The Swimming Pool

by Louise Candlish

  He looks grim. ‘Well, this is going to be a setback, to say the least. Maybe take us back to square one.’

  ‘If we’re lucky.’ And we are lucky, I remind myself, compared to the Channings. At the thought, my heart begins to pound, a huge and frightening sensation. As if in objection, Molly’s breathing grows a little more insistent and our heads turn instantly to monitor it. Only when it quietens again do we continue.

  ‘Seriously,’ Ed says, ‘it would have been better if she’d never stopped being terrified. Then she wouldn’t have been there in the first place.’

  None of us would.

  There is silence, broken by a hungry grumble from the hot-water pipe.

  ‘Where were you?’ he asks again. ‘Who were you with? Obviously not our daughter.’ And I catch a faint note underlying the suspicion, a note of patience run dry, of love lost.

  Undone, I mutter that I need the loo, an easy way to end this before I say the wrong thing. Before I give myself away. Stepping from Molly’s room into the hallway, the flat feels foreign, as if we’ve borrowed it from strangers, as if there are corners and shadows I’ve never noticed before.

  In the bathroom, the first thing I see is the dress I wore to the party, sitting in a heap on the tiled floor. I changed it for jeans and a shirt at the first opportunity, hours ago, or perhaps minutes, I’m not sure. Time is different tonight: it thickens and clots, rolls and spins. I can’t trust it.

  Who were you with? Obviously not our daughter.

  And now I think the thought I’ve been suppressing these last hours: This is twice I’ve let you down, my love.

  Twice I’ve not protected you as I should.

  5

  Tuesday, 30 June – nine weeks earlier

  On weekdays after work, Ed and I took it in turns to walk Sarah’s cockapoo, Inky, for her, mostly to offer practical assistance during her recuperation, partly to assuage our sporadic urges to acquire a pet of our own. Because we all knew that wasn’t going to happen – we would never be able to suffer the hairs and the dirt.

  As with most other Steele activities, strict protocol was in force and whichever one of us did not dog-walk was expected to cook dinner and take care of any other domestic chores. When my mother had made that comment about not knowing which of us was worse, the answer was easy: neither, because Ed and I liked order equally. The difference was in motivation. For him, it was about efficiency, time management. Divide and conquer, he would say, whenever we drew up schedules or cross-referenced diaries, sometimes punching the air for effect. (When he did this, I could see how he might be mocked by his students if he wasn’t as nice-looking as he was.)

  Keen for her to benefit from the fresh air, I always invited Molly on my walks, though she invariably declined on homework grounds (what parent who happened also to be a teacher was going to challenge that excuse?). Gayle sometimes came, however, depending on whether or not she was on a weight-loss mission, and this evening, with the school holidays only weeks away and the new parading ground of the lido on our minds, we both were.

  ‘Weight doesn’t mean a thing,’ she said – with two teenage daughters she was as vigilant as I was about judgements on body image. ‘But I’d prefer it to be ten stone that doesn’t mean a thing, not thirteen.’

  ‘I agree.’ Actually, I liked Gayle the way she was, approachably sized and animated of feature. She had a heart-shaped face and narrow nose that flattened slightly at its tip, and the kind of faintly bulbous eyes that looked wonderfully emphatic in heavy make-up (though bare, as they were this evening, gave the unsettling impression of their owner being caught mid-throttle).

  ‘Do you think we should sign up for this early bird aqua-aerobics?’ she asked, a little out of puff as we took a break at the lido noticeboard. It was an uncomfortably humid evening, the slow-rising, ripe-smelling humidity that you know isn’t going to break in time to deliver a good night’s sleep. The buttercups, normally on springs in late June, were heavy-headed. ‘Eight a.m. isn’t too crazy, is it? The café won’t be open that early so there’ll be no one to witness the horror of our exposed flesh.’

  I remembered the teenagers laughing at me on my first outing, and my shame under Lara’s gaze. ‘Well, we could certainly try,’ I said. A few weeks ago, I would have scoffed, referenced one of our failed pursuits of previous summers (Zumba, transcendental meditation, bridge), but now I felt only the same gush of optimism I’d had on seeing the picture of the Channings on the community website. How lucky we were to have the long holiday ahead – that sacred stretch when hope triumphed over experience to make you believe you’d be free for ever.

  ‘Of course, you’ll have the place to yourself soon,’ Gayle said. ‘How long between your lot breaking up and the release of gen pop?’ (Gen pop: general population. American prison parlance was used often at All Saints and even at Rushbrook, though not at EHP. The day I heard my new head, Mrs Godwin, referred to as a screw would be the day the British monarchy was overthrown.)

  ‘Just over a week and a half,’ I said. ‘We’ll be here with our verbal reasoning papers and iPhones and I don’t know what else – cellos? This sounds good, Gayle, look – a Last Day of Summer party.’ I pointed to a poster for a ticketed event to be held on the August bank-holiday weekend. Cocktails … Live music … Limited tickets still available!

  ‘Dress code: the French Riviera,’ Gayle read. ‘Hmm. The last time Craig and I went to the South of France it rained and we wore anoraks. I seem to remember he slipped and twisted his knee.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll come, Natalie?’

  ‘What?’ I was startled both by the question and the sudden quickening in my veins. ‘Oh, hello, Lara.’

  Presumably having emerged from the nearby exit turnstile, she had come to a halt rather close to us, near enough for me to catch the scent of chlorine on her skin. I had not seen her face uncovered before, or at such close range, and I experienced for the first time the kind of persuasive velvet-brown gaze that sells washing-up liquid and frozen peas, its blink designed not for the owner’s physiological needs but to give the beholder a moment’s relief.

  ‘How are you?’ I said, and – I couldn’t help it – I felt a shiver of proprietorial pride.

  ‘Exhausted.’ Lara took an illustrative deep breath. ‘I’ve just done fifty lengths.’

  ‘Wow.’ Remembering the measly six of my own first effort, I didn’t need to pretend to be impressed by this.

  A second blonde strolled up alongside her, possibly the friend I’d seen cradling her dog like a newborn. While not in the same league as Lara in appearance, she was certainly in the one above mine, her figure the right side of athletic, jawbone enviably sharp. The whites of her eyes were pink from the water, the irises glowing the pale blue that can look unearthly, even sinister, if the emotion is wrong.

  ‘This is my friend Angie,’ Lara said. ‘We’ve been toasting ourselves all afternoon.’

  ‘In both senses of the word,’ Angie added, miming the raising of a wine glass, and I stopped myself voicing the hope that they’d done their swimming before drinking, given that alcohol was a contributory factor in at least twenty per cent of deaths by drowning.

  Both women were in waffle robes, as if leaving a hotel spa for their guestrooms, which appeared to confirm my hunch about a residence on The Rise. Since it was a weekday in term time, I deduced that they had neither conventional jobs nor any requirement to be at home feeding children or supervising homework. In Lara’s case, perhaps the head-turning teen broke away from practising poses in the mirror to put fish fingers in the oven for the little boy. More likely there was an au pair or a housekeeper – no, both, a whole staff of helpers.

  I introduced Gayle, who gave a grudging smile, and at once Lara returned her attention to me. ‘So you’ll come to the party?’ she said, and I noted the ‘come’ instead of ‘go’, as if the invitation were personal. ‘I’m helping organize it,’ she explained. ‘You and Ed should definitely come. And Molly too, of course. We wan
t a family vibe.’

  I was flattered that she had remembered Ed’s and Molly’s names – and mine, for that matter. Perhaps it was the effects of exercise, perhaps the contrast with her tipsy friend, but she had a less capricious air about her today, and the sincerity of her invitation prompted an unusual honesty in my response. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I’d like to, but we don’t come to the pool often, not as a family.’

  ‘Why not?’ Lara and her friend waited, confident that there was no problem I could propose that they couldn’t solve on the spot. By my side, Gayle was restless, poised to move on. She didn’t expect me to explain my family difficulties to members of a different tribe, especially not one so remote from our own. As if to reiterate our less upmarket credentials, Inky strained the lead to sniff a patch of half-dried urine at a nearby bin.

  ‘It’s Molly,’ I said. ‘She suffers from aquaphobia.’

  ‘Aquaphobia? What – is that like hydrophobia?’ It was Angie who spoke, her forehead crinkling only at the hairline, which pointed to Botox or some other desperate measure.

  ‘Not quite. It’s a fear of being in the water. She’s still willing to drink the stuff, she just doesn’t want to get into it.’

  ‘But that’s terrible.’

  Lara’s reaction was rather more contained. ‘Oh, yes, you said before she didn’t like the water. Is it really that bad, Natalie? An actual phobia?’

  ‘It’s pretty bad. But it could be worse. It could be severe allergies. Or agoraphobia would be more restrictive.’ My brain held a league table of phobias, ranked not only in order of severity of risk to life but also of hardest to hide.

  ‘So how does that work with swimming at school?’ Angie asked.

  ‘There is no swimming at her school,’ I said. That was hard for them to understand: the independent schools their kids likely attended would have sports facilities galore, including an indoor pool. ‘It’s not compulsory at state secondary schools. In primary school, she had a medical exemption.’

  ‘What about when you go to the beach?’ Lara said, in an earnest tone. ‘Is it the same in the sea?’

  Sensing Gayle smoulder, I knew she had automatically interpreted this as some superior allusion to Mauritius or Antigua, exotic family idylls thrown off kilter by the inconvenience of a reluctant snorkeller in the family. And yet intuition told me that Lara was not completely ignorant of the hardships of other people. Her eyes were unusually expressive of empathy, expressive in fact of considerably more pain than I was currently feeling.

  ‘It’s the same, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘To be honest, we don’t go. We try to work around it, have different kinds of holidays.’

  Angie continued to frown. ‘But wouldn’t it be better to tackle it head-on than avoid it like that?’

  Gayle made a disapproving huffing noise just as Lara said, ‘Poor you,’ and placed a hand on my upper arm. Her touch was very gentle, the thumb moving in a faint, comforting caress, and I felt myself colour at the intimacy. ‘And Ed, of course. That must be very difficult for both of you, very worrying.’ She sighed, as if personally burdened, before withdrawing her hand and stepping from us. ‘Anyway, we’ll leave you to it. I’m sure you don’t want to be waylaid like this when you’re walking your dog. Isn’t he adorable? So bouclé.’

  Our parting left me with the absurd sensation that I’d received the healing touch of Mother Teresa.

  As Gayle and I strode off, legs working far faster now (there was nothing like an encounter with richer, thinner women to urge you towards the pain barrier), I didn’t have to wait long for her explosive verdict.

  ‘Who do they think they are? “Tackle it head-on”! Like you haven’t thought of that yourself. You’re the girl’s mother!’

  ‘They meant well,’ I said. ‘It’s hard for people to get to grips with Molly’s situation when most kids love the water so much.’

  Gayle changed tack. ‘Seriously, though, she spoke as if she knew you really well. I can’t bear that kind of overfamiliarity, can you?’

  Seeing her scowl, I felt an unexpected flare of impatience. She had a tendency to condemn everything that failed to conform to her life view; Ed was the same, always so sure of his position. Normally I went along with them, today I thought, hang on, wasn’t this a case of inverted snobbery? No more attractive than the conventional kind, at the end of the day. ‘Well, we did chat at the lido on Sunday, so I suppose it’s not that overfamiliar.’

  ‘That explains how she knew Ed’s and Molly’s names.’ She tutted. ‘She was like the lady of the manor checking on her peasants. Your dog is bouclé! I mean, come on, why do they feel the need? No wonder the other Westbridge mums call them the Noblesse.’

  I chuckled. ‘That’s a good one.’ Westbridge was a more-expensive-than-most private school in Battersea with a liberal-arts bias, just the kind of school I would have expected the Channing children to attend. ‘Every school gate has its alphas,’ I added, ‘even Rushbrook. How do you know all this, anyway?’ (A ridiculous question: Gayle knew everything.)

  ‘Are you kidding? Everyone knows Lara. She’s our new local celeb. You know she helped get the pool reopened?’

  ‘I gathered that, yes.’

  ‘Apparently she was some sort of competitive swimmer before she was an actress, hence it being her pet project.’

  ‘She’s an actress?’

  ‘Well, was,’ Gayle said, with a faint sneer. ‘Don’t you remember, she was in that mermaid film in the early nineties? A kind of British Splash. She was still a teenager. And then she was in a soap briefly, plus those nauseating ads for some bacteria-fighting yoghurt.’

  Not frozen peas, after all. I did some quick arithmetic. ‘So she must be, what, early forties now? Not much younger than us.’

  ‘Looks a lot younger, though,’ Gayle said crossly. There’d been a stinging incident recently when her electrician had mistaken her older sister for her younger. ‘Must be all that swimming. Fifty lengths? That’s two and half kilometres and she didn’t look remotely knackered. Life’s not fair, is it?’

  But I refused to admit defeat so easily. ‘Come on, we’ll be getting just as much exercise in the holidays when we start our regime. It’ll be a fresh start. Oops, not by the picnic, Inky …’

  Gayle watched me scoop Inky’s poop as a pair of picnickers averted their eyes in disgust. ‘Anyone would think you liked them,’ she said. ‘Lara and her friend.’

  ‘Well, I see no reason to dislike them.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  And for the second time in five minutes, I had cause to note my surprising change of position. After all, hadn’t I been suitably snarky to Lara during our first conversation? At least until she’d said she liked me – I think I’m going to get on very well with you, Natalie (yes, I remembered the exact phrasing). Was that all it had taken to win me over? All the advice I gave Molly about beauty being only skin deep and the evils of vanity, and here I was in my mid-forties, responding to the fleeting favours of the pretty girls in the most predictable fashion imaginable.

  Or maybe I was just keeping an open mind. Harnessing that new optimism.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told Gayle truthfully, and dropped the bag of dog poo into the nearby bin. ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

  July 2003

  Molly’s was not an inexplicable problem: it had its known beginning. What we did not know, and what made it so difficult to manage, was how it would end. Whether or not it would.

  It had begun when she was eighteen months old, with an incident in a toddlers’ pool in a park in the Surrey town where I’d grown up and where my mother had remained after her divorce from my father.

  Molly had been paddling happily, playing with her stack of plastic pots, filling and pouring and splashing. It was her favourite activity, the pool a perfect mid-calf depth, and when visiting Mum in good weather we came at least once a day. Seated at the edge with my feet in the water, aware of the deepening midday heat, I reached behind me into my duffel bag for my
phone and saw that it was time for us to leave and return to the house for lunch. Tugging at the towel, rolled up tight and crammed into the bag, I paused, distracted, before adjusting the toggle and pulling it free.

  When I next looked, the world had tipped. Molly was no longer standing but lying on her front, her left arm by her side, the right bent but too weak to lift her body on its own. Her head was twisted to the side and raised in a bid for air, ear and cheek exposed but nostrils submerged. The roar of adrenalin was as powerful as a jet engine. I leaped forward and scooped her up, clumsy but fast. ‘Molly? Oh, God! What happened?’

  In my arms her body was rigid and her face contorted with such terror it seemed to alter her identity and I stared for a second as if at a stranger’s child. After a pulse-stopping delay, she opened her mouth and wailed. It had an alien new sound to it, a tone of primal shock, almost like the first scream after birth.

  ‘Is she all right?’ A woman had appeared next to me, her own child in her arms, dark splashes of water on her clothes from having dashed across the pool to help.

  ‘I think she’s fine,’ I said, pressing Molly to me, ‘just a bit upset.’ Blood churned in my head, made our voices remote and unreal. ‘She’s coughing. That must be a good thing?’

  That was when the trembling began, huge, wild convulsions, as if her muscles had a life of their own, her flesh as hysterical as her voice.

  ‘I wonder if you should get her checked out at A & E,’ the woman said, ‘just to be on the safe side. Who knows what bugs there are in this water?’ The kind soul even offered to drive us, saying her car was right near the gate, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear a chaperone and, crying my thanks through Molly’s screams, tore the greater distance to my own car. I drove to the hospital barefoot, my pumps abandoned by the pool.