The Swimming Pool Season by Rose Tremain Page B

wife’s and some, though he’s forgotten what’s what, belonging to his dead sons.
    Gervaise’s heart lifts. Tomorrow Mallélou will go to Bordeaux. By Wednesday Xavier must be released. And in this case the Judge must be lenient – a young man too big for his boots, a first offence . . .
    â€œHe didn’t kill, did he?”
    â€œNo, Maréchal.”
    â€œYour boys wouldn’t kill, would they?”
    She shakes her head, her lips tight. Mother-fuckers. Fagsuckers. Jewish shit. Kill the Commies . She feels tears start.
    â€œNo. I don’t think they would.”
    â€œThen it’s all right. You take the money. And don’t you worry about it.”
    â€œHe robbed a woman.”
    â€œWell. Jewels, was it?”
    â€œNo. Wine and potatoes.”
    The Maréchal’s face creases into a thousand laughter lines. “Potatoes! Potatoes! You tell him, just you tell him that’s a waste of time. We’ve got plenty of potatoes here, eh Gervaise?”
    Yes. Gervaise touches her eye, where the tears twitch. Yes. It’s pathetic. Her sons are pathetic. Not like she wanted them to be. It’s Mallélou’s fault. It must be. In that sooty, overheated signal hut his blood and his semen grew too stale and hot.
    Mallélou doesn’t like it when Gervaise borrows from the Maréchal. In the days when he worked on the railways, he never borrowed and he has tried to teach his sons: never owe anyone. It humiliates him, in particular, to take money from a man who doesn’t like him, who gives it to Gervaise because he’s seen and known more of her life than anyone else. He’s convinced himself that the Maréchal actually saw Gervaise born, was actually there, gawping at the mother’s spread fanny when her little peasant head came pushing out. It’s become the thing he resents most about the old man, this and the way he treats Klaus with contempt. Who does the old bugger think he is? Some tribal chief? Mallélou likes modern hierarchies, hates primitive ones.
    So when Gervaise comes back with the three thousand francs, he quashes a momentary fear that the Maréchal wouldn’t give it to her this time, and snatches it from her breasts without a word. Watching this, Klaus feels angry but says nothing.
    Hervé Prière compares the touch and scent of his niece, Agnès, to the touch and scent of falling blossom. Everything he notices about her is light, gentle. Her voice, her straight shiny hair, her feet. She plays the Bechstein with a touch so light, she turns concertos to water music. “Play Clair de Lune ”, Hervé asks.
    And this piece of music enters his willowy soul and moves it. He sees rivers and minnows and stars. His shoulders relax. His restless fingers are still. If he could only hear this music in his dreams, instead of the things he does hear . . .
    She’s been there three days. She drives his car and he laughs: “You look like a kid behind the wheel of that car.” She’s twenty. Small like her mother and sister, with the mother’s English peachy skin. Her eyes are green, flecked with brown. She wears pale, soft clothes – little rabbity jerseys, grey skirts – and flat bright buds of shoes. She’s neat in all her ways. When she cooks, she dabs and wipes as she goes. And she likes food to look pretty and neat. Under the baked egg dishes she fans gold maple leaves, she tosses mint flowers onto the potatoes, she arranges cheese on a criss-cross of washed twigs. Hervé is enchanted, captive to these careful ways. Then he starts to wonder about her. He wonders why, at twenty, she gives these things such attention. Like the blossom she reminded him of, falling from the old walled trees of his youth, she seems both old fashioned and somehow lacking in substance.
    After dinner, when she’s washed the plates and dishes, and put everything away, she arrives in the sitting