by Rose Tremain
The kettle is boiling. She pours water on the tea and sighs heavily. Her face is flushed. Larry looks away from her out of the window where the trees are buffeted by the wind. This hurtling of leaves reminds him painfully that winter is almost here. In that instant, waiting for the tea, he feels old.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” says Nadia, bringing in the tea tray, “perhaps you are so right. Perhaps one day I must go to this institution, but I know it’s giving me some nightmares and I don’t want to fly out of the window, you know, or down the stairs like poor Hervé. I have a little root now in Pomerac. I am like some shallow heather or what with a small poor root in the soil and I don’t want you just tear me up, you see?”
“Yes. I see, Nadia.”
“Compris? Okay?”
“Yes.”
“So now you tell me, you want to telephone?”
“To Miriam? No. I had a letter this morning.”
“Bad news, so?”
“She wants a kind of rest from me.”
“Rest? So are you so exhausting, my dear? Are you biting her in your loving and so?”
Larry smiles. Nadia pours tea.
“She helped me so well when I was down. Now she needs a break from me.”
“So this is all? Poff! She leaves you in a puff of steam?”
“Yes. For a while.”
“So what you do, my darling? I don’t know what she expects you do in Pomerac. You have no friends, no? Only Nadia and Hervé and those old Mallélous . . . You make your pool all alone? I think Miriam’s going a little mad. I think she don’t see what hurting she makes. I am really surprise.”
They sip the tea. The last two biscuits from an expensive packet are set out on a plate but sit there uneaten. The room is hot, as usual, and very tidy, with Nadia’s bed folded into the wall. Sitting silently in this small protecting space, they hear a car begin to climb the Pomerac hill. Nadia gets up and goes to the window, squashing her cheek against it to see along the road. It is Hervé’s car. She turns to Larry with the fear of a startled rabbit in her face.
“So, he’s coming.”
“Hervé.”
“Of course Hervé.”
“I’ll be on my way then, Nadia.”
Larry gets up but Nadia flurries to his side and grabs his hands.
“Don’t go! Oh tell Nadia what to do, what to say! I’m so beating in my heart, Larry. Please stay . . .”
“You’ll be all right, Nadia.”
“Oh my God, my God . . .”
“He’s a kind man, Nadia, he’s fond of you . . .”
“Listen!”
“What?”
“Listen, Listen.”
They’re quiet. The car engine now sounds fainter.
“Oh my God . . .”
“What, Nadia?”
“He’s not coming. He’s not stopping.”
She rushes back to the window. She can’t see the car. Despair and confusion shimmy in her body as she turns helplessly back to Larry.
“It’s going . . .”
“The car?”
“He’s not coming to Nadia.”
“Perhaps he’s turning round.”
“Ssh!”
They listen again. They can’t hear the car now.
“He’s gone to you, Larry.”
“Okay. It’s okay, Nadia. I’ll go and find him. I’ll ask him to come and see you.”
“But not to scold! Oh I’m dying if he tells me you are so foolish Nadia, so stupid Pole. Oh my God, what trouble!”
“Try to be calm, Nadia. Harve’s a good man, a kind man. He won’t hurt you.”
“But he won’t love me neither! Never! I know it. He’s wasting his life and Nadia’s life and now I think, is poor Claude seeing all this in his padded room or what? All is confusion.”
Nadia is crying now and Larry’s reluctant to leave her. He gives her his handkerchief and gently pats her yellow hair.
“Let me go and find him, Nadia.”
“I don’t know why I am ever fall in love with any man. Better to be lesbian! Women are kind, you know . . .”
“Not all are.”
“Oh so not that fucking Leni, but most are feeling and won’t make you suffer.”
“Try to stop crying, Nadia.”
“Yes. I will. You go, Larry. You go.”
He can still hear her sobbing as he goes down the stairs, but he finds himself hurrying away from the sound, a feeling of excitement beginning to beat in him as he tells himself with sudden certainty that his visitor isn’t Hervé after all but Agnès.
He runs out into the wind. Colossal white clouds chase over the village, coming west from the sea and billowing towards the south. It’s a day in which Pomerac feels small and Larry minute within it, hurrying like a dot to its little i among countless reams of writing.
The car is parked right outside his door, almost blocking the lane. Agnès is standing by it, wearing a woollen beret. When she sees Larry, she waves and calls: “I’ve come to see the pool!”
Larry’s out of breath quickly these days and arrives at her side panting. He apologises. “I’m sorry Agnès. I was up at Nadia’s. Luckily, she heard the car.”
“Oh, it’s okay. What a terrible windy day, hmn? So. Will you show me the pool?”
“Yes. If you like. It’s looking its worst now, though. Just a big pit.”
“Well, I think it’s exciting. I expect these Pomerac people are scandalised, non?”
“No. They aren’t. They seem rather pleased.”
“I don’t think many can swim.”
“No? Well, they’ll be able to learn then.”
He hates her snobbery. All snobberies he hates. Even Oxford’s self-pride was repellent to him. He’s stern with Agnès. He makes her move the car and park it carefully behind the Granada before he leads her round to the pool site. And he offers no helpful comment. Just lets her stare at the hole and the mounds of rubble and earth.
“It’s so funny,” she says, “when I see a swimming pool, I never imagine all this happening. I imagine the work is very tidy.”
“No. It’s not tidy. It’s foul work at this stage.”
“So when does it become like a pool?”
“Oh, eventually.”
She looks at him sadly. She knows he’s cross with her, yet doesn’t know why. She wants to say to him, I needed courage to come here. Don’t hurt me.
“What colour will it be? Blue?” she asks.
“All pools look blue. It’s the volume of water – provided it’s clean.”
“But you won’t make it blue?”
“The floor will be a very pale blue. The sides will be white and the mosaic trim black and white like the St. Front cupolas.”
“Like St. Front? How wonderful!”
She smiles – the approving child – and he feels gratified. His anger begins to go.
“In the summer, if you’re still here, it will all be finished – and tidy.”
“In the summer? So long? I don’t think I shall stay so long. I may get married in the summer.”
“To Luc?”
“Yes, of course.”
She turns suddenly and walks towards the house. Larry wants urgently to say, don’t get married yet. Stay here. I’ll make you a little place by the pool . . .
Inside his house, she hesitates. The cautious careful Agnès wants to walk quickly away, get in the car and fly. But the purpose that brought her here still whinnies in her for attention. She’s like a restless pony jangling its bells, tossing its head this way and that. Larry watches her. This feeling of her preciousness to him gathers again in his chest. His caring for her weighs him down. He feels heavy and breathless. They stand, fixed apart from each other, unspeaking.
But the pony in Agnès is so proud, it won’t be denied its favour. It’s decked for the circus and must strut, must shake its plumes and flash its tail. It leads her stubbornly to Larry, then stands waiting, waiting with its head bowed.
Larry is as still as gra
nite. I won’t be the one, he wants to say, I won’t be the one. But the pony is still, too, now. Help me. I’ve come as far as I can. Moments pass. The wind drums on the stone and sings down the chimney. Next door Mallélou wakes and hears as if in a dream the voice of his son in his own house. Help me. But Larry moves away. I won’t be the one. Sensing that the moment which has just passed was of the greatest, saddest significance and that a similar moment may never ever occur again, Larry takes Agnès gently but firmly by the hand and leads her to her car. Without a word to him she drives away.
In the dark, Xavier Mallélou tiptoes to his mother’s door and listens. Wrapped in a cold mist which settles on the village as the wind drops at dusk, the house is silent as the mind within the skull.
Down the passage, Mallélou’s light burns. Next to his small room, Klaus sleeps in a carved bed – his only possession apart from his clothes – that he had expensively transported by truck from his mother’s house near Heidelberg.
Xavier had forgotten this Pomerac silence. He had forgotten there were silent places at all. He wears his coat over his underwear. In the city he sleeps naked, but the bed that’s made for him here is freezing, as if the sheets were stored in the damp barn. He can’t sleep in this cold and silence. He feels like getting drunk and bleating out all his sorrows, to be rid of them once and for all. He wants to wake Gervaise, but takes pity on her and lets her sleep. He knows she’s up before it’s light, tugging at her cows, blowing on her fingers to warm them for the teats. She sleeps like a child, a grateful and rejuvenating sleep. Even thoughts of her son with his eczema face, even thoughts of Klaus lying in his painted bed, don’t keep Gervaise from sleep. Time will heal the eczema. Time will bring her lover back to her chicken-down pillows. What matters in this silence is rest.
Xavier goes down to the kitchen and turns on the light above the oilcloth-covered table. This shiny cloth reminds him of Mme. Motte’s restaurant and he shudders. He wonders, but won’t ask, what happened when his father went in that night. Did he insult her? Did he throw up on her floor? It was all vain, anyway, vain and spiteful, the reaction of clodding myopic idiots. If he survives prison, he promises himself he’ll fight his way into a college and get an education at last. If he survives. If it’s not too late. If colleges take people like him with no experience of anything but petty jobs, petty ways and petty theft. Je suis petit, he repeats helplessly. Je suis trop petit . . .
When he looks up at last from this pessimistic mumbling, he sees Klaus standing on the stairs. The German wears a mighty quilted robe, stained at the cuffs and elbows. His hair is wild from tumbled sleep, his wide feet stuck into sabots. Xavier wants to laugh. He’s like some monarch out of ancient time. You can imagine a courtful of retainers following him from the banquet to the closet to the royal bed, applauding his appetite, his blue-blooded stools, his possessing of a courtesan. Yet Xavier has also found him admirable. At supper, he was courteous and full of gaiety. Mallélou, diffident and quiet even on this day of his son’s return, clearly liked and respected him and Gervaise sat contentedly in his wide shadow and showed him an unobtrusive tenderness. He’d become important to this family. His presence coloured the room like Christmas boughs.
“I’m not disturbing you? You like some drink with me. Ja?”
“Yes,” says Xavier, “I’d like some drink with you.”
“Well I keep in the cupboard here some schnaps, out of a little sentimental reason. I think it’s getting stale because I am not a very sentimental man, so I don’t often drink it.”
He laughs his big laugh. Upstairs, Mallélou wakes and hears it and envies this man his big chest and lungs that can make such a joyous sound.
Klaus finds the dusty bottle and two little fine cut glasses left to Gervaise by Eulalie, the Maréchal’s wife. (The Maréchal alone, she had decided, would have absolutely no need of cut glass.) He pours the schnaps and holds the drinks up to the light.
“Fine glass.”
“Xavier stares at Klaus and wonders about his age. He could be forty. He could be a lot older.
“To our friendship!” says Klaus.
“Yes,” says Xavier, “to friendship.”
The schnaps is bitter and warming. Xavier is glad of it and glad he isn’t alone.
Klaus seats himself, pushing up the sleeves of his robe on his fleecy arms. He turns to Xavier, looks at him steadily and quietly begins: “I was working in Thiviers. My trade was the bread and patisserie. I learn this from a master-baker in Heidelberg, then I am apprenticed to a patissier in Périgueux and finally I am a partner in a little business in Thiviers. You know the shop, perhaps. Your mother and father both came in from time to time. We bought honey from them, honey from the flowers and clover of Pomerac.
“These people, your parents, are good friends to me. I am invited here and I think to myself, these are true friends where I have not met true friends in all my life. You know what this is, to meet with affection? You know what the soul says when it finds this relief? Stay. Bleib. Bleib. And I could not do otherwise. So I sell my half share of business and I don’t mourn this, not for an hour, not for a minute.
“Now you are a young man. You may not understand how I could give up this business to settle here. But I wasn’t so young. My skill had become a routine. I had no feeling for anyone. My life was dry, you know, without any love. Dry as ashes. Like I am an urn and all I hold is the burnt bones of people, not their smiling or their giving or even their tears.
“Well, I had lived long in this condition. So long. You see how I am – so big a man. So loud. I can’t help this. And if you cut my heart out I tell you it’s the size of a watermelon! So I need love. I need what these people, your parents, give to me and I will not leave them.”
He stops talking and drains his glass of schnaps. “So this I tell you. You are the son and should know what this stranger, this foreigner is doing in your house.”
Temporarily, Xavier feels set aside from his own miseries. Change has indeed come to Pomerac, but change of a fortunate kind. All the dark spaces he remembers from his adolescence in this house seem to have been filled, obliterated by this smiling man. If his father is declining, his mother has been made stronger than he remembers, and when she looks at Klaus, ladling his soup and passing it to him, her face is luminous with happiness.
“You’re her lover, Klaus.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Does my father know?”
“Again, of course. He’s an old man. I do his work for him. He’s not ungrateful.”
“She loves you, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Very much?”
“Yes.”
“And you?”
“She’s my woman. Gervaise is my woman.”
He pours more schnaps. His smile is wide, with no hint of apology in it. Xavier, too, finds himself smiling, happy in Klaus’s company and content with the deep silence beyond.
Agnès Prière lies in her narrow bed and examines her life. It’s like a cluttered room; nothing in its place. Her marriage to Luc lies in a corner of it, a garment of sequin and shimmer she’s flung down impatiently, waiting for the right time, the right occasion to take it up again and put it on. The trouble with Luc is he shows her no gratitude. He’s like an enemy come to pillage, not a lover come to woo. With this enemy she will be safe – from poverty, from other, sadder worlds, from change. But the ground she gives – her body smelling of clean wool, of roses and sunshine, her virgin self solemn as incense – he scorches it with his soldier’s fire. His kisses burn.
There’s a cupboard in this untidy room. In there hidden away in darkness, is the gift of herself she wants Larry to discover. She won’t marry the soldier till the older, wiser man has loved her gratefully, with tenderness, and shown her her own inner fire. She’s a child in love and Luc is the handsome classroom bully-boy, shining up his buckles and his boots and letting all his understanding go dull. She’s tired of the boy’s firecrackers and wants the quiet teac
her. All this, to Agnès, is perfectly logical and wise. Yet what she can’t do is invite the teacher in. He must come to her. So she waits, and her life meanwhile is confused. She thinks sadly of leaving and going back to Paris, to its stately black winter. Today she’s almost resigned: the teacher won’t accept what she offers. Yet Agnès is stubborn in defence of the orderly patterns her mind makes. She refuses to imagine her sumptuous summer wedding till she’s understood the rites she’ll be dressed up for. Rites and rights. Her own. Not just the groom’s.
So she’ll try once more. A last time. Then her room can be put in order. She doesn’t doubt that, a year from now, she’ll be Luc’s wife.
One morning, soon after Xavier’s arrival in Pomerac, the Maréchal wakes with the notion that sewage from the Ste. Catherine sewage plant is seeping into Eulalie’s grave. To think of the clean woman his wife was lying with her bones in muck troubles him so badly he can’t eat his habitual breakfast of coffee and bread. He sits in his grey room, repentent for the small care he takes of Eulalie’s plot. He wants to find flowers to sweeten her earth. He wants to talk to her through the marble chippings.
Raising his stick in greeting to the villagers he meets on his way, he shuffles up to Gervaise’s door, watched by Nadia from her window, seen eventually by Klaus and Larry who are down in the pool pit laying pipes to and from the central drain, received at last by Mallélou in his morning idleness, unshaven, pale and smelling of sleep.
“Mallélou? It’s me. Come for a favour.”
“Yes. Come in, Maréchal, come in.”
All decisions, all rejoicings, all rows, prayers, repentences and family arithmetic take place, in Gervaise’s house, round the oilcloth table. It’s here, then, that the Maréchal sits and brings out his pipe.
“Wine, Maréchal?”
“Well, all right. Just a glass.”
“Nothing bad happened, I hope?”
“To me? What more can happen this side of death?”
Mallélou pours the harsh red wine he likes to drink on and off all day. “Plenty, Maréchal.”
“Well, I could lose my speech or my wits, I suppose. I could get dumped in a rabbit hutch line Lemoine . . .”
“Your house could burn.”