The Swimming Pool Season

by Rose Tremain

  Bernice, having eaten almost the whole block of Toblerone without noticing it, pushes the few segments left into Dr. O.’s hands. The chocolate feels warm. Dr. O. isn’t hungry after his lunch with Miriam, but he eats the Toblerone out of simple obedience to Bernice’s gifts. Already, he feels frightened for her. If he withdraws his own gift of acceptance, what will she do with all the tender offerings she stores? The warm chocolate slides guiltily into his stomach. He swallows and sighs. Bernice turns momentarily from the film and stares at him.

  “What’s the matter?” she whispers.

  “Nothing,” says Dr. O.

  Liv Ullman swallows Nembutal, handful after handful, and lies down on the child’s bed to wait for death. Bernice Atwood tucks her hand into the warm crease of Dr. O. ’s arm.

  Miriam tiptoes up to Leni’s room. The curtains have been drawn and sunlight falls on Leni’s bed. Leni is awake with her glasses perched on her nose and the Sunday papers spread around her. Replenished with sleep, she seems alert and strong.

  “Leni. You’re awake.”

  “Well I heard voices. What are you up to, Miriam?”

  Miriam sits down among the papers.

  “Up to? I had Dr. O. for lunch.”

  “You mean you ate him?”

  “No. He gobbled a lot of chicken.”

  “Is he still here?”

  “He’s gone to the Bergman film with Miss Atwood.”

  “Silly him. We could have entertained him better. So he asked himself over, did he?”

  “No. I invited him.”

  Leni peers at Miriam over her glasses.

  “And he didn’t want to come up and see me?”

  “He did. But you were sleeping. We didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Oh.”

  Leni takes off the glasses, which hang on an ugly chain round her neck. Her eyes seem bright, full of curiosity.

  “Are you hungry, darling?” asks Miriam, getting up. Leni’s stares she has always found discomforting.

  “I’d like some of that soup you made yesterday. I’m glad you invited Oz, Miriam. I think that was very clever of you.”

  “Clever of me?”

  “Yes, you’ll have a proper companion, now, for your stay here.”

  “I’ll go and heat the soup.”

  “Was he nice to you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t want much soup. Don’t give me too much.”

  Miriam is on her way out of the bedroom when the telephone rings. Leni picks it up and stubbornly states a long out-of-date telephone number.

  “Oxford 7815.”

  Close in her ear, ragged with its pierced hole heavy jewelled earings have pulled to a slit, she hears Larry’s voice, so close that her first thought is the dismayed one: Larry’s in England.

  “Leni,” says Larry quietly.

  In Leni’s mind, he’s at Dover, standing on the windy front with his baggage. But he’s in Nadia’s room, tracing a line in the condensation on her window.

  “Where are you, Larry?”

  Miriam stops, her hand on the door. Not today, she thinks. I’m not ready for Larry today. Yet the France brochure opens. Pomerac sits on its hill in the sunshine. Gervaise stares at her with reproachful eyes, calling her back.

  “Where am I?” asks Larry. “I’m in Pomerac. Can I speak to Miriam, please?”

  No courtesies for Leni today. No enquiries after her health. If she’s dying, Larry thinks impatiently, let her get on with it.

  Leni holds the receiver out to Miriam. “It’s Larry,” she says, “he’s in Pomerac.”

  “I’ll take it in the study.”

  “Yes. Very well.”

  Leni says nothing more to Larry, just rests the receiver on her eiderdown. Miriam closes the door on her mother and goes down to the telephone she used only a few hours ago to summon Dr. O. Between that moment and this so many emotions have pecked and pulled at Miriam she feels in need of bandaging.

  When she lifts the receiver, Larry, puzzled by the silence, is calling her: “Miriam? Miriam?”

  “Hello, Larry,” she says softly.

  “Oh, I’ve got you.”

  “You’re at Nadia’s.”

  “Yes. I wanted to ring yesterday, to say happy birthday, but Nadia was out and I didn’t feel I could ask Mme. de la Brosse.

  “No. Well, how are you?”

  Cold, Miriam thinks. I am so cold with him.

  “Coping all right, but missing you. I thought of you yesterday. Was it all right?”

  “What?”

  “Your birthday.”

  “Oh yes. All right. Just quiet. Leni got up for a while.”

  “She’s getting better, then?”

  Miriam listens. There’s been no click of Leni’s receiver going down. Often, when colleagues telephoned David, she’d listen in.

  “Yes,” says Miriam wearily, “she’s a lot better.”

  “She’s not dying then?”

  Miriam listens again. Now it comes, like a sniff of disgust, the click. “She’s very weak. I’ve been trying to get her to eat, but she won’t.”

  There’s a brief and troubled silence before Larry says: “When are you coming home?”

  Home, thinks Miriam. Pomerac. Home?

  “I don’t know, Larry. I can’t possibly leave till Leni’s on her feet.”

  “How long?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “I thought if someone was dying, they died.”

  “They do in the end, Larry.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. It’s always been hard for me to understand . . .”

  “Understand?”

  “Why you love her.”

  “She’s my mother, Larry.”

  “What, the Jewish mother. That?”

  “Not only. It’s not just duty.”

  “What then?”

  “A stubborn love that won’t go away. And I like it that she . . .”

  “What?”

  “She needs me. For once. She’s never needed me. Now she does.”

  “I need you.”

  “I know, Larry. How’s Nadia?”

  “Nadia’s here. Do you want to talk to her?”

  “Yes. I’ll say hello.”

  Nadia rather than Larry. Anyone. Miriam waits. I must ask him not to call any more, she decides. Letters are better, less painful.

  “Hello my darling!” Nadia’s high voice flies, unchanged, down the wires.

  “Nice to hear you, Nadia. How are you?”

  “Well, I’m so sorry, my darling.”

  “What, Nadia?”

  “I’m not here on your birthday. Larry is coming and coming. Till ten o’clock. He think I am arrested and sent home packing to Poland! But I was at a very good At Home party from some old friends of Claude’s. They have some uncle or what in a wine house, so Nadia is absolutely pissing all day and today my God the bloody hangover, you don’t know!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Nadia. But it was a good party?”

  “I don’t remember! I’m so pissing, Miriam, I don’t know what I eat or say or who is kissing me or what, but actually everyone is pissing, even the uncle from the wine house, so we are all not knowing what we’re doing. Maybe I dance with someone. I don’t know.”

  “How’s Larry, Nadia?” Miriam says gravely.

  “Oh Larry. You want to talk again?”

  “No. Just tell me how he is.”

  “Well. He is so kind to me, Miriam. I am crying one evening and telling him my bloody life is so and so, and if I was Larry I tell Nadia, look, this so moaning gets out my nose, but he is not telling this and comforting me. So kind, you see?”

  Autumn comes. Women getting old start sobbing like children.

  “Oh I’m glad, Nadia.”

  “But of course he is sad for you.”

  “Sad?”

  “Yes. And your mother? She isn’t kick the bucket?”

  “No.”

  “So you come back to Pomerac, Miriam?”

  �
�Not yet.”

  “I think you leave this old mother and come home.”

  “This was my home once.”

  “Well so. Poland was mine. Cockroaches on my bloody floor. Some lavatory they make before the First War. My neighbour on the landing with one leg . . . You think I go back there?”

  “No. But in my case it’s different.”

  “But you don’t stay so long, my darling, for this Leni.”

  “Why?”

  “Well if I have some husband so kind as Larry I’m not staying in Poland with my mother and queue for her fucking bread . . .”

  “But you know what I feel about Leni, Nadia.”

  “I know, my darling, I know. But I say you don’t stay there.”

  “I have to stay until Leni’s well.”

  “But you’re saying me she was kick the bucket, my dear.”

  “She may. I don’t know.”

  “So if she kick, then you go back for the funeral and so and so and make the white wreath, but you don’t forget Larry.”

  “Of course I haven’t forgotten him, Nadia. Don’t be stupid.”

  “Well, so I’m stupid. I’m getting pissing yesterday and stupid but today not. I don’t know why if I say this of your Leni’s death I’m so stupid,”

  Miriam sighs. She sits down at Leni’s desk which has not been used since her illness. Bills and correspondence are piled up, waiting for Miriam’s attention.

  “I’m doing my best, that’s all,” says Miriam, “Of course I don’t mean you’re stupid, Nadia.”

  But it’s Larry who comes back to the telephone.

  “Miriam, I wanted to tell you, I’ve begun the pool.”

  “Good, Larry, good. I’m glad.”

  “How fast I can get on depends on the weather. At the moment it’s glorious.”

  “Is it? Yes, it’s fine here this afternoon.”

  “Cold, mind you. You’ve got to stretch the imagination to remember summer.”

  After this, there seems little more that either Larry or Miriam want to say. Miriam considers for a moment asking about the walnut tree but decides quickly that it’s too late and it will have been felled by now. Larry wants to ask whether Miriam has seen Thomas but her coldness to him cuts the question off before it’s uttered. They say a solemn goodbye and leave it at that.

  Miriam walks to the kitchen and begins to stir Leni’s soup.

  In the night she’s woken by Gary.

  “Mother’s had a fall, love. Afraid you’ve got to get up.”

  “A fall?”

  “On the landing. She was dizzy, she said. I heard her go. I was reading. Luckily.”

  Miriam tugs on the warm dressing gown that has replaced la robe. Gary has carried Leni back to her bed. Her face has the pallor of bone.

  “Dr. Wordsworth’s coming,” Gary whispers.

  Miriam sits on Leni’s bed, takes one thin hand in hers. There is sweat on Leni’s forehead. She draws sharp, shallow breaths.

  “I’m so sorry, Miriam . . .” she murmurs.

  Gary, his hair wild, his thin body sumptuous in a black quilted gown, rebukes her.

  “Ssh, darling. Don’t utter.”

  Miriam turns to Gary. “Is there pain, Gary?” To Miriam’s irritation, Gary turns straight to Leni and asks her: “Where’s the pain, sweet?” Leni’s lips tremble as she answers: “Foot.”

  We’re a strange flock of nightbirds, Miriam thinks, a tryptich of pain and devotion talking in whispers round the lamp. Outside the night is starry and cold. Gary crosses to the electric fire and turns it on. Even in his quilt, he’s shivering. Tea, Miriam decides. This is an English emergency; we’ll drink tea. She strokes her mother’s hand and lays it down. “I’d like tea, Gary,” she says. “Will you make it or shall I?”

  “I,” says Gary and flits like a silky bat out of the room. As he goes down the stairs, he thinks, in seven hours I’ll be teaching Heart of Darkness to IVb. He wonders if this night vigil will help or hinder him. To him, darkness today and yesterday has meant Gabriel. He knows he’s in love. He will be as jealous of this black Othello as the character himself is jealous. The way between this night and the winter is strewn with strawberry handkerchiefs.

  Gary makes a tray of tea and takes this up. Leni’s lips are blue with pain. Miriam offers her tea, but she shakes her head. Gary and Miriam nibble Bourbon biscuits and drink the tea sweet to keep themselves awake. Once, Miriam suggests that Gary goes back to bed and tries to sleep, but he’s settled himself on the other side of Leni’s bed like her lover and he won’t be moved.

  He’s still there, with his white, shapely legs stretched out beside the invalid, when the doctor arrives. Only the request that he goes out while Leni is examined dislodges him. He mooches back to his room and turns on Ella Fitzgerald: Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today . . .

  To the accompaniment of this old, old song Dr. Wordsworth, a clean and ruddy man of sixty, informs Miriam and Leni that Leni’s ankle is broken. She pouts with frustration. “I’m not going back to hospital, Dr. Wordsworth.”

  “There’s no alternative, Mrs. Ackerman. The ankle must be set.”

  . . . and from under her velvet gown, she drew a gun and shot her lover down . . .

  “I don’t want to go back in that hospital, Miriam.”

  “Oh, it won’t be for long, Leni. Will it, doctor?”

  “No. Now I’m going to give you something for the pain.”

  “What? What are you giving me?”

  Dr. Wordsworth is filling a syringe.

  “Just a mild painkiller.”

  “That means some kind of dope. They give cocaine and heroin all the time in hospitals now. They just call it by some other name, dia-something. Is that what I’m getting, coke and heroin?”

  “Just an effective analgesic.”

  . . . When her Ma came and got her and dragged her from the jail . . .

  “You’d better come with me to the hospital, Miriam. I’ll be spaced out. You must come and make sure they plaster up the right bit of me.”

  “Of course I’ll come, Leni. I’ll go and dress.”

  “No, don’t go yet. Let me hold your hand while I get my fix. Do you remember Long Day’s Journey? ‘Caught her in the act with a hypo!’ What a dreadful line! I never admired that play.”

  Leni is turned on her side and her bottom punctured. Streams of cold anaesthetising poison enter her blood. She looks startled and her hand holding Miriam’s relaxes its grip. Dr. Wordsworth, struggling against the effects of the sleeping pill taken two hours ago, telephones for the ambulance. Gary tiptoes back to Leni’s door and strains to listen.

  Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today . . .

  The question of whether, after the Bergman film, Dr. O. should spend the night with Bernice is one that begins to torment him as soon as the film nears its end. It still torments him as he walks out into the cold, clear night with Bernice at his elbow, he striding, she taking little running steps to keep up with him.

  Dr. O. inhabits the top floor of a house in Plum Street off the Woodstock Road, not far from Rothersmere Road; Miss Atwood has two rooms in Cattle Street, almost within uneasy sight of Blackwell’s. Between these two identically shabby residences their love affair walks back and forth. Neither has ever suggested flat-sharing. Bernice has this recurring dream: Dr. O. buys a Jacobean hall arranged round a courtyard not dissimilar to that of the Bodleian Library. On cold flagstones he lays her down. He places a Book of Hours on her breasts. On this, he swears to love her for ever, and to make her mistress of his house. She wakes up satisfied and content. Even if she wakes up to find herself alone in her Cattle Street bed, this dream seems miraculous and right. She doesn’t doubt the bonding and binding of Dr. O. to her. One day, they might put their book collections together in one room. Say some vows, even, though she scorns what men and women make of marriage. Her love is not domestic. It’s ancient and profound and will not be interred in trivia. Only a hall or a castle might give it stern en
ough shelter.

  Bernice knows and Dr. O. suspects that, had they not found each other, they would have led virtually celibate lives. Bernice was a virgin the night Dr. O. drove her home from the opening of a heraldry exhibition in his Morris Traveller and invited her in for coffee. His rooms smelled of the must and dust of pre-war time. Newspapers and journals in bundles. A ream of blotting paper. Leathery classics from skirting to cornice. A gas fire. A candlewick bedspread. Ink. Parchment shades. Washing on the fireguard. Dr. O. poured water on Nescafé with a shaking hand, but Bernice was calm. She walked about, touching things. If she had any fear at all it was the thought of conceiving a child. All lay so anciently, so silently in the room, so silently in her small womb, she didn’t want it disturbed with new limbs and mewling and milk. She wasn’t certain how children were prevented. She’d heard there was a pill. She’d heard there were rubber things you push up. Over the coffee, she said simply: “The only thing I don’t want is a baby,” and saw Dr. O. nod his agreement. So she trusted him and thought no more about it. When she saw him unroll a little transparent balloon onto his hard prick she thought simply, that must be it, and waited with her legs spread lovingly wide for the first immersion of a man in her blood. The pain is ecstatic, she thought. She mourned the pain the moment it was past. Later she examined the spatter of blood on the sheets. My gift, she thought, given and received. From this night on, her life was entirely happy.

  Now, without her knowing it yet, as they walk from the cinema to Dr. O.’s car – the same Morris Traveller that once conveyed the virgin Bernice to Plum Street – this happy life is being taken from her.

  “Did you like the film?” asks Bernice. She senses Dr. O. is grave and distant and wonders if the film depressed him.

  “I’ve seen it before,” is all he says.

  They get into the car. The windscreen wipers grind, though there’s no rain. Dr. O. is absentminded about the noises and movements his car makes. He feels sick from the Toblerone and his head aches. He drives to the corner of Cattle Street and stops.