The Swimming Pool Season

by Rose Tremain

  So Claude sinks into a chair and Nadia at the window doesn’t move. The door closes, at Claude’s back, on Father le Sueur and Claude knows he’s alone with his piece of ice. “Girls’ hawthorn, spring spires,” he whispers, “all turned to laughter . . .”

  The appearance of Xavier Mallélou in court is set for the coming Monday morning.

  In his obsession with Agnès, he’s pushed to the very remotest corner of his mind the idea that prison will one day separate him from her – a separation he knows his love but not hers will endure. Now, the summons comes. Gervaise pulls his petty-thief’s head to her breast and scolds, “Why potatoes, Xavier? The silliness! The waste!” Mallélou stares at his son and remembers, like a bitter taste in his mouth, his own failure to avenge him. “The stupidity,” he says morosely, “was going to work for a woman.”

  This time Klaus is going with Mallélou and Xavier to Bordeaux – a kind of talisman in Gervaise’s mind, a protector of her son’s fate. She’d go herself, go down on her knees to the magistrate if necessary, promise to keep Xavier on the right side of the law, but she can’t leave the cows and she can’t leave the Maréchal. Enthroned in the Heidelberg bed, the old man is doing brave battle with his infantile disease. He knows, however, and has told her as much, that without Gervaise he would die. In his increasingly confused and fevered brain, Gervaise is actually, with her woman’s strength, with her knowledge of animals’ ailments, fighting the poisons in his blood. He can’t spare her, not even for her son.

  The thought that Xavier may leave tomorrow for Bordeaux and not return is like a ghost in the household, the ghost they all see and none admit to. Only the Maréchal mumbles from his pillows, “Say goodbye to him, Gervaise, and hope for nothing. Our idiocies are punished the hardest. That’s a thing I’ve learnt.”

  On Saturday, Xavier’s head is filled, bloated, with a single idea: he wants one night – the whole night, not just one hour of it – with Agnès, a memory of normality and tenderness and passion with dignity to sustain him through his months of shambling round the prison yard, of listening to those no-hopers crying.

  After supper, while Mallélou and Klaus settle down to the television and Gervaise is upstairs collecting the Maréchal’s tray, he says casually, “I’m going to see someone. I’m taking the car,” and before Mallélou can turn his attention to him, he’s out into the yard, running past the inquisitive necks of the Christmas geese and reversing the fourgon very fast up the lane past Larry’s house which lies in darkness.

  He drives past the waterfall with his fear and nervousness increasing. Will Agnès be alone in the house? Was it yesterday Dr. Prière left for Florida? Instead of loving him, will she simply say, “I’m sorry, Xavier. We can’t meet here.” Will he, before he leaves her, be forced to tell her where he’s going? The pale drive comes into view. The car swings. The yellow headlights bound up on the laurels that border the drive. Xavier feels invaded with longing and with fear. How easy, how sweet life was for those two students in their room full of books . . .

  A light is on in a downstairs room as Xavier draws up on the gravel. When he gets out and stands listening in the dark, he can hear, faintly, piano music. Agnès once talked about her playing, told him she might have had a career. He stays listening, shivering by the front door, before he reaches out and rings the bell. Below him, Hervé’s garden seems to fall away off the hill. The night snatches at shapes and bears them away.

  More lights come on. Now Xavier can see, in the dim hall, the suits of armour worn by the ancestors of Agnès. These cruel, visored generations of men seem to announce to him: “She’s not for the likes of you. Never.” He’s hunched against the cold and against the spectre of his love flying away into these hollow bodies of soldiers when the door is opened and Hervé stands above him.

  “Yes?”

  The piano music goes on, louder now.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you . . .” Xavier’s voice is hopeless, faltering.

  Hervé crushes him. “Who are you?”

  “A friend of Agnès’s. Can I see her please?”

  “No. You can’t. She’s gone. Who are you? Don’t I recognise you? Aren’t you Mallélou’s boy?”

  “Yes. That’s Agnès playing, isn’t it?”

  “I told you. Agnès isn’t here. She returned to Paris yesterday. Sooner than planned.”

  “But that’s her playing . . . I can hear her.”

  “No that is not her playing. She doesn’t, alas, play that well. That is the very fine Mexican pianist, Murray Perahia, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12, Opus No. K.414. Agnès is with her family in Paris.”

  Hervé interprets Xavier’s dumb expression of pain as a look of disbelief and offers politely but coldly: “Come in and see for yourself,” and holds the door open for him. But Xavier shakes his head. He doesn’t want to smell the polish and the dust and the old varnish of her dead relations. She’s his girl. She belongs in his arms. The smell of her is his.

  “Is she . . .”

  “What?”

  “Is she . . .” he knows the answer but he asks the question anyway – the peasant in him hoping the poor dying calf won’t die – “ . . . coming back?”

  Hervé, sensing his distress perhaps, smiles his practised doctor’s smile: “No, no. I shouldn’t think so. She’s getting married in the New Year.”

  “Ah,” says Xavier, “ah.” And, still staring at the row of metal breastplates, he stumbles backwards into the night.

  When Mallélou has turned off the television, while Gervaise boils milk for their night drinks, Klaus tugs on his bulky anorak and tells Gervaise, “Just going to have a look at the mosaic,” and goes out past the animals settling in their warm straw, past Larry’s silent walls and round his garden to the pool.

  The clouds have drifted away and a brilliant three-quarter moon is up. Klaus’s huge shadow is just visible on the pool floor. He stares at his work. More than any loaf or extravagant patisserie he’s ever made, this confection with the shimmery black and white and silver pieces of mosaic makes him feel proud. He’s completed one set of steps and is halfway round to the second set.

  “Meine Kathedrale,” he murmurs, “meine wunderliche Kathedrale!”

  He turns and is about to walk back into the house when he notices the old fourgon parked at the top of the lane and sees, in the bright moonlight, Xavier resting his head on the wheel. He hesitates before deciding to go the car. Xavier has kept his love affair with Agnès secret from Gervaise and Mallélou, but Klaus saw it begin and it’s to him that Xavier has confided, “This is the only girl I’ve met I feel love for.” That this message has passed, in the warm darkness of the featherbed, from Klaus to Gervaise is something only they know. Day by day Gervaise has watched her son and said nothing.

  “Xavier,” Klaus calls softly in the lane.

  Xavier looks up, startled. He waits without moving for Klaus to come to the car. The German bends slightly and his big face fills the small side window like a portrait in a frame. Xavier’s staring straight ahead. He seems abstracted, ghostly in the peculiar light, filled with his trouble.

  “Open the window, Xavier.”

  “She’s gone, Klaus. Without telling me. Without saying goodbye. She’s gone back to Paris.”

  “Can’t you open the window?”

  “I suppose I should have known. I’m so stupid. I don’t seem to know a thing. Why does everything go wrong?”

  Hearing this indistinctly, Klaus opens the opposite door of the fourgon and crouches by Xavier in the manner of an athlete limbering up. Xavier’s face is white and his thumbs are repetitively moving up and down the inside rim of the steering wheel.

  “Are you telling me this great love is finished?”

  “Not in me it isn’t. It never will be . . .”

  “Yet she’s gone? Back to the army boy?”

  “Yes. I wanted to marry her, Klaus. She could have saved me.”

  The squatting position isn’t comfortable for Klaus who, in h
is meaty legs, has the beginnings of varicose veins. He straightens up. He looks behind him at the mosaic rim of the pool so glorious under the night sky and feels a tremor of fear that this work of his could, like Xavier’s affair, be suddenly and brutally ended. He sighs and looks back at Xavier.

  “I’m so sad for this thing,” he says, shaking his head. “Love is few.”

  For Nadia and Larry, it’s been a strange day. After Rouigny, they drove north-west to Montreuil in silence, Nadia’s fluffy head turned stubbornly away from Larry, the brown of her sorrow for Claude in close harmony with the flat, brown fields going past her. Larry took her to a good restaurant he remembered from his years of journeying to and from the Boulogne hoverport. They sat down in a comfortable, crowded room and Larry ordered kir and chose a rich meal for her, and she tried to coax the brown in her head into warmer colours and her little short hand reached past the vase of flowers on the table and touched his and she said in a voice full of gratitude, “I don’t know you are so caring of me, my bean, but now you teach me.” Yet the colours in her head wouldn’t change.

  After lunch, they drove to Boulogne beach and stared into the wind and heard the sea thunderous on the shingle and he thought of England and Miriam but didn’t speak of either. They drove back to Arras in the dark and the fair, when they got there, had started up and the empty square was hectic with light and machinery and music and shouting and even the hotel bar was full of people.

  They retreated to their rooms, neither hungry after the Montreuil lunch, and lay on their beds and tried to read. But the noise of the fair and its thumping multicoloured lights invaded their small, side-by-side spaces and the silences of the day seemed to Nadia wrong, hostile, a travesty of friendship. If strangers could make such a din, right there in her room, surely it was better to talk through it or under it, to shout with it, even, to let herself go. Larry would understand and forgive her. She couldn’t keep the visit to Claude locked in her for ever.

  So now, towards eight o’clock in the evening, Nadia puts down her book, pats her hair, steps into her shoes, takes her key and goes out into the passage and knocks on Larry’s door. He’s not surprised she’s come. He’s been down to the bar and bought a bottle of vodka. When he hears her knock, he’s glad.

  He pours the vodka into tooth-glasses. Outside, numbers are being announced through a microphone – a lottery. There’s a sad, mischievous gremlin in Larry that wants to laugh till he cries. Today he stood and stared at the flat, dull grey horizon which, further off, was England. The gulls shrieked of their journeys there. Larry threw stones into the sea. One stone for each thing he’d lost.

  There’s only one chair in the room. When Larry has poured the vodka, Nadia sits down on this and he goes back to the bed. Nadia caresses the rim of the tumbler, staring down into it.

  “Nadia,” says Larry gently, “what happened today is between you and Claude. You don’t have to tell me, or anyone.”

  “No,” says Nadia, “I want.”

  Larry sips his drink, waits. After a moment, Nadia says: “I think I was imagine he’s not remembering me. You know? I think I was hoping. Because I am the one who must decide, after he has so many years of depression and therapy, I am the one who’s signing the paper for Rouigny. The guilty one. The jail-maker. The ‘screw’ you’re calling this. Me. Nadia the screw.

  “But of course he is remember. Nadia, he says. So many times over. Nadia, Nadia, Nadia, like in the language laboratory you repeat what the voice is asking: voulez-vous des tomates, voulez-vous des tomates . . . You know? Till you think these fucking tomates, I can’t never eat one again!

  “I gave him those presents – my paté and my foulard. I put the foulard round his neck but it’s looking so silly, you know, with this baggy clothes they put on him, I don’t think this was so good a present. And he’s starting to cry then and asking me, how’s Pomerac, how is my houses, how is the old man making baskets? Imagine these questions! I’m so amaze. All these years I think, oh well so Claude’s forgetting everything. Forgetting what is Christmas or who was his mother, forgetting to tie the tie or what is the colour of a post box or where is America. But I’m so wrong. He’s not just remembering Nadia, Nadia, Nadia, but Pomerac too and asks me, do you taking care of my houses! And all this time he’s getting these tears in his eyes and so staring at me, I just pray this Father astrologer is coming back with the tea. But he doesn’t come. We’re just alone. I don’t know what I do, my dear, I’m so sorrowful for him and I feel so bad I’m signing those papers and my God, you should see what he’s look like in these terrible clothes and this hair so white and standing there in my foulard, I want to cry and cry. I try to ask him, how you are Claude, and what do these monks teach you, but then all he tells me is, Nadia, Nadia, I’m going to be the first one to be told when it’s over. So I ask, what is over because I think he’s meaning when he can come out and go back into this life, but he’s not mean this, he’s explaining me, I’m going to be the first one or the second one to know about the end of the world. So then I can’t help it. Though I’m try so hard, I just cry for him, my bean, I can’t help. I’m try and try but I’m so full of sadness, I can’t stop these tears, so he’s coming to me and wiping my face with the bloody foulard and really I think, my God, this fucking human race is so sad disaster . . .”

  Nadia wipes her eyes with her sleeve and gulps her drink. Larry watches her, nodding silently, and feels the only way to blanket his own grief is to give her as much as he can in the way of comfort, to let his understanding touch her, stroke her, caress her, calm her. We’re like a little tribe of two, he thinks. The jungle savages us. We lick each others’ wounds.

  “Come here, Nadia,” he says softly. And he opens his arms to her. She looks up in surprise, but she doesn’t pause to question what he’s asking. Wiping the smudged blue mascara from her eyes, she moves to the bed and lies down and feels Larry’s warmth and his arms bring her to a kind of shelter.

  “My bean,” she says with laughter. “You are so wonderful!”

  The following morning, Sunday, Mallélou dresses himself with the shutters closed on a damp, misty day and shivers as he thinks of the journey to come and the courtroom and the lawyers’ jargon designed to confuse the likes of him and the terrible future lurking in the city for his son. He fumbles with the stiff buttonholes of his fly. All this agony seems to lie there, in his balls, this one, vulnerable part of him taking the pain of the whole. And why can’t he ever get warm these days? Stupidly, he envies the Maréchal his body’s fever. His own bones are as freezing as railway iron.

  Klaus and Xavier are tired. After the nightly ritual of Gervaise’s hot drinks, they stayed at the table and the “sentimental” schnaps was poured on Xavier’s heart and he was forced to be content with this and with Klaus’s kitchen-wisdom because this was all, on this night of betrayal, there was to cling to. They talked till one or two in the morning. Upstairs, the Maréchal coughed and wheezed. Klaus said there was often more learning in the actions of others than in our own bêtises. Watching these, you became a better judge of character. “Next time, Xavier, you’ll see what a girl wants of you when you screw her. You’ll see it in her eyes.”

  “I don’t want any more girls,” Xavier said bleakly. “I can’t love the others.”

  There was no real comfort in the talk, but it helped Xavier through the night. He snatched at sleep, afraid to dream of his lost girl. Now, it’s the morning of departure and he knows that Pomerac will go from his life yet again, only taking him back in some distant, obscure future. “It’s over,” he says silently as he stares at the cold, shrouded day. “It’s over.” This time, Pomerac was Agnès. His love. He tells Gervaise as they sit down to breakfast: “Even if they let me off, Maman, I’m not coming back.”

  “Not for Christmas?” she asks.

  “No, Maman. I can’t this year. I can’t.”

  “Well,” she says sadly, “we’ll miss you.”

  He wants to say goodbye to the Maréchal, but
the old man is sleeping when he goes in. Xavier stands at the door and stares at him. La Comedie Humaine, Larry Kendal calls him. In his parchment cheeks is the faint dimpling of a smile. Dead bodies smile, someone told him during a game of Babyfoot; it’s the fixing of the facial muscles. But the Maréchal isn’t gone yet. His ancient chest rises and falls. The white stubble on his chin is as lively as mustard-seed.

  “Wish me luck, old man,” Xavier mutters, “and if your luck holds, then lend us the fine.”

  He chooses to see in the Maréchal’s tranquil-seeming sleep a hopeful sign. He was a prisoner-of-war. He survived.

  Gervaise with her peasant’s pride, with a strange reserve, has never chosen to make a fuss over departures. Time and nature take things, animals, people from you. If you learn nothing else from the seasons, you learn about change. Though she’s planned her Christmas dinner and this year saw, in her mind’s eye, Xavier on one side of her, Klaus on the other, she lets her son go with two light kisses, saying only, as he picks up the tied-together suitcase, “God be with you, Xavier.” He will never, in the days to come, be far from her thoughts. But he knows this. She doesn’t have to tell him. If he needed proof of her love, it’s in the sending of Klaus, her big golden angel, to watch over him. And when her thin arms go round Klaus’s neck to kiss him goodbye, she whispers urgently to him, “Pray for him, Klaus.”

  With breakfast over and Xavier’s suitcase packed, there’s no point in lingering. Mallélou says to Xavier, “You drive the car, boy. It’s too far for me.” And the tired man climbs into the back of the fourgon and sits on his bony arse among the chaff. He wears his ancient railwayman’s winter coat. Xavier and Klaus get in. Gervaise stands at the yard gate, with her chickens pecking near her legs, and takes out her handkerchief and waves bravely, cheering them away.

  It’s in the course of this day – while Miriam’s cable lies on the mat by Nadia’s front door and in England flowers are arriving for Leni’s funeral – that Nadia and Larry make the long drive back to Pomerac.