The Swimming Pool Season (28 page)

“You're beautiful, Xavier!”

“So are you. I love you, Agnès.”

“So strong in me, so hard.”

“More than I thought I could love . . .”

“I love the hardness of you.”

“Marry me. I want you to marry me.”

“Marry you?”

“Yes.”

She laughs a delighted laugh, then silences her own laughter by kissing his mouth hungrily. From the overcast sky, rain falls on the empty trees over their pampas bed and drips onto their heads, a peculiar third baptism in the life of Xavier Mallélou. Though they begin to feel very cold, neither can bear to break away from the other. They just hold each other more tightly and Xavier covers them with his coat.

This place by the river is some way from the window where Nadia stares out at the rain. For the time being, then, the love affair of Xavier and Agnès remains hidden from Nadia and it is Larry who says to her that morning: “Something's happening in Pomerac.”

She turns from the window and looks at Larry with bright beady eyes. “Something happens? Oh at last is something! Well, you tell Nadia and we'll have some little vodka to toast.”

But then to Nadia's irritation he sits silent. He's hunched up in an old green cardigan. He looks miserable. Nadia gets out the vodka glasses and the last two inches of vodka in what she's promised herself must be her last bottle till Christmas when a cheque is sent to her from Claude Lemoine's estate. She's broke on vodka. She's eaten no butter or cheese for three weeks. Her meals are boiled vegetables and cheap sausages. This state of affairs is getting bad. Her nails are becoming brittle. When she climbs her stairs, she feels weak. She's begun having a dream that she's put herself in a concentration camp.

Larry watches her pour the vodka and feels grateful for its impending warmth. Life, on this day, seems to Larry Kendal as sad as an English hymn.

“So? So? You tell me what, old bean!”

Smiling, Nadia hands Larry his glass of vodka. He sighs. Her irritation increases.

“Well, come on! What's this so terrible thing you're sitting like a shivering dog in the veterinary waiting to put away? Is someone threat your life, or what?”

“No, no. Of course not.”

“Then what, my dear? They fill your pool in again?”

“No. The snows will do that. But not until.”

“Well I don't know you're so pessimistical! We're not live in Siberia, you know!”

“No. But it'll be a hard winter. I feel it.”

“How you can feel it, my darling? So you become a snail making the deep burrow?”

Larry's silent. Yes, he wants to say, I'd like that: carve out something under the earth and stay there till spring, or till Miriam decides to come back.

“Well, I don't mock,” says Nadia gently and comes and sits by Larry and pats his hand. “I'm sorry, my bean, if I'm so impatient, but Nadia is pass so much time waiting, always waiting and always I'm so glad if they tell me, something happens. You don't mind. Okay?”

“Well, I'll tell you, Nadia,” says Larry slowly. “Something's happening to Agnès.”

“Oh, to the fairy princess? You don't say she is turn into a frog?”

“No. She's fallen in love with Xavier Mallélou.”

A look of astonishment crosses Nadia's pink face. She takes a hasty sip of vodka.

“Well, I'm telling you, when I see this boy come up to Pomerac, I am think, now he puts some firecracker under all the bums! No, truly, I am decide this. I think, now the dead bones wake up in the earth! But how you know this for sure?”

“Klaus told me. He described to me how they met. He said he's never seen this before, two people just struck dumb by each other.”

“So that is what, then. Well, I like this, you know. Like
Wuthering Height
, no? The girl of so perfect family and in her silk bodices loves the wild boy. But I don't know what Hervé is saying! My God. I think he's not approve at all! My God. I think he's having to stroke his bloody box now!”

“Perhaps they'll keep it a secret.”

“Well, in Pomerac, it's not so easy, you know. Every person stick their necks into your onions. You think it doesn't go, the story of those Mallélou's and Klaus König? Believe me, people are learn there what is what.”

“Maybe, maybe,” says Larry dejectedly. “I'm not really bothered by any of it.”

“So I don't know why you're so sad, my dear.”

“I'm not sad.”

“But you
seem
. I think it's not Nadia crying today, but you.”

“I'm sorry, Nadia.”

“No, no, you don't sorry. You tell Nadia what. Is this fucking Leni send you some poison-letter?”

“No.”

“And you don't get a word from Miriam? You don't know when she's coming?”

“No.”

“So no wonder you get sad.”

“Yes. But it's not only Miriam.”

Nadia walks to the window and stares out for a moment, then turns and looks reproachfully at Larry.

“So I think I was right,” she says, “I think ever since you're putting eyes on this Agnès, you're think of the bed, Larry. I'm not right? No? You deny? I don't think you deny.”

“I do deny. It was she who came to
me
.”

“And after?”

“What?”

“After she is putting this thought in your mind, you don't thinking how wonderful, how fantastical I'm making love with a virgin, I'm taking her maidenform?”

Larry shrugs. “I don't know what I thought, Nadia. All I know is that now I can't stop thinking about her, I'm so jealous of Xavier, I could kill him.”

Nadia's silent. She looks dismayed and disappointed.

“Well I tell you my old bean,” she says at last, “every man in Nadia's life is sighing after these little princesses. But what madness, you know. What stupidness. I just don't know why they are doing this. Why is youth so wonderful? Just for the buds of tits and the flat belly? Perhaps this is all you're wanting in the end. Not companionship. Not any intellectual conversationing. Not any loyalty and familiar person. Just tits and maidenforms. I am so amaze. When I am young and in the teashop with my Uncle Leopold, I don't know what I
have
, this so precious thing, this youth you're all strive after. I don't appreciate. I long for growing up and experience of life. But no one of you
wants
my experience of life! You want maidenforms. I tell you, my darling, this world is so badly arrange, better to be like Claude and shut out or shut up, I don't know which or what. I am just confuse. It's like we are all sleepwanderers. Even me. Why am I wait at the window? I don't know. I know Hervé is leaving. I knew he's leave without one word to Nadia. And still I wait. Stupidness no? Sleepwanderers. You, me, Hervé, even these young lovers. So what will happen? You tell me, my dear. What is come next? Winter, we know, that's all. And perhaps you're right: all the animals are burrow down and down and snow is coming from Siberia.”

Larry says nothing. Outside, the drizzle is steady now and the trees are still and shiny. Nadia takes up the vodka bottle and empties its contents into their waiting glasses.

FOUR

  

One December Wednesday, two days before the opening of Miriam's exhibition, Gary Murphy abandons his lilac room and the unwritten poems that sit in it like bored guests, and takes himself walking in the Cherwell meadows. He feels the piercing cold of the day most keenly in his neck, from which all his jutting hair has been shaved. His new hairstyle makes him look younger and more cruel. The front is kept long and falls over his eyebrows. Piers, whom he's forced to meet very often these days, informs him he's “bang in with the new mood” and Leni tells him the beaux of her youth cultivated this look under broad-brimmed velvet hats. Gabriel, who's decided to play Othello as shaven-headed as Kojak, has dreams about Gary's hair. The altered face of his friend disturbs him. He's superstitious about touching the shorn neck. He wishes that Gary had no modern vanity.

Leni has equipped Gary with a pair of green wellingtons, attaching to which is a little history that still creases a smile in her once matchless cheeks. The wellingtons belonged to a lover of hers, a Gloucestershire farmer called Roddy and always known to her and David as “our dear Philistine”. David never once imagined that Roddy was Leni's lover and indeed never knew. Leni wanted to punish David for his presumption and punish Roddy for being the kind of man he was. She sent Roddy away. But only after she'd exchanged, in their respective cars, David's wellingtons for his, identical green wellingtons, different only in size. If David ever noticed, he never admitted the discovery. Leni would watch him walking on the downs in boots one size too big for him, the innocent, his feet tucked up in warm socks, not knowing the flip-flap of the rubber was Roddy's. And she'd imagine Roddy on his farm, staring at pigs, fingering grain, becoming aware that his boots pinched him, thinking he'd got off scott free, thinking, men can come and take what they like – own the land, own the women – but punished day after day in his hurting feet. Petty. She knew it was. Yet she didn't like events that had no consequences. Both these men had to pay a small price for what had happened. Otherwise, what did any of it signify – the words of love on Roddy's hayseed breath; David lying like a boy in her arms and sleeping? She made fools of them to tell them both: nothing is ours
as of right
; in the least action, we are responsible.

Gary's feet are the same size as Roddy's, so the wellingtons fit him very well. He wraps his bare nape in a crimson scarf and trudges with his hands in his pockets through a landscape shorn, too, of all its foliage. A heron on the river stares at him and flaps off. A skirt of mist sits on the further fields. Nature is pared down, quiet, pale, waiting. The sky is a flat white. Ahead are the January storms, the snow blizzards, the sleet, the winds. Ahead, too, is Gabriel's
Othello
. Far into each night, now, this
Othello
is being made. Like the getting of coal, it seems to be hard, back-breaking, heart-straining work. Gabriel's eyes are red with exhaustion and excitement and fever. When he looks at Gary, it's with a miner's contempt for one who's never been near a coalface. Gary shivers with fascination and dread. The more hectic, the more savage Gabriel seems, the more he craves his wild embrace. The performance itself waits to catch him – the gazelle in the lion-trap – and wound him with too-strong emotion. He practises sitting quietly. He persuades Leni to come with him to the first night. He warns her he may have to sob. She promises to bring chocolate truffles to pop into his child's mouth and scented hankies for his tears. A special space is reserved for Leni's wheelchair. Filled with vanity and longing and strangely empty of poetry, Gary orders himself a new Italian suit made of dark green velour. And the days pass.

Here, on this cold morning, unaware of Gary walking towards her in the mist, is Bernice Atwood, wrapped in a threadbare coat and staring at the water. She doesn't own any wellingtons, nor has anyone lent her a pair, and her strong brown shoes are very damp. Her toes in nylon tights inside these shoes, curl and uncurl in time to a tiny swaying rhythm her body has set up. She's singing to the baby inside her. No words or notes come out of her, but just as, without consciously offering food to her baby, it takes what it needs from her body, so when she sings in her head she knows the baby is calmed in its waters and rewarding her by its silent growing. She likes to sing to her baby several times a day in this way. Its existence is unknown to anyone but her. The child is her secret and only she can sing it secret songs.

These walks she takes in the damp December countryside are in obedience to her child, who seems to ask that she fill her lungs with freezing air and get her feet wet in the sodden grass, but who then lets her come home to her flat, deciding not to go into the bookshop, deciding to put off for yet another day the questions for Dr. O. with which her heart feels squeezed, lets her come home and light the gas fire and eat a buttered scone and rest and wait for the future. Lying down on a rug, she can sleep away the whole day after her walk by the river, so tired is she from the air and the walking and from the invisible giving of her blood into her baby's buds of limbs. She wakes up at a teatime and thinks of Dr. O. turning on the lights in the shop and putting on the kettle in the stockroom. In the fading teatime light, she longs to tell him about the child which, though hers, is part of him. If the sunset is golden and green and brilliant at her window, she thinks of her pregnancy as a thing of splendour and imagines Dr. O. filled with admiration for her, embracing her stomach, humbled at her womanhood, saying sonorously: “My task was a small one, Bernice, but yours is mighty.” The fact is Dr. O. is absenting himself from her life. Going. Day after day. Slipping off. Not since the Sunday of the Bergman film has she been alone with him, except in the shop. In the shop, he's silent, withheld, preoccupied. Even the lunches she makes he eats in silence. A voice in Bernice – the voice of the child? – tells her to be patient. By nature, she's a patient woman. Her work, her life, is lived painstakingly out. Now, at the river, she patiently sings her song and curls and uncurls her feet and reminds herself that people's lives have had the strangest shapes, that the most famous lovers endured seasons of separation, and prays to the earth of Oxfordshire to let Dr. O. come back to her. When she looks up and sees Gary walking towards her, she feels afraid.

In all its minute detail, Bernice remembers the teatime visit to Leni Ackerman. She remembers the colour of the cake and the colour of Miriam Ackerman's hair. She remembers the way Leni screeched and how Gary fussed over her. More acutely than the fact that no one introduced her to Gary or Miriam does she remember what happened to Dr. O. in that room, in that company. He became awkward. His hands looked too big for the teacup they gave him. His clothes looked shabby. He was a man who never apologised for the way he was, yet in the Ackermans' room all his gestures were apologetic. This grieved her. Immediately, she'd seen Leni as the cause and thought not much more about it. But now, as she sees Gary, she realises with a stab of pain like a quill going through her abdomen, that it was on this day and in the presence of Miriam, yes, Miriam, not Leni, that Dr. O. began to change. In the time it takes for Gary to raise his arm to her in a muted greeting, in these scant seconds, has Bernice understood her fate.