Swimming Lessons Page 3

  She looked over her shoulder again; perhaps the man had been wrong about the ferry, maybe it would return once more before they closed it, but there was only the night behind her. She waited for another five minutes and tried the ignition again, but now the clunk sounded deadly. She took her suitcase and satchel from the back seat, and once more shuffled over and out of the car.

  Chapter 4

  THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 4TH JUNE 1992, 3:55 AM

  Dear Gil,

  Of course I couldn’t write the story of a marriage in one letter. It was always going to take longer.

  After I finished my first letter I meant to send it straightaway. I found an envelope from an old electricity bill in the kitchen table drawer, and thought I’d walk to the postbox as the sun came up before I could change my mind. But as I perched on the arm of the sofa in the dark with the pen in my hand, there was a noise from the girls’ room (the squeak of bedsprings, the creak of the door), and without thinking I grabbed a book from the nearest shelf, shoved the letter inside, and pushed it back into place.

  Flora stood in the doorway, the sunrise coming through the windows of our bedroom, silhouetting her skinny nine-year-old body in a nightdress.

  “Is it morning?” she said.

  “No, Flora,” I said. “Go back to bed.”

  “Has Daddy come home?”

  “No,” I said. “Not yet.”

  I put the first letter I wrote to you inside The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. Appropriate, for all sorts of reasons. I’ve been thinking that I’ll leave all my letters in your books. Perhaps you’ll never find them—maybe they’ll never be read. I can live with that.

  So, 1976. We, the chosen four, sat in your tiny office, high up in a corner of a sixties block of whitewashed corridors, lecture rooms, thin carpets on concrete floors, fluorescent lighting, and metal-framed windows that let in the cold. Apart from the narrow desk overflowing with paper, you’d made your office into a cramped version of a gentleman’s club: rugs, lamps, book-lined walls, an old leather chesterfield, and low armchairs crammed around a buttoned footstool. The room had a smell—of coffee, warm upholstery, and tobacco—a smell I loved to inhale, a grown-up’s space. You wore a black ribbed cardigan zipped up to your chin, and you reclined in your usual chair.

  “Last six lines of the final chapter,” you said, and we scrabbled for our books, found the page and stared at it. You recited them aloud, from memory. “So what effect do they have?” you asked.

  Moments passed until reliable Brian spoke up.

  “Jackson’s letting us know that Merricat has grown more robust. She’s no longer afraid of the village children—in fact, she might even eat one. Whereas Constance has become even more dependent on her sister and most likely will never leave the house again.”

  “But what do you think?” you said, slurping your coffee and resting the cup against your chin. Brian, looking confused, caught my eye, but I shrugged. We were silent for at least a minute.

  “Well,” Brian said. “That is what I think.”

  You sighed. “What about you, Elizabeth?” You relaxed into the velvet armchair, the padded arms shiny with wear and the white stuffing coming out of the ends, like a man in a smoking jacket who has tucked his hands inside his shirt cuffs for a joke.

  “I . . .” she started, clearly unsure and trying to feel around for the answer you wanted. “I, I think, with the spiders, Jackson’s telling us that Constance covered up for Merricat . . .” Elizabeth paused, waiting for an indication that she was on the right track. “Because, you know at the tea party, when what’s his name, the uncle, says that Constance cleaned out the sugar bowl, because, you know, that’s where the arsenic was, but the uncle, whatever he’s called, said there was a spider in it.” You stretched out your legs and let her talk until she wound down and came to a stop. Even I was embarrassed for her.

  “So?” you said, drawing out the word. We were silent. “How do you interpret that?” You plonked your cup on a sheaf of papers beside you on the desk. The top page was upside down from where I sat, and I couldn’t read it. “Come on, people.” Despairing of us, you ran your hands through your hair—brown but receding—leaving a promontory of curl to flop across your forehead.

  “Guy,” you said. “Help your friends out.” I was never sure why you had included Guy in our group of four. I thought he was the weakest writer, someone who liked to string long words together for the sake of it. I’d been sleeping with Guy on and off for the previous year. Off more than on, because although the sex was good, my pale body disturbed him. One time he’d told me it was like “doing it” with a weird deep-sea creature, and also he talked too much and I was tired of listening.

  While Guy gave his bombastic speech about what he thought of Jackson’s intentions, I reduced the volume and tried to think of something to say when it came to my turn. Something that would make you sit up in your overstuffed chair and nod in agreement, something you hadn’t even thought of yourself. I had no ideas. Not even a theory we could argue. Really, nothing. When Guy had finished talking, and while my heart was leaping in my throat at the horror of my empty mind, you stretched your arms up behind your head and yawned. It was a yawn so loud and so lengthy that we looked away. Once your mouth finally closed, you leaned forwards and rubbed your eyes with the heels of your hands. When you took them away, the whites had a pinkish tint. I don’t know how much you’d drunk the night before, but the fumes were radiating off you.

  I waited with nervous anticipation for you to ask my opinion. You didn’t even turn toward me.

  “Look,” you said. “Some of you, especially those tortured souls who like to think they’re poets”—here you stared at Guy, who frowned back at you—“might fantasise about the idea of scribbling away in your garret, unappreciated by the literary world until you’re in your grave. But there really is no fucking point. Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line. Have none of you read Barthes or Rosenblatt?” (We scribbled down the names.) “A book becomes a living thing only when it interacts with a reader. What do you think happens in the gaps—the unsaid things, everything you don’t write? The reader fills them from their own imagination. But does each reader fill them how you want, or in the same way? Of course not. I asked you what effect those lines have, and you’ve all described what you think Jackson intended, what the lines do, or at least what you believe they do. In some cases you’ve most certainly got even that wrong.” You glanced again at Guy. “But none of you told me what effect they have on you. What they made you, the reader, imagine in here.” You thumped your chest. “You’ve missed the very essence of literature and reading. Who gives a fuck about Jackson and her intentions? She’s dead, literally and metaphorically. This book”—you snatched Elizabeth’s copy from her lap and flapped it in the air—“and all books are created by the reader. And if you haven’t realised that and what it means to your own work, you know shit-all about writing and you’re never going to, so you might as well stop now.”

  It was as if I were in my father’s flat again, cowering at one of his rants about his ex-wife, my mother. Guilty by association. You leaned back once more, stretched your legs, and, arching your spine, put your hands behind your head and closed your eyes as if you were reclining in a deck chair on a Sunday afternoon. I watched in fascination as your cardigan rose above the waistband of your jeans and a strip of flat stomach appeared; you weren’t wearing anything underneath, and when I looked at your feet I saw you didn’t have any socks on either. You must have slept on the sofa, had likely still been asleep when Brian, always the first to arrive, had knocked on your office door at two in the afternoon.

  “Yep,” you said with your eyes still closed. “You can stop now. Go on, get out.”

  Brian, sitting on the sofa beside Elizabeth, made a noise, a tiny clearing of his throat, but the rest of us just sat.

  “Go on, fuck off no
w,” you said. For a short while more we waited, but you didn’t move and I wondered if you’d fallen asleep. We gathered our notes, our copies of the novel with pages marked by slips of paper, our bags, our pens and pencils; all of us keeping a wary eye on you in case you jumped up and shouted, “Where are you going? We’ve still got work to do!” But you remained in the same position in the armchair while my fellow students and I shuffled around each other like a sliding-tile puzzle—one of us sitting so another could stand, Elizabeth pressing herself into your desk so Guy could squeeze past. I was the last in the queue to get to the door, Elizabeth disappearing in front of me down the corridor.

  “Ingrid!” you shouted, and I jumped, turning towards the room. You were sitting up. “Have a look at this.” In one movement you tilted sideways, plucked a book from a low shelf, and threw it at me. It came spinning end over end and I dropped my bag to catch it, slapping the covers between my palms to stop it just short of the bridge of my nose. “Let me know what you think,” you said, and returned to your previous position, arms behind your head, legs out, and eyes shut. I was dismissed.

  Come back to us, Gil.

  Yours always,

  Ingrid

  [Placed in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson, 1962.]

  Chapter 5

  Even with her head bent against the wind and the rain, Flora recognised her route through the heath. Seven years ago, the summer she turned fifteen, she had lain in a dip in the sand near this path and these woods, with her eyes and legs open beneath a boy called Cooper.

  A group of teenagers—villagers and holidaymakers—would gather in the dunes if the evening was dry and light a bonfire in the sand. One night Cooper had offered Flora a drag on his cigarette and a sip of his beer. He had looked at her expectantly, waiting to see what she would offer in return. She had led him through the sandy paths of the heath to the woods at the far end of Little Sea Pond and pressed him into the muscled trunk of a hornbeam. She hadn’t kissed a boy before and wasn’t sure whether she enjoyed the feeling of his tongue in her mouth. She imagined withdrawing her face and him still standing there with his eyes closed and his tongue out. Flora knew no one cared where she was—not her father, who would be in the pub, and not Nan, on another maternity-ward placement, who had left two plates of dinner in the fridge: a lake of stew separated from the peas by a wall of mashed potato.

  After the kiss, on their walk back to the bonfire, Cooper said, “Will you be around tomorrow?”

  “Maybe,” Flora said.

  The next evening they left the fire early and returned to the tree, which bent its spine to the wind and crouched protectively over a sandy hollow.

  Flora couldn’t now bring Cooper’s face to mind and she had never learned his first name, but she recalled the way the silhouetted leaves and thin branches of the hornbeam had swayed against the night sky. They didn’t talk much, but there was a full moon and Flora had brought a sketchbook. She made Cooper take off his jumper and T-shirt although he complained the night was cold, and had him rest against the tree trunk so she could draw him. She tried to look hard and not make assumptions about what was in front of her, like her art teacher had taught her. What she drew didn’t resemble Cooper, but when she had finished she liked how his face blended into the bark of the tree. Afterwards he undid his trousers and she lay back in the sand. She imagined Cooper as a faun or satyr with the legs and cloven hooves of a goat; a half animal performing an act that came from somewhere deeper than his limited ability with conversation and his love of poorly drawn tattoos. She liked to create a picture of the two of them in her head, how they would appear to a bird or someone sitting in the top of the tree: their bodies merging and blending in the moonlight. She put up with roots digging into her spine as the boy became lost in his own rhythm and finished with two or three jerks that ran through the whole of his body.

  Flora went on the pill, and she and Cooper visited the tree many times that summer, while she learned what her body was capable of and what she liked. But it was the drawings and the afterwards time she mostly did it for; when he held her and kissed her quietly, his weight heavy until they both felt her body ejecting the soft wetness of his.

  “Chucked me out of the disco,” Cooper would say and roll off. Then he would hitch up his trousers and lie on his back beside her, their fingers entwined. Sometimes they shared a cigarette; other times he fell asleep and his fingers would go slack.

  On the last night before Cooper was due to go home—to a northern city and with nothing said about love or keeping in touch or meeting the following summer—while he moved on top of her, Flora gazed upwards, watching the branches of the hornbeam slice the moon like a pie. Later that night she returned to the tree with a penknife. And to leave her mark on an object that would still be there long after she’d gone, Flora cut a nick in the trunk and pushed a human tooth into the gap—one of half a dozen she kept in an old cuff-link box of her father’s.

  Flora trekked up the final sand dune with a puff of effort; the suitcase and her satchel were heavy. The inky sea bled out before her, mixing with the sky at an indefinable point. The rain had stopped abruptly, in the way that the weather along the coast could transform from hour to hour, and the only noise was the grate of the waves and the wind rattling the trees behind her. To her left, the beach curved away out of sight around to the ferry and The Pinch, while to the right, a concave mile of sand swept into indistinct shadow, backed by more dunes and then a car park. Beyond this were a few lights from the dozen houses, shop, and pub that made up Spanish Green, the village where Flora had grown up. In the distance, a chalky cliff rose to mark the edge of Barrow Down. But in front of her right now was the nudist beach, the place where her mother had disappeared. For the first time in nearly twelve years, Flora stepped onto the sand where the sea was retreating. She took off her shoes and socks, tied her laces together, slung her shoes around her neck, and strode towards home in the shallow waves, trying to imagine who, if anyone, would be there to meet her.

  Chapter 6

  THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 4TH JUNE 1992, 5:00 AM

  Dear Gil,

  (I’ve been thinking about getting a dog. Flora would love it. A red setter or an Irish wolfhound—a big dog that would bark at the wind when I take it to the beach. I know you don’t like dogs. But you aren’t here.)

  I took my time reading the book you’d lent me. I can’t remember the title now, but it was a terrible title and a terrible book, and I couldn’t work out why you’d given it to me. I worried I was missing something. While I cycled to the university and home again I composed sentences in my head, sentences that were positive or at least constructive, but I couldn’t find anything to redeem the book. I studied the parts you’d highlighted—the sex scenes you’d underlined and your margin notes—trying to analyse what you meant and blushing at your crude drawings. A few weeks passed; I went to several of your classes and hung around at the end each time— putting my coat on slowly, taking my time to pack my bag, hoping you’d ask me about the book. I was always the last student to leave, but you never called my name, never asked me to stay behind.

  I thought you must have forgotten, so one afternoon when I had a free period, I went over to your office. He won’t be in, I told myself, although that morning I’d put on my yellow crocheted dress, the one that never failed to get comments. He’s a rude bastard and he won’t be in, I repeated. But when I walked the footpath, you were hanging out of your office window four floors up, smoking a cigarette. You saw me and smiled, and gave me a kind of salute, which I took to mean come up, so I went through those echoing stairwells and corridors to your office, half terrified, half expectant.

  As I lifted my hand to knock on your door, it opened. You stood there, holding the glass jug of your coffee percolator, and from the surprised expression on your face I immediately realised that the wave from the window had been a hello, not an invitation.

  “How lovely,” you said. “Were you coming to see me?�
� You moved past, and there was that smell again, which made me close my eyes for a moment so I could concentrate on inhaling it. “Go in,” you said. “Make yourself at home.” You held up the jug. “Water,” you said, and went off along the corridor.

  I stood in the small space between the sofa and the armchairs breathing you in, tugging at the bottom of my dress, and regretting my choice. A brown Smith-Corona sat in the middle of your desk with a piece of paper curling out the top. I leaned over it and, hooked by the word “Guy,” straightened the page and read about a man on a beach waiting for a woman. I read until I heard a cough behind me.

  “Sorry.” I jumped back.

  “It’s OK.” You laughed at how flustered I was. “But maybe you should wait until a later draft to read it.”

  You put the coffee on and flapped a newspaper around the room. “I make coffee because I hate the smell of cigarettes. I’m trying to give up,” you said. “But then I always want a cigarette to go with my coffee. Know what I mean?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. I’d never smoked a cigarette, and in England my coffee came out of a jar.

  “So, what can I do for you?” You paused and looked at me, your unshaven chin tucked down and your eyes up. “Ingrid.” You were twice my age, a university professor; my university professor.