The Swimming Pool Season by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online Page A

the Thiviers train in my car and lift this girl to Hervé’s house. But no, he is saying, I am not putting my faith in you, Nadia. You will risking life and limb in your Polish driving.”
    â€œOh I see. Well I don’t know why he couldn’t trust you. But he did ask me to go for Agnès.”
    â€œSo you go, you go. Okay, I say Larry is a man, but who is going on the left, you or me? Maybe Larry is daydreaming he’s rolling to Stonehinge and just forgetting right is right. No?”
    Nadia unlocks her door. Immediately beyond it is a tiny lobby where she hangs Claude’s mackintosh. Her blonde hair, now soaked, clings to her head like a cap. Larry, his mac over his arm, follows her up. Nadia at once disappears behind the Japanese screen and Larry hears her filling a kettle. At least, at Nadia’s, the tea is always good. They sit and drink this tea for half an hour. Nadia alternately pats and prinks up her damp hair. Larry’s Burberry slowly dries in the heat of the fierce little fire. Nadia steers the conversation from Hervé’s seeming lack of trust in her to the question of trust and betrayal in general. We are all deceived, runs her threnody: the people or things we put our faith in alter and disappear before our very eyes, like mirages. Take Claude. Take the swimming pools. Claude was a healthy man, vigorous, sexually potent, with a sense of humour and springy chest hair. And then what happens? The health of his mind begins to go, his limbs become weak and his fine pelt turns wispy and grey. He is no longer Nadia’s Claude. His poor little sex dangles there like the lolling dead neck of a chicken. His laughter fades. “And the pools, Larry? The same with the pools, no?”
    Larry thinks of pink bird necks and dead laughter and shivers.
    â€œSo sparkling, no?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œLike my Claude. So beautiful sparkling eyes. I’m sorry you’re not seeing them.”
    â€œI’m sorry, Nadia.
    â€œAnd I am never seeing those swimming pools. But I imagine.”
    â€œCan you?”
    â€œOh yes, yes. Like those David Cockney painting, this loops of brightness and all the lying people in their skin reflected. I can imagine very good. No?”
    Larry is silent. Nadia pours more tea, waiting for him to yield up the dark confusion that came with the collapse of his dream. But, oddly for Nadia, she has said it all for him: the phrase “loops of brightness” ransacks his mind like a lost song.
    Miriam sorts paintings and folds clothes. Now that her flight is booked, she does no more crying for Leni, but meticulously prepares herself for her re-entry into what is left of her mother’s life. She remembers the house, the street, the neighbours, the smell of autumn in North Oxford. Her desire to be there now is like a sudden home-sickness. She wants to talk about it all, reminding herself that she can still belong there. It’s just a question of arriving. She packs her tin of watercolours and her box of pastels. The act of closing the lids on these and putting them in the suitcase gives permanence to her stay in England. She looks up guiltily at Larry’s anxious, grizzled head. “It’s no use,” she says, “wondering if you’ll be all right. I know you’ll have the moments of loneliness. You’ll just have to telephone me from Nadia’s. And I’ll write. Of course I’ll write. But I have to go. You understand this.”
    â€œYes.”
    He’s never felt so distant from her. Miriam. His chestnut woman. His careful wife. The daily monitoring of what makes her happy, this is a habit he’s never asked himself to break. Even when he was ill and depressed, he tried to “get on” with each bitter day as she instructed him. He dreaded losing her then, when he had so little to give her. He had nightmares of Leni, then, waiting with her disdainful eyes, waiting to snatch Miriam from him.