Elementals - A. S. Byatt [22]
His brain hurt, and his eyes stared, and he felt whipped by winds and dried by suns.
He was happy, in one of the ways human beings have found in which to be happy.
One day he got up as usual and as usual flung himself naked into the water to watch the dawn in the sky and the blue come out of the black and grey in the water.
There was a hissing in his ears, and a stench in his nostrils, perhaps a sulphurous stench, he was not sure; his eyes were sharp but his profession, with spirits and turpentine, had dulled his nostrils. As he moved through the sluggish surface he stirred up bubbles, which broke, foamed, frothed and crusted. He began to leave a trail of white, which reminded him of polluted rivers, of the waste-pipes of tanneries, of deserted mines. He came out rapidly and showered. He sent a fax to the Jardinerie Émeraude. What was Paradise is become the Infernal Pit. Where once I smelled lavender and salt, now I have a mephitic stench. What have you done to my water? Undo it, undo it. I cannot coexist with these exhalations. His French was more florid than his English. I am polluted, my work is polluted, I cannot go on. How could the two young men be brought to recognise the extent of the insult? He paced the terrace like an angry panther. The sickly smell crept like marsh-grass over the flower-pots, through the lavender bushes. An emerald-green van drew up, with a painted swimming-pool and a painted palm tree. Every time he saw the van, he was pleased and irritated that this commercial emerald-and-blue had found an exact balance for the difficult aquamarine without admitting any difficulty.
The young men ran along the edge of the pool, peering in, their muscular legs brown under their shorts, their plimsolls padding. The sun came up over the green hill and showed the plague-stricken water-skin, ashy and suppurating. It is all OK, said the young men, this is a product we put in to fight algae, not because you have algae, M. Bernard, but in case algae might appear, as a precaution. It will all be exhaled in a week or two, the mousse will go, the water will clear.
‘Empty the pool,’ said Bernard. ‘Now. Empty it now. I will not co-exist for two weeks with this vapour. Give me back my clean salty water. This water is my life-work. Empty it now.’
‘It will takes days to fill,’ said one young man, with a French acceptance of Bernard’s desperation. ‘Also there is the question of the allocation of water, of how much you are permitted to take.’
‘We could fetch it up from the river,’ said the other. In French this is literally, we could draw it in the river, puiser dans le ruisseau, like fishing. ‘It will be cold, ice-cold from the Source, up the mountain,’ said the Émeraude young men.
‘Do it,’ said Bernard. ‘Fill it from the river. I am an Englishman, I swim in the North Sea, I like cold water. Do it. Now.’
The young men ran up and down. They turned huge taps in the grey plastic pipes that debouched in the side of the mountain. The swimming-pool soughed and sighed and began, still sighing, to sink, whilst down below, on the hillside, a frothing flood spread and laughed and pranced and curled and divided and swept into the river. Bernard stalked behind the young men, admonishing them. ‘Look at that froth. We are polluting the river.’
‘It is only two litres. It is perfectly safe. Everyone has it in his pool, M. Bernard. It is tried and tested, it is a product for purifying water.’ It is only you, his pleasant voice implied, who is pigheaded