The Swimming Pool

by Louise Candlish

  When she closed the book with a little gesture of defeat, I longed to make it better. ‘What – of living in Palm Springs? I don’t think that’s possible here. Even with my return, the sun isn’t hot enough.’

  She barely registered the reference. Having declared herself delighted by my attendance, she now had the air of keeping her chin up under house arrest, rather like Molly in the rain-pummelled cottage in the New Forest. Miles’s mockery had hurt her feelings after all, perhaps, and I longed to let her know I was on her side.

  ‘I went there once, you know.’ She leaned on her elbow, steering the branch of a potted oleander from her hair. ‘To LA. To try to “make it”. I had an agent there.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing. That was the problem. I wasn’t special. They didn’t like my teeth, kept saying I should fix them. But I like flaws. They’re the interesting bits. Who wants to be “fixed”?’

  ‘I completely agree. I was just saying that to someone yesterday, in fact.’ I couldn’t believe it was only twenty-four hours since I’d been in the same room as Mel. She was a mythical creature now, had no place in this sphere, not even in my thoughts.

  ‘And my voice,’ Lara said. ‘They said it was too husky, like I had a throat condition.’

  ‘Your voice is wonderful,’ I said.

  ‘That’s sweet of you.’ She shrugged. ‘So I came back. I met Miles. I suppose I just gave up. I thought being twenty-two lasted a lifetime. I thought I’d have a hundred more chances.’

  ‘Well, at least you tried,’ I said. ‘That’s more than most.’

  But they sounded such mundane platitudes and had no useful effect. I tried to express some of the passion I truly felt: ‘You’ve done things other people can only dream of, Lara. Look at your life here.’ I gestured to the park, the glowing grass, the threads of pathway that gleamed like metal. ‘Seriously. What could be better than this? It’s our green and pleasant land right on your doorstep.’

  ‘Oh, that. Blake. “Bring me my arrows of desire”.’ She surprised me sometimes with her sudden quotations, though she was an actress, of course, and it was natural she should have a memory for them. She tore off her sunglasses and I saw that her eyes were full of melancholy. The shock of it made my heart hammer.

  ‘Are you all right, Lara? Is it Miles, what he said about – ?’

  ‘God, no, Miles is fine. I’m just feeling a bit …’

  If not prepared to criticize her husband, she might, I thought, talk more about her acting career, those dreams of Hollywood that didn’t get off the ground, but what she confessed was rather closer to my own realm of neurosis: ‘Georgia will be leaving home soon. It makes me sad, that’s all.’

  ‘Georgia?’ I laughed in surprise. ‘She hasn’t even done her GCSEs yet. She’s still got three years left at school.’ Molly had five, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered how I was going to feel when she left, especially this week when I was without her. Our family reduced by a third, our life would flatten, darken. As the younger’s world opened, so the elders’ would shrink, a natural process but not necessarily a welcome one. Perhaps Ed and I would drift apart and I would, in time and without fanfare, enter the Stoneborough house for abandoned females. ‘Plus you’ve got Everett,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s a long time before you have to worry about being alone. I’ll be an empty-nester before you.’

  ‘That’s true.’ She smiled at me, grateful, fond. ‘I’m just being silly. We all have our sad days, don’t we?’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘I miss Angie when she’s away. But my sister Iona is arriving tomorrow. She’ll cheer me up.’

  I agreed that her sister would, though not without a pang of dismay that, in spite of her earlier pronouncement, I had not proved equal to the job.

  ‘Shall we swim together this week, Natalie?’

  My spirits leaped. ‘You won’t be going with Iona?’

  Lara’s normally expressive eyes were suddenly opaque. ‘Oh, she doesn’t swim.’

  ‘Then I’d be happy to step in.’

  ‘Tomorrow at three?’

  ‘I’ll be there.’ And I strolled home across the park with the exhilaration of an unexpected promotion.

  Mindful of the sourness of the night before we went to the New Forest, I was careful to get dinner started at a reasonable hour, only to find I had forgotten another duty: Inky’s early-evening walk.

  ‘Sarah counts on us, Nat,’ Ed said. ‘What was so important that you decided to blow her out like that?’

  One day back and already I was disappointing him. And lying too, apparently: ‘I bumped into Gayle and got chatting, that’s all. But it’s not a big deal, I’ll take him out now, it’s still light.’

  ‘It’s fine. I did it myself,’ Ed said. ‘But you will be able to do the afternoon walk for the rest of the week, won’t you? I’m chocker.’

  ‘Yes, yes, don’t worry.’ I didn’t need reminding that I was the one on holiday, not him.

  ‘Don’t leave it too late, because Sarah has her evening routine. They’ve reduced her painkillers and she’s in quite a bit of discomfort. She said she’s going to bed earlier than usual.’

  ‘Poor thing. Leave it with me.’ Of course, I’d just agreed to meet Lara at the lido the next day at three, which was about the same time I’d called around today – and yet I’d only been able to leave when I had because she’d grown uncharacteristically glum. How was I going to fit Inky in?

  Naturally, it was out of the question that I should cancel my plans with Lara for the sake of an old friend in chronic pain.

  It’s easy to see, in retrospect, where my instincts went awry.

  Tuesday, 18 August

  She was not glum. She was a woman who had never known a moment’s glumness in her life. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Natalie,’ she giggled, ‘he’s an absolute angel, but is he ever going to stop yapping?’

  Inky, making his lido café debut, was too stimulated by the shrieking and yelling, by the ceaseless slap and thump of bare feet on stone, to do anything but bark.

  I could understand his awe. Alone with Lara at the VIP table on the terrace, her special guest and chosen companion, her substitute Angie, I was exactly like a teenager falling in love for the first time. My head had not only been turned, it was spinning.

  Lara scooped Inky into her arms and babied him, blowing gently into his face to calm him. Her fingernails today were cranberry, her sunglasses nude Stella McCartney cat-eyes.

  ‘You’ll make up the numbers, won’t you, darling?’ she said, sing-song and silly, ‘while Choo-choo’s away? Stop us being lonesome?’

  Inky watched, silent at last.

  Of course, the idea of Lara as some neglected, unfulfilled figure was preposterous even before you took into account the constant stream of courtiers to our table that week. I’d thought I knew everyone in Elm Hill but plainly I knew none of those Lara had collected in her brief tenure, not only the rich high-maintenance women and successful, driven men, but also receptionists, shopgirls, litter-pickers. Occasionally, she invited someone to join us for a glass, and that person would look at me, talk to me, as if I must be worth knowing too.

  ‘You’ll miss La when she’s off on holiday, I expect?’ said a man called David, a neighbour on The Rise. ‘Do you two swim together every day?’

  ‘For now, yes, but I’ll be back at school in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘What do you mean,’ he said, ‘“back at school”?’

  ‘I’m a teacher,’ I told him. ‘I teach at Elm Hill Prep.’

  ‘A teacher?’ He was astonished. ‘I thought you were one of La’s ladies who loaf.’

  ‘Sadly not,’ I said, smiling. ‘The loafing has just been a summer job.’

  If only it could go on, I thought. If only it could be the lido’s opening season, the hottest summer in ten years, the year I met Lara, for ever.

  David moved on. The lifeguards rotated and it was Matt’s turn to climb the rungs of the chair nearest
our table.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Lara, lowering her sunglasses for a full-glare vista.

  A second guard took his perch at the far end, another youngster wearing flashy gold aviators. Not so long ago I would have assessed him purely for signs of former professional acquaintance, but now … when in Rome. ‘Look how well he handles that flotation aid,’ I said, in a wicked undertone.

  Lara cackled, delighted. ‘We can only hope he’s left full-time education – just think of your place in the Establishment,’ she teased. ‘Actually, they have to be eighteen to apply, so you’re off the hook. Oh, bless Inky, he’s falling asleep.’ She ruffled his curly ears, then, as R&B came over the pool’s sound system, she was on her feet and passing him back to me. ‘I just need to go and have a word with Reception …’

  When she came back, they were playing ‘Heatwave’ by Marilyn Monroe, which made me remember that ridiculous conversation with Ed when he’d said that no one ever thinks a homeless person is glamorous.

  I watched, giggling, as she lip-synced and angled her face in coquettish Monroe poses, finishing with a little kick in the air, a flourish of her foot.

  ‘I suppose I ought to get back to Iona. ‘I said I’d only be an hour and it’s been, God, what, three? Why don’t you come and meet her, Natalie? Inky too, of course.’

  After the event, I wished that this had been one invitation of Lara’s I hadn’t accepted, for the encounter marred an otherwise idyllic stretch. Unsure of Inky’s reliability in so expensively furbished a house, I left him in the shade at the front door before going up to the sitting room alone, Lara having diverted into her bedroom to take off her damp clothes. But Iona hardly glanced at me when I walked through the Diana doors. Sprawled on one of the petrol-blue sofas, she was playing with Everett, his blond head bent over a scattering of dice on the coffee table; only when he was dispatched to the freezer for a victor’s ice lolly did she favour me with her attention.

  ‘He’s been teaching me how to play Perudo.’ She spoke in the lazy tones of a cut-glass accent deliberately scuffed. ‘Honestly, it’s the most I’ve achieved in about six months.’

  So she had Lara’s flippant manner if not her beauty. Though her face bore traces of Markham heritage in its fine-boned nose and oversized eyes, the arrangement, head-on, was askew, a face with a touch of the Cubist to it. She was fleshier, with none of Lara’s mercurial elegance, and I would have put money on her having been one of those girls whose attractiveness had peaked in her early teenage years before she could make use of it, which made it the cruellest of gifts.

  ‘You’re Natalie, are you? La said she might bring you back. Where is she?’

  ‘Just changing downstairs,’ I said. There was a sense of reckoning about the way this woman was looking at me and I hesitated to join her on the sofa without a direct invitation. Instead I hovered, unsure whether to offer her a drink or to wait to be offered. ‘You didn’t fancy a dip in our new lido?’ I asked cheerfully.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ Iona looked at me with barely concealed displeasure. It wasn’t only her physical form that was heavier: where Lara’s personality ran a gentle finger down your arm, hers threatened to shake you till your teeth rattled.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘You’re talking to someone who finds the Red Sea too cold,’ Lara said, joining us in her fluffy robe, and within moments she’d uncorked the inevitable bottle of bubbly. ‘She never used to be like this, Natalie. She used to be amazing in the water. But now she’s a scaredy-cat, just like Mary-Lou.’

  Iona’s voice grew shrill in playful retaliation. ‘Yeah, right, Amanda. Olympic wannabe.’

  ‘Who are Mary-Lou and Amanda?’ I asked. ‘Old synchro teammates?’

  ‘Teammates? They’re characters in Malory Towers.’ Iona said this as if she should really not have to explain something so blindingly obvious. I could see she must have been the know-it-all Alfie Mellor of her own school (I often thought how easily we announced our childhood selves and how rare it was to come across truly convincing reinvention).

  She went on: ‘Mary-Lou’s scared of swimming in the rock pool and Gwendoline Mary holds her under to give her a fright. And Amanda swims out to sea and almost drowns, so she misses the Olympics because of an injury. Just like our little nymph here.’

  ‘I see.’ I wasn’t sure if it was the stories of near drowning – old habits died hard and I was used to people censoring themselves in Steele company, I suppose – or the nymph reference, but I felt myself startle.

  Noticing my confusion, Lara laughed. ‘You must think we’re nuts, Natalie. I need to explain that we had a summer when we were little when we read all the books and went around speaking like the characters. Mum was completely fooled – she thought they were our real friends.’ Everett had reappeared bearing an ice lolly shaped like a dagger and Lara pulled him on to her lap.

  ‘At first it was quite piggy-hoolier talking like them, but then it became rather smashing,’ Iona said.

  ‘What’s piggy-hoolier?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t you remember the Mamzelles?’ Lara cried. ‘It was how they pronounced “peculiar”.’ As if finding himself bombarded with a foreign language, Everett slipped from her grip and disappeared downstairs. The sisters hooted. ‘Oh, Iona, we’re clearing the room. I don’t think anyone else gets it but us!’

  ‘Everyone gets it,’ Iona said, in her scathing way. ‘Otherwise those books wouldn’t have sold zillions of copies, would they? Maybe it’s because Natalie’s a teacher. That’s what you are these days, aren’t you? Old Enid’s frowned upon by the PC crowd, isn’t she?’ It was not quite an accusation, rather an exposure of mediocrity, and I knew that by becoming riled I would only be falling into her trap. I was bewildered too by that ‘these days’: she spoke as if she’d met me before. I satisfied myself with a faint raising of the eyebrows.

  ‘Natalie isn’t PC,’ Lara objected. ‘She doesn’t even work in a state school. Didn’t Molly read Malory Towers, darling?’

  ‘No, she wasn’t really interested in stories set in schools.’ This struck me only now as odd; normally young children enjoyed any connection with the professions of their parents.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Lara asked.

  ‘I’ve just got a bit of a headache. It must be the heat.’

  Iona held up a palm, terminating a remark already made. ‘Never blame the sun,’ she chastised. ‘We need to keep on its good side or it won’t come out again.’

  She appeared to share Lara’s rather pagan veneration of the sun. I was not enjoying her company.

  ‘Go and grab something from the Pharm,’ Lara suggested. ‘That’ll sort it out.’

  ‘I’d forgotten you call it that,’ Iona said. ‘Promise me it’s kept under lock and key, safe from underage fingers, La?’

  Lara rolled her eyes. ‘No, I leave it open. I want nothing more than to have my offspring and their friends die of an accidental overdose of Valium. The code is my birthday, Natalie.’

  ‘Wow, we won’t need an Enigma machine for that,’ Iona sneered, and Lara flapped a hand in her direction. Iona seized it to begin some sort of play fight, calling out, ‘Beast!’ and ‘Smelly!’ and I left the room to the yelping sounds of puppies.

  Arriving in the main bathroom, I thought how Lara had rightly assumed I knew the date of her birthday. What else did she assume? Was this how all friendships worked between those with Wikipedia pages and those without? Tapping in the combination and releasing the lock, I was taken aback by the sight in front of me. It was as if someone had robbed a hospital: pots of prescription medication three or four deep, as well as over-the-counter items from the UK and other countries. Don’t get me wrong, there were no bags of cocaine (at least, not that I identified); if Ed had been right in his suspicion of street drugs then they were certainly not stored here.

  Street drugs: I sounded like my mother.

  I helped myself to two Nurofen and carefully closed the cabinet door.

&n
bsp; Upstairs the sisters had moved outdoors, the chatter continuing ceaselessly in voices raised over the rush-hour car engines of returning residents and arriving evening swimmers. Walking barefoot across the sitting room towards the kitchen for a glass of water, I thought I heard my name mentioned and out of instinct rather than guile I kept the water flow light and soundless so I could listen.

  ‘They really haven’t got a clue?’ Iona said.

  ‘No, and you’re the only one I’ve told.’

  ‘You guys are crazy. I don’t know how you get away with this stuff.’

  ‘I can’t help it if other people aren’t as inventive as we are.’

  ‘Inventive? What kind of a euphemism is that?’

  There followed a scramble of giggling and snorting, one sister indistinguishable from the other. It was impossible not to call to mind Angie’s hints of an open marriage, and when I finally turned off the tap and stepped out into the evening light, I knew I was blushing.

  Seeing me, Iona said: ‘Natalie, can you believe it? This slut hasn’t got any underwear on.’

  My mouth opened.

  ‘She means because I took off my swimsuit,’ Lara drawled, unruffled. ‘I didn’t want to sit on a damp gusset. I really don’t think Nat’s interested, Iona.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Iona said, and the giggling resumed. What an unpleasant woman she was.

  Below, Inky had begun to bark and at the next interruption from Everett I made my excuses and prepared to leave. ‘I’ll leave you to enjoy your evening,’ I said, with clumsy formality, and it seemed to me that Iona made it clear in the tone of her goodbye that she didn’t expect to see me again.

  ‘It’s the Land of Do As You Please here, isn’t it, Natalie? Remember what happened there, eh?’ This was the last thing she said to me.

  ‘Iona, you’re being very weird today!’ Lara protested, but weakly because she was drunk and giggling. I knew I had no right, but I couldn’t help feeling betrayed.