The Swimming Pool

by Louise Candlish

  Ed registered the word – not one either of us had used in years, if ever – before shaking straight his newspaper. That Saturday Guardian symbolized many things for him. It spoke of who he was: a left-leaning man who still took the time to read the news in print and in full, at least once a week. Others might have downgraded their engagement with current affairs to a quick scroll on their phones as they jostled commuters on train platforms or jay-walked their kids across perilous roads, but he was still willing to give it the time and attention it deserved. Even if his wife would have preferred a conversation

  After we’d ordered I scanned the other tables for familiar faces. As a teacher at one local school and a parent at another, I was confident there’d be several. There was Molly’s chaotic chum Rosie and her family – we exchanged waves – and Gayle’s neighbour Ian, dressed for once in jeans and a shirt, not his customary Lycra (a keen cyclist, he was one of those hovering spidery types who, you suspected, had only themselves to blame when caught in a skirmish with a motorist); and Annabel from the kindergarten at Elm Hill Prep, in my opinion not so much teaching assistant as holy being.

  As a member of staff at the largest senior school in the postcode, Ed, were he to look, would recognize more Elm Hillians still (recent incomers had led a movement to call us Elm Hillbillies but the old guard had squarely rejected that). Though not, I guessed, the woman my gaze fell on next.

  She was at the table closest to the water and the best on the deck, glamour radiating from her and rendering the rest of us mere extras in her scene. Her clothes were exotic (to my eye, anyhow; doubtless they were workaday to her): a pink silk shirt-dress with a woven silver belt; flat snake-print sandals, the kind you might wear on a luxury safari or for a stroll through a hilltop village in Umbria. Oversized sunglasses with amber-coloured frames covered much of her face, leading the eye down a small kittenish nose to an insolent Bardot mouth.

  Irrationally, my brain ordered my pulse to leap.

  ‘There’s that woman,’ I said to Ed in an undertone.

  He didn’t look up. ‘What woman?’

  ‘The one I told you about, with the matching daughter. I can’t remember her name.’

  That was a lie: I didn’t want to utter it for fear of being overheard by its owner. It was only six days since the sunrise photo shoot, but already Lara Channing had become the de facto face of the place, her photo gracing the leaflets posted through doors and even appearing on the features pages of the Standard to illustrate a piece about the new heyday of London’s lidos.

  She was not with her daughter this morning but with a man I assumed to be her husband, given their idle tapping of iPhones and sporadic, inattentive conversation (at least he had not, as Ed had, placed a partition of newsprint between the two of them and kept it there even after their orders had arrived). I couldn’t see his face, only the back of his head, the still-dark hair fastidiously cropped, the strip of neck between hairline and box-fresh cotton shirt expensively bronzed. On the table, alongside the phones, were a black coffee (his) and a green smoothie (hers), the antioxidant one with kale and kiwi that I’d not ordered myself because I thought £4.99 was scandalous for a soft drink – and even if I didn’t Ed would.

  ‘They’re locals, apparently,’ I said, prodding his newspaper. ‘Though I’ve never seen them before, have you?’

  ‘Hmm.’ He lowered the paper to reveal a chewing jaw, his plate of sourdough toast almost finished. He was famously hard to engage in gossip even when he wasn’t trying to read. Careless talk costs lives: he would have led by example quite beautifully in wartime. ‘The daughter’s not at All Saints, is she?’

  ‘I’d be amazed if she was,’ I said. With or without the staff’s dedication, All Saints (staff nickname: All Sinners) was not the school of choice for any known elite, and if I took anything from this first in-the-flesh impression of Lara Channing it was that she belonged to an elite. With those enticing looks and that media-magnetism, she was a breed apart from the mothers of Elm Hill Prep, BMW-driving, gem-set-watch-wearing creatures of privilege though they were. Even the way she looked out at the water suggested a satisfaction more personal, more nuanced, than mere inbuilt human response.

  Giving up on Ed, I spooned my granola, enjoying the erogenous touch of the sun as I continued to watch. But it was a risk to scrutinize someone in sunglasses when you were bare-faced yourself and, sure enough, she soon sensed my attention and returned it, even lifting her sunglasses in a playful peekaboo gesture. I blushed. Never in my life had I so regretted not making an effort with my appearance. My skin was makeup-free – caked in foundation during the working week, I tended to let it air at weekends, hardly noticing after all these years the looks that strayed to the birthmark above my right eyebrow; my hair was limp and in need of a wash, with a rather Tudor centre parting I didn’t normally wear; my clothes were shapeless and unflattering. Not at all the right look for Miami Beach, for the eye of Ms Channing.

  There was worse to come. I became aware of her husband/companion twisting in his seat to stare across to our table – at exactly the moment Ed happened to glance behind him with a frown. As I squirmed, mortified, there was a sudden heightening of energy at the other table, an exchange of urgent mutters, before Lara’s laughter sprayed the air, musical and delighted and, it seemed to me, a little contrived. I adjusted my seat so that Ed blocked my view of them and theirs of me, my heart stuttering as if something significant had just occurred.

  ‘What?’ Ed said, seeing my face. His expression softened. ‘Thinking about Molls? You’re allowed to like it, you know.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘This. The pool. There’s nothing to stop you coming here.’

  ‘I know.’ I didn’t say that I hadn’t been thinking of Molly at all.

  We’d hardly finished eating when the bill came, unbidden. ‘I think Liam wants the table back,’ I said. ‘Look, the queue’s out the door. Shall we go?’

  Ed sighed. ‘If this is what it’s going to be like, I don’t think I’ll come here again.’

  But we both knew it was a moot point for soon his Saturdays would not be his own. Change was afoot in the Steele household: this summer, he would be offering himself as a private maths tutor, to continue at weekends during the autumn term and until the entrance exam season in January. If it went well, it was possible he might be able to do it full time from the 2016/17 school year, and as a family we would prioritize this mission. All Saints, like any conflict zone, was no place for middle-aged men.

  In any case, once Molly’s term-time Saturday-morning tennis finished and she was free to join us on such outings – well, this was the last place she’d want to come.

  I remember exactly how I felt as we strolled home from the lido that day, a restless blend of exhilaration and frustration that struck me as overdue, even inevitable. I remember thinking how effortlessly I could predict the unfolding of the day and how it might be more interesting if, for once, I could not. Molly would arrive back from tennis and hole up in her room – she had the larger of the two bedrooms: we’d recently swapped after she’d accused us of never using the superior square footage while conscious, which was more or less true – or at the kitchen table where the laptop and other electronic devices lived. (None was allowed in her bedroom, a child internet-safety rule and school recommendation we obeyed religiously.) Later, she’d hang out with a local friend, probably at the friend’s since that was more likely to be a house with a garden, siblings and pets, amenities we couldn’t offer.

  Meanwhile, Ed had year-ten exam papers to mark, and I, having risen early to take care of next week’s lessons preparation, thought I might steal a march on the laundry (racy stuff). Later, I would pay a call on our upstairs neighbour Sarah, whose recovery from hip-replacement surgery was proving slower than hoped. Ed and I often ran errands for her or popped in for a cup of tea. Homework and chores being duly completed, we would then slide pizzas into the oven (nutritionally supplemented with broccoli spears or sliced pepp
ers) and gather as a three to watch TV or a film. Ed and I would share a bottle of red and Molly would have a fizzy drink of her choice. It was that kind of life: casual on the surface but orderly, strictly managed. Rules were in force, standards upheld.

  ‘Is it me or does it feel very small in here today?’ I said, as I plucked back the curtains to expose the very edges of the windowpanes. Our flat, on the first floor of a 1980s block in a quiet lane off the high street, was north-facing and, though it was bright outside, the light in the living room was indirect and dreary. Even our furniture felt wintry: the indestructible Indonesian wood that had been in vogue twenty years ago and never replaced (a victim of its own success); the brown leather sofa that had looked so stylish in the store but leached the light like a plug hole sucked bathwater; the glass vases that held fresh flowers far less frequently than had originally been intended.

  ‘It is small,’ Ed said, ‘but there are plenty of migrants who’d consider it palatial.’

  I’d noticed before that this was a difference between us – he always compared down, I up – but today it felt defining. It felt problematic.

  The flat had been ours long enough for us to feel as if we owned it, though it was in fact a housing association sub-let, the reason we could continue to afford to live in a suburb like Elm Hill since an upgrade of the overland line had caused both house prices and private rents to rocket. These days, when people remarked on how the place must have tripled in value since we’d bought it, I simply nodded, weary of explaining again our tragic missteps in the London property dance. At the beginning, we’d saved and sacrificed like normal couples, had been mere months from having the deposit for the modest terrace of our ambitions, when all at once prices had begun to race out of reach. It was no more than a fever, we told each other: best to keep our cool and wait it out. By now, of course, the deposit that might once have bought a terrace was barely sufficient for a one-bed. We’d still look at the property websites sometimes, watch the numbers rise and rise. It was like hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, we would say.

  But we were not the only ones in this situation, and if you were in the mood to count your blessings you could find plenty of them. There was the relatively modest rent, of course, which had saved us thousands of pounds over the years; the park was a ten-minute stroll away; Molly took the bus to her school, while Ed and I walked or cycled in separate directions to ours. I had nothing to complain about.

  Why, then, on that Saturday afternoon, as Ed frowned at his malfunctioning All Saints software and I lugged the laundry hamper from bathroom to kitchen, was I suddenly feeling so discontented with my lot?

  ‘I bet they live in one of those big houses on The Rise,’ I told Ed.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Channings.’

  ‘Who are the Channings?’

  I sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll ask Gayle. She’ll know.’ Indeed, Gayle kept herself so thoroughly abreast of local gossip that when we’d worked together at Rushbrook Primary I’d sometimes had to tune out of her bulletins to keep myself from spontaneous combustion.

  Definitely The Rise, I thought, closing the washing-machine door with a mildly resentful thump. Overlooking the southern edge of the park and with views of the city, The Rise was hands-down the best street in Elm Hill and the new lido would raise its status even higher. I had visions of snakeskin sandals kicked off in a huge central hall, a softly lit mirror for the adjustment of blonde loveliness on departure. There would not be, as there was in our entrance nook, a noticeboard pinned with calendar, timetables and a chore schedule, set dead centre above a shoe-storage unit checked daily for disorderliness. (About as welcoming as an army barracks, my mother said, the last time she visited, adding, ‘I don’t know who’s worse, you or Ed.’)

  ‘I think our focus needs to be our pensions,’ Ed had concluded eventually on our prospects for home ownership.

  Imagine being (relatively) young and your husband saying that! And imagine being able to suggest no better idea for a shared raison d’être, not when you were as busy as you were pairing shoes, separating coloureds from whites and generally bringing control to bear on systems that would have thrived perfectly well on their own. It was pitiful, truly.

  All of this is, I think, important background.

  3

  Sunday, 28 June

  ‘You know what?’ I said to Molly. ‘How about we just do this straight away before it becomes a big thing?’

  Honed over the course of a decade, my tone neither coaxed nor demanded, only neutrally suggested – ‘big thing’ was not ‘Big Thing’. Her objections I pre-empted deftly: ‘Just you and me. No little exercises. We’ll sit right at the back and we won’t stay long.’ I no longer made such rookie errors as asking what the worst that could happen was. As far as she was concerned, it was the very worst.

  Even so, I wasn’t expecting her to agree quite so readily to a trip to the lido.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, with a sigh forceful enough to lift a strand of hair. (Like mine, hers was neither dark nor light, neither straight nor curly; recently she had begun blaming me openly for its lack of distinct identity.)

  ‘Really? That’s great, darling.’ I guessed she must have been expecting the proposal and had decided that if she humoured me this once I might not ask again and she’d have her summer to herself.

  In the same spirit of getting it over and done with, I drove, which was a mistake because the roads off The Rise were fully parked and soon we had circled almost for as long as it would have taken us to walk. As I hunted, Molly gazed into her lap, ominously silent. Her chin sank low, fringe dipping over her eyes; it was as if she hoped it might cover her whole face and screen her from the rest of the world. At last, I spotted a Fiat 500 vacating a space by the side wall of one of the large villas I’d ascribed to Lara Channing, and reversed my old Mazda into it.

  ‘Finally.’ Molly groaned with a world-weariness I knew to conceal nerves. Delays did not sit well with her: they were unscheduled minutes in which she might work herself up to a change of mind. As we approached the lido entrance, she remained a careful pace behind me. You could already hear the screams.

  Inside, the terraces teemed (I read later that a thousand people went through the turnstile that first full weekend), almost every square inch patch-worked with towels and bags and picnics, and the general explosion of paraphernalia that came with a family day out. It felt more like a lake than a pool, so vast was that expanse of aquamarine, its straight edges made jagged by the heads and shoulders of bathers clinging to the side rail. I had imagined us taking a pair of deckchairs, Molly’s angled strategically away from the water, but all were occupied. We settled instead at the rear of the far terrace next to the exit turnstile, Molly sitting with her back to the wall, as if the pool were a terrifying precipice to be kept at extreme distance.

  Which, to her, it was: 50 by 25 metres of water, with a depth that increased from one to 2.5 metres. I had no idea of the cubic volume but suspected that she did: before this outing, she would have armed herself with all published facts about Elm Hill lido. I suspected, too, that she was itching to get up and give the turnstile a push, check that it was in working order in the event of an emergency evacuation. And the reason her gaze strayed frequently to the gate that divided the café from the pool area? She was scanning for the nearest alternative exit route, having noted that re-entry to the reception area was impossible, thanks to steel barriers.

  It goes without saying that she was the only young person here behaving in this way. The rest thronged at both shallow and deep ends, noise levels pitched somewhere between frenzied and hysterical.

  ‘No wonder everyone’s screaming,’ I said. ‘It’s only eighteen degrees in the water, according to the noticeboard.’ I spoke in a we-know-better tone, as if the temperature were the reason she wouldn’t be going in. Enabling, a therapist would call it, or collusion, as Ed would have it, but for God’s sake, wasn’t it really just compassion? Love?

&n
bsp; ‘OK, Molls? I’m so glad we’ve come.’

  She must have noticed the gratitude in my voice because she gave me a co-operative half-smile before extracting her book from her bag. Without further comment, I began pulling off my clothes. The sooner I swam on our behalf, the sooner we could persuade ourselves that it was acceptable to leave, in spite of the steep entrance charge that had encouraged others to make a day of it. For us, thirty minutes would be a success.

  Dodging the pumping legs and wayward elbows of small children, I lowered myself into the shallow end, sucking in my breath as coldness crept over my bottom half. Across the water on the café terrace, vast umbrellas swelled with the breeze; overhead, a plane scratched a pale line across the blue. Still delaying, I waded to the roped swimming lanes with my arms held high, as if navigating a river with my possessions balanced on my head, and only when laughed at directly by a group of teenagers, who might or might not have been past pupils of mine, did I submerge fully.

  There was an instant surge of pleasure. In the last ten years, when I’d all but eliminated swimming from my life, I’d forgotten its curative charms, the optimism it stirred; I’d forgotten that I associated it with joy. Holidays in Devon when I was very young and my parents still enjoyed each other’s company; my honeymoon in Greece, with that mesmerizing blur where turquoise infinity pool met the silver-blue of the Ionian Sea; and, steeped in nostalgia of a more unsettling kind, the summer spent in my grandparents’ village in Hampshire, when a neighbour’s daughter and I had disappeared for hours every day to the bathing pond in the woods.

  After the first length, I looked across to check on Molly, glimpsed her face in profile, her expression stoic rather than miserable, which was as much as I could hope for. She could break through at any time, the therapists said. Never give up. And yet, with each new expert, we had given up.

  Resting already, I touched my midriff under the water, felt the extra inches I affected not to loathe, evidence of another long winter – and spring – of staff-room snacking, birthday cake after birthday cake, Friday treats every day of the week. At Elm Hill Prep, Christmas and Easter meant high-end chocolates from twenty-four sets of top-earning parents and, well, it was rude to refuse them.