Swimming Lessons Read online

“I know everyone thinks she drowned. That’s what the police and the journalists and everybody assumed. I found an old newspaper cutting once. The headline was something like ‘X-rated novelist’s wife drowns off Dorset beach.’ They didn’t even bother to name her; she was just a wife.”

  “She wasn’t a writer. It wouldn’t have even made the papers if she hadn’t been married to Gil Coleman.”

  Flora knew that her story, or rather, her mother’s story, trailed along behind her family like a second shadow, reminding the people who saw it to repeat what they knew to the people who didn’t. Once, when she was eleven, Flora had been choosing an ice cream in the village shop when she overheard a woman, a tourist, say to her husband, “Wasn’t it one of the beaches here where that Swedish girl drowned? Didn’t she put stones in her pockets or something, or am I getting muddled? You know, that famous author—or was it his wife?” Flora had lifted her head from the chest freezer and seen Mrs. Bankes, the shopkeeper, frown and shake her head. The husband had paid for the newspaper and hurried his wife away.

  Flora had wanted to shout “Norwegian!” after them, but instead she had licked the tips of her fingers and pressed her skin against the icy inside of the cabinet.

  “Are you going to ask your father who he thinks he saw in Hadleigh?” Richard said.

  “No.”

  “Really? Aren’t you curious?”

  “We don’t talk about that stuff. It’s not what we do.” She rubbed the tops of her arms with the towel.

  “Your father thinks he saw his dead wife, your mother, and you’re not going to ask him?” Richard was incredulous.

  “I told you, she’s not dead.” Flora’s voice rose. Ingrid turned again from the front door of the Swimming Pavilion, the towel over her arm, the dress showing off the pale skin of her neck and shoulders. Flora probed the memory like a tongue poking at a bloody gap left by an extracted tooth. When the skin healed over and the remaining teeth moved together to fill the hole, she was still aware of what was missing.

  “OK, OK.” Richard held his hands up, palms flat towards her, as if she were attacking him.

  “If you’re so interested, ask Daddy yourself. You seem to be very pally even though you’ve known him for all of two minutes.” Flora yanked her shirt over her head, her damp arms sticking in the sleeves. “Richard, remind me again why you’re still here?”

  “Gil asked me to stay. I like to think I might be able to help.”

  “With what, exactly?”

  Richard looked disconcerted. “With everything that’s going on.”

  “And what do you think is going on?” Flora rubbed her goose-pimpled legs with the towel and stared at the sea. The waves were getting bigger, cresting and foaming, slapping onto the beach and racing back. A mother called her child in from the water.

  “Flora, I know this is difficult for you—your dad’s . . .” he stopped. “All those memories of your mum that must be resurfacing—I know you haven’t had the easiest time, but why are you trying to push me away?” He put a hand on one of her chilly knees. “Why do you do that? Really, I only want to help you—all of you.”

  “Because we barely know each other,” she said, and shoved at him. A family sitting near them—a mother, father and two young girls—were eating sandwiches and staring. “What?” Flora shouted and the parents turned away, busying themselves with blowing sand off fallen grapes. When she looked at Richard again, he had slipped his feet into his shoes and was standing up.

  “I’m going back to the house.” He waited, then said, “I don’t think this is working.”

  She was aware of his Converse trainers, black with white laces, on the periphery of her vision.

  “See you later, then,” he said.

  She clenched her jaw. The shoes stayed a couple of seconds longer, and when she didn’t reply they disappeared from view.

  Chapter 22

  THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 12TH JUNE 1992, 4:30 AM

  Dear Gil,

  After our meetings with the dean, you insisted we drive back to the Swimming Pavilion. You checked that I was well, kissed my tight-stretched skin, and went to your room to write. I didn’t mind: I wanted you to finish your novel; we needed the money. I stood at the window and watched the light wink out in your room and thought you should get some rest—what was the point in both of us being awake? A period-like cramping pain came, low in my back, nothing I couldn’t cope with. It passed. Another arrived twenty minutes later when I was in the kitchen getting a glass of water; I bent over the sink and hummed with my teeth clamped together. It faded and I brewed a pot of tea, sitting at the table in the unlit kitchen to drink it, thinking how it was impossible and ridiculous that I had grown a human being inside me and soon it would arrive, fully formed, from my body. The next pain came as I stood up, so that I had to clutch at the back of a kitchen chair to stop myself from dropping to my knees. “Gil!” I called through gritted teeth. “Gil!”

  I used the toilet and returned to the bedroom, curling on my side under the covers and kicking them off when the pains gathered strength. I didn’t want to move; if I lay there for long enough they might go away. It was too soon to have a baby—I wasn’t ready, I wouldn’t ever be ready. But the bursts of pain made me arch, cry out, and struggle from the bed. A few minutes before six, when the sky was lightening and I was on all fours on the bathroom floor, my waters broke with a pop. I crawled along the hall too afraid to stand; if I stood, the baby would fall out of me. Still on my knees I opened the front door and sitting on my bottom levered myself down the three steps to the path. That was where you found me.

  “Why didn’t you shout?” you said. “Why didn’t you come and get me?” You helped me up, took me into the bedroom, put a nightie over my head. “Have you phoned anyone? Have your waters broken? Ingrid, we’re going to have a baby. He’s coming.”

  “I don’t want to do this,” I said before another contraction overtook me. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m meant to be travelling with Louise. I was meant to get a degree.”

  “You’re going to be an amazing mother. It’ll be wonderful. I know it.” You tried to prise my fingers from where they were clamped around your forearm, turning the skin white.

  “Don’t go,” I cried. “Please don’t go.” I was being dragged under again, tossed upside down and scraped along the bottom.

  “A minute, Ingrid,” you may have said. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  There was the sound of someone screaming and there was pain, and when I was dumped on dry land there was exhaustion.

  You held a bowl for me and pulled my hair out of my face while I sat on the edge of the bed and threw up. Your red hands smelled of soap. I wondered if you’d been a surgeon in a previous life.

  “Can you stand?” you said after you’d wiped my mouth. “We need to go now.” You had hold of my elbow, guiding me upwards, but the wave came again, a tsunami of pain that picked me up and tossed me. I must have climbed onto the bed, pressing my face into the pile of blankets and pillows at one end. “Ingrid,” I remember you saying before a groan, deep and guttural, escaped.

  “Fuck off,” I said into the pillows; then I was on my back, pushing and panting, and you were looking between my legs and smiling.

  “I can see him, Ingrid,” you said. “He has dark hair.”

  “She,” I said in between strains.

  “Whichever. It doesn’t matter. It’s here.”

  “I don’t know how to do this. I can’t do it!” I could hear myself shouting in panic, and with a searing red-hot pain the head was delivered.

  “Wait,” you said. “Breathe, she’s turning, she’s coming.” And with one final heave, the baby was out. You scooped her up, put her over your knee, and smacked her tiny blue bottom until she cried and pinkened. She was your colouring—dark hair, her skin brown next to mine. At some point while I was under or resting you’d fetched clean towels from the airing cupboard and a bowl of hot water. You wrapped her so only her face was showing. “We’ve
got a girl,” you said, kissing me, putting the baby in my arms, and wiping damp hair from my face. Our daughter was as plump and creased as a shar-pei. Her eyes were glassy and looked straight through us. “The first,” you said. And I laughed; I felt hysterical.

  The midwife arrived an hour later, bumping a wheeled tank of gas and air up the veranda steps. The placenta had been delivered, the cord cut, and you were holding Nanette in your arms.

  “My goodness, what a bed,” the midwife said, and then, “Looks like I wasn’t needed after all.” She sat on the edge of the mattress and took hold of my wrist. She was tall and thin, with the blue belt of her uniform pinching her waist.

  “Waspish,” you said later.

  A round white hat was stuck on the back of her head behind a severe middle parting. “I’ll need to carry out a quick examination,” she said, lifting up the sheet covering my legs. “Mr. Coleman, I’d be obliged if you’d leave the room.”

  I could see you were about to argue. “A cup of tea, Gil,” I said. “Please?”

  “And leave the baby with us,” she said.

  The midwife tutted as she examined me. “I always prefer it if my ladies are shaved before delivery,” she said. “It makes everything so much neater. Did you lose a lot of blood?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have plenty of pilchards and Guinness, just to be sure. Well, you’ll do. Legs together, please. Let’s have a look-see at baby now. You don’t have to breastfeed, you know.” She took Nanette from me, unwrapping her. “Lots of women are bottle-feeding these days. Formula’s got everything in it, and more.” She inspected the umbilical cord and seemed satisfied. Nan was weighed on portable scales, wrapped up again, and handed back.

  I felt nothing. I waited for the rush of love I knew was supposed to come, and I wondered what my mother had thought when she looked at me for the first time. A few days later, when I was still forgetting there was a baby in the next room and would only remember when the front of my dress became wet, I telephoned my aunt. She was delighted to hear she had a great-niece, said she would visit as soon as she was able, and, when I asked, she told me that my mother had loved me from the moment she saw me. I believed then—but didn’t say—that there had to be something wrong with me. My aunt never made it over from Norway; she died a week later.

  I woke a little while ago to see Flora sitting beside me in her nightie. The sun was up and there was dribble on my cheek where I’d laid my head on the table to close my eyes for a few moments; it seems my little sleep had become a couple of hours.

  “What are you doing?” Flora asked.

  “I’m writing,” I said.

  “But you’re not a writer. Daddy’s the writer.”

  I paused, thinking about all the things I could tell her. “Yes,” I said. “Daddy’s the writer. I just write letters.”

  “In your sleep?”

  “I was writing before I fell asleep.”

  “Who do you write letters to?”

  “Daddy.”

  “What do you put in them?”

  “All sorts of things.”

  “Do you write about me?”

  “I haven’t got to the bit where you were born.”

  “Does Daddy write back to you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he hasn’t read my letters yet.”

  “Why?”

  “They’ll be waiting for him when he gets home.”

  Flora huffed, as if the idea of writing anything was ridiculous and exhausting.

  “Why don’t you just talk to him?” she said.

  Why don’t I just talk to you? Because you aren’t here, because even if you were, you wouldn’t listen.

  Yours,

  Ingrid

  [Placed in Egon Schiele, by Alessandra Comini, 1976.]

  Chapter 23

  When Flora returned from the beach, Nan was on her knees wiping the kitchen floor, wringing a sopping cloth into a bucket. The chairs had been lifted to stand amongst the books on the table, and Richard was washing something under the tap.

  “What happened?” Flora said, standing in the doorway.

  Nan looked up, pushed her hair out of her face with the back of her wrist. “The washing machine leaked. Some kind of blockage.”

  “Found the culprit,” Richard said. He placed the little soldier on the counter beside Nan’s head.

  “How on earth did that get in the wash?” Nan stretched her neck to look at it.

  “It’s mine.” Flora stepped forwards and snatched it up. They stared at her. “I found it,” she said, “on the beach in Hadleigh,” and she backed away across the hall and into the bathroom. Behind Flora’s eyes, Ingrid turned from the Swimming Pavilion, the towel over her arm and a book in her hand.

  Through the gap in the door Flora heard Nan say, “For goodness’ sake,” her voice breaking.

  “Come on,” Richard said. “Up with you. Come on.” There was the sound of a chair being placed on the floor and Nan sniffing.

  “I can’t do it anymore,” Nan said. “I just can’t do it.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  Flora had to lean forwards to catch what Richard was saying.

  “If I don’t, then who will?” Nan said.

  “People will manage. You’re not Gil’s wife and you’re not Flora’s mother. These aren’t your roles, Nan.”

  “Things would fall apart if I wasn’t here.”

  “So let them,” Richard said, his voice calm and soft. “It’s time to start your own life.”

  Nan sobbed, a peculiar noise Flora couldn’t remember ever hearing before, although it was muffled as if Nan were holding her head in her hands. Suddenly the bathroom door was pushed open, knocking Flora backwards so she had to catch hold of the sink, just managing to keep upright. Richard stared at her and then tugged off a length of toilet roll and left, pulling the bathroom door shut behind him.

  Flora tore off her own piece of toilet paper, wet it, and, looking in the mirror, scrubbed at the smudged mascara under her eyes. She stripped off her wet bikini and put on Ingrid’s pink dress, which she had left hanging on the back of the door, and went into the kitchen.

  “I thought we could have dinner in the bedroom,” Nan said, as if nothing had happened. She glanced at what Flora was wearing and looked away without comment. “Then Dad won’t need to get out of bed.”

  Gil was sitting up again, this time in his pyjamas, a pillow on his lap ready for his plate. The skin on his face that had taken the impact of the fall was now like a plum at its peak of ripeness—stretched tight, as if with one touch it would split open. The other side was waxy and yellow. Nan had made a quiche Lorraine.

  “That was the dress I bought for your mother,” Gil said, reaching out a hand to touch it as Flora sat again on her mother’s side of the bed. “Years ago.”

  “I keep telling her to take it off,” Nan said.

  Gil rubbed the fabric between his fingers.

  “I’ve worn it before, Daddy. Loads of times.”

  He looked at her. “Have you? I never noticed.”

  Nan served the food, picking the cucumber and tomatoes out of the salad for Flora and leaving a space around them on her plate. She chopped up Gil’s food so he could eat it with a fork.

  “Martin said he would call in sometime,” Nan said. “See how you are.”

  “Surprised he has the time with his golf and that bloody dog.”

  “Martin has a dog?” Flora sat up. “What sort?”

  “Small and too yappy,” Gil said.

  “There’s a cupboard full of dog food in the kitchen,” Nan said.

  “I was thinking of getting one as well,” Gil replied. “A bloody big dog. I might call her Barbara—or no, wait, Shirley.” Gil laughed.

  “How about Charlotte?” Richard said.

  “Or Simone?” Flora said.

  “Carson?” Gil said.

  Nan rolled her eyes.

  “Harper?” Flora a
sked.

  “Yes, Harper. Definitely Harper,” Gil said, laughing.

  “But you don’t like dogs,” Nan said, watching Flora slice between the quiche’s egg mixture and the pastry.

  “You’re not really going to get one, are you?” Flora said.

  Gil leaned forwards to pat her hand, still laughing. “Sorry, Flo.”

  She scraped off the eggy filling and pushed the pastry to the side of her plate. She could sense Nan’s disapproval without having to look up.

  “So, you work in a bookshop,” Gil said to Richard. “Secondhand?”

  “New, I’m afraid. It’s just temporary, until something better comes along.”

  “What kind of temporary job lasts two years?” Flora said.

  “I am surprised,” Gil said. “My youngest daughter being courted by a bookseller. It’s not often we see her holding a book unless it has drawings in it. There was a time when Flo was a great reader.”

  “We’re not courting!” Flora snapped, and then under her breath, “It’s Nan you should be asking about that.”

  “Although I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for,” Richard said. “Teaching, perhaps. Or maybe I’ll do a bit of travelling first.”

  Flora stabbed a piece of cucumber with her fork.

  “A very good idea,” Gil said. “Don’t let yourself get sidetracked by relationships or having children.”

  “Daddy!” Flora said.

  Richard looked flustered, but Gil continued, “Give yourself some time to work it out. There’s no need to settle down too young. How old are you? Twenty-two, twenty-three?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Ah,” Gil said.

  Flora sliced through the cucumber flesh in one smooth motion.

  “I called the hospital about your book,” Nan said. “I spoke to someone in A&E and they put me through to the ward, and then I talked to someone in charge of ambulances and they suggested I call the lost property office. But when I rang again the woman on the switchboard said they didn’t have a lost property office. No book, I’m afraid.”

  “Perhaps it got left on the beach,” Flora said. She looked at Gil, whose eyes were watering. He blinked and the tears were sucked back in.