino sends brown and orange whorls into his brain and he follows these down, down, like a dead body chucked in a well and falling miles and miles into darkness.
Waiting by the scaffolding, tiredness robbing his body of its feeble resistance to the rain and cold, Xavier paces and stamps. Light from the restaurant still floods the pavement and he knows Mallélou is in, but he can hear nothing. He expected shouting and the sound of things being broken. He wants a table to come flying through the glass.
He decides to cross the street, to go nearer. He can’t wait here all night. He’ll die of cold and exhaustion. He remembers an American film where two cops gobble flabby pizza in the street while two rich villains eat lunch in a warm restaurant far into the winter afternoon. He liked this scene. Life is like that, he thought. Unfair. The rich guys ride around in the Cadillacs. They know there are these millions of other guys getting cold in bus queues and this is part of their pleasure. One day, he will be in a Cadillac. One day he will be in the warm, plushy restaurant.
Xavier doesn’t cross the street because a police car comes hurtling down it, blue light turning but no siren going. It pulls up in front of the Mimosas and two policemen get out, unhurriedly, and wander in. Xavier presses himself back into the shadows. A red sign slung on the scaffolding says DANGER. TRAVAUX. He waits. The rain eases off. Bits of paper and leaves gust round him in the wind. He’s dying to go back to his room, to see his own things, to light his gas fire, to smell his own pillow, to sleep. His mind barely questions what is happening when he sees the two policemen come out again carrying the inert body of his father and then hurling it like a sack of vegetables into the back of the car. He thinks merely, well, it’s over for now, sees the restaurant sign go out and the car drive off, and walks quickly away in the direction of his lodgings.
October comes. Larry buys a map of the St. Front basilica. He makes drawings of the ground plan, trying to simplify it and make a shape that fits his vision of his new pool. When he’s satisfied with the shape, he cuts
a template of it out of some hardboard he finds in Miriam’s studio, then calculates the measurements of this to square with a basic 36′ by 18′ dimension. He feels excited. He goes out and stands by the walnut tree. Through its thinning leaves comes a lovely dappled light. Larry regrets the need to cut it down but decides that he must do this now, straight away, before Miriam returns. A tug of love over a tree strikes him as unnecessarily stupid.
Larry then gets out from the dusty attic his Aquazure Pool Definition Kit. This consists of a long coil of blue nylon rope, a bunch of sharp wooden pegs and a forty-foot flexible measure. With these ordinary tools Larry “defines”, on empty lawns, on unsightly briar patches, the shape of the miracle to come. He measures off each angle and inserts a peg till the basic shape is stitched out in pegs. Then he ties the blue nylon rope to one of these and winds it on right round all the pegs, thus “defining” the pool. At this point, prospective pool buyers tend to pace round the blue lines, talking to each other: “Gosh, you get the impression now don’t you, Jessica?” “Golly, I’m dying to see Emma’s face when we tell her, Edward.” Larry smiles, remembering these long-ago small excitements and sets to work in the sunshine, hammering pegs into the flinty earth.
Klaus, whose English is non-existent, stares solemnly at this peculiar endeavour from the low wall separating Larry’s garden from the edge of Gervaise’s first meadow and eventually asks, “Ich help, Larry?”
Larry glances up. “Nein, Danke,” he says. But he senses Klaus’s continuing large presence and his bewilderment, so when all the pegs are in and he has led the rope up the south side of the St. Front nave, past the Didron window, round the vaulted apse where the steps will be, into the apsidal chapel, past the fourth cupola, back along the north wall of the nave and west into the vieille Eglise where the diving board will be, he straightens up and gestures at his handiwork. “Schwimbad,” he announces.
Klaus stares for a moment at Larry, then smiles a broad disbelieving smile.
“Schwimbad?” Klaus questions. “In Pomerac?”
“Ja,” says Larry, then struggles with what he thinks may be a German sentence: “Alles Personnen in Pomerac kann geschwimmen here.”
But Klaus is laughing now, the deafening laugh of a monarch at a banquet: “Ich kann nicht schwimmen, Larry! Ich Kann nicht schwimmen!”
Larry shrugs, joins in the laughter. An image comes to him of the well-fleshed Klaus floundering in the new pool, his legs floating hopelessly down towards the drain. He, Larry, stands by, terrified, doing nothing. It is Gervaise who leaps in and bears Klaus to safety on her sinewy back.
Klaus stops laughing and points in Larry’s direction.
“Aber der Baum. Fällen sie den Walnuss Baum?”
“Was?” says Larry.
“L’arbre. Vous allez couper l’arbre?”
“Oui,” says Larry, “malheureusement.”
“A great damage,” says Klaus.
Larry looks guiltily at the tree. It stands well within his blue perimeter. He wonders how much trouble the roots will be. At Aquazure he had a JCB operator who was a skilled root man, but heaven knows what kind of labour they send with diggers in France.
When he looks up again, Klaus has gone. Oddly, Larry realises that he likes the German. He always seems so healthy and pink and free from any of his native angst. As if he’d come steaming hot like a cake from God’s belly, before Eden and sin, before women and toil and Sodom. He wonders if Klaus will stay in Pomerac or whether he’ll pack his bags one day and go back to wherever he came from and leave Gervaise weeping and wailing for him in her milking shed. You don’t imagine change in Pomerac. Even the Maréchal shows signs of eternity. Yet change must occur. The swimming pool is change.
Leaving the rope and the pegs in position, Larry gets into the Granada which smells of upholstery shampoo. Since Miriam’s leaving he’s cleaned it thoroughly inside and out and its tomato body glistens.
At the waterfall, he drives straight past Hervé’s drive, denying himself the tempting possibility of lunching in Hervé’s dining room with Agnès sweetly smiling over a tidy and delicious meal and heads instead for a café in Périgueux and an afternoon of difficult purchasing from Ducelier Frères. He also plans to seek out a tile-maker capable of designing Byzantine tiles. The vision of his pool is strong now. Next summer – on May Day perhaps, when the Pomerac women exchange their little bunches of lilies of the valley – there will be some official opening. Champagne even. And all the people will cluster round and see themselves for the first time reflected in what Nadia has so fortuitously called “loops of brightness”. Even the Maréchal will come, to see a new chapter added to the English comedy unfolding before his cataracted eyes. And Mme. de la Brosse; she will be quietly ashamed that a house in Pomerac other than hers has installed a pool. She will take Larry aside from the marvelling throng of villagers, and ask him to quote for a pool of her own – “Like this one, Larry, but perhaps a little larger.” And thus Aquazure France will begin.
Larry drives fast in his new surge of optimism. Change is certainly coming. Leni will die and Miriam will return, altered and free. Agnès will stay on with Hervé and wear white dresses at the poolside. Klaus will learn to swim.
TWO
Leni
It is the morning of Miriam’s fiftieth birthday. A grey rain falls on North Oxford, a heavy autumn rain driving slowly west to the Cotswolds. By Leni’s front door, blue hydrangeas, planted by Gary, are dying down; orange puddles lie on the sandy driveway; Gary’s Mini sits here uselessly, having failed its M.O.T. test. All is quiet and motionless and wet. Over the front attic bedroom, slates have slipped from the roof and water drips steadily into a variety of bowls set out on a green carpet. No one uses this room now. A faded copy of Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity betrays the past habitation of a literature student. Miriam empties the bowls each evening and remembers that her father, David Ackerman, once had a den up here and wrote his books by the attic window.
Down in Leni’s room, an electric fire is on and a Chinese lamp casts yellow light on the pillow. The heavy blue curtains are still drawn. It could be early evening. In her large bed, Leni’s body is brittle and thin. It’s becoming hollow, she tells herself, like the cuttlefish bones you find on the beach. She drinks cocoa to try to fill it up. Miriam makes her mashed potato. She craves sweet, soft substances – nothing sinewy like celery, nothing sour like apples – paste going through her like porridge, warming the draughty bags of her digestive tract, white, soothing paste in her empty darkness.
In common, she supposes, with most invalids, Leni Ackerman dislikes night-time, wakes early, longs for the household to start opening doors and turning on lights and flushing lavatories. She longs, most of all, to talk. Illness hasn’t made her silent, but rather given additional colour to her gritty voice, as if all her dark blood was now gathered at her throat, leaving the rest of her pale and weak.
Since Miriam’s arrival, the nurse, Bryony, has left. It is Miriam, now, who comes to Leni in the morning, switches on her fire, brings her The Times and a cup of milky tea. She sits on her mother’s bed – just as Leni sat on hers to kiss her goodnight as child – and takes her hands in hers and feels glad that she’s there. When Leni dies it will be like this: Miriam will have possession of the fragile fingers. She will lay them down gently. She will close the door and close the eyes. She will sit on the bed, remembering.
“Well,” says Leni, smiling, “so you’re fifty! At fifty, I think one should try to be honourable.”
“What did you do at fifty? Did you celebrate?”
“Oh yes. Your father gave me that parrot we called Aneurin, after Bevan, and we had what he called a Parrot Party, with everyone dressed up in their gayest things. Didn’t you and Larry come? Perhaps you weren’t gay, Larry’s not particularly gay, or should I say jolly, is he? But then all those people made such a deafening noise round the parrot cage, that Aneurin began to peck himself to death that actual night and kept on until he’d done it. Lucky
human beings don’t have beaks. Or they’d do this, I’m sure. Don’t you think? They’d peck themselves. Women would. Men are too vain, perhaps. Woman would peck themselves in moments of heartbreak.”
“I don’t remember the Parrot Party.”
“Well then you didn’t come, Miriam, because it was very memorable. Your father looked extraordinary, more like a bald eagle than a parrot really. Yellow eyes. He gave himself yellow eyes. I can’t remember how he did it. A lot of his students came and they looked so wonderful. I love it when young people look wonderful for a night. And there was a superb parroty scandal on the lawn. Two boys rolling about together near a flood light. They were sent down. It was the fifties after all. No one was permissive except us. I think our Parrot Party started permissiveness in Oxford.”
“And what did you do that was honourable?”
“Well, I decided that morning never to fall in love with anyone again. Except your father. I allowed myself to go on falling in love with him. From time to time, like in the summertime when he’d come out and sit on the lawn and his legs would go brown. I like brown legs, don’t you? I always want to touch them. But the question of other men, I thought: that’s it now. No more. Not that I didn’t have a few of them still drooling round. That medievalist who made such a bad Dean. What was his name? Something extraordinary. I can’t remember. He got on your father’s nerves. At the Parrot Party he looked like a hen, all goosey skin. Well, I put them behind me, all out of my sight. That was the honourable thing to do.”