The Swimming Pool Season

by Rose Tremain

  “I can’t live without you.”

  “Yes. I think about it all the time.”

  “Think about what?”

  “This. Fucking.”

  “Am I good? Am I a good lover?”

  “Yes. Make me come, Xavier. It’s so fantastic.”

  “Why won’t you marry me?”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t.”

  “Will you?”

  “I don’t know. Please make me come.”

  “You won’t marry your soldier, will you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Agnès . . .”

  “Oh, hurry. I need to come. I have to.”

  “Just tell me there’s some future, Agnès . . .”

  “Of course there is.”

  “You’re not lying?”

  “No.”

  So slowly and tenderly and with an anxious kind of hope Xavier gets onto his knees and buries his worshipping head between her spread legs.

  No more than an hour passes before she’s back in the car and driving away from him. He watches her till she’s out of sight, then stares at the track that’s taken her away. This is all we have, he thinks, this hurried ritual. And suddenly, he’s no longer content with these brief, wild meetings. He wants more than anything he’s ever wanted, to be with her in her bedroom in Hervé’s house and hold her in his arms all night, easy and intimate and slow, like the student couple to whom he gave the key to his cast-off room. Strange how they’ve become his model. He suspects it’s because they, with their books and their difficult music and their odd knowledge of other countries’ wars, understood in private what each was giving and what, in the easy logic of their particular love, each took.

  He drives, without hurrying, wrapped in his plans for his future with Agnès, back to Pomerac. Halfway there, he notices that his lip is bleeding.

  She’s home by this time, running in, preparing tea for Hervé before the evening surgery. She feels dizzy and tired from her own pleasure. She sits gratefully by the fire in the bureau and takes up the letter from Luc that has arrived that morning. She learns from it that her mother has invited him to stay for Christmas.

  Foot by foot, the big sunken box that the pool now is, is growing. Klaus and Larry, wearing baggy bleus from the Pèrigueux market, seem to be fighting back the descending winter, fighting back each afternoon’s earlier and earlier sunset with their busy mixing and shovelling and pouring and smoothing of concrete. Gervaise, hurrying from the Maréchal’s bedside, chivvying Mallélou to dress himself and not shame her by flopping round the house all day in pyjamas, scuttles over the earth mounds with bowls of coffee and looks fondly at the new straight walls and the high colour in Klaus’s cheeks:

  “Mon dieu, c’est formidable, quand même!”

  “We’re not far from the mosaic, Gervaise,” says Klaus with huge pride. His confectioner’s soul and his easy love of God make him long for this magnificent challenge. The thousands of black and white facets waiting for his attention in cardboard boxes mesmerise him and urge him on. He works as hard as two men. Larry is amazed at the speed now being achieved and senses that the German has brought to his vision a kind of superstitious luck. Larry’s no longer building the pool for Miriam, not even for Agnès though his mind still seats her at its edge, but for the thing itself, for Pomerac. On certain days, he hears the water already in it, sees its satisfying reflections, Nadia’s “loops of brightness” made even more dazzling by the cathedral colours under the surface. Though darkness breaks further into each day, and up and down the village families are making Christmas garlands, Larry no longer feels cold. His house is dusty and neglected. He’s stopped imitating the way Miriam used to care for it. Let it sit and wait for her. Let it bear the burden of her neglect, not him. He’s forging Aquazure France. He’s doing what was asked of him: beginning again.

  Only his nights are sad. Miriam. Agnès. Neither of them are with him, nor even thinking of him. This suspicion that he’s been let go even from the thoughts of his wife makes him feel small. You can hold people as tenderly in your head as in your arms. He tries his sleep trick, the inventions. But the anxious, commercial, opportunistic Larry of the Aquazure days is going; and gone, with the moderating of his ambitions, is the old knack of inventing that bludgeoned his brain to sleep for so many years. Instead he finds himself remembering Miriam’s habits and gestures. The stern way she looked at herself in the mirror. The old fashioned daily brushing of her hair. Her peculiar wearing of la robe. The way she drove the Granada, sitting bolt upright. The hardness of her chest as if, under her breasts, she was made of steel. Her fat tears. Her unfussy way of waking. Her Ackerman pride. Her eyes in the landscape. The feel of her tongue in his mouth.

  In the direction of Agnès he tries not to glance. But there she is at his mind’s edge: her soft clothes, her skin of an English schoolgirl, her plump hands folding, straightening, gathering, arranging, polishing, patting, smoothing, touching. He’s caught between Miriam’s familiar mouth and Agnès’s unfamiliar caressing hand. What heaven to take both these women in his arms. What peace.

  He’s up as early as Gervaise now, keen to shrug off the hopeless nights. He makes coffee the French way, very strong, with boiled milk, and eats hungrily from the loaves Klaus brings him every second day. He sees the sun come up and the cows come bumping up the lane. He puts on his bleus and feels impatient to start work. Some mornings the frost is so hard he’s afraid he’ll find cracks in the new concrete but the sides are holding. He pats the pool walls like the neck of a faithful horse. Good girl. Keep going. Keep going. The lean-to he’s made for the filter plant is topped out with a smart little roof of coral tiles. As he sits up there, putting them on, he remembers Miriam had a favourite dress of this exact colour.

  Then, one afternoon, the concreting is finished. Klaus looks at the smooth walls, the two sets of perfect, gently curving steps (one set under the main cupola, one in the apsidal chapel) and throws his trowel in the air with joy. “Ich liebe dich, Larry! Ich liebe dich!”

  “Tomorrow we start the mosaic, Klaus.”

  “Oh, my God, this is so wonderful!”

  “We could finish by Christmas.”

  “Look at this! All with our hands!”

  It’s almost dark. Only the faces of the two men stand out palely. With the blue dusk falling on them in their pit, they feel acutely both the ridiculousness and the wonder of their achievement. They sit down at the deep end wall and laugh.

  That evening, after drinking a celebratory schnaps with Klaus, while Mallélou sits and watches the television and ignores them and Gervaise spoons broth into the Maréchal’s fever-cracked mouth, Larry drives down to Mme. Carcanet’s and buys two bottles of vodka. Tonight, a landmark night in the rebirth of Aquazure, he has decided he and Nadia will for once drown their sorrows in style.

  There’s no snotty gulashnova simmering behind the Japanese screen when Larry arrives and Nadia apologises.

  “If you had tell me, my darling, we were celebrating, I could have make you some blinis with salmon eggs.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter, Nadia.”

  “But you know all I have is a little saucisson.”

  “I didn’t come for a meal.”

  “Well, I tell you, I’ll put out the saucisson and we can nobble it.”

  “Nibble, Nadia.”

  “Nibble, nobble, I don’t know you’re so pedantical . . . Now you pour the bloody vodka and I’m tell you some important decision I make.”

  As Larry pours the drinks he remembers that until he met Nadia he’d never even tried vodka. Now, because it’s her one luxury, he’s come to reverence the taste of it. He passes Nadia her glass and raises his own.

  “To us!”

  She looks at him quizzically. “To us, Larry? You think we are coupling?”

  “Well, to you and me, perhaps I should have said. Because we’re the ones here.”

  “And we don’t drink to our absent friends?”

  “If you li
ke.”

  “Well, I think.”

  “To them, then.”

  “Yes. To them. Though I tell you what I’m think this morning when I wake up: I think we never see them again, and you know I feel so desolated I just hug in my bed and not get up.”

  “We will see them again, Nadia.”

  “No. I don’t think.”

  “You mean Hervé and Miriam?”

  “Yes. And not only these two.”

  “You believe Hervé won’t come back from America?”

  “Well, not for Nadia. No one comes back for Nadia, so you know what I decide?”

  “Wait a minute, Nadia. You said you don’t think Miriam’s coming back either?”

  “Oh how can I know, my dear? What’s my feeling? Right or wrong?”

  Larry sits down, takes a sip of vodka, and looks apprehensively at Nadia. She pats her hair and looks away from him out of the uncurtained window. He feels chill, tired suddenly from his day’s labours on the pool.

  “I don’t know why you say that about Miriam, Nadia.”

  “I don’t say. I feel. Maybe that fucking Leni kicks her can and she comes back after all. But I wonder. Because what is take so long, you know?”

  “Her exhibition.”

  “Yes. But this is over now, no?”

  “I can’t remember which night it opened.”

  “So you are forgetting her a little too, Larry. You see? We live for all these days and years with this one person and saying all the time, my dear one, the companion of my life’s trip, and so, and chosing so nice foulards or the favourite confectionery at Christmas and for the birthday, and then what? They are leaving us for the loony bowl or the bed of the mother. And I think when we’re old we’re remembering them and not feeling so happy. We’re finding some old foulard we gave in the bottom drawer and some moths have come and eating holes in the foulard and the so beautiful colours of it are gone . . .”

  “Oh stop it, Nadia!”

  “Well, I just say what is true.”

  “No you don’t. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve hardly given Claude a thought.”

  “But today I find this foulard.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. I find it. I can show you.”

  “Claude’s?”

  “Of course. I don’t have so many men’s things in my drawers.”

  Larry sips to hide his smile.

  “And the scarf had the moth in it?”

  “No. But it’s so thin, you know. Like a moth wing. And so I decide.”

  “Decide what?”

  “That you are right, my friend. On all matters I don’t say, but for this one thing, you are right.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. What am I right about, Nadia?”

  “I must go to see Claude.”

  Larry looks up at her. Her little foxy eyes seem clouded and grave. It’s as if she’s announced her own death.

  “When?” he asks gently.

  “At Christmas. I can buy a new foulard to take. No? But I don’t know if let him wear these things or if they’re so suspicious he hangs himself with it and they take it away. What you think?

  “I don’t know.”

  “I never go there because I have such the fear of the institution, you know. Even in my school, I’m writing my name on my desk and on my peg and every little place that is mine. Nadia Poniatowski. Nadia Poniatowski. Everywhere I can write it. So I won’t lose myself.”

  “Would you like me to come with you, Nadia?”

  “Well, you know, my bean, I would feel so grateful. I don’t persuade. Don’t think.”

  “No. I’ll gladly come with you.”

  “But you don’t imagine we’re on a pic-nic, you know.”

  “What, Nadia?”

  “These adjustment places, they’re so bad, you know.”

  “If they’re so bad, Nadia, why’s Claude left in there?”

  “Oh he’s not knowing, Larry. You ask Claude, is it summer, is it winter and he’s telling you, summer in my ears, winter in my arse, or some nonsense like this. So what’s this place to him? His home, you see. Like Pomerac is yours.”

  Home. Larry picks up the vodka bottle. Home. The only warm light he’s sat in for weeks was the candlelight of Gervaise’s birthday feast. He’s always thought of home as a place kindly lit. His house here is lit like a workshop with cheap strip lights. When they bought it, they never imagined winters in it.

  The theatre is filling up. At the edge of the second row, with Leni’s wheelchair drawn up next to him, Gary keeps glancing behind him to see whether people are still coming in. He wants a good audience and hopes all the press are there, yet inside his green velour suit feels cavernous with apprehension. He wonders if Gabriel’s first speech won’t be too momentous for him: . . . but that I love the gentle Desdemona . . . He fusses with the programme, staring at the director’s name: Piers Duckworth. Piers and Gabriel. Gabriel and Piers. A winged couple. Stars. A spangled future leaving the Wednesday Man behind . . .

  “All right, Gary dear?”

  Leni is pale in her chair. Wrapped in an old fur stole, she reminds Gary of decrepit royalty. Pushing her in, he felt very protective of her, like a loyal equerry. People made way. They were glanced at like celebrities.

  “Yes. Will you be comfortable, do you think?”

  “I like this little theatre, even though the heating’s so poor. What are the costumes like, d’you know?”

  “Oh, basic drapery. Nothing wonderful.”

  “I saw a performance of this play here years ago where they all seemed to be wearing yellow rugs. It was most peculiar.”

  “Designers like to make their marks.”

  “Quite, but what a silly mark to make. Perhaps the thing was sponsored by Colman’s Mustard.”

  “Well, or Bird’s!”

  “Oh yes, Bird’s! I adore custard, you know.”

  The lights begin to go from the auditorium. Leni takes off her gloves and settles them in her lap. She glances anxiously at Gary and slips a parchment hand through his arm.

  “I think, darling,” she whispers to him, “you ought to take off your hat. Or they’ll be prodding you from the row behind.”

  In his nervousness, Gary had forgotten Leni’s “first night present” to him, bought by Miriam, a ’30’s-style trilby, pale grey with a broad brim, the hat to compliment his new haircut. He snatches it off and rests it carefully on his knee. He’s aware of looking modish and fine. The lights are gone now, the darkness settling down round them like a soft bird, Unseen, Gabriel waits, the whole play in his head. Gary marvels. Actors know plays like musicians know symphonies. Every move. Every rill. Today, Billy Skipper had to recite eight lines of Coleridge in assembly and got stuck at line 4. Gabriel’s taken it all into him, to the last syllable. The coal’s mined. Now the fire . . .

  Gary gasps as the fierce lights come up and Roderigo and Iago come on. He’s aware of the actors’ feet very near him. Vulnerable. Actors are flesh. Yet there are flames to go through. Leni’s hand tightens on his velvet arm. He feels boiling hot, slightly sick. Thank heaven Leni’s there. She was the right choice because she’s seen it, she knows it can be got through – Othello in yellow rugs – he must have faith . . .

  He’s glad the first scene’s quite long, preparing him for Othello’s entrance. During it, barely taking in what’s being said, he tries to calm himself with sensible breathing. The actor playing Iago is young, playing him kittenish, spiteful, petty. He moves himself about like a little dark Puck. Yes, Gary thinks, this could be right. It’s the young who show us our worst selves. And he sees himself old, still teaching Conrad, taunted by younger and younger seeming boys.

  But Gabriel’s on now. Beside the puckish Iago he looks huge. His gestures are slow. He’s like a big gold and ebony statue. Gary fears for this slowness. Was it Piers’s idea? Express his slowness to realise he’s being fooled in lazy body movement? The muscle-bound soldier? The gullible Moor? He risks to push out the play’s length. Ga
ry coughs with irritation and looks sadly at Gabriel’s feet, where the pink colour of the soles curves round the toes. Leni takes her hand from his arm and Gary wonders if this isn’t a sign of disapproval, if she won’t say at the interval, “Well, it’s a shame they’ve understood it all wrong.”

  Then Desdemona is sent for. Small and blonde, with earnest pale hands seeking out the touch of Othello constantly, she starts to bring his slow, deliberate gestures into another focus. You feel the Moor’s heat. He’s the dark, bountiful earth where this little fritillary of a woman has planted herself. Already, you weep at his coming rejection of her. They play their present need of each other to perfection: I have but an hour of love . . . You don’t doubt what kind of love this is. Gary starts to marvel at the ease with which his lover can seem to be this woman’s husband. The tenderness, the eyes caressing, the constant touching and holding. The audience are settled now, concentrating. Leni holds herself still and taut. You feel the play begin to catch hold . . .

  There’s no muddling or stumbling. Piers has moved his actors cleanly through the verse. Meanings appear. Buds of meaning fatten to revelation. Cassio is a curly-headed beauty. Puck buzzes his venomous aside like a mosquito . . . as little a web as this will ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. And when at last Iago comes to Othello with his first but terrible: Look to your wife, observe her well with Cassio, Gary is so moved by Gabriel’s look of pain, is so certain that all the weeks spent mining this performance are at last yielding something memorable, that he turns to Leni to retake possession of her hand.

  It’s not very dark in Row B. Light from the stage is reflected in the line of faces looking up. And it’s in this half-light, as of a coming dusk, that Gary sees Leni’s head fallen sideways onto the shoulders of her fur stole, her mouth wide and her tongue gaping, her eyes staring, blind as glass into the empty space above them. The sight of this tears from him a peculiar scream and he’s next aware of what seems to him like a minute of absolute silence. Have the actors stopped talking? There’s a soundless shuffling and turning of heads. A long strand of saliva falls from the corner of Leni’s mouth down onto her fur. Her face is terrible: the witch in the lap of her demon. Gary observes himself lift up his grey hat and cover the face with it. He knows he must get to his feet. Get her out. Ger her out, he instructs himself. Sound returns. He can hear someone running down one of the aisles. On the stage he can hear the cadences of Gabriel’s voice, but not the words. People have left their seats. A posse of heads is staring down at him and at Leni’s dead face covered by his hat. Still he can’t stand up. He’s clinging frantically to the arm of his seat. He thinks he may be going to vomit. The saliva strand . . . the witch in her trance . . . The running stops. A man he doesn’t know asks the posse to go back to their seats. This man’s hands are on Leni’s chair. He seems to have taken charge. Gary can hear his own breathing has a peculiar note to it and breath comes hard. Death suffocates. The witch dies in the dark at the edge of the stage . . . He’s wailing. He can hear it. Leni is wheeled round away from him. A man leans in from the space where the chair was and gently takes his arm, helping him up. So he’s standing now, so tall above all the seated people, it’s as if his legs were six feet long. They gape at him. At his back he hears Gabriel throw himself into his first jealous agonies: She’s gone, I am abused, and my relief must be to loathe her . . . “Let’s go out,” says the stranger holding his arm. Ahead of him, Leni’s being pushed through a door and he sees the hat fall off into her lap. “Mother!” he wails, but she’s gone through the door and the stranger’s grip tightens on his arm “Come on, sir. You’re all right . . .”