The Swimming Pool Season (40 page)

He likes the cruel logic of his plan. Agnès tricked him. He'll trick Corinne. Love's a fairytale. The big con. You have to get dignity by other means.

For a long time, Xavier sits and stares at what he has written. Already, the word “college” frightens him, and when he tries to imagine himself buying books and pens and walking one cold morning through its high doors, his mind pauses in dismay, refusing to construct the picture.

In France, the snow keeps on. In England, on Christmas Day, there's no sign of it, only a hard, beautiful frost.

At three o'clock, with darkness already settling down over Oxford, Miriam, Gary and Perdita walk arm in arm to St. Mary's for a carol service. A few rows in front of her, Miriam sees the close-together heads of Dr. O. and Bernice Atwood. Neither of them turn and look at her. Gary notices them too and remembers his meeting with Bernice by the river. He sees now that she's wearing a new coat.

Larry and Thomas, both indifferent to carols, stay behind in the house. Though Larry wants to talk to his son, the old unease between them seems to return the minute they're alone together and Larry soon retreats from the hot kitchen, tugs on a coat and goes out into the frosty dusk. He walks quite fast, enjoying the silence of the city.

He's barely out of earshot of the house when the telephone rings and Thomas hurries to Leni's study to answer it. Entering Leni's “own” rooms – her bedroom, her bathroom and this room from which she used to write to him – brings the loss of her back to him. It's with a subdued voice that he gives the Oxford number.

There's a lot of crackling and whooshing on the line. Thomas waits. Clear and high out of these peculiar noises comes a voice which says, “My bean?”

“Who is this?” asks Thomas.

“Nadia. It's Nadia. It's not you, my bean?”

“This is Thomas Kendal,” says Thomas.

There's a long silence, save for the whooshing on the line which is like the sound of a sea gale.

“I'm sorry,” says Nadia, “I must speak to Larry. You can fetch him, please?”

“He's not here,” says Thomas.

There's another burst of sea noise before Nadia says urgently, “I must speak to him, you know. I promised I would telephone today.”

“Can he call you back?” says Thomas, absentmindedly. His long fingers are gently touching the leather corners of Leni's blotter. On the blotting paper itself are imprinted one or two pale, indecipherable ghosts of her stylish handwriting.

“I think,” says Nadia, “this news must not wait any longer. I think you must tell him. You tell so kindly, please. I think it's better you tell him. Okay?”

“Sure,” says Thomas, “tell him what?”

“Well . . .”

Thomas waits, impatient as Leni would have been impatient with this anxious-sounding person. When next she speaks, it's a rush of words, a wave breaking: “Please, you tell him I am so ashame, that this whole village is so ashame for so cruel a thing. You must tell him Klaus is not to blame, nor these Mallélous. Please say we could do nothing. None of us. In the night is coming two bulldozers. And we are told afterwards Mme. de la Brosse has given them some paper from the Mayor . . . just a piece of
paper
, you know, and with this piece of paper they are falling all the earth in, you understand? All the earth back into the swimming pool. And for so many days I am keeping this thing from Larry, but now I have to tell him. So you tell him please the pool is destroyed and I am so sorry, my poor bean. Say him Nadia is sorry . . .”

When the wave has receded, an awkward goodbye is said and Thomas is alone with his father's tragedy. He sits down at Leni's desk and stares at her pens in their tray, her gold-handled scissors, her Japanese inkwell. So deliciously cruel she always was about Larry. Now, in her study, Thomas hears her empty laughter and feels afraid.

It's completely dark when Larry comes in. In the December sky, over the worshippers in St. Mary's hangs the same full moon Uncle Leopold once told his gullible niece to eat. Larry's nose is red and icy. He's grateful for the warmth of the house as it takes him in. And he feels clear-headed from the walk, calm inside himself, full of hope.

Thomas comes out of the kitchen. He's made tea, he says. His blanket face is grave, his eyes over-bright, as they were at Leni's funeral. Strange boy, thinks Larry. Too like his grandmother for my comfort. Yet, he puts a friendly hand on Thomas's shoulder. “Let's start old Gary's Christmas cake, shall we?” he says.

So the beautiful iced cake is cut and plates laid and the tea poured, and over this modest, very English meal, Thomas gently tells his father what has happened in Pomerac.

The moment Thomas starts talking, Larry gets up. He has to move away from Thomas's look. When the full realisation of what has happened comes to him, Larry's first thought is, I want to hurt him, I want to throw my fist in his face, I want to kill him – for his
pity
! Instead, he brings his hand crashing down onto the burning hot enamel of the Rayburn. Above it, some tin mugs of Leni's jigger on their hooks. Larry takes them one by one and hurls them across the room. They don't break. They're hardly dented. Like Leni herself, he thinks. Indestructible! Except at the end. Everything, in the end, goes back into the earth. Maggots fiddle with her now. There's a thought! Where she was caressed, now she's eaten. But she cast this one last spell. The old “Duchess of Oxford” came whispering in the ear of Mme. de la Brosse as she sat by her fire in her empty house. Together, they laughed and laughed. They cackled like hags in the night, and then she fled. Leni the cat. Leni the ghost of beautiful women. And the plan was formed . . .

Thomas moves to pick up the mugs, but Larry stops him. “Don't touch them!” And Thomas understands. “If you're blaming Leni . . .” he begins, “you're idiotic.”

“I
am
idiotic, Thomas! Didn't you know that? Has it taken you twenty-seven years to realise your father was an idiot?”

“Please don't, Dad. Don't start blaming me. I had nothing to do with it.”

“No? But you all understood, didn't you? He'll do what we tell him. Larry the lamb! He'll trot off to France when we tell him to. He'll get well when we tell him to. He'll start building his silly little swimming pool. Well, you were wrong about the swimming pool. You were all wrong. I wasn't building a swimming pool. It never
was
one!”

“What was it, then?”

“It was a bloody cathedral! That's what it was. It was a
cathedral
!”

“I thought you were indifferent to God.”

“God? Who mentioned God? I am totally and absolutely indifferent to God. I wasn't building it for Him. It wasn't a church monument. It was a monument to
me
!”

Larry bangs his barrel chest with his helpless fists. I'm like a child, he thinks. I've got a child's trust in the world. And he lets his hands drop.

He moves from the Rayburn to the window. On the sill is a line of Leni's cacti Miriam has neglected. They seem shrivelled and light. He hates the look of them. He closes his eyes.

“I would like to have seen it,” says Thomas quietly.

“Seen what?” Larry's voice is steady now. He feels the first weight of his anger begin to lift.

“The French pool.”

“You were never interested in the pools.”

“Not in the old days, not much. They all looked the same.”

Larry shrugs. “This one wasn't that different.”

“What was the cathedral thing, then?”

Larry turns and looks at his son. In the boy's face is real sadness. Go to Australia, he wants to say. Go with my blessing, with my love even, but go and leave me with my failures. But he doesn't say this. He rubs his eyes and says: “It was just a kind of inspiration I had. New colours. Black and white instead of blue, and in the shape . . .”

“What did you use, tile or mosaic?”

“Both. Tiles on the sides, mosaic on the trim. Some silver bits which would have shone under the water . . .”

“Sounds good.”

Larry shrugs again. “Probably not.”

He sits down then. He pours himself some tea. With the pain of his anger easing, his mind travels to Pomerac. It's early morning, cold and clear. With his ladder propped against the deep-end wall, Klaus is working with the mosaic pieces. The sun is up, the whole place gloriously lit. Larry stands, holding a bowl of Gervaise's coffee in his hands, and watches. The scene is fine, yet at the very edge of it there's a speck, a shadow, something he can't describe that gives him a small sense of unease.

“Do you know,” he says suddenly to Thomas, “that while I was working on the pool I saw an eagle? I saw it twice. The second time, it was so near me I could almost have touched it. And they look at you, you know. They look you in the eye. I thought about it a heck of a lot. I wanted it to come back and it never did. But I knew why. It despised me. I was much too tame.”

Larry hears the front door open then and Miriam, Perdita and Gary come into the hall. They're laughing and singing snatches of carols.

“Larry!” Miriam calls above the laughter. “We're home.”

More snow falls on Pomerac. Behind her draughty windows, Mme. de la Brosse looks out at the silent lane and wonders anxiously, will the roads be passable, will I be able to get back to Paris? Last night, after midnight mass at Ste. Catherine, she and Lisette waited with the mulled wine and the cakes and the sugar angels for the children, but no one came. She sent Lisette out with a torch to see if families were waiting at her gate but there was no sign of anyone and up and down the lanes of the village all the lights were on and the fires burning and the doors closed.

“Ah well, so much the better,” Mme. de la Brosse said to Lisette. “It's an out-dated custom. I only kept it on for Anatole's sake. Take the cakes and the other rubbish home to your family, dear.”

“Thank you, Madame. But I still don't understand. Why did no one turn up?”

Mme. de la Brosse shrugged. “They've forgotten the old ways. It's not my fault. We live in a disrespectful time.”

Mallélou didn't go to the mass. He hated snow and was growing, in these last months of his decline, to hate God. Why had God sent His son among ignorant Jewish fishermen who needed everything explaining to them in crass anecdotes about virgins and weddings? Why had he not arrived among the sensible burghers of Bremen, made them his apostles and baptised them in the Weser? That plaster-of-Paris Jesus at Ste. Catherine had started to seem stupid to Mallélou, anyway. Jesus with a broken thumb: typical French peasant ineptitude.

“I'll stay with the old man,” he told Gervaise, as she and Klaus put on their coats. “Someone has to stay with him. We can't all go rushing off to get our sins forgiven.”

“What sins?” asked Gervaise curtly.

Mallélou looked from her to Klaus and grinned. “Plenty, Gervaise!”

“And you? You don't think you've got any?”

“I didn't say that.”

“I'm happy to stay with the Maréchal, you know. You go to the Mass.”

But Mallélou started to push them out into the yard. “Go on, off you go. You leave me in peace . . .”

Wearily, then, he climbed the stairs to the Maréchal's room, went in without knocking and sat down by the old man's bed. The room was cold, with the snow pressing and mounting up against the window, but the smell in it was foetid and Mallélou tugged out a grimy handkerchief and sat with this pressed to his nose. Half asleep and dreaming of his dead sons, the Maréchal felt the presence of Mallélou near him and opened his eyes and said: “Not long, eh, Mallélou?”

Mallélou stared at him over the handkerchief.

“For me or for you, Maréchal?”

“You, you're young compared to me. But you're tired of it, Mallélou. I can see that. In your eyes. Life's hard. It's no good being tired. You've got to have the stomach for it.”

“Eat. Sleep. Shovel some shit. Have a nip of wine. There's no point to it, is there? Even my cock's limp as a dead bloody sparrow. Not like in the old days. I was chipper then. Horny as shit then. In that signal hut where I worked, we had this ashtray the shape of a woman . . .”

“You've told me, Mallélou.”

“. . . I used to put the fag-end right
there
. Burn her right in her black pussy every damn morning! Fantastic, non?”

Mallélou stared down at his feet and noticed that his sabots were worn and scratched and that there was a hole in one of his socks. He sat staring at these familiar things for a long time, remembering the long-ago days of the signal hut and repeating in an almost inaudible whisper “Fantastic, non? Fantastic, non?” A choking and gurgling sound from the bed disturbed his reverie and he looked up. With his owl's eyes wide open on the falling snow and his snowy hair flying like flax across the pillow, the Maréchal had died.

Now it's morning. The sun's brilliance on the white landscape is startling. Gervaise sleeps. Upstairs, the body of the Maréchal, washed and dressed by Gervaise and Klaus in the silence of one o'clock on Christmas morning, waits for the undertakers, covered with a clean white sheet. Gervaise dreams of the party she gave the week Klaus became her lover. It was high summer and they set up a long table in the yard and got pissed as lords in the sunshine and danced to accordion music on the dry, flinty earth of the barnyard with the hens pecking at their skipping legs and the guineafowl flapping and screeching on all the roofs.

Mallélou wakes and stares at the ski-ing poster. The snow's here now. If he were young, he'd like to dress up in a stretchy yellow suit with a number on his back and go tearing down mountains, hearing the ice under his feet. He blows his nose. The smell of his handkerchief reminds him of the old man lying and waiting for his coffin and he shudders. “Let me,” he asks the Aryan God of his imaginings, “have the stomach for spring.”