The Swimming Pool Season (37 page)

On the morning of Leni's funeral, which is at ten o'clock, Dr. O. hurries to the bookshop to make sure Miss Atwood will cope sensibly with the customers and won't – as she's taken to doing – hide away in the stockroom drinking Bovril and reading
Jane Eyre
.

He waits for her until 9.45, but there's no sign of her and no answer from her Cattle Street number. Exasperated and uneasy and with a dread of the ordeal to come, he writes a polite note of apology, sticks it up on the door, double-locks it and hurries, feeling a kind of vertigo, to St. Mary's Church. In his haste to get the note written he's left out the word “closed” and it reads rather strangely for a man so meticulous with language:
The Management apologises to customers and regrets that the shop will be all day today
.

Dr. O. expects to find St. Mary's crammed full with Leni's mourners. If she'd died at forty, the whole of the University would have flocked to pay her homage. But apart from Miriam, with her family in a close, protecting group shouldering her off from his glance, there are perhaps a dozen people in the church, mostly old colleagues of David's and their wives, couples whom he knows slightly and who went once to Leni's parties in fancy dress. They all seem old. Leni once said to him: “When I die, bring all the young men to my funeral, Oz! Let's have some frolicking on my bones!” But apart from Thomas and Gary, there isn't one young man. Just a couple of rows of lined faces, wrapped up in fur collars. Well at least, thinks Dr. O., as he slips into a back pew, the church is burying her. Leni, born a Jewess, had courted the Church of England not for its God but for its respectability and for the splendour of its architecture. In time, it had forgotten she didn't really belong. It certainly didn't question her burial rites. But, as the service begins, Dr. O. finds himself shivering with anxiety about the fate of Leni's soul. Why hadn't he gathered in the young undergraduates as she'd once instructed? She is Babylon, he thinks fretfully, and the voice of St. John the Divine undoes his concentration. Poor fallen Leni!
And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee
 . . . I wanted to be a bridegroom for you, Leni, he hears himself protest. Now, nothing remains even of that intention. I let you down, Leni.
So much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow
 . . .

Dr. O.'s eyes fill with tears. He's glad he's at the back. No one notices him or turns round. He remembers the lunchtime Miriam cried in his arms. What made him so bold with his courtship: this one moment of weakness in her? Now it seems futile. Bernice has suffered terribly in her silence with her peculiar making of Bovril and the hiding of her body in a little corner of the stockroom and sometimes humming over her reading of
Jane Eyre
a tuneless kind of song and rocking herself backwards and forwards. He thought it was eccentricity in Bernice, this rocking. Now he sees it was suffering and he feels ashamed. She once gave him so much. He left her for a woman he never possessed. How stupid mankind is.
The fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee . . . and thou shalt find them no more at all
. Dr. O. blows his nose and is touched by loneliness in the marrow of his wide bones.

The vicar of St. Mary's is recalling David's contribution to the life and thought of the University. Miriam, whose hands are held tightly, one by Larry, the other one by Thomas, is aware that the legacy, in her, of David and Leni is a kind of stubborn strength. She refuses to let life cast her down. Even the artist in her – never great, never fantastic – kept struggling on. She turns and looks at Larry and finds he's looking at her. She feels a sudden happiness she can't account for.

The service isn't long – no magnificent hymn singing for Leni – and its ordinariness seems quite inappropriate to the way she was. Only Gary, in a black cape he's borrowed from Wardrobe at the Playhouse, lends a touch of drama. His eyes stream. Perdita finds in her pocket a cotton scarf with
Beautiful Sydney
written on it and passes this to Gary who remembers, just after Leni's death, being handed a mug with
I love N.Y
. on it. Relics, Gary thinks. In time to come, Leni will be bone – a relic. In his mind Leni's soul, black as a tadpole, is already nosing its way into darkness, into the heart of nothing. Not even IVb, attentive in the Bilge lab, see it pass. Leni, once his mother, is nothing. She is less than the almost invisible morsel of life under IVb's microscope. And though it's not Wednesday, the first few lines of a poem start to intrude themselves into his head:

You

were the one who

in the album of my love

was chiefly photographed . . .

He's agreed, though he hates the macabre of it, to be a pallbearer. The other bearers are Thomas, Larry and an elderly don called Professor Whitburn, a collaborator with David Ackerman on a book about Richard Cromwell, son of the Protector. Gary has to put one caped and trembling arm on this Professor's shoulder. He senses, as the unsteady procession moves off with Leni held high, that there is dandruff under his fingers. She feels heavy. The four men breathe hard. Thomas, taller than the rest, has to hold himself at a tilt. Gary longs now for it to be over, to deposit her in the ground and turn away, orphaned for the second time. His cape smells faintly of stage make-up, reminding him that life is not perpetual bereavement. Tonight, he's going to
Othello
again. He thinks he will keep the scarf saying
Beautiful Sydney
and in the fretful triangle of himself, Gabriel and Piers try to let it play some part – his strawberry handkerchief – to reassure himself that Leni hasn't stolen all his cunning.

As they move out from the draughty porch and load Leni back into the hearse (St. Mary's has no burial space left; Leni will lie with David under a windswept hill north of the town) Larry starts to wonder whether Leni, her old powers lingering for a few days, hasn't ushered in a season of dying. He imagines the procession they will make in Pomerac for the Maréchal: every man, woman and child in the village following, the sewage tankers slowed by the mourners on the Ste. Catherine road, Gervaise leading bravely, behind her, Mallélou and Klaus and behind them, in her Paris black Mme. de la Brosse. He sighs. La Comedie Humaine – ended. He looks anxiously at his son for his few remaining signs of youthfulness.

Dr. O. hovers while Leni is shoved back into the hearse and Miriam, Larry and Thomas climb into their limousine. He's forgotten to bring his car. He imagined, wrongly, they'd find a space for Leni at St. Mary's and now he can't follow to wherever they're going to put her. Miriam sees him waiting, but quickly turns away and in another moment is driven off, her husband's arm around her. Dr. O. is touched by how white her skin seems above her dark coat. He can't break the habit of finding her beautiful.

Bernice Atwood is packing. She has written a letter to Dr. O. expressing regret that she's not able to work for him any more and asking him to forward her final salary cheque to her aunt's house in Newbury. The letter doesn't mention love or betrayal or her unborn child. It ends with the peculiar line:
Yours sincerely in my hope for your future happiness, B.A
.

She hasn't got many possessions aside from her books, which she has decided to put into storage. She has one frock, a loose kind of smock, girlish yet sombre. She thinks this will do, soon, as a maternity dress. Though she's taken to wearing heavy, baggy jerseys, the mound of her baby is now clearly visible to her. Her skirts won't fasten and her big breasts feel cramped in her size 38 bra. The day is approaching when Bernice is going to have to TELL. She's not afraid of doctors, but dislikes the touch of them. Her aunt is a widow and a nurse and childless and very fond of Bernice. She's inclined to put her trust in this quiet woman. Also, her aunt keeps pets – two dogs and a cat. She's read somewhere that pets are helpful in developing a child's capacity to love. Bernice wants her baby to love her.

As she fills her two suitcases, she thinks, It's been the unhappiest time of my life. She can remember so clearly what she calls “the time before”, the hundred or more nights in Dr. O. 's bed, the way she could, just by kissing him, get him to fuck her in the middle of the night, his breath and his body hot with sleep and lazy and very beautiful to her in the darkness. It was at these times that she often wanted to shout out “I love you, Dr. O. !”, scream at him as she came and tear at his back with her little white nails. She folds and pats her two nightdresses. In summer, she had liked to sleep naked in that Plum Street room, fold her arms behind her head and admire the breasts Dr. O. had once described as “remarkable”. Why hadn't she ever screamed it out? “I love you, Dr. O.!” Do men expect to be told this in order to carry on loving you? Is the fact that she never said it in some way to blame? Did Miriam Ackerman, that day at tea, whisper it to him behind her slice of cake: “I'm in love with you, Oz.” She never heard it. Miriam didn't seem to pay him a lot of attention. It's all, thinks Bernice, beyond my understanding.

She stares at her empty room. She never owned the furniture in it, so none of it is going, yet the room has a deserted feel. It's a question of time, she decides. If you're in a place long enough, you fill it up with yourself. Now, she's leaving it. Her travelling alarm clock is already closed. Her radio is packed, her brass rubbing (done one Saturday afternoon with Dr. O.) torn down and crumpled into the bin, her set of Samuel Palmer postcards tucked in between her spongebag and her Complete Shakespeare. She sits down on the tidy bed and stares at what she's leaving. Not much, Bernice. You never had much. But the
time
, though. All those hours in the Bodleian Library. Those millions of strokes of the Rötring pen, of the fine squirrel brush. Books of Hours. Hours and hours and hours and hours . . . Time, in Oxford, was full. You filled it up. Now it spills. The future's a spilt wasteland. Yet
why
? She still asks the question. Why?

Her train to Newbury is at 1 o'clock. She still has an hour or more to wait. She wonders whether she won't unpack her radio and turn on Radio 4. She doesn't feel like reading.
Jane Eyre
's in the case, too. She decides, though it's cold, to go for a last walk round the city. She knows her walks are good for her baby because her own colour is healthy and this means the blood in her is fresh, not stale and full of poisons. She puts on her coat which is tight across her belly and very frayed at the cuffs, she notices. You're an evacuee, Bernice, she informs herself. A “vaccy”. They're throwing you out.

Then, as she's buttoning the coat, she feels it: a little push inside her, a little wriggle or kick, a movement. “So it's alive!” Bernice says out loud and bumps back down onto the bed and takes up her rocking position, but this time marvelling. Her baby moved. She's not afraid of the child any more, of the milk and paraphernalia. In fact she's begun to look forward to holding it, not inside her, but in her arms. No one can snatch her child from her at a Sunday tea party. It's hers, hers and beating its soft little limbs in her comfy womb. She'll protect it from all cruelty. She'll sing it madrigals, or even old nostalgic country songs:

Take me back,

To the black hills,

The black hills of Dakota . . .

She has no firm notion of where Dakota is, nor which range of hills this song is actually talking about. But this is a good rocking song. Her baby seems to stop moving and listen.

Then her doorbell is rung. The taxi she ordered to take her to the station. Now, with the thought that it's here, she feels the finality of her departure. Tonight, she'll lie in an unfamiliar room in Newbury. Oxford is over. Finished. She gets up. She puts on her woollen gloves, picks up the two cases, gives her room one last caressing glance and goes awkwardly down the stairs, leaving her door ajar. As she lets the cases drop to open the front door, she feels another impudent small kicking inside her. When the child comes, she thinks, I won't be so lonely.

Dr. O. is standing at the door. He's dressed very formally in a dark suit with a plain black tie. When he sees Bernice with her suitcases, he knows at once that she's leaving him and will never come back.

“Words,” he says helplessly. “I don't know what to say.”

“What?” says Bernice, her heart racing like an engine under her thin coat. “What, Dr. O.?”

“Can I come in, Bernice, or are you . . . ?”

“Come in, please.”

She holds the door for him, pushing her luggage out of his way. She closes the door. She didn't expect to see him ever again. Her face is flushed. Though she tries to force them back, tears prickle in her grey eyes.

“You're leaving,” says Dr. O.

“Yes,” says Bernice. “I did write you a letter. I said I hoped you'd be happy . . .”

The tears fall. She can't stop them. She had more control before she was pregnant. She's read pregnant mothers often cry . . .

“I'm going . . .” she says with her face buried in her woollen gloves, “I'm going . . . to have your baby.”

So it's gone from her. Her secret. It's out of her. For weeks she rocked it and held it in. Now it's out and she can't stop her crying. She lets herself tilt towards him. One of her suitcases stands between them and, as she moves, it falls against Dr. O.'s legs. But he's not bothered by this bruising of his shins. If this is the worst pain there is, he thinks, then I've been let off lightly. Carefully he rights the suitcase and puts his arms round Bernice like protecting wings.

“Bernice,” he mumbles in a voice thick with sorrow, “marry me.”