The Swimming Pool Season (2 page)

Mallélou worked on the outskirts of the city once, a poor job on the railways, tapping the line. Then he was promoted to signals. In the perched-up signal box he felt content. “The life of a signalman,” he told Gervaise, “it's all right. I would have been comfortable with that.” And now, years later, he often thinks about the fugged smell of the signal hut, the tin mugs of coffee, the ashtray the shape of a woman, and mourns the passing of something agreeable. The thing he'd liked every morning was you stubbed out your first cigarette in that woman's pussy. And you felt okay. You looked out at those sloggers on the line and thought,
imbeciles
. But when the father of Gervaise died, Mallélou went back with her to the old man's bit of land. The brothers wouldn't go. They had jobs in the print in Angoulême, jobs too good to leave for a few hectares. And Gervaise had never, in her simple head, left those fields. The soot of the railways had made her wring her hands. “I don't feel sane,” she'd say, “in this smog.” So they returned. It was dawn-to-dusk work, the farm. No walking home with the lights glimmering in the city rain and thinking, that's it for now, a day off, get out tomorrow and see a Hollywood film. You never got out from Gervaise's farm. It cried and bleated and sang to you in every season.

Klaus descends. There's a roguish majesty in all his movements. Standing at the table where Mallélou has set out the ham, Klaus dwarfs the older man like a giant Goth. His skin is pink, pig-pink fleeced with curly gold that lightens in summer; his mouth is a sweeter colour, the purple-pink of the smoked ham. Mallélou has a secret plan for Klaus: to get him to Paris to meet Claude Chabrol. He trusts absolutely Chabrol's willingness to turn the weighty Klaus into a star. But Klaus shows no sign of wanting to go to Paris. He seems happy with his slow, labouring life. He seems, in fact, one of the most contented men Mallélou has ever met. Yet why? His trade was bread. There was money in the city bread shops. He was doing well and he chucked it. Just chucked it and stayed on with Mallélou and Gervaise, listening out the winter evenings by their fire.

“Go and call her, Klaus. Tell her the coffee's hot.”

“No. She'll come in when she's finished.”

“Well she's late today.”

“So? She's late.”

“I'm not waiting for her then.”

“Don't wait.”

But they hear her now, that flip-flap of her rubber boots. After her meal she will measure the milk into churns while Mallélou drives the cows back to their pasture. She comes in, her breathing audible but shallow, her skimpy hair flat on her forehead under the soft scarf, her little flinty eyes bright like an animal's. Klaus draws back a chair for her and smiles, as if a king or queen had dropped in for tea. Mallélou turns back to his coffee on the hob.

The post van bouncing on the rutted lane wakes Miriam. Miriam Kendal, née Ackerman, makes the transition from sleep to alert wakefulness elegantly, without fuss or sighing. At almost fifty she's well fleshed but not soft, large but not fat. Dependable, she seems, stoic, healthy. Larry envies his own son his robust mother, yet often feels that for a wife he might have chosen someone more fragile, with a greater need of him.

Miriam puts on a garment she privately addresses as la robe. Sometimes she paints wearing la robe. Sometimes she goes out to the flowers in la robe and thinks of Sissinghurst and Vita Sackville-West and her friends wearing those strange clothes they wore. Mainly la robe is a comforter. Larry calls it “that thing”. “Why're you in the garden in that thing, Miriam?” “It's not ‘that thing',” she wants to say, “it's la robe.” She loves it. It's loose and full of pockets. She designed it and made it herself with a remnant from Dickins and Jones. She made it for the French holidays, for summer and a terrace. Now she's in it all year till winter.

She can hear Larry talking to the postman. The way Larry speaks French makes him sound both eager and helpless. This isn't merely true of Larry, Miriam has noted, it's true of almost all the English men. Somehow, the women manage this language better. Or perhaps the eagerness, the helplessness is simply less embarrassing in a sex the whole terrified patriarchal world is hoping will retain its last shred of docility and willingness to obey. It's odd though, she flinches when Larry talks French. She has this thought of displacing him to Germany where, in hard monosyllables like
gutt
and
Gott
and
nicht
and
nacht
he might regain some missing strength, some sort of dignity.

The door of the post van slams. Miriam at the window watches it reverse almost to Gervaise's yard and bounce up the lane. Letters don't often come. The Kendals' absence in England is no longer new. It's assumed they've “made a life for themselves”. Only Leni writes every month. You can measure date and season by Leni's letters.

“Is it from Leni, Larry?”

Miriam comes down the uncomfortable staircase. Larry stands in the wide kitchen-living room. For some reason he's slung a tea towel over his shoulder and he holds this in just the same way as, twenty-seven years ago, he held their baby, Thomas. Men slung with tiny babies make them seem so light. Larry's a well-built man, his legs just a little too short for his torso. His face is wide and his blue eyes generous and kind. His hair is wild, curly and grey.

“No. Not Leni. It's not her writing. But it's postmarked Oxford.”

“Oh? Who, I wonder?”

“Addressed to you.”

The mist has cleared. On the flagstone terrace, expertly laid by Larry, the sun is falling on straggly geraniums in plastic urns painted to look like stone. Old Mallélou has admired the lightness of these pots. His own existence is hedged with weightier things.

“I'm off then, Miriam,” says Larry. He wears shorts and a sweat shirt. His sturdy, short legs beneath these move him rather jerkily to the hook where he hangs his car keys.

“Off where, Larry?”

“Périgueux. It's time I looked up those pool suppliers.”

“I thought we were going to wait till the spring now.”

“I don't want to wait. I want to get on with it.”

Miriam goes to the fridge and takes out a carton of orange juice. The orange juice in France tastes of sugar and chemicals. Miriam mourns her Unigate delivery.

“Well. What time will you be back?”

“Oh, not sure. Car needs a spin. I'll go via Harve's and see if he wants anything. You'll be working, won't you?”

“Yes.”

“Remind me, when I get back, there's something I want to talk to you about.”

“Talk to me now.”

“No, no. It's not that important. Just a thought I've had about the car.”

“The car? You're not thinking of changing it in are you?”

“We should trade it in this year. But I don't think there's any question. Next year perhaps, after the pool's in.”

“So what
about
the car?”

“Nothing, Miriam.” Larry is agitated now, wanting to leave. The Périgueux road goes past a waterfall. Perfect spot, this, he always thinks, for a car commercial, and imagines himself in a spanking new Datsun Cherry or a VW Scirocco. “It's just a little scheme which, like all my schemes, will come to nothing.”

“What are you upset about, Larry?”

“Upset?”

“Yes. You seem upset.”

“I'm not upset, Miriam. I'm just keen to press on.”

“You'll get a beer and a sandwich or something for lunch?”

“Yes. Don't worry about me.”

Miriam smiles. “Larry, you've still got that tea towel over your shoulder.” Larry doesn't smile. He seems fussed with rage. He snatches the towel off and leaves without another word.

In the lane, his passage to his Granada is temporarily blocked by Gervaise's cows slipping and swaying past his house on their way back to the fields. Mallélou with his stick and Larry with his car keys exchange a silent greeting.

Miriam sits down at the heavy wooden table – bought in Eye, Suffolk, for six pounds – and opens the letter. It is, after all from Leni Ackerman, but written in black biro by someone else.

Dearest Miriam
,

Kind Gary – you remember my lodger, Gary? – is going to help me with this letter because at the moment my silly hands refuse to do anything practical, like holding a pen
.

I hope I shall be up soon and back at my desk. And perhaps at Christmas you might afford the trip over. I do miss you, Miriam darling, and have thought of you so much in this recent time. I hope those plans you had for a new exhibition are going on well. With love and blessings from your loving mother, Leni
.

P.S. Where is Thomas? I've forgotten where he is or what he's doing? If he's in England, please ask him to come and see me
.

Miriam reads this letter twice and tears gather quickly in her grey eyes and begin to fall. When Miriam cries, she cries copiously: “Look at Miriam's tears!” Leni used to say delightedly. “They're so round and perfect!” And Miriam can still feel the scented dabbing of Leni's lawn handkerchiefs and hear her screechy laugh. Leni. Impossible to imagine you dying. Impossible. Miriam wipes her eyes with the sleeve of la robe. Get well, Leni. Get strong again. Don't leave me. Don't.

But Miriam's mind has already heard, in some hard and buried part of itself, this certainty: Leni is dying. She pushes away the orange juice, lays her arms on the table and weeps. Outside, she dimly hears the Granada start up and thinks for a moment of calling Larry back to comfort her, and tell her it isn't so. Yet it is so. Miriam knows. She prefers to be alone with this knowledge and let it bow her.

Gently, on her bed in the spacious old Oxford house, Miriam lays out her mother's dead body. At her back, out of sight behind the door, students fuss and whisper, boys mostly, bringing flowers. Miriam selects a dark dress, thin with time, with clusters of sleek, soft feathers at each shoulder. The Crow Dress. A hat used to go with it: more feathers and a velvet-flecked veil. She finds this and lays it down while she touches the fine, fine contours of the face, eyes vast in their sockets, a nose like Napoleon's in the Delacroix painting, angular and fierce. Leni Ackerman. So beautiful.

At the waterfall, Larry turns left up the steep drive that leads to Harve's house. There's a mush of chestnut leaves on this track and the green husks of conkers. Autumn begins, then the winds come and it starts to feel like winter. Harve's house is two centuries old, with a stone turret and brown, echoing cellars. He's been alone in it but for a maid, Chantal, for years now. He's fifty-one and a bachelor: Docteur Hervé Prière, known to Larry affectionately as “Harve”. He's a slim and careful man with a proud forehead and slow exquisite speech. Larry loves him for this, his care with language. He was the first Frenchman Larry could understand.

He's in a room he calls the bureau with his straight, dry legs resting on a hard sofa. These legs are in plaster from heel to knee, the vulnerable imprisoned feet covered with woolly socks like egg cosies. His long hands flurry with a medical journal but he's not reading it; the broken legs disturb and reproach him. Where will the next years lead him? To what precipice? He's become so somnambulist. The night he broke his legs, he flew down the stairs.

Chantal is away. Some dying parent or cousin in Paris. Poor old Harve slithers round the wood floors of his mansion on flat, sinewy buttocks, wearing a dark shine into his grey trousers. He prefers this slithering to walking with crutches, believes it's quicker, doesn't mind if he looks like a seal. And he says people in the village are kind: Nadia Poniatowski cooks him chicken with chestnuts; the de la Brosse widow lends him her maid to make his bed and do his washing. The practice is suffering, though. The young locum sitting in Hervé's consulting chair is too shy of bodies; has let slip he'd rather be a vet.

Larry parks the Granada on the gravel sweep. Harve's home, in its high isolation, always impresses upon Larry the lowliness of his own house, its hopeless nearness to Gervaise's south wall, the pretensions of its terrace. He feels diminished by Hervé's turret, by his sundial, by the wistaria dressing the stone with mauve cascades. This is elegance. This is nobility and money and roots. Larry has begun to fear that life led without the comfort of these is oddly futile.

“How are you, Harve?”

Larry has walked past dusty leaning suits of armour in the impressive hall and found his friend in the bureau, staring at his legs.

“Oh, Larry. Good. Good of you. So bloody boring all this. Imagine the war-wounded. What do they do? Restricted motion kills. It's killing me.”

“Yes. Or the man chained to his desk.”

“The man chained to his desk! That's good. Yes. What does he do? Dies. Have a drink, Larry. Sherry or something? A little morning cassis?”

Hervé waves feebly at a mighty oak cupboard where these drinks are kept. Larry has had no breakfast. He feels hollow and slightly unsteady. He imagines Miriam poaching her solitary egg, making a small pot of coffee, taking these into the sunshine.

“Well, a cassis . . .”

“Yes. Me too. I like cassis in the morning. Gets the stomach nice and warm. You pour them.”