Swimming Lessons Read online

  “The second of six, remember?” you said when we were all in the kitchen. You hugged me and slapped Jonathan on the back.

  “We can’t afford it,” I said.

  “Of course we can.”

  “I can’t scrimp and save anymore.”

  “I’ll get a job. It’ll be fine.”

  Jonathan laughed, stopping when he saw your face.

  “What?” you said. “You think I can’t?”

  “What kind of job?” Jonathan said.

  “I don’t know.” You dismissed the question with a wave of your hand; nothing was going to spoil this news. “Something in Hadleigh—fisherman, baker, candlestickmaker, behind the bar with Martin.”

  Jonathan rolled his eyes. He thought it was funny.

  “Talking of Martin,” you said. “A celebration is called for, I think.” You rubbed your hands together. “A lunchtime drink?”

  “You finished the whiskey last night,” I said.

  “How about that fine public house up the road? The one Martin opened up about”—you looked at your watch—“an hour ago?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.

  “Oh, come on. What the hell is wrong with both of you?”

  “We don’t have enough money to go to the pub!” I was shouting. “We need more milk, more washing powder, more food.”

  “Don’t be such a spoilsport, Ingrid. I promise you it’ll be fine.” You swept me up in your arms and waltzed me around the kitchen, bent me over backwards, and kissed me with Jonathan watching.

  We walked up the road to the Royal Oak, you carrying Nan, and Jonathan and me trailing behind.

  There were several people in the pub: that farmer and his wife (the ones whose barn burned in the lightning storm); Joe Warren, who’d now lost all that weight; Mrs. Passerini with her yellow fingers, perched on her usual stool at the end of the bar; a couple of cattle-feed reps in their suits having a lunchtime pint; and of course Martin serving the drinks.

  “Gil,” he said, smiling and holding his hand out. “Long time no see.”

  Mrs. Passerini got down shakily from her stool, put her cigarette in her mouth, and lifted Nan out of your arms. Nan didn’t cry, just kicked her fat legs in her little white tights and gurgled.

  “I’ve got an announcement, Martin,” you said. “Pass me a piece of cutlery.” You stood at the bar and took the long-handled spoon out from the pickled-egg jar and chinked it against the glass. The pub quietened.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” you said, “we’re here to celebrate that the Colemans are bringing the average age of this village down to sixty. My beautiful wife, Ingrid”—you waved me over and pulled me in to your side—“is having another baby!”

  I was passed around like Nan—hugged by beery neighbours, my stomach stroked by their wives—and you didn’t have to buy a single drink. At two thirty in the afternoon I left with Nan, and Martin locked the door behind us. You hadn’t asked him about a job.

  It was cold that January, and while I waited for you and Jonathan to return I got into bed with Nan to keep warm. When the evening arrived and neither of you had come home, I put the oven on, keeping the door open to warm the room, and cooked and mashed some carrots. After Nan fell asleep I ate the last of the bread, sitting alone at the kitchen table. I went to bed and heard the front door open and someone go into Nan’s room, the spare bed creaking up against the adjoining wall. I rapped my knuckles on it, and Jonathan returned the knock. I lay in the dark and stared at the nearest bedpost rising up and disappearing into the shadowy ceiling, my fingers threaded together across my stomach. I was numb. I heard you and a crowd of people come back, long after closing time. Your celebrations continued in the kitchen.

  I must have slept because when I woke in pain in the dawn you were snoring beside me and I hadn’t noticed you come to bed. The sheet under me and my legs were red and sticky with blood. In the kitchen I leaned over the back of a chair, breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth. When the cramp passed, the only sensations I felt (facts and truth, remember) were relief and guilt.

  I went to the toilet, and as I flushed our second baby away, I listed all the un-telling I would have to do that day, starting with you, Gil, and afterwards Jonathan, and then our neighbours. And I worried—considering the number of empty bottles in the kitchen, none of which you’d have paid for—whether they would believe I’d ever been pregnant.

  Ingrid

  [Placed in Money, by Martin Amis, 1984.]

  Chapter 27

  In the afternoon, Flora sat opposite her father on the veranda. It was still warm and the bees droned in the honeysuckle that her mother had planted and now ran wild over the side of the house. She and Nan had excavated one of the high-backed armchairs from the sitting room, placed it in a strip of sunshine, and tucked Gil into it with a blanket. The last time she was home he had just been her father, a reclusive eccentric who was always there in the Swimming Pavilion or his writing room, even when she wasn’t thinking about him. Now he was an old man who was dying. She hadn’t been able to discuss her new knowledge with him; she wasn’t even sure it was new—perhaps she had known as soon as she’d seen him struggling out of the car two days ago.

  After the punch, Flora had apologised over and over to Nan. The sisters sat side by side on Gil’s bedroom floor, and Flora learned that their father’s early symptoms of indigestion and sickness had been ignored—firstly by himself, and then by his GP—until it was too late. There had been some treatment offered that Gil had refused, saying it would only delay the inevitable and insisting on coming home as soon as he was able.

  From the veranda they watched the sparrows pecking at the crumbs of toast Nan had thrown out, taking turns with a dust bath in a dip they had made in front of the gorse bushes, and then Flora watched Gil sleeping, his eyeballs moving under his closed lids like a dreaming dog’s. She took her sketch pad from under her chair and got out a charcoal pencil, putty rubber, and a small piece of rag that she kept wedged in between the sheets. The smell of drawing was cream, a clotted and buttery yellow.

  She moved into the shade to stop the glare coming off the blank page and drew her father, his head tipped against the wing of the chair, his right hand resting in his lap and the other in the sling, his good cheekbone polished to a knuckle by the clear light reflected off the sea. With the rag she moved the charcoal across the page, lifting it with the rubber, smudging it with the tip of a wet finger.

  “Have you had an argument with your young man?”

  Flora looked up. She’d thought he was still sleeping.

  “Not really.” The angle of his head had changed and she redrew the line that ran from his temple past the hollow of his cheek to under his chin.

  “It’s not worth it,” Gil said.

  “What isn’t?”

  “Upsetting someone you love.”

  Flora glanced up. “Who said I loved him?”

  “You never know when you’ll see them for the last time.”

  Flora stared at her drawing, tore it out of the pad, and crumpled it up.

  She began again, a series of dashes, shadows, and lines—the bones in Gil’s head no different from the chair’s structure. She liked to see how much could be left out of a drawing while keeping it recognisably human. People’s brains always wanted to fill in the gaps—imagine a nose where there was only a hint of a nostril, or the fully formed whorl of an ear where she drew a short coil. Everyone saw a different picture. Flora’s fingers were grimed with black and there was dirt under her nails. The man on the paper didn’t look like her father: he was healthy and young, and he would live forever. She ripped this page out too, and tore it in half.

  “Aren’t you going to show me?” Gil said.

  “They’re rubbish. I can’t do it anymore.” She leaned forwards in her chair, picking at the rinds under her nails. “Daddy?” she started, but when her father looked up she didn’t know which question she wanted to ask—whether he was certain he
had seen Ingrid in Hadleigh, what it felt like to know he was dying, or why he really wanted all the books burned. Instead she said, “Did I tell you that it rained fish the other day, when I was driving here in Richard’s car? They were bouncing off the roof and the bonnet.”

  “I don’t know why you think you can’t draw anymore, Flo. It seems to me you did a bloody good drawing in Queer Fish.” Her father winked.

  She looked through her sketchbook: Nan hanging out the washing, Martin in his slippers reading the paper, Richard sleeping, his glasses skewed on his face.

  After a few minutes Gil said, “There’s something I wanted to ask you.”

  “What?” Flora said.

  “Bring your chair closer.”

  Without standing, she shuffled her chair towards his.

  “Closer,” he said. She moved until the arms of their chairs were touching. Behind him, some optical illusion made the sea appear higher than the land, as if it were being sucked away in the presentiment of something momentous. “It’s always been you and me, Flo, hasn’t it? I should have let your sister in more, and your mother of course. But that’s done now. There’s something I want you to do for me.”

  “What is it? I’ll do anything you want, Daddy.” She sought his hand from under the blanket.

  “I want you to get me a baby’s boot. One of those knitted ones.”

  Flora pulled her hand away. “A what?” she said.

  “And it must be blue. Blue wool. I don’t need a pair—just one will do. I wondered if Nan might have them at the hospital. I can’t ask her myself; she’ll think I’ve gone mad.”

  “Christ, Daddy.” Flora laughed. “I thought you were going to ask for something important. You nearly made my heart flip.”

  “It is important. It’s very important. I need it, Flora.” Gil’s face didn’t change.

  “Come off it, Daddy. You can let me in on the joke now. What do you need it for? A one-legged baby?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” Flora stopped smiling.

  “Completely.”

  “God, Daddy. What is all this?”

  “I’m going to bury it.”

  “What?” Flora said again. “Why?”

  “It’s just something your mother . . .” He stopped midsentence, as if checking his words. “So you won’t ask Nan?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Forget I ever asked. Forget it.” Gil tucked his hand back beneath the blanket, rested his head against the wing of his chair, and said something under his breath.

  “What?” Flora said. He didn’t repeat it, but it may have been, “Baby shoes, never worn.”

  Later, when Gil had gone inside, Flora picked up her torn drawings and walked to the end of the garden with a box of matches and burned each page, letting the black flakes float into the nettles.

  Chapter 28

  THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 16TH JUNE 1992, 4:35 AM

  Dear Gil,

  Yesterday, before the morning bell, Flora’s teacher met me in her classroom. She showed me a letter and asked me whether I’d written it:

  Dear Mrs. Layland,

  It is with my deepest regrets that I write to tell you Flora was unable to come into school yesterday. Her father came home to spend some time with his daughter and that is the reason she didn’t come in. I also write to let you know that he is still home and so Flo might not be in in the future.

  Yours sincerely,

  Ingrid Coleman

  I cried in front of Flora’s teacher, not because the letter was so clearly written by a desperate child, and not because Flora is missing school or lying—although that’s what Mrs. Layland thought—but because she doesn’t need me.

  On the 9th of February 1978 you drove me to the check up appointment you’d made with my doctor. I didn’t want to go: what was there to learn? I’d been pregnant and now I wasn’t. You’d barely spoken after I’d woken you that morning. I thought I heard you crying in the bathroom, but the noise stopped when I rattled the door handle and called your name. When you came out you sat in the kitchen brooding over a cup of coffee.

  Jonathan stayed a week longer, but in the end I don’t think he could stand the melancholic atmosphere that settled over the house. I was sad to see him go, although not having him around meant one less thing to think about.

  At the surgery you remained in the waiting room until the examination was over and Dr. Burnett called you in.

  “I’m pleased to say everything is where it should be.” The doctor addressed you. You didn’t laugh and he continued: “Miscarriage this early is much more common than you’d think. And Mrs. Coleman is only . . .” He looked at the envelope that contained everything he knew about me.

  “Twenty-one,” I said.

  He peered over his half-moon spectacles as if he were surprised I’d spoken. “Twenty-one, yes,” he said. “Still almost a child herself.”

  “But what’s wrong?” you asked.

  Dr. Burnett removed his glasses. “Mr. Coleman, there is nothing wrong with your wife. Go home and carry on doing the things you’ve been doing, and I can assure you she’ll be pregnant again in no time.” He put his glasses on again and wrote something about me in a spiky hand at the bottom of a piece of card, and slipped it into the envelope with the others. “Plenty of good food and rest.” He clicked the end of his pen. The appointment was over. I half rose, but you stayed in your seat.

  “You’d advise then,” you said, “that she shouldn’t go swimming?” The question was unexpected.

  “Swimming?” the doctor said.

  “In the sea,” you said. “In the middle of the night, in the morning, in the evening—any chance she can get.”

  Dr. Burnett glanced at his watch. “Dear me, no. Rest is what’s called for here. She should avoid all physical exercise.”

  We argued in the car on the way home, your knuckles white around the steering wheel.

  “Looking after Nan isn’t restful either,” I said. “But are you going to get up in the middle of the night when she’s teething, when she’s got a temperature? Are you going to clean up when she’s been sick, change her nappies? Are you going to stop writing so that you can push the pram up to the shop because there isn’t any food in the house?”

  “It’s fucking swimming, Ingrid,” you said.

  “Swimming isn’t strenuous, Gil. I happen to find it restful.”

  “This isn’t about you, for God’s sake.” The hedgerows rushed past us.

  “I know what it’s about. You don’t need to tell me.”

  “This is our baby, and you’re happy to take a risk with its life because you’d rather go for a fucking swim.”

  “Gil!” I shouted. “There isn’t a baby. I lost it, remember, while you were getting drunk.”

  You became patronizingly calm, but your teeth were clenched. “I meant next time, Ingrid, of course.”

  I stared out of the passenger window at the sea. In my head I was saying, If there is a next time. Neither of us spoke for the rest of the journey.

  Four months later, you sold a short story and when the money came through, in true Gil style, you spent it on a holiday to Florence. An early birthday present or our second honeymoon, you said. I arranged for Megan, from the village, to take care of Nan while we were away. Megan was a year younger than me, happy to have some time off from the dairy, I thought. She picked Nan up with a confidence I still didn’t have, held our daughter on her hip in a way that made me feel as if I’d been faking motherhood for thirteen months.

  She stood with Nan on the veranda as we got into the car, and she looked at me with pity, and naively I thought she must have heard about the miscarriage. She held Nan’s tiny wrist so that our daughter waved us good-bye as you reversed the car out of the drive. By the time we reached the main road, my eyes had filled with tears. You put your hand on my knee.

  “It’ll be fine. Megan will look after her. What’s the worst . . .”

  �
�. . . that could happen,” I finished for you, smiling feebly. But I didn’t admit, not even to myself, that the reason I was crying wasn’t because I was already missing Nan but at the relief of getting away from her.

  Florence, 15th to the 19th of June, 1978. You had it all planned out. In the mornings we’d go for thick strong coffees at one of the little cafés on the Piazza della Repubblica and you’d order us two cornetto semplice. We’d stroll in the Boboli Gardens, and in the Accademia we’d stare up at Michelangelo’s David. After a long lunch we’d go back to bed for the afternoon. Later, you’d take me to La Specola and show me the three supine wax women that you fell in love with when you were fifteen, no matter that their insides are on display for everyone to see. You’d tell me how you visited them every day to escape the claustrophobia of your bullied mother and the wheezing pump of your father’s portable oxygen machine as the three of you did a latter-day version of the grand tour. We’d eat dinner at ten, finishing with chestnut ice cream and more coffee.

  The sun was warm and Florence was beautiful, the hotel and the room perfect. We sat on the stone window seat and you kissed me with the sounds of the street coming in: car horns, raised Italian voices, and the click of women’s shoes on paving. You started to undress me, one button at a time, but I had to prise myself away and run to the bathroom so I could vomit into the toilet bowl. A queasy feeling had come over me as soon as we’d stepped onto the train at Pisa, but I’d ignored it.