The Swimming Pool

by Louise Candlish

  I was pitifully out of shape and managed only four or five more lengths before, afraid my lungs would burst, I climbed out.

  It was as I was drying myself – casually out of range of Molly, who had been known to shrink, even scream, if dripped on – that I saw Lara Channing again, passing through the gate from café to sundeck with a boy of eight or nine by her side. Her hair was piled on her head in a careless beehive, thick fringe tumbling over the gold-rimmed mirrored aviators perched on her nose. She wore a pale-blue sarong crossed at the chest and tied behind the neck, a style that accentuated her well-toned shoulders and delicate collarbone. I wanted both to watch and avoid watching when she removed it for swimming and revealed that photogenic, age-defying figure, the kind I had never come close to owning even in my twenties.

  I focused on Molly. ‘What are you reading?’ Then, when she showed me the somewhat juvenile title: ‘Didn’t you read that years ago?’

  She shrugged, didn’t need to explain. Re-reading books for younger children was a comfort, a safety behaviour. An imagination alert to danger – hypervigilance, they called it – could not cope with anything too complicated and now was not the time to begin Crime and Punishment. Her posture was even tenser than on arrival, sweat visible on her forehead and lip, and I felt the rush of tenderness I always did when her fear became tangible, the longing to draw her close and murmur protective words. But I’d learned she didn’t like that.

  ‘I had an idea,’ I said instead. ‘Dad knows the café manager, Liam. Why don’t we ask him to arrange a behind-the-scenes tour? See how it all works? They’ll have state-of-the-art systems, I’d have thought, or maybe they’ve restored the original plumbing.’

  Her expression was unyielding. ‘You said no little exercises, Mum.’

  ‘It’s not an exercise, I just thought it might be interesting. You know, historically.’

  ‘Historically,’ she echoed, with teenage disdain.

  ‘Well, it was just a suggestion.’

  It was then that I became aware of a pair of bare feet at the edge of my outspread towel. They were narrow and fine-boned with pretty little toes and nails painted a glittering black. Above, silver and green threads had been worked into the blue fabric of the sarong, a raised woven texture that I wanted to rub between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Hi again,’ a voice said and, though I’d never heard it before, I would have known even without those visual clues that it belonged to her. It was the sultry, rough-grained voice of a lifelong habitué of some smoke-filled speakeasy – or at least a woman with a sore throat – a voice that didn’t try to please so much as expect to.

  I looked up, unable to make direct eye contact thanks to the reflective lenses of her sunglasses (Ray-Bans; the ones the previous day had been Gucci – evidently there was a collection). By her side, the small blond boy smiled down at us with the self-confidence of a young ambassador. I was familiar with the type from my year-four class.

  ‘We saw you in the café yesterday,’ she said. ‘I was here with my husband, Miles.’

  ‘Oh, right. OK.’ Under her deluxe gaze, I adjusted my sitting position so my thighs didn’t splay so much, sucked in my stomach, which barely helped; you could suck in muscle but you could not suck in adipose tissue. My swimsuit was royal blue with white piping and now I wished it was plain black or, better still, that I was not fat. I’ll swim every day, I resolved. I’ll come after work – no, not enough time, plus there was Sarah’s dog to walk. When term breaks up, that’s when I’ll start. Every morning, no excuses.

  While these thoughts chased one another in circles, Lara had begun smiling in a perfect pink crescent that made dimples. ‘Your husband is a teacher at All Saints, they tell me. I bet the girls love him.’

  ‘Well …’ Though I didn’t look at Molly, I could easily imagine her expression at this declaration, not to mention the suggestive tone. ‘As much as any maths teacher can be loved.’ I wondered how Lara Channing knew Ed was a teacher at All Saints. She was not a parent there, of that I was more certain than ever.

  She tipped her head a fraction, as if I’d tempted her to break an important confidence, which caused strands of blonde fringe to curve over the sunglasses. ‘He looks a bit like Alain Delon, we think.’

  We think, they tell me. She was utterly self-assured.

  ‘Has anyone else said that?’ she demanded. ‘I like to think I’ve got a bit of a gift.’

  ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think people know who Alain Delon is, these days, do they?’ Indeed, I had only the vaguest notion myself: a French film star with dark hair and moody attitude. In any case, it seemed unlikely that Ed resembled a film star of any nationality or vintage. If he did, he’d hardly be married to someone like me. He’d be married to someone like her.

  ‘He was a famous actor in the sixties,’ Lara told Molly, who was regarding her with admirable sangfroid. ‘He was kind of like a young Michael Caine or maybe Terence Stamp. Cool, very cool. He’s in one of my all-time top ten French films from the sixties.’

  Cultured though I liked to think I was, I wasn’t sure I could name more than a handful of French films I’d seen in my whole life, much less be able to pick out ten favourites from a single decade. Nonetheless I sneered secretly at the phrase ‘all-time top ten’, which struck me as rather adolescent. Molly, meanwhile, only nodded, her expression knowing, even faintly doubtful, as if she watched Terence Stamp and Michael Caine films every day of the week and had her own opinions on them.

  ‘Belle de Jour?’ I suggested gamely. ‘The one with Catherine Deneuve?’

  Lara raised her pretty chin and laughed. It was a beautiful thing, melodious and commanding, and even amid the general clamour people turned their faces to heed its call. Her teeth were large, white and imperfect, with little gaps, and even that was charming, as if she had no time for impeccable dentistry, life being the carousel that it was. ‘No, he’s not in that. That was Jean Sorel, I think. The one I love is La Piscine.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve seen it,’ I said, grateful at least to be able to explain to Molly that la piscine was French for swimming pool.

  ‘I know,’ she replied crossly. ‘I’m not an idiot.’

  I sucked back a reprimand, mindful of the circumstances.

  ‘Well, you must see it,’ Lara told us. ‘Lust and deception in Saint-Tropez. Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. A classic.’

  At this the boy spoke for the first time: ‘My sister’s middle name is Romy.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Lara looked delighted with him, as if he’d named the capital of Mauritania. ‘After the actress, that’s why. Your middle name, my love, was inspired by Sinatra. Everett Frank Channing.’ She stooped to kiss the top of his head, and as her sunglasses slid down her nose, I caught a glimpse of oversized dark eyes smoky with kohl. She winked at me before pushing the sunglasses back into place. ‘Miles and I did look up whether Frank and Romy ever slept together. Hard to verify, it was the sixties, but if they’d ever been a proper couple, well, that would have been too weird.’

  Unlike discussing the sex lives of dead celebrities in front of small children: that was not weird. Clearly this woman did not buy into the prevailing parenting cult of the appropriate, which I had to admit Ed and I had raised to an art form. (Was it appropriate to give appropriateness quite so much value? Might it not on occasion be helpful to be inappropriate? This, genuinely, had once been a debate in our household.)

  Beside me, Molly’s cool had slipped and she was starting to gape – good news in that it meant she was being properly distracted from her preoccupation. The boy, Everett, likely used to this sort of talk, was less riveted. With a kindly pat on his mother’s hand, he left her side to stamp across people’s possessions to the pool’s edge and cannon-ball into the deep end with a tremendous splash. We were too far back for the spray to reach us but still Molly flinched.

  ‘You don’t like the water,’ Lara said to her, more in observation than query.

  ‘No. She hasn’t sinc
e she was little.’ I spoke for Molly even though Ed and I had agreed to stop doing so because she wasn’t an invalid, and if you couldn’t speak for yourself at thirteen, your parents had done a pretty poor job raising you. ‘So, this is quite a crowd, isn’t it?’ I said, changing the subject. ‘A runaway success, I’d say.’

  ‘It certainly is.’ With a languid movement, Lara brushed her hair from her eyes to view the crush. ‘But, my God, it’s been a long time coming. There were so many times I almost threw in the towel, no pun intended.’

  That was how I understood that she had been not only the most photogenic participant of the inaugural swim but also instrumental in the restoration project as a whole. And yet she did not make her remark as a boast or even with any particular pride, only in the casual assumption that I would know full well who she was and what it was she had done. She was less queen bee than citizen queen.

  ‘I’m not sure I know your name,’ she said, and when I told her she was unexpectedly pleased, clapping her hands together and lacing her fingers in delight. ‘Well, there you go! His first wife was called Nathalie! The one he left Romy for.’

  I looked at her, bewildered.

  ‘Delon, I mean. Poor Romy, she was utterly heartbroken. I don’t think she ever really recovered.’ Her attitude was one of true sorrow, as though these people were good friends of hers. She was, I thought, quite bonkers. ‘Did your Alain leave someone for you?’ she asked.

  ‘Not that I know of, no. And he’s called Ed, actually.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Will your little boy be all right in the water on his own?’

  She didn’t turn a hair. ‘Oh, totally, he swims like a fish.’

  ‘And is your daughter here with you?’

  ‘Somewhere, yes, with her little band of chumettes.’

  ‘We saw you in the paper,’ Molly piped up to my surprise. ‘You were wearing those old-fashioned swimsuits.’

  ‘We were!’ And Lara rewarded her with the same dazzling smile she’d bestowed on her son for remembering his sister’s name. ‘Not a bad shot, was it, but I’m a bit ambivalent about it now, to tell you the truth. Apart from anything else, it’s only gone and brought another scout out of the woodwork.’

  ‘Scout?’ I assumed she didn’t mean the ever-prepared kind that camped in the woods and strove to make the world a better place.

  ‘Yes, bloody model agencies. You know, she’s even been approached getting on the school coach. She’s barely fifteen! It should be against the law. It’s hardly better than pimping or grooming.’

  This was too much. Quite apart from the fact that Ed and I raised such adult and unsavoury subjects with Molly only after careful rehearsal, how much more arrogant complacency could one parent fit into a statement? A daughter so beautiful that model agencies fought over her, pestering her as she boarded a private coach to an independent school (only the independents had their own coaches, the termly cost being considerably more than was allocated by the state for a child’s lunch); and a parent so well off, so principled, she could afford to be dismissive of such approaches.

  ‘My heart bleeds,’ I said. ‘What a terrible cross for her to have to bear.’

  ‘Mum,’ Molly objected and I bit down my smile. The little betrayer was already siding with some beautiful stranger against her own flesh and blood.

  She needn’t have worried, however, because after a tiny moment of surprise Lara began giggling. ‘I think I’m going to get on very well with you, Natalie,’ she said, in a flirtatious drawl, and I undid my previous good work by being thrilled that my little rebellion had impressed her.

  As a sudden afterthought, she asked, ‘Are you a teacher as well, Natalie?’

  ‘I am, actually.’

  ‘At All Saints, like Alain?’

  ‘Ed. No, I teach year four at Elm Hill Prep.’

  ‘Oh, yes, across the park. I’ve heard good things about it.’ And she gave me a last interested look before taking her leave.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw her trade kisses with a couple at the edge of the café terrace before joining a female friend at the same plum table she’d occupied the day before. Its surface was scattered with phones, ashtray and cigarettes, ice bucket with champagne bottle and several glasses – no kale smoothies today – and all of this, along with the small dog sitting on the friend’s lap in defiance of the no-dogs signs around the site, conferred an aura of roped-off VIP glamour on the arrangement.

  The supervision of her son was evidently to be managed from afar and with a drink in hand. As the waitress approached to refill their glasses, Lara beamed up at her with exaggerated gratitude – ‘You’re an angel!’ I lip-read – and her shoulders sagged like Odysseus returned, though all she’d done was pick her way across the decking to Molly and me and make a few eccentric remarks.

  I didn’t ask myself why she should have done this when she didn’t know us, any more than I’d questioned with any real weight how she’d informed herself of my husband’s profession and place of work. No, her idiosyncratic line in conversation was enough to tell me she did as she pleased and that, thanks to the dumb luck of being more attractive than the rest of us at an age when only the attractive retained any societal relevance, she got away with it.

  Which both irritated and impressed me.

  That evening, Molly and I Googled Alain Delon, and the images we found made us rock with laughter. To think of Ed being likened to this brooding Gallic god! Then I thought to bring up images of Delon at the age of forty-five and I saw there was a likeness of sorts: Ed could have been his less blessed, less tormented brother or cousin, an offering from a low-grade lookalike agency (perhaps a scout – someone with a ‘gift’, like Lara’s – would approach him as he boarded the number 68 bus).

  ‘We met a fan of yours at the lido today,’ I told him, when he came into the kitchen to see what all the hilarity was about.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lara Channing. The one sitting near us in the café yesterday.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You do. I showed you her picture in the Standard last week?’

  ‘Oh, that one. The self-publicizing blonde.’

  ‘Exactly. Well, she’s decided you look like that old French movie star, Alain Delon.’

  ‘She said that,’ Molly confirmed. Sometimes she and Ed double-checked information with one another as if I were not a reliable source in my own right.

  Not that Lara had been the first to note Ed’s relative good looks – he was a little more handsome than most men of his age and type, and I don’t deny there was a reflected glory in that, especially when meeting new people. There must be something about her if she’s with him, they thought. But once they got to know us they understood the true inversion: in spite of his handsomeness, Ed behaved as if he were no less ordinary than his wife. ‘He distrusts flamboyance,’ his late mother had told me, on our first meeting, and the manner in which she said it – shrill, provocative, loud enough to be heard in the next street – made no further explanation necessary.

  As for my first impression: with reasons of my own to desire conformity, a lack of exhibition, I’d known an exact match when I’d found one.

  ‘Let’s have a look.’ Ed viewed the images with commendable bafflement, enlarging one in which a sunlit Delon, hair swept casually from a furrowed brow, cigarette between his fingers, glowered menacingly into the mid-distance. ‘I think she must be overdue an optician’s appointment.’

  I laughed. I’d never given my style of laughter a moment’s thought, but now it struck me as inferior to Lara’s ringing instrument, expressive not so much of pleasure as of a mean-spirited crowing. How had I not noticed before? Was that how I’d sounded to Lara?

  ‘We talked to her at the lido today,’ Molly said, her pride unmistakable. It struck me that it was the first time I’d heard her utter the word ‘lido’.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ Ed said. ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘She’s really nice.’

  ‘She’s very
…’ I searched for the word, careful not to criticize in front of Molly ‘… she’s very boho.’

  Ed made a face and closed the image of Delon to expose the wallpaper image of a pre-pubescent, pre-sarcastic Molly that never failed to cause a sentimental pang. ‘Beware of boho,’ he said. ‘It’s just another word for immoral.’

  ‘Her daughter’s a model,’ Molly said, undeterred.

  ‘Could be,’ I corrected, ‘but not allowed by her parents.’

  ‘Pleased to hear it,’ Ed said. ‘Modelling is not a career to aspire to. It totally destroys your value system. Brains are what count.’

  Until you get Alzheimer’s, I thought, but since Molly’s grandparents and even a great-grandmother were still of sound mind I had yet to have occasion to explain that.

  One human tragedy at a time, Gayle always said, and it was as sound a parenting philosophy as any other I’d heard.

  4

  Monday, 31 August, 1 a.m.

  ‘What happened tonight?’ Ed asks, and he speaks under his breath as if he has no real expectation of being heard, much less answered. Then, more forcefully: ‘I’m not sure I understand, Nat.’

  Here we go. I press my fingers into the plush of a soft toy on Molly’s sofa – Rabbit, one of the few to survive the cull of puberty – before settling on my response. ‘She could have drowned, that’s what happened.’ And before I can help it, I’m bristling: I’m blaming him for what happened because he was there when I was not. He could have kept her closer, kept her safe.

  But, of course, he thinks the same of me. He always has.

  ‘No, I mean, where were you before that? I was looking for you – I looked everywhere.’

  I sit Rabbit on my lap. ‘It was a big crowd. I couldn’t find you either.’ My eyes return to Molly’s resting form. Her rumpled sheet rises with each pull of breath and she has writhed free of her blankets. Is she warm enough? The paramedics wrapped her in hypothermic blankets – should we have asked to keep them? Her party clothes were in a dripping bundle by the front door. ‘We need to concentrate on making sure she’s OK,’ I say. ‘And I don’t just mean physically.’