Swimming Lessons Read online

  Flora came in while I was sitting on the floor.

  “Don’t be sad, Mummy,” she said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  I love who we were then and who we might have become.

  Yours,

  Ingrid

  SPANISH GREEN, DORSET, JUNE 1976

  Ingrid,

  If I could, I would turn our love on its head: we would get the anger, the guilt, the blame, the disappointment, the irritation, the workaday, and the humdrum over and done with first. We would have everything to look forward to.

  At the bitter beginning, when I am old and many parts of me don’t work like they used to and other bits have fallen off, you will return. You, so much wiser, will make me wait a long time. Years, perhaps, or maybe even until I’m dead.

  After that you will leave. My friends will not be surprised. In public I will be vitriolic; I will get drunk, vomit on the front of my suit, and fall over in the street, but in the privacy of my bed I will let the tears fall down my moth-eaten face.

  But you too, Ingrid, will be old: your corn hair blanching to silver, the backs of your hands livered, your skin looser yet more beautiful. In the decade after you leave me, you will insist we switch off the bedroom light before we undress, and when, accidentally, you see me naked, you will sigh and wonder why you hadn’t taken a younger man; one who still had flesh on his backside.

  A year after that, you will move out for a week to your sister’s, telling tales of pissing in the nettles at the bottom of the garden, too many books, and toothpaste smeared around the end of the tap where I have sucked the water from it. You will complain that I drink too much and don’t write enough. Your sister will agree about what a shit I am and that you deserve better. Neither of you will speak to me for months. (Tell me, do you have a sister?)

  Five years later I will try, and fail, to mend the hole in the Swimming Pavilion’s roof and you will refuse to hold the ladder because you have better things to do. You will ask our neighbour’s thirty-four-year-old son to nail on a new corrugated sheet, and as you hold tight to his ladder, you will look up with regret and thoughts of the different life you could have had in the city. In the evening we will shout at each other; one of us will slam doors.

  In our middle years, we will travel together: I will take you to Emerald Lake in July and hire a boat so you can trail your hand in the water, stirring the blue mountains that pass beneath us. You’ll hum a tune about the lakes of Canada and I’ll put down the oars so I can kiss you; we will hire bikes and cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge on a cloudy day, and the next morning our faces will be pink with sunburn; we’ll travel through Turkey by public transport, standing on the buses and ducking like locals when the driver shouts, “Police!”; in Sweden we will slip duty-free gin into glasses of tonic that we’ve bought in a bar and discuss our children, all six of them.

  We will drive up to London for the launch. As we grow younger, I will write a successful novel and dedicate it to you. I will sit at my window and type, happy to see you stroll to the sea for an afternoon swim. When you return, we’ll take armfuls of books out to the unmown lawn and lie on a blanket with them spread about us. We will read to each other and watch the gulls wheeling above. If we are shat upon, you will teach me to swear in Norwegian.

  Then one day I will borrow a more sensible car than the one I own now and arrive outside your room in London at five in the morning. I will toot the horn with excitement until you put your sleepy head out of the window above me and we will both laugh, and I will be full of desire for you. We will pack my sensible car with your belongings: your grandmother’s velvet chair, a box of diaries, and suitcases of clothes that you won’t need when you live beside the sea.

  After you come to live with me, we will go to the supermarket and I will press you up against the black-currant jam shelf in the preserves aisle and kiss you full on the mouth so that old ladies smile at us, remembering. You will beat me at Monopoly and I will lose my temper and hide the Mayfair card between the sofa cushions. We will take a picnic to the nudist beach and stay there until the sun goes down, and when the sea is lit by the moon we will make love on the sand.

  The last time you come to my house it will be stormy and the noise of the rain drumming on the tin roof will be so loud we will have to shout to make ourselves heard. There will be a power cut like there often is here, and we will light candles and I will hold your face in my hands and kiss you again, and when I lead you to my bedroom we will know that everything is as it should be and that we will always feel this way.

  Near the end, I will say that I want you to see my house beside the sea, and the next day I will drive us and both of us will know what will happen after we have had dinner. We will cook eggs and bacon and move around my kitchen as if we have been choreographed, and we will eat at the table amongst the books.

  The day after that, I will take you to lunch on Candover Street for hot salt beef and a warm beer. I will walk you home and we will kiss for the last time at your front door, on the street where anyone can see, but neither of us will care. Your lips will taste of mustard and cloves.

  I will write you a letter.

  Gil

  [Both letters placed together in Prophecy—What Lies Ahead, by Oswald J. Smith, 1943.]

  Chapter 9

  In the hallway, towering piles of books lined the walls all the way to the kitchen. Precarious columns of paperbacks and hardbacks with cracked spines and dust jackets rose like eroded sea stacks, their grey pages stratified rock. Many were higher than Flora’s head, and as she walked between them it was clear that one bump might have them tumbling in an avalanche of words. The house had always been full of books, far too many for one person to get through in a lifetime. Her father didn’t collect them to read, to own first editions, or to keep those signed by the author; Gil collected them for the handwritten marginalia and doodles that marked the pages, for the forgotten ephemera used as bookmarks. Every time Flora came home he would show her his new discoveries: left-behind photographs, postcards, and letters; bail slips, receipts, handwritten recipes, and drawings; valentines and tickets, sympathy cards, excuse notes to teachers—bits of paper with which he could piece together other people’s lives, other people who had read the same books he held and who had marked their place.

  Flora hadn’t been back for a month or two, and in that time it was as if the books had spawned. When she looked into the sitting room it was the same: nearly all the surfaces—the side tables, coffee table, and sofas—were covered. A second wall of books as high as her waist had always leaned against the outer one, but now that had grown in height, sagging in places and collapsing in others like a rockslide on a mountain road, and a third buttress was in development, encroaching on the diminishing space. She was surprised Nan hadn’t said anything; her sister would surely have been worried about their father’s state of mind before now.

  From the doorway, Flora saw that the record player was clear of books and a record had been left on the turntable. Just for the sound of something so she wasn’t alone in the house, she made her way across the room and switched it on, and a guitar started, a man sang. She picked up the album cover—one she hadn’t seen before among her father’s collection—showing a man sitting at a kitchen table, pots and pans hanging above his head. Townes Van Zandt was written along the bottom. She turned the volume up so she would be able to hear it through the house, and then she flicked the sitting-room light off and went down the hall. There were fewer books in the kitchen, but they still hugged the walls, cluttered the table, and roosted on the counter. These had strips of newspaper, hanging out like loose grey tongues marking pages. Flora picked up a brick-red hardback without a jacket, its cover worn in places to brown suede: Queer Fish by E. G. Boulenger. She flicked through it and one of the homemade bookmarks fluttered to the floor. She stopped somewhere in the middle and held the book up to her nose—dust, memories, and the smell and colour of vanilla. She found a pen and at the bottom of the page dre
w a phalanx of fish dropping from a rain cloud. She closed the book, replaced it, and checked in the fridge: a bottle of milk in the door, four eggs in a box, an opened packet of smoked bacon secured with a pink elastic band that the postman must have dropped. Flora sniffed the milk, filled the kettle, and spooned leaves into a teapot.

  Using the telephone in the kitchen, she called her sister’s mobile—Nan had programmed the number into Gil’s phone—and let it ring until the message service kicked in and Nan’s infuriatingly calm voice, the one she must use for women in labour, invited the caller to leave a message or, if it was an emergency, to call the maternity ward. Flora tried Nan’s house: no reply. She scrolled through the telephone’s contacts list searching for her father’s mobile number, but when it wasn’t there she was almost pleased that Nan hadn’t thought of everything. Flora considered phoning the hospital to ask about Gil but told herself that if there was something urgent, Nan would try to find her.

  With her cup of tea, Flora walked back along the book-lined hallway, running her fingers along the spines as she passed: an Italian phrase book, How to Breed Cats for Profit, Jaws. She stopped to flip the record and then went into the bedroom. For the first nine years of Flora’s life it had been her mother’s, filled with her mother’s things, and although her father had occasionally spent the night there rather than sleeping in his writing room, Flora still thought of him as a visitor to the house. The bedroom was on a front corner, with two side windows facing the sea and one looking out onto the veranda. She put the light on and saw this space was also full of books, against the walls and stacked beside the bed. A glass of water stood on top of a pile on the bedside table, and on the other side, the digital alarm clock that had stopped working years ago perched on another stack. The bed, an ancient giant that used to dominate the room, was now overshadowed and reduced by paper. The blankets and cover were rumpled, and one of the pillows still bore the indent of a head, as if someone had been there just a few minutes before. Flora put her nose to it, smelling the khaki colour of unwashed hair. She wasn’t sure what she had been hoping for. If her mother had come home it was ridiculous to think she would have got into bed. Flora opened the wardrobe, half hoping the greatcoat would be hanging there. She remembered the odour of it, thick and heavy like the stems of nettles and tangled undergrowth. She had liked to hide things in the pockets. No greatcoat. Just Gil’s shirts, all facing the same way, pairs of trousers folded over the hangers with the creases crisp, a jacket, a suit Flora couldn’t remember him wearing, and two pairs of slip-on shoes. They might once have been stylish: soft Italian leather, hand stitched, but now split around the seams and the heels worn down. She realised her father must have moved back into the house.

  When she was fourteen, just over four years after Ingrid had disappeared, Flora had come home early from school to discover Gil and Nan clearing away her mother’s clothes. As soon as she opened the front door she heard Nan talking in the bedroom.

  “It’s time, Dad,” Nan was saying. “Having this stuff around isn’t healthy for Flora. You know she comes in here all the time, dressing up, playing with the jewellery, spraying Mum’s perfume. I can smell it on her.” Her father mumbled a reply.

  Flora didn’t wait to hear more. “What are you doing?” she said as she burst through the bedroom door.

  Gil stood in front of the dressing table holding open a bin liner, his face turned towards the sea as Nan tipped in all the lacy silky things that Flora liked to stroke.

  “We’re having a clearout,” Nan said, opening the bottom drawer, which Flora knew contained jumpers because when her sister was at college and the house empty she took them out, pushed her face into them, then refolded each one and put them back. Gil said nothing, just continued to hold the bag open and stare out the window.

  “But what will Mum wear when she comes home?” Flora made a grab for the bin liner and the plastic ripped, underwear falling onto the floor.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Nan yelled, scrabbling about, scooping everything together. Flora joined her sister on the floor, snatching as many pieces as she could, stuffing them under her body, and lying on top of them while Nan tried to drag her off. Flora let go of the bundle with one hand and lashed out, clawing at her sister’s face. Nan drew back, her fingers against her cheek, and when she lifted them off, blood oozed from a long scratch. She struck Flora across the face. The two of them stopped, shocked into silence.

  “Sit on the fucking bed, Flora,” her father said, “and don’t make this harder than it already is.” She sat in silence and watched her mother’s 1940s shirtwaist dresses, woollen palazzo pants, and A-line skirts being lifted from their hangers and folded into boxes. The cheesecloth tops and yellow crocheted minidress were squashed under the pairs of Oxfords, pumps, the makeup from the dressing table, the cheap necklace with the paste stone like a bird’s egg, and the perfume. And on top of them, the pink chiffon evening dress. And then the boxes and the bin liners were loaded into Nan’s car. Flora didn’t think about where they would end up; they were gone.

  Two weeks after Nan had taken everything away, Flora went with her father into Hadleigh, and while he flicked through the secondhand books in the charity shop, she wandered to the back to rummage through the old tweed jackets and wide-collared shirts. A girl of about twenty came out of the changing room in Ingrid’s chiffon dress—the skirt dragging on the carpet tiles, the neckband too tight. The girl stood in front of a mirror and twisted sideways, stretching around to look. Flora grabbed on to a clothes rail to keep herself upright and glanced at the girl’s reflection. She remembered the day she’d seen her mother wearing the dress, a sandy-coloured towel draped over one arm and a book in her hand. There was a waft of coconut—the colour of golden honey again, and Ingrid turning and stepping, turning and stepping, out into sunlight.

  “It doesn’t fit right,” the girl said to her friend, plucking at the gauzy fabric. “And there’s a rip in it.” She held up the bottom.

  “It’s old-fashioned, but not in a good way,” her friend said, lifting the skirt and sniffing. “And it smells of dead people.” The girl wearing it twirled in front of the mirror and pretended to choke. They both laughed and returned to the changing room together. At the front of the shop Gil was still busy flicking through the books. Flora slipped a cheap and ugly bead necklace off the display and dropped it into her coat pocket.

  Flora shut the wardrobe door and went into the bedroom she shared with Nan. It had a single window with a view of the tangled garden and Gil’s writing room and, from Nan’s side—since she was the elder sister—a glimpse of the sea. Nan’s teddy bear was propped up against her pillow, her bed made with sheets and blankets, hospital corners tucked under. A chest of drawers stood between both beds. Long ago Ingrid had painted a wide white band across the top, down the front of the drawers, and inside them. In her anger, desperate to stop her daughters arguing over which side belonged to whom, Ingrid hadn’t removed any of the contents when she yanked out the drawers and painted, so that for years afterwards Flora had worn clothes streaked with white. Now she opened the deep bottom drawer and looked inside. On the left, a pile of Nan’s winter jumpers, neatly folded, and on the right a knot of laddered tights, jeans that Flora had never got round to taking in, and bras with their underwire sticking out. She burrowed through her clothes, flipping the heap over, moving aside her father’s empty cuff-link box, searching for a flash of pink chiffon. The day after she had seen the dress in the charity shop, Flora had left school during morning break, stuffed her tie in her pocket, turned her blazer inside out, and walked the two miles into town. Using her lunch money she had bought the dress and taken it home, keeping it hidden at the back of the drawer. Flora found it now, took off her damp clothes, leaving them on the floor where they fell, and then pulled her mother’s dress over her head, reaching behind herself to do up the clasp, and stood facing away from her wardrobe mirror. The man in the sitting room was singing about a woman with yellow hair. Flora
held the handle of the bedroom door and half turned, staring over her shoulder at her reflection. She was the same age as her mother had been when Gil had bought her the dress, shortly after Nan had been born—to celebrate the birth, Flora presumed. Many of the sequins and silver beads had gone from the bodice, leaving hanging threads. The skirt was stained and still ripped, but in the mirror, an image of Ingrid and her heart-shaped face looked back. Only the towel and the book were missing.

  Chapter 10

  THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 7TH JUNE 1992, 4:15 AM

  Dear Gil,

  They say that insomniacs are at their most creative in the middle of the night. It doesn’t feel like that to me, although these letters do come out in a rush of words that fly from the end of my pen, and when I read them back the handwriting is so poor many of the sentences are hard to decipher. I remember hearing about a poet (a famous insomniac) who would hire five hotel rooms and sleep in the middle one to guarantee complete silence during the night. What was her name? You would know if you were here. There’ll be a book of her poetry somewhere in the house, although even you wouldn’t be able to lay your hands on it. Some of the walls are two books deep. That poet, whatever her name was, wrote The Letter, and said her handwriting was like the legs of a fly and her heart chafed for the want of her lover. How appropriate. How easy it is to imagine the worst. I would prefer to know where my lover, my husband, is—who you’re with and what you’re doing. Maybe that’s why I never really became a writer of fiction. I am a writer of truths, a factualist. No more lifting of carpets or turning of blind eyes; what we’ll have here, in these letters, are bald, bare facts.