The Swimming Pool Season (19 page)

“No, no. What I wanted to explain, Miriam, is that anything at all that might have existed between myself and Miss Atwood is now in the past. I confess I had thought this relationship would be lasting, but I want you to know that nothing more will now, er, take place between us . . .”

Miriam wants to smile at the old fashioned cadences of this speech. Dr. O. would have belonged very well in Barchester. She looks at him fondly. He's agitated and red.

“I'm sure Miss Atwood must be very sad,” she says.

“Well . . .” Dr. O. takes a grateful sip of wine. “I think she must come to realise it's all for the best, that we are not, in certain respects, completely compatible. I hope I'm not offending your sensibilities, Miriam, when I tell you that in the, er, privacy of the, er, bedroom, Miss Atwood is utterly silent. Now of course I'm not a man of the world, but on this one very personal question, I do feel that true sexual congress cannot take place when there is, well, silence. Wouldn't you agree?”

Miriam stares at Dr. O. in disbelief. Today she had felt free of the ancient intimacies binding her to Larry. She's not in the mood to discuss Dr. O.'s closet secrets. She marvels at his sudden insensitivity and sighs deeply.

“How we each behave,” she offers, “in our private moments is luckily not a matter for legislation. Now, Dr. O. I don't want to pry into your life. Please. Let's talk about something else.”

Dr. O. now looks totally confused and begins gulping wine. “Have I offended you, Miriam?”

“No. Let's talk about my father, shall we? I was so happy working in his room today.”

“I have offended you.”

“No, Dr. O.”

“I have. Oh dear. It was only my anxiousness to make you understand . . .”

“Understand what?”

“How deeply I love you.”

Bernice Atwood is listening to a radio programme entitled
Vanishing Fire
about the disappearance of the red squirrel from English woods. A Norfolk gamekeeper recalls: “There want no shortage a' them. You saw plenty a' them when I were a bor. An' we had thisere game. Squiggie-stooning, we named it. Cruel, I reckon. But we did that. A bor's game. Harmless, we thought . . .”

Bernice enjoys programmes which tell her about nature, vanishing or not. She likes to imagine, on her infrequent excursions to the countryside, the tens of thousands of creatures she can't see, invisible to her yet at this very moment burrowing, building, gathering, spinning, fornicating, fleeing, flying. If nature was still, it wouldn't interest her. If nature showed her all of itself, it wouldn't interest her. It's the boundlessness of its hidden world that makes her stand still in the forest and say breathlessly to Dr. O., “Listen!” Now, sitting silently by her fire, she imagines seeing a red squirrel one day. Then in old age saying on the radio, “I remember the last days of the red squirrels. I saw one not far from Oxford.”

Yet even as Bernice listens to the programme, she knows that something terrible is happening in the quiet, primeval forest of Dr. O. 's love for her. Something has crept in under cover of darkness and turned the soil. All the roots of trees more ancient than buildings are cold and dying. She knows that the chief protector of this love was time, settling gently year by year on the quiet arrangement of her limbs with Dr. O. 's, on their minds, on their identical responses to the labours of long-dead monks for the glory of the illustrated word. And now, time has unsettled them. Why? Why, she wants to wail. Her love is unchanged. Her love is as fiery, as swiftly-leaping as the vanishing squirrel. For Bernice, future and past are one, unchanging. Time held them safe, she thought. She even imagined them old, side by side in the shop, side by side in their tumbled bed. On the night of the madrigals, she felt sad. Now, days have passed, days in which, with a mortifying clumsiness, Dr. O. has, like St. Peter, denied her.
Why
? Bernice's mouth sits in a little straight line of pain.
Why
? She knows – but this is small comfort – that she isn't guilty of even the briefest moment's withdrawal of love. She is as constant as the mayfly to its single day. Her only transgression is to be sick in the bookshop lavatory one morning, causing Dr. O. to stare at her accusingly and ask: “No connection with maternity, I trust, Bernice?” and her to answer as stylishly as the dying Nelson: “None. Would you kiss me, Dr. O.?” He pecked her hot cheek and withdrew. The smell of him near her made Bernice reach out her white arms and bring him to her and lay her face on his neck. Again, he withdrew and she let him go, afraid. She smelled of sick and disgusted him. And so for the rest of the day he showed her no kindness. That night, in need of his comfort and finding herself alone, she began to feel afraid.

The programme on the squirrels ends. Someone informs her that these creatures are still plentiful in France, especially in the densely wooded area of the Dordogne. So Bernice, who has never travelled to this region, tries to calm her helplessly anxious heart with imaginings of these distant-seeming forests.

Leni is alone in the mauvish light of her private hospital room. Books and magazines have been brought to her by her visitors, but tonight she isn't reading. She lies propped up and dreaming of her life.

Leni, the witch, stares at the brew she has made
.

Age, she decides, hasn't quelled her love of mischief. Merely, the people she knows are too old or too dry or too lazy to practise it any more. The Oxford of her younger days has vanished from sight. In rooms she doesn't visit, where she isn't invited, she imagines that something which passes for mischief goes on quietly. (In the old, quiet world it was daring to be noisy, to dance and cavort and yell; now in the modern scream-bombarded world, it might seem bold to be silent and secretive.)

A night nurse, her eyes puffy with daylight sleeping, comes in and gives Leni the two pills she has taken each night for sleep since the death of David, and Leni thanks her. The first night she took the capsules, she dreamt they contained a tiny powdering of ash from David's burnt body. He was a man who, all his life, slept well. Sleep is like thanks, she decided, for the strength of the day. David's contentedly snoring face reaffirmed this. Now all her days are weak and her brain won't give her this blissful gratitude. She mourns it guiltily, swallows her pills, lies like a cat in the dark, seeing the edges and outlines of her past.

She had a nickname at one time, the “Duchess of Oxford”. There was some venom in it, from which David tried to protect her. She laughed at his protection then, knew there were a hundred women in Oxford jealous of her beauty and more jealous still of her wit. So few people she meets now are witty. For all that it allows, this age is bleak. As if all the big juicy brains had shrivelled and dried like her own womb which is so small now in her small body it couldn't push out a bird. She'd like David's protection from this drying up of life. With age, he would have grown in girth, as she has shrunk. In his bulky warmth she would have felt less arid.

The night nurse removes Gary's flowers, some of which have begun to wilt. Seeing the flowers go, she remembers today was Wednesday and wonders what bits of love-blinded thought he's struggled with. She thinks of him tenderly, his head close to the desklight, the night coming on in his lilac room. “Mother . . .” he calls her softly, “I'm going to miss you, lovely.” And Leni sighs, remembering his future homelessness. “I must do something about that,” she says aloud.

“What did you say, dear?” asks the nurse.

“I must remind myself to do something about the house. Or Gary will be chucked out – by my son-in-law.”

The nurse, whose morning this violet-lit darkness is, looks reproachfully at Leni. The old suffer from disconnected thought. You have to yank them back to reality and pin them down.

“Time for sleep,” she says firmly, snatching one pillow from the pile where Leni's head is lodged like a precious vase padded out for packing. “Now, I'm going to pop you on the pan, Mrs. Ackerman, ready for the night.”

THREE

  

Word that Larry's swimming pool is begun travels on frosty breath round the lanes of Pomerac. Children come and throw stones into the big yellow-clay pit. A dog falls into it and breaks its neck and lies in the rain for a day, unnoticed. Up from his tobaccoey room comes the Maréchal and pauses at Larry's wall and stares with his bird eyes at the hole and the felled walnut tree and the mountain of mud. By Gervaise's kitchen fire he sits nodding his disbelief: “Swimming pools! This isn't America.”

But Gervaise feels as emotional as on her Saint's day at the thought of this apparition slowly forming behind her south wall. As if worlds she will never see have been brought to her doorstep. As if her love of Pomerac, deeper by fathoms than any pit sunk in Larry's garden, is now nevertheless shared by this stranger who has chosen to spend his money not in Paris or Hollywood but here, right under her nose. So she feels protective of Larry. The more because he's alone now and sometimes helpless-seeming. She's taken to calling on him, bringing leeks and parsnips from a vegetable patch so fertile with the rich cow-muck that her beet comes shouldering out of the earth and her summer peas climb waist-high. He seems rather grateful for her care of him. His struggles with her language have lessened. He finds words now, to thank her with dignity and to offer tobacco for Mallélou who, since he returned from Bordeaux, behaves more and more like a very old man, sucking a vacant pipe in the cold yard, standing still.

Larry and Gervaise even talk of the pool and he has explained to her how he found inspiration in St. Front. She thinks this is clever. Life is often the art of seeing in one artefact or idea the embryo of another. Klaus, too, admires this vision of a pool and has negotiated with Larry a small fee for helping him do the pipework and concreting. Only Mallélou and the Maréchal have in common their disdain. Their old men's bones distrust shiny, treacherous surfaces.

“You would have thought,” grumbles the Maréchal to Gervaise, “Pomerac was safe from this kind of comedy.”

But Gervaise is stern with this moaning: “They say swimming strengthens the heart, Maréchal.”

“The heart? It's going to break mine.”

“Why?”

“You ask me why, Gervaise?”

“Yes.”

“Because it's a madness come to a place that was sane.”

“But a small madness. It's not hurting anyone.”

“It's hurting me.” And he taps his ancient chest. “It's going to finish me off.”

Gervaise leans over and presses her lips to the Maréchal's head. As winter nears, he wraps this head up in a muffler. He smells of oily wool. “No one understands,” he's fond of saying, “the cold gets in through the skull. Small wonder people die young.”

Mme. de la Brosse has closed her house and gone to Paris for the winter. She will open it briefly for Christmas, then leave again till spring. Pomerac in November, petrified by the first frosts, shedding its leaves, held in the sighing of the wind, bleated to by the high rooks, only reaffirms the passage of her own life into a dead season. In Paris, in busy restaurants, in warm shops smelling of leather and perfume, this season is partially obscured. She still has one or two old admirers. They take her to the theatre and to dinner at the
Mediterranée
. In her small, smart flat she is comfortable and safe. Catherine Deneuve lives in the same block.

No one misses her in Pomerac. Her limes are clipped. Behind the worn shutters, her furniture is shrouded. Chickens and guineafowl and goats stray into her garden. She could be dead. The Maréchal stares at the closed house and remembers her old father-in-law, the Colonel, a jumpy, well-tailored man with an old-world sense of grandeur. The house was done up with velvet and brocade. There was champagne on the lawn on family birthdays. At Easter the village children brought posies of wild flowers and were given history books and pencil boxes. The Colonel believed in education for the peasants and sent his wife to Périgueux to buy these gifts with care. Over the years the St. Catherine school library was virtually restocked by Colonel de la Brosse and, though the headmaster was a man who hated the military, he was forced, year after year, to thank this man for his patronage. When the Colonel died, this teacher felt profound relief, as if a heretic had been burned. The Colonel's son, Anatole, was a man too shy and reserved to give pencil boxes to shabby children. For a year or two, the Easter posies came and the little girls and boys who had made them waited awkwardly for their presents. The old widow was absent. Anatole and his wife took in the flowers and gave beakers of lemonade, round which the children's hands grew cold, waiting. They could tell all the zeal had gone from the house. Easters came and went and not one book nor one mathematical instrument ever came out of it again. These same children, now grown into mothers and fathers of the stone-throwers in Larry's garden, remember Colonel de la Brosse with wary affection. They conclude he may have been corrupt. Stories are told of a bribery scandal. But at least he was colourful and kind and had seemed to be as brave in his charity as he had been in the war. No collaborator, he. Escaping from prison, he walked two hundred miles to Paris and on forged papers made his way to London where he joined de Gaulle's Free French. He returned a hero and in Pomerac he was garlanded with wild roses. All his life, he was given flowers. Now, he lies at Ste. Catherine but his marble grave is visited only once a year, in March, by the Maréchal, who brings mimosa for all the old soldiers buried there.

With his garden in ruins and all Miriam's flowers covered in clay, Larry is trying to dig out the future. The eagle he hopes plaintively to see doesn't visit him any more. The bulldozer has frightened it off. The future looks like a rubble pit. Larry's old knack of seeing the finished pool just under this pit seems to have left him. He feels frightened of the scar he's made. He cleans and polishes the Granada, hiding it and his bulgy reflection out of sight of his excavations. His hand, fretting over the body of his car, seems a lunatic limb, making silly little motions. Yet what is there in him so easily comforted by shine? He should be a car salesman. Cars come mirror-bright from someone else's labours. All the salesman does is try to love them, to slap their boots and bonnets with familiarity and pride, to show them off looking their best. Pools are so complex by comparison. Even finished, they're temperamental. Larry stares at the rumpled earth and knows he's lost faith. The future refuses to appear in any guise but the chopped-up present. He digs and digs and still he can't see it. He wonders if, by leaving him, Miriam has snatched it away.