The Swimming Pool Season (11 page)

Klaus, whose English is non-existent, stares solemnly at this peculiar endeavour from the low wall separating Larry's garden from the edge of Gervaise's first meadow and eventually asks, “Ich help, Larry?”

Larry glances up. “
Nein, Danke
,” he says. But he senses Klaus's continuing large presence and his bewilderment, so when all the pegs are in and he has led the rope up the south side of the St. Front nave, past the Didron window, round the vaulted apse where the steps will be, into the apsidal chapel, past the fourth cupola, back along the north wall of the nave and west into the vieille Eglise where the diving board will be, he straightens up and gestures at his handiwork. “Schwimbad,” he announces.

Klaus stares for a moment at Larry, then smiles a broad disbelieving smile.

“
Schwimbad
?” Klaus questions. “In
Pomerac
?”

“
Ja
,” says Larry, then struggles with what he thinks may be a German sentence: “
Alles Personnen in Pomerac kann geschwimmen here
.”

But Klaus is laughing now, the deafening laugh of a monarch at a banquet: “
Ich kann nicht schwimmen, Larry! Ich Kann nicht schwimmen
!”

Larry shrugs, joins in the laughter. An image comes to him of the well-fleshed Klaus floundering in the new pool, his legs floating hopelessly down towards the drain. He, Larry, stands by, terrified, doing nothing. It is Gervaise who leaps in and bears Klaus to safety on her sinewy back.

Klaus stops laughing and points in Larry's direction.

“
Aber der Baum. Fällen sie den Walnuss Baum
?”

“
Was
?” says Larry.

“
L'arbre. Vous allez couper l'arbre
?”

“
Oui
,” says Larry, “
malheureusement
.”

“A great damage,” says Klaus.

Larry looks guiltily at the tree. It stands well within his blue perimeter. He wonders how much trouble the roots will be. At
Aquazure
he had a JCB operator who was a skilled root man, but heaven knows what kind of labour they send with diggers in France.

When he looks up again, Klaus has gone. Oddly, Larry realises that he likes the German. He always seems so healthy and pink and free from any of his native angst. As if he'd come steaming hot like a cake from God's belly, before Eden and sin, before women and toil and Sodom. He wonders if Klaus will stay in Pomerac or whether he'll pack his bags one day and go back to wherever he came from and leave Gervaise weeping and wailing for him in her milking shed. You don't imagine change in Pomerac. Even the Maréchal shows signs of eternity. Yet change must occur. The swimming pool is change.

Leaving the rope and the pegs in position, Larry gets into the Granada which smells of upholstery shampoo. Since Miriam's leaving he's cleaned it thoroughly inside and out and its tomato body glistens.

At the waterfall, he drives straight past Hervé's drive, denying himself the tempting possibility of lunching in Hervé's dining room with Agnès sweetly smiling over a tidy and delicious meal and heads instead for a café in Périgueux and an afternoon of difficult purchasing from
Ducelier Frères
. He also plans to seek out a tile-maker capable of designing Byzantine tiles. The vision of his pool is strong now. Next summer – on May Day perhaps, when the Pomerac women exchange their little bunches of lilies of the valley – there will be some official opening. Champagne even. And all the people will cluster round and see themselves for the first time reflected in what Nadia has so fortuitously called “loops of brightness”. Even the Maréchal will come, to see a new chapter added to the English comedy unfolding before his cataracted eyes. And Mme. de la Brosse; she will be quietly ashamed that a house in Pomerac other than hers has installed a pool. She will take Larry aside from the marvelling throng of villagers, and ask him to quote for a pool of her own – “Like this one, Larry, but perhaps a little larger.” And thus
Aquazure France
will begin.

Larry drives fast in his new surge of optimism. Change is certainly coming. Leni will die and Miriam will return, altered and free. Agnès will stay on with Hervé and wear white dresses at the poolside. Klaus will learn to swim.

TWO

  

It is the morning of Miriam's fiftieth birthday. A grey rain falls on North Oxford, a heavy autumn rain driving slowly west to the Cotswolds. By Leni's front door, blue hydrangeas, planted by Gary, are dying down; orange puddles lie on the sandy driveway; Gary's Mini sits here uselessly, having failed its M.O.T. test. All is quiet and motionless and wet. Over the front attic bedroom, slates have slipped from the roof and water drips steadily into a variety of bowls set out on a green carpet. No one uses this room now. A faded copy of Empson's
Seven Types of Ambiguity
betrays the past habitation of a literature student. Miriam empties the bowls each evening and remembers that her father, David Ackerman, once had a den up here and wrote his books by the attic window.

Down in Leni's room, an electric fire is on and a Chinese lamp casts yellow light on the pillow. The heavy blue curtains are still drawn. It could be early evening. In her large bed, Leni's body is brittle and thin. It's becoming hollow, she tells herself, like the cuttlefish bones you find on the beach. She drinks cocoa to try to fill it up. Miriam makes her mashed potato. She craves sweet, soft substances – nothing sinewy like celery, nothing sour like apples – paste going through her like porridge, warming the draughty bags of her digestive tract, white, soothing paste in her empty darkness.

In common, she supposes, with most invalids, Leni Ackerman dislikes night-time, wakes early, longs for the household to start opening doors and turning on lights and flushing lavatories. She longs, most of all, to talk. Illness hasn't made her silent, but rather given additional colour to her gritty voice, as if all her dark blood was now gathered at her throat, leaving the rest of her pale and weak.

Since Miriam's arrival, the nurse, Bryony, has left. It is Miriam, now, who comes to Leni in the morning, switches on her fire, brings her
The Times
and a cup of milky tea. She sits on her mother's bed – just as Leni sat on hers to kiss her goodnight as child – and takes her hands in hers and feels glad that she's there. When Leni dies it will be like this: Miriam will have possession of the fragile fingers. She will lay them down gently. She will close the door and close the eyes. She will sit on the bed, remembering.

“Well,” says Leni, smiling, “so you're fifty! At fifty, I think one should try to be honourable.”

“What did you do at fifty? Did you celebrate?”

“Oh yes. Your father gave me that parrot we called Aneurin, after Bevan, and we had what he called a Parrot Party, with everyone dressed up in their gayest things. Didn't you and Larry come? Perhaps you weren't gay, Larry's not particularly gay, or should I say jolly, is he? But then all those people made such a deafening noise round the parrot cage, that Aneurin began to peck himself to death that actual night and kept on until he'd done it. Lucky human beings don't have beaks. Or they'd do this, I'm sure. Don't you think? They'd peck themselves. Women would. Men are too vain, perhaps. Woman would peck themselves in moments of heartbreak.”

“I don't remember the Parrot Party.”

“Well then you didn't come, Miriam, because it was very memorable. Your father looked extraordinary, more like a bald eagle than a parrot really. Yellow eyes. He gave himself yellow eyes. I can't remember how he did it. A lot of his students came and they looked so wonderful. I love it when young people look wonderful for a night. And there was a superb parroty scandal on the lawn. Two boys rolling about together near a flood light. They were sent down. It was the fifties after all. No one was permissive except us. I think our Parrot Party started permissiveness in Oxford.”

“And what did you do that was honourable?”

“Well, I decided that morning never to fall in love with anyone again. Except your father. I allowed myself to go on falling in love with him. From time to time, like in the summertime when he'd come out and sit on the lawn and his legs would go brown. I like brown legs, don't you? I always want to touch them. But the question of other men, I thought: that's it now. No more. Not that I didn't have a few of them still drooling round. That medievalist who made such a bad Dean. What was his name? Something extraordinary. I can't remember. He got on your father's nerves. At the Parrot Party he looked like a hen, all goosey skin. Well, I put them behind me, all out of my sight. That was the honourable thing to do.”

“And after Daddy died?”

“After? Nothing important. Nothing that meant anything. Just company sometimes. Another person in the bed. And now look. No one. Leni alone. But I bought you a present for the fiftieth, darling. I got Gary to buy it. If he's awake we'll ask him to bring it in, shall we? You go and see.”

Miriam releases Leni's hands, pats her pillows just as Nurse Bryony used to do. Her day has a simple routine to it now, which begins and ends with the making of hot drinks. In the mornings she often thinks of Larry on the terrace in Pomerac, at night she thinks of the stars above it. Neither thought carries with it any strong emotion. They're just images her mind discovers.

She shuts Leni's door, walks along the passage past the small room she occupied as a child and which, since arriving here, seems to beckon her back, past the guest room she currently occupies, to the end room which, for eight years now, has been Gary's. It's Saturday. Sometimes Gary sleeps late. Miriam waits at the door and listens. She hears music playing softly. Ella Fitzgerald. Gary in love tightens his heartstrings on the strangulating rhymes of Cole Porter:
If a Harris pat, means a Paris hat, okay! But I'm always true to you darling in my fashion
 . . .

“Gary . . .”

“Yes. Is Mother awake?”

“Yes. Can I come in?”

“Yes.”

Gary's room, decorated now in his own taste and not Leni's, smells of polish and stationery, like an office. He airs it a lot, even in winter. He puts roses on his mahogany desk. His bed is kept tidy under a Peruvian patchwork quilt. The walls are pale lilac with framed posters announcing poetry readings at which the name Gary Murphy appears small besides large-lettered ones, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Peter Porter, George Macbeth. Gary is a schoolteacher full-time and a poet on Wednesdays. The boys he teaches play football on Wednesday afternoons. The days between Wednesdays often seem to go very slowly for Gary. He stores words up till he's bursting. Even at weekends he doesn't release them. At weekends, he eats, plays music, has love affairs. His latest volume of poems is called
Wednesday Man
.

Gary in his dressing gown (he sleeps naked, never wearing pyjamas) is lying on his made bed sipping Marmite. He makes the Marmite in a fine bone teacup. This and a plain biscuit are his daily breakfast. He's a slim and pale man with thick, cavorting hair. He has rather long, shiny fingernails. He's thirty-five and an orphan. As long as he can remember, which is back to when he was six and shared a Scoutcub tent with a blond boy called Arthur Wellington, he's been a homosexual. He has never ever touched a woman. The only woman he has ever loved is Leni. He called Leni “Mother” as a joke. Now, without any effort of will, he thinks of her as his mother and her slow dying is the worst thing that has ever happened to him. Of Miriam, Leni's real child, he's a little jealous. Some evenings he slips in to Leni's room with a mug of cocoa after Miriam's in bed. When Leni dies, Gary thinks he may die too. It will have to depend on how he's feeling that week. The worst eventuality he can imagine is that she dies on a Wednesday morning.

“Leni wanted to know, could you bring the birthday present into her room?”

Gary switches off Ella Fitzgerald and turns with an expansive gesture to Miriam. “Oh the birthday! What does one say? Commiserations?”

“Yes. I expect so.”

“I told Leni we should have a cake, so I'm going to make one. Butterscotch?”

“Lovely.”

“We'll have a tea party, shall we? Downstairs?”

“Well, it's years since there was a birthday tea . . .”

“So we will. I love treats. We need them more as we grow old, not less. I often think, God, why doesn't someone take me to Peter Pan?”

Miriam smiles. It's the smile of her father, David Ackerman, which Gary cannot recognise and he thinks only, how strange there's so little of Leni's beauty in her. Except the hair. Gary admires Miriam chiefly for her hair. He takes a last sip of his Marmite, lays the little cup down on its saucer. From the bottom drawer of his tidy desk he takes out two parcels, both carefully wrapped.

“I love presents,” says Gary, gently touching them. “Never mind if there's nothing inside.”

They walk together along the corridor to Leni's room. Gary goes quickly to the bed and places a tender kiss on Leni's forehead.

“How are we, Mother?”

“All right, Gary dear. Still alive for Miriam's birthday. Have you got the present?”

“Of course.
Presents
.” And he places them gently not into Miriam's but into Leni's hands.

“Which one is from me, Gary?”

“Whichever you like. I don't mind a bit giving her the tiara and you can give the Woolies digital.”

Leni smiles a still brilliant smile. Her intimacy with Gary, their unshakeable closeness, is primarily expressed in the humour they share. Miriam is for the moment the onlooker, the outsider. Leni lifts the gifts, feeling their shape and weight. She selects one and holds it out for Miriam to take. There is no card. Miriam dislikes the solemnity in the opening of presents: people tearing off sellotape with grimly-set mouths: the fear. She unwraps the present quickly – far too quickly for Gary's sense of occasion – and finds an oblong jeweller's box in her hands. She feels checked, off-balance. She hopes the jeweller's box hides something workaday and insubstantial. She eases up the lid. Lying on a velvet pad is a silver and turquoise necklace. Aware of her eager audience, she lifts the necklace and stares at it. It's heavy. She wonders if it comes from South or Central America. She imagines it circling the olive neck of a Mexican dancer. She looks at her mother, waiting in the pillows with her mouth gaping.