The Swimming Pool Season by Rose Tremain

he stumbles on, Xavier’s arm pushing him, rain pricking his neck and drenching his collar.
    They turn into a long, dead-seeming street. Far down it, a single square of light falls onto the pavement. Above this a boxed sign, strip-lit from within, says Restaurant les Mimosas. Bonne Table .
    Xavier pulls Mallélou into the shadow of some scaffolding. The older man senses he’s being controlled like a kid, tugged here and there, ordered about, when it should be him . . .
    â€œOkay?” hisses Xavier. “That’s her. Where the sign is.” Mallélou stares up and down the street, numb, dumb – too old, too afraid. Xavier wants to hit him, to wake him up. “ Okay ?”
    â€œSure, sure. But I’m not drunk enough. I need something . . .”
    â€œNo you don’t. It’s a woman. She can’t hurt you. Why are you scared?”
    â€œNot scared, Xavier . . .” His speech is slurred. He can hear it. So long since he was pissed like this, he’d forgotten how it makes you weak. Time was when a few pastis were good, good and he’d arrive at Marisa’s place with a hard heart and a stiff cock, not weak then or afraid or frozen, but ready to do business his way, Mallélou’s way . . .
    â€œ Allez !”
    Xavier pushes him out from the scaffolding and he totters across the cobbled road. He feels his son’s eyes at his back like a gun and he doesn’t turn. He takes breaths of cold air, tries to send this clean knife of air up into his brain to clear it of muddle and fear, and ancient thoughts of city days when he was young, before there were sons, before there was Gervaise, when he was king of the signal junction. What’s one muddling old widow? What’s a place like hers, with a few poor tables and a crammed yard at the back? He knows this kind of woman, this kind of place. Rusty boilers, beer crates piled up, stinking tiles like a public toilet, vermin. There’s a sour taste in his throat. Drink is futile. Sons grow to thugs of men and make you impotent. He should have stayed in his own cot with his face turned to the wall. Stayed by Gervaise’s fire. Let Xavier weep and rot in that scum-filled jail, let him find out for himself that in the end whatever you do you pay, you pay and pay . . .
    But he’s there now. He’s brought himself to the front of the restaurant. He stares in. The glass is fugged from the hot breath of the kitchen. Water drips down it inside and out. A sign dangling on the door says fermé . He notes that this is hand-inked in feeble, illiterate writing. He sways and his forehead knocks the icy glass. This small sound brings Mme. Motte back through the plastic fly-curtain that separates the restaurant from the kitchen. Mallélou sees her approach, a small scuttling woman with a flat mutt’s face and black dyed hair. He doesn’t move. He knows that Xavier is still at his back like a revolver, but distant now, too far to kill, someone shadowy. Mme. Motte stops, one hand holding a soapy dish cloth. She bends and wipes the plastic cover of one of the tables. Her arms are red and fleshy, her bosom tight in her floral overall. She looks up, sees Mallélou still staring at her and points to the closed sign.
    Mallélou stares and tries to make the right connections: this woman will put Xavier back inside; this woman has control over what happens; he’s here to alter these things; if he fails to alter these things, his son will despise him always.
    He turns the handle of the door and falls against it as it opens. Mme. Motte, quicker than a rat, comes darting to him waving her damp cloth and shouting. Mallélou sees her little puckered mouth, topped with a faint moustache, opening and closing and hears shrill sounds aimed at him. Something damp flicks his face and he feels his legs shudder. She’s pushing him now, trying to push him back into the freezing