The Swimming Pool Season

by Rose Tremain

  Larry sits alone on his terrace. Thoughts slide and slip. This is his third gin. He feels flushed and breathless, his face a pink lamp in the quiet descending dusk. He’s trying out the solitude to come. Wearing it. He admires the slow declining of light. His silly, shiny face like a beacon embarrasses him. He’d like to decline with the dusk. Become weightless, invisible. Slipslidin’ away . . . Damn Miriam for loving her mother. Why had there never been a daughter, his daughter, who would love him in this same, fierce way? He’d asked for a daughter. So often. Oh, one of these days, Larry. One of these days . . . But all the days passed. Now, all there will ever be is Thomas. That raspy voice he’s inherited from the Ackermans. And grey already. Thomas is grey. He’ll be bald next. Old years and years before his time, making excruciating furniture. But there should have been someone else to replace him, a daughter. Except it’s too late. For Miriam. Not for him. For him and Miriam, but not for him. Why not a baby somewhere else? Start again. Yet the baby could be a son. Grow up like Thomas, looking ancient before he’s hardly alive. No point in that. Unless . . . Unless it was to stop the coming loneliness, this confrontation between his round face and the dark. He closes his eyes. His thoughts revolve. The nearer your destination, the more you’re slip-slidin’ away . . .

  Inside Gervaise’s house, Mallélou and Klaus are reverently watching their favourite weekly serial on a black and white television, so many times superceded by the year-in year-out production of newer models, it’s as if the celluloid ghosts of the old programmes still palely turn beneath the programmes showing now. Thus, during this latest episode of Devil or Man? (Homme ou Diable?), Mallélou for a split second sees American canyons and tumbleweed, hears a dry wind. He nudges Klaus. “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  “Something peculiar there.”

  The picture’s streaking, dividing. Bodies are pinched sideways. Klaus gets up and thumps the set. The sound grows in volume, but the people are still pulled.

  “Oh leave it. Leave it, Klaus.”

  Klaus returns to his chair. Robert X, hero of the programme, this week masquerading as a surgeon, is about to insert an amplifier the size of a pinhead into the voice box of a beautiful singer, thus assuring her a rich and starry career and a scene in which he will go to bed with her. What appeals most to Mallélou about this programme is the way the hero is able to become, at will, numberless things. One week he was a tennis star. Mallélou didn’t know how they’d filmed the climax to this scene, at the French Open Championships. Mallélou would like to write to the TV channel suggesting an episode in which Robert X was chief signalman at an important metropolitan junction. He has the germ of a story. A beautiful provincial girl is on one of the trains. On another is a beautiful Parisian girl. At the terminus, a stranger waits. Which train will arrive first? Aloft in his box, Robert X, the signalman, controls the destinies of these people. Stories. It makes Mallélou tremble to think he could escape his life inventing stories.

  Gervaise comes in. She hates the harsh, sad light the television gives. And the quivering, growling pictures, they seem remote to her, meant for city people in apartment houses with their hearts boxed up in street names. They remind her of the years when she was a signalman’s wife in that no-man’s-land where the city hurls its debris of worn tyres, broken glass, rusting crates, and the countryside flings its poorest seeds, willowherb and ragwort and dock. In her head, she knew where, not far down the line, the city began and where, not far up the line, it ended absolutely and silence started and the earth was deep and rich. It seemed wrong that anyone should live in that in-between place. Leave it to the trains, she thought, and the dumped cars and the sodium lights. When her children were born, she was shamed by the world she showed them, just as these days it embarrasses and shames her to watch television. The stories they tell her, Mallélou and Klaus, after the Friday evening hour of Homme ou Diable?, stories of a person so “advanced” he can alter in seconds the lives of ordinary people, they seem stupid to her, pathetic, sad. She wishes that Klaus at least didn’t like them so much. She has no idea that Mallélou is seeing canyon ghosts and composing letters to the television company. She begins to set the table for supper. Robert X is now in a satin bed with the beautiful singer. Mallélou is smiling a satisfied smile. In the jumpy, vexing light, Gervaise puts out a tender hand and touches Klaus’s head.

  The morning is grey. Nadia Poniatowski has turned on her electric fire. Beyond her damp windows, a blanketing drizzle shrouds the village, so that the limes of the de la Brosse garden are no more than flat shapes and the house behind them invisible. Nadia hates this kind of smothering weather. She feels lost in it. She’s glad when the telephone rings. Such a relief to hear a voice, to remember she’s far from friendless . . .

  “Good morning, Nadia, my dear. Hervé here. What a most unpleasant morning, uhm?”

  “Oh Hervé. My dear dear. Yes. Too very miserable.”

  “Now. May I ask a small favour?”

  “Oh yes, dear Hervé. Always from Nadia.”

  “My niece is arriving on Monday. Agnès, whom I believe you once met . . .”

  “No. Not your niece I meet, but your sister . . .”

  “Oh yes? Well.”

  “Or sister-in-law.”

  “Ah yes.”

  “I think I am meeting your sister-in-law, Hervé.”

  “Ah, Well, no matter. Now, the question is, would you mind bestirring yourself in this very unpleasant mist to give Larry a message from me.”

  “Larry and Miriam?”

  “Yes. Or, in this case just Larry, who has kindly offered to meet the Paris–Thiviers train for me, and bring my niece up to the house.”

  “Oh but of course, Hervé my dear. I will do this collecting.”

  “Thank you, Nadia. Will you tell Larry, then, that the Paris train gets in at 9.18 on Monday evening and Agnès will be on this?”

  “But why I am telling Larry?”

  “What?”

  “No. Well I’m not bothering to tell Larry.”

  “You can’t?”

  “Oh no. Nadia will do this.”

  “I’m so sorry, Nadia. You seem to have lost me . . .”

  “Why am I bother telling Larry, when I am meeting your girl?”

  “Well, just the day and time, Nadia. Agnès called me a few minutes ago to say which day she would be coming.”

  “Nadia will go.”

  There is silence at Hervé’s end of the telephone. Near him, on a mahogany balustrade table is a silver box engraved with the signed names of members of his father’s regiment. Hervé does not understand why he has always found the feel of these names beneath his thumb soothing and sweet, but he does. He touches them now, trying not to feel angry with la Poniatowski.

  “Let’s start again, Nadia. All I am requesting is that you should go down to Larry’s house and tell him the time of Agnès’s train.”

  “Well all right, so, Hervé. You don’t trust Nadia to drive?”

  “What?”

  “You think, oh a woman and a Pole into the boot with some Slavic perversion doesn’t stop at the red light or something? You think this woman doesn’t use her feet?”

  Patience. Hervé strokes the dead names: Patrice Armoutier . . . Guy de Rocheville . . .

  “What are you talking about, Nadia?”

  “You think so a precious girl won’t safe with Nadia? You think I’m not driving in all directions since I was eighteen years old?”

  “Nadia, Nadia . . .”

  “Is this what? Aren’t you knowing I’m always conducting Claude the moment he is composing his headaches and always stopping at red lights?”

  “What are you talking about, Nadia?”

  “Talking about? I am talking about trust!”

  Nadia thumps down the receiver. Despite the buzzing which tells him she has rung off, Hervé disbelievingly repeats her name a few times more while his fingers caress the box lid: Alain Dunoyer . . . Yves Bonnetard . . . Slowly, he replaces his
receiver. He remembers angrily that the night he broke his legs, Nadia’s high and sorrowing voice had somehow entered his dreams.

  Nadia puts on her old beige raincoat. Claude used to puddle about in this garment and it still smells faintly of the tobacco he kept in its pockets. She blows her nose on a piece of kitchen paper, picks up her key and goes quickly down her stairs out into the silent, shapeless day.

  At Gervaise’s barn, she pauses. Klaus, a heavy black mackintosh over his head, is shouting at the cows bumping and slipping down the lane. Nadia calls good morning but the little greeting is lost in the mist. Klaus doesn’t see her and strides on, slamming the animal’s rumps with a long hazel-switch.

  Nadia picks her way between new cow-flops to Larry’s door. She knocks with a little fist still clutching the piece of kitchen paper. Before she’s withdrawn her hand, the door opens and Larry, also wearing a beige raincoat, collides with her.

  “Nadia! I was just coming up to see you.”

  “Oh Larry. I’m talking now just to Hervé.”

  “What?”

  “He’s not trusting me with his niece in the car.”

  “What, Nadia?”

  “This Agnès or what her name is.”

  Larry glances back into his house which is dark on this morning of drizzle. Upstairs, Miriam is still sleeping after a wakeful night spent mourning Leni. Too drunk to comfort his wife with more than sighings and belchings, Larry had stumbled off to bed and slept soundly, dreaming of his own face, round and luminous like the moon, up there in the firmament.

  “Miriam’s asleep, Nadia. Can we go on up to your flat? I need to make a telephone call to Air France.”

  “Oh you were coming?”

  “Yes.” Larry moves Nadia out into the lane and closes the door behind them.

  “I think it’s best if Miriam flies to London. I don’t know how ill Leni is, but neither of them would ever forgive me if I didn’t get her there in time.”

  “Well, forgive you! If Leni is knocking up the daisies, she can’t forgive you or not!”

  “No. That’s quite true.”

  “You are so nervous of women, Larry.”

  “Nervous? Am I? I don’t like Leni Ackerman, that’s all it is.”

  “Such a dreadful beauty, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. That about sums her up.”

  “I know this kinds of woman. My Polish mother is being like this: very beautiful and all the men’s heads are coming off in the street and they’re spreading the red carpet over the puddles like Sir Raleigh, but then at home we have no carpet and my mother is always complain, look at this bloody puddles, and I’m not putting my foot in it.”

  Larry giggles. He thinks of Claude in his prison. He hopes the poor man is granted some silence there on those buried battle fields.

  “Why do you laugh, Larry? She isn’t like my mother, this Leni?”

  “Well, I don’t know your mother, Nadia. Leni is probably quite all right with people she likes. She never liked me, however, and she’s chosen, over the years, to make this very plain.”

  “Oh what did you doing, Larry! Some practical fun? You put a whoopee pillow on her seat?”

  “Metaphorically, yes. She thought the noise of my conversation was beneath her.”

  They are almost at the doorway to Nadia’s stairs now. The other houses in the village are still shrouded and no one moves in the lanes. Even the dogs are chained up, under cover. Nadia takes a key from her pocket.

  “Well, you know Larry, I am so most upset about Hervé.”

  “What’s he done, Nadia? I didn’t understand what?”

  “Well this bloody niece or what she is. I say I will go for the Thiviers train in my car and lift this girl to Hervé’s house. But no, he is saying, I am not putting my faith in you, Nadia. You will risking life and limb in your Polish driving.”

  “Oh I see. Well I don’t know why he couldn’t trust you. But he did ask me to go for Agnès.”

  “So you go, you go. Okay, I say Larry is a man, but who is going on the left, you or me? Maybe Larry is daydreaming he’s rolling to Stonehinge and just forgetting right is right. No?”

  Nadia unlocks her door. Immediately beyond it is a tiny lobby where she hangs Claude’s mackintosh. Her blonde hair, now soaked, clings to her head like a cap. Larry, his mac over his arm, follows her up. Nadia at once disappears behind the Japanese screen and Larry hears her filling a kettle. At least, at Nadia’s, the tea is always good. They sit and drink this tea for half an hour. Nadia alternately pats and prinks up her damp hair. Larry’s Burberry slowly dries in the heat of the fierce little fire. Nadia steers the conversation from Hervé’s seeming lack of trust in her to the question of trust and betrayal in general. We are all deceived, runs her threnody: the people or things we put our faith in alter and disappear before our very eyes, like mirages. Take Claude. Take the swimming pools. Claude was a healthy man, vigorous, sexually potent, with a sense of humour and springy chest hair. And then what happens? The health of his mind begins to go, his limbs become weak and his fine pelt turns wispy and grey. He is no longer Nadia’s Claude. His poor little sex dangles there like the lolling dead neck of a chicken. His laughter fades. “And the pools, Larry? The same with the pools, no?”

  Larry thinks of pink bird necks and dead laughter and shivers.

  “So sparkling, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like my Claude. So beautiful sparkling eyes. I’m sorry you’re not seeing them.”

  “I’m sorry, Nadia.

  “And I am never seeing those swimming pools. But I imagine.”

  “Can you?”

  “Oh yes, yes. Like those David Cockney painting, this loops of brightness and all the lying people in their skin reflected. I can imagine very good. No?”

  Larry is silent. Nadia pours more tea, waiting for him to yield up the dark confusion that came with the collapse of his dream. But, oddly for Nadia, she has said it all for him: the phrase “loops of brightness” ransacks his mind like a lost song.

  Miriam sorts paintings and folds clothes. Now that her flight is booked, she does no more crying for Leni, but meticulously prepares herself for her re-entry into what is left of her mother’s life. She remembers the house, the street, the neighbours, the smell of autumn in North Oxford. Her desire to be there now is like a sudden home-sickness. She wants to talk about it all, reminding herself that she can still belong there. It’s just a question of arriving. She packs her tin of watercolours and her box of pastels. The act of closing the lids on these and putting them in the suitcase gives permanence to her stay in England. She looks up guiltily at Larry’s anxious, grizzled head. “It’s no use,” she says, “wondering if you’ll be all right. I know you’ll have the moments of loneliness. You’ll just have to telephone me from Nadia’s. And I’ll write. Of course I’ll write. But I have to go. You understand this.”

  “Yes.”

  He’s never felt so distant from her. Miriam. His chestnut woman. His careful wife. The daily monitoring of what makes her happy, this is a habit he’s never asked himself to break. Even when he was ill and depressed, he tried to “get on” with each bitter day as she instructed him. He dreaded losing her then, when he had so little to give her. He had nightmares of Leni, then, waiting with her disdainful eyes, waiting to snatch Miriam from him. That he survived that time, that Miriam helped him so lovingly is a kind of miracle to him. He’s never thanked her. The way he yearns to show his gratitude is by getting Aquazure, France started. He could do it, surely? The summers are long. Thousands come from England – and from Paris – to holiday homes. The public pools and lakes are overcrowded in July and August. He can beat Piscines Ducellier Frères at their own game, because he’s not merely a pool builder, he’s a pool artist. Consider the St. Front idea; no mere pool installer would have found inspiration in a Roman-Byzantine basilica. He pictures the St. Front pool installed beyond the terrace for Miriam’s return, his gift for those months of patience.

  “Have you
packed up all the paintings yet, Miriam?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Harve asked me, could he see some before you go. He’d like to buy one for his niece’s room.”

  “His niece?”

  “Yes. She’s arriving on Monday, to help out.”

  “Well I can’t sell a painting. I need everything for the exhibition.”

  “Just a small one, he said. A little still life or something.”

  “No, Larry.”

  He’s begun to hear Leni’s voice in hers. He thinks, she’s hardening her heart. He can’t bear to stand and watch her packing, yet he wants the comfort of her. He feels desolate, humble.

  “You may be away for your birthday, Miriam.”

  “Yes. Never mind.”

  “I mind.”

  “Why?” Leni again. Hardness. Curt questions.

  “I wanted us to have a proper celebration this year. A party, even.”

  “Who would we invite?”

  “Nadia . . . Harve and his niece . . . Mme. de la Brosse . . .”

  “And the Mallélous, I suppose. Watch Gervaise eating with her mouth open.”

  Larry ignores this, though it worries him. Miriam brought them here to live. Now, she’s found an excuse to leave Pomerac and run back to Oxford.

  “I thought we’d get Thomas out here for once . . .”

  “Well, I’ll be seeing Thomas.”

  “I won’t.”

  “No. That can be my birthday gift then: seeing Thomas.”

  She’s packed two suitcases: almost all the clothes she owns are laid gently in. Left in the wardrobe are just the soft summer things. She’s also bought Leni’s favourite peach jam, sachets of tisane somniflor and a tin of Perigord fois gras. Larry imagines Leni’s fragile lips opening and closing on this delicacy, her heart stopping as its poisoning richness enters her blood.

  The mist and rain of Saturday linger on Sunday. The dampness quells the stench of the septic tank. Larry examines the Granada for signs of rust. Pomerac inhales moisture into its old stones and the interiors of rooms are dark and cold. Larry, wearing the Burberry, surveys the site of the new pool. A casualty of the pool will be the walnut tree Miriam is fond of and which now reproaches Larry with an exemplary crop of bright green fruit. Miriam wanders out and stands near him by the tree. She looks shabby, he thinks, in her bulky mac, and he touches her shoulder tenderly. At least she doesn’t have Leni’s sharp bones. Miriam reaches up for Larry’s hand and presses it tightly. She, who is running, running to the bedside of her mother, feels in this moment like a mother to Larry. His blue eyes have a helpless look.