by Rose Tremain
They arrive after dark, Nadia so filled with her memories of Claude and with the sweet comforts of the night that followed her visit to Rouigny, she feels that days and days have passed since she left her flat. She almost expects to find dust on all the surfaces and mould on the tangerines in their glass bowl.
As they take the Pomerac lane, Nadia reaches out and touches Larry’s face. “I like if you spend one night in my flat, my darling. You want?”
“Yes, I want,” says Larry.
His loving of Nadia has distanced him from his miseries. He feels strong today and at peace. He acknowledges a peculiar gratitude towards Claude.
Nadia picks up the letters on her mat and puts them down on her table while she switches on her fire, draws the curtains, searches her fridge and her cupboard for the ingredients of a little meal.
“I have a small jar of salmon eggs. You like this, my dear? And then I can make some omelette. Okay for you?”
“Excellent, Nadia.”
“Now, where is the vodka you are bringing the other night? I think we drink to our friendship which is a little altered. No?”
It’s while searching for the vodka that she notices the blue cablegram. She considers, for the briefest second, just to make sure Larry stays with her tonight, hiding it, letting tomorrow take care of it, but she doesn’t do this. She passes it to him in silence. He stares at his name on it in disbelief, then with mingled fear and hope.
“So,” Nadia says quietly, “Miriam sends you at last.”
He opens it quickly, not wanting to give the moment too much reverence. Joltingly, he reads: Leni died last night. Have been trying to telephone. Please come at once. I love you and need you. Miriam.
Nadia stares at him, holding her breath. Last night she thought as she lay with him in the funfair flickering light, at last someone comes to me. At last I’m not alone. Now, as Larry looks up from the cable, his face slightly flushed, she knows he’s about to be taken from her.
“It’s Miriam coming back, my dear?”
“No. Leni’s dead. She wants me to go to England.”
Not tonight, not tonight, my dear bean, thinks Nadia . . .
“You won’t go tonight?”
“Of course not. Tomorrow or Tuesday.”
“Well . . . I’m so happy for you, my darling. What an upturn! At last she’s pushing up the sod, this fucking woman. But how silly, you know. Yesterday, we were at Boulogne. You could have took the ferry and now be with Miriam.”
“Yes, it is strange. The way things occur is often peculiar.”
“Can I read your cable?”
“Of course.”
Larry hands Nadia the torn blue paper.
The words I love you stare out at her, yet her mind is still warmed, soothed with Larry’s tendernesses towards herself. Her life has in it, she decides, the cruelties of Eden.
“So she is loving you again, Larry. You deserve this. How you deserve! Let me kiss you, my darling, because I think you are so kind a man, so helping and redeeming of Nadia. Whatever happen, I will be grateful. You know?”
“I’ve done nothing, Nadia. Only what I wanted to do. You’re lovely.”
She sits on his knee and he presses a long kiss on her fine little mouth. In bed, she’s like a doll, a painting, so round and smooth and small. But even as he holds her and feels her tongue come probing his, he’s remembering the big bony body of his wife. Miriam, Miriam, say these gestures of love, says the hardening of his cock under Nadia’s perky bottom, Miriam wait for me!
On Tuesday afternoon, near to the time that Larry’s boarding the Bordeaux flight to London, Mme. de la Brosse walks up the lane to his house and knocks on his door. Getting no reply, she picks her way round to the back and stands still as a ghost looking down at the swimming pool.
No, she thinks, no, no, no. The effrontery. The presumption. To live in Pomerac, you must obey its old ways, not invent new. “The English,” she mutters: “No taste.” She’s a strong Gaullist. She liked the way de Gaulle kept humiliating Wilson. “Non, alors non,” she repeats.
She’s heard the Maréchal is ill. Her sense of herself as “head” of the village dictates that she visit him. She goes round to Gervaise’s gate and calls above the noise of the birds, “Madame Mallélou!”
Gervaise is in her kitchen, resting by sitting still in a straight-backed chair, waiting for one more day to pass, waiting for news of Xavier and for the return of Klaus. Hearing the call, she straightens her apron and goes out into her yard.
“Ah,” says Mme. de la Brosse, “I was told our poor Maréchal is with you. I wanted to call. I’ve brought him a little Turkish Delight – from my bonbonnier in Paris – for when he’s well.”
“Come in, Madame” says Gervaise, “and please forgive my untidiness. My family have gone to Bordeaux.”
“Oh yes? And it seems Mr. Kendal’s away too, is he?”
“Yes. Today, he went. His wife’s mother’s passed on. I don’t know when they’ll be back.”
“Ah. I see.”
“Have you seen the pool, Madame?”
“Yes, I have.”
“So courageous, we think he is.”
“Courageous, you think?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s a point of view. Now let’s see our old soldier and give him these sweets.”
Gervaise feels anxious as she goes in front of Mme. de la Brosse up the stairs, hating the smell of perfume at her back. Outside the Maréchal’s door, she says firmly, “Let me go in first, Madame. He likes me to tidy him up before visitors see him.”
“Oh naturally. I’ll wait outside.”
He’s asleep and dreaming of Eulalie. She squats in a mustard field, her plaited hair loose and starting out strangely from her head. She smiles and waves a pale hand at the acres of nodding yellow flowers. “Piss!” she announces. “Fields of piss.” She’s young. In his dreams and in his wandering mind, Eulalie gets younger and younger. “I am her bridegroom,” he sometimes says out loud.
Gervaise bends over him. Since the early morning, his temperature has been high. His face on the pillows is falling back, sucked inwards towards the skull, and Gervaise blames herself for this sudden deterioration: too much of her strength has fled to Bordeaux with Xavier and Klaus; the little that’s left may not be enough to keep the old man alive.
Snoring there, he looks so deeply asleep she doesn’t want to wake him. Not for Mme. de la Brosse and her futile sweets. Yet gently, she does. Obedience to Pomerac’s hierarchy comes as easily, as naturally to Gervaise as the opening phrase of the Our Father. She puts out a hand to the Maréchal’s face and says: “Forgive me, Maréchal. Forgive me this once for waking you . . .”
But he’s glad to leave his peculiar dream of Eulalie in the mustard field, to see Gervaise and the calm white walls of the room.
“Mon dieu . . .” he says.
“Let’s sit you up a little.”
“They torment you, dreams.”
“Come on, mon vieux, let’s sit you up.”
“What’s happened, Gervaise?”
“Nothing. Madame de la Brosse has come to see you. She’s brought you something.”
The stretched face collapses into a smile. “Not a pencil box!”
“No, no . . .”
“That’s what they used to give – books and pencil boxes.”
“I know, Maréchal.”
“But I never had much learning. Not me.”
“All right, are you? Shall I show her in?”
“My breath stinks, Gervaise. That’s death for you.”
“Ssh . . .”
“You stay, Gervaise.”
“No. She wants to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t ask.”
She doesn’t stay very long. When Gervaise goes up to the room again, the gift-wrapped box of candy has been placed on his feet. He’s staring at it, moving it up and down like a little pink boat.
“Why’s the h
ouse so quiet, Gervaise?”
“Well, Klaus and Mallélou aren’t back.”
“Something’s happening, Gervaise. I don’t trust this quiet.”
“Nothing’s happening here, Maréchal. And Xavier –”
“Keep a watch out, Gervaise.”
“What?”
“I feel it.”
“You must sleep, Maréchal. I’m sorry to have woken you.”
“Don’t blame me, Gervaise.”
“Blame you?”
“If something happens. Don’t think I caused it.”
“You’re safe here. Quite safe.”
“It’s not me I’m afraid for.”
She removes the sweet box from his feet and sets it by him on a table. At this moment Xavier could be riding to prison with the police light turning.
“Is it . . .” she asks as she straightens the Maréchal’s blankets, “is it Xavier?”
But he only stares at her helplessly, his eyes glassy with fever and through his pale lips repeats: “It’s not me who’s to blame.”
She goes back to the kitchen, feeling cold, and banks up the fire. Tired from her worries, she makes a soup for her supper and stands over it, hugging the kitchen-warmth to her.
At five, she forces herself out into the freezing dark to milk the cows, disliking this task, on this day, more than she’s ever done and promising herself, in some kindly future, the modern milking parlour she’s so often imagined. If a pool can come to Pomerac, then any miracle can occur. Though Mallélou is useless now, old long before his time, she and Klaus will work and save for the milking parlour. Then, in her old age, there won’t be this ritual. “I will,” she says to the warm udders, “have earned the rest.”
When she comes in, the milking done, the churns lugged to the bottom of the hill for collection by the de la Brosse milk pasteurising company, she goes up again to the Maréchal’s room, listens for a moment to his snores, then returns to the kitchen, eats her soup, parks her body in its straight chair and is lulled quickly to an exhausted sleep by the warmth of the soup in her belly and the grey, flickering coming and going of subtitles on an American TV movie. It’s a movie about truckers. A vast convoy of juggernauts rolls in to a mid-western town. In a grinding of gears and a scream of engines the trucks smash up the town to set free a prisoner. The noise fills Gervaise’s head and wakes her. She opens her eyes, stares at the screen. The revving trucks remind her of the huge sewage tankers thundering down the Ste. Catherine road and of her time on the edge of the city. “God save my son,” she thinks and closes her eyes again and sleeps and the noise of trucks goes on in her head.
Upstairs, the Maréchal wakes and hears the convoy and feels relieved, for a moment or two, that the house is filled with noise and no longer with silence. But then, outside his window, he sees a light. This room looks out onto the edge of Larry’s garden, not onto the lane and the Maréchal questions the existence of this light beyond the thin curtains. Unless, they’ve moved me, he thinks. But the room with the painted bed is familiar in all its detail. Even the pink box of Turkish Delight is there on the table. He stares at it, remembering the tight features of Mme. de la Brosse as she sat tidily on a chair, out of reach of his breath, talking about community responsibility and her friend the Mayor . . .
“Gervaise!” he calls urgently, “Gervaise!”
He waits. He knows the noise is too loud and she hasn’t heard him. He looks back at the window. The light jolts, recedes, returns. He measures the distance from his bed to the window: three metres perhaps. He can’t walk three metres. For his feeble excretions Gervaise brings a flat pan and sits him on it. He’ll never leave his bed.
“Gervaise!”
He wants to pummel the floor. Though he tries to call loudly, he knows his voice is feeble. But then he hears her coming, her sabots on the wooden stairs, a galumphing tread for this thin woman. She flies in to the room, one side of her face red where it’s rested against the chair, her eyes wide and startled.
“What is it, Maréchal? You need the pan?”
“Look, Gervaise!”
He points a frail finger at the window.
“What?”
“Lights. Something happening. I told you . . .”
“What is it?”
“Go and look. I can’t tell what it is.”
She’s at the window. It’s panes are icy, frost forming at the edges. Out in the night she sees two lamps like searchlights moving close to the ground. They shine towards her, moving forwards at first then stopping. Downstairs the television is still noisy but now she can hear, outside where the lights are, what sounds like tractor engines. Her breath frosts the glass. She rubs impatiently at it. She thinks, Pray to God I’m dreaming. Pray to God it’s part of the television dream – Robert X, the man even Klaus admires, altering lives . . .
But she’s out of the Maréchal’s room and down the stairs in her clogs and snatching up her coat before the Maréchal, his heart full of fear, has time to implore her one more time, “Don’t blame me, Gervaise!” He twists in the bed and stares helplessly at his door left ajar. His feverish brain remembers with shame the blue spruce tree.
Run, Gervaise urges herself, as the night cold fastens itself round her . . . up the lane, turn left past Larry’s house, over the rubble-strewn garden round to the back . . . run and it will still be there, smooth, pale, silent, its mosaic shimmery even in the darkness, waiting for summer, waiting for the water . . . But she knows she’s too late. She knows, of course, as she stands and watches the digger moving backwards and forwards and the vast mounds of earth go tumbling in, that all the months of Larry’s work are brought to nothing – the reward (yes, the same one they gave her in the city) the reward for his struggle to belong – and that within seconds, as she scrambles in her clogs over the frosty mud, Klaus’s foolish vision of a black and white cathedral will be obliterated by the terrible tireless clay of Pomerac – earth returning to earth, a burial.
She stands and weeps. Upstairs in his agony, the Maréchal picks up the box of Turkish Delight and hurls it with all his strength at the window.
Larry lies in his wife’s arms and pretends to sleep.
I have missed, Miriam thinks as she holds him, the weight of Larry. Leni’s element was air while she breathed: words fluttering off, like paper or leaves. Dr. O.’s is fire: his scarlet longing spilling over like lava. But Larry’s is earth: his close-packed legs, his patient ploughing of his dreams. With Leni gone – a speck now, Leni’s life like a kite miles up in the blank white sky – she’s felt a longing to be taken back by Larry, to be held down as he holds her now, his woolly heavy head on her breast and shoulder. What had made her long for him in recent days was not merely Leni’s going, but a sudden fear that the vain ringing and ringing of Nadia’s telephone somehow signalled a withdrawal of his love for her. No less than you deserve, she told herself. You withdrew your love for a time. Now he’s punishing you. When, finally, she had heard his voice on the telephone, she had wanted to say to him, Please try to forgive me.
Carefully and with a quiet feeling of excitement, she had moved herself out of the child’s bedroom and spread her things round the guest room as if in a hotel, enjoying its luxury. Larry was on his way. She was free to love him generously now, no part of her withheld in obedience to Leni. She expected to feel old at Leni’s death. Instead she felt free. The snow ceased and began to thaw. Flowers and cards started arriving. Gary stayed in his room and cried silently to Ella Fitzgerald. And eventually, inevitably, Dr. O. turned up.
Looking grave, he came into the hall, stood staring not at Miriam but at the three-quarter moon face on the grandfather clock and started to say how he felt, at this death, empty handed.
“What do you mean, Dr. O.?” said Miriam. He was wearing a dark suit. He held himself apart from her, stiff and formal. His poor pasty face seemed painted with sadness.
“I wanted,” he said forlornly, “to offer something to Leni. She seemed to ask it. The thing I wanted to
offer most was my love for you . . .”
“Please don’t say that, Dr. O.,” said Miriam more brusquely than she intended, “I’ve told you very often this isn’t possible.”
“Yes. I know. I know. Don’t worry. I’m not going to pester you any more. It’s just that, without this, I do . . . well . . . feel I can’t come to the funeral because I have nothing to offer. Do you understand?”
“No,” said Miriam. “Not really. Because offering anything isn’t important now. Send flowers if you like. But even that . . . She won’t see them, will she?”
“I admired her so,” he said with despair.
“Yes, I know you did,” Miriam said more gently.
“She once taught me to dance, you know,” said Dr. O. and stared forlornly down at his weighty pelvis. “I should have kept on with dancing.”
“As an offering?” Miriam said spitefully and Dr. O. looked up, hearing the acid in her voice.
“Yes,” he said, “as something.”
Now Larry opens his eyes and finds, very close to them, a hank of Miriam’s hair. He gazes at it, counting the grey threads. His mind travels to Nadia’s blonde head, a head so tiny he seemed able to hold it to him with his palm. She’ll be alone now in Pomerac, poor Nadia, making tea, turning on the little fire, remembering Claude, remembering Arras and the fair outside the window and him . . .
This thought makes him feel suffocated, slightly breathless. He props himself up and watches Miriam’s face. She smiles at him – the smile he thought he’d lost. I want to be strong for her, he thinks. He flicks away the spectre of Nadia to the furthest corner of his mind. Nadia’s so light and insubstantial, its not difficult to push her away. Larry’s finger touches Miriam’s brow, still hot after his hungry, celebratory embraces, a love-feast so abundant it reminded them both of their first years together. It was their passion which defied Leni then, just as now, on the day before her funeral, it’s their passion which buries her.
“Bitch!” he says suddenly. “Why did you stay away so long?”
“Well, it was good I did.”
“Why?”
“Because look at you – you’re well again.”