Swimming Lessons Read online

  “It’s for you,” he said to Flora.

  “Dad,” Nan said, exasperated.

  Flora frowned at her sister, shrugged, and stepped forwards to take the phone from him. She was nervous about holding the receiver up to her cheek, as if something dreadful might slide out of the earpiece.

  “It’s your mother,” Gil said. “She wrote and told me she would call.”

  “Oh, Dad,” Nan said, the exasperation gone and her voice now full of pity.

  But on his face Gil wore an expression of just-you-wait-and-see, and Flora’s stomach jolted with an excitement she couldn’t control. She hesitated, looked at Nan and her father, and lifted the phone to her ear. She heard a fuzz of white noise and then the multitoned dial sound. “There’s no one there,” she said.

  “Come on,” Nan said to Gil. “Let’s get you back to bed.” She shepherded their father, who went willingly now, saying to Flora over his shoulder as he left the room, “She must have hung up.”

  Flora moved some hardbacks and sat on the sofa. She dialled 1471 and listened to the recorded announcement: “You were called at five twenty-six. The caller withheld their number.” She returned the phone to its cradle and pulled her legs up to her chest although the night was warm. The piles of books surrounding her collapsed, hedging her in.

  The one time she could remember speaking to her mother on the telephone was when she had been made to stand in the school office a few days before Ingrid disappeared. Her headmistress—backcombed hair and tweed suit—had spoken to Ingrid first, explaining that Flora had been discovered standing on the side of the main road with her thumb out when she should have been in school. And that it was only luck that Mrs. May, who taught craft and home economics, happened to be passing, or who knows what would have happened. The headmistress passed the phone over and Ingrid’s voice buzzed with suppressed anger in Flora’s ear.

  “What were you thinking?”

  Flora shrugged although Ingrid couldn’t see her.

  “You could have been picked up by God knows who,” her mother said. “Abducted, disappeared, or worse.”

  Flora stretched out on the edge of the sofa, making a prop for her head from four books. She stared at the paperbacks squashed under the coffee table—The Pursuit of Love, Valerientje aan Zee, Room at the Top, The Cocktail Party—until the titles blurred and she heard Nan return.

  “Do you think that was Mum on the phone?” Flora said.

  “Of course it wasn’t Mum. He’s imagining things. There wasn’t anyone on the other end, was there?” Nan sighed, ran her fingers through her hair, and Flora saw streaks of grey at the temples. She tried to remember how old Nan was; her birthday had only been a couple of days ago. Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Too young to be going grey.

  Nan switched off the lamps in the sitting room. “You should come back to bed too,” she said. “We could all do with some rest.”

  When Nan left, Flora couldn’t resist picking up the handset and listening again. The dial tone murmured at her. She put the phone down and went over the conversation she’d had earlier with Richard and Nan, trying to work out if there was something she’d missed.

  Chapter 16

  THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 9TH JUNE 1992, 3:30 PM

  Dear Gil,

  Yesterday morning when we were having breakfast, Flora told Nan and me she didn’t go to school on Friday.

  “The school pool was closed,” she said. “So what was the point?”

  “To learn stuff?” Nan said, shaking her head.

  “I have to practise. I went to the sea and swam there.”

  “Flora,” I said, clenching my stomach muscles, and my throat. “You must go to school. And you mustn’t swim in the sea on your own. It’s too dangerous.”

  Flora picked up her spoon, sank it carefully into her bowl of cereal so it filled with chocolatey milk, and slurped like it was soup.

  “You do,” she said.

  After the party, we were on our own for almost a month: in bed with the windows open and the sound of the sea in our ears, sleeping, talking, eating toast, and making love amongst the crumbs. You liked to look at me when we’d finished; you would lie at the end of the bed with your head propped up and watch me while I fell asleep. It was too hot even for sheets but I wasn’t shy. You said everything was beautiful. Sometimes when I woke you’d drawn parts of me in the margins of your books. (Juvenile marginalia.) Everything was beautiful.

  Or we lay front to front, no space between us, our skin fused by sweat. “Promise you won’t die before me,” you said, your face pressed into my hair. “I couldn’t live without you.”

  “Don’t worry.” My lips were against your ear. “If I do, I’ll come back to haunt you. I’ll call you in the early morning; I’ll wake you from your bed and down the telephone wires I’ll tell you that I love you.” You laughed.

  When we got up, our bodies would be marked by the imprint of creased sheets and speckled with crumbs. We’d have a bath, me leaning back against your chest and you whispering, “Tell me what it is you want me to do. Anything.” I didn’t know what you meant the first time you said it. Afterwards we would lie in the grass in the garden like you’d said we would, surrounded by books and the hurrying of insects. It was still a field then, the old pasture for your mother’s long-dead horses; scrubby gorse bushes, clumps of deergrass, rowan, hawthorn and hazel grew on the southern edge above the chine, a nettle bed at the sea end.

  We picked up paperbacks and read to each other: a chapter from Barbara Comyns, a paragraph or two from As I Lay Dying, a line from Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  “‘What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist,’” I read aloud.

  You put your hand on my thigh, stopped me from going on. “That’s not true,” you said. “You existed for me before I’d ever set eyes on you. I knew I’d find you; it was only a matter of waiting.”

  “I don’t think that’s what Lawrence means, is it?” I lowered the book and stared at you over the top of my sunglasses.

  “It doesn’t matter,” you said. “It’s what I mean.”

  We took the phone off the hook, didn’t switch on the radio, and the newspapers piled up in the hall. If visitors arrived uninvited, you scared them away by shouting over the closed gate that we were quarantined because of smallpox. Once, remember, you made me stagger out of the house, dotted with lipsticked spots.

  We played your records, drank red wine, and danced in the sitting room until late. We took picnics to the beach, and when night came we made love in the sand dunes, and again you said, “Tell me what you want me to do,” and this time I knew what you meant but I’d nothing to tell you; all that I wanted I already had. We must have spent most of that time without clothes when we were indoors; do you remember me surprising the postman as he stood at the front door with a letter to be signed for? After I returned to bed I told you how his gaze had started on my face and slid downwards at the same rate as his eyebrows went up. You asked if I liked him looking.

  The envelope stayed where you’d dropped it, unopened on the floor, another document marking time with the rings of coffee cups. (Later I found burned pieces of it amongst the nettles, and it was years before I understood its significance.) I thought Jonathan had been wrong when he warned me about you, and I’d been right. Things would be different for us.

  You didn’t pick up a pen or go to your writing room for almost four weeks. The path that had snaked through what we optimistically called the lawn began to disappear as the grass sprang up, even while it yellowed in the sunshine. I wrote, though, to Louise in London to say I was staying with a friend on the south coast for the summer and not to worry, and to my aunt to say London was hot and I was working hard. I blocked October and the beginning of term from my mind.

  One day when we were lying out in the garden, my head in your lap, we heard an Irish voice.

  “I thought you were dead,” it said.

  Jonathan.

  You stood up, my head
dropping onto the ground with a bump, and I remember a stab of something like anger that the day had been interrupted by your friend. You opened the gate for him, and when I stood up the two of you were hugging.

  “Ingrid,” Jonathan said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Ingrid’s been teaching me how to live the Scandinavian life,” you said, turning towards me. “Did you know she’s half Norwegian? It’s been a smorgasbord of delights.” He slapped Jonathan on the shoulder. “How about a drink?” he said, leading his friend into the house.

  “It’s not a smorgasbord,” I said to no one. “The word is koldtbord.”

  That first evening you and Jonathan sat out late, drinking on the veranda. I couldn’t keep up with the whiskey intake and went to bed. The next morning when I walked past the spare room I saw the chest of drawers gaping and Jonathan’s suitcase open and empty on one of the beds, and I understood that our time alone together (yours and mine) was over.

  I tried to freeze Jonathan out, not speaking to him unless I had to answer a direct question, leaving the room when he came in, letting the two of you go to the beach without me, saying the sun was too harsh. I thought about packing up and returning to London.

  After a week there was one morning when you were gone from the bed, and when I pulled open the curtains the world outside had gone, too, hidden by the mist that had come up from the sea in the night. I opened one of the windows in the bedroom and heard the tapping of your typewriter, dulled and distant, and considered whether I might have misidentified my enemy—it wasn’t other women, or Jonathan, but your writing. Perhaps, I thought, during our month alone you’d been waiting for someone else to come and entertain me, to take me off your hands so you could go back to your room and the people in your head.

  I packed my belongings into a small blue case I found under the bed, not that I had many—some clothes you’d bought for me in Hadleigh, a sun hat, and a toothbrush. Outside, the mist obscured everything like the light in an overexposed Polaroid. I walked blind out of the drive and stumbled to where I thought the lane must be. The silence was a thick blanket, and even the normal morning crockery clinking and shouts from the kitchen staff in the pub were muffled as I passed. By the time I reached the bus stop on the main road, beads of water clung to my clothes and my hair.

  The headlights showed first and then the bus crawled out of the fog, pulling up a little way past me. The door opened and Mrs. Allen, the pub cleaner, got off. She looked at me, shivering in my summer dress and sandals.

  “Reckon this haar will blow over in an hour or two.” She gave my arm a pat. “Then the sun’ll come out, just you wait and see. Don’t you go running off so fast now.”

  “You getting on, young lady?” The driver was hanging out of the bus. “Only it’s a bit miggy with the door open.”

  And as I picked up my case, there were footsteps running up from the lane. Jonathan appeared out of the mist. “She’s not going,” he said, panting.

  “Did Gil tell you to come?” I said.

  “What do you take me for? He’s still typing. It’s me who wants you to stay.” Jonathan took the suitcase from me. “Come on, will you?”

  I looked at the driver, undecided.

  “You don’t get an offer like that every day,” he said, and disappeared inside his bus, the door closing behind him.

  As Jonathan and I walked through the lanes, we saw that Mrs. Allen was right: the sun glowed over our heads. By the time we reached the drive the sea mist had cleared, and I felt I was coming home.

  After that, Jonathan and I spent every day together, swimming and walking through the heath to Little Sea Pond. Post came for him sometimes, with writing commissions, and when he agreed to them there would be telephone calls a week later asking where his articles were. We went out in the morning before the holidaymakers, or in the dusk when our only company was the bats. Occasionally we persuaded you to come with us for a swim or a picnic, and of course you always emerged in the evening for the food I’d cooked and the whiskey Jonathan provided in payment for his board and lodgings. While we tramped across the heath and around the Agglestone, it was Jonathan who explained that you’d grown up in the big house down the road with your ill and controlling father and beautiful Catholic mother. You’d watched the disaster of their marriage, escaping to London as soon as you were old enough, and vowing that you wouldn’t make their mistakes. It was Jonathan who told me the real version of the story you’d given in that first creative-writing class: that your father didn’t tell you your mother was ill, instead he sent a telegram when it was too late. “Your mother’s died. Funeral Friday,” or some such thing. And he’d made you see her body, so changed in death that you found it difficult to remember what she’d looked like alive. He told me your mother left you a small amount of money in a trust fund, but how, when your father died of lung disease, there were debts so large the house had to be sold. The Swimming Pavilion was rolled on logs through the lanes of Spanish Green, and I like to imagine the men levering it along with giant poles, and cart horses pulling it, until it rested in its current position overlooking the sea.

  Once Jonathan went up to London and returned with people he’d picked up on his travels: hitchhikers with guitars and Dutch girls with dusty feet. Bums and hangers-on, you called them, but I knew you didn’t really mind. They camped in the grass, not bothering with tents, and I got used to seeing strangers in the kitchen spreading jam on dry Weetabix or sitting around the table like it was their home. I liked the house busy with people and music. There was an impromptu party that started in the pub, had a stop-off in the Swimming Pavilion, and ended at dawn around a campfire in the dunes. And there were one or two girls who I could have made friends with but after a couple of days they were gone. Even while these people slept in your garden, used your bathroom, and cooked in your kitchen you locked yourself away in your writing room. Sometimes you came out for the drinking and the food, and occasionally you came out to spend the night with me in the four-poster bed.

  Then, at the beginning of September, when the fog rolled in from the sea once more, I realised I was pregnant.

  Yours,

  Ingrid

  [Placed in Small Dreams of a Scorpion, by Spike Milligan, 1972.]

  Chapter 17

  When Flora got up she was surprised to see her father dressed and sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee and a plate smeared with egg in front of him. Two rashers of bacon lay on the edge, untouched. His left eye looked grotesque in the morning light, puffed and purple like a rotten aubergine. Another bruise spread out under his bottom lip and over his chin, which was stubbled with grey hairs. His left arm still rested in its sling. She was even more surprised to see Richard sitting in the chair opposite.

  “Morning,” Flora said, bending to kiss her father on the top of his head. Gil patted her cheek absent-mindedly. As she sat, Nan put a plate in front of her—a fried egg flipped once but with the yolk still soft, two slices of crisp bacon, and a piece of toast, each with their personal space intact. She tried to catch Richard’s eye so she could frown at him, but he was concentrating on Gil.

  “Take this, for example,” her father was saying. Gil tilted his chair to stretch for a slim volume from the top of a stack of books beside the cooker.

  “Careful, Dad.” Nan stopped squirting kitchen cleaner over the cleared surfaces and passed the book to him.

  Gil moved it backwards and forwards, squinting to try to focus. “God knows what I did with my glasses. I couldn’t find them in the bookshop either.” His hand stopped. “By the way,” he said to Nan, “did that book ever turn up, the one I was holding when I . . .” he paused “. . . fell?”

  “No one mentioned it,” Nan said. “I don’t remember seeing it in the hospital.”

  “Perhaps you could call them for me?”

  “About a lost book? Surely it’s not that important?”

  “Maybe Viv has it,” Flora said, in a way that made Nan glance at her. Flora raised he
r eyebrows, smiled, and gave her sister a private nod.

  “I’ll give the hospital a ring,” Nan said.

  Gil adjusted the book in front of his face again. “Rood-Lofts and Their Remnants in Our Churches Including Dorset by E. Z. Harris,” he read.

  Richard patted the papers on the table, moving books. A pair of glasses with black frames appeared from under the side of a plate. He picked them up, opened the arms, and Gil bent forwards so Richard could slip the glasses over the old man’s ears. The action was like a familiar habit, as if they had known each other for years. With her knife, Flora worked at freeing her egg yolk from its white without breaking it or having it touch the bacon. Gil let the book fall open at a page marked by a scrap of newspaper. Flora ate a piece of egg white with an edge of toast.

  “This writing was done by a woman,” Gil said, waving the pages.

  “How do you know?” Richard said, peering at it upside down.

  “Purple ink, for a start.”

  “Spending their pensions on brandy and summer gloves?” Richard said.

  “Setting a good example for the children.” Gil and Richard laughed together. “It’s women who underline and write words in the margins,” Gil continued. “Men doodle and scribble obscenities.” Gil handed the book over to Richard, who examined the writing, turning it sideways to decipher it. Now he had an attentive audience, Gil leaned backwards for another book.

  Nan topped up everyone’s coffee.

  “Thanks,” Richard said, and Flora saw that her sister was wearing an apron that had belonged to their mother and she had put on lipstick.

  “Oh, yes, thanks,” Flora said to Nan. Gil picked up his cup and drank, still looking at the book.

  “I can’t read it,” Richard said. “What’s this word?” He squinted.

  “Now this is wonderful,” Gil said. He pressed the book against his chest so he could open it one-handed, and Flora saw the cover: Queer Fish by E. G. Boulenger.