The Swimming Pool Season (12 page)

“Well?”

Why? Miriam wants to ask. Why jewellery? You know I never wear finery.

“It's very beautiful, Leni darling. Thank you.”

“Oh put it on,” says Gary.

“You don't like it, do you?” Leni's smile has gone.

“Of course I like it. It's the most . . . lovely thing I've had.”

“Of course she loves it,” says Gary, patting Leni's arm.

“Yes. I love it,” says Miriam.

“Gary chose it,” Leni says, hurt.

“Thank you, Gary,” says Miriam.

“No. Leni's the one. She said whatever we do, we musn't give Miriam anything dull.”

“No. And it isn't dull. My word, not.”

“Sky,” says Leni.

“Sky?” asks Miriam.

“I told Gary, I think we should find something the colour of the sky for Miriam because the skies were always the bits you loved doing, in the watercolours. If you don't like it, you don't have to wear it.”

“I do like it. I'll put it on now.”

Miriam puts the cold metal round her neck. She fumbles with the clasp. Gary and Leni watch her. The necklace is on. She knows that this piece of jewellery the colour of a pool must stay hidden from Larry for ever. When Leni dies, she will give it to Thomas's Australian girlfriend, Perdita.

“There.”

Miriam crosses to her mother. Gary, standing sentinel at the bedhead, makes way for the women to exchange a relieved embrace. The little ceremony is over except for the giving of Gary's present which, in the complicated logic of these three people's affection for each other, scarcely counts. Miriam opens this eagerly and is pleased to find a slim volume of poetry:
Wednesday Man
by Gary Murphy. Inside it is inscribed, in pencil:
To Miriam Ackerman Kendal. After fifty years
.

At teatime, with Leni downstairs on the sofa, Gary's butter-scotch cake moist in her mouth and a pale sun breaking through the rainclouds, visitors arrive. Dr. Oswald Carlton-Williams, once a student, then a colleague of David Ackerman's, is now a bookshop-owner and known to all who know him as “Dr. O.”. He is Miriam's age, or a little older. He prefers the small kingdom of his bookshop to the big echoey palaces of the University. He's a broad, untidy man. Clothes rumple and sag on him. He's shortsighted and an excellent draughtsman. He spends much of his free time in the Bodleian Library making painstaking copies of medieval borders from
bibles moralisées
, of illuminations from Slavonic gospels, and chiefly for this love of his of early manuscripts is he loved by his assistant in the bookshop and his companion of this teatime, Miss Bernice Atwood. Bernice Atwood is the kind of heavily shod, plain girl who fills Leni with boredom. She trudges through life, Leni thinks, when life should be embraced like a lover. Leni longs to teach her dancing, swimming, some grace. She doesn't know how Dr. O. puts up with Bernice, always at his side, year after year. No doubt they have some kind of silent love affair. Perhaps he seduces her with his Carthusian Breviaries, his Flemish Apocalypses? Decorates her pale plump body with fools and windmills and weaponry and saints? He's a loyal man. So loyal to the memory of David, he comes weekly to visit her. Perhaps loyalty rides in his blood like ancient writing: MS. Douce, MS. Ashmole, MS. Bodley. MS. Gough Liturg. – Ms. Atwood. This must be the explanation.

Dr. O. remembers Miriam. He remembers being shown her paintings and admiring what he recognised as careful work. Without knowing Miriam at all, except through her watercolours of Oxford, he once had a dream he'd marry her and come to live with the Ackerman family in the big house in Rothersmere Road, within distant sight of the University Cricket Club pavilion. When he found out she was married to an employee of a Finance Company (in the long days before
Aquazure
, when Larry worked for the Morgan Beatific Trust) he felt cheated and disappointed. The Ackermans had no other daughter. His chance of binding his lonely life to their peopled one was gone for ever. He had never thought about Miriam as Miriam, only as part of that family in that house. He couldn't, at the time of that dream of his, have told you whether Miriam's eyes were grey or green, whether her laughter was loud like Leni's or gentle like David's, or indeed whether she ever laughed at all.

Since then, Dr. O. has always suspected his judgement where women are concerned and he has never married. He doesn't regret this. Bernice adores him. When he touches Bernice, she pants like a lion. He suspects most women are like her in bed, panting and silent with big white thighs like marble, but he's not particularly curious. Leni he's admired for years. One of his colleagues, no older than himself, once said to him in a choking voice: “Don't sleep with Leni Ackerman. If you do, you'll never love any other woman.” And after this, until she began to get old, he often tried to imagine what it could be like to tear off Leni's clothes and press himself into her. He knew he would never find out. He preferred to keep her as a friend and spend large clutches of time in her house, talking, drinking vodka, reading, even dancing, which he did so badly and she so erotically, he found it fiercely embarrassing. “Come on!” she'd shout, twirling scarves, “Be the music!
Be
it!” He'd try to obey. He knew no other house in Oxford where its occupants would suddenly dance and he felt privileged to be there, as if he were spending an evening with the Sitwells. He had never danced with Miriam. Miriam was never there in the dancing days. Or perhaps she hid. Hid from her Mother's pantomime. For a pantomime it was really: costumes, shrieking, music, jokes. It died with David. After that, Leni seemed to get a little smaller, fade a little. She still had lovers but took them, she told him, without relish. It seems to Dr. O. that her life since the death of David has been like a long convalescence. There was the death and the grief, then this other time in which she sat still and age covered her like a shawl to keep her warm. Now, without knowing it as Miriam knows it, he senses she's dying. He visited her in hospital and didn't think then she would come back to Rothersmere Road. But she did and a nurse came. Gary fussed over her – the adoring son she'd never had. And now, on her birthday, eating butterscotch cake, Miriam is here. Dr. O. finds he's terribly pleased to see her. He wishes in a way that Bernice hadn't come with him on this visit. Without her there, he would again feel like one of the Ackerman family.

“You remember Oz, Miriam?” (Leni is the only one of Dr. O. 's friends who doesn't call him Dr. O. She calls him Oz or sometimes The Wizard.)

“Yes, of course.”

Dr. O. remembers the auburn hair. In this one feature only was Miriam more striking than her mother. “Yes, yes,” says Dr. O. “We met very often. But some years ago now.”

“Leni tells me you have a shop.”

“Yes, yes. Nothing as departmental as Blackwell's. Rather small in fact. But yes, yes, a bookshop.”

Bernice Atwood waits, smiling, for Dr. O.'s nervousness to subside and for someone to introduce her to Miriam. Nobody does this, but Gary gets up and offers her simultaneously his chair and a slice of butterscotch cake. She takes the cake and sits. The wide armchair, which her bottom fills, is only a few inches away from Leni's tiny, thin feet on the sofa. Bernice knows little about Leni Ackerman and therefore doesn't know that Leni dislikes and pities her. She decides that Leni is simply one of the “old type” of dons' wives, eccentric, wealthy enough to run a big house, a mother figure for the male undergraduates. She's glad there aren't many like her. Their dining rooms were like power houses. They had unfair influence. They corrupted the studious mind. And for all their power, they reinforced male supremacy in a closed and competitive world. They are anachronisms. Bernice bites into her cake. No one tells her why there are five candles on the plate.

“I like Oz,” Leni says later to Miriam. Gary is out with a black actor called Gabriel, currently rehearsing Othello at the Oxford Playhouse. This is the first evening Leni and Miriam have spent alone together. Leni decides she feels strong enough to sit in the kitchen in a cane chair while Miriam makes soup. “Do you like him, Miriam?”

“Yes. I remember him from years ago.”

“I always thought you'd marry somebody like that. With a good mind.”

Miriam chops onions, chops parsnips and doesn't answer.

“Oz would have been very right for you. He's an artist in his way. You would have got along well.”

Miriam stirs the chopped vegetables in a heavy pan. She understands both the rightness and the cruelty of what Leni is saying. Miriam feels glad she has no daughter to terrorise with love.

“There's so much, Leni, you've wanted to change in my life. So much you've wanted to be different. I'm sorry you didn't always get your way.”

Leni shifts her small weight in the wicker chair, ignoring this statement with a sniff.

“I think Oz was in love with you years ago. I think that's why he didn't marry.”

“No, Leni,” Miriam says gently. “He was in love with you.”

Leni smiles, stares at Miriam in surprise. It's the smile of the astounded teacher; against expectations the pupil has the right answer. “A” will be awarded. A housepoint.

“That was just frivolity,” says Leni. “I used to teach him to dance, to move his body. He liked this of course. Unless you get them on their feet and dancing, men like Oz spend all their lives sitting down. But he'll never dance again. That Atwood's like an albatross on him.”

“I should think,” ventures Miriam, “that Dr. O. is very content – he seems content – without any dancing.”

“But no one gets him laughing. He used to laugh. Before the bookshop. Before Atwood.”

“Where is the shop?”

“Oh, tucked away. Some little alley round the back of Wadham. No one buys anything.”

“Of course they do, Leni, or the shop wouldn't still exist.”

“It scarcely does. When I was last in there no one else came in for half an hour. Not one customer. I think Atwood keeps them away. So she can have Oz to herself.”

“I'll go to the shop on Monday. I want to buy some novels to take home.”

“You're not going home, Miriam. I couldn't manage.”

“Not now. When you're well.”

“I suppose I could be dying. I'm quite old enough. Then you can bury me and go.”

Miriam won't give Leni the satisfaction of a reply. She pours boiling water onto a stock cube in a pyrex jug. For the swiftest second, she thinks of the chicken broth Gervaise lives on. Bones boiled and boiled. Bread made by Klaus cut up and dipped in the clear liquid. It occurs to her for perhaps the first time, that Larry, in his nearness to the Mallélous' wall, may be lonely. She regrets, partially regrets, her harshness on the telephone and decides she must call through to Nadia, tomorrow or the next day. No card has come from Pomerac for her birthday.

“Of course I'm leaving you this house, Miriam.”

“Yes, Leni.”

“Larry won't want to live in it I shouldn't think, so you'll have to sell it. The problem is Gary. I'd like to make some clause or codicil giving Gary the tenancy, but the solicitors say that isn't fair on you and that it devalues the property. Personally I can't see why. I'd buy a house with a sitting poet. In fact, I think it'd add. But then we live in an age of philistines. ‘Monetarism' is the most repellent word they've invented since ‘bivouacking'.”

Miriam smiles. “You can solve the problem of Gary. Leave him some money to buy a little place of his own.”

“Yes. I could. But it's this house that Gary loves. His room. The garden. He does all the gardening now, you know. We got rid of that girl gardener. Gary said she was too fond of miniatures. He's put in great fat bushes all over the place and it looks much better. You'd see it if the rain would stop.”

“I have seen it, Leni. I walked round it on my first morning.”

“Well. It's better, isn't it? Bolder. You wouldn't think Gary would be a bold gardener, would you, but he is. And he keeps it all so well. Just as if it were his. And then the house. You see, this was really the first home he ever had. He lived with that uncle he hated, then on his own in Earls Court and then here. And he said after all that, Rothersmere Road was paradise. Paradise. He's felt loved, you see. Probably for the first time. You remember how shy he used to be? Crippled. As if he'd just broken the waters of an egg and come floating out. God knows how he survived his first year in that school. I used to wonder if those loutish boys wouldn't just dismember him. Crunch him up and eat him, like quail on toast. I dare say they only didn't out of respect for his poetry. Though, there again, adolescents don't value the life of the mind. They'd rather have Neanderthals shouting instructions at them in so-called song.
Hit me with your rhythm stick
! Baffling.
Come on, Eileen
. I tuned to Jimmy Young one morning on the hospital earphones.
Come on, Eileen
! I'm sure Jimmy Young didn't understand that. He's my age without the topknot, but he was playing it. Perhaps pop is forbidden in the school and they let Gary speak in peace.”

She talks. Miriam watches the stock cube dissolve, then pours it on to the vegetables. Leni will talk talk talk till her last moment on earth. While the soup simmers and Miriam pours herself a weak scotch and water, Leni starts to talk about David Ackerman. Her remorse when he died. The question that still torments: did her infidelities shorten his life? So many men wanted a share of what they said she was – beautiful. No age has ever side-stepped the physical beauty of woman. It was always hard currency. And if you're rich with it, as she was rich, how can you bear to hide it and not spend it? But she thinks she might be wiser now. So much of what we call beauty is fabrication, a false concept, a conditioning. So it betrays, in the end. Turns to dust. She envies Miriam her plainness, her lack of natural riches. Beauty and loyalty conflict. Loyalty and art are a recipe for the sane mind . . .