The Swimming Pool Season (17 page)

“Oh, he does very well, really. He's picked a lot up.”

“Does he like it?”

“What?”

“France.”

Miriam brings the car to a stop behind the rusting Mini. With dry lips she says: “You look pale, Thomas. Why don't you and Perdita come out and stay next summer? Then you can see it all for yourself.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

“I can't.”

“No? Why?”

“If he can get the pool company going again, I think he'll like that.”

“He won't though, will he?”

“Why d'you say that?”

“I don't know. No reason.”

Miriam sighs. “Time will tell,” she says as they get out of the car. She feels tired. The night was short and the day full of events: Thomas's arrival, the visit to the hospital. She leaves Thomas in the kitchen making tea and tells him she'll rest for an hour. She climbs the stairs and walks, not to the end guestroom where Leni put her, but to the small room next to Leni's which she occupied as a child. The bed isn't made and the room is cold. She draws the soft flowery curtains, takes off all her clothes except her slip and lies on the pink eiderdown under the cotton bedspread. She lies straight and stiff, staring up at the ceiling. The room feels empty. A few child's books remain in a little glass-fronted bookcase,
The Wild White Stallion, Lost Endeavour, The Snow Goose
, but the Zedbed on which schoolfriends occasionally slept has gone, the gifts those same friends made or bought – meerschaum ornaments, velvet pigs, balsawood mobiles, Knitting Nancy mats, patchwork pillows – have long ago been sorted out into Leni's hatboxes and given to jumble sales. David and Leni were always kind and polite to the schoolfriends. They thought friendship prepared children for love. It was to be respected. Nicknames were given fondly. Outings were arranged – a film at the Gaumont followed by hot chocolate and cakes at the Cadena Coffee House. One evening, as Miriam and Dilys Weston walked home from the Cadena in which they had smoked two Senior Service each, a smog descended on Oxfordshire and Mr. and Mrs. Weston couldn't drive their Austin into the city to collect Dilys. In Miriam's heart was rapture. The Zedbed was made up. David, who called Dilys Weston “Dolores”, came up and said excitedly, “Well, Dolores, what larks, eh? And duck for supper.” “Dolores” and Miriam were given glasses of wine. They floated to bed believing no night of their lives would be as wonderful as this. Dolores chose a nightdress from Miriam's drawer and borrowed her toothbrush. And through the winter night they lay and talked of their lives to come. Their friendship marched with them into a starry future. They didn't doubt its everlasting satisfactions. They shared an orange Miriam had taken from the dining room. They slept at last just before the alarm woke them, and walked to school arm in arm.

Miriam turns over and closes her eyes. What a comfy, clean and precious childhood she had. Music, books, nice clothes, good food, friendships. It prepared her for nothing – only for life as it was then, protected, rational and warm – yet she remembers it with joy. Dilys Weston married a hearty banker with a ruddy neck and clumsy hands. They raise their sons to be bankers and the sons, too, are hearty, stupid, and cruel. She says she doesn't remember being called “Dolores”. “Your father would never have called me that, Miriam. It's such a common name.” Miriam sighs, sleeps. In the dream which follows she ties a pair of kitchen scales to Dilys Weston's Gucci-shod foot and drowns her in the Cherwell. Young, bearded punters shimmer by in brilliant light but they don't stop for the drowned body.

It's Wednesday. Gary has made himself a tray of food to nibble at. To get himself in the mood for writing his own poem, he tugs one or two books from his shelves and reads lines at random:

“. . . I am herald to tawny

warriors, woken from sleep . . .”

“Charles Baudelaire knew that the human heart

Associates with not the whole but part.”

  “. . . the round angelic eye

  Smashed, mix his heart's blood with the mire of the land.”

“October is marigold . . .”

“Saint Anthony in the sand saw shapes rising . . .”

Then he puts them all away and sits with his pencil hovering over the blank lines of his Oxford pad. He nervously writes the title:
Walk
. He doesn't know why he's chosen this title, yet he feels it's perfectly right. He suspects it's because the essence of his friend seems to lie not in his smile or his eyes but in his innocent hip movements. As if his soul was tucked in under his pelvis.

Gary hasn't loved a black man before. Gabriel's colour seems to lend seriousness to his feelings. I've tap-danced with love till now, Gary decides. I've done routines. Snickety-pick. Snickety-pick. Then walked away, holding my shoes. He sighs, remembering the vulnerable pale colour of Gabriel's palm, and experiments with a first line:

Love was my dancing partner till . . .

Till? Till what? Poetry is often the art of asking and then answering the right questions. Gary, on Wednesday, strives to be truthful. Poems are not tricks. Wednesday Man is not – must not become – a mountebank.

He sharpens the pencil. A Berol Venus. It couldn't be any sharper. He eats a biscuit spread with cream cheese. Crumbs mess the page. Gabriel is, by this time, in his ten-thirty rehearsal. Piers, the director, wears, says Gabriel, Fair Isle sweaters and neat wool ties, but in contrast to these soft-spoken clothes his voice is Olympian and his arm on your shoulder as weighty as the mountain. Gary's mind makes a tableau of the thunderous Piers leaning on Gabriel as a stone deity leans on a garden fountain and his lovesick body shivers with dread. Jealousy.
Honest lago, that look'st dead with grieving
 . . . Even in his tap-dancing affairs, his flimsy, flickery flirtations, jealousy has kept him wakeful and peevish and silly. He's never fought it. He's not even sure it can be fought. Only edged aside – by trust. But on what insubstantial grounds can he trust Gabriel? His love is ten days old – two Wednesdays old. And Piers the god, Piers the statue, is creating and remaking Gabriel into a future star even as Gary sits with his tray of nibbles and tries to make sense of the title,
Walk
. Betrayal may exist already, at this precise moment as Piers puts his hands on the springy shoulders and moves the actor forward, his huge voice grown intimate in its careful instruction, “. . . to here I think, love, and turn and . . .
I had rather be a toad, And live upon the vapour in a dungeon, Than keep a corner in the thing I love
 . . .” Gary sighs, tries to erase the words, erase the tableau. He takes a sip of Marmite and concentrates on his first line,
Love was my dancing partner till
, returns to the image of the darkness that has haunted his week and, pressing so softly on the paper the words look pale, he etches meaning into five more lines. He holds his breath as he writes. (If words came to him in torrents and not in the trickles they do, he'd asphyxiate himself getting them down.) He gasps for breath and reads:

Love was my dancing partner till

darkness fell in the pink ballroom

and my ladies in their salamander heels

ran chattering to open

carriages, knowing none of my burning.

He relaxes. It's begun. A direction starts to seep through like a developing picture. Along the landing, in Leni's empty room, the telephone rings. Gary knows that Miriam's in the house somewhere and will answer it. His only dread is that it might be Gabriel, ringing to call off the evening ahead, already spread out in Gary's mind like an exquisite embroidery: birds and dragonflies of love-talk, flowers of fine wine, thickets of touch. On the way to this silken date, he will visit Leni in the hospital. Like Thomas, whose wild and spectre-ish appearance Gary rather admires, he longs to bring Leni home so that everything is once more in place in the house and his fears of her dying quelled by the sound of her presence. He's getting used to Miriam. The thought that, when Leni goes, he will eventually be left absolutely alone in his room and out from his room will stretch only passageways of silence is as awful as anything Gary can contemplate. He imagines the quiet; the stairs getting cold; the boiler going silent. Gas and electricity cut off. No milk delivery. No post. Just him and a house he doesn't own and has no right to remain in – his home. He gets up and paces round the room, licking the pencil end.

He's there all day. He boils kettles to make fresh hot Marmite. He eats all the food. The hours of Wednesday pass in a sequence absolutely unlike any other day, expanding or contracting with the slow, slow journeying of the poem. The hour for his visit to Leni passes and he lets it go. He hears Miriam and Thomas drive off in Leni's car. The hour of his meeting with Gabriel grows closer. He dreads putting on his evening finery with the poem half-finished. He wants to meet his lover with the gift of his poem wrapped in his head. The telephone rings again and no one answers it. His room heats up as his lilac radiator comes on in the late November afternoon. He switches from Marmite to Earl Grey tea. He unwraps a new packet of Bourbons. Miriam and Thomas come back and he knows it's evening now: Piers lets the cast go and walks with Gabriel to the Randolph for a drink. They drink cocktails? Beer? The sipping of either is torment to Gary's soul. The bedside clock ticks towards seven. One hour left.

At seven-twenty, he slips quietly down the corridor and into the bathroom where he runs a deep bath. And here in the comforting warmth, he at last lowers himself into that slit of time which divides the sombre labours of his day from the embroidery pleasures of his approaching night. In the hot bathroom, the poem sits lightly in him, secret as a child and limb by limb complete. Soaping his legs, he whispers it aloud. There are imperfections, he knows, as in most things: the vaccination scar on his thigh, the jolt in the rhythm of stanza three which he can't seem to correct. But soap and steam cover his yellow scar; the opaque mind of the reader doesn't notice the slight lurch it has to make . . . This, anyway, is Gary's hope. The poem is Gabriel's after all, the first but not the last gift. People don't criticise gifts. Even Miriam, who clearly hated the turquoise necklace, accepted it smiling. So here you are, Gabriel. Put down your cocktail. Tell Piers to leave. Listen:

 
Walk

 Love was my dancing partner till

 darkness fell in the pink ballroom

 and my ladies in their salamander heels

 ran chattering to open

 carriages, knowing none of my burning.

 I took my shoe-shuffle heart

 to a high tenement,

 and hung up my crimson laces.

 I thought of my gauzy ladies only

 when I heard

 cuckoo-blues or alley-jazz:

 a number.

 Now love walks like a panther up

 my stair.

 There is no accompaniment, no beat

 and I try my best to make

 no sudden movement, no

 safari smile

 to scare the animal away.

 Timidly, I offer food: yesterday's

 bones.

 But my panther disdains them

 and with a proud impatience treads

 down my bed, tearing fresh red

 meat from the wall:

 my dancing shoes.

At ten to eight, Gary in a lambswool rollneck and a blue velvet jacket, calls goodnight to Miriam and Thomas in the kitchen and walks past his dead car into the spangly night. A big, ochre moon is up.

Dr. O. has bought
The Joy of Sex
from Smith's. It sits white and unopened on his bedside table – an Aladdin's lamp he's far too frightened to rub. Listening to the shipping forecast at five-to-six (there is a certain quiet comfort in shipping forecasts, a few moments of gentle reassurance before the terrible bombardment of the News), he keeps glancing at it, knowing that this is the evening he promised himself he would read it. He has structured the whole day round this promise, heard himself refuse to go with Bernice to hear madrigals in St. Mary's on the grounds that he's feeling ill, acted out the suffering man all day, blowing his nose, sighing, leaving uneaten the cheese sandwich Bernice buys him for lunch, complaining of heartburn (a malady not unconnected with his actual state) and chest pains. All this so he can read a sex manual. He's fifty-three. He feels terribly ashamed. He doesn't know where, since the days of Leni's dancing lessons, his life has kept him. He's sure some long-stay prisoners have had more experience of women than he has. Pert, tight-waisted, dolled-up women with names like Tina. Women who shout and swear and teach you what their bodies like. Then, when you come out after all the years of your sentence, you haven't forgotten what to do. Tina waits for you with her hair in a new style. She knows you'll be all right because you learned it all properly when you were young.

“Viking, Forties, Chromety, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher . . .” In her Cattle Street room Bernice Atwood listens to this same repetition of places she will never see. She brushes her hair, preparing to walk alone to St. Mary's Church. It's been a hurting week. Bernice feels a pain like a bruise in the area of her breasts. She's certain Dr. O. is ill. Since the night of the Bergman film, he's been so silent, like a dumb dog in pain. Now, today, he doesn't eat, he describes certain symptoms, he's vague and distant with the customers. He needs, he
needs
my care, says the pain in Bernice's chest. I would make him well, if he would only let me. Bernice's aunt is a nurse. Bernice knows how caring should be done. You must never pester a person to get well. Healing has its own time-span. Not for nothing are nurses called angels; patience is the first lesson you learn.