The Swimming Pool Season (24 page)

It is here, still sleeping, that Mallélou is to be found on the morning of his son's arrival. Xavier shivers by the stove downstairs while Gervaise boils milk for coffee. She remembers Mallélou snoring up there with his light burning and feels ashamed that Xavier should discover his father like this. “Your father's not well,” she tells him. “So I let him sleep these mornings. He's not well at all.”

“What's the matter with him?”

“He won't say.”

“So he's skiving. As usual.”

“No, no.”

“Letting you do all the work.”

“I like the work. You know that.”

“But Papa should help you.”

“He does what he can. He's put in a new fence on the top meadow since the summer.”

“What's that mess next door, Maman?”

“What mess?” Gervaise is uncritical of Larry's excavations. She can see in her mind only the finished St. Front pool.

“What are they doing? Building a tower block?”

“A
tower
block?”

“Or what?”

“Where?”

“In Lemoine's house.”

“Ah. Lemoine's long gone, you know. The house was sold to some English people.”

“Lemoine's dead?”

“No. Put away. He was put away.”

Change. Xavier huddles near the stove where Gervaise watches the milk. Change has crept here, right to his mother's frayed hem. Xavier feels so sickly and troubled, he knows his whole body is shaking. Gervaise, moving quietly, trying not to be agitated, makes a bowl of milky coffee and puts this gently into Xavier's hands.

“I'd like a drop of cognac in it, Maman.”

“I don't keep cognac, Xavier. Only eau de vie.”

“Eau de vie, then.”

They sit at the table in the kitchen where Gervaise had her birthday feast. Outside, Klaus leaves his basket of eggs by the door and walks away, up to the barn, where he continues the shovelling and hauling of manure begun by Gervaise. Upstairs, Mallélou sleeps on, dreams of the railways, never imagines his son has come home.

“I feel a failure, Maman.”

“Get away. You did a stupid thing, that's all.”

“I won't last in prison. I'll be one of the ones who can't take it.”

“Who says it'll come to prison?”

“It will. Or a fine we can't pay.”

“We'll pay.”

“What with? The Maréchal's savings?”

Gervaise feels herself blushing. Stupid, she thinks, to blush when no one knows better than Xavier the debts she owes to the old man. Yet, at almost fifty, she's a proud woman. She doesn't like to imagine a debt so large it can never be repaid.

“We'll find a way.”

He's glad to be with her. He's always felt pride in belonging to her. From the broken suitcase he tugs out the toilet-water and the soap, gift-wrapped by the shop, and gives them to her – a present from his city life. She smiles and thanks him, but they distress her. In the days of the signal hut, Mallélou would often come home reeking of this same scent. In her mind, it's the smell of city-death.

“Put some on, Maman.”

“What now? In these clothes?”

“Yes. Why not.”

“No, no.”

“Why not?”

“I'd like to save it.”

“Save it what for?”

She doesn't know. Some ceremony perhaps. A funeral. Mallélou's funeral.

“I'll just save it.”

At her table, drinking the good coffee, Xavier is calmed. He thinks of the room he's left behind in Bordeaux, his few possessions there, and knows he was right to leave it. He was going mad in there while his neighbours, two students his own age, tormented him with their laughter, with their serious music and with their tender ways. He felt too melancholy even to drink with his friends. The lives of those students on the other side of his wall were full of hope and his own was devoid of it. At night he'd hear them talking about the books they were reading and feel astonished that they could do this in and out of their love-making which was like some novel, full of expressions of fidelity and joy. He wanted to thump the wall to shut them up. One night he brought a whore to his room and screamed at her to keep the students awake. Then, lying by her side, her old puckered mouth snoring, he felt a sorrow for himself so profound he began to cry. He sensed the students listening in silence – holding tight to each other probably – to his pathetic sobbing and found himself wishing they'd come and comfort him. For the first time in his life he longed to have a wife, some woman he could admire, some clean girl with a mind. Women fell for him, that had never been a problem. Corinne, the brunette who worked in a babyshop opposite Mme. Motte's restaurant was dying of love for him, so she said, literally dying of it. But he was indifferent to her. Not even flattered. Indifferent to them all. Perhaps the woman did not exist who could move him.

He was having perpetual nightmares of the prison, and waking tired, as if he'd really been there in his sleep. He kept imagining himself old and prison-tainted, an old lag, all his good looks gone for ever. Why had he bothered to steal wine and potatoes? Even his mates laughed at the potatoes. He was getting stupid like his father. He began searching for a new job. He applied for posts as a biscuit packer, a florist's van driver, a station newspaper kiosk attendant, and a demonstrator of electrical goods. He got none of them. For the demonstrator's job he was expected to have Bac Part II – just to switch on switches, plug in hoses, assemble food processors . . .

His money was low and he saw the winter coming. Already his room was cold. The students started to discuss Marxist and non-Marxist interpretations of the English Revolution. Xavier, unaware that there had ever been an English revolution, lay buried in misery like a dog and began to long for the comfort of his mother.

One morning, he knocked on the students' door. They were pale, dark-eyed people who slightly resembled each other. Xavier told them they could use his room over the winter – “If you have a colleague to put up, or if you want to give a party” – and asked them only to take care of his things. “Where are you going?” they asked, and Xavier looked blank, unprepared for this question, “I have a friend . . .” he stammered and waved his hand hopelessly, “I have a friend . . .”

On the train to Thiviers, he imagined the students going through his magazines, and saying: “Look what he reads. He's thick. Look at this muck he buys.” He envied his brother Philippe his life in Paris. His job wasn't much – he worked for a cigarette company – but he'd stayed right with the law, he was engaged to the daughter of a chemist, there was hope in his future. It was freezing in the train. When Thiviers station came he didn't remember it and almost let it go by. Then he got out and felt the bellowing of the wind in the brilliant air. The chestnut leaves and the oak leaves were streaming off. Everything was flying and thudding and whooshing in the huge wind. Well, he thought, let it carry me off. Let it blow me up to hell.

But now the wind's settled, and, hugging his bowl, he's calm. Loving this frightened child, glad to be his protector, Gervaise nevertheless begins to wonder how the presence of her son in her house may alter the ways and affections of her lover.

The only resident of Pomerac to have noticed the arrival of Xavier Mallélou is Nadia. Since the evening of the
snotty gulashnova
, she's spent a lot of time standing at her window rehearsing what she'll say to Hervé when he arrives – as she's certain he will – to scold her for falling in love with him. As she rehearses, she strains anxiously for the sight of his car, even pressing her cheek against the glass. It's with her face at this peculiar angle that she sights the stranger with his sullen head and his clapped-out suitcase and recognises in this sad-seeming person Gervaise's son.

With her eye for beauty, her worshipping of straight-limbed, elegant men, Nadia had long ago been fascinated by Xavier Mallélou. His brother Philippe was an ordinary-looking boy, wiry like Gervaise, untidy like Mallélou, but Xavier was different, a changeling, an imposter, illegitimate surely, with the body of a god.

She knows the saga of Mme. Motte and the stolen wine. All was explained to an impatient-sounding lawyer over her telephone. She didn't expect Xavier to turn up in Pomerac. She stares at him, stares with a feeling of hope she can't account for. If forced to express it, she might simply say that with Xavier's arrival, life in Pomerac – she can't say how or why or when – will be subtly altered. She trusts him to alter it. Her heart cheers him home like a runner.

Larry, arriving soon afterwards at her flat to tell her about the letter from Miriam, is informed immediately. “Come up, Larry. You know that Mallélou boy is arriving, my dear?”

Larry closes Nadia's door and sits down on her colourful sofa.

“The one who got into trouble?”

“Yes. And he looks you know like the dog coming home, the tail under the legs.”

“You mean he's arrived?”

“Oh yes. Just one hour ago. I see him come up the hill so bent, you know, like that Prodigal Son. You learn that bloody story? The fatted-up cow is given to this one who is away and fucking, and the good brother who is minding the sheep is getting Matzo balls or what. When I learn this paraphrase I think my God this Christian religion is like Claude sometimes, round its rocker! Anyway, you want tea, my darling?”

Larry laughs, then on impulse says: “Let's visit Claude. I'll come with you. Let's go to Calais or wherever he is and make sure he's all right.”

Nadia stops her preparation of tea and stares at Larry over the Japanese screen. “You don't know what you say, Larry. There's no sense to Claude. And to see this notty man breaks my heart.”

“But he must wonder why you never come, Nadia.”

“No, I don't think. He forgets me. If I come, he's saying who is this woman?”

“You don't know that. Perhaps he's very lonely and missing you.”

“Oh no, Larry! Don't
talk
! My heart is breaking enough . . .”

“But you can't leave Claude there for ever and never visit him.”

“So, you reproach?”

“No. I'm not scolding you. I'm just thinking how it might be for him. It might make him very happy to see you, Nadia.”

“Well I don't know if I could do this. We Poles, we know of the institution, you know. We know what is liberty and what is the trouble of the soul in prison. And what am I remembering if I see my Claude? Oh my God I am remembering how he was strong and takes me to an open-air restaurant in the Bois and I'm crying for what is gone. So how is this help Claude, my dear? You tell.”

The kettle is boiling. She pours water on the tea and sighs heavily. Her face is flushed. Larry looks away from her out of the window where the trees are buffeted by the wind. This hurtling of leaves reminds him painfully that winter is almost here. In that instant, waiting for the tea, he feels old.

“I'm sorry, my dear,” says Nadia, bringing in the tea tray, “perhaps you are so right. Perhaps one day I must go to this institution, but I know it's giving me some nightmares and I don't want to fly out of the window, you know, or down the stairs like poor Hervé. I have a little root now in Pomerac. I am like some shallow heather or what with a small poor root in the soil and I don't want you just tear me up, you see?”

“Yes. I see, Nadia.”

“Compris
? Okay?”

“Yes.”

“So now you tell me, you want to telephone?”

“To Miriam? No. I had a letter this morning.”

“Bad news, so?”

“She wants a kind of rest from me.”

“Rest? So are you so exhausting, my dear? Are you biting her in your loving and so?”

Larry smiles. Nadia pours tea.

“She helped me so well when I was down. Now she needs a break from me.”

“So this is all? Poff! She leaves you in a puff of steam?”

“Yes. For a while.”

“So what you
do
, my darling? I don't know what she expects you do in Pomerac. You have no friends, no? Only Nadia and Hervé and those old Mallélous . . . You make your pool all alone? I think Miriam's going a little mad. I think she don't see what hurting she makes. I am really surprise.”

They sip the tea. The last two biscuits from an expensive packet are set out on a plate but sit there uneaten. The room is hot, as usual, and very tidy, with Nadia's bed folded into the wall. Sitting silently in this small protecting space, they hear a car begin to climb the Pomerac hill. Nadia gets up and goes to the window, squashing her cheek against it to see along the road. It is Hervé's car. She turns to Larry with the fear of a startled rabbit in her face.

“So, he's coming.”

“Hervé.”

“Of course Hervé.”

“I'll be on my way then, Nadia.”

Larry gets up but Nadia flurries to his side and grabs his hands.

“Don't go! Oh tell Nadia what to do, what to say! I'm so beating in my heart, Larry. Please stay . . .”

“You'll be all right, Nadia.”

“Oh my God, my God . . .”

“He's a kind man, Nadia, he's fond of you . . .”

“Listen!”

“What?”

“Listen, Listen.”

They're quiet. The car engine now sounds fainter.

“Oh my God . . .”

“What, Nadia?”

“He's not coming. He's not stopping.”

She rushes back to the window. She can't see the car. Despair and confusion shimmy in her body as she turns helplessly back to Larry.