THE SWIMMING POOL SEASON

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.

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.

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.

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 holidays, 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.

“I’m off then, Miriam,” says Larry. He wears shorts and a sweat shirt. His sturdy, short legs beneath these move him rather jerkily to the hook where he hangs his car keys.

“Off where, Larry?”

“Périgueux. It’s time I looked up those pool suppliers.”

“I thought we were going to wait till the spring now.”

“I don’t want to wait. I want to get on with it.”

Miriam goes to the fridge and takes out a carton of orange juice. The orange juice in France tastes of sugar and chemicals. Miriam mourns her Unigate delivery.

“Well. What time will you be back?”

“Oh, not sure. Car needs a spin. I’ll go via Harve’s and see if he wants anything. You’ll be working, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Remind me, when I get back, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Talk to me now.”

“No, no. It’s not that important. Just a thought I’ve had about the car.”

“The car? You’re not thinking of changing it in are you?”

“We should trade it in this year. But I don’t think there’s any question. Next year perhaps, after the pool’s in.”

“So what about the car?”

“Nothing, Miriam.” Larry is agitated now, wanting to leave. The Périgueux road goes past a waterfall. Perfect spot, this, he always thinks, for a car commercial, and imagines himself in a spanking new Datsun Cherry or a VW Scirocco. “It’s just a little scheme which, like all my schemes, will come to nothing.”

“What are you upset about, Larry?”

“Upset?”

“Yes. You seem upset.”

“I’m not upset, Miriam. I’m just keen to press on.”

“You’ll get a beer and a sandwich or something for lunch?”

“Yes. Don’t worry about me.”

Miriam smiles. “Larry, you’ve still got that tea towel over your shoulder.” Larry doesn’t smile. He seems fussed with rage. He snatches the towel off and leaves without another word.

In the lane, his passage to his Granada is temporarily blocked by Gervaise’s cows slipping and swaying past his house on their way back to the fields. Mallélou with his stick and Larry with his car keys exchange a silent greeting.

Miriam sits down at the heavy wooden table – bought in Eye, Suffolk, for six pounds – and opens the letter. It is, after all from Leni Ackerman, but written in black biro by someone else.

But Miriam’s mind has already heard, in some hard and buried part of itself, this certainty: Leni is dying. She pushes away the orange juice, lays her arms on the table and weeps. Outside, she dimly hears the Granada start up and thinks for a moment of calling Larry back to comfort her, and tell her it isn’t so. Yet it is so. Miriam knows. She prefers to be alone with this knowledge and let it bow her.

Gently, on her bed in the spacious old Oxford house, Miriam lays out her mother’s dead body. At her back, out of sight behind the door, students fuss and whisper, boys mostly, bringing flowers. Miriam selects a dark dress, thin with time, with clusters of sleek, soft feathers at each shoulder. The Crow Dress. A hat used to go with it: more feathers and a velvet-flecked veil. She finds this and lays it down while she touches the fine, fine contours of the face, eyes vast in their sockets, a nose like Napoleon’s in the Delacroix painting, angular and fierce. Leni Ackerman. So beautiful.

He’s in a room he calls the bureau with his straight, dry legs resting on a hard sofa. These legs are in plaster from heel to knee, the vulnerable imprisoned feet covered with woolly socks like egg cosies. His long hands flurry with a medical journal but he’s not reading it; the broken legs disturb and reproach him. Where will the next years lead him? To what precipice? He’s become so somnambulist. The night he broke his legs, he flew down the stairs.

Chantal is away. Some dying parent or cousin in Paris. Poor old Harve slithers round the wood floors of his mansion on flat, sinewy buttocks, wearing a dark shine into his grey trousers. He prefers this slithering to walking with crutches, believes it’s quicker, doesn’t mind if he looks like a seal. And he says people in the village are kind: Nadia Poniatowski cooks him chicken with chestnuts; the de la Brosse widow lends him her maid to make his bed and do his washing. The practice is suffering, though. The young locum sitting in Hervé’s consulting chair is too shy of bodies; has let slip he’d rather be a vet.

Larry parks the Granada on the gravel sweep. Harve’s home, in its high isolation, always impresses upon Larry the lowliness of his own house, its hopeless nearness to Gervaise’s south wall, the pretensions of its terrace. He feels diminished by Hervé’s turret, by his sundial, by the wistaria dressing the stone with mauve cascades. This is elegance. This is nobility and money and roots. Larry has begun to fear that life led without the comfort of these is oddly futile.

“How are you, Harve?”

Larry has walked past dusty leaning suits of armour in the impressive hall and found his friend in the bureau, staring at his legs.

“Oh, Larry. Good. Good of you. So bloody boring all this. Imagine the war-wounded. What do they do? Restricted motion kills. It’s killing me.”

“Yes. Or the man chained to his desk.”

“The man chained to his desk! That’s good. Yes. What does he do? Dies. Have a drink, Larry. Sherry or something? A little morning cassis?”

Hervé waves feebly at a mighty oak cupboard where these drinks are kept. Larry has had no breakfast. He feels hollow and slightly unsteady. He imagines Miriam poaching her solitary egg, making a small pot of coffee, taking these into the sunshine.

“Well, a cassis . . .”

“Yes. Me too. I like cassis in the morning. Gets the stomach nice and warm. You pour them.”

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 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.

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.

Larry finds a pizza stall and carries his wedge of pizza, wrapped in a paper napkin, to a sunny café with orange plastic chairs. He orders a demi. The pavement at his feet mills with people. One man carries a larch tree in a heavy tub. He seems to walk jauntily nonetheless and in time to a sweet, long-ago song that surfaces in Larry’s head as he sips the cold beer: Hello Mary-Lou, goodbye heart. The larch-carrier passes out of sight, but Larry can still see the tip of the tree bobbing above the heads of the people. He likes this busyness. He likes the hard commercial buy-sell brightness in the women’s eyes. Perhaps this is where he and Miriam should be, in the city. Consumers. Consommateurs. With so much to have, to wear, to swallow. Consommations.

But then he remembers the eagle. He’s seen it twice now. A week ago on the roof of Gervaise’s milking barn, then this morning there on the boundary wall, his wall. On the barn roof, high up, it didn’t look so vast. A hawk, he told himself, a kestrel, a buzzard . . . But close to him, no higher than his head, you couldn’t doubt it. The first eagle he’s seen in his life and it sits on his wall like some tame sparrow! Miraculous things occur so disappointingly seldom, Larry has come to believe you have to make them happen. That feeling of shivering, of the self becoming small. Superb. The eagle dwarfed him. He was afraid to watch it take off and reveal the great width of its wings. No wonder these birds are a protected species. If we let all the wonders go we’ll become crazy with our sense of loss. When Aquazure collapsed, Larry was wounded so much less by the sad reproaches of his employees, by the grim sighings of the bankers and solicitors, than by the loss of the thing itself, the pools. The pools became so magnificent, after he’d lost them. He remembers his first pool: oil-heated in the days before electric heat exchangers had become the thing; a Roman-end pool, concrete, no vinyl anywhere, real mosaic tiles, dive board and slide, non-slip surround, underwater light, and a pool house converted from eighteenth century stables, fitted with kitchenette, changing rooms with basins and mirrors, a toilet with a rainbow blind. He’d looked at this finished miracle like God upon creation and was well-pleased. But, unlike God, he couldn’t alter the weather. The summer after that pool went in, it was used for less than three weeks. The same year, building other pools by then, the work hampered and made difficult by rain, Larry met an American meteorologist on a London tube train. This meteorologist said English scientists should be exploring the possible use of the Rosenblum Crystal in weather control. “Ah, the Rosenblum Crystal,” said Larry, as if he knew, “yes. Why aren’t they exploring it?” The meteorologist shrugged. “Dunno. Perhaps they like this climate.” Larry never discovered what the Rosenblum Crystal was but there were many days, hundreds even, when he thought about it: a magical particle, roseate, he imagined, dispersing cloud like tear gas, making pathways for the sun.

The café fills up. Near Larry, a dominoes game begins. The men shout. Larry marvels at how quickly they get into the game. The comfort of routine, repetition. He has no routine now. No one waits for him, watching a clock. He waits for no one. Next only to the pools, he mourns his office. It was a functional place, never beautiful, never plush, yet it constantly reaffirmed an order of things with which he felt content. Larry envies the men not only the domino game but the day-to-day patterning of time that brings them to this café at this hour. He senses that they never miss a game. Just as he, well or ill, never missed one day at Aquazure. Not one. So no wonder, when it all went, he felt helpless, like a rape victim, fouled up and helpless. And it was Miriam who decided one day, it’s enough. We must try a new start. The new start was France. The house at Pomerac. Now, a year after that start, Agnès Prière is arriving. And an eagle perches on the wall. Larry orders a second beer and waits patiently for two o’clock.

The oldest living inhabitant of Pomerac is M. Foch, known to all the villagers as “The Maréchal”. He’s a stooped and serious person with springy white hair and eyes like owls’ eyes, circled by time. He’s been widowed for years now, lives out each day in fumbling solitude, sucking down the broth that keeps him alive, sucking on a blackened pipe. He makes baskets. Mme. de la Brosse arranges the sale of these for him in Périgueux and Angoulême. His baskets are neat and strong. You can’t recognise the ninety-year-old Maréchal in them. He knew Gervaise’s father and grandfather. Gervaise cooks a hen for him at Christmas and Easter and on All Saints Day. Mallélou is afraid of him because he mistrusts strangers and, to Foch, Mallélou is still a stranger. When the English started to come to the village, he raised his hooded eyes to glance at their shiny, big cars and their marble faces and merely shrugged with despair and disbelief: “C’est la comédie humaine, non?” Larry, deviating from village custom, always refers to the Maréchal as “La Comédie Humaine”. He has the notion that the sight of a swimming pool in Pomerac would cause the old man’s heart to cease.

Gervaise dreads this death. The Maréchal is in her first memories: looking for cèpes in the forests behind Ste. Catherine, the Maréchal wearing a sacking apron with a big pouch, putting her child’s hand inside this pouch and feeling the warm cèpes like minute limbs of flesh, smelling of leaves and earth, and feeling afraid, as if she’d touched something private and forbidden. Then her grandfather’s funeral: crying for Grandpapa, not knowing where he’d gone, not believing they’d boxed up his body. The Maréchal took her out of the church and she sat with him in the cold November graveyard with a light snow beginning to fall. “He went to America,” he told her. “All spirits go there because there’s room for them there on the prairies. When the prairie grass whooshes and sings, that’s the spirits calling.” But the word “prairie” sounded lonely, far too lonely for Grandpapa, with his wine-breath and his chatter about governments, so she wept and the Maréchal gave her his handkerchief, which was red and white and smelt of lavender. The Maréchal was perhaps fifty then. His wife, Eulalie, was a seamstress from Thiviers. To Gervaise, this couple always seemed old and, when Eulalie died, she wasn’t really surprised. But she got used to the permanence of the Maréchal. His going would tug deep at her heart.

The Maréchal owns no land now. Bit by bit as he aged he sold it off to his neighbours. The de la Brosse family bought most of it and Mme. de la Brosse is now the largest landowner in Pomerac. She also owns a milk pasteurising plant. Gervaise has always thought of the de la Brosse family as being rich. A maid is employed at the house. Mme. de la Brosse buys her clothes in Paris. Yet the house has a neglected feel. Most of its rooms are shuttered. For long periods of the year, Mme. de la Brosse is away. Only at Christmas does she offer hospitality: after Mass on Christmas Eve, the villagers are given hot wine and cinnamon cakes. For the children, there are lollipops and sugar angels. Some don’t bother to turn up. “To another year, Mme. de la Brosse!” someone says and the slim little widow raises her glass and answers: “To another year!” But you sense she’s tired. She’s not more than sixty – young enough to be the Maréchal’s daughter – but exhaustion seems to hang in the limp folds of her eyelids, in the vexed lines at the corners of her mouth. “Life,” says this creased and bedraggled skin, “has never been much.” The only person in the village who seems to interest her is Klaus. Perhaps their mere size difference astonishes her. Last Christmas, Klaus made a sumptuous Bûche de Noël, decorated with holly, and brought this to the Christmas Eve party, carrying it aloft in his wide, red hands. Mme. de la Brosse clapped and blushed: “How kind, how kind . .