The Swimming Pool Season (33 page)

“I'll just sit, Miriam.”

She goes out of the kitchen and he hears her open and close the study door. Now he thinks, she'll call them all to her, her family. In this silence of the snow he envies her the blood ties she's forged. So easy, when you're loved, to put on independence. What Leni's absence wakes in him is a longing for certainty, for a trusting love. Waiting for the black, brocaded actor, Gabriel, ransacks his equilibrium, makes the days too cruel. Let him climb his starry ladder with Piers Duckworth. Gary must find a gentler man. And it's strange, too, how in the wake of this death, his curiosity about the play has vanished. He doesn't even feel like reading the reviews, or telephoning to say why he missed the party. No one has inquired, of course. No message has come. He feels like a drab sparrow in need of kind behaviour. Other people's scraps aren't enough.

Miriam is dialling Pomerac. Nadia's number has sat, perfectly remembered – a code she might need again one day – in her head for weeks. Now she dials it and hears at last the familiar one-tone ring. It's ten o'clock in the morning. Nadia will have finished her breakfast of coffee and pastries and will be folding her bed away into the wall. In moments Miriam will be talking to Larry. The one tone sounds on and on. Around its ringing, Miriam imagines Pomerac sitting in strong sunshine, its real winter still far off. She replaces her receiver with a slight unease. Nadia's usually home at this time. She dials the number again, making sure of every digit. No one answers. Miriam hugs her shoulders. She can't bury Leni without Larry to be strong for her. In his mocking of Leni and her world, there's a future. Without it, all seems to be silence. Quickly, she dials the number of Thomas's shop. Perdita answers and tells her Thomas is in Brussels.

“We must get him home, Perdita, I'm afraid.”

“He'll be back next week.”

“Can you contact him?”

“Yes.”

“His grandmother died last night.”

There's a long silence before Perdita says, sorrowfully, “Gee.”

“I'd like him home,” says Miriam.

“Sure you would,” says Perdita, “and you know he's going to be sad?”

“Yes.”

“He's going to be broken up.”

“Yes.”

“He loved Leni so much.”

“I know.”

“God. It's awful. You know?”

“Yes. I do.”

It's snowing again. The sky's lead-coloured. You can see the sticky flakes settling. When she was a child, Miriam used to long for snow to pile up against the windows of this house, sealing them off. The Ackermans. Safe in their moated life. Now, she's the last of them. Leni's Crow Dress lies in tissue paper in a drawer. David's papers were long ago dispersed into libraries. Already the house, empty forever of Leni, feels different, as if it's entering a fallow season. It yielded what it could. Now it sighs and rests. Its future will appear after a certain time has passed.

Perdita promises to contact Thomas and she and Miriam say goodbye. Carefully, Miriam dials Nadia's number and lets it ring for a full minute before she puts the receiver down. To talk to Larry has become a matter of urgency. She needs his indifference. Those close to her here – Gary, Thomas, even Dr. O. – will simply show her their own grief. She dreads, in particular, Dr. O.'s sadness. The man's sorrowing feverish voice wails at her across centuries, shows her the wounds she's made, like a
flagellant
showing you his slashed shoulders. I've heard enough, she wants to say. Take your bleeding flesh away. But to Larry she wants to plead, don't punish me for my indifference. We all need some time outside our most binding affections. The silence in Pomerac fills her with foreboding. She imagines their house deserted, the wind starting to pull at its tiles and chimney pots. And Larry and Nadia gone. Gone where? And why? To punish her?

She goes back to the kitchen, where Gary is still sitting as if he's afraid to move. She suggests a cup of tea.

“I'll have Marmite, love,” he says.

Putting the kettle on, she feels a surge of friendliness for this old-fashioned kitchen, the heavy table, the warm, scratched, scorched, time-stained Rayburn, Leni's favourite teacups on hooks. The house is hers. It holds her, as it's always held her, safe and she doesn't want to part with it. Merely, she wants Larry in it with her – a desire, with Leni gone, to gather her own people, her own things round her, to breathe easily, sensing her life's complete. She's surprised at how very little grief for Leni she's actually feeling. As if she'd left all the mourning to others.

“Will she be buried beside David?” Gary asks suddenly.

“Yes. This is what she asked for. They were so close, really, when he was alive.”

“A marvellous ‘pair'. How I envy the ones who get this right, this
pairing
.”

“It always has its problems.”

“Yes. Yet it's what we all ache for. Like lemmings, you might say. Lemmings who learned how to swim!”

Miriam smiles. “How do you want the Marmite, Gary?” she asks.

He looks up and his eyes are brimming. “Black, dear,” he says.

As the telephone rings and rings unanswered, in Nadia's flat, Larry and Nadia drive north into the vast, treeless plains of the world war battlefields. It's sad country, Larry always feels, like Lincolnshire and Norfolk without their hedges or oaks. The big patchwork of prairies is only here and there green, mostly a dark empty ploughscape with only the church spires recalling its old dignity.

They've been driving since dawn, taking turns at the wheel of the Granada, stopping for coffee and sandwiches near Tours, and again near Orleans, both feeling content in the hard, bright morning that replaces the five o'clock dark, warmed from the sun on the car windows, talkative, glad to be going somewhere, away for a time from Pomerac. Larry's impressed at how well Nadia drives, like a strong, venturing soul, not like the confused, mistake-prone person she actually is. And in her liking for the Granada, he feels grateful. The car, in its turn, is behaving very well. The journey's peculiarity is its joyfulness.

Claude's institution lies in the triangle formed by Arras, Bapaume and Cambrai in a place called Rouigny, a landmark either so insignificant or so willingly forgotten, it appears on almost no map. “You know why?” says Nadia. “Because they don't want, if there is some loony getting loose, they don't want him to find himself.”

The home, Larry learns in the course of the long drive, is run mainly by monks and the director is a certain Father le Sueur, hairy in Nadia's memory and talkative about the planets and stars. “He has a telescope on the roof,” she tells him, “but I don't know what some monk is being an astronomer for. Maybe he's looking for heaven?”

It's dark afternoon when they enter Bapaume. They plan to stay the night here or in Arras and visit Claude the following day.

Now that they're near him, Nadia feels her dread of the meeting return and she's glad not to be alone. In her small suitcase are presents for Claude: Périgord paté (“I don't think those monks cook so well, you know, and Claude had so fine taste organs”) and a paisley foulard bought in Périgueux (“a neckchief or a weapon, I don't know. If he wants to hang himself, better with my rope, no?”) They go on in silence through Bapaume, but when, in Arras, they pull up in the central cobbled square and Larry gets stiffly out of the car, he stands in this formal and oddly silent place and sniffs his nearness to England and feels, as deep as a wound, his loss of Miriam. Nadia senses her companion falter and asks anxiously, “You're okay, my darling?”

“Yes,” says Larry, quickly.

“I think we're tired, you know. I think we just see our rooms and then go to the bar, no?”

“Yes. I agree.”

“So beautiful
place
, no?” says Nadia looking round at the tall-shouldered houses. “You don't imagine how it was so destroyed.”

“No,” says Larry. Yet he feels its quietness is peculiar, as if the town had long ago lost its spirit.

The hotel manager gives them a churlish reception, eyeing them with suspicion. As they sign the cards he sets out for them, they can see that the small, dimly lit bar on their left is empty, except for a large Alsatian which lies sleeping under one of the tables. A radio is on in the bar, news bulletins followed by old pop songs. “I think,” says Nadia, as they go up in the tin lift, “we're the sole guests.” Larry smiles. He is proud of Nadia today. Proud of her bravery. Both of them feel a vodka-longing.

Their rooms are side by side, both with tall, thinly-curtained windows looking out onto the square. The floors are lino, the only heating squat, rusting radiators of the kind that always remind Larry of his parents' house and of Miriam's hair. Sad places, he thinks. Rooms you could die in. They scuttle down to the empty bar and order their vodkas.

When Larry dreams, that night, about Miriam, it's not to see Leni lying in the hospital morgue or to hear, in Nadia's flat, the vain ringing of the telephone, it's a dream in which, in the cabin of a huge luxury liner, he's saying goodbye to his wife. She's seen him onto the ship and even brought him flowers for the journey, an old-fashioned courtesy. He's trying to persuade her to sail with him. Where to? No one says where the ship's bound. The rest of the passengers seem like holidaymakers, carrying children, wearing sun-visors. Miriam's restless, scared she'll be trapped aboard, and she leaves without touching him. “Don't worry,” she says as she goes, “there's plenty of recreation.” When Larry wakes it's still dark and a lone drunk in the Grand Place is hurling bottles at the sky.

No more than ten kilometres away from here, where Larry lies thinking of Miriam and next door Nadia lies dreaming of a ride she once took in the Bois de Boulogne, Claude Lemoine curls his body into a womb shape and repeats, cold as three glittering icicles in his brain, the three syllables of his wife's name: Na-di-a. It's without form. It's just the cruel, satisfying wound his mind must constantly make. Na-di-a. Naa-di-aa . . . The woman his wife was stands not in but outside this saying of her name. Like a ghost at the edge of this word. The pain is in the word, not in the insubstantial woman who lingers to one side of it. He's forgotten what she looked like except that she was small and that she was once, at dawn, in a high bed, in clear light, beautiful. Claude presses his pale chin to his fustian knees and rocks to keep the pain of his word bearable. Na-di-a. Na-di-aa!

“Lemoine!” shrieks a voice near to him. “If you don't shut up, I'll kill you!”

All three, Claude, Nadia, Larry, are glad of morning when it comes, Claude unaware of the visit that's about to happen, Nadia washing her fluffy hair and painting her eyelids blue to look clean and feminine for this exiled man, Larry keen to forget Miriam in his protective care of Nadia.

Breakfast is brought to them in the bar at nine. Outside in the square, since first light a fair has been setting up, the convoy of trucks hissing and grinding through Nadia's dreams of the Bois and Larry's dreams of the ocean liner. It's Saturday. Down the buried chambers of the channel bed an urgent summons from Miriam is moving towards Pomerac. It arrives at the Ste. Catherine post office and is being driven, on blue paper in a yellow van, up the Pomerac slope just as Larry and Nadia climb, full of apprehension into the Granada and take the road to Rouigny.

Like the monks, the patients in the Rouigny Maison d'Ajustement breakfast after six o'clock vespers. The cook's keen on junket. Lines of dull faces, growing old under Father le Sueur's heaven, suck bowls of this white wet substance in the cold early dark, then shuffle off to their “classes” in groups of twenty. Claude Lemoine is making baskets. Down the furrowed drug-washed track of his memory the Maréchal comes out into the Pomerac lanes and sits on a chair in the sunshine and places on his knee an identical basket to the one Claude is weaving, a tall bread panier. My fingers, thinks Claude, winding this cane, will get as old as his. “As old as whose?” someone asks. Quite often, Claude says out loud by mistake his private thoughts. Or else the people in here are mind readers. Father le Sueur sometimes says, “We know what's in your head, son.”

One thing Claude has worked out. Father Le Sueur, by virtue of his communication with God and his observation of the stars, will be the first person on earth to know about the end of the world. He, Claude, therefore, will be the fifth or sixth person to know or at worst the sixty-seventh. He imagines how it will be. It will happen during basket-making. Like now, for instance. Father le Sueur will come in and announce – privately to Claude, because most of the others couldn't be trusted not to vomit or fall down at this news – “The world's ending today, Lemoine! Spring hawthorn, church spires, the laughter of girls at café tables, all the works of God and man and the Devil are turning to lava. Heaven will be crowded. The early birds will get the pardoner's worm. Know what I mean?”

Claude looks up over the rim of his basket as Father le Sueur, looking grave in his grizzled face, comes in. Conversation stops as the twenty faces are turned up like potatoes and watch their chief protector out of their sprouts of eyes. Claude's heart begins to beat frantically, “Spring hawthorn, cathedral towers . . .”

“You have a visitor, Claude.”

“You mean – ?” God? he wants to say, but is afraid to show off in front of the class.

“Your wife.”

Claude gazes at the kindly, hair-pocked face. “Me?” he asks, “Mine?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

“Yes, Claude. Leave your work and come with me.”

It could be code, he thinks, as he follows Father le Sueur down the disinfected corridors, code for some universal catastrophe. He knows I'm one not to panic, not to let him down . . .