I admitted I was not.
‘I often get that,’ she said, shrugging. ‘People think they know me from their childhood. Or they come up to me in Waitrose and ask if I used to be a BBC weather girl. But you get used to the double-takes.’
‘I’ve had a few of those,’ I told her. ‘At least yours are because people like how you look.’
There must have been unintended self-pity in my voice because Lara seized my hand, brought her face so close that I could feel her breath on my cheek. ‘You don’t actually care about some old blemish, do you?’
I blinked, not yet used to her abrupt displays of fervour. ‘Not now, no. But I used to.’ It was strange: I’d gone months without giving my birthmark a thought, and here I was, drawing attention to it twice in the space of an hour. What would a psychologist say? That I was casting myself as Beast to Lara’s Beauty, perhaps. ‘Now I bare all quite happily,’ I added lightheartedly.
‘Talking of which, let’s get some more sun!’ Lara declared, dropping my hand. To my astonishment, she wrenched her kaftan over her head to reveal a black swimsuit with plunging lines. Her skin was the glossy caramel the media had taught us to desire above all other hues. ‘Come on, Natalie, don’t look so appalled, join me!’
I gaped. ‘Oh, no, I’m not wearing swim stuff, just ordinary underwear.’
‘Anything goes here, darling.’ And, flinging the kaftan on to the nearest chair, she took my hand once more and led me back out to the terrace. The teenagers had scattered and the adults made no comment about her having stripped, Angie absently removing her vest to reveal a bikini top. Seated, I pulled up my skirt an inch or two. As if in response to the bared skin, the sun grew hotter; it seemed to me to be almost at the point of eruption.
During my absence, Ed had once again become the centre of attention, Douglas and Andrew in particular seeming very struck by him. I imagined Lara telling them before our arrival, ‘Just you wait, boys. He’s so like Alain.’
If ‘Alain’ had considered views on the shockingly erratic grading of GCSEs.
‘I’m fascinated by those big comprehensives like All Saints,’ Andrew was saying. ‘Is it like on that TV series? Do the kids really speak to the teachers like that?’
‘And are they always having sex with each other?’ Douglas asked. ‘If you believe what they say in the papers, it’s Lolita in every classroom.’
Sozzled as he was, Ed was quick to object to this remark. ‘That depends which papers you read. Believe it or not, the idea is not to have an affair with your pupils, but to teach them your subject and get them through their exams.’
I hoped Ed wouldn’t mention Craig’s trials: Gayle (not to mention Craig himself) would be mortified.
‘What about you, Georgia?’ Douglas teased, and I saw that she was back, wine bottle in hand. ‘Any hot guys on the staff at Westbridge?’
Georgia burst out laughing, a sound that somehow incorporated both knowingness and innocence. In my drunkenness I wanted to gush admiration for her good humour, her sweetness, her poise.
‘Dougie, you know I would have told you already if there were,’ Lara said. ‘But there aren’t, are there, darling? Not since Mr Roddick left,’ she added, winking at Angie.
‘Ooh, Mr Roddick, I like the sound of him,’ Douglas said, and the laughter this provoked would have befitted Monty Python at the London Palladium, not least from me. When the others stopped, I found that I was still laughing. I had not been so drunk since Christmas. Why was I being so uninhibited today? I wondered a little wildly if the cocktails had absinthe in them or maybe that poppy-seed tea I’d read about in an article on the dangers of adolescent drinking.
‘Does she always take this long, Ed?’ Stephen said, the cue for more gaiety, resulting in Lara dropping her glass over the railing. There was a brief shocked silence at the tiny musical shattering below and then laughter rocked the terrace once more. Marthe was sent down to pick up the pieces.
Fearful perhaps that the party had lapsed into a more dangerously hedonistic phase, Ed suggested a Steele family departure and though I longed to stay I also knew it was in my best interests to quit while I was ahead. As we waited for Molly to reappear, Stephen treated the group to a joke about synchronized swimmers.
‘I bet you’ve heard that before, have you?’ I asked Lara.
‘Oh, darling, I’ve heard them all before,’ she said, in the same tone of delighted indulgence she’d bestowed on Everett at the pool. There was something undeniably adult, however, about the way her palm lingered on Ed’s back as she accompanied us to the door.
I was glad Ed didn’t get it into his head to repeat Stephen’s joke to Molly as we walked home. I was confident she wouldn’t have found it at all funny: If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do all the rest have to drown too?
It goes without saying that I Googled the Channings’ house the moment we got back to Kingsley Drive. They’d bought it two years ago for £2 million and it had no doubt doubled in value since then. After a little research, I found the photo Lara and I had looked at together: ‘Poolside Glamor’ by Slim Aarons. The house in the picture was in Palm Springs, the subjects not models but society ladies at a drinks party. ‘When you photograph a lot of women, you get to know things,’ Aarons famously once said, which pretty much brought me up to speed on him.
A Negroni was one part gin, one part Campari and one part vermouth. James Bond made one for himself in Thunderball and had not, I imagined, quoted Abraham Lincoln as he drank it.
Without knowing surnames I couldn’t examine the professional credentials of Douglas, Andrew or Stephen, but I found Miles Channing easily enough. He was chief risk officer at Enfield Baines Morrow, a global provider of insurance products. He looked extremely self-important in his photograph, a corporate warrior par excellence, the match of any form of adversity, act of God or otherwise.
Company motto: Risks you never knew existed.
None of this I shared with Ed. Though, in the end, he’d thoroughly enjoyed himself at La Madrague, I knew he would make a point of not being interested.
13
Monday, 31 August, 6 a.m.
Dawn seeps comfortingly around the edges of the blinds, soft and innocent and healing. My eyes go to the clock on the bedroom wall, strategically placed for a sleepy schoolgirl to see from her pillow. How many thousands of times have I called to her from the kitchen, ‘You need to hurry’; ‘You’re running late’; ‘Now, Molly!’? Those were our dramas then, the threat of a missed bus, a late registration.
We didn’t know we were born.
Ed is no longer in the room. Guessing he must have taken me up on my offer and gone to bed, I sink with relief into the sofa and the back of my head meets the wall, hard against my skull. I’m aware of tenderness on my right cheekbone, but don’t go to the mirror to check for bruising: to do so would be to acknowledge the horror of how it was earned. Then I hear the flush of the toilet, the pull of the light cord. Ed’s footsteps across the hallway have purpose.
I rise and meet him outside the door so our voices won’t disturb Molly.
‘I just found this in the bin.’ He’s holding the balled-up dress. ‘Why have you thrown it away? It probably cost a fortune.’
I snatch it from him. ‘I must have put it in there by mistake. I meant to put it in the laundry basket,’ I say, but it’s too late, his brain is alighting on details he noticed earlier.
‘Before,’ he says, ‘when we came back, it looked like it was torn.’
I can tell he wants to take it back and check for damage, for clues. I watch him weigh up the consequences of seizing it from me: accusations, an argument, all the denials or disclosures he thinks he wants to hear. I ball the fabric tighter, press it to me. ‘That must have been from the chaos of the accident.’
‘Come on,’ he says, ‘it was like that when you found us – not just the dress, your hair, everything. You’d been with him, hadn’t you?’
‘Who?’
He grows angry. ‘How many
candidates are there?’
Knowing better than to allow myself to be provoked, I strain to neutralize my tone. ‘If you must know, I was going to get in the pool. I must have torn the dress as I was getting changed.’
The admission horrifies him, as I would expect it to, but it is not without precedent and he believes me.
‘I must have been drunker than I thought.’
Surprise, surprise, he’s thinking. ‘Did you even have your swimming stuff?’
‘No, it wasn’t planned. I borrowed a swimsuit from Lara. She keeps spare kit behind the counter in the café.’
‘For just such law-breaking opportunities, eh?’ He grimaces. ‘Where were you getting changed?’ He is focused on the logistics of my misdemeanour; the teacher investigating the pupil’s crime.
‘In one of the huts.’ I swallow, my throat dry and painful. ‘But as soon as I realized something was wrong I came straight out to find you. I hadn’t even strapped my shoes on.’
He frowns. The chronology of the evening has not yet cleared in his mind. ‘I was thinking,’ he says, a new touch of determination to his tone, ‘won’t they have security cameras? You know, around the pool and by the exits.’
‘I don’t know,’ I lie.
‘If they do, there might be something useful in the footage.’
Something useful for understanding Molly’s actions, I wonder, or for understanding mine? I hate myself for the thought.
As I hasten past him to find a new hiding place for the dress, somewhere I might never find it myself, the voice I hear belongs to Gayle:
You’d think, as a maths teacher, he of all people could put two and two together.
14
Wednesday, 29 July, five weeks earlier
‘I think this is my favourite colour,’ I said to Gayle, squinting as citrus-fresh morning sun bounced off the surface of the water. ‘Swimming-pool blue.’
Saying it, I felt the now-familiar sting of betrayal: how could I take such pleasure in the very thing that caused the person most precious to me to experience primal terror?
There’d been by now a third hypnotherapy session and still no initiative by Molly to venture here again. At Bryony’s suggestion, I neither hid nor flaunted my own daily swims: ‘The more relaxed you are around the subject the better,’ she said, echoing every one of her predecessors. The fact was – and this never stopped being hard to hear – Molly’s terror was directly associated with me. She might have begun to cast me in the role of tedious authority figure, there to be challenged and mocked, but if I’d learned anything from the years of therapy it was that I was her primary role model and what I did, what I said, mattered.
‘I think my favourite colour is that almost-black brown of really good chocolate fudge cake,’ Gayle said, and it was clear already that if either of us was going to flag in this fitness regime it would be her. It was she who had pulled us over for a rest just a couple of lengths into our swim. Feet pedalling, we clung to the rail at the deep end, not far from where her younger daughter Harriet and a friend lay coiled on their towels, like snakes sleeping in the sun. Gayle’s other daughter, Alice, was there too, with an assortment of friends, as were Izzy and Rosie and others from Molly’s school. Sometimes, at the lido, it felt as if there were only one girl missing.
‘They’re not coming into the water?’ I asked Gayle, nodding towards Harriet and her friend.
‘Oh, Nat, they’re not here to swim.’ She regarded me with amused indulgence. ‘If only I could go back in time and be as lovely and unsuspecting as you.’
I smiled. ‘Go on then, tell me what their real agenda is.’
‘Not what. Who.’
I followed her gaze to the lifeguard, the one called Matt, who was not on patrol this morning but occupied in stacking equipment in a large crate near the emergency exit. By now I understood that the staff were rotated scrupulously, watching eyes kept fresh. (They were required to wear sunglasses to combat the glare.) ‘One of them likes him?’
‘Both, I’m afraid. He’s the hottie of the season, I understand. May the best girl win.’
Provided Georgia Channing wasn’t interested, I thought.
It was an odd thing, but I had not told Gayle about the lunch at the Channings’. Had we met on the Monday, I rationalized, I would have done so without thinking, but we didn’t meet until the Tuesday, by which time weekend activities were not foremost in our minds; then, today, it seemed peculiar to mention it when I hadn’t before. Which was insane, because I would have loved to have shared the details of the party with her: Miles’s not expecting us; men sitting hip to hip in a hanging chair and laughing like loons; a glass dropped over the rail; near-naked women tanning themselves. Maybe I was worried she would be envious or, more likely, scornful or, just as likely, amazed that I was not.
I noticed that Lara’s preferred table was occupied today by a trio of twenty-something homeworkers absorbed in their laptops. They’d fitted little sun visors over their screens.
Harriet and her friend watched through half-closed eyes as Matt came out of a storage room and spoke into a walkie-talkie, the sort the police would use. It was an eye-catching combination, I had to admit, that decent, responsible demeanour and the eroticism of a half-naked young man.
‘So do you think you’ll stay on at Elm Hill Prep?’ Gayle asked me.
‘Yes, of course.’ Then, sensing the significance in her silence: ‘What? You thought my conscience would be too painful to bear and I’d go running back to Rushbrook? They’re just kids, Gayle, same as all the others. They’re not criminals because their parents are paying for their education. I’m not sure we’d do any different if we had the spare cash.’
Under water, Gayle’s feet kicked in protest and, seeing her stout white legs, distorted unflatteringly by perspective, I thought of Lara’s slender limbs soaked golden in the sun. ‘That’s not what Ed thinks,’ she said.
‘No, but it’s what I think. And Ed hasn’t got a leg to stand on now he’s tutoring. He’s not discovering geniuses in the ghettos, you know. They’re mostly from private schools.’
‘So you said. Georgia Channing et al.’
Which made me remember Craig’s remark, Et tu, Brute, and I thought, How ridiculous they are. Trust us to have as our closest friends two of a dying breed who genuinely believed teachers in independent schools were the pampered enemy, when repeatedly studies showed the hours and even the pay in the two sectors were so close as to be splitting hairs. I understood now at least one reason why I’d concealed the Channings’ lunch from her: she’d brand it a bid for advancement inspired by my defection to the private sector. ‘Ed says it’s just as tiring as his All Saints classes,’ I said.
‘I’m sure it is, but that’s not the point, is it?’
A swimmer approached, her head surfacing between us, mouth sucking air, and I recognized my neighbour from the ground-floor flat. She and her boyfriend were younger than Ed and I and we’d never established a friendship with them as we had with Sarah. Why not? Why had we aligned ourselves with the older, not the younger? I smiled and she turned, dipped below the surface, pushed away.
‘So what is the point?’ I said.
Gayle pouted. ‘That it’s unfair for only a tiny minority of children to have access to one-on-one tuition in the first place.’
‘Of course it’s unfair, but almost everything is in this city, this life, so let’s not waste our energy on futile indignation. Besides, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.’ And I felt quite proud of myself standing up to her like this. Compromised though my old self’s principles might have become, they were my principles to compromise, not hers or Ed’s or anyone else’s. ‘Talent rises in the end,’ I added.
Gayle raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you sure you don’t mean shit?’
Friday, 31 July
It was another two days before I saw Lara again. Gayle having taken Harriet and Alice to their grandparents for the weekend, I was at the lido alone, enjoying the tightening sensa
tion of water drying on hot skin, when I became aware of a fall in volume as people turned to watch someone swimming.
I looked too. It was the first time I had seen her in the water. She moved in a sleek and frictionless way, almost as if luxuriating in a flush of current, the water guiding, not resisting. When she climbed out, her hair was smooth on her skull and down her spine and she was breathing visibly, torso rising and falling. I could see the girl in her, the teenage athlete from the photograph, and again I experienced déjà vu, that sense of prior connection.
I followed her to her VIP table on the terrace, feeling slightly shy in doing so, as if I’d misunderstood our lunch together or even imagined it and an approach now might be unwelcome. ‘Hi, Lara.’
‘Natalie, what a lovely surprise!’ She kissed me on both cheeks, her skin warm and moist, and patted the seat next to her. It was the first time we’d been alone together and some nameless impulse caused me to glance about and see if anyone had noticed. I spotted the mother of a child from my EHP class a few tables away (‘We’re not happy about this at all,’ she’d told me at parents’ evening on establishing that Elsa, nine, was not at the top table for literacy). I couldn’t help feeling a little smug at her expression when she saw just who I was with and I directed a cool smile her way before turning my full attention to Lara.
‘Thank you again for the lunch on Sunday. It was wonderful.’ The sky was white today, sunglasses redundant, and there was a new starkness to our eye contact. ‘Such a treat to spend time in your beautiful house. If I lived there, I don’t think I would ever leave.’
Lara laughed. ‘You say that but, honestly, the best thing about it is how close it is to here.’ She stretched her fingers towards the pool as if expecting to be able to dip them in the water. ‘I can’t believe I used to get in the car every day and drive all the way to the Harbour Club.’
Every day, I thought. The Harbour Club (later I would Google its membership fees and find the matter too delicate for general publication). It was a likeable trait, I reminded myself, to want to eschew the superior luxury of a private club in favour of a public facility, not to mention to have helped campaign for its existence.
The Swimming Pool Page 11