‘Really?’ She was the last person I would have expected to confess this: liberal and permissive, she was often seen laughing at Choo’s Twitter account, managed by Eve, or jokingly requesting Georgia share photos of Matt and his colleagues in their lifeguards’ uniforms. She would have been astonished to see us sit Molly down, as we had done not so long ago, for a family viewing of the latest police child-protection video. (As for what she would make of my having tried to open my daughter’s journal, perhaps she’d be more sympathetic than I might have guessed.)
Seeing my surprise, she added, ‘I don’t mean I read all the messages and posts, I’m not a glutton for punishment.’ There was a chuckle here, but even that was abbreviated, almost curt. ‘I just scroll through the contacts and followers, see who she’s been chatting with. Just in case.’
‘I think that’s very wise,’ I said earnestly. It would be pleasing to be able to report this conscientious parenting to Ed. ‘Ed and I try to keep up to date with Molly’s passwords. Our view is that if there’s something worth hiding, then there’s something worth finding.’
Of course the truth was that if there was something worth hiding then these half-child half-adult creatures would stop at nothing to hide it, and if we thought we had the faintest chance of outwitting them we were fooling ourselves. Their skills at subterfuge were superior, their self-absorption more complete.
‘Anyway,’ Lara said, ‘yesterday I noticed something that worried me.’
‘Oh, Lara.’ I reached to pat her arm in sympathy. ‘Tell me. Maybe I can help?’
She held my eye – she was rare in not letting her gaze drift upwards to the birthmark – and then, very gently, she brushed my hand from her arm and placed her own hand where mine had been. There was something in the gesture that turned me cold. ‘I noticed she had an awful lot of messages from Ed,’ she said finally.
I blinked, once, twice. ‘From Ed? Well, of course. They’re presumably about scheduling their sessions. Or links to revision sites and so on.’
There was just the barest trace of pain in her eyes, too obscure to name, before she looked down. ‘Maybe, yes. I just thought there were an awful lot. Some were from when you were away, which struck me as inappropriate.’
Never before had I heard Lara use this word as a negative. As far as she was concerned, inappropriate was a hoot, a cue for applause.
‘I know there was a FaceTime session,’ I said, battling my confusion. ‘I was in the room when he took the call from her. You and I spoke afterwards, remember? You’d been here, swimming in the rain.’
‘I don’t mean that. These were emails, a whole string of them. Georgia doesn’t normally bother with email. She does Instagram and WhatsApp, all that stuff. This felt secret. The email address was different from the one he uses when he sends me an update or an invoice.’
‘Secret?’ I faltered, my chest tightening. If she was suggesting what I thought she was suggesting, then I had to shut this down directly. It went without saying that I trusted Ed implicitly and knew him to be beyond reproach, in thought as well as action, but I couldn’t vouch for Georgia and the vagaries of the teenage psyche. Who knew what nonsense she and her friends had been exchanging on the subject of her ‘old but hot’ maths tutor? In my experience, the most attractive girls were the very ones interested in the challenge of gaining adult attention, their peers having proved all too easy to win. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said that, buoyed by her success with the older Matt, Georgia had perhaps made some regrettable comment about Ed that Lara had stumbled upon, prompting this investigation. Yes, it was a predictable enough suspicion (and one I might have anticipated had I not been so focused on Molly and, I admit, myself).
Most crucially, if Craig’s experience had taught me anything it was that parents – people – had only to hear the word ‘smoke’ and they were already warming their hands on the fire. God, teenage girls were a liability; it was a miracle society survived them.
‘Let’s start at the beginning.’ I spoke with the firm-not-forceful tones of a teacher that, in the past six weeks, I’d almost forgotten I possessed. ‘Ed always communicates by email or phone with his students. Texts are too easily missed and there’s often detailed information to give, or attachments. I have no idea how many accounts he uses, but I do know he’s highly organized and I wouldn’t be surprised if he runs his admin from one account and pupil liaison from another. You say the correspondence felt “secret”: in terms of the content, did you actually read the emails?’
‘No,’ she admitted.
‘Well, you should – if only for peace of mind. Come on, let’s go back now and read them together and you’ll see there’s nothing whatsoever for you to be worried about. It’s not an invasion of privacy if it’s correspondence with a teacher. I’m sure Ed wouldn’t mind us looking. All teachers know communication with pupils needs to be transparent.’
Lara sighed, as much the sigh of a thwarted child as an anxious parent. This sort of confrontation didn’t come naturally to her, I guessed. ‘She’s out with Eve, she’ll have her phone with her.’
‘If it’s email then you can access it on her laptop or whatever device she uses. Do you know the password?’
‘There’s no point. She’ll have deleted them by now.’
‘Why would she have done that?’ I knew from Ed’s and Craig’s stories of confiscated phones that young people (all of us for that matter) were less efficient in deleting sent emails than received ones, and lengthy exchanges could be revisited easily. ‘Lara, have you talked to Georgia about this?’
‘Not yet. I was hoping … I was hoping I wouldn’t have to.’
Again she exhaled heavily, tiring of this, and I saw that I was going to have to press her to be explicit. ‘Are you asking me to raise this with Ed? If so, I honestly think he might take offence. He’s absolutely scrupulous about teacher–pupil boundaries. He doesn’t even approve of our socializing, to be honest.’
I didn’t add that Lara had personally blurred the relationship to a level that could surely be construed as more troubling than anything Georgia might have done. I bet the girls love him: that had been one of the first things she’d said to me. She was, after all, a woman who was blithely lustful of her daughter’s eighteen-year-old boyfriend.
‘Forget it,’ Lara said, abruptly, decisively. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything. As you say, I’m sure it’s completely innocent.’
‘Of course it’s innocent. Seriously, if I thought for a moment Ed had crossed the line with a pupil, any pupil, believe me, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I would be at home spitting blood.’
Saying this, I was struck by what was fundamentally unnatural about this conversation: she was not spitting blood. Yes, I knew this was nonsense, scarcely worth my rousing any but routine defences on Ed’s behalf, but if she really believed there had been any impropriety between Georgia and a teacher in his forties, shouldn’t she be on his doorstep demanding answers? Wouldn’t Miles be at her side, ready to punch his lights out?
Inexplicably, through some rogue neurotic impulse, an image of Stephen sprang to mind.
‘Look, I ought to get back,’ I said. Cold now, I was also feeling the beginnings of nausea, not because of any doubt I had about my husband, but for the dawning knowledge that my friendship with Lara was now at risk. ‘Molly will be home in a few hours and I don’t want to be out when she arrives.’
As I struggled to my feet, I felt her fingers lock around my ankle. Then, when I pitched slightly, her other hand rested briefly on my calf to steady me. Her eyes were fierce with pleading. ‘Listen, you won’t say anything to Ed, will you? Don’t give this another thought, I’m just being paranoid, stressed out about the party next weekend.’
I couldn’t see what possible connection there might be.
‘This doesn’t change a thing between us,’ she continued. ‘See you tomorrow as usual? We’ll have lunch here, shall we?’
‘I’m not sure what my movements will
be,’ I said truthfully. ‘It depends what Molly wants to do.’
At this, Lara became more animated still, as if I’d hit upon some inspired solution to save the day. She released my ankle and sprang to her feet. ‘Bring her with you – I’d love to see her again. Let’s see if we can’t get her in the water this time!’
She was almost wild; I didn’t recognize her.
‘Text me, Natalie, promise?’
As I moved away, I saw people watching with interest, including the two women stretched out near by. They didn’t know me but, like most, they either knew who Lara was or were naturally attracted to her. They wondered who had inspired such entreaties; it was not the dynamic they would have expected, the beauty begging the disfigured. And, to my shame, I enjoyed that confounding of preconceptions.
Given the food for thought I carried away with me, I enjoyed it more than I should have, just as I did the memory of her fingers on my ankle.
Arriving home, I was calmed both by the gleaming cleanliness of the place (part in atonement for Friday’s antics and part in preparation for Molly’s return, I’d spent the previous afternoon deep-cleaning) and by immediate evidence of the professionalism I’d just been defending in my husband. For sitting in his office cell, producing invoices, was a man who gave sixty or seventy hours a week to his job in term time and who was applying the same dedication to his tutoring. All these weeks that I’d been indulging myself, he had not once complained that he was working when he could have been relaxing: he was utterly committed to the new venture. It was inconceivable that he would jeopardize it with even the smallest ambiguity.
I showered, then joined him in the living room, where he’d adjourned with his laptop. I was determined to do as Lara had insisted and keep the matter to myself. The problem was – and it’s hard to admit it even now – I continued to be agitated, not by the threat to Ed’s reputation so much as the one to my relationship with Lara. We might have parted with her publicly begging me to agree that nothing had changed between us, but the very fact that Lara Channing was begging meant something was seriously amiss.
‘Are you all right?’ Ed asked.
‘Fine.’ And in that single syllable I knew I was going to allow Iona’s runaway train to derail. I could feel my hands slipping from the wheel, my feet rolling from under me. ‘How is it going with Georgia since we’ve been back from holiday?’
In spite of the abruptness of the question, he answered willingly. ‘It’s going perfectly well. We had a good session yesterday.’ Then, at my silence: ‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Nat, just spit it out.’
‘Just, well, you don’t think …?’
He looked up properly, fingers motionless on the keyboard. ‘I don’t “just, well” think what, exactly?’
‘That maybe she might be getting a little too fond of you? Developing a bit of a crush.’
Ed stared at me, irritated. ‘What on earth makes you think that? We get on well, of course we do, but I find that that’s slightly more constructive than encouraging students to hate me. Better for business, too.’
I consciously relaxed, meaning my body language to show how casual my remarks were, how expectant I was that he should dismiss them out of hand. ‘I don’t mean you would ever do anything, of course you wouldn’t. I just mean her. Maybe she’s not the innocent we think she is.’
Faint colour stained Ed’s cheeks. ‘Whether or not she’s “innocent”, whatever that means, is not my concern, is it? I teach her maths, not morals. End of story.’
But his tone was anything but terminal. Sensing the magnitude of my mistake, I blundered instead towards generalization. ‘I’m just saying, with girls of that age, the ones who come on their own, maybe we should make sure I’m here at the same time? Just to be on the safe side? You can’t be too careful – we know that from poor Craig’s ordeal.’
Ed set aside the laptop. ‘Why would you bring that up? Craig was the victim of a malicious campaign.’ As the words formed, there it was, the sudden flush of comprehension that seemed to make his eyes change colour. Now he exploded. ‘This has come from her, hasn’t it? You’ve just seen her at the pool and she put this idea into your head? Interfering witch.’
‘Ed!’ Instantly I was ambushed by an instinct to defend Lara from his accusations, not him from hers – what was the matter with me? Even as I engaged in it I recognized my behaviour as both disloyal and self-sabotaging. ‘Ed, don’t get this out of proportion. All she said was she’d noticed Georgia had had a lot of emails from you, including when we were on holiday. She wondered if that was the normal amount between a tutor and his pupil and I said it was. Don’t worry, she hadn’t actually read them.’
He flushed deeper still, enraged. ‘You say that like there was something to read! And you’re prepared to cover it up like some complicit political wife. Like she no doubt would for Miles.’
My head pounded. ‘No, I don’t. If I thought that, then don’t you think I’d be confronting you myself? Obviously, I knew it was nonsense.’
‘So you agreed to have a quiet word with me, did you? Aren’t you insulted on my behalf? Doesn’t it make you wary of this woman?’ He laughed, bitter, scornful. ‘No, of course it doesn’t, not when you’re a desperate acolyte.’
As I gaped, he startled me by picking up his phone and flinging it on to the sofa seat next to mine. It bounced against my leg and I put out a hand to stop it falling to the floor. ‘I haven’t deleted any emails or texts for weeks. Read any you like. Go on! All the sent ones are still there too. Feel free to show the police.’
To my horror, he reached next for his laptop. ‘If you throw that at me as well,’ I said, ‘I swear I’ll leave and not come back.’
‘Where will you go?’ he demanded. ‘To the Channings’? Do you really think they’d have you? The wife of a sex pest?’
By now, the scene had gathered a combative heat that was unprecedented between us and no less distressing because I had commanded it myself from perfect tranquillity and order. ‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘Of course I’m not going to read your private messages.’
‘Not private. Professional.’ His tone was as black as his expression.
‘Yes.’ I laid the phone on the coffee table, face down, as if that were an illustration of my honour.
‘Do you want to know what I think?’ Ed said.
‘You’ve already told me, haven’t you?’
‘I think she’s fucking toxic, your great mate Lara. I think she’s pathologically jealous of Georgia and is trying to damage a perfectly healthy and productive teacher–pupil relationship. She’s using you to help her.’
‘She’s not.’ Oddly, it was this, more than anything, that cut the deepest: that I should be being used, not loved for myself. ‘She had a brief concern and she aired it discreetly. If you must know, she begged me not to mention it to you.’
‘I bet she did. She’s stirring trouble for her own entertainment. This is probably what she does for a hobby while Miles plays golf.’
‘He doesn’t play golf.’
‘Was she pissed? At the pool?’
‘Of course she wasn’t. It’s the middle of the day.’
‘So what? They probably start on the booze the minute they wake up.’
We’re too drunk. We’re always too drunk.
I suppressed an involuntary impulse of dread or lust or something equally violent. ‘This is a mistake, yes, we can agree on that, but don’t forget all the lovely things she’s done for us. Think how she’s helped Molly.’
He made a contemptuous sound. ‘It’s Georgia who’s helped Molly, and before you say it again, I don’t believe for a moment that Lara ordered her to. All she did was recommend a therapist and anyone could have done that.’
‘It was more than that,’ I protested. ‘She even rang Bryony in advance.’
Ed’s exasperation flared once more. ‘That’s how she operates, don’t you see? She does favours, puts herself at the centre of thi
ngs. Like the lido. The way you describe her, she’s like some mobster running her front-of-house from there, controlling guest lists, keeping everyone quiet with cocktails, leading midnight break-ins.’
I burst into laughter. ‘What are you talking about? That’s not remotely how I describe her! And she spent two years on the restoration campaign, which is hardly a quick favour. It must have been pretty tedious and was probably unpaid as well.’
‘She doesn’t need the money. She just fancied having a pool across the road from her house and had nothing better to do with her time. It’s all power play.’
‘It’s good works, Ed, and friendship.’
‘A funny kind of friendship. But maybe that’s what you prefer, these days. Over the people who genuinely care about you.’
He meant Gayle, of course. This conversation was an out-and-out disaster. Only a physical withdrawal was going to stem this flow of hateful comments and I got to my feet to leave the room. ‘Look, please don’t blame Lara, blame me. It wasn’t even an allegation. I should never have said anything.’
‘The point is, I would expect you to say something,’ Ed said. ‘You’re my wife. At least, I thought you were.’
‘What?’
‘Mum?’
We both started at the sound of our daughter’s voice, the sight of her moving from hallway to open living-room doorway, her face appalled.
‘Molls, you’re early! I didn’t hear you come in.’ I hurried to hug her, but her arms remained by her sides.
‘Because you were shouting,’ she said coolly. And she looked first at her father and then at me, as if to say we had deliberately ruined her homecoming.
Behind her, my mother appeared. ‘You do know that everyone on this floor can hear you going at it hammer and tongs? Honestly, Nat, you’ll have people complaining you’re lowering the tone.’
With Herculean effort, I ignored this remark.
‘Hello,’ Ed said blandly. ‘Come and sit down. Tell us all about your week away, Molls.’
The Swimming Pool Page 24