The Swimming Pool Season Read online

  About the Author

  Rose Tremain is a writer of novels, short stories and screenplays. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer Richard Holmes. Her books have been translated into numerous languages, and have won many prizes including the Orange Prize, the Whitbread Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Angel Literary Award and the Sunday Express Book of the Year.

  Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a movie; The Colour was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and selected by the Daily Mail Reading Club. Rose Tremain’s most recent collection, The Darkness of Wallis Simpson, was shortlisted for both the First National Short Story Award and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Three of her novels are currently in development as films.

  ALSO BY ROSE TREMAIN

  Novels

  Sadler’s Birthday

  Letter to Sister Benedicta

  The Cupboard

  Restoration

  Sacred Country

  The Way I Found Her

  Music & Silence

  The Colour

  The Road Home

  Short Story Collections

  The Colonel’s Daughter

  The Garden of the Villa Mollini

  Evangelista’s Fan

  The Darkness of Wallis Simpson

  For Children

  Journey to the Volcano

  THE SWIMMING POOL SEASON

  Rose Tremain

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Epub ISBN: 9781446450512

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2003

  4 6 8 10 9 7 5

  Copyright © Rose Tremain 1985

  Rose Tremain has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  First published in Great Britain in 1985 by Hamish Hamilton

  Vintage

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.vintage-books.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099428251

  For Richard Simon

  My grateful thanks to Maureen Duffy for her help with the poem

  Contents

  1 Pomerac

  2 Leni

  3 The Sleepwalkers

  4 Winter

  ONE

  Pomerac

  Here, at dawn, the first sound is the calling of Gervaise to her cows. Standing with her wrists on the metal gate, put in this summer to replace a wooden five-bar so rotten and moss-covered it was returning itself, limb by limb, to the crumbly earth, Gervaise floods her peasant head with a superstitious prayer: Thank you, Our Lady of Jesus, for this gift of a metal gate. Bless our English neighbour who understands the need for it. Amen.

  Then the cows lollop slowly to her, white, muddy rumps swaying through the white September mist. They’re heavy with nourished flesh, huge with milk, and this woman calling to them, Gervaise, is a little stick of a person beside them, so meagrely fleshed, her breasts lie flat on her ribs like soft purses. Yet she it is, her knowledge of soil and weather and sickness and crop, who gives this warm steaming health to these cows. She it is – not her husband, M. Mallélou still rolled up in his flannel sheets and snoring at the whitewashed wall – who opens the gate now and drives the cows under the window of Larry Kendal, her English neighbour, and on up the rutted lane where Larry’s tomato-coloured Granada is parked, opaque with dew, its rear bumper squatting in briars and brambles, on past the car and over a small incline where the cows’ hooves slip on loose stones.

  As the village clock chimes six, Gervaise follows the animals into the barn where one day, she has promised herself, she will install a modern milking parlour, kind to the teats, self-cleaning. As she begins to milk the cows, she croons a lullaby so honoured by time it has passed into her veins. Gervaise wants to still the quivering udders to the rhythm of her voice, but the cows begin to tremble and stamp. Very often they do this: they refuse to be calmed as her sons were calmed at her breast by Gervaise’s singing, yet every morning she sings.

  Gervaise’s English neighbour, Larry Kendal, wakes as the cows come toiling past his Granada. Buried under the lane where they pass is the cheap septic tank he installed four years ago, when the house was a holiday home, occupied for a few weeks only each summer. This year, the stench from that septic tank has been sickening. Little froths of sewage have bubbled up onto the stones and weed. The cow flops smell sweet compared to that rancid human waste. It’s the meat we gobble and the alcohol we sip . . . Something will have to be done about the tank. No use pretending the problem will go. Larry hears six o’clock from the bell-tower and sighs. The chime is both familiar and utterly alien. It’s the sound of the village, Pomerac, on its silent hill, in a country he’s trying to make his own, but which refuses to enter his blood or his language or his longings or his will. It’s like a hopeless mistress, beautiful, frigid, cold, dry. And the effort of possession is tiring. He’s trying still, but he’s tired out. And it’s at dawn that his strivings kill him most, with that long day ahead. The light falling in his room is white and dense, yet utterly flat, casting no shadow anywhere, so the room seems featureless like the day.

  But Larry Kendal thinks of his car and feels comforted. The interiors of cars have always soothed him: the smell, the comfy seats, the exquisite functioning of small switches. Once, when he had planned to leave Miriam, to drive a hundred miles to another city, to another life, it had been enough just to go round and round Oxfordshire all night and take his Renault 16 to breakfast at a Post House. Odd this, how the car had been both the vehicle of and the argument against a dramatic change in his entire way of life. Like a devil’s advocate or a clever friend. But he hates what sun and air and rain are doing to the Granada. He wants to apologise to it for his failure to shelter it. He has a plan: he’ll buy the bit of land at the top of the lane where Gervaise’s old milking barn is slowly shedding its tiles. He’ll refurbish the barn as a garage, with a proper up-and-over door, a window and a strip light. Here, too, will he install the swimming pool plant: the heat exchanger, the pump, the backwash, the sand filter, the pipework to sump and skimmers, the vac, the winter cover, and the anti-algae compounds. Yet fears for his plan are growing: he doubts he has the power – or the money – to make Gervaise sell him the barn. She “owes” him for the gate he put in to stop her cows from eating Miriam’s flowers, but her need of the barn is so old and obvious, she’s too sharp, too sensible to let anyone take it from her. Even to Miriam, the plan seems vain. “Don’t be stupid, Larry. What about the winter? The cows would simply die.” But the Granada, he wants to wail. Rust is coming. The damp and the dew. It’s clapping out . . . But these words tail off. They’re futile.

  Miriam sleeps. Larry can feel, a few inches from the sighs that keep heaving and falling, heaving and falling inside his ribcage, the lovely warmth that is his sleeping wife. Her hair on the pillow is a burnished colour, the colour of those broad-shouldered radiators his parents used to have; and the heat her body gives, he compares it to central heating, warming the core, the centre
of himself. He doesn’t know whether he should call this feeling of being warmed “love”. Love has always seemed such a sumptuous word to Larry Kendal that he has held it apart from his private vocabulary, like a medal kept hidden in a leather box and never pinned on. Earned of course, but just not worn, not displayed. But no, he decides, it isn’t precisely love that he’s feeling, in this dull white dawn, not precisely, yet he’s not ashamed of what he does feel: the warmth of Miriam in his bed is right, perfectly right, and he is grateful for these calm moments of certainty. Miriam and his car: to these he belongs. He is theirs, they his. This is right.

  Larry turns his back on Miriam, pulls the sheet up to his eyes to shroud the light and tries to drift back to a sleep which, all night, seemed hardly to hold him so that he kept falling in and out, in and out of it like out of a boat or a tipping hammock. He tries his most effective sleep trick: think up three inventions, or if you’re not asleep after three, think up five. Inventions are like sleeping pills: they satisfy that bit of the brain that won’t shut up, they knock it on the head and you get drowsy. So he lies still and warm with Miriam’s breathing at his back and concentrates first on a ready-pasted disposable toothbrush to be sold in vending machines in public toilets everywhere, called the Rush-Brush, no, the One-up Brush, no, the Brush-up Brush, yes that’s it, the Brush-up Brush, and men in floppy suits with airline breath and perfumed women smelling of escargots de Bourgogne (to name but two categories of people) reach for these gratefully and the quick cleaning of their mouths alters the next few hours of their lives. But through these lives, as they hurry to kiss lovers or mistresses waiting at arrivals gates or in hotel lobbies, creeps a queer, primitive noise which sends them and the toothbrushes, though they try to cling on and have substance, back into the nothingness they stepped out of and Larry is there in the white room, empty of inventions, listening but not wanting to listen to Gervaise singing to her cows. Disturbed by these songs, Larry’s brain sets up a ferocious conversation: if Gervaise won’t sell me the barn, how much might it cost to lay a driveway to the right of the house down the length of the boundary and build a new garage there? Too much. Money he hasn’t got. Money has must spend on the pool. Unless Miriam does well out of this exhibition she’s planning. What are the chances? Not bad, perhaps. Watercolours are back in fashion. People want small, pretty, familiar things again. They’re tired of being baffled. Art is creeping back inside frames. And Miriam’s work, since she’s found all these wild flowers in France (far more here than in Oxfordshire because it is Gervaise who rules this corner and not a business consortium), has got brighter and a little freer. But would Miriam agree to a garage? She feels nothing for the Granada. Hates cars, she says. Which is odd. She’s fifty next month and there are slits of grey in her radiator-coloured hair, yet she hates cars. You’re meant to love comfy, luxy things more as you age. Larry does. Take the swimming pools. He loved, loved those swimming pools. But Miriam didn’t. She admired them, but she didn’t love them. Though why is he using the word “love”? Even for the pools, it wasn’t exactly love. Just, he was so proud of those pools, they were so sparkly and new. This new azure jewel replacing nettles or a field, this superb manifestation of design and plumbing and know-how where before there was only wasteland . . .

  On it goes, this talk that won’t stop to let sleep edge through. The bell chimes the half hour. The light behind the thin curtains expands in brightness. Larry, in this foreign hamlet he must now think of as home, feels a prisoner of all the waking and beginning going on outside the window, and opens his eyes to listen.

  M. Mallélou’s sepulchral voice is calling up dark wooden stairs: “Klaus! Klaus!” Mallélou has set out bread and coarse ham and three bowls for the strong coffee he makes every morning. His hands fuss over this making of coffee, measuring, pouring. He’s a small sinewy man with cavernous speech. Larry Kendal refers to this man, always, as “old Mallélou” and he seems, to those who don’t know, more like the father of Gervaise than the husband. Klaus must be the husband, they decide, despite the German name: Klaus is the husband and Mallélou the father or the uncle. And Gervaise aids this misconception: in the evening, sitting by the stove, one elbow on the oilcloth table, she places a naked yellow foot tenderly in Klaus’s lap. He takes it in his red German hands and massages and warms it.

  Mallélou worked on the outskirts of the city once, a poor job on the railways, tapping the line. Then he was promoted to signals. In the perched-up signal box he felt content. “The life of a signalman,” he told Gervaise, “it’s all right. I would have been comfortable with that.” And now, years later, he often thinks about the fugged smell of the signal hut, the tin mugs of coffee, the ashtray the shape of a woman, and mourns the passing of something agreeable. The thing he’d liked every morning was you stubbed out your first cigarette in that woman’s pussy. And you felt okay. You looked out at those sloggers on the line and thought, imbeciles. But when the father of Gervaise died, Mallélou went back with her to the old man’s bit of land. The brothers wouldn’t go. They had jobs in the print in Angoulême, jobs too good to leave for a few hectares. And Gervaise had never, in her simple head, left those fields. The soot of the railways had made her wring her hands. “I don’t feel sane,” she’d say, “in this smog.” So they returned. It was dawn-to-dusk work, the farm. No walking home with the lights glimmering in the city rain and thinking, that’s it for now, a day off, get out tomorrow and see a Hollywood film. You never got out from Gervaise’s farm. It cried and bleated and sang to you in every season.

  Klaus descends. There’s a roguish majesty in all his movements. Standing at the table where Mallélou has set out the ham, Klaus dwarfs the older man like a giant Goth. His skin is pink, pig-pink fleeced with curly gold that lightens in summer; his mouth is a sweeter colour, the purple-pink of the smoked ham. Mallélou has a secret plan for Klaus: to get him to Paris to meet Claude Chabrol. He trusts absolutely Chabrol’s willingness to turn the weighty Klaus into a star. But Klaus shows no sign of wanting to go to Paris. He seems happy with his slow, labouring life. He seems, in fact, one of the most contented men Mallélou has ever met. Yet why? His trade was bread. There was money in the city bread shops. He was doing well and he chucked it. Just chucked it and stayed on with Mallélou and Gervaise, listening out the winter evenings by their fire.

  “Go and call her, Klaus. Tell her the coffee’s hot.”

  “No. She’ll come in when she’s finished.”

  “Well she’s late today.”

  “So? She’s late.”

  “I’m not waiting for her then.”

  “Don’t wait.”

  But they hear her now, that flip-flap of her rubber boots. After her meal she will measure the milk into churns while Mallélou drives the cows back to their pasture. She comes in, her breathing audible but shallow, her skimpy hair flat on her forehead under the soft scarf, her little flinty eyes bright like an animal’s. Klaus draws back a chair for her and smiles, as if a king or queen had dropped in for tea. Mallélou turns back to his coffee on the hob.

  The post van bouncing on the rutted lane wakes Miriam. Miriam Kendal, née Ackerman, makes the transition from sleep to alert wakefulness elegantly, without fuss or sighing. At almost fifty she’s well fleshed but not soft, large but not fat. Dependable, she seems, stoic, healthy. Larry envies his own son his robust mother, yet often feels that for a wife he might have chosen someone more fragile, with a greater need of him.

  Miriam puts on a garment she privately addresses as la robe. Sometimes she paints wearing la robe. Sometimes she goes out to the flowers in la robe and thinks of Sissinghurst and Vita Sackville-West and her friends wearing those strange clothes they wore. Mainly la robe is a comforter. Larry calls it “that thing”. “Why’re you in the garden in that thing, Miriam?” “It’s not ‘that thing’,” she wants to say, “it’s la robe.” She loves it. It’s loose and full of pockets. She designed it and made it herself with a remnant from Dickins and Jones. She made it for the French h
olidays, for summer and a terrace. Now she’s in it all year till winter.

  She can hear Larry talking to the postman. The way Larry speaks French makes him sound both eager and helpless. This isn’t merely true of Larry, Miriam has noted, it’s true of almost all the English men. Somehow, the women manage this language better. Or perhaps the eagerness, the helplessness is simply less embarrassing in a sex the whole terrified patriarchal world is hoping will retain its last shred of docility and willingness to obey. It’s odd though, she flinches when Larry talks French. She has this thought of displacing him to Germany where, in hard monosyllables like gutt and Gott and nicht and nacht he might regain some missing strength, some sort of dignity.

  The door of the post van slams. Miriam at the window watches it reverse almost to Gervaise’s yard and bounce up the lane. Letters don’t often come. The Kendals’ absence in England is no longer new. It’s assumed they’ve “made a life for themselves”. Only Leni writes every month. You can measure date and season by Leni’s letters.

  “Is it from Leni, Larry?”

  Miriam comes down the uncomfortable staircase. Larry stands in the wide kitchen-living room. For some reason he’s slung a tea towel over his shoulder and he holds this in just the same way as, twenty-seven years ago, he held their baby, Thomas. Men slung with tiny babies make them seem so light. Larry’s a well-built man, his legs just a little too short for his torso. His face is wide and his blue eyes generous and kind. His hair is wild, curly and grey.

  “No. Not Leni. It’s not her writing. But it’s postmarked Oxford.”

  “Oh? Who, I wonder?”

  “Addressed to you.”

  The mist has cleared. On the flagstone terrace, expertly laid by Larry, the sun is falling on straggly geraniums in plastic urns painted to look like stone. Old Mallélou has admired the lightness of these pots. His own existence is hedged with weightier things.