The Swimming Pool Season by Rose Tremain Page A

street, but he holds fast to the door, leans all his weight on his arm on the handle and knows that his legs are going, bending, collapsing. He breathes, tries to straighten himself, but the air he breathes is suffocating and hot like the air of a greenhouse. Waves of nausea come. He swims in them, swaying, toppling. At his feet a pattering of lino sends brown and orange whorls into his brain and he follows these down, down, like a dead body chucked in a well and falling miles and miles into darkness.
    Waiting by the scaffolding, tiredness robbing his body of its feeble resistance to the rain and cold, Xavier paces and stamps. Light from the restaurant still floods the pavement and he knows Mallélou is in, but he can hear nothing. He expected shouting and the sound of things being broken. He wants a table to come flying through the glass.
    He decides to cross the street, to go nearer. He can’t wait here all night. He’ll die of cold and exhaustion. He remembers an American film where two cops gobble flabby pizza in the street while two rich villains eat lunch in a warm restaurant far into the winter afternoon. He liked this scene. Life is like that, he thought. Unfair. The rich guys ride around in the Cadillacs. They know there are these millions of other guys getting cold in bus queues and this is part of their pleasure. One day, he will be in a Cadillac. One day he will be in the warm, plushy restaurant.
    Xavier doesn’t cross the street because a police car comes hurtling down it, blue light turning but no siren going. It pulls up in front of the Mimosas and two policemen get out, unhurriedly, and wander in. Xavier presses himself back into the shadows. A red sign slung on the scaffolding says DANGER. TRAVAUX . He waits. The rain eases off. Bits of paper and leaves gust round him in the wind. He’s dying to go back to his room, to see his own things, to light his gas fire, to smell his own pillow, to sleep. His mind barely questions what is happening when he sees the two policemen come out again carrying the inert body of his father and then hurling it like a sack of vegetables into the back of the car. He thinks merely, well, it’s over for now, sees the restaurant sign go out and the car drive off, and walks quickly away in the direction of his lodgings.
    October comes. Larry buys a map of the St. Front basilica. He makes drawings of the ground plan, trying to simplify it and make a shape that fits his vision of his new pool. When he’s satisfied with the shape, he cuts a template of it out of some hardboard he finds in Miriam’s studio, then calculates the measurements of this to square with a basic 36′ by 18′ dimension. He feels excited. He goes out and stands by the walnut tree. Through its thinning leaves comes a lovely dappled light. Larry regrets the need to cut it down but decides that he must do this now, straight away, before Miriam returns. A tug of love over a tree strikes him as unnecessarily stupid.
    Larry then gets out from the dusty attic his Aquazure Pool Definition Kit. This consists of a long coil of blue nylon rope, a bunch of sharp wooden pegs and a forty-foot flexible measure. With these ordinary tools Larry “defines”, on empty lawns, on unsightly briar patches, the shape of the miracle to come. He measures off each angle and inserts a peg till the basic shape is stitched out in pegs. Then he ties the blue nylon rope to one of these and winds it on right round all the pegs, thus “defining” the pool. At this point, prospective pool buyers tend to pace round the blue lines, talking to each other: “Gosh, you get the impression now don’t you, Jessica?” “Golly, I’m dying to see Emma’s face when we tell her, Edward.” Larry smiles, remembering these long-ago small excitements and sets to work in the sunshine, hammering pegs into the flinty earth.
    Klaus, whose English is non-existent, stares solemnly at this