The Swimming Pool Season

by Rose Tremain

  “If he goes in the night, I’m afraid it’s no use calling me, Madame Mallélou. You must call the surgery number and you will be put through to the doctor on duty.”

  “I can’t call anyone, Dr. Prière,” says Gervaise. “We don’t have the telephone.”

  “The more reason to let him go to Thiviers. He’s so weak, Madame. He can’t last very long.”

  “I buried my parents, Dr. Prière. I’m not afraid of death.”

  “No. Well, it’s your decision.”

  “So you’re going to America?”

  “Yes. Florida. A fine climate there.”

  “My sons talk about America.”

  “Do they?”

  “So I tell them, go if you can. It’s a country for the young, from what I can tell.”

  “Ah, well. I’m not young, Madame Mallélou.”

  “No. But I expect you have acquaintances there.”

  “Yes. A few.”

  “We don’t understand America – not from Pomerac. I don’t think we can, do you?”

  Hervé Prière shrugs and opens his car door. “I expect we understand them as well as they understand us. Good bye, Madame Mallélou.”

  “Good bye, doctor. Enjoy Florida. We’ll think of you, by your pool . . .”

  He drives away. Nothing, of course, has been said about Agnès and Xavier. This interlude, in Dr. Prière’s mind, doesn’t seem to have existed.

  Gervaise turns back into the house. She’s baking today – bread and cakes and flans for the return of Klaus. Her kitchen smells of flour and cloves and sugar. Into her baking she’s putting prayers for her son. Upstairs, the Maréchal dreams of the pike fishing, a six o’clock mist sitting on the river, his sons wearing sou’westers and eating cinnamon biscuits, the stink of the bait in his hands, the clusters of grey snouts coming silently to the shallows . . .

  Her baking done, Gervaise goes up and tiptoes to the bed. The Maréchal sleeps on, his mouth wide. The room is acquiring a sour, musty smell. Gervaise wants to open the window but the wind is too keen and the snow is coming. “Let me die in my own stink, Gervaise!” the Maréchal asked. “It’s the least you can do.”

  There’s a commotion downstairs. Gervaise whips off her apron and hurries to the landing. At the foot of the stairs is Klaus, smiling his huge smile. You could, Gervaise thinks, dam up the Gironde with Klaus’s face! She hesitates before going down to him. In her brief hesitation is her first question: Xavier?

  “He’s free, Gervaise.”

  “No? You’re not lying?”

  “He’s free. A fine, that’s all. No sentence.”

  “Oh mon dieu. Oh, mon dieu, Klaus!”

  “He bought you these.”

  Klaus is holding a bunch of limp, hothouse daffodils, wrapped in florists’ paper. Gervaise runs down the stairs and throws her skinny arms round Klaus’s neck.

  “You did it, Klaus! You looked after him. You and my prayers . . .”

  “Not me, Gervaise. The judge was very fair . . .”

  “It was you. I know it was you! If you hadn’t gone with him . . .”

  “Well, it’s over.”

  “Thank God. Oh Mother of God, thank you!”

  Mallélou’s at the door, his head sunk down into his overcoat. He’s staring at his wife and Klaus with the impartial, freezing stare of the executioner.

  “It’s gone then!” he blurts out.

  Klaus turns. “What’s gone?”

  “You mean you didn’t see?”

  “See what?”

  Slowly and almost soundlessly, Mallélou begins to laugh.

  “You saw, didn’t you, Gervaise? Eh? You saw what they’ve done. Damn me if they haven’t ruined it! All that work, hah! All that work!”

  “What’s he talking about, Gervaise?” asks Klaus.

  Gervaise pulls away gently from Klaus, then reaches out to him again and strokes his cheek like a child. Mallélou’s laughter has turned to coughing and he spits with relish onto the lino.

  “The pool . . .” says Gervaise, “ . . . Madam de la Brosse got a demolition paper out of the Mayor. Illegal, they pretended it was. They said Larry needed official permission . . .”

  “So?” The great valley of Klaus’s smile has gone. His cheek, under Gervaise’s caressing hand, is white.

  “Diggers came. It’s ruined. They filled it in.”

  “No . . .”

  “Last night.”

  “Nein. Nein! Das ist nicht möglich . . .”

  “I couldn’t stop them, Klaus. I ran out as soon as I heard them . . .”

  “Nein. Nein. Meine Mosaiken! Meine Kathedrale . . .”

  Klaus thrusts the bunch of daffodils into Gervaise’s hands and pushes past Mallélou out into the yard. They hear him start to run up the lane.

  “Go on, then,” says Mallélou, still coughing, “run after him, scamper after him. Neither of you can change it. The whole damn thing’s buggered!”

  But Gervaise doesn’t go out. She holds the bunch of daffodils to her face and smells their unfamiliar scent of spring. At least Xavier’s safe. Her prayers were answered. No prison. No cell. He’s safe. Now he must try to start again. Gervaise walks to the dresser and reaches down an ugly glass vase which she fills with water. She unwraps the flowers and sticks them in.

  The table is set for lunch. Mallélou sits down, still wearing his coat, and pours himself a glass of red wine. Gervaise goes to the stove where a pot au feu is simmering.

  “How’s the old man?” Mallélou asks after a while.

  “Very weak. I sent one of the children for Dr. Prière.”

  “He’s going to croak, Gervaise. He should be in the hospital.”

  “No. He’s staying.”

  “I don’t want death in my house!”

  “It’s not your house. It’s mine.”

  He looks away. These days, he hasn’t got the strength to argue with her. At least someone did for that swimming pool. That’s taken the grin off all their faces! Someone showed a bit of sense. He must remember to mention it to Mme. de la Brosse at Christmas, mention it to the Mayor, if he should ever happen to see the Mayor . . .

  Kneeling by the pool, Klaus is scraping at the hard clay where it touches but doesn’t completely obscure his mosaic work. The digger drivers, in their hurry to do the job and be gone, didn’t fill the pool quite to its rim and some of the black and white mosaic trim is still visible, a weird patterned band sunk in the earth, like a gigantic game of dominoes. As he feebly scratches at the soil, a memory comes to him of being taken one summer by his mother to stay with his cousins who lived in a small chalet in the mountains, near a lake. She had bought him red bathing trunks. “In this lake,” she told him, “all children learn to swim like eels.” His cousins were eels, or so they seemed to him, their thin bodies twisting, flicking, gracefully darting through the water. His mother held him up, his bottom sticking out of the water like a cherry. She held him and held him and he can remember the feel of her hands under his chest and tummy. But the longer she held him there and screamed at him to paddle, to kick, the deeper grew his fear of the lake. His cousins swam out to a raft and dived like sticklebacks. They yelled at him to watch and then mocked, “Klausie-wausie can’t swim! He’s too fatty-watty!” And so he was. He was landlocked.

  Now he hears footsteps coming over the garden and looks up, expecting to see Gervaise. But it isn’t Gervaise, it’s Nadia. She stands a little way from Klaus, nervous of him, nervous of his anger and loss.

  “So I see your returning car,” she says, “and I must come to tell you what a stupid sad business I think. You are working so well on this black and white. Larry is so proud of you. He tells me, Klaus is so good a worker and so driving of inspiration.”

  “I must telephone Larry,” says Klaus, still prodding at the earth and touching the little shiny ceramics with his thumb. “Perhaps I can use your telephone?”

  “Well,” says Nadia, “of course you are welcome to use. But I must say to you I am awake all the night a
fter these bulldozers are coming and by morning I am deciding no, I think we don’t telephone to Larry yet.”

  “Larry must know. Then I will work to get this order revoked. And we shall clear all this away.”

  “But not yet, my dear. Please. You don’t tell Larry yet.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this will spoil the return to his wife. You know if you are loving a person so much as Larry is loving Miriam you want, after the separation, to take a gift. You understand me? You want to bring the chocolates or the flowers or even some foulard. Something to say, ‘I love you, my dear person, and I am so missing you.’ But this is all Larry is taking. You understand? This is all the precious gift he has to take to his wife, this swimming pool. You appreciate? He goes so in a hurry, you see. He says to me, my God Nadia, I’ve got nothing for Miriam, no chocolate, no basket of sugar-almonds. But I say no, you just think sensibly, my friend, and you will see you have a gift. You have made this pool for Miriam and this is it. So what I ask is we don’t telephone Larry for some few days. Just some few days. Okay? We give him a little time till the gift is not so the important thing. Like if you bring flowers, so after some days they die but you don’t bother. You remember how it was nice to give them. You do understand? Please. We wait a little.”

  Klaus straightens up and brushes the yellowish earth off his hands. He feels tired in all his heavy flesh, tired, tired. But he smiles affectionately at Nadia.

  “You are right,” he says.

  “So,” says Mme. de la Brosse to Hervé in his candlelit dining-room, “how long will you be away?”

  Hervé glances down the table at his guests. They’re all, he thinks, growing old with ease, getting comfortably through the years, untroubled by dreams of violence and confrontation, harbouring no guilt for what they don’t know, passing without despair from the eating of fois gras to the tomb. It’s how it should be, he decides. Life should be pleasant. In Florida, he imagines, life will be very pleasant. See Miami and die? “You know something, Hair-vay?” whispers the ghost of his friend, Howard J. Mills, “guilt’s right out of fashion here. Vietnam, Watergate, it’s all gone through us and out and we’ve flushed it down the john. And we’re bringing back Fun.”

  “Sorry?” says Hervé to Mme. de la Brosse. “What did you say?”

  “Oh it’s not important. I wondered how long you’d be in in America?”

  “Until the spring, I think’ says Hervé. “My niece is getting married in January and she wants me to come back for this, but I don’t think I will. I’ve told her, if she wants me at the wedding, she’ll have to postpone it.”

  “Ah yes. Agnès. I heard she stayed with you here. An absolutely charming girl, I remember. Do you approve of the young man?”

  Hervé’s concentration seems to be bad tonight. He hears the question, but sees in his mind not Luc but Xavier Mallélou standing in his porch late at night. He hears, in the distance, the Mozart concerto. The young man’s face is thin and fine, like the face of a filmstar.

  “Yes,” he says, “yes, very much. I only feel . . .

  “Yes?”

  “That she’s too young.”

  “Oh, I think the young know their own minds these days, Hervé. They have to learn so much so fast.”

  “True. But Agnès has had a sheltered upbringing. Very correct. I thought there might be a little rebellion.”

  “Ah well,” says Mme. de la Brosse, taking up her glass and looking admiringly at its crystal in the light of the candles, “if I were you, I’d just be grateful there wasn’t.”

  “Yes,” says Hervé, but still the image of Xavier Mallélou remains. That night, he understood Agnès’s sudden departure. But the young man’s distress had, in Hervé’s mind, made his niece seem cruel. They go hand in hand, he thought, obsessive domestic order and indifference. He doesn’t know what’s become of the Mallélou boy. Nadia would know, of course, but Nadia is out of bounds and must remain so.

  “What about you, Madame?” he says to Mme. de la Brosse. “How long are you staying in Pomerac this time?”

  “Oh, just for Christmas. I don’t want this generally known, Hervé, but I have decided to sell up.”

  “Ah.”

  It’s not really yours to sell, Hervé thinks. It was Anatole’s family home. In the old days of the Colonel they passed it forward in their minds from son to son, from generation to generation.

  “I can’t run two homes any more. It’s too great a burden. And I find Pomerac very changed. Certain liberties are taken now. It’s not the community it once was.”

  She means Larry, thinks Hervé. And the pool. Her boldness in upholding the bylaws of the commune are the talk of this dinner party. She expects – and receives praise. Hervé, alone, finds her high-handedness distasteful. There was something fantastical in Larry’s project, something comfortingly mad. Now order has been reimposed. Xavier’s white face in the moonlight, the shimmer of Larry’s cathedral – both have been obliterated. Though he smiles at his guests, Hervé is feeling a silent, deepening unease. He pours wine and notices his hand is trembling. He wishes he’d put the regimental box on the dining-table, within reach of his fingers.

  As Hervé plays host at his farewell party, Nadia lies in her monogrammed frayed linen and listens to the silence all around her. There’s something eternal, tonight, about the quiet, as if, far away on his roof at Rouigny, Father le Sueur had stared through his telescope and seen, in their clusters and shoals, the stars wink out and all the universe blanketed in darkness.

  I’m alone. Finally.

  Je suis seule. Finalement.

  Ich bin alleine. Letztens.

  Jestem sama. Nareszcie.

  She doesn’t feel afraid. She’s remembering, with a little laugh inside her, her passion for Uncle Leopold, how she’d lie in the dark of her Wielkopolski Street room and hear the night choked with sounds of neighbouring lives and make a secret pathway through all this rumpus to Uncle Leopold’s blue door and imagine him holding out his hefty arms to her and taking her in. “Nadia,” she used to pretend she heard him say, “you are my princess!”

  She wonders if Uncle Leopold is still alive, if his door is still blue, if the teashop exists where he bought her pastries, if, in his ancient eyes, he sometimes imagines the moon is cheese. She’s led so many lives since then. Now, all of them have brought her here, to this stillness.

  Under the soft bedcoverings, she lays her stubby-fingered hands on her breasts, which are still round and full with mauvish nipples the colour of plums. Claude, when he felt fretful, liked to suck her breasts like a baby. “Your sad Polish milk is good,” he’d say and at one time in her life with Claude she began to lactate a little and Claude’s lips would pull and pull at her nipples, drinking the last drop out of her and she’d start to feel the tug of him in her womb. She wonders if, in his dormitory, he remembers the taste of her body.

  Since her visit to Rouigny, she’s thought about Claude almost constantly. Claude Lemoine. The handsome man she met as a poor student in Paris. Claude in his fine neckties. The father of her children. Claude locked up, making baskets, gabbling about the end of the world, remembering he once owned two houses, repeating and repeating the three syllables of her name: Na-di-a, Na-di-a . . .

  Like Gervaise, she senses, in this colossal silence, the nearness of the first winter snows. Winter, in Wielkopolski Street was snow. You lived with it piled it up against the basement steps from November to February. Here, it snows and thaws, snows again, freezes for a week or two, crystallising the forests, then slowly melts. She likes its obliterating cleanness. She likes the sound of the children laughing in their snowball games. She puts on her ancient fur-lined boots and walks down to the Ste. Catherine woods. And now, this year, it’s coming before Christmas. Claude, she asks soundlessly, do you remember Christmas, my dear?

  She’s made a plan. Tonight, in this final aloneness, she’s made it. She will telephone Father le Sueur and ask that this year Claude be allowed home for Christmas.
Home. To the small flat she will decorate with fir and the mistletoe that grew in all the ancient apple trees torn out by the de la Brosse manager. Home. She will make the flat into a home for Claude, just for a time. She’ll cut his hair and tidy him up. She’ll roast a goose with apricots. She’ll bargain with Mme. Carcanet for some good claret. She’ll set a place for Claude with his own family silver . . .

  “Look,” she will say, as they come up the stairs and into this room he’s never seen, “how my life is small now, Claude. You see? No bigger than yours, my dear. Just one small place and my small bed I fold into the wall. Some small kitchen space here where I shall cook your goose, and this little Japanese screen you remember from our bedroom in Paris?

  “Now, sit down, my darling, and take some breath after this so long journey and Nadia will make tea and put on the fire. You think I forget what you like, Claude? Well, I don’t. I am breaking myself to buy you some delicacies – truffles you see here and some rillettes with armagnac and of course one pot of salmon eggs for Nadia’s famous blinis. So please relax, my dear, and we won’t be sad or regretting for this short time. N’est ce pas? I think you are so long with those monks and with your baskets, you’re forgetting what is in the world. So I will show you. I will show you the forest, Claude, and the frozen river where the pike fishing men used to go. I will show you the old lanes of Pomerac and the clock which still chimes and the Mallélou yard and tell you the story of all what happens in our old house we sold to the English couple, the Kendals. This is a long story, my dear, so you must be patient and not intervene me with your talk of the world’s end or the astronomical thoughts of Father le Sueur. In fact this story is too long for now, Claude. I shall tell it to you later, when I unfold my bed from the wall and I undress you, my darling, and you put your head here, where I think you used to like to be, on Nadia’s breast . . .”

  She’s busy in her head with her preparations, like a small-snouted animal slowly gathering its solitary winter hoard. Near morning, it starts to snow and she sleeps and dreams of Claude’s white head beside hers on the pillow. When she wakes, late, and sees the bright and dazzling landscape, she catches her breath with wonder. “So you don’t be some gloomy Pole today,” she instructs herself, “the world is beautiful, Nadia.”