Swimming Lessons Read online

  “You can still go. They say you meet more people if you travel alone. You can send me postcards—let me know what I’m missing.” I tried to laugh, but it came out strangled.

  “You’ve changed. It’s those baby hormones making you stupid. Bloody hell, Ingrid, just get rid of it. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. That man’s the one who should be ashamed.”

  “I’m not ashamed. I’m excited.” I didn’t sound it, even to myself.

  “You have no idea what it’ll be like, do you?” She sat beside me and took my hand, trying another tack. “You’re too young, Ingrid. Think what your aunt would say. Have you told her?”

  “Not yet.” I withdrew my hand from hers.

  She looked me up and down. “You’re not showing—well, the boobs maybe a bit. How far gone are you?” Her hand was on my knee. “We could go to the clinic together.”

  “I’m keeping it. This is what I’ve chosen, with Gil.”

  “What that man has chosen.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Think about what you’re giving up,” she said.

  “What do you mean? I won’t be giving anything up. I’m going to finish university.” It hadn’t occurred to me that I wouldn’t. I’d avoided thoughts about the birth or what life would be like afterwards. I’d been to the GP in Hadleigh, and then to an appointment at a London hospital where I was weighed and measured and examined by a doctor who didn’t bother to tell me his name. He’d given me a date when the baby was due, but it seemed so far in the future—like thinking about Christmas in April—that I couldn’t imagine it ever coming round. I’d been given leaflets on antenatal classes and weaning, but the sketchy drawings of grown-ups holding babies and smiling seemed to have nothing to do with me and I’d thrown them away.

  “When’s it due? April, May next year? Term won’t have finished and you’ll be enormous. Think what people will say.”

  “When did you ever care what people said?”

  “What will you live on?”

  “Gil has something in trust from his mother and some money from his novels . . .”

  “So you’re going to live on the money given to you by a man?”

  “. . . and there’s his teaching.”

  “His teaching!” She spat out the words. “He won’t be in that job for long when they find out.”

  “They won’t be bothered. They’ve seen it all before.” I pulled away from her and stood up.

  “It’s an abuse of power,” she said. “You’re his student. It’s disgusting.”

  “I love him,” I said again, angrily this time.

  “And you think he loves you? You think he hasn’t done this before?”

  “We’re getting married. I know he wants this—a family.”

  I sat again and we were both silent for several minutes. After a while I said, “I think I can smell the beans burning.”

  I wore the yellow crocheted dress to our wedding. Louise, however, arrived at Caxton Hall registry office on the 5th of October 1976 in a long white dress, high-necked, with lace sleeves. “Secondhand,” she said. “What do you think?” She twirled on the pavement. She wore it to annoy you and had no idea how much it hurt me.

  Inside, waiting in the lobby, Jonathan tried to defuse the atmosphere. “Diana Dors and Orson Welles got married here,” he said. You and Louise looked in opposite directions and I sat on the only chair. “Not to each other, of course.”

  “Actually,” Louise said to no one in particular, “this is where the suffragettes held their first meetings.”

  The registrar appeared, picking food out of her teeth and wiping her hand across her mouth. And it was you and Louise, in her mock wedding dress, that the woman greeted and ushered forwards to be married.

  In the end, of course, Louise was right: the university did find out and they did care. I never discovered who told them—perhaps it was Mrs. Carter, who’d seen that first kiss; perhaps it was Louise, so angry with me for deserting her that she didn’t think about the consequences. Whoever it was, on the 29th of April 1977, when the baby was nearly due, you received an invitation for a chat with the dean the next day.

  “It’ll be fine,” you said. “A slap on the wrist. ‘Just don’t do it again, Coleman,’ with a nudge and a wink. Really, nothing to worry about.”

  Neither of us wore our wedding rings on campus, and when I attended your classes we carried on as if we were still only lecturer and student. At the beginning of the autumn term, when I still wasn’t showing, Guy had invited me to his lodgings for a “bedroom shuffle” (as he called it), and I delighted in telling him that I was seeing someone else and watching his face fall.

  “Who is it?” he asked, and when I wouldn’t tell he pressed me further. “It’s someone I know, isn’t it? He’s married, isn’t he?”

  I knew there was gossip. Sometimes rumours went round like Chinese whispers: you were having an affair with the vice chancellor’s wife or his secretary; you were a homosexual; you’d been discovered with your pants down in your office. Up until Christmas the latter was nearly true; we just hadn’t been caught. The number of private tutorials I had that first term grew until I was being requested by you almost daily, but we never discussed my work. Instead, you asked me again and again to tell you what I wanted you to do, until I had to come up with something.

  “I want us to make love in your writing room,” I said, although I was perfectly happy with your office, the Swimming Pavilion’s bed, or the dunes. “I want to lie back on that velvet cover. It’s night and the window’s open.” I was beginning to enjoy myself. “We can hear the sea lapping at the sand. I want you to kneel between my legs and push my thighs apart.”

  “Only Professor Coleman is allowed in, miss,” the porter said, blocking my entry to the administration building with his suited bulk. He was more like a bouncer than a porter, and I reckoned if I couldn’t match him pound for pound, our waist measurements would be similar.

  “Mrs.,” I said.

  The man would look me only in the eye.

  You, Gil, placed your hand against my neck. “I’ll be fine,” you said. “What’s the worst that can happen?” You smiled a brave smile.

  Louise was standing behind me, and I knew she would have that concerned expression on her face—the one where her eyebrows met below her wrinkled forehead. That morning during a “chat,” she’d pulled the same face and said, “Someone has to be there for you. This isn’t all about Gil.” I’d told her I was perfectly capable of looking after myself, but she’d insisted.

  You pushed through the glass swing door into the university while Louise and I waited, leaning against the wall like schoolgirls skiving school. In front of us was that famous metal sculpture: tubes and beams crisscrossing each other and a circular plate resting at the end of a pole.

  “What do you think it’s meant to be?” Louise said, tilting her head.

  “The skeleton of an arthritic elephant,” I said.

  “A line drawing by a left-handed octopus.”

  “A climbing frame for rectangular children.”

  A porter had been posted sentry by the door, as if the dean were worried we might storm the building. (A pregnant girl and her skinny friend rushing past him and demanding that Professor Coleman be allowed to keep his job.) After a while, he went inside and came out with a chair. I was determined to refuse it, although I could feel the downwards pull and stretch of things inside me. But the man set it beside the door and sat on it himself, tilting it back, waiting for the show to begin. He stretched out his legs and rolled a cigarette, lighting it in the cup of his hand even though there was no wind, and smoking it with the lit end tucked under his fingers.

  You came out of the building smiling, with bravado, I suppose.

  “So,” I said when no one spoke. “What happened?”

  Louise read your face faster than I did. “Have you considered adoption, Ingrid?” she said with a laugh.

  “Just shut up,” you said. “I’m not even
sure why you’re here.”

  “I’m here to look after Ingrid’s best interests.” She folded her arms across her chest.

  “Stop bickering,” I said, “and tell me what happened.”

  “Listen.” You took me by the elbow as if to lead me away. “Fuck Louise, fuck the dean. In fact, fuck the lot of them.” You put your arm around me. “My next book will sell. I know it.”

  I stepped away. “But surely you apologised.”

  “It’s a bit late for that.”

  “They can’t throw you out. Don’t you have tenure or something?”

  “They haven’t thrown him out,” Louise said, still leaning against the wall. “I think he’s saying he’s resigned.”

  “Not exactly,” you said.

  “Why?” The muscles of my stomach contracted and hardened painlessly. Braxton Hicks contractions, you told me later. “Why would you do that?”

  “I wasn’t really given an option. The dean blabbered on about avoiding a scandal in the papers and an imminent visit by the university funding committee, blah, blah, blah.”

  “Perhaps he’s behind on the payments for his modern art collection,” Louise said.

  “But you can get another job, can’t you?” My hand was on my stomach, as hard as a rock. “At a different university.”

  “I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of letting him recommend me. He can fuck his job and any other up his arse.”

  The porter dragged on his cigarette, listening and watching, a smirk on his face.

  “No, Gil, tell me you didn’t.”

  “Come on,” you said, taking my arm again. “It’ll be fine.”

  “I’m going to speak to him,” I said, pulling away. “You need that job—we need that job.”

  The porter jumped up as I approached and threw his cigarette on the ground to open the door for me. He gave a little nod of the head as I passed, perhaps with some respect for the angry pregnant woman.

  I walked straight past the dean’s secretary sitting behind her desk. Despite my size I was too quick for her, and I was in the dean’s office before she’d even stood up.

  He was older than I’d expected. I’d seen him from a distance of course, from the high seats at the rear of the main lecture theatre when he gave us a five-minute pep talk at the beginning of each year about not letting the university down, or our parents, or, most important of all, ourselves.

  “Miss Torgensen,” he said, as if it were he who’d requested a meeting. “Please, take a seat.” He indicated the chair in front of the desk he was sitting at. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew my name.

  “I’d rather stand, thank you,” I said, although my knees were shaking.

  “May I offer my congratulations on your expected arrival?” He nodded at my bump. “When is the little bundle of joy, as they say, due to arrive?”

  “The week after next,” I said.

  I was pleased to see a brief expression of shock pass across his face before he composed himself. “My goodness.” He came around to hold out the chair. “Then please do sit. I wouldn’t want anything to start in my office.”

  I remained standing, and he let go of the chair and went back to his own.

  “Have you thought of a name yet?” The dean was all smiles.

  Do you remember, Gil, our weekends by the sea when I was so pregnant I couldn’t move? You would stuff me into the car in London on a Friday afternoon and drive south, your hand on my stomach whenever you weren’t changing gear. At the Swimming Pavilion I undressed and collapsed on the bed. My skin was stretched tight over my belly, which you said sat like a white beach ball caught in the branches of an aspen. My tummy button popped out and I developed the faintest linea nigra (as you told me it was called)—the ghost of a ginger line—as if you could have peeled me open to reveal six babies packed together in segments. My areolae darkened to salmon pink and enlarged as my breasts swelled. You said the new constellations scattered over my nipples were called Montgomeries, and I didn’t question how you knew all the words. You crouched between my knees, pressing your lips up against my distended stomach, whispering to our unborn child, telling it stories about sea horses, cuttlefish bones, and the tangled nets of fishermen. Or you opened my legs to gaze at me, exclaim at the width of my boyish hips, and wonder how our baby would make it into the world through that narrow passage. When I tried to pull you up and into me, you said it wouldn’t be right now I was almost a mother. You wanted to look but you no longer touched. Instead you lay beside me, reciting names to see which one would stick: Fyodor, Saul, Wallace. Don’t you know any female writers apart from Shirley Jackson?

  “We haven’t decided,” I said to the dean. I knew what he was trying to do. “I want to talk to you about Professor Coleman’s job,” I said.

  “I’m afraid I can’t discuss the personal information of an employee of the university. That’s private.”

  “He’s my husband.”

  “So he told me.” The dean straightened the blotter in front of him. “The information about his employment is still confidential.”

  “But we need that job.”

  “Perhaps something he should have considered earlier.” The dean looked at my stomach. “Actually, Miss Torgensen,” he said pointedly, “it’s rather useful that you’ve come to see me now.”

  “So you’ll reconsider?”

  The dean put his head on one side and frowned. “No, no; it’s your own position I’d like to discuss. I was hoping to invite you in for a chat next week, but since you’re here . . . Are you sure you wouldn’t like a seat?”

  My belly tightened again and I shook my head.

  “It’s a question of standards, you see. I’m sure you understand that the university has a reputation to uphold. You might think we can turn a blind eye to relationships between professors and students, but I’m afraid that isn’t the case. It’s a matter of trust. Expectations are changing . . .” The dean continued, his voice a monotone. I swayed on my feet, his words coming back into focus when he said, “I’ve already had a word with the head of English and he’s happy for you to take some time off from the university, get some rest, or whatever it is mothers do.”

  “But my finals start next week,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t worry about those. No, no. I suggest you go home and look after your husband and your baby. That’s where your place is now.”

  “My place is here. I want . . . I need to finish my degree.”

  The dean pushed his chair back from under his desk and smiled. “Perhaps something you also should have considered earlier.” He stood, his arm extended as if herding me out. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve another appointment.”

  I turned and left, marching past his secretary and slamming the door behind me.

  And that was the end of my education, in the dean’s office, one week before I would have finished anyway.

  Yours,

  Ingrid

  [Placed in Advice to a Wife: On the Management of Her Own Health, and on the Treatment of the Complaints Incidental to Pregnancy, Labour and Suckling, by Pye Henry Chavasse, 1913 edition.]

  Chapter 21

  In the afternoon, when they returned from collecting Gil’s car, Flora took Richard down to the beach. A breeze was blowing in from the sea, a tang of military-green weed and things half-buried. A group of gulls circled the up-currents, banking and turning, waiting for something. She’d found a pair of old swimming trunks in the airing cupboard but Richard had refused them. He sat on his towel, running the fine dry sand through his fingers. Flora pulled her shirt over her head; she was wearing a bikini underneath. Goose pimples rose across her legs and arms.

  “Are you coming in?” she said.

  “With a skeleton inked on me? That’d get your neighbours talking.”

  She’d forgotten about the drawing. Flora went to the water and was in up to her thighs before she turned to look back. Richard had come to the edge, his jeans rolled up, his feet lappe
d by waves.

  “It’s freezing,” he called.

  “Don’t be such a baby.” She took a lungful of breath and launched herself out. Like always, the coldness of the water shocked her, but within two strokes or three, the rest of the world was forgotten and she was transformed from a person who breathed air to a thing of the sea, an underwater creature—everything was the smooth action of bone, muscle, and moving forwards. Flora opened her eyes. The water was the colour of mint tea, and sometimes if she listened hard enough, her mother’s voice sounded amidst the swish of the weed and the tumble of the sand, telling her to straighten her legs, to keep her lead hand in motion, to swim against the current so that it was always easy to return, even when tired. She dived to where the waves churned the bottom, aware of her arms and thighs, the bubble of air she held inside her. She touched the seabed and surfaced with a fistful of sand: a good-luck charm. When she glanced towards the beach, Richard was still standing, watching for her. Flora turned away and moved into a front crawl, her arms slicing through the water, her hips, shoulders, and head rotating as she lifted her mouth above the chop. She glanced up at the buoy in the distance, her usual sight, and swam straight for it. The swell tossed her but she found its rhythm, breathing in the dips, pushing through the waves. She kept her head low so her bottom and legs rose, and let her body work with the water’s flow. When the tips of her outstretched fingers touched the buoy, she pulled up her legs, flipped, and pushed off with the balls of her feet, hearing the heavy underwater yaw and slap, and headed back to the beach.

  When she was within her depth, Flora stood and waded. Richard was on his towel again.

  “Impressive,” he said.

  “Mum taught me how to swim.” She flopped down beside him, chest heaving. “It was about the only thing we could do together without arguing.” She wrung out her hair and wrapped her towel around her.

  “Was she a good swimmer too?”

  “Very. She could go a long way beyond the buoy. It’s farther than it looks.”

  “I’m sure.”