The Swimming Pool Season (41 page)

Klaus wakes in Gervaise's bed. He can feel, is the weight of her deep sleep, her sadness. She was, in her heart and even sometimes in her head, the Maréchal's child. Her care of him was daily proof of her love. To her land, to her animals, to her sons, to the Maréchal, she was as steadfast as the seasons. Let no one and nothing else, thinks Klaus, desert her.

He gets up without waking her and goes out to the cows, lodging himself against their warm bodies to milk them. Christmas Day. In Heidelberg, his mother will be opening the present he sent her, a set of wicker canisters for the storing of angelica and peel and vanilla pod. And here, later in the day, they will sit, the three of them, Klaus, Gervaise and Mallélou, as they always sit round the Christmas table, decorated with ivy and paper roses, and eat rich goose, and the fumes of their heavy meal will waft upstairs and creep into the Maréchal's cold room under the door. Gervaise will be solemn and silent. Mallélou will drink to distance himself from the body above his head. He, Klaus, will note that with each year's passing, the greater seems to be this couple's need of him.

The milking done, Klaus comes slowly back down the lane. The sight of Larry's Granada in its blanket of snow makes him remember, for the first time that particular morning, all the afternoons of the building of the pool, with the light going, with Larry urging him on, with the mosaic slowly, inch by inch, taking shape. In his heavy snowboots, he crunches round past Larry's silent and shuttered house and stands some way from the swimming pool, looking with a perplexed smile at what remains of it – a shallow basin in the soft contours of the snow, an indentation. Gone, he thinks. Gone, as if it had never been.

Then he hears an insistent tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap and he throws his head back and looks up at the empty trees and the blue sky and sees, at the Maréchal's high window, Gervaise beckoning him in. He waves to her and turns towards the lane. The sun dances on his golden head. For a man his size, his tread is light.