The Swimming Pool Season

by Rose Tremain

  “Time for sleep,” she says firmly, snatching one pillow from the pile where Leni’s head is lodged like a precious vase padded out for packing. “Now, I’m going to pop you on the pan, Mrs. Ackerman, ready for the night.”

  THREE

  The Sleepwalkers

  Word that Larry’s swimming pool is begun travels on frosty breath round the lanes of Pomerac. Children come and throw stones into the big yellow-clay pit. A dog falls into it and breaks its neck and lies in the rain for a day, unnoticed. Up from his tobaccoey room comes the Maréchal and pauses at Larry’s wall and stares with his bird eyes at the hole and the felled walnut tree and the mountain of mud. By Gervaise’s kitchen fire he sits nodding his disbelief: “Swimming pools! This isn’t America.”

  But Gervaise feels as emotional as on her Saint’s day at the thought of this apparition slowly forming behind her south wall. As if worlds she will never see have been brought to her doorstep. As if her love of Pomerac, deeper by fathoms than any pit sunk in Larry’s garden, is now nevertheless shared by this stranger who has chosen to spend his money not in Paris or Hollywood but here, right under her nose. So she feels protective of Larry. The more because he’s alone now and sometimes helpless-seeming. She’s taken to calling on him, bringing leeks and parsnips from a vegetable patch so fertile with the rich cow-muck that her beet comes shouldering out of the earth and her summer peas climb waist-high. He seems rather grateful for her care of him. His struggles with her language have lessened. He finds words now, to thank her with dignity and to offer tobacco for Mallélou who, since he returned from Bordeaux, behaves more and more like a very old man, sucking a vacant pipe in the cold yard, standing still.

  Larry and Gervaise even talk of the pool and he has explained to her how he found inspiration in St. Front. She thinks this is clever. Life is often the art of seeing in one artefact or idea the embryo of another. Klaus, too, admires this vision of a pool and has negotiated with Larry a small fee for helping him do the pipework and concreting. Only Mallélou and the Maréchal have in common their disdain. Their old men’s bones distrust shiny, treacherous surfaces.

  “You would have thought,” grumbles the Maréchal to Gervaise, “Pomerac was safe from this kind of comedy.”

  But Gervaise is stern with this moaning: “They say swimming strengthens the heart, Maréchal.”

  “The heart? It’s going to break mine.”

  “Why?”

  “You ask me why, Gervaise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because it’s a madness come to a place that was sane.”

  “But a small madness. It’s not hurting anyone.”

  “It’s hurting me.” And he taps his ancient chest. “It’s going to finish me off.”

  Gervaise leans over and presses her lips to the Maréchal’s head. As winter nears, he wraps this head up in a muffler. He smells of oily wool. “No one understands,” he’s fond of saying, “the cold gets in through the skull. Small wonder people die young.”

  Mme. de la Brosse has closed her house and gone to Paris for the winter. She will open it briefly for Christmas, then leave again till spring. Pomerac in November, petrified by the first frosts, shedding its leaves, held in the sighing of the wind, bleated to by the high rooks, only reaffirms the passage of her own life into a dead season. In Paris, in busy restaurants, in warm shops smelling of leather and perfume, this season is partially obscured. She still has one or two old admirers. They take her to the theatre and to dinner at the Mediterranée. In her small, smart flat she is comfortable and safe. Catherine Deneuve lives in the same block.

  No one misses her in Pomerac. Her limes are clipped. Behind the worn shutters, her furniture is shrouded. Chickens and guineafowl and goats stray into her garden. She could be dead. The Maréchal stares at the closed house and remembers her old father-in-law, the Colonel, a jumpy, well-tailored man with an old-world sense of grandeur. The house was done up with velvet and brocade. There was champagne on the lawn on family birthdays. At Easter the village children brought posies of wild flowers and were given history books and pencil boxes. The Colonel believed in education for the peasants and sent his wife to Périgueux to buy these gifts with care. Over the years the St. Catherine school library was virtually restocked by Colonel de la Brosse and, though the headmaster was a man who hated the military, he was forced, year after year, to thank this man for his patronage. When the Colonel died, this teacher felt profound relief, as if a heretic had been burned. The Colonel’s son, Anatole, was a man too shy and reserved to give pencil boxes to shabby children. For a year or two, the Easter posies came and the little girls and boys who had made them waited awkwardly for their presents. The old widow was absent. Anatole and his wife took in the flowers and gave beakers of lemonade, round which the children’s hands grew cold, waiting. They could tell all the zeal had gone from the house. Easters came and went and not one book nor one mathematical instrument ever came out of it again. These same children, now grown into mothers and fathers of the stone-throwers in Larry’s garden, remember Colonel de la Brosse with wary affection. They conclude he may have been corrupt. Stories are told of a bribery scandal. But at least he was colourful and kind and had seemed to be as brave in his charity as he had been in the war. No collaborator, he. Escaping from prison, he walked two hundred miles to Paris and on forged papers made his way to London where he joined de Gaulle’s Free French. He returned a hero and in Pomerac he was garlanded with wild roses. All his life, he was given flowers. Now, he lies at Ste. Catherine but his marble grave is visited only once a year, in March, by the Maréchal, who brings mimosa for all the old soldiers buried there.

  With his garden in ruins and all Miriam’s flowers covered in clay, Larry is trying to dig out the future. The eagle he hopes plaintively to see doesn’t visit him any more. The bulldozer has frightened it off. The future looks like a rubble pit. Larry’s old knack of seeing the finished pool just under this pit seems to have left him. He feels frightened of the scar he’s made. He cleans and polishes the Granada, hiding it and his bulgy reflection out of sight of his excavations. His hand, fretting over the body of his car, seems a lunatic limb, making silly little motions. Yet what is there in him so easily comforted by shine? He should be a car salesman. Cars come mirror-bright from someone else’s labours. All the salesman does is try to love them, to slap their boots and bonnets with familiarity and pride, to show them off looking their best. Pools are so complex by comparison. Even finished, they’re temperamental. Larry stares at the rumpled earth and knows he’s lost faith. The future refuses to appear in any guise but the chopped-up present. He digs and digs and still he can’t see it. He wonders if, by leaving him, Miriam has snatched it away.

  For a few days he thought Miriam’s absence would be short. He trusted Leni to die. Now, he senses he’s been abandoned. Miriam’s voice (so cold, he shivered by Nadia’s fire) on the telephone first told him this. It also told him that she didn’t know why she’d done it or even how it had happened. “It was an accident,” her flat voice seemed to say, “an accident that just happened.” All the digging he does and the ordering of pipework is, of course, for her return: the pool will be finished; Miriam will come home to Pomerac. But Larry can’t see either of these things. His loss of faith extends suddenly to his marriage and he gasps with fear at the thought of being alone through the winter. When Gervaise comes round bringing turnips, he feels grateful relief: he’s not forgotten by everyone and everything. He keeps an anxious watch out for the eagle. “My friend, the eagle,” he says to himself boastfully. But it doesn’t come. More and more as darkness creeps on in the afternoons, he scuttles up to Nadia’s. Between them, she and Gervaise, by giving him food and warmth and their bizarre companionship, seem to keep him from despair.

  These days, Nadia’s longing to be loved by Hervé is no secret from Larry. This pent-up love of hers is catching at her smile and carving channels of hurt from her fine little nose to her crab-apple chin. “What,” she asks, as the dark settl
es round Pomerac and the children are called in to the blackened ranges, “is this old bean to do?”

  Larry is doggy-dumb. Life, at present, refuses to provide him with answers. Nadia gets cross: “I don’t know what is the English heart made of? Waste I’m thinking. You live in the constipated heart!”

  Larry nods, feeling the lead-weight of his own chest. “I’m sure you’re right, Nadia. But there’s no logic in love, you know, and as a nation we tend to be rather good at logic. What you lose on the swings . . . you see?”

  “Swings? What is this swings, Larry? You mean balançoires?”

  “Yes. But never mind. Shall I go and talk to Harve for you?”

  “Oh no. This is a lost cause, my friend. To Hervé what I am but an old Pole? He has this clean Agnès, so what he need some old Gulashka for? I am only some dirty fly he swats away with his handkerchief from Simpsons of Piccadilly, no?”

  “No. He’s very fond of you, Nadia.”

  “Fond? Fond? So he treat me like some sister or mother! I don’t want his fond, Larry. I want his desire of me.”

  Desire of her. With her fluff of dyed hair and her pink, stubby, restless hands, Larry can’t imagine she stirs the gentlest whisper of blood in Hervé’s aristocratic groin. His body seems fitted out for tall fashionable women with the cool smiles of cats. This week his plaster casts were cut and fell open like conker husks, revealing his mended legs within, still shapely, hairless and at the ankles royally tinged with blue. He walks on them fearfully, as if they were stilts he hadn’t got the hang of. This revealing of his new legs increases Nadia’s sighings.

  “How I am a fool for elegance, Larry! My Claude is once so elegant a man. We order all his shirts at Sulka in the rue Royale. And when I walk with Claude on his arm, in the Champs Elysees, I’m thinking, my God Nadia, you would be back in Warszawa now this minute with some one-legged neighbour on the landing snitching or snimping food, and, I know what a lucky woman I’m being with my beautiful Claude in his neckties. And how could I imagine his rocker would go? I ask you. If you had seen my Claude at the Tour d’Argent, at Laperouse, you would never have guessed, this man is getting bananas . . .”

  “It’s very sad, Nadia. I’m so sorry about Claude.”

  “But destiny, no? First I’m getting a madman. Then it’s my fate to lose my stupid Polish heart to a man of stone. You know this fashionable Polish director, Wajda, is making movies about men of stone and this is my Hervé.”

  “No, I don’t think so, Nadia. His men are factory workers or shipyard people.”

  “Well, what it matter? All the men in Nadia’s life are notty or iron.”

  “Notty?”

  “Notty, nutty, nitty. I don’t know what’s the difference? Or men of ice, like my poor Hervé with his precious little niece. Look at his legs! When he fell down, they packed his legs in ice.”

  She’s drinking a lot, these cold nights. Mme. Carcanet who owns the épicerie at Ste. Catherine, gets the vodka she orders, but Nadia’s too poor to buy the crate all at once. She saves on electricity and nail varnish and butter to buy the bottles one by one. She’s generous with the liquor, seeming to forget what it costs. Larry drinks gratefully and notices the way Nadia has begun to fling her small, plump body round the flat, throwing it onto chairs like a dancer, gathering cushions into her short arms and pressing them into her face, sending her shoes hurtling to the ceiling, then kneeling and weeping against her Japanese screen. He’s uncomfortable with these performances and yet grateful for them. She doesn’t often ask him about himself. In her pink-faced lamentations, he forgets the hole he’s making in his garden and the void around which his self-respect now seems to be constructed. One night, he dreams he’s become a swimming pool, become this cold, empty space. Someone has filled him not with chemically treated water, but with vodka. In Nadia’s warm flat he feels protected from dreams like this. Her grief shields him from his. He feels an affection for her which now and again surprises him. He longs to comfort her, yet knows he never will. On and on goes her little tragedy. On and on goes his listening.

  On a mild morning, when a soft rain has chased away the cold front, with a vodka hangover pressing on his forehead, Larry climbs wearily into the Granada and drives past the waterfall to Hervé’s mansion. The wistaria leaves are gone. Even the Michaelmas daisies he remembers Agnès picking are dying down and all the summer grandeur of the garden has disappeared. Larry gets out of the car and breathes the wet air. He’s come determined to do or say whatever he can, as inconspicuously as he can, for Nadia. Agnès sees him standing in the drive and comes out. Over her neat little skirt she wears an apron. She’s laying fires, she says, and smiles. Then she puts a hand on Larry’s arm and says, “Luc, my fiancé, is here. I would like to introduce you,” and leads Larry down the armoured hallway to the sitting room. There is no sign of Hervé. He’s not in the house, is Larry’s immediate thought, when he sees the boy, Luc, lounging on one of Hervé’s expensively covered sofas, reading a magazine. The doctor, on his newly knit legs, has gone back to his surgery. Agnès and her young soldier have the house to themselves.

  The conversation is brief. Luc isn’t interested in Larry, looks at him insolently through long dark lashes and barely tilts up off the sofa to shake his hand. Silence hangs in the big room. Larry moves to leave. To his surprise, Agnès sounds flustered when she says: “Don’t go. Stay for some coffee, or tea. I could make Lipton’s tea.” Luc stares at her. The boy’s body is leggy and soft, like a colt’s. Of this soft sinew, the army is trying to fashion red muscle. It’s to annoy Luc that Larry agrees to the tea. To find a disdainful, lazy animal in possession of Agnès is vexing. He wants to say to this obedient girl, don’t marry yet. And with these words almost on his lips he follows Agnès to the kitchen, abandoning the soldier to his magazine.

  She fills a heavy kettle and lights the gas. Larry imagines her grown old, making these identical movements from sink to stove. And in between, time slips and vanishes. It’s as if she has no life through thirty years. Larry wants to catch her arm and shake her, but he just stands still, watching her. He’s aware that this is what he does these days when he comes here: he watches Agnès. It doesn’t seem to bother her at all. It’s as if she expects it. Like the protecting regard of a parent. She doesn’t shrug off his watching of her or push him away but rather brings his look closer by treating him fondly and seeming to share with him thoughts she keeps from her Uncle Hervé. Reaching for a tray, which she begins to set with pink and white cups and saucers, Agnès says quietly and without self-consciousness: “Luc wants me to sleep with him. Today. He wants me to do it today. Do you think I should?”

  Larry stares at her over the teacups. Her green eyes address him calmly. She’s not nervous, only perplexed. Larry aches for summer and the finished pool. By this, he would find Agnès a protected little corner in the sun. Say to Gervaise and Klaus, this is my adopted daughter.

  “Do you want to? If you want to, then it’s all right.”

  “I’d like it if . . .”

  “What?”

  “If it was going to be right.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be right?”

  “Because he knows nothing. He’s never had a woman. Only whores.”

  “You’ll learn together.”

  “No.” She says this with force, then looks down at her hands, setting out the tea tray.

  “Why not, Agnès?”

  “Because I know what this means. You learn the man’s way, just the selfish way, and later you have to find out what’s right for you. So you betray your marriage. But I love Luc. I don’t want to betray our marriage. You see?”

  Larry feels astonished not so much at the dilemma but that Agnès, with her strange old-fashioned ways, should understand it so well. Momentarily, he’s sorry for Luc. What twenty-year-old boy understands that he, the best of lovers, can be, for his first woman, the worst lover she will ever have? His pride, his youth, his potency all deny this. He laughs and struts away. His woman runs cryin
g, following, begging him not to go. She loves him. Yet in time she’ll betray him. He understands neither the quality of her love nor her reason for betraying it.

  Before Larry can find in himself anything by way of advice for his wise-child, he discovers Luc standing silently in the kitchen doorway. Agnès flicks her soldier a look of sudden sorrow and turns away to the kettle. Larry stares helplessly at the back of her sweet head that he wants to protect with his hands.

  Since Bordeaux, Mallélou sleeps with a light burning in his narrow room and his hands tucked between his legs. He feels so cold and defeated in his head, he thinks his brain’s becoming dry like a tuber. He’s grown forgetful. His legs are weak. Measuring barbed wire, setting posts, shovelling leaf-swamp from the ditches – soundlessly through these November tasks creeps a certainty of death. He stands in Gervaise’s fields and feels afraid. He hopes God is a German, his rightful master, and will forgive him his cowardly life. He weeps hot tears that fly in the harsh wind for his leaving of Marisa. “I loved you, Marisa!” he bleats across time. “With you I was a man.”

  Gervaise discovers him crying like a baby in an empty corner of the meadow and asks him again, “What happened in Bordeaux?” But he’s told her everything that happened: his visit to the prison, his round of Xavier’s sad bars, his arrest at Mme. Motte’s, his night in a police cell, his release. What he can’t admit is his old-man’s terror. When he was kicked out of his cell at dawn, grey with sleeplessness and smelling of puke, he sat in an empty café and watched life wake up and pass him by with disgust. He wanted to cry then. He saw he was finished. Irrelevant. They tore down the old signal hut and built a concrete palace of flashing squares and digits. He had been superseded. He warmed and warmed his shaking hands on a bowl of coffee. Buses clinked and hissed outside the café. People got on and were whisked off to city jobs his own sons had never been educated to do. There was nothing left for him but to go back to Pomerac and wait to roll over dead one night like a sick sow. Winter’s coming, say the hunched backs of the city workers clambering on their buses. Keep the light burning, says Mallélou. Keep the frost from turning your balls to ice.