The Swimming Pool Season by Rose Tremain

skimmers.”
    â€œOur trouble was we always did things too grandly. Why build a garage?”
    â€œYou must conceive grandly! Or not bother.”
    â€œA hut would do.”
    â€œNo. Not for me.”
    Miriam lightly tugs away her imprisoned hand. “You’ve got to stop dreaming, Larry.”
    And she walks away from him slowly towards the house; the mother withdraws her love, slaps the child awake. Larry sighs. His heart is throbbing.
    By the time her plane leaves on Monday, he’s ready to feel relief at her going. On Monday morning, he sees the eagle again. It stares at him with an eye so flint-hard, he senses a challenge and he feels his spirit lift. When the eagle takes off, he knows it will return. What he dreads is to see its mate come, the pair. Only in its isolation does the bird inspire him.
    At Bordeaux airport, it is still raining. In Miriam’s mind, Oxford is cloudless, the stones yellow in afternoon light. All light has gone from the tarmac as she follows the crowd to the plane. Unseen by her, Larry waves, but she doesn’t turn. As he climbs wearily back into the Granada he thinks of Agnès hurtling south on the Paris train, to be met, at last, by Nadia’s waiting gabble. Travel. Change. Arrival. Loss. Hello Mary-Lou. Goodbye heart .
    News of Gervaise’s youngest son, Xavier, comes to Pomerac.
    At twenty, Xavier Mallélou kissed a bitter goodbye to his job on the railways, told his boss, in fact, that he could stick this particular job (the laying of sleepers on a new stretch of the Bordeaux-to-Biarritz line) up his grandmother’s cunt, and went to work for a certain Mme. Motte who ran a cheap restaurant for long-distance truckers in Bordeaux. Neither Gervaise nor Mallélou had ever met Mme. Motte, nor seen the small premises where she offered a five-course set meal (soup, cold hors d’oeuvres, hot dish, cheese, sweet) for thirty-five francs, but Xavier had written one letter to say he had some responsibility in this new work. He wasn’t just waiting tables: he was negotiating with a new wine supplier and was “getting to know properly” the regular customers. He’d also convinced Mme. Motte to get little cards printed with the name and address and the price of the menu on them. Business was brisk. On winter days, he was warm by the chip-fryer instead of freezing to death on that bitch of a line. Mallélou shrugged, remembering the signal box and the coffee and the thighs of the ashtray. He didn’t blame his son for wanting to be warm, but he considered the railways to be “a fair master”, whereas a widow running a café, what kind of boss was this for a young man? Klaus reassured him. He’d worked for a woman once, learning the bread business. They could treat you fair. Yet Mallélou felt disappointed in Xavier. He wrote to his son and advised him never to trust Mme. Motte and never to do her favours, sexual or otherwise.
    Now a letter comes from the police. Xavier is accused of stealing seventeen cases of wine, and three hundredweight of potatoes from Mme. Motte over a period of six and a half months. Bail has been set at eight thousand francs. The accused is being held in custody until this sum has been raised. The accused has no visible means of support.
    Gervaise weeps. That wasteland, that no-man’s-land, poisoned the heads of her sons. Everything they touched was foul. They played football with old cans, they made swings with worn tyres, they fished in a dead river. And the language. That language of the hard, mucky wasteland boys. Fuck and suck. Cunt. Arseholes. Nigger-lovers. Kill the Socialists . She weeps for all of that which was, or should have been, their childhood and which, in its own bitter words, fucked them.
    She goes up to the Maréchal’s house. The mist and damp are still heavy on the village. The Maréchal sits by his range with a half-made basket on his knee. The pipe, barely alight in his