The Swimming Pool

by Louise Candlish

  Louise Candlish

  * * *

  THE SWIMMING POOL

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  For John Candlish

  Prologue

  I am running naked through the streets of Elm Hill.

  It is late evening, summer’s end, and the streetlamps burn synthetic holes in the darkening sky. Deep in the rack of streets on the east side of the park, the mild air feels hostile, the near-silence thunderous.

  I am trembling badly. The arm covering my breasts has begun to spasm and both knees are buckling. Blood leaks from my right foot where gravel has sliced the sole. But none of that distresses me as much as my face, the grimacing, primitive feel of it, as if I’ve been robbed of all that makes me civilized.

  He has done this to me.

  A sign for Wilson Road slides into view and I feel a sudden ache of hope: where I started is farther from me now than my front door. Just a left turn here, a quiet stretch of residential road, and the high street will be ahead. This will end.

  A woman approaches, lifts her eyes, and I see the same startled expression and flash of high colour as in every other face I’ve encountered, all mobility arrested by the shock of seeing a nude woman loose in leafy Elm Hill. They suspect I’m insane – there is a secure mental-health facility at Trinity Hospital a mile or two away – and are afraid to help in case I turn savage.

  But there’s a flicker in this face that prompts me to speak for the first time since this nightmare began. ‘Please, can you lend me something?’

  ‘What?’ She’s stunned by my addressing her – and by my accent. It’s worse to know that I’m educated.

  ‘To cover myself. Please.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve got anything …’ She looks down at her cotton dress and gestures helplessness. It’s balmy: no one is carrying a scarf or a jacket.

  It strikes me that I’m thinking normal thoughts. I’m still rational.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, and suddenly she does have something, screwed up in her handbag, a light cardigan of some sort.

  ‘Can I borrow it? I’ll return it if you –’

  ‘Keep it.’

  With shaking hands, I tie the garment around my lower half, then tighten my arms over my chest.

  ‘Look, hang on.’ The woman takes a purposeful step towards me, her gaze lingering on the bruises that bloom on my arms. His fingerprints. ‘My name’s Beverley. You don’t have to tell me yours, but something has obviously happened, hasn’t it? Come home with me and –’

  I interrupt: ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Broadwood Road.’

  I know it: no closer than home. ‘No, thank you, I’m fine.’ I sound polite, as if declining the offer of a drink.

  The awful thing is she’s relieved. She did the right thing and now she can scurry away with a clear conscience and a story to tell.

  On the move once more, I slam my left toes into the raised edge of a paving stone and cry out at the pain. Raising my free hand to my face to wipe away tears, I catch a scent beneath the sweat, a scent that only makes me sob harder: chlorine and sunshine, scrubbed stone and suburban grass. Swimming pool.

  I’ll never go back.

  At last the high street blazes in greeting, the Vineyard bar directly opposite the junction at which I’ve emerged. I falter. I’d forgotten about the pavement terrace, its crush of smokers: I’ll need to pass right by it to reach Kingsley Drive. From a standing start, I sprint across the traffic lanes and meet the shockwave, the universal bewilderment that erupts into laughter.

  ‘Who booked the stripper?’ a man’s voice calls out, and a second round of laughter volleys into my back. ‘Bit long in the tooth for that, aren’t you, love?’

  I sense rather than see the phones in their palms. There will soon be pictures circulating, if not already, attracting likes and shares and re-tweets, comments that make this man’s sound tender.

  I’m on my street. The pain in my damaged toes is ferocious, consuming the foot and calf, causing me to limp. My building is in sight: four featureless storeys, the night sky above. It’s nearly over, nearly over.

  And then I see him. He stands by the building doors, watching, waiting. My knees roll and at last I sink to the ground, powerless. Because I know he’ll watch for ever – he’ll wait for ever.

  It will never be over.

  1

  Monday, 31 August 2015, 12.15 a.m.

  She coughs in her sleep.

  I spring to her bedside to check that her chest is rising and falling as it should, that her pulse is steady and her skin warm. In the dimmed light, I can see the vestiges of stickers glued on the headboard in younger years, pictures of kittens and ponies and love-hearts: all things nice. Children grow and it strikes the parent as both miracle and loss.

  The coughing subsides, but I remain on my knees, vigilant. I haven’t watched over her like this since the night she was born, when I stayed awake, enchanted and petrified, ready for her cry. At least Ed is with me this time. Thirteen and a half years ago, he wasn’t allowed in the maternity ward after visiting hours but was sent home with the other fathers, ready or not.

  I don’t suppose Lara Channing had to stand for that. She would have been in some posh clinic for the births of Georgia and Everett, installed in a private room with Miles at her side, the recipient of privileges she’d assume came as standard. ‘You are an angel,’ she would tell the staff, in her smoky, intimate way. ‘I mean it, an angel.’ And she would say it like she really meant it.

  But I mustn’t think ill of Lara. Not now.

  ‘Here, this should sober you up.’ Ed comes into the room with mugs of black coffee – as if adrenalin had not annihilated the alcohol hours ago, pinned open our eyes and cleansed our ears.

  I return to my seat on the little pink sofa by the door, take the coffee in both hands. The smell is instantly comforting. Though there is space next to me, Ed chooses not to take it, perching instead on Molly’s desk chair under the window. ‘Is she sleeping a bit better, d’you think?’

  ‘Yes. I’m glad we brought her home.’

  We speak in whispers. Until the last half-hour she’d fought sleep, like an infant, her distress slow to fade, and since then we’ve hardly dared exchange more than a syllable.

  ‘She needed to be in her own bed,’ I add.

  ‘You’re probably right. It’s good you insisted.’

  You insisted, this should sober you up: it destroys me, the way he speaks. If never again, surely tonight we should be united. ‘She was completely hysterical, Ed.
We know how to deal with that better than anyone. And it’s not like we’ve snatched her from intensive care and absconded, is it?’

  He lifts his glasses from the bridge of his nose, replaces them a second later. He is not quite looking at me. ‘No, but the paramedics were pretty clear about wanting to take her in for observation.’

  ‘We’ll observe her here,’ I say.

  He nods, lets it go. To the right of where he sits, Molly’s school uniform hangs on the wardrobe door, a scholarly silhouette with regulation tights dangling low. New shoes sit on the carpet below. All ready for the first day of term on Wednesday. I wonder if she’ll be well enough to go back or if we should keep her at home for the week to recuperate fully. To think how we used to dither over arrangements when she had a day off sick, debate whose turn it was to cover, like it actually mattered!

  All three of us were different people then.

  ‘Ed?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I wish I’d never …’ I pause, struggling to subdue the what-ifs, to keep them from massing and charging.

  ‘Wish you’d never what, Nat?’ Now he looks at me, direct and eager, almost with a sense of daring.

  I lose my nerve. ‘Nothing.’

  And I think how wrong people are when they say you should never regret, I think how unrealistic that is – dangerous, frankly. Personally, I regret almost everything, including and especially these last months. Even the parts when I was so happy I thought I might levitate, when it felt as if I’d never before known what summer was, what pleasure was, what it meant to live life to the full.

  Mostly, I regret ever laying eyes on Lara Channing.

  2

  Sunday, 21 June – ten weeks earlier

  I happen to know that the sun rose at 4.42 the morning I first saw her. It was, in fact, the longest day of the year, with twelve hours and sixteen minutes of daylight.

  I’m guessing it was past eleven by the time I logged on to the Elm Hill community website and saw her photograph, possibly even closer to noon. Sunday mornings were sacrosanct in the Steele household: all three of us being in full-time education, we timetabled down-time and this was our prized weekly triple period of laziness, the only blank box on the kitchen calendar.

  Pleasantly indolent as I sat at the kitchen table, mug of green tea cooling in front of me, all I had in mind was to check if it was the right week for the farmers’ market on the high street, but as soon as the homepage appeared I was waylaid. With her blonde tresses falling to her breast and her slender, burnished limbs, with a smile broad enough to post a letter through, she eclipsed quite effortlessly the competing items. Missing moggies and pedestrianization schemes, forget them, look at me! Listen to my news!

  There was a second figure in the photograph, a newer, fawnlike version of the first, a teenager who looked older than Molly by two or three years. A mother-and-daughter shot, then, like one of those pictures you see of ‘ageing’ supermodels and their mini-me progeny on the beach in St Barts, the kind that make you wonder how each party really feels about the other’s beauty. The caption read:

  Brave locals Lara and Georgia Channing prepare for this morning’s Dawn Dip at the new Elm Hill lido.

  Ah, of course. Now I noticed the band of cyan water at their feet, the festive triangles of bunting above their heads, the blurred rainbow in the background that must be the row of changing huts I’d heard about, each door painted a different shade of art-deco pastel. In tribute to the 1930s origins of the site, mother and daughter had attired themselves in swimwear from the period: high-necked, low-legged, this was a style that flattered few. Luckily for all concerned, these two were the few.

  The mother was quoted in the accompanying report: ‘To have such a beautiful pool on our doorstep is a gift. This is going to be the best summer Elm Hill has ever had!’

  And, against my better judgement, the words stirred excitement in me, causing me to turn to the kitchen window and check the sky above the plane trees: yesterday it had glowered the grey-black of a mussel shell, but today it shone blue and unblemished, a perfect June day. If I opened the window I’d be able – almost – to smell summer. Teachers exist in a perpetual mode of countdown and I didn’t need the calendar to tell me there were less than three weeks till school broke up (four for Ed and Molly, an inequality that neither had any intention of letting me forget); maybe it was going to be the best summer we’d ever had. Maybe, after all our careful avoidance of the new neighbourhood facility, it was going to be possible to enjoy it.

  Then again, I thought, sensing resistance in the seat next to me, history suggested otherwise.

  ‘Four forty-two, good Lord!’ I swivelled the laptop to show Molly, who glanced up from her DS.

  ‘Four forty-two what?’ Her face was expressionless as she registered the image. With her straight brows and small mouth, she did impassivity well – even when wearing a Dalmatian-print onesie.

  ‘That’s what time these two crazies went swimming this morning, and a whole lot of other people as well. It’s midsummer. The new pool has opened.’

  Molly made no comment, which was not unusual even when the subject was to her taste. I loved her reflectiveness, a quality I believed to be deepened, if not outright caused, by her being an only child. Not that I wasn’t sometimes tempted to project my own thoughts on to her, of course.

  ‘Maybe next year that will be us,’ I said, keeping the mood casual. Never judge, never blame, the last therapist but one had said, a little mantra for us. In the end, he had brought nothing new to the table, but I didn’t judge or blame him for that.

  Molly glanced again at the photo, raised her eyebrows. ‘To be brutally honest, Mum …’ – that was what the girls her age were saying at the moment, to be brutally honest – ‘… I don’t think that kind of swimsuit is, uh, your style.’

  I narrowed my eyes at the screen, failing to diminish the backlit glamour, the pull of the Channing woman’s energy. ‘You’re probably right. Maybe I’m better sticking to the one I’ve got. Bland, conservative, modest …’

  ‘I’m not even kidding,’ Molly said, another current teen favourite (what did it ‘even’ mean? An expression of agreement, I gathered, or possibly contempt). Infants modelled their turns of phrase on their parents’, but at this age they could come from anyone.

  Not only do you have to let them go, my friend Gayle said, but you get no say in who influences them instead. On matters to do with parenting Gayle was my touchstone. The day I dismissed her advice was the day I lost faith in common sense.

  I closed the laptop and returned to my tea, feeling – and I know it sounds trite – different. Inspired. So the lido had opened at last – re-opened, to be precise, following a closure that had lasted nearly two decades and at least three fund-raising campaigns that had bitten the dust before this last successful one. Each delay had been met with disappointment by the local community; only Ed and I had wished it would never happen, that the funding would fall through once and for all, or some stalemate develop between builders and conservationists. That it would be left for the skateboarders or graffiti artists or clubbers or whoever else had been making use of the derelict site during the dark, dry years.

  But secret wishes were dandelion clocks to the force of nature that was Lara Channing, for, as I would soon learn, it was she who had driven the project. From the very day she had moved into her parkside house and eyed the abandoned beauty from her terrace, she had made its resurrection her mission. She’d personally overseen the procurement process, the bid to the Lottery Commission, the final restoration; she’d even interviewed the lifeguards.

  ‘People don’t turn Lara down,’ Miles Channing told me once, and his eye lingered on me long after he’d made his point.

  Saturday, 27 June

  Well, we were only human and, intrigued, Ed and I strolled down to have a look at the new pool the following Saturday morning when Molly was at her tennis lesson. Of course I’d passed the abandoned building countless times over the
years, but such was its design – squat brown brick walls with enclosing curved corners, a horizontal strip of windows too high to see into, entrances and exits that had been boarded up more securely with each trespasser’s breach – that, prior to its reopening, it had been impossible to get so much as a glimpse inside. Now the plywood frontage had been replaced with a stark glass entrance, the reception area beyond a temple of flawless pale stone and polished wood. Signs in art-deco font directed arrivals one way to the changing rooms, the other, through a long sky-lit corridor, to the renovated poolside café.

  There was already a queue for tables when we arrived, but fortunately the manager, Liam, was the partner of a colleague of Ed’s and he offered to squeeze us in on the sundeck. ‘We’ll need the table back at twelve,’ he warned. He had the look of a man whose brakes had failed and we stepped quickly out of his way, seating ourselves before minds could be changed.

  ‘Table back?’ we grumbled. ‘What is this, the Ivy?’

  But at the first turn of my eyes my cynicism vanished. It was as if a large nut had been cracked open to display its fruit – and the fruit was liquid blue, shivering with its own freshness. I had to shield my gaze from the sheer dazzling beauty, from the transforming, sun-spangled glamour of it. With the photogenic length of multicoloured huts and the candy-striped deckchairs on the upper terrace, it might have been Miami Beach or the Côte d’Azur. Only the smell was English, not of swimming pool yet, but of the park beyond, of sap-drenched leaves and cut grass; green and lusty and alive.

  ‘It’s so huge,’ I said to Ed, slightly idiotically. The shallow end, a riot of flailing limbs and shrieking mouths, seemed a field’s length away. ‘I can’t take my eyes off the water, can you?’

  ‘Humans have an inbuilt attraction to it,’ he replied, his words scarcely audible above the raised voices of a group of children setting up camp on the other side of the railing. ‘They’ve done a nice job, haven’t they?’

  ‘Nice? It’s glorious.’