‘Swimming at the new lido, a few drinks things,’ I said.
‘Well, quite the bon vivant. You’ll have to keep an eye on her, Ed.’
To my horror, I blushed.
We said goodbye to Molly. It was bittersweet to know that I was sadder about the separation than she was. It was another thread broken. But that was right and natural, I knew. The threads were the dissolving kind – you couldn’t find the ends to fuse them again, you had to let them go.
Driving home, I was overcome with a relief so heavy it was almost a sense of reprieve, even reward. It was nothing to do with having left my beloved daughter, of course. It was to do with Mel, her casual dismissal of our wickedness, her absence of hard feelings towards me. She didn’t care, it wasn’t a big deal. If I took her lead as unquestioningly as I had at the time, I’d live the rest of my life guilt free.
I stared through the windscreen at the thickening red string of brake lights ahead as the motorway curved towards London. Soon the evening would fade and we’d be dazzled by headlights. I reached to touch Ed’s hand, resting between us on the gearstick.
‘What?’ he said, glancing across.
‘Oh, you know, just seeing Mel, it made me think, there but for the grace of God …’
‘Come on,’ he scoffed. ‘You shared a few japes when you were Molly’s age, that’s all. I don’t know why you’re so hung up on it. It couldn’t be more obvious that you have nothing in common.’
‘It was a lot more than japes, Ed.’
‘What are you saying?’ He inhaled sharply, for effect, I sensed. His mood was playful. ‘Not that you and Snout-nose –’
‘Don’t call her that.’
He glanced again. ‘Did you two share some sort of an “awakening”?’
‘Don’t get excited, nothing like that.’ But I squirmed. ‘Do you think …?’ I began.
‘What?’
‘Molls’ll be all right, won’t she? Without us.’
‘Of course she will. If last week’s anything to go by, she won’t set foot outside the house.’
‘I hope she gets some fresh air.’
I tried to picture Molly swaggering around with a Mel of her own, being urged to climb scaffolding and roam the woods like a savage. For all her pleas for freedom, would she like that level of permissiveness? After all, the lack of that freedom was probably what saved her from being mocked for her condition. Back then aquaphobia would have been mistaken for cowardice, a fault more despised than an unfortunate birthmark. She’d have been the one getting her swimsuit pulled off by Mean Mel and me.
Or worse.
The thought made me shudder.
‘Listen,’ Ed said, ‘I was thinking, about your pool party.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Since you’re so keen on it, let’s go. We can have a little birthday celebration there, can’t we?’
I was overcome by delight. ‘What made you change your mind?’
‘I just want you to have what you want. It’s your birthday, not mine. We’ll make sure Gayle and Craig and Sarah are going too.’
‘We’ll only go if Molls is happy with the idea,’ I promised. ‘I would never leave her out.’
‘Of course not.’
I watched him watch the road, make his lane changes in precise and considered manoeuvres, keep the correct distance from the vehicles ahead; he could have been a driving instructor. We would have sex later, I recognized the aligning stars: the empty flat, the rapprochement of the holiday, the mood of the drive. And, in my case, the sense of release from a long dread, an ordeal sprung without warning and somehow survived.
Ed had been right about one thing: the summer of 1985, I’d sentimentalized it – or, more accurately, demonized it. I’d fixed it in my mind quite differently from how the other players had.
I’d not remembered it as a game at all.
Stoneborough, August 1985
She was Mel’s and my bête noire, though I wasn’t entirely sure how to pronounce that and, in any case, the truth was that we were hers – a beast with two heads.
She came from the new estate by the woods, where we hung out sometimes on the building site of half-complete houses and where the finished articles, like hers, seemed to us millionaires’ ranches from American TV shows. In truth, that would have been enough to win our interest had she not been so pretty where we were plain, so popular where we were feared. She was also the best swimmer. The way she held herself in concentration before plunging into a dive, only to emerge seconds later with an expression of unselfconscious joy on her face, pieces of broken light spraying behind her: it both fascinated and infuriated me. The boys, usually chortling, called her the Nymph and competed over who would go out with her.
We called her Nessie, short for Loch Ness Monster.
The first time I remember seeing her at the pond she was with her mother and that in itself was something to be despised because this was a place for kids, not adults, everyone knew that.
‘She’s got no other protection,’ said Mel. Most of the kids had siblings, Mel and I each other, but Nessie’s sister was away for the summer at some watersports camp. (They were evidently an aquatic clan.)
The sole adult voice rang out repeatedly that afternoon: ‘Come out of the sun, darling’; ‘That was a better dive!’; ‘Careful out there in the middle. Your feet could get caught on roots.’
She was one of those neurotic mums who saw danger lurking everywhere, who made such a big deal about being Nessie’s mother it was as if she thought she was Nessie. (When my own mother phoned from home, I refused to speak to her.)
‘Show-off,’ Mel said loudly.
‘Slag,’ I agreed. Though neither of us looked in Nessie’s direction, everyone who knew us would guess who we meant because it was common knowledge we had it in for her.
‘Who are those girls?’ Nessie’s mother asked. ‘Are they your friends?’
‘In your dreams,’ Mel drawled, under her breath. That was one of our lines that summer: In your dreams. We never said it to each other: it was as if we understood at some elemental level that the other would not dare have dreams of her own.
‘You know what?’ Mel said. ‘We should do her some time.’ She meant ambush, strip, humiliate.
‘Who – Nessie? Seriously?’
A decorum of sorts prevailed in our dealings with the group. A boy could be stripped and insulted and left to wriggle his way home, but his hands could cover all there was to cover and he’d usually come back the next day. (In Stoneborough that summer, there was nowhere else to go.)
A girl was different. We hadn’t done a girl before.
‘Actually, forget it,’ Mel said, lighting a cigarette stolen from her father and sending smoke in Nessie’s mother’s direction, challenging her to tell us off for it. When she passed it to me, the end was damp from her mouth. ‘We need something better for her.’
Better as in worse.
22
Monday, 31 August, 8 a.m.
I push open the main doors of our building, moving blindly, by memory, and almost crash into someone arriving. It is only when she says my name that I focus: Gayle.
‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ she blurts, and it takes her a moment to recover herself. Her eyes are prominent and raw, her neck blotched with a rash. The last time we stood face to face like this, I wondered if we would ever speak again. ‘I heard about last night. I’m so sorry.’
Automatically wary, I listen for the bitter edge to her voice, but cannot find it. ‘Thank you.’
‘How is she?’
‘She’s all right,’ I say, ‘thank God.’ Thank God: I hear it in a different place, another time, and feel a rush of shame so intense it threatens to knock me off balance. I can’t deal with this now. I make off down the path towards the car, but of course she follows.
‘Wait, Nat! What happened exactly? Is it true she fell in and the Channing girl went in to rescue her?’
My fingers on the car door handle feel icy. It
’s early, but I sense the air temperature will stay low all day – it’s as if the season has turned overnight. ‘She has a name,’ I say. ‘It’s Georgia.’
‘Of course, sorry. What I mean is, wasn’t there a guard on duty?’ There’s a touch of familiar indignation in her voice now. ‘That place isn’t safe, if you ask me.’
‘It wasn’t their fault,’ I tell her. The ferocity of emotion in her eyes is too intense to engage with for more than a second or two. ‘The kids weren’t supposed to be anywhere near the water. It was all roped off.’ And I remember then: Lara used the security budget to help pay for the band. ‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ I add, ‘but I can’t really talk. I need to get somewhere.’
‘Right.’ She’s puzzled: why would I be going somewhere that will take me away from Molly?
‘But Ed is upstairs with Molls if you want to see them?’
‘No, I don’t want to bother him. I wasn’t going to come up, I just wanted to deliver this.’
I notice now the item under her arm, a small cream tote patterned with roses. ‘Is that Molly’s bag?’
‘Yes. Alice brought it home last night. She said she found it unclaimed after … after you’d left, and Liam said it was Okay to look after it for you. Her phone’s in there. I thought she might want it today. She’ll be getting messages from her friends.’
‘Thank you, she’ll be pleased.’ I stand by the car, stranded and awkward.
‘What happened to your face?’ she says. ‘You look like you’re getting a bruise.’
‘I don’t know.’ I shrug. ‘I must have knocked it last night in all the chaos.’
‘We’ll talk when everything’s back to normal,’ she says, gauging my mood, pledging her support and saying the right thing in one fell swoop. That, I suppose, is what a true friend does, and I feel a second, hotter, gush of shame, a yearning for some breath-sucking velocity that might transport me back in time and let me do better what I have done so badly.
In the car, I sift through Molly’s bag on the passenger seat: lip balm, keys with a starfish key-ring, a notebook. Her phone in its lilac-coloured case, low on power, probably only good for another hour or two. The passcode doesn’t work; she must have changed it. Hardly a crime – it’s natural to want privacy, to keep secrets. That makes me remember her journal on the laptop. Might the police ask for access to her devices, if and when they come knocking? If Georgia were to … to not make it, a diary or email exchange might cast light on the girls’ state of mind.
Well, whatever helps their investigation, I think. Georgia is the victim, but Molly is hardly anything less. She has nothing to hide.
I return the phone to the bag and start the car. I have no doubt I’m still over the limit. Margaritas last night, Lord knows how many, very little food, no sleep. I could easily cause an accident. It’s the kind of thing you read about in the papers: one poor decision leads to another, blunder begets disaster.
And I would be able to say exactly how mine began, too: with Lara’s voice, the private, grainy seductions of it; with Lara’s eyes, dark with kohl and glittering with caprice.
I thought she chose me because I was special, but it turns out I was only special because she chose me. And if that still matters to me even the smallest of jots then I am a terrible, terrible woman.
23
Monday, 17 August – two weeks earlier
‘Thank God you’re back!’ Resplendent in a metallic-grey silk playsuit no mortal had the right to carry off, hair ablaze with gold in the high sun, Lara leaned on the balustrade with one foot poised on the lower rail as if she might at any moment spring up and jump. Below, sunlight struck off the silver lettering at the lido entrance and rinsed the brickwork clean. The building was ringed by its queue, a double string of figures in bright clothing and sunglasses, while more customers arrived on bikes, carrying the light with them in little flashes. In the distance stood the pearlescent cluster of skyscrapers of the City, our own Manhattan.
Though I could see London, I could smell only countryside, the lush, loamy fragrance of the horse-chestnut trees, the rich earthiness of the park after a week of rainfall.
As a sudden eruption of laughter caught on the breeze, Lara turned to me with a lavish, almost ardent look. ‘You’re obviously some sort of solar deity, Natalie. It rained every day last week and now look at it!’
She reached to grasp my hand and I responded like any willing audience to the star turn: riveted, motionless, all disbelief happily suspended.
‘Promise you’ll never leave us again.’
I promised. No matter that it had rained everywhere the previous week, washing out my own family holiday. Lara wasn’t interested in that. The glass of champagne in her hand was her second since my arrival thirty minutes ago.
‘Good. For a moment there last week, I thought it wasn’t going to be the perfect summer after all. I was really quite cross.’
I felt a flush of pleasure that this was as special a time for her as it was for me.
The music she was playing today was the Byrds.
Miles was working from home that afternoon, a rarity, I gathered, though I assumed he was senior enough in the company hierarchy to do as he pleased. I was aware of him inside, circling the living room, talking into his phone in presidential tones, on one occasion exclaiming in exasperation. After an hour or so, he joined us on the terrace for a cigarette (Lara’s plan for Bryony’s intervention had not yet been implemented, evidently). It was the first time I’d been with the Channings since that discussion with Angie, and then Ed, about their alleged infidelities, and I couldn’t prevent a certain heightened interest in the dynamic between the two of them.
‘What’s wrong?’ Lara asked him, that restless foot back on the rail.
‘Oh, just the usual screw-ups,’ he said.
‘Well, at least you know you’re indispensable.’ She lifted her foot rather spectacularly to the upper rail, stretching the hamstrings with no apparent discomfort.
‘Hardly,’ Miles said. He held his cigarette in a careful, almost precious, way. ‘They happen whether I’m there or not. Watch yourself on that railing, La. We don’t want our nice white pebbles getting bloodstained.’ And the way he looked at her was suddenly different, surprising, the way you would look at someone you didn’t know at all, almost as if he were deciding whether he could trust her. That was her allure, I thought. Her spontaneity. It kept us all guessing, even her own husband. I remembered Angie’s angle: that she’d do anything for him. She knew the couple far better than I did yet I couldn’t help thinking she’d got it wrong. That I, the newcomer, knew better.
‘Have you noticed,’ Lara said, ‘that in film and TV, no one smokes any more? Or if they do, it’s only to signify villainy. James Dean, Steve McQueen, Delon, of course: they smoked and they were the heroes.’
‘Anti-heroes, don’t you think?’ I said, recalling Delon’s character’s actions in the only film of his I’d seen: strong arms denying his enemy air, forcing the other man’s lungs to fill with water. ‘And didn’t everyone smoke in the sixties? Heroes, villains …’
‘Small children, farmyard animals,’ Miles said, smirking. When he exhaled, his facial muscles froze in a kind of grim rapture.
‘My point is that now it’s only the villains,’ Lara said, holding his eye.
‘What are you trying to say about me?’ There was a note of challenge in his tone. ‘Or is this just more of your GCSE media studies gibberish?’
Offended, I opened my mouth to protest, but of course Lara could defend herself.
‘Don’t be tedious, Miles,’ she said, and sighed, half amused, half exasperated. (I imagined using those words, that tone, with Ed. Don’t be tedious, Ed. It would be satisfying, for sure.) She finished her champagne and, noticing my empty glass, demanded, ‘Do we need a new bottle?’
‘What you “need” is a job,’ Miles said.
‘I have one, remember?’ She held his eye before adding, ‘Being me is a job,’ and as she drift
ed past us towards the kitchen I laughed, both at the remark and Miles’s indulgently defeated expression.
In his wife’s fragrant wake, he turned his attention to me. ‘I hear you’re joining us for the bank-holiday party?’
‘Yes, I hope so.’
‘And it’s your birthday that day?’
‘It is.’
‘Good.’
Flattered that he knew – and approved – I had an odd sensation, like pins and needles in my lungs, that he was going to say something important. But then Lara reappeared and he looked away, grinding out his cigarette in a glass saucer. I watched as he used his fingertips to tidy the ash from the edges of the saucer into the centre circle, a curiously fastidious act. I imagined those ashy fingers touching Lara’s skin after I’d gone. In her fist, the champagne bottle foamed, eager to spill into our glasses. Miles took the tumbler she offered – I wasn’t sure if it was whisky or brandy but in any case it was decadent for a homeworker mid-afternoon on a Monday.
It took effort to remember my own working week, the daily structure: assembly, maths, break, literacy, lunch; in the afternoon, something creative, the making of a collage depicting London during the Blitz, perhaps. Fire-red skies and ruined buildings. I had not forgotten my stated aim at the beginning of the summer break to forget being a teacher and live like a civilian, but this rarified version surely exceeded the greatest of expectations. Drinking champagne with a couple from a social stratum normally well beyond my powers of access, sitting with a heart-stopping view across London – and getting so used to it that I was mesmerized instead by the sun-fired hair of my hostess. My mood soared higher.
But when Miles’s office rang and he retreated to his study on the ground floor, I found Lara’s spirits had, conversely, dipped somewhat. She plucked idly at one of her photography books, a Slim Aarons collection of swimming pools on the French Riviera, in the California desert, on the Florida coast. Her favourite was California, she said. She showed me a picture of a modernist house in a seared landscape, a pool of untroubled blue: ‘Don’t you wish you could reproduce that feeling?’
The Swimming Pool Page 19