The Swimming Pool Season

by Rose Tremain

  One mid-November day is Gervaise’s birthday. It’s become her custom, over the years, to receive very little, but to give the kind of feast that warms up the blood and sets Klaus singing German lullabies far into the night. The Maréchal is invited and normally eats so much he falls asleep by Gervaise’s fire. They cover him with a rug and leave him to dream his dreams of the old days of the pike fishing or the days of his April chivvying of women. This year, the heads fly off four ducks and their livers are mashed with bacon and garlic and sweet wine into a rich paté before they’re scented with dried tarragon and fresh bay and roasted in their own fat. Trout are brought up from Ste. Catherine and poached with fennel. Bottles of apricots and damsons come down from the larder shelves and are arranged by Klaus in two flans as big as bicycle wheels. Cheeses are unwrapped from their muslin. There is food enough for eight or ten (all the more because Mallélou only picks at meat these days) and Gervaise decides, scraping turnips and carrots for a vegetable compote, to break with custom and invite Larry. Mallélou complains: the English don’t know how to enjoy themselves; you can’t feel at home with a stranger. But no one listens. Larry is invited and readily accepts. He drives to Périgueux in search of a gift for Gervaise and comes back with a tree.

  Setting her table with linen, Gervaise feels as happy as a child. Let Mallélou sit down and die if he wants to. Through her hard soles of feet, Gervaise feels her plantedness on the earth. She is strong. Her cows are healthy. Her lover shows no wish to leave her but rather on this very morning has tossed forty-nine kisses into her hair, one for each year of her life. If her sons are absent, this is only because she’s never tried to keep them by her at Pomerac, knowing this was vain. She believes they love her. Even Xavier with his petty thieving will remember this is her day and pause in his city life to think of her. She smiles, folding her best napkins. Her kitchen smells of roasting and wine. She thanks her Maker for this gift of life.

  At six in the evening, Klaus walks the lanes to the Maréchal’s house. The old man has shaved and put on a tie the colour of a bilberry. He’s as hungry as a lion, he tells Klaus. Klaus guides him gently through the dark farmyard to the warm kitchen lit now with twenty candles, the table decorated with ivy and fir, six bottles of wine open on the sideboard. He shakes Mallélou’s hand, then pulls Gervaise to his nightfrosted cheeks and holds her face against his. Then he tugs a crumpled little parcel from one of his many pockets and presses it into Gervaise’s hand. It’s a brooch he gave his wife when she was fifty. Mme. Foch used to wear it on Sundays clipped to a velvet hat. Gervaise recognises it at once and feels it should never belong to her, but the Maréchal anticipates her protests and says sternly: “If I had a daughter, Gervaise, she would have it. You’re the nearest damn thing I’ve got to a daughter, so you take it, and if I don’t see it on you at Christmas, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  So she takes off her cooking overall and pins it on her skimpy chest and Klaus and Mallélou and the Maréchal all stare at her, each knowing in his own heart his private quantity of love for her.

  “Forty-nine,” she says quietly to her audience, “I don’t think it’s a bad age to be.”

  Larry arrives then, carrying his tree, a wiry blue spruce. Gervaise, who sees in the spruce the friendly ghost of the lavish lawns she suspects still roll across England, lawns sloping down to pools or up to rockeries and summer-houses, insists that the tree is brought in and stood in a corner of the room. Larry, smart in a brown suit he used to wear at Aquazure, is congratulated on his gift. He knows they expected him to bring something inappropriate, like a shop-bought cake. But the tree has delighted Gervaise, so even the old Maréchal offers his hand to the Englishman to shake and Klaus slaps him on the back and smiles, “Das ist schön, Larry, sehr schön,” and Mallélou hands him a glass of wine and Gervaise gives him two insubstantial kisses like moths on his face.

  In the months to come, Larry will remember this night of Gervaise’s birthday many times. It’s like a safe place, kindly lit, to which he will often return. The feast is mountainous and good. After the rich pots of paté, the trout come steaming to the table smelling of caraway and wine. It grows hot in the kitchen. Klaus fills and refills the glasses. Bright blood comes to all the faces, even to Mallélou’s. The Maréchal sucks and chomps on his false teeth, Klaus tells a fable about a Lutheran monk roasted and eaten with watercress by one of the Popes, Larry is asked to sing God Save the Queen and all but Mallélou laughingly join in: “Zenne er vee-tauriouse, a-pie an gloriouse, Go say ar Cuine!” Before the main course, the Maréchal staggers to the door and pisses in a bright arc into the yard where the hens and geese are settling for the night. He returns as the four crispy ducks, surrounded by the vegetable compote and served with a frothy cider sauce, are carved by Mallélou. Larry wants to applaud the sight of these. He gets to his feet and begins a round of toasts to Gervaise who looks young in the candlelight, so young and happy that Klaus wants to gobble her bright lips with his meal. After Larry’s toast “To my good neighbour and superlative cook,” it’s the turn of the Maréchal to stagger up with a trembling full glass and bless, not for the first nor the last time, this day he remembers so well, Gervaise’s birthday. Klaus, comfortable with his well-fed belly, his hair like an angel’s hair in the golden room, asks that forty-nine more of these special days, forty-nine more Novembers be given to Gervaise. She laughs in mock protest and, before the little company can turn to Mallélou, who hasn’t proposed his toast, thanks each of them in turn for remembering her and sharing her food.

  More wine is opened. The duck bones are shovelled away and the cheese and the flans come on to the table. Larry loosens his tie. Klaus rolls up the sleeves of his clean white shirt and fetches his mandolin from its nail on the wall. In the sad songs that come warbling out from this happy giant of a man, Larry senses that the heart he has hardened so bitterly since the failure of his pool company is gently being forced open to take in this tiny particle of France. He feels his shoulders comfortably settled in his chair. He knows he’s smiling. Gervaise passes him a big wedge of apricot flan. His gift of a tree sits proudly in its tub. All that he touches, tastes, sees, is simple, uncomplicated and good. He marvels that Miriam could choose Leni’s corrupting world. In this hot candlelight he thinks of Oxford’s monotonous chimes, and shudders. Then he takes up his glass, forgets England and Miriam, and leans back to listen contentedly to a lovesong he can’t understand.

  The singing makes the guests pause in their joviality and sit silent for a while, wrapt in memory or hope, or, in the case of Mallélou, in the language he has since the war associated with bravery and love. He’s never questioned, nor found anything strange in his admiration of the German race. I’m a ragged dog, is what he believes; I hoped for a fine, clean master. That Klaus is king of his household saves him from his failures and satisfies his ache to see his peasant wife possessed and mastered, her skinny little arse bunched like dough in the breadmaker’s hands. That she’s in love with Klaus, and that between these two is a passionate affection, he seems not to notice. When he watches their love-making, he sees a tableau: Gervaise his dark, mucky, ignorant, stewed, pig-proud French paysanne screwed to hell and back by all the anger and longing locked up in his soul. No feeling is sweeter than this. If Klaus leaves, Mallélou knows that, to find the same terrible relief, he will have to beat his wife to death.

  How superb the songs are! In this music, in the wine that soothes his blood, Mallélou sleepily forgets his fear of dying:

  Und immer weht der Wind, und immer wieder

  Vernehmen wir und reden viele Worte

  Und spüren Lust und Müdigkeit der Glieder . . .

  He forgets the cold night outside and the nearness of winter and the trial of Xavier still to come. He lights a cigarette and remembers, with a feeling of breathlessness, his days in the signal hut and his nights in Marisa’s scented bed. These memories reassure him that even if his life is now imprisoned by this silent village, by this one room, where the candles be
gin to gutter out and the Maréchal starts to snore with his head on the wine-stained damask, he once lived like a man.

  Hervé Prière, back in his mahogany surgery chair, recognises very quickly that all his weeks away from his practice have made him lazy. His patients toil in and out of his consulting room, with their colds and sprains, with their colic and boils and bleeding, and all he longs for is for the last one to leave and to be left in peace.

  He sleeps fitfully. He doesn’t trust his new legs not to lead him back to the abyss. He longs to put a nursery gate at the top of the stairs, yet he feels too ashamed to do this. Called out sometimes in the middle of the night, he goes shivering and exhausted to his car, drives badly, wakes as if from sleep to find himself at the bedside of a stranger. He prods soft flesh with anxious, freezing fingers, colder to the chest or abdomen than his stethoscope. He feels the sufferers recoil from him and doesn’t blame them. He thinks of giving up medicine for good and travelling first class to some Pacific island to examine the remainder of his life under a parasol.

  Now that he’s working again and his nights are disturbed, he realises what comfort there was in the days of the slithering round an absolutely eventless life on his bottom. Not only was he entirely happy, he was polishing his floors. (Polished surfaces have always given Hervé Prière great pleasure and satisfaction.) Though he doesn’t want the pain or the shame of legs re-broken, he ponders nostalgically his time as an invalid and longs distractedly for silence and peace and summer flowers in a bowl and a morning cassis in his bureau.

  One Sunday – a morning of colossal sunshine, the morning on which Agnès has driven her soldier-fiancé to the Paris train – Hervé is enjoying just such a cassis and listening to a Mozart piano concerto on his rather antiquated record player. His thoughts are of his sister-in-law, Agnès’s mother, a woman of reassuring elegance and quiet integrity. She is the right person, Hervé decides, to tell him whether he should cease to be a doctor. He considers telephoning her, decides he will and is on his way to turn down the music when Larry’s voice calls him from the hall.

  Hervé is glad to see Larry. Since the departure of Miriam, Larry seems more reflective, wiser even. His Englishman’s chatter about England has almost ceased. In his solitude, embarked on his ridiculous pool, he seems admirable where before he was absurd, brave where before he was only stubborn. Perhaps he, decides Hervé on impulse, is the person to confide in.

  “Come in, come in, Larry. You’re not disturbing me.”

  They shake hands. Hervé pours Larry a drink. The sun glints on the regimental box.

  “How are you, Harve?”

  “Tired. I seem to be very tired. Tell me about the pool. How’s it coming?”

  “Slowly. The digging down’s about done.”

  “The frosts may slow you down.”

  “Yes.”

  “I admire you, Larry.”

  “Admire me?”

  “Yes. Your perseverance.”

  Larry sits opposite Hervé and sips at his cassis.

  “It’s limited, my perseverance. If I fail this time . . .”

  “I don’t think you’ll fail.”

  “No. I’ve lost touch with the future, anyway. It seems blank these days.”

  “And mine is too full.”

  “What, Harve?”

  “Too full of people. I’ve decided, I want to give up. I want to hand over – to someone young.”

  “Why?”

  Why. This is the one question Hervé didn’t expect to be asked. He thought it was obvious. His heart wasn’t in medicine any more. His heart was in sitting still.

  “I’d like to go away for the winter, Larry. Spoil myself. A doctor’s life is too rigorous for me now. The time away from it was so pleasant.”

  Slightly to his own surprise Larry hears himself become stern with Hervé. People who exchange work for idleness are courting misery. Life without work is hopeless. Life without hope isn’t hope, but death. Hervé laughs, calls him old-fashioned, an old Victorian. And knows his choice of confessor is wrong. Larry Kendal is the kind of man who will die working on some new blueprint, just slump forward, worn out, onto a batch of drawings of rustless cars, finger-light chairs that snap open like umbrellas, portable toilets, recipes for insomnia . . .

  “Ah, well,” sighs Hervé, “I see you think I’m a shirker. I shall probably carry on, anyway. My sense of duty has always been strong. Let’s talk of something else. How’s Nadia? She doesn’t visit me any more.”

  Larry asks for another cassis. He takes his refilled glass to the window and stares out at Hervé’s lawn. He wonders, but doesn’t ask, whether Agnès is in the garden. Now that he’s here in Hervé’s tidily arranged room, he’s aware how completely Nadia would disturb the man’s peace. He wants to apologise to Hervé for what he’s about to say. He feels idiotic. There’s no hope here for Nadia. He must help her to stop drinking. To stop dreaming. It’s not fair to expect anything from Hervé.

  “You know,” Larry says without turning, “that Nadia believes she loves you.”

  There is silence behind him. Hervé’s hand alights quickly onto the box lid and begins its stroking: Patrice Armoutier, Guy de Rocheville . . .

  “Loves me?” he says quiveringly.

  “Yes.”

  Larry turns and looks at his friend. Hervé is grave, as if a death had been announced.

  “Poor Nadia,” says Hervé. “My poor little Nadia.”

  “Yes,” says Larry.

  “My poor, poor Nadia . . .”

  “She says she’s loved you for a long time, Harve.”

  “This is terrible,” says Hervé.

  “Yes,” agrees Larry.

  “A tragedy.”

  “I thought it probably was.”

  “You must comfort her, Larry.”

  “Comfort her?”

  “Tell her she must not come and see me again. Tell her this house is out of bounds to her.”

  “That isn’t comfort, Harve.”

  “You must help her to understand.”

  “That you don’t love her? She suspects you don’t. It doesn’t stop her loving you.”

  “What a catastrophe. I must leave France, Larry. I must go to the South Seas.”

  “There’s no need for that . . .”

  “It’s so absurd! She’s already locked up Claude.”

  “That wasn’t her fault.”

  “Not her fault? I’m not so sure. He was a very respectable man, Claude Lemoine.”

  “Respectable, maybe . . .”

  “He couldn’t live with Nadia, that’s all. Who could live with her? No man could live with Nadia and stay sane. Oh my God, this is terrible. You must persuade her to leave Pomerac.”

  “She has no money, Harve. The little flat’s all she’s got.”

  “Then I must leave. We must never see each other again.”

  “But you were fond of her.”

  “Fond? But only so far, my friend. Copains. You know the word? And she should never have presumed otherwise.”

  “She doesn’t ‘presume’. She loves you. She doesn’t imagine you love her.”

  “Oh Larry, Larry, what a misfortune.”

  “You had to know.”

  “Did I? Why must one always know the bitter things?”

  Hervé has left the silver box and begun to pace about the room, or rather to take mincing little steps back and forth across it on his brittle legs.

  “Women!” he says despairingly, “I swore I was exempt. I swore I’d never love one of them and I never have. So how have I deserved this? By being kind to Nadia? By writing prescriptions when she’s ill? It isn’t fair, you know. If you’d seen what she did to Claude . . .”

  “Love is seldom ‘fair’, Harve.”

  “Well don’t play the philosopher, Larry. Why are you involved in this at all?”

  “I spend a lot of time with Nadia . . .”

  “You love her, then. Let her send you mad.”

  “Don’t get angry.
All she talks about, night after night, is you. I couldn’t go on listening to this and saying nothing.”

  “Why not? Why did I have to know about this?”

  “Because Nadia has to know what you feel. She has to be sure.”

  “You tell her then. And tell her I never want to see her again. Never.”

  “This is very harsh, Harve.”

  “Yes, it’s very harsh. This is the only way.”

  Hervé sits down, tired. Larry feels like the Egyptian messenger, beaten for bringing bad news. Ahead of him stretches vainly an evening with Nadia. She’s cooking a Polish meal. More vodka has been ordered from Mme. Carcanet.

  “I’m sorry, Harve,” he says hopelessly. “She’ll get over it, I suppose.”

  “I can’t bear tragedies.”

  “She will get over it.”

  “And this is tragic.”

  A car sounds on the magnificent gravel. Agnès returning.

  “Say nothing to Agnès,” Hervé says quickly.

  “I must be going,” says Larry.

  “No. Don’t go. Agnès likes to see you.”

  Yet he does leave. He feels punished and sad. His friendship with Hervé may have been jeopardised. In the dark hall, Agnès runs up to him and kisses him fondly like a dear parent, but he leaves her grimly, with scarcely a word to her.

  Nadia is making what she calls her snotty gulashnova. Pork is boiled to silver shreds in a sauce of garlic, white wine, rosemary and prunes. She says it’s a recipe she got from the wife of her one-legged neighbour on Wielkopolski Street. It’s always looked disgusting, she admits. Everything that came out of those Wielkopolski Street kitchens looked disgusting but this stew always tasted good. You eat it with mashed potato.

  While the snotty gulashnova simmers, Nadia re-tints her hair with a new bottle of Nice’ n’ Easy. Blueish paste runs out of the cling-film, in which it is suggested she binds her head, and trickles down her neck. She shivers, wiping this away. She wonders how grey or even white her hair is by now.