‘Are you okay?’ I asked, the fist-sized knot in my stomach loosening a little.
‘Yes, thanks,’ Molly said. The other two only shrugged.
‘Harriet’s going to be all right,’ I reassured them, and saw Georgia and Eve exchange an inscrutable private look. ‘Molly and Harriet know each other quite well,’ I explained to them, with sudden heat. ‘I thought she might be worried.’ I had the sense that these remarks, or perhaps the display of passion that had accompanied them, embarrassed Molly so I said no more. She was safe – they all were, including Harriet – and that was what mattered. I would contact Gayle later and make things right.
‘Phone your mum,’ Angie instructed Georgia, ‘in case she’s heard something and is worried about you.’
‘Sure,’ Georgia said, in an obedient, humouring way. It was clear that the girls had already turned their attention to more important things.
‘Come in here,’ Angie said, ushering me into the sitting room at the front of the house, ‘where we can have some peace.’
By the time I’d taken a seat in one of a pair of tub armchairs by the fireplace, Angie had delivered two glasses of something potent and repulsive that it took me a moment to identify as grappa. There was no immediate effect so I took another large gulp. Now details came into focus: a zebra-print rug, a row of potted orchids on the mantelpiece. After initial enthusiasm, Choo resettled on a sheepskin throw.
Angie perched settled next to me, wordless as a counsellor. Distant sounds through the open window brought the news that normal business had resumed at the lido.
‘Did you actually see what happened?’ I said.
‘No, I was in the café on my phone when I heard the whistle and I saw the lifeguards go around clearing the water. I thought there must be some technical thing, or something in the water. They clear it, you know, if there’s vomit, that sort of thing. But then they shouted, “Lifeguard going in,” and the next thing you know Matt is in the water helping someone out. But it was only a false alarm. The kind of alarm we like.’ Even so, Angie continued to look vexed, as if the worst part of the story was still to come.
‘What? What are you not telling me?’
‘I don’t know if I should say. It’s just gossip.’
‘Seriously,’ I pleaded, ‘I need to know everything. When I get home I’ll call Gayle. She’ll want to know any information I can give her.’ She won’t speak to me, I thought, swallowing. Not yet, maybe not ever.
‘Well, don’t tell her this,’ Angie said, rolling her pale eyes.
‘What?’
At last she spilled: ‘The girls think Harriet faked being in trouble in the water. If so, then that was a very dangerous thing to do, not to mention totally disruptive.’
I was taken aback. ‘But why would she do that?’
Angie’s attitude was markedly less easy-going than usual: she was, in her own way, shaken. ‘Well, to get her knight in shining armour to jump in and save her, apparently.’
I remembered now the casual gossip about Georgia’s boyfriend and Harriet’s interest in him. ‘You mean Matt?’
‘Got it in one. The incident happened right where he was patrolling. It was quite a coincidence.’
‘That doesn’t sound like Harriet at all,’ I said doubtfully.
‘Does anything ever sound like the child we think we know?’ Angie said. ‘Honestly?’
I thought of Gayle’s joke about writing a book called Not That I Know Of. Poor Gayle. She’d been there on site with Harriet yet it hadn’t been enough. These girls of ours, their thoughts were their own, their impulses, their mistakes.
‘As if we haven’t got enough worries,’ Angie sighed as she trickled the last of the grappa into our glasses. ‘Oh dear, Stephen will have a go at me for finishing this. He’s convinced I’m on the slippery slope to rehab. Like he’s a pure vessel, eh?’
I sipped the alcohol, disconcerted by the mention of her husband. ‘Angie,’ I blurted, ‘I wanted to ask you about him. Have I … have I done anything to offend him?’
She looked astonished. ‘Stephen? Of course not. What makes you say that?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ I shook my head, at last learning my lesson about cutting short these potentially damaging conversations. ‘I’m sure I just imagined it.’
The readiness – more than that, the air of knowing – with which Angie accepted this made me suspect that she might have taken part in some past discussion about my state of mind, presumably with Lara, and I felt suddenly victimized. Fine, so I’d been unusually vigilant about poolside safety, and fine, I’d lost my mind slightly regarding Stephen – it wasn’t as if I’d got the measure of Miles either, for that matter – but I wasn’t the one spinning this nonsense about Harriet or fabricating a flirtation between Georgia and a middle-aged man. Maybe Ed was right: this group was trouble.
‘I should take Molly home,’ I said, getting to my feet.
‘Of course. Let’s go and tell her to shake a leg,’ Angie agreed, and when she hugged Molly and pressed biscuits on her before leaving, I felt guilty for those previous uncharitable thoughts. What was wrong with me, second-guessing my friends when they were only trying to support me? If I continued like this, I’d have none left.
‘Thank you for everything this afternoon,’ I told Angie. ‘I needed … well, I needed a friend.’
‘You’re very welcome.’ At the door, she kissed me on the cheek. ‘Where’ve you been this week, anyway? I haven’t seen you since our fun and games last Friday. Nothing’s wrong, is it?’
‘No.’
‘It’s not to do with La, is it? Not that silly business about Ed? You really mustn’t worry. I’m sure he’s quite safe from her clutches.’
I couldn’t quite stifle my gasp, startled by her casual reference, but then I saw she meant Lara’s attentions, not Georgia’s, and must be referring to our conversation at La Madrague about the Channings’ marital indiscretions. One thing about this afternoon: it had put the ambiguity of the events of late Friday night into perspective. Not that, Lara had said as if it were trivia, just another jape with the gang. Miles’s and her peccadilloes, either individual or shared, were none of my concern.
‘Seriously, Lara’s one of the good guys,’ Angie said. ‘You can take my word for it.’
30
Monday, 31 August, 9.15 a.m.
In the hospital atrium, I stop to buy a takeaway coffee, drawn as much by the cheer and energy at the counter as by any need for refreshment. They’re soothing, the stock mundanities between the server and the customer – ‘Drew the short straw, did you?’ ‘Every time, love, every time. Sugar with that?’ – and the discordant roar and sputter of the coffee machine.
I decide on green tea. It comes too hot to drink.
I thought you might have understood … Don’t think about what that means: nothing matters now except the girl up there in Critical Care and the staff working to bring her back to her family.
I sit at an empty table to phone Ed. As I dial, I cradle Molly’s phone in my other hand, as if it connects me to her just by touch.
Ed answers at once, no greeting, only the question ‘How is she?’ and the sound of his voice, the urgent dread in it, undoes a catch in me and I have to breathe deeply before I can reply.
‘I don’t really know. I saw Lara, but I didn’t get much information. She was very upset.’
‘That’s understandable.’
‘It’s serious, though, Ed. I don’t think Georgia’s regained consciousness and the longer it goes on …’ I tail off, unable to articulate the rest of the thought.
‘Where are you? In the car?’
‘No, still in the hospital. I stopped to pick up a drink. I felt, just, overwhelmed.’
‘You’ve been awake all night – you need to come home and rest,’ he says, and I search for the tenderness in his tone but cannot find it. I cannot find it.
My eyes refill, colours swim, the passive expressions of those around me distort into anguish. I blink a
nd a woman comes into focus, blue overalls, a stethoscope and security pass around her neck; a man in green, AMBULANCE spelled out on his back in yellow.
‘Has Molly woken up yet?’ I ask.
‘No. I’ve come into the kitchen so I don’t disturb her.’
‘Tell her I’ll be back very soon with breakfast. I’ll stop by La Tasse and get her favourite croissants, the almond ones.’
‘Look, I need to go,’ Ed says. ‘I’ve just missed a call from Liam.’
‘Wait, one thing: Molly’s pin doesn’t work on her phone. Do you know if she changed it?’
‘What are you using?’
‘One nine oh nine.’ Inky’s birthday. Every year she makes him peanut-butter biscuits, says they’re his favourite, though the truth is he likes all biscuits the same.
‘She changed it from that a few weeks ago, don’t you remember? It’s oh three oh eight now. Try that.’
Maybe they told me or maybe I haven’t been around to be told. I hang up, key in the digits. Is 0308, as the previous one was, a memorable date? What happened on 3 August?
I’m in. I scroll through the most recent images: nothing from the party, which seems odd, but dozens of pictures of the lido in daylight hours, dating from the preceding days. Faces and legs are cut off, the subject a door or a light, sometimes out of focus as if the phone had slipped as her finger tapped the screen. Then, in perfect clarity, Georgia, in the pool, teeth bared in a theatrical growl, tiny white straps on suntanned skin. The thought of this radiant creature having been rendered inert, inanimate, by the very water she is pictured in: it breaks my heart. It would break any heart.
I open WhatsApp and scan for Georgia’s name. There’s a group called ‘Water-babies’ involving her, Josh and Eve, a long thread of messages dating from weeks ago and continuing till yesterday. Words jump out – ‘Pussy’, ‘Champ’, ‘Result!’ – and there are numbers, 2/05, 2/36, 1/57, 2/58, inexplicable to me, as are many of the emojis and acronyms. Some I recognize (PIR: parent in room; CTN: can’t talk now), others are no more than gibberish. PB: who knows what that might be in this new foreign language. Parental bitching? When I was at school, it meant ‘personal best’. Your fastest cross-country score, your longest jump.
When I was at school … I stopped doing sports after that Stoneborough summer. Remorse, dread, cowardice: one or all had diminished me and I spent my free time instead in the school library. Indoor spaces, solitary pursuits: these were safe and I had a greater chance of controlling them. But before I’d been active. Gregarious and full of life. I’d been in groups and teams and gaggles.
If the start of the summer feels far gone then the earlier part of my childhood is so remote as to have been built on air. Will I feel like this when Molly is grown and gone? Will all the crisis and drama of the last twenty-four hours seem as if it was dreamed up by a fantasist?
My tea is cooler, drinkable now. It tastes bitter, woody, bracing.
As I close the screen, the last thing I see is: 3/01? F*cking amazing!
31
Friday, 28 August – three days earlier
I see now that I wasn’t thinking straight that weekend. Maybe I hadn’t been thinking straight since the beginning, since that luminous Saturday morning in July when I took my seat at the lido café and came face to face with our bewitching new lake of ultramarine. Since I’d begun seeing Elm Hill in spangled, crackly cine-film vision, as if it were old Hollywood, its trees not elms but palms or cypresses, its people golden and decadent, subject only to the laws of their own making. Since I’d worshipped at the altar of La Madrague and believed myself to be, like its residents, closer to the sun than other people.
It was going to be as hard to remove myself from the fantasy as it had been easy to be seduced by it.
But remove myself was what Ed expected me to do, evidently.
‘I’m going to give the Channings notice on the tutoring,’ he told me on Friday morning, even before I’d got up. Though he came bearing coffee, he stood at my bedside ready to do battle. This was how it was now and I can’t say I didn’t feel sorrow: when he announced news that was important to him, he counted not on support but on strife. It was as if the New Forest holiday had never happened, or the previous ninety-nine per cent of our marriage, for that matter.
‘Oh, Ed, I wouldn’t do anything too hasty. Apart from anything else, they’re a really influential family.’
‘Exactly. I can’t risk rumours circulating. I need to nip this in the bud. The timing’s good because they’re about to go on holiday and by the time they get back term will have started and everyone will be crazy busy. I’ll let them know in writing and it will get lost in the general excitement.’
He was like a civil servant burying scandal in news of a war.
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘whatever you think is right.’ Though I hadn’t seen Lara for five days, his reminder that she would soon be departing for a holiday disheartened me.
Pleasantly surprised, Ed sat on the bed, his manner more conciliatory. ‘Before you ask, I don’t mind Molly still being friends with Georgia and the others. I can’t deny they’ve been a good influence.’
‘You can’t stop friendships,’ I agreed. ‘If they want to be together, they’ll be together, whatever we say.’ Indeed, Molly had seen Georgia again the previous day for their lido tour with Matt and declared plans for today too. They were becoming inseparable.
‘But the adults,’ Ed said. He paused and I saw the absolutism in his eyes. ‘I’d rather we stopped seeing them altogether.’
My rejection of this was both instant and wholesale. Yes, I had paused communication of my own accord, but the idea of being forbidden Lara’s company permanently was unthinkable – and the notion of being told to do it by my husband untenable. ‘The problem is, Ed, like I just said, you can’t stop friendships. I can’t just cut people out like that, and even if I could I wouldn’t. This isn’t Saudi Arabia. We vote, we drive, we choose our own friends.’
‘I see.’ He stood up again, and there was a sense beyond his immediate physical withdrawal that he was disconnecting from me – and also that he had anticipated having to do so. ‘Well, it goes without saying that we can’t go to the pool party on Sunday. I can’t, anyway,’ he corrected himself. ‘Not being a Saudi female, you must decide for yourself.’
‘Thank you, I will.’ Though on the surface quite unruffled, I was profoundly disturbed by this exchange. ‘Seriously, Ed, I think you should keep an open mind about the Channings. The way you’re feeling, it’s not even their fault. It’s mine.’
He scowled. ‘What is it with this woman? She’s even got other people blaming themselves for her crimes!’
‘There are no crimes,’ I protested.
‘Not on my part, there aren’t. I can’t speak for the rest of you.’ And he left the room.
Devastating though this was in one way, in another it was constructive, providing as it did the catalyst I’d needed to break my paralysis and act. When Lara phoned again and left a voicemail suggesting I drop by her place ‘any time, any time at all’, I replied by text saying I would call around that afternoon. I had a mission: far from sharing Ed’s determination to cut off relations, I planned to erase the issue that had fractured those relations and continue just as we had been. I would enlist her help. Perhaps if she were to apologize to him or appeal to him directly, we might even be able to change his mind. He was not a tyrant; his decision was not irrevocable.
Hope made me naïve. Something else – I couldn’t name it yet – made me careless.
First, before I saw Lara, I needed to make my peace with Gayle. I still had some sense of priorities.
Wednesday’s planned dinner had been abandoned, of course, Craig having phoned Ed to cancel after returning from the hospital, where Harriet had had her lungs checked. They had been found undamaged. He’d evidently made no reference to my part in the aftermath of her accident, which was no small mercy since I honestly didn’t think I could bear disapproval from
Ed on a whole new subject. Neither Ed nor I brought up the parallel with Molly, who’d had the same examination in a different A & E department all those years ago.
Gayle had rejected several calls from me, just as I had Lara’s, so I cheated now by ringing her from Ed’s phone.
‘Oh. Nat.’ Her tone was neutral, with just a touch of distaste.
‘I know you don’t want to hear from me,’ I began, ‘but I just needed to make sure Harriet’s all right. Ed says she had the all-clear from Trinity?’
‘She’s absolutely fine. It was all a storm in a teacup – she’s not even sure how it happened.’
‘I thought maybe she collided with another swimmer? It can get very crowded in the afternoons –’
‘I know,’ Gayle interrupted, an edge to her voice. ‘I do swim there myself, hence being on the scene when it happened.’
I knew what she meant by this and rushed to address it. ‘We should co-ordinate our times again, like we used to?’
Before I’d ditched her for Lara. It served me right that she continued as if I’d not made the offer: ‘To answer your question, she doesn’t remember any collision with anyone else, just being under water and becoming a bit disorientated.’
‘Was she holding her breath? It could have been that thing Matt told us about. Shallow-water blackout?’
‘Not everything has to be some dramatic medical event, Nat,’ she said, sighing. ‘Far more likely it was the effects of the sun. Who knows with girls, hormones running riot like they do? Anyway, she didn’t lose consciousness. She would have surfaced by herself if Matt hadn’t spotted her, but she was under just a bit longer than they like. Better to be on the safe side.’
‘Absolutely.’ I was encouraged by this flow of information. Realistically, I’d expected to be hung up on. ‘So there aren’t any after effects?’ I was not sure what was driving my persistence, genuine concern or the desire to disprove that accusation: There are other children in the world … parents who care about their children just as much as you do about yours.
The Swimming Pool Page 26