The Swimming Pool Season

by Rose Tremain

  “I could get the English as neighbours!”

  He slaps the table and laughs. Mallélou joins in. Mocking Larry and his pool is a bond of a kind – one of the few – uniting these two men. But the Maréchal looks solemn.

  “I need a lift to Ste. Catherine. I can’t walk that far any more.”

  “Today you want to go?”

  “Before too long. I need to spend an hour with Eulalie.”

  “Eulalie. God rest her.”

  “I think they’re disturbing her.”

  “Who?”

  “Those sewage lines.”

  “Disturbing her? Best go today then. Tell you what, Xavier will take you.”

  “Xavier? He’s here?”

  “Yes.”

  “No one told me.”

  “Well, he’s here. Come back to his mother.”

  “I’m glad for her, Mallélou.”

  “Yes, yes, glad for her. But what about the boy? So skinny he is. Where’s his youth? Where’s his energy? If it comes to prison, God save him. He’s not up to it.”

  “I’d like to talk to him. We were all fond of Xavier.”

  “Well you talk to him, Maréchal. You try to put some pep into him.”

  The Mallélou family own an old Renault fourgon, empty of rear seats, smelling of pipe ash and eornseed. Calves, goats, guineafowl, hens have at one time or other been bumped down the Pomerac lanes in this rusty car. Now Xavier drives the Maréchal in it, holding fast to his stick, his owl’s eyes watery in a day of strong sunlight, to visit Eulalie’s grave. The wind which howled at Xavier’s arrival has gone, the brittle leaves and bright berries of the hedgerows are still and the sky is clear. It’s the last of autumn before the winter drizzles, the last warmth dredged from the sun.

  The Maréchal, his mind on Eulalie’s bones, talks to Xavier of mighty things, of the evanescence of youth, of the ennui of old age. Xavier drives and says little, scratching his sore face. The journey by car is very short. They arrive quickly at the church of Ste. Catherine les Adieux and its crowded burial ground, past which the road to Thiviers thunders.

  Xavier is glad to get out of the car and away from the Maréchal’s wisdom. The old man wanders off towards the tall headstone that reads: Eulalie Marguerite Foch, 1899–1971. “Quand j’ai traversé la vallée/Un oiseau chantait sur son nid.” He stands in silence, holding the chrysanthemums he’s brought and remembering the warts which buttoned out on Eulalie’s chin as she passed sixty and began to be flustered by premonitions of death.

  Xavier, who has been told by Gervaise to let the Maréchal “be alone with Eulalie”, decides to go into the church, where, as a boy, he heard his mother pray repeatedly for rain or sunshine, for healthy cows and a good crop of apples and give thanks when these blessings came about. The God inhabiting this church seemed always very obedient to Gervaise. In Xavier’s mind the Christ who watched over the labour of her animals and sent his sunshine to ripen her tomatoes was the plaster-of-Paris Christ propped up on the Ste. Catherine altar. There was nothing universal about him. He only heard you if you lived near Ste. Catherine. He was a CB God, a short-wave deity.

  He’s still there on the gaudy altar. The hand raised in blessing has a chipped thumb. The eyes are painted a fierce blue. If the statue were dropped, it would smash to smithereens. Xavier walks down the nave towards it wondering, now that he’s back within the orbit of its power, whether he can ask to be spared prison and be heard. He makes his genuflection and slips into a pew. There’s only one other person in the church, a woman kneeling in the front row, praying, her head covered by a silk scarf. Xavier wonders whether this hunched figure isn’t Mme. de la Brosse.

  He says his prayer: “God save me from jail. Please save me from that. Save me from jail, please God,” and crosses himself. The church is cold. He fears that his prayer is as cold, as empty of poetry as it. The plaster Jesus with the mutilated thumb stares, unseeing, past him towards the font where, when he was eight Gervaise insisted he and Philippe be rebaptised, knowing in her soul and in her liver that the holy water of cities is polluted, hoping that the holy water of Ste. Catherine, despite its nearness to the sewage farm, would wash away the childhood of the tyre dumps and the wall slogans. Xavier can’t enter this church without remembering the embarrassments of that baptism. Mallélou got up like a bridegroom or a mourner in a suit of shiny black. The priest ladling water on their heads like soup, the Maréchal coughing into a handkerchief, a cluster of Ste. Catherine children at the door, laughing. After it, they walked in a little formal troupe up the Pomerac hill, their hair still wet. And he and Philippe kicked stones, missing the city litter.

  Xavier watches as the woman in the scarf gets up, stands staring for a moment at the sentimental window behind the altar, then turns and walks towards him. The woman is Agnès Prière. Expecting the dejected, resigned, life-is-bitter countenance of Mme. de la Brosse, Xavier finds his knees on the hassock shivering with the greengage beauty of pale Agnès. Quickly covering his eczema patch with his hand, he sends to her hazel eyes a stare of absolute longing. She falters in her smooth walk and is for the briefest second face to face with his young man’s desire. Then she walks on, passing him, setting her face towards the open door. She wants to look back at him. She resists and resists till her feet touch the slab of sunlight at the doorway, then she turns quickly and sees him standing now, as if preparing to follow her, and she knows from his open mouth that this touching of each other with their eyes has made him breathless. Sadly she walks away to Hervé’s car and gets in and drives off. She wonders whether, in an average life – in the life of the kiosk woman on the corner of her Paris street, in the life of her piano teacher with his fathomless spectacles – there are many moments like this one, moments when what is suddenly glimpsed is as suddenly and as swiftly lost.

  At Eulalie’s graveside, the Maréchal’s eyes weep from strong sunshine and remembered days when his wife was living, smelling of lavender. He remembers her linen drawer and all her home-stitched camisoles and petticoats and knickers. So neat and flying was Eulalie with her sewing machine, that women tramped to her from five villages with their paper patterns, their cards of lace and their cotton remnants. She could have made ballgowns. When the Maréchal’s hands undid the ribbons at her breast, his lust sometimes faltered at her woman’s artistry and all he then asked of her was to lay his head on her ruches and pleats and gathers and let her hands gently caress his back. She died thin, in the same size bodice she’d worn on her wedding day, and was boxed up in a white smock she’d made especially for death. Now she’s bone and even her children are bone in their Paris graves and only the Maréchal has any memory of her body in its camisoles, its little accommodating movements under his belly, its more knowledgeable ways with the crimping iron. “Eulalie,” he says soundlessly, “I hope they’re not disturbing you with muck.”

  Xavier stays in the church. He walks to the Ste. Catherine Roll of Honour for the two wars and starts to read off the names. I would like, he finds himself thinking, to do something brave and be remembered in carved letters. I would like there to be some honour in my life. The face of the girl stays with him like a presence. So clean. Her breath would be innocent. He would take her to the pike river and let his love for her spring up. After loving her, he would ask her to wash him with freezing water. They would stumble about, splashing, laughing. There would be blood on her thigh. And they would be lovers very often after that. For years. It breaks Xavier’s heart to know this will never happen.

  Riding home without his chrysanthemums, reassured that all seems peaceful at Eulalie’s resting place, the Maréchal says to Xavier: “It’s a very precious thing, a wife. I shouldn’t neglect her like I do.”

  “Well,” says Xavier, “it’s of no significance. She’s not there to notice whether you neglect her or not.”

  “You don’t believe in an after-life, Xavier?” says the Maréchal.

  “No,” says Xavier.

  “Neither do I,” says the Maré
chal, “neither do I,” and shakes his head. Then, as they near the Pomerac hill he says suddenly: “I believe in this one, though. It’s no good neglecting that. Eh, Xavier?”

  “No,” says Xavier.

  Nadia Poniatowski still finds herself spending some part of each day at her window, craning for the sight of Hervé’s car. Sometimes her watching is overtaken by the darkness and she becomes suddenly aware that she can’t any longer see the lane on which her eyes are fixed. When this happens, she draws her curtains and renounces her vigil as pointless, promising herself not to waste another minute of her life in this way. She busies herself then, writing letters to her children, doing her gros point cushion covers, polishing silver. She knows her love is hopeless. She knows it’s harming her like an illness. Yet it refuses to leave her. November goes slowly to its end. She tries to save on electricity to afford her vodka and her room is often cold. She shivers and dreams through her days, arriving very often in her mind at Hervé’s bedroom door: two sleepwalkers meeting at last. “So stupid, stupid!” She screams at Larry, her only confessor, her only visitor. “Why am I so suffering from this stupidity?”

  But since the morning of Agnès’s visit to him, Larry has less patience with Nadia’s infatuation. Her talk of Hervé doesn’t help him in his own forgetting of Agnès, tempts him, in fact, to consider himself wildly fortunate as the unlikely altar of Agnès’s sacrifice, tempts him to get into his Granada and go flying past the waterfall, up Harve’s drive and on, on into the cool white tower where his child sits and waits . . . “Stop it, Nadia!” he hears himself shout. “We’ll both go mad with this thing. Stop dreaming!”

  Together they sit down and talk of Miriam. There is sanity in Nadia’s dislike of Leni; there is sanity in Larry’s missing of his wife. Another letter has come, informing him that the exhibition opens on December 1st, that Leni is out of hospital, that a man called Dr. O. has taken Miriam to the theatre to see The Rivals. In Miriam’s life, all seems to perch serenely, even Leni the macaw. Or so she wishes Larry to believe. She makes no mention of an end to the separation, won’t say what she plans. Nor does she mention the pool. Laying breeze blocks, Klaus says one morning: “Such a surprise for Miriam. Not?” And Larry’s heart thuds. “Not,” he says wryly. He’s stopped building it for Miriam. He’s building it for Agnès.

  So, towards the end of November, a feeling that he must see Agnès steals on Larry and sends him hurrying off to Périgueux one morning to buy a gift for her, something to offer, something to reassure her she’s not spurned, only protected. He wanders the market, staring blankly at birds and rabbits and overalls and flan tins. He stops at a flower stall and nearly decides to repeat his gift of a tree, but this doesn’t satisfy him. The tree would become Harve’s. He’s in search of something Agnès will keep. He goes back to the rabbits, remembering tenderly her soft jerseys, then realises that these rabbits are sold for breeding and eating, not as pets. He feels muddled – “stupid” in Nadia’s vocabulary – and English and heavy with wearying lust. He goes to the busy café where the dominoes players are just starting a threes and fives and orders a beer. Sternly in this busy bar, he reminds himself that Agnès is younger than his own son and once again makes a solemn promise to forget her.

  The lines of love or longing, if you drew them, they’d criss-cross Pomerac like a tangle of wool. Up in the de la Brosse garden, the old man paid to keep the edges tidy is dreaming of the bosom of Mme. Carcanet in the Ste. Catherine épicerie. Down at the school, the elderly headmaster says prayers in the library donated by a Colonel he despised and adds one for himself: “God punish my wife for the lovers she takes each spring.” From the Maréchal’s foetid room, lines travel not only to Eulalie in her smock but half across France to his dead sons and all the grandchildren who year by year expect news of his death and never come to visit him. And down into Pomerac, deep into the very centre of the village, comes the cold, black line of the longings of Claude Lemoine. This is the cruellest line. It’s threaded not merely to Nadia but to the land on which he once owned two houses. It touches every stone and every season.

  From the Mallélou house, a tattered thread winds back through time from the room where Mallélou lies and stares at the wall to a room in Bordeaux where Marisa once lay in her cream satin sheets. From Gervaise, a patient line travels to Paris and encircles her eldest son, Philippe. To and from Heidelberg go the confectioner’s lines of love for his mother and her missing of him. Yet in the embrace of Klaus and Gervaise all longing is forgotten and all desire satisfied. Their lovelines weave a basket which holds them together. But from Xavier a web is spun, reaching vainly from house to house, from hamlet to hamlet, in search of Agnès, whose name he doesn’t know, whose own longings he can’t guess at. Larry knows where she is, his irresistible child. As winter nears, the springtime man he sometimes is sends his green foliage of desire. And Agnès sits in her castle, writing love letters to her soldier, waiting, waiting, as Nadia waits at her window for life to alter, for the future to become clear . . .

  Freezing winds sigh over the Pas de Calais ploughlands and in these Claude Lemoine hears the eternity of his own exile. In the complicated patterning of Pomerac’s affections, the sharp and wounding line his heart sends is never noticed.

  Certain lines, however, are about to be redrawn. While Larry sits in the Périgueux café listening to the shouts of the dominoes players, Hervé Prière sends Agnès down to Larry’s house with an invitation to dinner. In a month’s time, Hervé is going on holiday to Florida; Agnès will then return to Paris; the dinner is a little farewell to his neighbours. Hervé’s old-fashioned courtesy dictates that he invite Nadia, but the coward in him declines to do this. He asks Agnès to ask Larry not to mention the dinner to Nadia, only the departure.

  It’s another bright and tranquil day: November going gently. That morning, the de la Brosse maid, Lisette, arrives to collect rugs and bedspreads for dry-cleaning, picking her way among the goat droppings in the garden. The Maréchal, seeing Lisette pass, thinks of Christmas and the sorrows reborn each year with it. “How many more?” he asks aloud.

  Xavier and Klaus, grown quickly fond of each other’s company, are working together on the swimming pool, laying the breeze-block base and walls onto which the concrete will be moulded. Amateurs both, they work painstakingly with plumblines and levels, strange guardians of Larry’s vision. Sometimes in Klaus’s ample imagination, the pool takes on the form of an actual cathedral, a work of magnitude and grandeur. He longs to be entrusted with the mosaic steps. He forgets that he’s neither a masterbuilder nor a swimmer. He’s boisterously happy. And a little of his optimism passes, at first imperceptibly, from him to Xavier. The eczema is healing. His idea of starting some late education seems less a mirage, more a possibility. It’s as if the German was pouring into Xavier’s dark skull some of his own peculiar light.

  Getting no answer at Larry’s door, Agnès walks round to the back of the house. Standing at the pool edge, she looks down on the blond curly head of Klaus and the dark straight head of Xavier. Xavier looks up and sees her and in his surprise absentmindedly wipes his eyes with his trowel, thus banding his face with mortar. Under his breath, not to her, but to his dreaming of her by the river he’s gasped, “Ah mon dieu, c’est toi!”

  Seeing him, she’s dumb. As if she doesn’t want to reveal the self she’s been until now, neat and clean Agnès with her careful nails, fiancée of a boy from a good family. She blushes, in fact, at the very thought of the person she is. Xavier’s stare, his sweet confusion, only add to her feelings of wanting to conceal herself, to become, in this instant, someone entirely different.

  Wiping the mortar from his face with a rag, Xavier climbs out of the pool pit and is, before she’s fully aware of it, at Agnès’s side. He rubs his hands on his overalls and rashly reaches for her white little wrist. Like one of those meddling elders, Juliet’s nurse, Pandarus, Klaus stares in wonderment at the antics of these two young people and rightly concludes, as they walk hand in
hand away from him, that the same benign God who brought Gervaise to his patisserie with her honeycombs has thrown a thunderbolt at them. He shrugs and smiles and goes back to the contented building of his cathedral walls.

  Thoughts of England start to trouble Larry half way through his second beer.

  Since the night of Gervaise’s birthday he’s felt a bit more comfortable with his life in Pomerac, less sorry for himself, less afraid of winter and language, happier with the ancient ways of the village. Klaus has become a kind of friend. Even Xavier is courteous to him and pleased to work on the pool. And then there is Agnès. He’d like to kidnap her. Dress and undress her like a doll. Make her room beautiful. He knows these are the fantasies of his middle years. Though they feel like love, they’re base. Yet they make him happy. He’s happy with his fictions.

  Then in the noisy café, where the air is full of greeting, he remembers the blue telephone and the white telephone on his desk at Aquazure and the Year Planner above them and his Golfer’s Desk Diary signed by Tony Jacklin, and he feels a stab of misery.

  The Aquazure offices were sited on the boundary of an industrial estate, on a road called Edith Cavell Way. The buildings on it seemed uniformly made of painted tin but were in fact built rather soundly and only clad in this corrugated substance as a measure against the damp. The Cavell family had once owned a cottage on this piece of lowland but the damp had been the eventual cause of its demolition. Whether Edith had ever stepped inside this cottage no one knew, but the new estate stuck her name up proudly and it was on the whole a conglomeration of rather proud, self-making people, like Larry Kendal, who traded here. Next to Aquazure was a fitted kitchen business called Amora Kitchens and on the other side a glazing company called Aviemore Ltd. Three A’s in a line. At lunch, if he wasn’t seeing a client, Larry would join John Aviemore and Mick Williams of Amora for a ploughman’s at the estate pub, The Ferryman. Like the Frenchmen now absorbed in their dominoes, Larry and his friends were reassured by their own routines. The barman knew their names and their preferred drinks. They discussed the sport they watched on TV – golf, football and snooker. And all three, at one time, seemed like people on the up. People who would, in due time, shake hands with members of the Royal Family, or at the very least with the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Their respective ambitions had been set into patio doors, melamine worktops and heat exchangers and if one of them had suggested, over a Guinness, that in less than seven years Larry would be crumpling his Year Planner and scribbling “Shit!” in his Tony Jacklin diary and abandoning The Ferryman for a foreign café, the others wouldn’t have believed him.