The Swimming Pool Season (27 page)

From the Mallélou house, a tattered thread winds back through time from the room where Mallélou lies and stares at the wall to a room in Bordeaux where Marisa once lay in her cream satin sheets. From Gervaise, a patient line travels to Paris and encircles her eldest son, Philippe. To and from Heidelberg go the confectioner's lines of love for his mother and her missing of him. Yet in the embrace of Klaus and Gervaise all longing is forgotten and all desire satisfied. Their lovelines weave a basket which holds them together. But from Xavier a web is spun, reaching vainly from house to house, from hamlet to hamlet, in search of Agnès, whose name he doesn't know, whose own longings he can't guess at. Larry knows where she is, his irresistible child. As winter nears, the springtime man he sometimes is sends his green foliage of desire. And Agnès sits in her castle, writing love letters to her soldier, waiting, waiting, as Nadia waits at her window for life to alter, for the future to become clear . . .

Freezing winds sigh over the Pas de Calais ploughlands and in these Claude Lemoine hears the eternity of his own exile. In the complicated patterning of Pomerac's affections, the sharp and wounding line his heart sends is never noticed.

Certain lines, however, are about to be redrawn. While Larry sits in the Périgueux café listening to the shouts of the dominoes players, Hervé Prière sends Agnès down to Larry's house with an invitation to dinner. In a month's time, Hervé is going on holiday to Florida; Agnès will then return to Paris; the dinner is a little farewell to his neighbours. Hervé's old-fashioned courtesy dictates that he invite Nadia, but the coward in him declines to do this. He asks Agnès to ask Larry not to mention the dinner to Nadia, only the departure.

It's another bright and tranquil day: November going gently. That morning, the de la Brosse maid, Lisette, arrives to collect rugs and bedspreads for dry-cleaning, picking her way among the goat droppings in the garden. The Maréchal, seeing Lisette pass, thinks of Christmas and the sorrows reborn each year with it. “How many more?” he asks aloud.

Xavier and Klaus, grown quickly fond of each other's company, are working together on the swimming pool, laying the breeze-block base and walls onto which the concrete will be moulded. Amateurs both, they work painstakingly with plumblines and levels, strange guardians of Larry's vision. Sometimes in Klaus's ample imagination, the pool takes on the form of an actual cathedral, a work of magnitude and grandeur. He longs to be entrusted with the mosaic steps. He forgets that he's neither a masterbuilder nor a swimmer. He's boisterously happy. And a little of his optimism passes, at first imperceptibly, from him to Xavier. The eczema is healing. His idea of starting some late education seems less a mirage, more a possibility. It's as if the German was pouring into Xavier's dark skull some of his own peculiar light.

Getting no answer at Larry's door, Agnès walks round to the back of the house. Standing at the pool edge, she looks down on the blond curly head of Klaus and the dark straight head of Xavier. Xavier looks up and sees her and in his surprise absentmindedly wipes his eyes with his trowel, thus banding his face with mortar. Under his breath, not to her, but to his dreaming of her by the river he's gasped, “
Ah mon dieu, c'est toi!
”

Seeing him, she's dumb. As if she doesn't want to reveal the self she's been until now, neat and clean Agnès with her careful nails, fiancée of a boy from a good family. She blushes, in fact, at the very thought of the person she is. Xavier's stare, his sweet confusion, only add to her feelings of wanting to conceal herself, to become, in this instant, someone entirely different.

Wiping the mortar from his face with a rag, Xavier climbs out of the pool pit and is, before she's fully aware of it, at Agnès's side. He rubs his hands on his overalls and rashly reaches for her white little wrist. Like one of those meddling elders, Juliet's nurse, Pandarus, Klaus stares in wonderment at the antics of these two young people and rightly concludes, as they walk hand in hand away from him, that the same benign God who brought Gervaise to his patisserie with her honeycombs has thrown a thunderbolt at them. He shrugs and smiles and goes back to the contented building of his cathedral walls.

Thoughts of England start to trouble Larry half way through his second beer.

Since the night of Gervaise's birthday he's felt a bit more comfortable with his life in Pomerac, less sorry for himself, less afraid of winter and language, happier with the ancient ways of the village. Klaus has become a kind of friend. Even Xavier is courteous to him and pleased to work on the pool. And then there is Agnès. He'd like to kidnap her. Dress and undress her like a doll. Make her room beautiful. He knows these are the fantasies of his middle years. Though they feel like love, they're base. Yet they make him happy. He's happy with his fictions.

Then in the noisy café, where the air is full of greeting, he remembers the blue telephone and the white telephone on his desk at
Aquazure
and the Year Planner above them and his Golfer's Desk Diary signed by Tony Jacklin, and he feels a stab of misery.

The
Aquazure
offices were sited on the boundary of an industrial estate, on a road called Edith Cavell Way. The buildings on it seemed uniformly made of painted tin but were in fact built rather soundly and only clad in this corrugated substance as a measure against the damp. The Cavell family had once owned a cottage on this piece of lowland but the damp had been the eventual cause of its demolition. Whether Edith had ever stepped inside this cottage no one knew, but the new estate stuck her name up proudly and it was on the whole a conglomeration of rather proud, self-making people, like Larry Kendal, who traded here. Next to
Aquazure
was a fitted kitchen business called
Amora Kitchens
and on the other side a glazing company called
Aviemore
Ltd. Three A's in a line. At lunch, if he wasn't seeing a client, Larry would join John Aviemore and Mick Williams of
Amora
for a ploughman's at the estate pub,
The Ferryman
. Like the Frenchmen now absorbed in their dominoes, Larry and his friends were reassured by their own routines. The barman knew their names and their preferred drinks. They discussed the sport they watched on TV – golf, football and snooker. And all three, at one time, seemed like people on the up. People who would, in due time, shake hands with members of the Royal Family, or at the very least with the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Their respective ambitions had been set into patio doors, melamine worktops and heat exchangers and if one of them had suggested, over a Guinness, that in less than seven years Larry would be crumpling his Year Planner and scribbling “Shit!” in his Tony Jacklin diary and abandoning
The Ferryman
for a foreign café, the others wouldn't have believed him.

He thinks of Mick Williams and John Aviemore now and wonders who rented the space between them. They'd had a farewell drink with him. That morning Aviemore had clinched an order for two acres of greenhousing and Larry saw the lesson he should have learned: in England all life is creeping inside shelter, like pictures back inside frames. He was working on domed plastic covers for his pools but they were too vulnerable to gales and punctures, not reassuring enough. John would prosper with his glass and Mick with his kitchens because this was where life had paused. The grandiose experiment, the bold essay, these weren't happening any more. England seemed to be learning only from the Dutch. Covering vegetables while they grew. Larry got sick-drunk on these late realisations and Mick Williams drove him home, lighting Rothmans for him with the car lighter and sticking them in his mouth like a thermometer. And this is what he became from then on: the patient.

Larry finishes the second beer and orders a third. The dominoes players are drinking red wine in small glasses, like Mallélou does all day. Larry has a longing he can't classify to be discussing Steve Davis and Hurricane Higgins with John Aviemore and spreading Branston pickle on dense white bread in
The Ferryman's
saloon bar. Those were optimistic days. The news beleaguered you, but then in the mornings your office carpet had been hoovered and you knew that on Edith Cavell Way there was order and sense and everyone going about their business. Susan of the dark hair and quick-batting Leeds voice made excellent coffee on the Cona and brought in the first cup of the day, smiling, and you knew that a day might come when you'd go not to
The Ferryman
at lunchtime but to the downs with Susan and fuck her in your car. You bought the Renault 16, with its reclining seats with this act in mind. And Larry can't see a cherry coloured 16 now without remembering the way Susan's white feet had pounded the dashboard. Odd that it was the same car who refused to let him leave Miriam. Odd too, how easily Susan was forgotten.

Forgetting England needs practice, he knows. Surprisingly, he's doing better on his own than when Miriam was there; he's hardened his heart. Then, without warning, nostalgia – for the Today Programme, for Match of the Day, for Blackwell's Bookshop, for Marks and Spencer, for his Oxfordshire kitchen, for milk deliveries, for the voice of Sir John Gielgud, for Wimbledon, for the smell of post offices, for the double ring of a telephone, for his
Aquazure
desk, for
The Ferryman
and for the sound, the unmistakable cadences of his own language – invades him like a fierce pain, and all he wants then is for things to be as they were. At moments like this, he longs to ask more famous exiles than himself what they miss most. The trivial things, he decides. The smell of London buses. Cheap tea. The Test Match . . .

He stares at the men banging down their dominoes and envies them their place in their own culture. He drains the third beer and goes to piss in a foul smelling open urinal before driving home without a gift for Agnès. Klaus is still in the pit laying blocks. When he sees Larry, he calls him down to tell him the morning's news, his huge body pleased with what it relates.

“Good. Not? Not? Thunderboulders whizzing!”

Hervé Prière is very pleased with his decision to go to America. In Florida, they understand the terrors people get not just of death or violence but of their own shortcomings. They've got ways to soothe you. The hotels have storm windows. The cars are like portable rooms. French food is reverenced. The women have shiny hair. The elevators are large. Money is a friendly not a devious God. It's not difficult, there, to go through a day without smelling any uncomfortable smells, aside from exhaust clouds. Even the toilets are air-conditioned with lavender air. You feel like an ancient Roman. Pampered. Clean. An elite. The bathwater is hot. The hotel supplies soft white bathrobes, like togas.

Hervé has been a doctor for thirty years. His mind makes a terrible collage of all the wounds, the tumours, the warts, the faeces, the rashes, the shaven hair, the burns, the bleeding and the dead souls he's examined over this great stretch of time and an exhausted voice inside him bleats, “Enough!” The sight of his own toenails flaking off makes him shiver these days.

His memories of America, where he's been three or four times in his life, are of clean teeth and white roller-skates and charcoaled T-bone and oldsters' jokes. He feels superior to his hosts in their Bermuda shirts, yet comforted by them, reassured, separated from his own (European?) mournfulness. He quickly acquires the taste for the whisky camaraderie, the back slapping, the hand pumping. “Hair-
vay
!” they call him, accenting the second syllable and his liking of their country makes them hurrah like children. He prefers speaking American to English and likes to put zest into his favourite expressions, “Sonofabitch!” and “Yip, yip, yip!” He's not certain what “Yip, yip, yip” actually means, but he says it often: “Freshen your drink, Hairvay?” “Yessir! Yip, yip, yip!” “Ever met Brigitte Bardot, Hairvay?” “No
sir
. Yip, yip.” America makes him feel like a celebrity. Celebrities are cushioned from their own consciences because their least actions are thought worthy of attention. In America he becomes a man of substance. People take care of all his needs. They make sure he's comfortable on his lavender-scented toilet. His ancestors are centuries older than the country and deference is paid. Someone makes certain he has practically no need of the regimental box.

So it's with enormous relief that Hervé informs his colleagues he will be retiring before Christmas. He lets thirty years of knowledge slip from him like a shirt due for the laundry. He sits in his bureau and thinks, very pleasurably, of the idle days and months ahead, his reward at fifty-one for the dedicated medical man he's been since his youth. He feels serene and calm, freed of an unbearable weight. His suite at the Demi Paradise Hotel, Boca Raton, is booked, as is his flight to Miami, first class. He plans his farewell dinner: his partners, Dr. Roger Jolivet and Dr. Jacques Albert and their wives, Larry, Agnès, Mme. de la Brosse, a distinguished solicitor from Thiviers and his wife, an undistinguished but charming writer, Georges Agnelli, also a bachelor, an old friend of Claude Lemoine's. Ten is an excellent number round his mahogany dining table. His maid, Chantal, is back from Paris and will take care, with Agnès, of the dinner. Before the sweet course, Hervé will make a speech – an au revoir. Champagne will be served.

The date set for Hervé's dinner is December 14th. The following day, the 15th, it is planned that Agnès will catch the train back to Paris.

These two events are less than three weeks ahead on the day when Xavier Mallélou and Agnès Prière make, at the river edge, a bed of wild pampas grasses.

It's a still mid-day, cold but motionless. The dark water, empty of pike now, meanders on towards the Gironde. The willows are leafless and black. Agnès feels this hard winter earth at her back and knows that only lovers make of it anything but a cradle and a tomb. And Xavier, looking down at this pale face turned up to the sky, remembers the students on the other side of his wall in Bordeaux, his jealousy of their tenderness, and feels choked with love. So hurtingly in love with Agnès does he feel, he can't stifle a grateful crying when he feels himself push past her little reproaching membrane and tear like a hurricane into her blood. It's a crying he can't still. He kisses her and both their triumphing faces are wet. And he moves her more than anything in her life. She who is so obedient to beauty, finds in Xavier a lover her enfolding arms want to possess for ever. She wants to shout with him. Hurl rocks. Climb the sky.