‘Nice and easy on nonagenarian gums, eh?’ my mother said, from her drinks cabinet by the window. ‘Do you know what a nonagenarian is, Molly?’
Molly looked hopeful of a rude punch line but I could have told her to expect a straight definition.
My mother had moved here on retirement four years ago, my grandfather having died not long before and my grandmother, then in her late eighties, not able to live alone. Ed and I had always regarded this as an act of duty to be admired, celebrated. If and when the time came, we hoped that we, and Molly after us, could be counted on to fulfil the same familial duty. Nothing in his manner suggested any change of position on this. I, however, was aware almost on arrival of a brand-new emotion in my own response, an unwelcome, guttural one that I could only imagine had been exacerbated by general nerves: revulsion. Because my grandmother looked – not to put too fine a point on it – decrepit. Her eyes were glassy and remote, as if peering at us from inside a jar, and her skin fell from the bone like oversized clothing. The idea of my mother nursing her struck me as not so much heroic as perverse; I didn’t want to be responsible for someone in this condition any more than I wanted to foist it on my own daughter.
‘Thank you,’ I said, accepting a tepid gin and tonic with weak fingers. What was wrong with me? Was this another manifestation of the crisis I’d experienced on meeting Georgia for the first time or, in a smaller way, the conviction I’d felt talking to Angie that I owed it to myself to seize life while I still had the muscular strength to do it? Looking to Molly for reassurance, I saw that she was regarding her great-grandmother in exactly the way she always did, with respect and wonder, rather as she would marvel at the longevity of a giant tortoise. She made no connection between her own flesh and that of her aged relative’s. Between us, drinks distributed, sat the interim model that was my mother, aged seventy, sprightly enough, and single by choice since divorcing my father almost two decades ago. (In the end, they had waited for me to leave home, an ill-conceived act of selflessness if ever there was one.)
I thought of that sense I’d once had that the men had been eliminated from society and eyed Ed with gratitude and unexpected desire.
Catching my eye, he frowned his ‘All right?’ frown and I nodded, swallowing a damp Wotsit.
‘So have you got all your textbooks with you?’ Mum asked Molly. ‘What will we test you on this time?’
‘Nothing,’ Molly said. ‘I didn’t bring any schoolwork.’
My mother and grandmother exchanged a look of astonishment.
‘She had a few bits and pieces at the beginning of the holidays, but now she’s mostly just hanging out with chums,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t have any studies to do while she’s here, not unless she wants to.’
‘I don’t,’ Molly confirmed.
‘Has something happened?’ my mother said, looking from Ed to me. ‘Normally the poor girl doesn’t have a minute to herself. Why’s she suddenly been let off the leash?’
‘I wouldn’t call her a poor girl,’ I said, ‘or on a leash. Molly’s older now, Mum, she’s thirteen. She can decide how she wants to spend her free time.’
I didn’t point out that, with his roster of private students, Ed had neglected the extracurricular enrichment of his daughter’s state education this summer; when the first tranche of maths had been exhausted, he had not had time to set the next. Meanwhile, distracted by the lido, by new friends, I had been cutting her slack of my own. The week without us in Stoneborough had been Ed’s idea, proposed in the spring when we’d planned the main holidays. At the time, I’d suspected he was concerned about my tendency to restrict her freedoms, thought Molly and I needed time apart. But that had been before Bryony, before Georgia. Before Lara. Such thoughts were unappealing, like remembering how it felt to be penniless after you’d struck gold.
‘Can I help with lunch in any way?’ I offered. The fact that neither hostess needed to be in the kitchen foretold of some one-pot affair that Molly would be sure to reject. I noticed there were extra place settings at the table, but did not draw attention to the miscount. I thought again of the missing men.
‘No, all done,’ my mother said. ‘We made the casserole the day before yesterday. I hope the potatoes haven’t gone liquid.’
I didn’t look at Molly. All I could hope for was that there was no offal involved.
‘By the way, Natty, we have a surprise for you. Don’t we, Mum?’ My mother became animated, almost gleeful. ‘I was in the shop yesterday and I happened to overhear her talking, so I threw caution to the wind and asked her outright.’
There was a silence. ‘Asked who what?’ I said at last.
‘If she was your old friend Mel, of course,’ Mum said.
I had the sensation of being poised at the top of a tall slide, an inch from tipping, my arms only just able to withhold my bodyweight from the plunge.
‘And she was! She’s been up all week visiting her mum while the damp’s sorted out in her flat.’
My eye fell again on those extra place settings. ‘Mum, you didn’t?’
‘Invite her for lunch? Of course I did.’
Now I was plummeting, friction burns on my legs and elbows.
‘Cheryl can’t come – she works in a pub in Eastleigh at weekends – but she’s bringing her grandson instead.’
‘Cheryl’s grandson?’
‘Mel’s. She’s got four, she told me. The little boy hasn’t inherited her nose, which is a mercy.’
‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’ Molly said, then, remembering my stories, ‘Oh, Snout-nose.’
‘What a thing to say,’ Mum said, frowning.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Molly,’ Ed said. ‘I hope you won’t say that in front of Snout-nose herself.’
As father and daughter giggled, I looked helplessly at them. Ed wouldn’t be joking like this if he knew the truth. You have to face your fear, I told Molly (or at least I had until one therapist deemed it an unhelpful mantra), but I’d never faced my own and now I was going to have to, with five minutes’ notice. I was going to the gallows without being allowed a last prayer.
It had not been easy to restrain myself, but over the years I had not once asked my grandmother for news of Mel or her family and she did not have the kind of personality to tittle-tattle unprompted. That one mention of Mel having relocated had been all she’d given and all I’d needed. My mother was a different matter: it would not have taken her long to penetrate the Stoneborough network, to acquire the intelligence needed to identify strangers from a moment’s eavesdropping.
‘Are you all right?’ Ed asked me. ‘You don’t look too well.’
‘I’m fine, just a bit thrown. No one likes a blast from the past.’
My mother was incredulous. ‘I thought blasts from the past were exactly what people liked. All this Facepaging.’
Molly and Ed giggled again. What was suffocating terror to me was high comedy to them. I was on my own.
The doorbell rang. ‘I’ll get it,’ Ed offered.
I didn’t know her when she entered the room, a small boy in her wake: she did not resemble her younger self at all. She was heftier, close to obese, and her hair, which I’d remembered as having the colour and shine of young conkers, was black and charred-looking, like the remains of a bonfire. And yet my face burned, my ears filled with the whine of tiny insects, my heart banged harder still. How did the brain do this, provoke the fight-or-flight response to danger long lapsed?
‘Hello again, Mel,’ Mum said, with a merriment she had not shown at our arrival.
‘We’ve got you some chocolates,’ Mel said in reply, gripping a box of Cadbury’s Heroes like an award, and it was her voice – the twang of its accent perfectly suited to the throwaway tone – followed by the rebellious bark of her laughter that made me know her.
My first lucid thought: did she remember the circumstances of our parting? Of course she did. How could she not? A better question was whether or not she despised me for it. But she was h
ere, wasn’t she, her eye contact perfectly guileless? The flatness of her nose was not so noticeable: it had been an unnecessarily cruel fixation.
‘Nasty Nat!’ she said, and when Molly gasped, she smiled warmly at her.
My heart rate steadied. How could I imagine I was in danger? She had never harmed me, she had favoured me. What I was feeling was the result of the same loose wiring that had caused that episode with Stephen in the screening room, linked perhaps to the intermittent midlife crisis. This was not a woman with a grudge, but one with soft spots – and adult responsibilities.
The boy was about Everett’s age and rather bold, judging by his opening remark: ‘Where’s your birthmark? Nan says it’s as big as a fried egg. That’s unless you’ve had it lasered.’
‘I haven’t,’ I told him. Long experience in speaking with children of his age calmed me. ‘It’s hidden under my make-up.’
‘We used to call them angel’s kisses,’ said my grandmother.
Not around here, I thought, but I smiled gratefully at her.
‘How many kids have you got, Mel?’ Ed asked.
‘Three. All grown-up. Rio’s my oldest daughter Justine’s second boy.’
I supposed being a grandmother in your mid-forties was not so unusual. At Elm Hill Prep the mothers were still producing their own babies at that age, but at Rushbrook there’d been a smattering of Mels.
‘What’s for lunch, Nan?’ Rio asked.
‘It’s a corned-beef hotpot,’ said my mother, and the boy’s dismay mirrored Molly’s. I knew I wouldn’t have been able to eat even if it had been a Michelin-starred feast.
‘He won’t eat that,’ Mel said, matter-of-fact. ‘Fussy eaters, the lot of them.’
‘To be fair, I don’t think kids today are familiar with corned beef,’ Ed said, and I thought of the class discussion about ersatz foods, the paste sandwiches and rock cakes at the D-Day party that had remained largely untouched by children who knew how to roll their own sushi.
‘Are you still called Mean Mel?’ Molly asked the guest, when we were finally called to the table. She was considerably more engaged than she had been at any time in the preceding week, Cluedo included.
‘Not often,’ Mel said, cracking a grin that exposed undersized teeth. And though I’d not given it a thought in thirty years, the sight now of one of the central incisors overlapping its neighbour was as familiar to me as my own eye colour. I felt a lurch inside me, not so much of remorse as loss. I blinked. Now that the adrenalin had drained, so had lucidity of thought, and I was finding it a strain to connect to this experience fully.
‘You’re not mean, Nan!’ Rio protested loyally. He was a sweet thing, really.
I wondered if Mel had taken him to the pond to swim and was about to ask when she winked at him, answering, ‘Depends who you listen to, love.’
At this, my mother’s antennae twitched. ‘Does he know about …?’ As she allowed the question to fade delicately, I froze, petrified. Did Mum know, then? But the unspoken intelligence was new to me too, it emerged, for no sooner had Rio finished not eating and been allowed to slide from the table to play on his DS than Mel was confiding to us that in her twenties she’d served six months in an open prison.
‘Blackmail,’ she said baldly, which made me gulp. ‘I’m not proud, but there we are.’
There we are, she kept saying. Yes, I was inside, but there we are. Dean and me split up, but there we are. One of my daughters hasn’t been to visit in nearly a year, but there we are. Nat and I were feral bullies one summer, but there we are.
She didn’t say that, of course. She didn’t mention our shared summer at all, in fact, keener to describe her daughter’s travels in Thailand and a recent coup in obtaining studio audience tickets for the forthcoming series of The X Factor.
‘How long are you staying at your mum’s?’ I asked. I could feel a distinct tingle of unease, the beginnings of panic, and it wasn’t hard to identify its source: I didn’t want to leave Molly in Stoneborough if Mel was there. Blithe she may have become, but I didn’t trust her.
‘Just till tonight. I have to work tomorrow. But Rio’s staying another week. The whole block’s got damp, it’s a nightmare.’
The tingle subsided.
‘Maybe Molly and Rio can play,’ my mother suggested, and Molly looked aghast at the idea.
‘Molly doesn’t really “play” any more,’ I said.
‘They could go down to the shop together then,’ Mum modified.
Molly pulled a noncommittal face, addressing Mel: ‘Mum told me how you used to steal cans of Coke from Mr Moron’s and when you opened them they exploded all over your clothes because you’d been running.’
‘Another vintage anecdote,’ Ed said, winking at Molly. ‘I assume that wasn’t Mr Moron’s real name?’
‘No, Morton. He’s long gone,’ said my mother.
I was staring at Mel by now, mesmerized by the planes of her face, the light and shade cast by her chewing muscles, the familiar and unfamiliar messages her eyes sent. ‘We were horrible to him, weren’t we, Mel?’
‘I don’t remember him.’ She sighed. ‘We were so bored that summer. Like every summer. Nothing to do in Stoneborough. No offence, Mrs Waters.’
‘None taken,’ my grandmother said. ‘It’s precisely because there’s nothing to do that we like it so much.’
As fear gave way to disbelief, I turned my frowning face from Mel to my grandmother and back again. What did she mean, nothing to do? Three decades I’d been haunted by that summer. It was impossible to accept her perfunctory dismissal of it.
Ed, at least, sensed the source of my disquiet. ‘I think “Nasty Nat” has rather sentimentalized her summer of delinquency,’ he said, smiling at Mel. ‘Your reign of terror over the neighbourhood boys?’ Even the little he knew he had reassessed, I saw, likely thinking that Mel’s prison sentence made our juvenile misdemeanours pale into insignificance.
‘I have not sentimentalized it,’ I said, struggling to manage my distress.
Soon after, I engineered a moment alone with Mel when she was in the garden, smoking. We must have stood here together before, I supposed, possibly shared one of the cigarettes stolen from her parents and brother.
‘How’s Nick?’ I said. ‘Do you remember how he was supposed to be looking after us while your mum went to work, but he just got on the bus to Southampton every day to see that girl?’
Mel chuckled. ‘He’s still the same lazy bastard.’
I held her eye, aware of the neediness that must be so evident in my own. ‘Do you think we look different now, Mel?’
She sniggered. ‘It would be a bit fucking weird if we didn’t.’
But she understood, as her next comment showed: ‘Didn’t you want to have a skin graft or whatever?’
The birthmark, she meant.
‘I don’t mind it so much now,’ I said. ‘It’s faded a lot. Anyway, these things are a part of us, aren’t they? I wouldn’t want Molly to think you should have to fix your imperfections and be the same as everyone else.’ I thought of Lara’s smile, the surprise of the gaps between her teeth, little breaches of her beauty. ‘But it wasn’t very nice when we were her age, I admit. All the name-calling, remember?’
Mel drew on her cigarette. ‘Do you think your mum is going to open the Heroes? I told Rio she would.’
‘I don’t know.’ It wasn’t only frustration I felt at this obtuseness – or evasion – it was also sorrow. Once she’d been my leader, but now she was left behind, and not just by me, I guessed. Lara’s face flashed a second time: she was a different kind of leader, a saviour from ordinariness, from myself. What would Mel make of her? The thought made me glow with secret pride. How far I had come, how well things had turned out for me, if she was my friend now.
It was time to be direct, I decided. Who knew if I would see Mel again? I might never have another chance at exorcism. ‘You know, I always wondered what happened to that girl.’
‘What girl?’ As she d
rew on the cigarette, deep grooves appeared around the edge of her upper lip. ‘Oh, the blonde cow. What did we call her again?’
‘Nessie.’ And just like that, with those two syllables, my heart was a drum again, battered with steel-capped sticks by some hyperactive demon.
‘That’s right!’ Mel exclaimed, with delighted laughter, exactly as if she’d not given the subject a thought in years. I couldn’t tell if she was acting; I couldn’t read her at all.
‘Do you remember my gran thought it was short for Vanessa? She thought she must be one of our friends. “Do you want to invite Nessie for tea?” she used to ask me.’ My voice caught. ‘Maybe I should have done that. Maybe we would have been friends.’
Stubbing out the cigarette in a flowerbed, Mel whistled. ‘God, Nat, you really hold on to this shit, don’t you?’
‘I suppose I do.’ I was pleased that she lit a second cigarette, was prepared to talk on. ‘I still feel bad about it, Mel. She didn’t do anything to hurt us – she didn’t say a word to offend us. What we did, it was evil.’
‘Don’t be mental, Nat. We were kids.’
We stared at each other.
‘The family left, didn’t they?’ I said. ‘Do you know where they went? Sometimes I feel like I should get in touch, try to explain.’
But she was utterly lacking in remorse. ‘Seriously, if that’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, then you must have been living like a nun all these years.’
‘It’s not just Nessie,’ I said. ‘I felt awful for leaving you in the lurch. I’ve never been able to tell you that.’
Her lips parted, her surprise genuine, and I realized then that she’d not seen it as I had. She’d seen it only as the way she was used to people behaving towards her, the same way she expected them to behave towards her in the future. It was wretched and there was nothing I could do to make amends. I knew for certain I would not see her again.
No sooner had Mel and Rio left than Ed began making noises about traffic on the M3.
‘What do you have planned while Molly’s with us?’ Mum asked, and all at once the week stretched ahead of me like a stroll through the Promised Land. Ed would be working, but I would be free.
The Swimming Pool Page 18