Swimming Lessons Page 14

  “I’ll check with Viv,” Nan said. “Maybe someone handed it in at the bookshop. But you’ve got plenty to be going on with here, haven’t you?” Her voice had taken on that singsong tone again of patronising encouragement.

  “If I don’t go soon, this house will be more paper than wood.”

  “Daddy.” Flora said, “Don’t say that.”

  “What?”

  “About going soon.” She put her knife and fork on top of her pastry—a child’s trick of hiding the food she didn’t want to eat.

  “In fact,” Gil said, glancing between Nan and Flora, “there’s something I’ve been talking to Richard about.”

  Richard shuffled on his seat, looked down.

  “I’ve asked him to burn the books.”

  Nan’s head jerked, a mouthful of food in her cheek.

  “After I’m dead,” Gil said. “Whenever that may be.” He smiled at Flora.

  Nan swallowed. “Which books? What do you mean?”

  “All the books in the house,” Gil said.

  “And you’ve agreed?” Flora said to Richard accusingly. He didn’t answer.

  “You girls aren’t interested in them,” Gil said. “The collection has got out of hand. I know it’s something your mother would have wanted.”

  “Mum! How do you know what Mum wants?” Flora kneeled up on the bed, her plate tipping, the quiche crust sliding off.

  “But I thought you loved them,” Nan said.

  “Why don’t you sell them back to Viv?” Flora shifted on the bed, unaware that her knee was resting on the pastry. “Or give them to her? Viv would take them, wouldn’t she, Nan?”

  Gil put his hand on Flora’s arm and she sat.

  “You’re sure?” Nan said.

  “Absolutely fucking sure.” Gil put his fork on top of his uneaten dinner.

  Chapter 24

  THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 13TH JUNE 1992, 3:32 AM

  Dear Gil,

  Jonathan warned me not to go into your writing room because I might find things I wouldn’t like. When I raised my eyebrows, he said, “You know, scrappy bits of paper with bad words written on them, screwed-up pages with everything crossed out, first drafts. Apparently first drafts are always ugly.” We laughed. We were walking over the heath that first summer, the gorse flowers fading to a paper-yellow, the smell of coconut disappearing on the wind that blew in from the sea. Jonathan said you needed to keep your room separate from the house and the people who visited. It was a place for serious writing and thinking.

  Once, when I was newly pregnant with Nan, I woke in the night without you beside me. I went outside and looked through the window in the door of your room and saw you resting your head on top of your typewriter. I tapped on the pane but you didn’t move. I wasn’t sure if you were asleep. In the morning you were back beside me, and you pulled me to you and made me promise that if you were ever missing from our bed I mustn’t come to find you. I laughed and you said, “I’m deadly serious, Ingrid. Everyone needs a place to escape to, even if it’s only inside their head.”

  “I’ll promise,” I said, “if you promise me the same.”

  We were lying face-to-face, separated only by the paisley curl of our baby inside me. Awkwardly, you held out your right hand and we shook on it. Do you remember?

  And there was the time, years later—in the middle of the argument where the teapot got smashed—when you shouted that I wasn’t allowed in your room because I was too fucking nosy and asked too many fucking questions. “How’s it going? How many words today? Thought of a title yet?” And you accused me of reading your pages when you were out, of snooping and checking up on you, of dripping my wet hair onto your words when they were still spooling out from your typewriter. It was fucking inhibiting, you said, and the reason you stayed in your writing room was no longer to write but because you needed to fucking protect your intellectual property.

  But the reason I wasn’t allowed in there wasn’t any of these, was it, Gil?

  4th August 1977: The first time since Nan had been born that I’d gone farther than Spanish Green’s village shop. I’d saved the money for the bus and the train fare a few pence at a time from the housekeeping you gave me, hiding it away in an empty custard powder box. I took Nan (three months and four days old) in the Silver Cross pram, and I was more proud of that baby carriage than I was of the baby. I’d bought it mail order with the little bit of money my aunt had left me. It was a shiny black boat on high white wheels. There was a satisfying pop when I pressed the cover in place, a firm click when the arm mechanism of the hood was locked, and a small bounce from the suspension when I walked. I put lipstick and mascara on for the first time in five months; my back was straight and my head up. I wore my platform sandals, a pair of flared patterned trousers with a comfortable elasticized waist, and a 1940s blouse with a floppy bow at the neck, which I’d found at the village hall jumble sale. I was ready for London. I pushed the pram down the road to the bus stop and let Mrs. Allen coo over the baby, tell me how glamorous I looked, and ask whether I was off somewhere exciting.

  “To see my best friend, Louise,” I said.

  The bus driver helped me on with the pram and the other passengers smiled and didn’t mind that we were blocking the aisle. At the train station, I stood on the platform as the 9:37 came in, and realised, with the same feeling as if I’d turned up a day late for a school exam, that the pram wouldn’t fit through the carriage door. I contemplated leaving it and Nan on the platform and stepping onto the train without her, but Nan and I, and the Silver Cross, spent the two-hour journey bumping around in the guard’s van amongst the bicycles, guitar cases, and oversized boxes. As the train pulled out of the station, Nan began to cry. I jogged the pram, pushed it to and fro, and picked her up. She cried harder—her eyes crimped shut, face red, and mouth open. She was normally a good baby, contented. Through Winchester and Basingstoke I paced up and down the dirty swaying van, moving her from one shoulder to the other, patting and stroking. She didn’t stop wailing. At Woking I changed her nappy and at Clapham Junction, in front of a group of Boy Scouts with bikes, I undid my blouse and hefted one of my enormous breasts out from my bra. I saw it anew—a huge white udder, larger than Nan’s head. She was having none of it, she carried on crying, her little body tensed and her head thrown back. The boys stared at me as I cried with her, wiping under my eyes, my fingers black with smudged mascara. When the train pulled into Waterloo, we were both sobbing.

  Louise met me on the platform. Her hair had been set and she wore a camel-coloured suit, buttons up the front of the jacket, high heels. Her eyebrows had been plucked and her bosoms were tiny.

  “My God, Ingrid,” she said, gawking at me, hair bouncing. “What the bloody hell happened?”

  “I’ve had a baby, that’s what!” I shouted at her, rocking the pram and making Nan bawl louder.

  “I can see that.” She glanced inside and with a sharp “Come on, then,” strode off. I followed on behind, looking sadly at her neat bottom in her fitted skirt.

  She’d kept the flat after I left, and when we’d negotiated the Underground, the narrow street door, and the stairs up to the third floor, Nan was still crying. The smell, the light, and the furniture were the same, and a wave of nostalgia washed over me for the life I could have had. I didn’t let it show. Louise had thrown a patterned cloth over the sofa, a new rug was hiding the ripped lino, and she’d put a vase of flowers in the centre of the table. She lit a cigarette.

  “I thought we could go out for lunch,” she said over the noise of Nan mewling. “I reserved a table at Chez Alain.”

  I took my hand from inside my blouse and stared at her.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, smiling. “My treat.”

  “With the baby?”

  “I’ve got a job—research assistant at the House of Commons. I started last month. It’s amazing.” She took a lipstick out of her handbag and applied it, looking in the mirror over the gas fire.

  “But I though
t you were going travelling.” I lifted my breast out of my bra and latched Nan’s whimpering mouth onto my leaking nipple, and finally her noise changed to wet sucking.

  “This opportunity came up and it was too good to miss.” Louise’s voice distorted as she stretched her lips. There was a tightness in my chest at the memory of the rebuke she’d given me when I’d gone back on our plans. “I bet you haven’t been to a restaurant in weeks,” she said. “It’ll do you good.” Her reflection in the mirror held the lipstick out to me. I shook my head.

  “I don’t know. It depends if Nan falls asleep,” I said.

  Louise smacked her lips together. “If she doesn’t, we can stick her in the bedroom; she won’t disturb the neighbours there.” She sat at the little square table where we used to eat our bean and potato stews and tapped her cigarette against an ashtray.

  “I can’t leave her here on her own.”

  She paused and said, “No, silly me, of course not. We’ll take her with us. Come on.”

  With Nan asleep, we renegotiated the stairs and walked to Chez Alain, bumping the Silver Cross up the steps.

  “Madam,” the French maître d’ said before we were even inside, “we don’t allow children in the restaurant.”

  “But I’ve reserved a table,” Louise said.

  “I’m sorry.” He didn’t look apologetic. “It will disturb our diners.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I have a reservation and I would like some lunch.”

  Nan was grizzling. I shook the pram and she began to cry. I could feel the sweet sting of my let-down reflex and the milk beginning to flow. The man shrugged, already turning away.

  Louise and I sat on the bench in St. George’s Gardens, where I’d read your books only fourteen months previously. (How could so much have changed?) She tore into the pork pie we’d bought from Levitt’s. I shifted away, embarrassed to be feeding Nan in public, bending forwards, trying to release my breast and at the same time fit Nan’s head under my blouse.

  “For God’s sake, Ingrid,” Louise said, her mouth crammed with pastry and pork. “Just get it out. What does it matter if anyone sees? You never used to be such a prude.”

  I could feel those old tears stinging my eyes. It took two hands to get Nan latched on. “Tell me about your job,” I said.

  She told me how she’d seen Barbara Castle’s back as the MP walked along a corridor in the House of Commons, and how when Parliament reconvened after the summer she was going to find the courage to introduce herself. Louise was excited, full of life and London. She held the pork pie up to my mouth so I could eat and keep Nan in place. I lunged and took a bite, fatty pastry spilling over my lips. Louise poked a piece back into my mouth with her finger and we smiled, and I was dismayed to feel my eyes watering again.

  “So, motherhood isn’t all you thought it’d be?” she said, finishing the pie, sucking the grease from her fingers.

  “I’m loving it. It’s wonderful.” I swiped my cheek against my shoulder. She wanted to say I told you so, and I wasn’t going to let her.

  “And your husband? He’s wonderful too, I suppose?”

  “Yes, of course. He adores Nan. He’s writing every day; his next novel will be finished soon.”

  “And life in the sticks?” She snorted.

  “You have no idea what my life is like, Louise, so how can you judge it?” I raised my voice and Nan twitched. She had come off my nipple and fallen asleep but I didn’t want to risk waking her again.

  “I can imagine.” Louise crossed her legs—in tan tights although it was summer—and folded her arms. “You’re unhappy, you regret what you’ve done, but now you’re stuck. You didn’t get your degree and you’re financially dependent on a man. You have a baby but no money and nowhere to go. You live in the back of beyond and you have nothing to fill your time or your mind except nappies and breastfeeding.”

  I shook my head, starting to interrupt, but Louise hadn’t finished: “Your husband spends his time working on some fiction you don’t believe will sell. When the baby pops off the boob, you cry yourself to sleep and then get up the next day and do the whole thing again.”

  “How dare you!” I stood up and hefted Nan to my shoulder, feeling a trickle of milk run down my stomach under my blouse. “You know nothing about what it’s like to be a wife and mother. Nothing.”

  “And I don’t want to,” Louise said. And then more calmly, “I can help you.” She put her hand on my arm. “If you want to leave him, I could help now, with the money.”

  I pulled away from her. “I don’t think so.” I put Nan in the pram, not bothering to tuck her in. She’d had enough food and was floppy with sleep.

  “Just think about it.” Louise stood up too.

  “I have to go.” I released the pram’s brake. “Thank you for . . .” I was unsure. “The pork pie,” I said, and wheeled Nan out of the park.

  I spent half an hour in the ladies toilet at the railway station, sitting in a cubicle to compose myself before the train came. I had to keep the door ajar to make sure no one walked off with that damned pram. The station was crowded with youths with spiky hair and rings in their noses, and girls in jeans so tight the fabric might have been sprayed on. No one in London was wearing patterned flares or platform shoes. The punks lounged over the public benches, smoking, pushing each other, and laughing. When I walked past one of the girls, her eyes rimmed in black and her face pasty, she opened her mouth and stuck out her thick pink tongue, curling it over her bottom lip to touch her chin. I realised she was about twenty-one, the same age as I was.

  I tried to call you from a phone box outside the station, parking the pram up against the grimy windows so I could see the baby and terrified of the trouble I’d be in if someone were to run off with her. London was too crowded, too noisy, too dirty; it scared me.

  It was dark when I got off the bus beside the village shop. Nan had slept all the way in the guard’s van, on the ferry, and on the bus while I dozed. The smell of the sea, the pitch-blackness, and the beautiful silence after the bus had pulled away all made me determined to prove Louise wrong. I would try harder to be happy. I was home. Nan and I took a detour through the car park to the edge of the beach so I could hear the sea shushing against the sand and farther away a hollow gulping as the water bumped against rock. I would have liked to walk along the beach and up the chine, but not even a Silver Cross could have coped with sand.

  Your car was on the drive and there was a light on in the house when I arrived home. I pulled the pram backwards up the three steps and parked it, with Nan still inside, at the end of the veranda. The front door was unlocked and, when I opened it, music was coming from the sitting room, where a light shone.

  “Hello!” I called out. “We’re home!” The music finished and there was the fuzz and click from the end of an album. I pushed the door open—the room was empty. I lifted the needle and stopped the turntable. The lights were off in the bedroom, but when I put my head in the door I saw that the bedcovers were still untidy from where I’d left them unmade that morning. I went up the hall. I don’t know why I felt the need to check everywhere, but I looked in the spare room, now the nursery. Nothing had changed. I stood in the kitchen doorway. No one was there either, but the air smelled of hot oil and old food. The silence in the house was thick, and it felt like there was somewhere else I hadn’t looked.

  When I’d first arrived at the Swimming Pavilion, you and everyone else in the village didn’t lock their doors. But when the holiday park was built, with its prefabricated chalets and offer of cheap holidays by the coast, the permanent residents of Spanish Green began to use their keys at night. I knew you wouldn’t have left our front door open without good reason.

  I’d walked into the hall and was facing the bathroom, also empty, when I heard the noise: similar but lower in tone to the cry of a young seagull; the sound of an animal, made every minute or so—repetitive, insistent. I listened. It was coming from outside the house. I returned to the veranda where t
he sound was louder. I checked on the sleeping Nan and stepped into the garden. There was a light on in your writing room, and I followed the cry along the path of bent grass. I thought a bird must have flown in and become trapped. I took two steps up to look through the window. The paraffin lamp was burning, casting a yellow light across your writing table and a small patch of floor, leaving the rest of the space in shadow. I pressed my nose to the glass.

  It took me a while to make sense of the shapes: at the end of the room I saw you, kneeling on the floor in front of the bed, your spine curving away from me so I could see your highlighted vertebrae throwing triangular shadows as if you were a lizard or dinosaur. At first I thought you were bending forwards to pray. I could see the crack of your bottom and the soles of your feet, one crossed over the other. Under your knees for comfort, I supposed, was a pillow from the bed. The birdlike cry came again, and you bobbed your head. I tried to understand what I was seeing even while I was thinking, Gil can’t be praying, he doesn’t believe in anything.

  Do you know that drawing? Look at it one way and you see an old crone with a hooked nose; look again and you see a beautiful girl in a fur coat with a feather in her hair. Finally, I saw the woman spread-eagled on the velvet cover of the bed, your hands pushing her thighs open, her calves and feet either side of your body. As I watched, she reached forwards to put a hand on your head, guiding you, pulling your face into her. She lifted her own head, with light brown short hair, and opened her eyes. Like Nan’s when she was born, this woman’s eyes were glassy, and although she looked straight at the window, she was lost in the moment and didn’t see me. She opened her mouth to make the cry again, her body convulsing in rhythm to the sound she made.

  Ingrid

  [Placed in We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against, by Nicholas von Hoffman, 1988.]

  Chapter 25

  At about five o’clock in the morning, Flora gave up trying to get back to sleep. Nan was breathing steadily and deeply as Flora crept out of their bedroom. She took a towel from the bathroom, put her mother’s dress over her head, and went to the beach. The morning was fresh, mist lying low in the hollows, and the rising sun was obscured by a haze that forecasted a beautiful day to come. The beach was empty when she swam to the buoy; the water as cold as ever, until it was time to come out and it became miraculously warmer than the air. As she strode onto the beach, a dog walker, a man she didn’t recognise, stopped to stare.