The Swimming Pool Season (26 page)

So she'll try once more. A last time. Then her room can be put in order. She doesn't doubt that, a year from now, she'll be Luc's wife.

One morning, soon after Xavier's arrival in Pomerac, the Maréchal wakes with the notion that sewage from the Ste. Catherine sewage plant is seeping into Eulalie's grave. To think of the clean woman his wife was lying with her bones in muck troubles him so badly he can't eat his habitual breakfast of coffee and bread. He sits in his grey room, repentent for the small care he takes of Eulalie's plot. He wants to find flowers to sweeten her earth. He wants to talk to her through the marble chippings.

Raising his stick in greeting to the villagers he meets on his way, he shuffles up to Gervaise's door, watched by Nadia from her window, seen eventually by Klaus and Larry who are down in the pool pit laying pipes to and from the central drain, received at last by Mallélou in his morning idleness, unshaven, pale and smelling of sleep.

“Mallélou? It's me. Come for a favour.”

“Yes. Come in, Maréchal, come in.”

All decisions, all rejoicings, all rows, prayers, repentences and family arithmetic take place, in Gervaise's house, round the oilcloth table. It's here, then, that the Maréchal sits and brings out his pipe.

“Wine, Maréchal?”

“Well, all right. Just a glass.”

“Nothing bad happened, I hope?”

“To me? What more can happen this side of death?”

Mallélou pours the harsh red wine he likes to drink on and off all day. “Plenty, Maréchal.”

“Well, I could lose my speech or my wits, I suppose. I could get dumped in a rabbit hutch line Lemoine . . .”

“Your house could burn.”

“I could get the English as neighbours!”

He slaps the table and laughs. Mallélou joins in. Mocking Larry and his pool is a bond of a kind – one of the few – uniting these two men. But the Maréchal looks solemn.

“I need a lift to Ste. Catherine. I can't walk that far any more.”

“Today you want to go?”

“Before too long. I need to spend an hour with Eulalie.”

“Eulalie. God rest her.”

“I think they're disturbing her.”

“Who?”

“Those sewage lines.”

“Disturbing her? Best go today then. Tell you what, Xavier will take you.”

“Xavier? He's here?”

“Yes.”

“No one told me.”

“Well, he's here. Come back to his mother.”

“I'm glad for her, Mallélou.”

“Yes, yes, glad for
her
. But what about the boy? So skinny he is. Where's his youth? Where's his energy? If it comes to prison, God save him. He's not up to it.”

“I'd like to talk to him. We were all fond of Xavier.”

“Well you talk to him, Maréchal. You try to put some pep into him.”

The Mallélou family own an old Renault
fourgon
, empty of rear seats, smelling of pipe ash and eornseed. Calves, goats, guineafowl, hens have at one time or other been bumped down the Pomerac lanes in this rusty car. Now Xavier drives the Maréchal in it, holding fast to his stick, his owl's eyes watery in a day of strong sunlight, to visit Eulalie's grave. The wind which howled at Xavier's arrival has gone, the brittle leaves and bright berries of the hedgerows are still and the sky is clear. It's the last of autumn before the winter drizzles, the last warmth dredged from the sun.

The Maréchal, his mind on Eulalie's bones, talks to Xavier of mighty things, of the evanescence of youth, of the
ennui
of old age. Xavier drives and says little, scratching his sore face. The journey by car is very short. They arrive quickly at the church of Ste. Catherine les Adieux and its crowded burial ground, past which the road to Thiviers thunders.

Xavier is glad to get out of the car and away from the Maréchal's wisdom. The old man wanders off towards the tall headstone that reads:
Eulalie Marguerite Foch, 1899–1971
. “
Quand j'ai traversé la vallée/Un oiseau chantait sur son nid
.” He stands in silence, holding the chrysanthemums he's brought and remembering the warts which buttoned out on Eulalie's chin as she passed sixty and began to be flustered by premonitions of death.

Xavier, who has been told by Gervaise to let the Maréchal “be alone with Eulalie”, decides to go into the church, where, as a boy, he heard his mother pray repeatedly for rain or sunshine, for healthy cows and a good crop of apples and give thanks when these blessings came about. The God inhabiting this church seemed always very obedient to Gervaise. In Xavier's mind the Christ who watched over the labour of her animals and sent his sunshine to ripen her tomatoes was the plaster-of-Paris Christ propped up on the Ste. Catherine altar. There was nothing universal about him. He only heard you if you lived near Ste. Catherine. He was a CB God, a short-wave deity.

He's still there on the gaudy altar. The hand raised in blessing has a chipped thumb. The eyes are painted a fierce blue. If the statue were dropped, it would smash to smithereens. Xavier walks down the nave towards it wondering, now that he's back within the orbit of its power, whether he can ask to be spared prison and be heard. He makes his genuflection and slips into a pew. There's only one other person in the church, a woman kneeling in the front row, praying, her head covered by a silk scarf. Xavier wonders whether this hunched figure isn't Mme. de la Brosse.

He says his prayer: “God save me from jail. Please save me from that. Save me from jail, please God,” and crosses himself. The church is cold. He fears that his prayer is as cold, as empty of poetry as it. The plaster Jesus with the mutilated thumb stares, unseeing, past him towards the font where, when he was eight Gervaise insisted he and Philippe be rebaptised, knowing in her soul and in her liver that the holy water of cities is polluted, hoping that the holy water of Ste. Catherine, despite its nearness to the sewage farm, would wash away the childhood of the tyre dumps and the wall slogans. Xavier can't enter this church without remembering the embarrassments of that baptism. Mallélou got up like a bridegroom or a mourner in a suit of shiny black. The priest ladling water on their heads like soup, the Maréchal coughing into a handkerchief, a cluster of Ste. Catherine children at the door, laughing. After it, they walked in a little formal troupe up the Pomerac hill, their hair still wet. And he and Philippe kicked stones, missing the city litter.

Xavier watches as the woman in the scarf gets up, stands staring for a moment at the sentimental window behind the altar, then turns and walks towards him. The woman is Agnès Prière. Expecting the dejected, resigned, life-is-bitter countenance of Mme. de la Brosse, Xavier finds his knees on the hassock shivering with the greengage beauty of pale Agnès. Quickly covering his eczema patch with his hand, he sends to her hazel eyes a stare of absolute longing. She falters in her smooth walk and is for the briefest second face to face with his young man's desire. Then she walks on, passing him, setting her face towards the open door. She wants to look back at him. She resists and resists till her feet touch the slab of sunlight at the doorway, then she turns quickly and sees him standing now, as if preparing to follow her, and she knows from his open mouth that this touching of each other with their eyes has made him breathless. Sadly she walks away to Hervé's car and gets in and drives off. She wonders whether, in an average life – in the life of the kiosk woman on the corner of her Paris street, in the life of her piano teacher with his fathomless spectacles – there are many moments like this one, moments when what is suddenly glimpsed is as suddenly and as swiftly lost.

At Eulalie's graveside, the Maréchal's eyes weep from strong sunshine and remembered days when his wife was living, smelling of lavender. He remembers her linen drawer and all her home-stitched camisoles and petticoats and knickers. So neat and flying was Eulalie with her sewing machine, that women tramped to her from five villages with their paper patterns, their cards of lace and their cotton remnants. She could have made ballgowns. When the Maréchal's hands undid the ribbons at her breast, his lust sometimes faltered at her woman's artistry and all he then asked of her was to lay his head on her ruches and pleats and gathers and let her hands gently caress his back. She died thin, in the same size bodice she'd worn on her wedding day, and was boxed up in a white smock she'd made especially for death. Now she's bone and even her children are bone in their Paris graves and only the Maréchal has any memory of her body in its camisoles, its little accommodating movements under his belly, its more knowledgeable ways with the crimping iron. “Eulalie,” he says soundlessly, “I hope they're not disturbing you with muck.”

Xavier stays in the church. He walks to the Ste. Catherine Roll of Honour for the two wars and starts to read off the names. I would like, he finds himself thinking, to do something brave and be remembered in carved letters. I would like there to be some honour in my life. The face of the girl stays with him like a presence. So clean. Her breath would be innocent. He would take her to the pike river and let his love for her spring up. After loving her, he would ask her to wash him with freezing water. They would stumble about, splashing, laughing. There would be blood on her thigh. And they would be lovers very often after that. For years. It breaks Xavier's heart to know this will never happen.

Riding home without his chrysanthemums, reassured that all seems peaceful at Eulalie's resting place, the Maréchal says to Xavier: “It's a very precious thing, a wife. I shouldn't neglect her like I do.”

“Well,” says Xavier, “it's of no significance. She's not there to notice whether you neglect her or not.”

“You don't believe in an after-life, Xavier?” says the Maréchal.

“No,” says Xavier.

“Neither do I,” says the Maréchal, “neither do I,” and shakes his head. Then, as they near the Pomerac hill he says suddenly: “I believe in this one, though. It's no good neglecting that. Eh, Xavier?”

“No,” says Xavier.

Nadia Poniatowski still finds herself spending some part of each day at her window, craning for the sight of Hervé's car. Sometimes her watching is overtaken by the darkness and she becomes suddenly aware that she can't any longer see the lane on which her eyes are fixed. When this happens, she draws her curtains and renounces her vigil as pointless, promising herself not to waste another minute of her life in this way. She busies herself then, writing letters to her children, doing her
gros point
cushion covers, polishing silver. She knows her love is hopeless. She knows it's harming her like an illness. Yet it refuses to leave her. November goes slowly to its end. She tries to save on electricity to afford her vodka and her room is often cold. She shivers and dreams through her days, arriving very often in her mind at Hervé's bedroom door: two sleepwalkers meeting at last. “So stupid,
stupid
!” She screams at Larry, her only confessor, her only visitor. “Why am I so suffering from this stupidity?”

But since the morning of Agnès's visit to him, Larry has less patience with Nadia's infatuation. Her talk of Hervé doesn't help him in his own forgetting of Agnès, tempts him, in fact, to consider himself wildly fortunate as the unlikely altar of Agnès's sacrifice, tempts him to get into his Granada and go flying past the waterfall, up Harve's drive and on, on into the cool white tower where his child sits and waits . . . “Stop it, Nadia!” he hears himself shout. “We'll both go mad with this thing. Stop dreaming!”

Together they sit down and talk of Miriam. There is sanity in Nadia's dislike of Leni; there is sanity in Larry's missing of his wife. Another letter has come, informing him that the exhibition opens on December 1st, that Leni is out of hospital, that a man called Dr. O. has taken Miriam to the theatre to see
The Rivals
. In Miriam's life, all seems to perch serenely, even Leni the macaw. Or so she wishes Larry to believe. She makes no mention of an end to the separation, won't say what she plans. Nor does she mention the pool. Laying breeze blocks, Klaus says one morning: “Such a surprise for Miriam. Not?” And Larry's heart thuds. “Not,” he says wryly. He's stopped building it for Miriam. He's building it for Agnès.

So, towards the end of November, a feeling that he must see Agnès steals on Larry and sends him hurrying off to Périgueux one morning to buy a gift for her, something to offer, something to reassure her she's not spurned, only protected. He wanders the market, staring blankly at birds and rabbits and overalls and flan tins. He stops at a flower stall and nearly decides to repeat his gift of a tree, but this doesn't satisfy him. The tree would become Harve's. He's in search of something Agnès will keep. He goes back to the rabbits, remembering tenderly her soft jerseys, then realises that these rabbits are sold for breeding and eating, not as pets. He feels muddled – “stupid” in Nadia's vocabulary – and English and heavy with wearying lust. He goes to the busy café where the dominoes players are just starting a
threes and fives
and orders a beer. Sternly in this busy bar, he reminds himself that Agnès is younger than his own son and once again makes a solemn promise to forget her.

The lines of love or longing, if you drew them, they'd criss-cross Pomerac like a tangle of wool. Up in the de la Brosse garden, the old man paid to keep the edges tidy is dreaming of the bosom of Mme. Carcanet in the Ste. Catherine épicerie. Down at the school, the elderly headmaster says prayers in the library donated by a Colonel he despised and adds one for himself: “God punish my wife for the lovers she takes each spring.” From the Maréchal's foetid room, lines travel not only to Eulalie in her smock but half across France to his dead sons and all the grandchildren who year by year expect news of his death and never come to visit him. And down into Pomerac, deep into the very centre of the village, comes the cold, black line of the longings of Claude Lemoine. This is the cruellest line. It's threaded not merely to Nadia but to the land on which he once owned two houses. It touches every stone and every season.