The Swimming Pool Season (3 page)

Sunshine comes in the flat squares the colour of amontillado on the polished floor. Larry sits a few inches from Hervé's woolly toes and they sip gently at the strong blackcurrant. Hervé says, “Did I tell you, I've sent for Agnès?”

“Agnès?”

“My niece. The elder one. Didn't get her place at the music school. All upset and mopey. So I told her mother, send her to me. She can play that old Bechstein and help me about. She's a sensible girl, not one of those young frights. She'll like these woods and this autumn air.”

“I'm glad, Harve. You need someone . . .”

“Yes. Another three weeks in this armour. My heart's not used to an invalid life. My blood pressure's up, I can tell without taking it. That's Agnès in that photograph. The one on the right.”

Hervé points to a picture on the mantelpiece of two windswept girls with their arms round each other's shoulders, smiling in what seems to be a Welsh or Scottish landscape, craggy and cold. They wear warm patterned jerseys; their hair is the colour of weak tea; they are clearly sisters. Larry is surprised by how English these fresh faces look. They could be English princesses on holiday at Balmoral.

“They look like princesses,” Larry remarks. Hervé smiles and sips his drink.

“Agnès was about seventeen then and little Dani fifteen or sixteen. Their mother is English. They speak the two languages very well.”

Larry looks at the photograph. Pale light on the smooth skin. No blemish anywhere. Better these radiant daughters than poor old Thomas going grey at twenty-seven with a pocked and crazy face the colour of a blanket. “Oh, I would have liked a daughter,” Larry says.

“You have just the boy, Larry, haven't you?”

“Yes. Thomas. We don't see much of him.”

“If I remember, he has some antiques business.”

“Antiques? No. Wish it was. Modern. Marxist furniture, he calls it.”

“Cheap stuff?”

“No. There's the irony. Not cheap. Sick jokes for millionaires.”

“Oh yes?”

“One's a lamp. It's a giant naked bulb on a flex with a great piece of plaster attached to it. So it looks as if your ceiling's falling down. Don't ask me to explain the logic. Don't ask me why anyone would want that, but they do, it seems.”

“Well. Very odd. Comfort of course has always been regarded as bourgeois. As corrupting even. Perhaps your son believes the rich might buy broken ceilings as a kind of absolution.”

“Beats me, Harve. Miriam pretends to understand what he's doing, but she doesn't really. She's as baffled as I am.”

“Sad for her. Most sad. How is Miriam?”

“Working hard. Got this exhibition coming up, did I tell you? A gallery in Oxford.”

“I admire those watercolours. Would she bring a few paintings to show me before they go to England? I could buy some little flowers or a scene to put in Agnès's room.”

“When's Agnès arriving?”

“The end of the week.”

“Who will meet her, Harve?”

“Oh, she'll get the train to Thiviers. Then I shall pay a taxi.”

“No, no. Don't pay the taxi. I'll go and fetch her.”

“No, Larry. The taxi can come . . .”

“I'd enjoy it. Be a pleasure. I like to feel useful.”

“Have some more cassis, Larry. This is kind of you. But the Paris train's a late one. Nine-ten, something like that.”

“I'd like to do it, Harve. Any excuse to get out in the car.”

So, as the Granada takes Larry on to Périgueux, he finds himself dreaming of this princess of a girl, this Agnès. What would he have called his own daughter? Harriet? Emily? He likes names that sound like the names for stern-faced china dolls. Agnès he likes very much: old-fashioned, simple and fierce. He feels his heart lift. If a young person is going to arrive, all the more reason to press ahead with the pool. Then, next spring, he will invite her to sit among the urns, on the first hot days. He imagines the imprint of her wet feet on his terrace.

Nadia Poniatowski has dreamt of her French husband Claude Lemoine, incarcerated still in his “Adjustment Home” in the Pas de Calais flatlands. He begged her, with sticky stewed eyes, to release him and take him back, him and his name and the thousand insanities busy inside his skull. No, she said, no, Claude. I changed my name back to Poniatowski, and the children's names, they're Poniatowski now and I'm teaching them about their Polish ancestors. You must stay where you are.

Nadia was grey at thirty-five with the madnesses of Claude Lemoine. Now, at forty-eight, she dyes her fine hair champagne blonde. She uses an English preparation called Nice 'n' Easy. She detests hairdressers. They complain about the thinness of her hair. And she's a proud woman. She won't listen to complaint about herself. She's reached the plateau beyond the murky valleys of her marriage and must not be dislodged from it.

Once, she and Claude owned two properties in Pomerac. When Claude finally went, she sold one of these to Larry and Miriam and lives in a small flat above the garage of the other house, empty now after another English family tried and failed to plant their hearts in it. She's got used to the flat. Her bed folds away into the wall. She cooks behind a Japanese screen on a second-hand Calor gas cooker. Polish recipe books are on a stained shelf above this. When she gives dinners, the silverware is still grand.

Talking is what Nadia Poniatowski loves. The details of lives, their longings and tragedies. She envies marriage counsellors their daily glut of private knowledge. “Tell me, tell me,” she implores. She, alone in the village, knows that Hervé Prière has started sleepwalking. Secrets spill out to her in sighs and shivers and she breathes them in through a fine sensuous nose. Yet in her sympathising, in her giving of advice, as she lifts her white neck and pats her hair, she makes errors of grammar and syntax, gets the carefully learned colloquial phrase exquisitely wrong. People have momentarily forgiven and forgotten the most wounding betrayals trying not to grimace at Nadia's language. Claude in his infirmary still carries tender basketfulls of his wife's peculiar sentences in his drugged and dopey brain.

Towards noon, as old Mallélou sits on his step, staring at the yard where chickens and guineafowl disdainfully scratch, Nadia in white slacks and a tight turquoise blouse comes down the lane to Miriam's door. Miriam, still wearing la robe, has anaesthetised her grief with strong black coffee, but sits at the table still with an unwritten letter to Leni inside her head and a feeling of weariness in her hunched shoulders.

“Miriam!” calls Nadia, and taps with little stubby fingers on the heavy front door. From the south window of her flat she has seen Larry drive off in the Granada and knows that Miriam is alone. In the past – but never when Larry's there – Miriam has talked about the failures that brought them to their peculiar exile, about the birth and death of
Aquazure
, the swimming pool company, brainchild of the hot summer of '76, the one-time jewel in the plumbing of Larry's heart. But Nadia knows she hasn't been told all. Behind Miriam's dignified quiet, there's more. A breakdown, goes the delicious rumour. Larry has a nervous breakdown.

“Miriam!” Nadia taps and taps.

“Who is it?” Miriam's voice is barely raised.

“Nadia, darling. Can I pop in? Aren't you working?”

Old Mallélou lifts his head. What a woman, that Poniatowski. Puts her husband in a nuthouse and never so much as visits him.

The door opens slowly on Miriam. Even to a less practised eye than Nadia's, the recent crying would be visible. Miriam turns away. Nadia follows her. Sometimes, Nadia reminds people of a shrill little dog.

“Sorry, Nadia, I'm not dressed . . .” Miriam's voice tails off. The presence of another person chokes her.

“Well, my God, Miriam, what's happened?”

“Nothing. Just a letter from Leni.”

“Leni, your mother?”

“Yes.”

“To tell you what for?”

“She's ill.”

“Oh my God, so serious?”

Miriam goes back to her chair. She folds her arms round herself, as if for protection from this intrusion.

“I don't really know, Nadia. I think it may be. She's seventy-eight.”

“Oh and you the single child, Miriam. You must go to England of course.”

Miriam sighs. “Well, that's what I've been trying to decide. I don't want her to see me and be frightened, but on the other hand . . .”

“Who is looking at her?”

“Nursing her, you mean?”

“Yes. Looking at her.”

“A nurse. And Gary's there. He wrote the letter for her.”

“Who is this Gary?”

“Her lodger. He's been there for years. She mothers him.”

“Well at least she has some companion. But if I were you, Miriam, I would go there. Let me come with you.”

“Oh no. I'd be perfectly all right.”

“But this is too upsetting, I know. Like the terrible one time I visit Claude and see all those people round their rockers . . .”

“Leni isn't ‘round her rocker', Nadia. She's just getting old.”

“And what does the doctor saying?”

“She's had pneumonia. Badly, I think, because she's too ill to write. Perhaps her heart is weak. I don't know. I think maybe I should go to England.”

“Yes. And let me come, Miriam. I can do all these arrangements.”

“No, Nadia. Larry can fix the travel. He loves this kind of little chore, and he's very good at it.”

“Oh but I must come.”

“No, no. You stay and keep Larry company.”

“Poor Larry also.”

“Why ‘poor Larry'?”

“With the swimming pool question.”

“That's in the past, Nadia.”

“But these such things are never past, Miriam, I don't think. Even now Larry would be dreaming of all that swimming pool disaster.”

“Dreaming of it? Well, perhaps he does. But he's thinking of trying to start the business again, out here. The climate's a lot better here.”

“But not the people, I don't see. Larry will not sell any swimming pool to those Mallélous!”

Miriam laughs. For a moment she imagines Gervaise, Mallélou and the mighty Klaus standing and staring with awe at this wonder Larry has sunk in their chicken yard.

“No. Not to the Mallélous. But there are a lot of holiday houses . . .”

“But mostly British, no? You hear them all at Riberac: ‘Sorry old bean, chippy-choppy old buffy bean.' Old bean all the time but not money for pools I'm thinking. Anyway, Miriam, we must talk of your mother.”

“Sit down, Nadia.”

“Thank you. You are loving your mother a good much, Miriam?”

“Yes I do.”

“I think the single child is always loving the parent.”

“Maybe? Love or hate. But Leni is . . . like a rare species. Something beautiful going forever. I used to think when I was little, she had a kind of magic, because everyone seemed to love her and want her to like them.”

“And your father is Don?”

“He was a history professor, yes.”

“And dead?”

“Yes, he's dead. He died in '75 very suddenly.”

“So your Leni is so on her own now.”

“Well she's not entirely. She's never moved from Oxford, so she has a lot of friends. There's even this man who wants to marry her.”

“And seventy-eight, my God! Why is there no kind rich man wanting to marry Nadia?”

“You're not divorced from Claude, are you?”

“No. But I get this divorce any time. Just I say look where he is in this loony bowl and the judge divorces me straight away.”

“Would you want to marry again?”

“My God yes! Where I am I have no money. Down on my bum end, you might say. Perhaps in Oxford there is some old choppy bean for Nadia.”

And so an hour passes. The sun is hot on the terrace, the geraniums in need of water. But Miriam and Nadia sit on at the table and talk of Oxford and madness and marriage and death.

Larry reaches Périgueux and parks the Granada in a square behind the St. Front cathedral. The ornate shoulders of this building appeal profoundly to Larry's sense of design. He has already decided to offer a “St. Front Pool” as part of the new range he has nervously planned for his reconstituted company. The thing is to build his own first – the show pool. Use the St. Front colours in the mosaic trim on the side and steps. Maybe use the ground plan of the basilica as a kind of template for the shape. Put in two or three sets of steps at different angles. Give the customers the idea of something utterly new. Let them see that pool-building is art. He feels light-headed with hope. The sky above St. Front is azure and the domes gleam. Larry wonders fleetingly whether this surge of optimism comes direct from God.

It takes him almost half an hour to locate the pool suppliers' ramshackle premises, designated
Piscines Ducellier Frères
, by which time it it is mid-day and a blue-coated employee is tugging a sliding grille across the shop front. Larry curses the way, in France, twelve o'clock hangs like a guillotine over the galloping hours of the morning. No matter how early you wake, the slam of mid-day always sounds too soon. And then time slows and drags. You sit in a café waiting for life to start again. You drink beer and fill up with wind. You feel randy and sad.

It has been market day, but the market, too, is over: the meat and cheese wagons have gone, the ground by the fish stalls is slushy with ice; a tired woman, making pancakes since dawn, snatches down her sign:
crêpes sucrées; chocolat confiture grand marnier
; men with wide, tattooed arms pack boxes of women's underwear and overalls and blouses; an elaborate display of bridal sweets, smelling of burnt sugar, is taken down and loaded into a car; crates of live chickens ride away in a caravan.