The Swimming Pool Season

by Rose Tremain

  Xavier Mallélou is back in his old room in the city. The students next door have gone to their families for Christmas and he finds on his table an envelope containing two keys – the key to his own room and the key to theirs. A note in clear, energetic handwriting reads: Thanks for the loan of your room. We had a party one night and several of your glasses got broken. As recompense, please use our room till Jan 3rd if you want, but make sure no books or records are taken.

  It’s cold in the building. He goes down to the communal telephone in the hall and calls Pozzo’s number. He must get out to one of the warm bars, order some oysters, start tapping the grapevine for some work, any kind of work, something to keep him fed while he tries to sort out his life. Pozzo doesn’t answer. Xavier fingers the cash in his pocket, almost a thousand francs – money he’s earned working on the pool. He must try to make it last. It’ll soon go if he starts treating Pozzo and his friends. But he needs their company. In the bar-talk, he’ll start to forget Agnès. Crazy-headed virgin. Cunt of a debutante. Love is for the middle classes. Romantic crap. Forget it. Get yourself laid, Xavier. Get a piece of hard-working city arse. Ride that till it doesn’t hurt any more. Forget the river. Forget that time you first saw her in the church. Forget your pathetic high-and-mighty notions of dignity. Dignity. Humanity. They’re just words. Life’s about making it through. Get a job. Get a woman. Forget her.

  He can’t manage it yet, though. There and then in the dark hallway by the pay-phone, he remembers the sweet smell of her, that beautiful, sad sweet scent of her hair, her breasts, her breath, her cunt. He closes his eyes. Above them is the drip-drip of the winter forest. Her skin, lit by pale sunlight, is as fine as the skin of a child.

  He goes back to his room and lies down on his bed which the students have left made and tidy. How can he forget her? Just the smell of her will haunt him all his life. He’d give his future for a night in her bed. Go and find her, says his terrible longing. Get on the Paris train. Kidnap her. Snatch her out of her society wedding. Marry her. But then he remembers the suits of armour, her ancestors staring at him from Hervé Prière’s hall, they in the warm house, polished and oiled and tended, he with the night at his back, out in the cold. To go to Paris would be futile. Just a waste of his precious money. When he got there, if he even found where she lived, there’d be some grand stairway to climb, some smart brass bell to ring. She’d stare at him coldly, like she’d stare at a florist’s driver come to bring her flowers. “Go away, Xavier,” she’d say. “It’s over. Can’t you understand?”

  With the students gone, it’s silent in the sooty apartment block, as if he’s the only person left in it. Perhaps even Pozzo and his other friends have gone away for Christmas. Christmas is in all the shops – big, lighted displays of chocolates and wristwatches and leathergoods and toys. Tinsel and trees and dyed greenery outside the flowershops and in the markets. Everyone shoving and spending. Old women pushing home jars of expensive liquor-soaked fruit, whole cheeses, tins of paté in plastic wheeled baskets. Carol music through megaphones tied to the lamp-posts. A one-legged man selling wrapping paper from a clothes horse on a street corner. Christmas all around. In Xavier’s cruel imagining, Agnès puts on her coat and her gloves and goes shopping for expensive presents for Luc. “You’ve left me nothing,” he wants to say to her, “not even my strength. Just a memory. A feeling of pain.”

  Though he’s heard them, so close to him on the other side of the wall, he’s never been inside the students’ room. For something to do, something to take his mind off his hopeless yearnings, he takes the key they’ve left him and, with a slight sense of being an intruder, a voyeur, opens their door. In size, the room is almost identical to his, but it faces out to the street and has a tall balcony window curtained in rough-weave, brightly coloured fabric. Similar fabric covers the bed. Shiny cushions are bunched against the wall and make the bed seem like a wide couch. A desk with a worklamp has been placed in front of the window and by the desk an umbrella stand has been filled with tall dried flowers. On all the available wallspace – even above the bed – bookshelves have gone up and these are crammed with books and papers and records and a Japanese stereo system. The kitchen corner – in his room greasy and dirty – is clean and tidy. More dried flowers have been hung up here. There’s a spice rack and a vegetarian calendar and a shelf of pretty china jars. Xavier stares at it. Compared to this, his own room is a dingy hole. And just as he used to envy the students their contented love, so now he envies them their ability to transform their room. There are ten days till they come back. He walks to their bed and sits down on it, fingering the satin cushions. I’ll move in, he decides.

  There’s no point in fetching his things. He hasn’t got much, anyway. His clothes can stay where they are. He turns on all the lamps and lights the gas fire and the room seems cosier and warmer than any room he’s ever slept in. He thumps the bed. He feels happy. For ten minutes, in his pleasure at the room, he hasn’t thought about Agnès. He sits down at the desk. Papers and notepads are arranged tidily on it. Pencils and pens are stuck into a glass jar. He takes up a biro, the only kind of pen he’s familiar with, and writes on a blank, lined sheet the word Begin. He underlines it.

  He goes to bed without his oysters, without phoning Pozzo again. He goes to bed hungry and light in his head with relief that he’s here in this peculiar room that smells of paper and joss sticks and not, thank Jesus, thank Mary, thank the plaster-of-Paris Christ at Ste. Catherine, in a cell, covered with a grey blanket, shitting his prison-issue pyjamas with fear at all the hopeless days to come. The pain of Agnès is sharp, a deep wound. In prison, though, it’d be ten times worse. Here, he won’t die of it; there, he might have died.

  Near sleep, he thinks of his mother, Gervaise. Her trust in him. Her loyalty. Her refusal to criticise or condemn. She’d be proud of me, he decides, if she came to visit me in a room like this. She’d see I was getting on, making something of my life. I’d make her a nice meal in that clean kitchen space and explain to her very patiently all the things I’m studying: the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, the fall of the Tsar in Russia, the conduct of the English Revolution I never knew existed till a short while ago . . .

  He dreams, of course, of his lost girl. He’s brought her to Bordeaux and they’re walking arm in arm in the smart middle of the city. I’m hungry, she tells him, so he steers her towards an expensive restaurant where, in its soft light, she will say to him: “Take your shoe off, Xavier, and make me come with your foot, under the table.” They start to run. He can feel, at his shoulder, her desire for him. They run and run, but the restaurant recedes. When they get there, it’s Mme. Motte’s greasy place and she starts to bray at them: “Pigs! Animals! Scum!” And he wakes, full of tribulation.

  It’s the middle of the night. The streetlights are on outside the curtains he’s forgotten to draw, the ugly sodium lights they don’t put in the posh boulevards. Above him, the spines of the books stare out at him. Knowledge. The power of knowledge. The thought he could acquire it teases and torments him. Does learning make people happy? He doesn’t know. The students seemed happy, but then they had each other. With Agnès, he would have been happy. Or would he? How long could he have loved this spoilt child of a dry and dusty aristocratic past? Would she have changed or does class and custom prevail even against passion? Do these books contain the answer to this? He suspects, if he could once understand them, they would.

  In the morning, with snow falling hard on the scurrying Christmas crowds, he stares at the word Begin he wrote on the pad and takes up the biro again. Underneath Begin he writes:

  1. Enroll college. Jan. Semester.

  2nd Phase. Bac.

  2. Find part-time work

  or

  3. Use Corrine.

  He sits back. His heart’s beating very fast. Corinne was the dark-haired girl who worked in the babyshop opposite the Mimosas. She was dying, she said, of her infatuation for Xavier. For the touch of him, she’d do anything he asked
. Women. They “die” for the touch of you, or they destroy you. It’s all enigmatic, stupid, hopeless. But fleetingly, in the quiet of this borrowed room, with the books and papers hedging him round, he sees the faint flicker of a chance for his future: he’ll make use of Corrine. Make her crazy with that feeling he once described, lying by the river with Agnès in his arms, lying with his bare bum butting the sky, as love. Then get Corinne to support him. Let her earn, with her no-hope job selling prams and matinée jackets and plastic bibs, enough money to see him through college.

  He likes the cruel logic of his plan. Agnès tricked him. He’ll trick Corinne. Love’s a fairytale. The big con. You have to get dignity by other means.

  For a long time, Xavier sits and stares at what he has written. Already, the word “college” frightens him, and when he tries to imagine himself buying books and pens and walking one cold morning through its high doors, his mind pauses in dismay, refusing to construct the picture.

  In France, the snow keeps on. In England, on Christmas Day, there’s no sign of it, only a hard, beautiful frost.

  At three o’clock, with darkness already settling down over Oxford, Miriam, Gary and Perdita walk arm in arm to St. Mary’s for a carol service. A few rows in front of her, Miriam sees the close-together heads of Dr. O. and Bernice Atwood. Neither of them turn and look at her. Gary notices them too and remembers his meeting with Bernice by the river. He sees now that she’s wearing a new coat.

  Larry and Thomas, both indifferent to carols, stay behind in the house. Though Larry wants to talk to his son, the old unease between them seems to return the minute they’re alone together and Larry soon retreats from the hot kitchen, tugs on a coat and goes out into the frosty dusk. He walks quite fast, enjoying the silence of the city.

  He’s barely out of earshot of the house when the telephone rings and Thomas hurries to Leni’s study to answer it. Entering Leni’s “own” rooms – her bedroom, her bathroom and this room from which she used to write to him – brings the loss of her back to him. It’s with a subdued voice that he gives the Oxford number.

  There’s a lot of crackling and whooshing on the line. Thomas waits. Clear and high out of these peculiar noises comes a voice which says, “My bean?”

  “Who is this?” asks Thomas.

  “Nadia. It’s Nadia. It’s not you, my bean?”

  “This is Thomas Kendal,” says Thomas.

  There’s a long silence, save for the whooshing on the line which is like the sound of a sea gale.

  “I’m sorry,” says Nadia, “I must speak to Larry. You can fetch him, please?”

  “He’s not here,” says Thomas.

  There’s another burst of sea noise before Nadia says urgently, “I must speak to him, you know. I promised I would telephone today.”

  “Can he call you back?” says Thomas, absentmindedly. His long fingers are gently touching the leather corners of Leni’s blotter. On the blotting paper itself are imprinted one or two pale, indecipherable ghosts of her stylish handwriting.

  “I think,” says Nadia, “this news must not wait any longer. I think you must tell him. You tell so kindly, please. I think it’s better you tell him. Okay?”

  “Sure,” says Thomas, “tell him what?”

  “Well . . .”

  Thomas waits, impatient as Leni would have been impatient with this anxious-sounding person. When next she speaks, it’s a rush of words, a wave breaking: “Please, you tell him I am so ashame, that this whole village is so ashame for so cruel a thing. You must tell him Klaus is not to blame, nor these Mallélous. Please say we could do nothing. None of us. In the night is coming two bulldozers. And we are told afterwards Mme. de la Brosse has given them some paper from the Mayor . . . just a piece of paper, you know, and with this piece of paper they are falling all the earth in, you understand? All the earth back into the swimming pool. And for so many days I am keeping this thing from Larry, but now I have to tell him. So you tell him please the pool is destroyed and I am so sorry, my poor bean. Say him Nadia is sorry . . .”

  When the wave has receded, an awkward goodbye is said and Thomas is alone with his father’s tragedy. He sits down at Leni’s desk and stares at her pens in their tray, her gold-handled scissors, her Japanese inkwell. So deliciously cruel she always was about Larry. Now, in her study, Thomas hears her empty laughter and feels afraid.

  It’s completely dark when Larry comes in. In the December sky, over the worshippers in St. Mary’s hangs the same full moon Uncle Leopold once told his gullible niece to eat. Larry’s nose is red and icy. He’s grateful for the warmth of the house as it takes him in. And he feels clear-headed from the walk, calm inside himself, full of hope.

  Thomas comes out of the kitchen. He’s made tea, he says. His blanket face is grave, his eyes over-bright, as they were at Leni’s funeral. Strange boy, thinks Larry. Too like his grandmother for my comfort. Yet, he puts a friendly hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “Let’s start old Gary’s Christmas cake, shall we?” he says.

  So the beautiful iced cake is cut and plates laid and the tea poured, and over this modest, very English meal, Thomas gently tells his father what has happened in Pomerac.

  The moment Thomas starts talking, Larry gets up. He has to move away from Thomas’s look. When the full realisation of what has happened comes to him, Larry’s first thought is, I want to hurt him, I want to throw my fist in his face, I want to kill him – for his pity! Instead, he brings his hand crashing down onto the burning hot enamel of the Rayburn. Above it, some tin mugs of Leni’s jigger on their hooks. Larry takes them one by one and hurls them across the room. They don’t break. They’re hardly dented. Like Leni herself, he thinks. Indestructible! Except at the end. Everything, in the end, goes back into the earth. Maggots fiddle with her now. There’s a thought! Where she was caressed, now she’s eaten. But she cast this one last spell. The old “Duchess of Oxford” came whispering in the ear of Mme. de la Brosse as she sat by her fire in her empty house. Together, they laughed and laughed. They cackled like hags in the night, and then she fled. Leni the cat. Leni the ghost of beautiful women. And the plan was formed . . .

  Thomas moves to pick up the mugs, but Larry stops him. “Don’t touch them!” And Thomas understands. “If you’re blaming Leni . . .” he begins, “you’re idiotic.”

  “I am idiotic, Thomas! Didn’t you know that? Has it taken you twenty-seven years to realise your father was an idiot?”

  “Please don’t, Dad. Don’t start blaming me. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “No? But you all understood, didn’t you? He’ll do what we tell him. Larry the lamb! He’ll trot off to France when we tell him to. He’ll get well when we tell him to. He’ll start building his silly little swimming pool. Well, you were wrong about the swimming pool. You were all wrong. I wasn’t building a swimming pool. It never was one!”

  “What was it, then?”

  “It was a bloody cathedral! That’s what it was. It was a cathedral!”

  “I thought you were indifferent to God.”

  “God? Who mentioned God? I am totally and absolutely indifferent to God. I wasn’t building it for Him. It wasn’t a church monument. It was a monument to me!”

  Larry bangs his barrel chest with his helpless fists. I’m like a child, he thinks. I’ve got a child’s trust in the world. And he lets his hands drop.

  He moves from the Rayburn to the window. On the sill is a line of Leni’s cacti Miriam has neglected. They seem shrivelled and light. He hates the look of them. He closes his eyes.

  “I would like to have seen it,” says Thomas quietly.

  “Seen what?” Larry’s voice is steady now. He feels the first weight of his anger begin to lift.

  “The French pool.”

  “You were never interested in the pools.”

  “Not in the old days, not much. They all looked the same.”

  Larry shrugs. “This one wasn’t that different.”

  “What was the cathedral thing, then?”

>   Larry turns and looks at his son. In the boy’s face is real sadness. Go to Australia, he wants to say. Go with my blessing, with my love even, but go and leave me with my failures. But he doesn’t say this. He rubs his eyes and says: “It was just a kind of inspiration I had. New colours. Black and white instead of blue, and in the shape . . .”

  “What did you use, tile or mosaic?”

  “Both. Tiles on the sides, mosaic on the trim. Some silver bits which would have shone under the water . . .”

  “Sounds good.”

  Larry shrugs again. “Probably not.”

  He sits down then. He pours himself some tea. With the pain of his anger easing, his mind travels to Pomerac. It’s early morning, cold and clear. With his ladder propped against the deep-end wall, Klaus is working with the mosaic pieces. The sun is up, the whole place gloriously lit. Larry stands, holding a bowl of Gervaise’s coffee in his hands, and watches. The scene is fine, yet at the very edge of it there’s a speck, a shadow, something he can’t describe that gives him a small sense of unease.

  “Do you know,” he says suddenly to Thomas, “that while I was working on the pool I saw an eagle? I saw it twice. The second time, it was so near me I could almost have touched it. And they look at you, you know. They look you in the eye. I thought about it a heck of a lot. I wanted it to come back and it never did. But I knew why. It despised me. I was much too tame.”

  Larry hears the front door open then and Miriam, Perdita and Gary come into the hall. They’re laughing and singing snatches of carols.

  “Larry!” Miriam calls above the laughter. “We’re home.”

  More snow falls on Pomerac. Behind her draughty windows, Mme. de la Brosse looks out at the silent lane and wonders anxiously, will the roads be passable, will I be able to get back to Paris? Last night, after midnight mass at Ste. Catherine, she and Lisette waited with the mulled wine and the cakes and the sugar angels for the children, but no one came. She sent Lisette out with a torch to see if families were waiting at her gate but there was no sign of anyone and up and down the lanes of the village all the lights were on and the fires burning and the doors closed.