The Swimming Pool Season Read Free Page A

going on well. With love and blessings from your loving mother, Leni .
    P.S. Where is Thomas? I’ve forgotten where he is or what he’s doing? If he’s in England, please ask him to come and see me .
    Miriam reads this letter twice and tears gather quickly in her grey eyes and begin to fall. When Miriam cries, she cries copiously: “Look at Miriam’s tears!” Leni used to say delightedly. “They’re so round and perfect!” And Miriam can still feel the scented dabbing of Leni’s lawn handkerchiefs and hear her screechy laugh. Leni. Impossible to imagine you dying. Impossible. Miriam wipes her eyes with the sleeve of la robe. Get well, Leni. Get strong again. Don’t leave me. Don’t.
    But Miriam’s mind has already heard, in some hard and buried part of itself, this certainty: Leni is dying. She pushes away the orange juice, lays her arms on the table and weeps. Outside, she dimly hears the Granada start up and thinks for a moment of calling Larry back to comfort her, and tell her it isn’t so. Yet it is so. Miriam knows. She prefers to be alone with this knowledge and let it bow her.
    Gently, on her bed in the spacious old Oxford house, Miriam lays out her mother’s dead body. At her back, out of sight behind the door, students fuss and whisper, boys mostly, bringing flowers. Miriam selects a dark dress, thin with time, with clusters of sleek, soft feathers at each shoulder. The Crow Dress. A hat used to go with it: more feathers and a velvet-flecked veil. She finds this and lays it down while she touches the fine, fine contours of the face, eyes vast in their sockets, a nose like Napoleon’s in the Delacroix painting, angular and fierce. Leni Ackerman. So beautiful.
    At the waterfall, Larry turns left up the steep drive that leads to Harve’s house. There’s a mush of chestnut leaves on this track and the green husks of conkers. Autumn begins, then the winds come and it starts to feel like winter. Harve’s house is two centuries old, with a stone turret and brown, echoing cellars. He’s been alone in it but for a maid, Chantal, for years now. He’s fifty-one and a bachelor: Docteur Hervé Prière, known to Larry affectionately as “Harve”. He’s a slim and careful man with a proud forehead and slow exquisite speech. Larry loves him for this, his care with language. He was the first Frenchman Larry could understand.
    He’s in a room he calls the bureau with his straight, dry legs resting on a hard sofa. These legs are in plaster from heel to knee, the vulnerable imprisoned feet covered with woolly socks like egg cosies. His long hands flurry with a medical journal but he’s not reading it; the broken legs disturb and reproach him. Where will the next years lead him? To what precipice? He’s become so somnambulist. The night he broke his legs, he flew down the stairs.
    Chantal is away. Some dying parent or cousin in Paris. Poor old Harve slithers round the wood floors of his mansion on flat, sinewy buttocks, wearing a dark shine into his grey trousers. He prefers this slithering to walking with crutches, believes it’s quicker, doesn’t mind if he looks like a seal. And he says people in the village are kind: Nadia Poniatowski cooks him chicken with chestnuts; the de la Brosse widow lends him her maid to make his bed and do his washing. The practice is suffering, though. The young locum sitting in Hervé’s consulting chair is too shy of bodies; has let slip he’d rather be a vet.
    Larry parks the Granada on the gravel sweep. Harve’s home, in its high isolation, always impresses upon Larry the lowliness of his own house, its hopeless nearness to Gervaise’s south wall, the pretensions of its terrace. He feels diminished by Hervé’s turret, by his sundial, by the wistaria dressing the stone with mauve cascades. This is elegance. This is nobility and money and roots. Larry has begun to