Swimming Lessons Page 9

  I wandered into the hallway. “Gil? Jonathan?” I called out. There was no reply. I knocked on your bedroom door and, after a moment, opened it. The place smelled of you, musky and male. (Bedrooms always smell of their owners.) The bouncing couple from the previous night had gone. I hadn’t appreciated the bed then, but I saw now that it was huge. Four intricately carved oak posts rose up from each corner, as if they should have supported a missing canopy. I ran my fingers over the nearest—scrolls, leaves, and vines entwined. A cover had been smoothed over your bed, or perhaps the bed hadn’t been slept in. It was made of faded silk, embroidered by hand in a Japanese style—willowy plants, flowers, and exotic birds against a pale-blue background. Many of the stitches had come apart through age and use, and the whole thing looked as if it was in the wrong house, like it ought to be in a much bigger, grander room. I ran my hands over the cover too, wondering about the person (surely a woman) who’d had the patience and the time to create every tiny stitch. I pulled back your wardrobe doors and inhaled you. I opened your chest of drawers and looked at the neatly curled ties. I lifted the lids on dusty pots containing matching cuff links and a watch that was silent. Your things. I peered at the oil paintings in gold frames hanging on the wooden walls—fishing boats heading out of a harbour on a violent sea; a girl in a white dress with a veined turquoise necklace at her throat and a dog on her lap. I examined the books in this room too, on the shelves and stacked into precarious towers on the bedside table. They were topped with half-drunk glasses of wine and an empty whiskey bottle. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched four bars of sunlight drift across the front of the chest of drawers and onto the wall opposite, and I listened to the noises of your house: water glurping in the pipes; the wooden walls moaning and creaking where the afternoon sun warmed them.

  The party debris continued into the second bedroom and the kitchen: dirty glasses cramming every surface, overflowing ashtrays and used cups. I drank three glasses of water, one after the other, while I gazed out of your kitchen window at a washing line slung from a corner of the house to a metal pole. A dozen clothes pegs clung like birds on a wire, and a sock dangled from one of them. No woman lives here, I thought. I went to the toilet, tidying myself in the mirror over the bath and using a toothbrush I found in the cabinet, hoping it hadn’t been used to clean anything other than teeth. And then I went out of the front door and into the grass where I’d stood with Jonathan the night before. Everything was still. Your car was on the drive but all the others had gone.

  There was a path through the grass, one I hadn’t seen in the dark, a trampled route from the house to your writing room at the far end. I can turn my head and see the room from where I sit now, with the morning sun lying on its tin roof. I thought then, and it still makes me think, that the tiny room—with its two long metal legs to keep it level—was balancing at the very edge of the garden, where the zigzag path I made now leads down the bank to the bottom gate and the beach, as if at any moment it might fling off its wooden walls and roof and leap into the water far below. The stable door to your writing room faces the house, and that morning I sidled up to it with a sense that I was trespassing. I stood on the bottom step and knocked. No reply. I knocked again and pressed my ear up against the wood. I turned the handle. The door was locked. I moved up a step and, shielding my eyes from the glare of the day, looked inside. Nothing has changed since that time: I saw the double bed built into the far end with its drawers underneath, the wood-burning stove just big enough to boil a kettle, and a folding desk with your typewriter facing a window that overlooked the sea. You weren’t inside.

  I was trying to angle my head to read the title on the sheaf of papers lying beside the typewriter when you called my name. I turned to see you standing in front of your wooden house with two shopping bags in your hands. You waited for me to walk to you.

  “I don’t let anyone go in there,” you said, and you were smiling but I knew I’d been warned off. There was a moment of embarrassment until you held up a bag and shook it.

  “Would you like some breakfast, or perhaps we should call it lunch?”

  You fried bacon and eggs, I started on the washing up and made coffee and toast, and we ate on the veranda in the sunshine. Afterwards you packed a bag for the beach (rug, apples, cheese), and led me down the chine to the sea.

  The beach was crowded, a boiling Sunday afternoon in early July with the tide out: damp towels hanging on striped windbreaks, sun-faded folding chairs, terry nappies drooping with seawater, hand-dug sand holes with little boys inside, tiny crabs overheating in buckets, and curling sandwiches in greaseproof paper. You rolled up your trousers and we waded out up to our knees amongst the air beds and beach balls. We kissed, and the idea that people who knew you were watching thrilled me. We walked around Dead End Point and past the beach huts where the families would soon pack up for the day and get into their hot cars to wait in the queue for the ferry. We walked past the car park and the ice cream van, along the perfect curve of the bay, and at the sign for the nudist beach you raised your eyes and I laughed when we passed it. We undressed and neither of us was shy, only curious. I didn’t think about how old you were: your body was tanned that summer, and still firm. You held my hand and we tiptoed together, wincing, into the water. Walkers turned to watch. Something about the two of us together has always made people look: our bodies suit each other, look right together. I remember thinking that the air and then the water on every part of my body was like a lover; a new, fresh, cold lover.

  We didn’t stay in for long. We lay on the rug and ate the apples, but you had forgotten a knife so we took the cheese from its waxed paper and bit chunks off with our teeth. You told me that when you were a child, sometimes whole summers would go by and you’d realise you hadn’t been in the sea, and I told you about the summers spent next to the icy waters of the Norwegian island where my father had lived.

  I waited for you to kiss me again or suggest we take the rug into the dunes after everyone had left, but instead you put your hand on my skin and said, “Let’s get dressed and go back.” We dragged our clothes on over our sandy arms and legs and walked home through the dunes and along the road.

  Late that evening when we were sitting out on the veranda, you said, “I don’t think we’ll ever have to shout to make ourselves heard over the noise of the rain drumming on the roof. I don’t think it’ll ever rain again.” You kneeled in front of me, took my face in your hands, and kissed me again. Then you stood and led me to your bedroom.

  Yours, always,

  Ingrid

  [Placed in I Am the Cheese, by Robert Cormier, 1977.]

  Chapter 15

  The woman in the library was Flora’s age, perhaps younger, and from the front, her hair had that look of having been artificially straightened in the way it poured from her centre parting. Her eyes narrowed. “Can I help you?”

  Flora stuttered an apology and backed away, stepping into someone standing behind her.

  “Flora?” The person held her by the elbow to stop her from falling, and when she turned it took her a moment to recognise the man out of context, clothed and vertical: Richard. She pulled away from him and ran down the stairs to the ground floor, her face burning. Out on the pavement he caught up with her.

  “Who was that?” he said. “What were you doing?”

  “Nothing. It was nothing.” She marched past the café, up the high street, Richard jogging to keep up. “Anyway, shouldn’t it be me asking you questions? Like what the hell are you doing here?”

  “I came to find you. You weren’t answering your phone.”

  “It’s broken.”

  “I had to get a train and then the bus—no idea where to get off. I went into the library to ask directions.”

  “So you were stalking me.”

  “I was worried about you.”

  “There’s no need. I’m fine.”

  “Flora,” he said, touching her arm. “Slow down. Who was that woman?”

  F
lora stopped walking, flung her arms up in the air, and let them flap to her sides. For a moment her voice wouldn’t come, but she swallowed the lump inside her. “I thought she was my mother. OK? But she wasn’t. Happy now?”

  “I’m sorry,” Richard said.

  “For following me or because she wasn’t my mother?”

  “For both.”

  “Well, you don’t need to be sorry. As you can see, I’m fine.” Flora was aware she was shouting and that people walking past were staring. “You can go home now.” She opened her satchel and groped in it for Richard’s car key, then remembered that the Morris Minor was in the garage. “I had an accident, last night. In your car.”

  Richard’s eyes widened. “Were you hurt? Are you all right?” He dropped the small rucksack he’d been carrying and put his arm around her; she let it stay.

  “I’m fine. But your car . . .”

  His arm fell away.

  “It’s the fan belt. I got it to the garage. They’re mending it now. It should be ready in a couple of hours.”

  “As long as you’re OK,” he said. “Come on, let me buy you a cup of tea.”

  “I’d bloody well rather have a proper drink,” she said.

  Richard and Flora sat on the veranda drinking Gil’s whiskey as the sun went down. Richard had found it under the kitchen sink behind a box of tools after she had sent him into the house without her. She’d also got him to drag the cover off the bed so they could wrap it around them. The tide was in and the deep water crashing against the cliffs boomed where it hit hollows in the rock, the sound like distant thunder.

  “This used to be a swimming pavilion?” Richard said.

  “Changing rooms to you and me,” Flora said. “When Daddy sold the big house up the road, this was all that was left. I think there were debts and death duties when my grandfather died. Daddy doesn’t talk about it.”

  Headlights swung around into the drive, illuminating the gorse flowers, yellow jewels in the black. Nan’s car pulled up.

  “Where have you been?” Nan said as soon as she got out and saw Flora standing at the top of the steps.

  “Where have you been, you mean,” Flora said. “You were meant to be home hours ago. How’s Daddy?” She went towards the car.

  “He’s sleeping. Leave him.” Nan blocked Flora’s route to the passenger door. “I’ve been calling the house phone and your mobile all afternoon. There was some stupid delay with the doctor wanting to see him again. Why didn’t you pick up?”

  “I thought I saw Mum in Hadleigh,” Flora said. “But it wasn’t her.”

  “Oh, Flora,” Nan said, her puff gone in an instant. She stepped forwards as if to take her sister in her arms.

  Deflecting her, Flora said, “This is Richard.” She turned towards the veranda, and Richard moved out of the shadows and down the steps to shake Nan’s hand.

  “How do you do?” Nan said, unable to resist her natural inclination to be polite no matter the circumstances.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your father. Is there anything I can do?”

  “Well,” Nan said, running her hands through her hair, “perhaps you could help me get him into the house. I think he might need to be carried.”

  “Carried?” Flora said. “Why can’t he walk?”

  “I’ve told you,” Nan said. “He’s tired. Why don’t you go and put the lights on so we can see what we’re doing.”

  “There’s a power cut.”

  Flora stood close by with a candle while Nan woke their father and introduced Richard. In the end Gil struggled out of the seat by himself, brushing off any helping hands but allowing Richard to tuck his arm under Gil’s elbow as they walked around the car.

  “Oh, Daddy,” Flora said, her hand going to her mouth. The candlelight showed butterfly stitches across Gil’s left cheek; the eye above it was dark and swollen shut. A graze speckled his forehead. He looked smaller, thinner, than when she had last seen him.

  “Flo,” Gil said sleepily. “Do you have the book?” He reached out for her hand with his right, and Flora saw that his left arm was held in a sling.

  “He keeps going on about the book he had with him when he fell,” Nan said to Flora. “We don’t have it, Dad.”

  Flora pressed her father’s hand, the skin as soft as sandpapered wood, the bones inside fragile. She kissed him on his good cheek, smelling the sour breath of sleep and under it his familiar odour: pepper, dust, and leather—otter brown.

  Nan helped Gil into bed while Flora held the candle. The light hollowed out his good eye socket, gouged craters into his cheeks and cast distorted shadows on the wall. Under his coat, Gil was wearing the pyjamas that Nan must have taken into the hospital. He winced when his bandaged arm was touched, but then sank into the bed with a sigh.

  “Love you, Daddy,” Flora whispered in his ear, although he was already asleep.

  In the kitchen they sat with Richard and talked in the half-light, working out who would collect Gil’s car from Hadleigh and drinking tea made with water boiled in a pan on the gas hob. Flora had hers black, not trusting the temperature of the fridge. She had seen Richard take note of the books in the hall, the sitting room, and the kitchen, but he made no comment about them. Instead, looking straight at Nan, he said, “What did your father say about seeing your mother?”

  It was the question Flora wanted to ask, but she was shocked at Richard’s audacity.

  Nan’s fingers tightened around her cup. “He was mistaken,” she said stiffly.

  “You mean he’s changed his mind about what he saw?”

  “Richard,” Flora said; a warning.

  “I mean what he saw isn’t possible,” Nan said.

  “But—” Richard began, and Flora put her hand on his and squeezed. “Is he going to be all right?” he continued.

  Nan made a low hum, her mouth closed. Flora caught a glance from her sister before she looked away again.

  “You’re worrying about his wrist, aren’t you?” Flora said.

  “He has a urinary tract infection. It probably explains some of his confusion, but . . .” Nan paused.

  “What?”

  “Things have become”—she chose each word carefully—“potentially more . . . complicated.”

  “What do you mean?” Flora said.

  “He’ll be fine at home, Flora. We’ll do everything we can to make him comfortable.”

  “You think his wrist is broken, don’t you?” Flora put her cup on the table and tea slopped over the edge. “We should take him back in. Get another X-ray.”

  Nan and Richard looked at each other, the light from the candles moving across their faces so she couldn’t read their expressions.

  “No,” Nan said softly. “He should stay at home with us. If he’s here I can keep an eye on him.”

  The three of them sat in silence, sipping at their tea until Richard said, “It’s late. I should get going.” He stood up.

  “Tonight?” Nan put her cup down. “I thought you’d be staying.”

  “Would you like me to stay, Flora?”

  “Richard’s got to work tomorrow,” Flora said.

  “I could leave in the morning.”

  “You’ll have to get up at a ridiculous time.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Richard said. “It’s Sunday; the bookshop doesn’t open until eleven.”

  “It’s far too late to go now,” Nan said. “You can sleep in the writing room.”

  “If he’s going to stay, one of the sofas will do,” Flora said. “It’s only Daddy who sleeps in the writing room.”

  Richard looked from one sister to the other.

  “The sofas are full of books,” Nan said. “And it would mean making one of them up.”

  “It won’t take a minute to throw a sheet over a sofa,” Flora said.

  “Dad isn’t sleeping in his writing room now.” Nan stood. “Come on, I’ll show you the way.”

  Flora narrowed her eyes at Richard but he didn’t appear to notice. He followed Nan ou
t of the kitchen.

  Flora thought about sleeping with Richard in the room at the end of the garden, but there was something about the two of them being there, using her father’s private space, that made her uncomfortable. So when she woke with the early light creeping through the window, it was Nan’s bed she saw with its covers thrown off and the sheets showing. There were voices across the hall—her father’s and her sister’s. Flora got out of bed and put on a spare dressing gown of Nan’s.

  “Give me the phone,” Nan was saying in her midwife’s voice.

  Nearly all the lights in the house were lit. The power must have come back on in the middle of the night, and the lamps in the sitting room glowed orange. Gil was perched on the arm of one of the sofas in his pyjamas, the telephone receiver pressed between his shoulder and his ear. He held the index finger of his right hand up at Nan, as if telling her to wait while he finished his conversation.

  Gil nodded. “Yes, yes, of course.”

  “Dad,” Nan said. “Give me the phone.”

  “Who is it?” Flora said, yawning. “What time is it?”

  “Half past five,” Nan snapped. “Go back to bed.”

  “But who’s he speaking to?”

  “Shh,” Gil said to Flora, and then into the phone, “OK, I’ll pass you over. It’s been lovely to speak to you, finally.” He paused, listening. “Me too,” he said, and Flora felt she was intruding on a private moment. Gil pressed the receiver against his pyjama top.