The Swimming Pool

by Louise Candlish

  I laughed, amused and a little smug, because I had no reason to doubt that my own place in the matriarchy was assured.

  At least, not until Georgia Channing came along.

  Tuesday, 14 July

  Mrs Bryony Foster, HYP, Dip Hyp, GQHP, and various other qualifications of the sort I’d grown wary over the years of accepting as evidence of anything much, greeted me with the calm, inclusive air I recognized from Mrs Godwin and other successful negotiators of the modern middle-class family. Even the environment resembled Elm Hill Prep, with its restored period features and wittily contrasting soft furnishings, presumably selected to remind paying customers of their own homes.

  ‘Are you coming in too, Mrs Steele?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, yes.’ I hesitated. ‘Or am I not supposed to?’ It had not occurred to me that Molly should attend the hypnotherapy session without me.

  ‘I’m happy with whichever you decide.’ She glanced at Molly with just a trace of significance. ‘It can sometimes make older children self-conscious to have a parent there. Molly might feel more relaxed if she’s not observed.’

  ‘I’d like to go in on my own, Mum,’ Molly said.

  ‘Really?’ She had a purposeful expression that I didn’t think I’d seen in previous times, though it was possible she was simply a better actor now that she was older. Whole days, perhaps weeks, of my life had been spent debating with Ed whether or not our daughter ‘really’ wanted to get better, so fiercely, so enduringly, did she fight the prospect of going near water. (Another fear birthed in those lightless, insomniac nights: did her continued suffering express some subconscious need to punish me?) We agreed that she did, but that time and again the phobia proved too powerful, the evil twin that perpetually triumphed.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, and that was that. How tall and solid she was as she walked from me into the consulting room, the opposite of a waif like Georgia Channing; from behind, from a distance, you could be forgiven for mistaking her for an adult.

  I waited with a copy of a health and fitness glossy, listening for the screams that told of unnatural goings-on, of confirmation that I had made a terrible mistake in letting her go into a room with a hypnotherapist, in coming here, in taking Lara’s advice in the first place. Gayle was right, what did she know about phobias? Her self-confidence was practically sociopathic, her own offspring demonstrably flawless. And hadn’t she said the recommendation had come from ‘asking around’? Around whom, exactly? Doubtless a circle of other privileged numpties with new-age leanings, women like Angie, who walked the streets in waffle robes and booked Reiki sessions for their dogs.

  I imagined Bryony’s voice on the other side of the door, chanting in Molly’s ear: Ignore your mother, she let you down very badly … What would emerge from Molly in return? She’d been too young to retain conscious memory of the original incident, all previous experts had agreed on that, but were they about to be overruled? This was a regressive therapy, after all.

  Then, inevitably, almost as if those maternal concerns had assembled expressly to conceal the thought: What if it were me in there? If experiences you genuinely couldn’t remember were extractable in this way, what about those you deliberately sought to suppress?

  Conveniently, I would require no answer of myself on this score for Bryony’s door was opening and Molly came strolling out. She looked undamaged, even cheerful.

  ‘How was it?’ I asked, noticing she held a cup of water and wondering if it had been used in the therapy.

  ‘It’s only been half an hour, Mum.’ She sipped the water.

  ‘It went very well,’ Bryony said, joining us. ‘Molly will tell you about it herself, but I’m confident we’re going to be able to make progress together.’ When Molly excused herself to visit the bathroom, she added, ‘I gather you have a new local pool. My advice is that you don’t take her there again until she suggests it herself.’

  I was heartened by the use of ‘until’ when she could have opted for the less committal ‘unless’. Paying, rebooking, I recognized old feelings, the foremost being gratitude that the burden of worry was being shouldered by someone better qualified than me. Was this, then, no different from the others? A necessary attempt at a cure rather than a faithful one?

  As always, the only true belief that mattered was Molly’s.

  ‘So was it like falling asleep?’ I asked her, as we walked towards Oxford Circus for the bus home.

  ‘It was more like feeling sleepy,’ she said.

  ‘What kind of thing did she say?’

  ‘Stuff.’

  (Stuff: the noun-sibling of ‘Whatever’. ‘We’ll assume you’re more willing to elaborate in your English essays,’ Ed would say.)

  ‘Are there any exercises to do?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘And you’re sure you’re happy to go back?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  It was a while since I’d been in the West End during rush-hour and, though there was movement and action in every direction, the clamour was less than I remembered. Black cabs moved with an almost sinister noiselessness and there was a marked absence of conversation since nearly everyone we passed walked with his or her head bowed, attention riveted to a phone screen. I was struck by how young the faces were – some looked only a few years older than Molly – with their smooth foreheads and richly pigmented hair. I wanted to urge them to look up and appreciate the world while they had attention to spare. Enjoy it! Discuss it! Then, all at once, I had a flare of the same fear I’d felt with Georgia, the sensation of hurtling away from my prime and towards death. I felt almost dizzy.

  It was the sun, I decided, surfacing. In the suburbs it consoled, here it punished, oppressed. I saw that Molly had shaken me off and was walking ahead as if alone. About to cross a one-way street, she too was looking at the screen of her phone, oblivious to those silent taxis.

  ‘Molly!’ I called in warning and she turned, cross with me for having fallen behind, cross with me for catching up. ‘Careful of the traffic,’ I said, falling into step again, slightly breathless.

  ‘I’m not a child,’ she protested.

  ‘People of all ages can get run over.’

  Just like people of all ages can drown.

  And the way she reacted, with a scowl of near revulsion, made me wonder if I’d said it out loud.

  Saturday, 18 July

  Not quite the early birds we’d aimed to be, Gayle and I met at eleven thirty on the first Saturday morning of the state-school holidays, some three hours after aqua-aerobics had finished. A veteran of four previous dips, I was not as melodramatic as she was in my assessment of the temperature.

  ‘Did you put a couple of tons of ice cubes in here before we arrived?’ she called to the lifeguard, as she inched along the edge, arms and shoulders still exposed, a method that I’d kindly pointed out only prolonged the agony.

  ‘It’ll warm up by August,’ he told us. He was the same good-looking one who’d approached me before, thinking me in difficulties, though I saw no reason to relate that humiliation to Gayle.

  ‘That’s no use to us now, is it?’ Her manner was flirtatious, and seeing the boy’s polite lack of understanding made me feel pity for her, for both of us.

  I was not the only one who’d put on weight over the long months of winter and spring, and we made heavy weather of the ten lengths we asked of ourselves. As we broke the surface and clambered out, I tried not to make associations with large, possibly injured, marine mammals. Sitting on our towels with coffee from the snack bar, both virtuous and miserable because we’d denied ourselves a flapjack to go with it, we had our backs to an excitable gaggle of teenagers on the edge of the sundeck. Into a sudden lull came the voice of the lifeguard we’d spoken to and, turning, I saw that he was issuing stern advice of some sort to the group. ‘No more, all right? I don’t want to see that kind of thing here again.’

  One of the boys, about sixteen and with the narrow waist and muscular development of a trained swimmer, glanced abo
ut to see who might have heard and caught my eye briefly before returning to his cohorts. The way he disregarded me was familiar to me from other encounters with young people who did not know me as a teacher or as the mother of a friend: just a forty-something woman of limited or no relevance.

  The lifeguard retreated, his face flushing, a reaction to the confrontation, I assumed, until I saw Georgia Channing hurrying towards him. She moved with a silent and arresting grace, rather like a sprite, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  ‘Hi, Matt!’ she sang, then, glancing over her shoulder, ‘Oh, hi, Natalie!’ Reaching the noisy group, she came to a halt, smiling hello. Without discussion, the kids gathered her into their heart and rearranged themselves, as if her presence had been required before they could properly settle.

  ‘Isn’t that the Channing girl?’ Gayle said.

  ‘It is. I met her the other day.’

  ‘She’s quite the queen bee, isn’t she?’

  Though this echoed precisely my own prejudices before I’d met her, I protested, ‘She’s actually very sweet. Not what you’d think at all.’

  ‘Really? I don’t believe that for a moment. She’ll be a member of the Noblesse in the making.’ Gayle made no attempt to disguise her dislike. It appeared that, on the matter of the Channings, she had made up her mind in advance.

  ‘Oh, Gayle.’

  ‘You said that exactly like you say “Oh, Ed”,’ she said, laughing.

  ‘How do I say “Oh, Ed”?’

  ‘You know, fond but dismissive. As if he’s a lost cause.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I said.

  ‘It is! Not that I’m one to talk. It’s a miracle I haven’t murdered Craig – he’s always so negative.’

  Not knowing quite where to start with those remarks, I took the path of least resistance and said nothing.

  On our way out, we happened to catch the eye of the young lifeguard, back in his chair, and I asked, curious, ‘What were they up to, that group over there?’

  He followed my gaze to the sundeck. ‘They play these stupid breath-holding games. I’ve had to tell them about it before.’

  ‘What – you mean swimming under water?’

  ‘Or just ducking under for as long as they can. Some of it’s swim-team stuff. We used to do it at my club – the coaches encouraged it to build lung capacity. But now we know it can cause shallow-water blackout.’

  ‘Sounds dangerous,’ I said.

  ‘It is. That’s why I’m here.’

  In spite of his elevated position, he spoke to us with the deference of a young man trained to respect his elders, and whereas in the past I would have appreciated the courtesy for the rarity it was, this time it was somehow dismaying, coming as it did so soon after the younger boy’s indifference.

  ‘What’s the longest someone can go?’ Gayle asked. ‘I don’t think I could hold my breath for longer than thirty seconds.’

  ‘My record was almost three minutes.’ If he was proud, it was only in a dubious, self-knowing way. ‘That’s about the limit without hyperventilating first. You have to bring your pulse down to do it for any real length of time. You know some German free-diver just did twenty-two minutes?’

  ‘Twenty-two minutes under water without breathing? I don’t believe that for a moment,’ Gayle said briskly.

  ‘It’s true,’ he said. And he almost added ‘Miss’, I could tell. Though I didn’t recognize him as a former pupil of mine or Ed’s, somehow he seemed to know we were teachers without needing to ask.

  ‘We’re old,’ I said to Gayle, as we were propelled through the turnstile. I had never seen the park so bucolic: the trees’ foliage was full, thick as wigs, the nettles temptingly velvet-soft, lethally chest-high. A suburban jungle. ‘I don’t know why I’m suddenly so aware of it, but I am.’

  ‘Baring all in public will do that to you,’ Gayle said. ‘But if it means remembering to breathe in and out at the correct intervals then I’m very happy to be old.’

  A sudden outburst of excitement followed us through the turnstile and I knew without looking back that it was Georgia’s group.

  10

  Monday, 20 July

  Unsurprisingly, Molly had made no request to return to the lido since our brief excursion together in June. When we walked past the main gates of the park together at the start of the holidays, I marvelled aloud at the trail heading towards it, its pilgrims’ shoulders heavy with swimming kit, supermarket carrier bags full of picnic lunch: ‘It’s like the path to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You know, in Spain. It’s a really famous pilgrimage.’

  ‘It’s just a pool,’ Molly said and her words, emotionless and hollow, made me shiver slightly. There not yet having been a second session with Bryony Foster, it was far too early to discuss progress and I was certainly not going to tempt Fate by voicing expectations. In any case, there were plenty of places for Molly to be besides the lido. As the daughter of teachers, she had no assumptions of her school holiday being idle. The first part would include a week of tennis, a stack of French worksheets (a holiday staple after it had been discovered that my year fours at Elm Hill Prep were as advanced as her year-eight class) and, naturally, extra maths. Later, in August, there would be a holiday with us in the New Forest and a week on her own in Stoneborough with my mother and grandmother.

  Needless to say, she objected to every last bit of it. ‘Can’t you just leave me alone to do what I like? Can’t I just go wild, like you used to in the olden days?’

  ‘I never went wild,’ Ed said, and then, when we accepted this without argument. ‘No need to protest quite so passionately, girls!’

  ‘We know you were a model citizen from birth,’ Molly drawled. Sometimes the adult-sounding intonation caught me unawares and I would startle, scrutinize her features, check she was still our child. ‘But Mum was naughty, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Oh, yes, your summer of sin,’ Ed said, smirking at me. ‘You were about Molly’s age, weren’t you?’

  ‘I think I was a bit younger,’ I said vaguely, though I knew very well I’d been exactly the age she was now. My ancient unease, usually suppressed, had prickled close to the surface lately. I didn’t like where this conversation was headed.

  ‘You were so lucky to be free,’ Molly proclaimed.

  ‘I was unsupervised,’ I corrected her, ‘and that’s not a good thing. I didn’t see my mum and dad for a month. I felt insecure, like no one would care if I got into trouble. Once I was back home again, I was fine.’ Was it only me who heard the rampant self-justification in this summary?

  Molly was watching me. She knew even less than Ed did about that ‘summer of sin’ and it was as easy for her to dismiss it as it was to profess a desire to emulate it. ‘You hung out with Mean Mel, didn’t you?’

  ‘That’s right.’ I couldn’t remember whether Mel had been awarded the sobriquet at the time or merely acquired it in the retelling, but she’d earned it all right, just as I had Nasty Nat.

  ‘What kind of trouble did you get into?’ she pressed.

  ‘I told you before: shoplifting, smoking …’

  ‘Note that it put her off both activities for life,’ Ed interjected.

  ‘What else?’

  Vigilant now, my mind sifted the minor crimes. ‘We played chicken with the traffic – that was stupid. There was one kid who very nearly got run over and the driver threatened to call the police, which gave us all a scare. And once we broke into a building site, climbed the scaffolding and dared each other to jump down on to a big mound of sand. It must have been twenty or thirty feet. We were very lucky we didn’t break our ankles.’

  ‘That was trespassing, by the way,’ Ed said. He liked the learning to be quite clear. ‘They could have got into trouble with the authorities even if they didn’t kill themselves through sheer idiocy.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Molly. Talk of death did not put her off. For someone afraid of the bathtub, she wa
s ghoulish in her love of other brands of misadventure. ‘So what were you meant to be doing?’

  I paused before admitting, ‘The adults thought we’d gone to the pond in the woods to swim. That’s where we went most days.’

  There was a catch in my voice – to speak of the pond was to have the empty spaces in me fill with anxiety sharp as hunger – and judging by Ed’s quick look, he had heard it. Of course he would think I was being careful not to insist on how much fun it was to go swimming with your friends and blurt out my wish that Molly could enjoy it too, though I was not. (In any case, the pond had had dark water, water you couldn’t see through, with a soft, muddy bed that your toes couldn’t rely on, and the expert in me knew that dark water was a whole other potential fear, more closely related to agoraphobia than aquaphobia.)

  ‘That was when you hid all the boys’ clothes, right?’ Molly said. ‘Even their trunks.’

  I forgot now why I’d once shared that particular detail – in warning, presumably, or in one of my talks about the developing body and respecting others’ privacy. ‘Only one boy at a time,’ I said, smiling both for her benefit and in the hope that it might trick my mind into subduing the agitation. ‘I’d hold him down and Mel would pull the trunks off. He’d have to beg, borrow or steal to get them back.’

  As a half-repellent nostalgia settled on me, I surprised myself by chuckling. For all the insecurities I’d experienced that summer, for all my shame and dread about the way it had ended, I retained a clear memory of laughing, and especially when torturing boys, of laughing so hard my whole chest ached. I could hear Mel’s voice, deepening with giggles as she swore at me to sit harder on our victims. I don’t think I had sworn before that summer.

  ‘Did the boys cry?’ Molly asked.

  ‘Once or twice, if they couldn’t find their clothes.’

  ‘This is starting to sound like my stag night,’ Ed said.

  ‘More like Lord of the Flies,’ Molly said, earning an approving look from Ed for having begun the reading list for year nine. ‘I think that was really horrible, Mum. Why did you do it?’