‘What?’
‘I’ll do it,’ Lara said, and now I felt what, moments ago, I had longed for, her hands on my clothes, my body, undressing me.
But it was a rough, careless disrobing and it was at his command, not mine. I sucked in my breath, too stunned to protest. My cognition was already blurred by her denial of Nessie and now here was Miles acting on some other unconnected agenda. My brain turned full circle: this must be something sexual, not the rendezvous I had wanted but a more complicated one, one that did not require my consent. I felt the drilling sensation of fear. ‘Guys, please, stop. I’m not interested –’
Miles laughed and it was not the urbane, sardonic laugh I knew, but an utterance of raw hostility. ‘You don’t seriously think we want to fuck you, do you? Look at yourself, you dumb bitch.’
I gasped, turned my face in humiliation. My jaw made contact with a wrist bone and the sharp pain it caused was a distraction, almost a mercy.
‘Is her dress off ?’
‘It’s not hers,’ Lara muttered, as if it revolted her to find me in it, as if the pleasure of her gift of it had never been experienced. I could feel liquid bubbling in my stomach.
The dress was at my feet and now Lara’s hands were on my skin, long nails scraping my back as she unhooked my bra. Again, I strained for clarity, finding one last solution: this was a misunderstanding. They’d misunderstood about Ed and now they’d misunderstood about me. Someone was smearing us, poisoning minds against us. I was filled with moral urgency, the need to clear my name, be my right self in their eyes. To go back to what we had been twenty minutes ago.
‘Please –’ I began, but was startled by the touch of something soft on my ear. Lips, a mouth so close the words dropped into the cavity. Not Lara’s.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’
‘No,’ I said miserably. ‘Remember you from where?’
‘Stoneborough, of course.’
‘I thought this was nothing to do with that?’
‘She thought it was me,’ Lara told him. ‘Can you believe it? She can’t even remember who she destroyed.’
‘I didn’t destroy anyone,’ I cried. I seized something solid, Miles’s upper arm, and squeezed, as if to wrest understanding from him: ‘You’re from Stoneborough? I thought you said you grew up in Kent.’
‘I did, after my family left the area. Because of you.’
‘I don’t understand.’ He must have known Nessie, then. She had not been his future wife or his sister-in-law, but his own sister or a close childhood friend. And Lara … I could feel her fingers, spiky with disgust, tugging my knickers down my legs. She was here because he was.
She’ll do anything for him. Angie knew them far better than I did. The thought of kind Angie on the other side of the pool, giggling with Douglas and Andrew, looking out for our kids or phoning to check on Eve, made me whimper. She wouldn’t go along with this, she’d know it was lunacy. Stripping a woman naked and holding her captive in a changing hut! And Ed, Ed would stop them – he’d protect me from their bullying.
You’re my wife. At least I thought you were.
‘You almost killed me,’ Miles said. ‘Do you realize that?’
Me. Not Nessie, him. And, with a surge of relief, I was back to the idea of a terrible misapprehension.
‘Please, can we straighten this out?’ I said, hearing the shake in my voice. ‘I know the village, and there was an incident, yes, when I was young. It was with a girl, the one I mentioned to Lara. But there was no boy involved. So maybe you’re talking about a different place, some other person?’
As his voice came close to my ear again, his hand pressed my head against the wall, flattening my cheek and mouth. ‘The fact that you have no idea what you did makes it even more despicable.’
‘But what is it you think I did?’ My voice was not mine, my sense of myself quite lost now.
‘You did what we’re going to do to you.’
‘Almost finished,’ Lara said, in a confirming tone, and I felt her stoop, squat, elbow bony against my leg, before roughly gripping my ankles as she removed my sandals.
As tears fell, my mind made a connection, plucked an image that might make a match.
Everyone hates you. Everyone. All the boys.
He must have been one of them. The ones we’d stripped and mocked so casually we’d considered our victims interchangeable. For they had been a pack, a litter, their pubescent bodies and incomplete faces standard issue, everyday fare. I couldn’t remember a single individual, only their massed wayward voices, their universal kicks of wildness and rage. Far more powerful in my memory were Mel’s snorts and the sudden delicious weakness inside my ribcage as I caught her laughter and felt the howls escape me. It had not haunted me as Nessie had. It had not come close.
‘That was …’ I stammered ‘… that was just a prank.’
‘A prank?’
And now my face was shoved against the wall, my cheekbone connecting hard, pain coursing through my head and neck.
‘Let me remind you about your prank, you whore. You left me alone in the woods without any clothes. I had to walk home through the village naked. Two fucking miles. When I got to the high street, people came out to laugh. Everyone I knew, my friends, my brothers.’
‘But … but we thought …’ I was, struggling to suppress sobs.
‘You thought someone would help? Well, they didn’t. It was the worst humiliation of my life. I didn’t leave the house for weeks. It was the holidays, I could hide. But then school started. I thought if I survived the first day of school I’d survive for ever, but I didn’t. Every single child knew about it. It was a witch-hunt. I was bullied, I was destroyed. I was sent to a psychiatrist because I tried to take my own life.’
I was unable to process this, to accept any part of it. All I could do was snivel my excuses, ‘Honestly, Miles, I swear I had no idea. It didn’t …’ I stopped myself, but he reacted as if I’d continued, roughly pulling my face closer to his by my hair.
‘Didn’t mean anything to you?’
I thought of Mel, who had likely attended the same school. Had she been aware of his suffering? As his tormentor, had she been, in the warped childhood hierarchy, a hero? Gulping, I reached for the last cowardly protest at my disposal: ‘It wasn’t just me. What about Mel –’
‘I don’t care about the other one. I remember you. I remember how you enjoyed it. You were sadistic – I saw it in your face.’
‘I didn’t enjoy it!’ This was overwhelming and yet, aware now of my crime, I could at least think more clearly, could begin to assemble a defence. ‘I can’t believe it affected you like this. It was over thirty years ago!’
‘Maybe in thirty years’ time you’ll still be thinking about tonight. I hope so.’
‘She will,’ Lara said.
‘I don’t understand what you want from me!’ I cried.
A slap to the side of my head shocked me into silence.
‘Shut up and listen. This is what you’re going to do,’ Miles said. ‘We’re going to get you to the turnstile and you’re going to go through it into the park. You’re going to walk home naked, just like I did. You won’t have your key, so you’d better hope someone’s home.’
He knew Ed and Molly were here, of course. I had a vision of myself ringing Sarah’s bell, or that of another neighbour, waiting to waylay someone coming or going from the building, and my mind rejected it as unthinkable. How could I explain? How could I endure humiliation like that?
‘An eye for an eye,’ Lara added. ‘It couldn’t be fairer. You’re lucky there’s no interest added.’
‘Someone will see me, someone will help me.’ Gayle, I was thinking, her house was closer than mine. But she was at the Vineyard, twenty minutes from here, almost on my own doorstep. Then I thought of Eve, at home on her own with Milena, just a street away. I’ll go there, make up some story, get her to lend me some clothes.
‘If they do, you’ll be luckier than I was,’ Mile
s said. ‘Or maybe you’ll be unlucky and someone will film you and post it where your pupils look – and their parents. Your colleagues. Your daughter.’
‘I refuse,’ I said, locking my legs, stiffening my body, like an animal. ‘This is ridiculous. You’re both mad.’
Lara grasped my bare arm, hurting me. ‘Now, listen to me very carefully: if you make a sound when we go out there, if you do anything to get out of this, then tomorrow we will be making a complaint to the police.’
In the dark, I swung blindly from one to the other: they really were demented. How were they holding down jobs, running a household, raising kids? At last I found my fire: ‘They won’t take you seriously. How could they?’ The police hadn’t been involved in our assault of Nessie, a crime far more serious than any skirmish with Miles; it was laughable that they would be interested in pursuing what we’d done to him. ‘We’re talking about a different age, three decades ago!’
‘Not about that, you moron,’ Miles said. ‘A complaint against your husband for the sexual harassment of a fifteen-year-old girl.’
My face and neck flooded with a heat so febrile, so suffocating that only adrenalin could stop me passing out. ‘What? There’s been no harassment.’
‘I think only the victim can make that call, don’t you?’
I was speechless, utterly broken. I had no idea what Georgia would be prepared to fabricate at her parents’ behest or – in the hysteria of the moment it occurred, I admit it – if there was any truth in it. But what I did know was that it would not come out of the blue: there’d be a paper trail, screen grabs of messages taken out of context, evidence of doubts raised to third parties, an account to someone convincing of Lara having had a warning word with the wife. They’d laid the trap.
‘Have you been planning this the whole summer? The tutoring, our friendship …?’ I was sobbing, speaking in gulps.
‘There is no friendship,’ Lara said.
‘This is why you were so keen to get me to the party …’
A new suspicion was dawning: last Saturday, at La Madrague, had they been going to do this then? Strip me, send me out into the night? Or had it been sexual, after all, to enslave me, guarantee my attendance at the party in spite of the planned alienation of my husband? But I’d left. I’d thought I wasn’t ready for their advances, and when the seed had been planted about Georgia I’d announced I wasn’t coming to the party after all. And then Lara …
Everything I’d felt, she had not. She had only acted.
Because tonight was perfect. At a drunken pool party, it was not beyond the realms of possibility that there would be some skinny-dipping, some shameful middle-aged character who’d drunk too much and made a laughing stock of herself. But it was more than that: it was public humiliation, the kind of thing that burned for a lifetime … Word would spread even without the incendiary of social media. I would be suspended or fired from work. What would Molly say?
Molly. Where was she now? Was she safe with Ed, helping put candles on a cake? How long had I been held in this hut? Had I been missed? Was she, right at this moment, picking her way around the pool, her demons reawakening, her step faltering? I felt myself begin to hyperventilate.
‘Let’s get on with this,’ Miles said, and at once a vertical crack of blue-tinged light appeared, enough for me to see his face, his eyes frigid, emotionless.
Far away, I thought I heard voices raised above the chatter, first Liam’s, ‘Where is she?’, and then Ed’s, ‘Let me find Molly …’ but I no longer knew if the sounds were real, if the experience I was having existed or was simply phantasmic.
Then, confusingly, I could no longer see Miles’s eyes: the column of light had gone black.
‘They’ve turned out the lights in the café,’ Lara was telling him. ‘I don’t know why.’
My birthday cake, I thought.
As the door opened fully, there was complete darkness beyond, an eruption of gaiety from across the water, a succession of distinct calls: ‘Not all the lights, just these ones!’
A male voice raised above the others: ‘Can someone sort this out? I can’t see a thing!’ Then, alcohol-fuelled jeering, laughter spraying from all directions.
‘Must be a power cut or something,’ Lara said. ‘Even better.’
And now her body was wrapped around me like a towel and she was steering me through open air, chill after the closeness inside the hut. My bare skin was pale, hairs raised. Now Miles was alongside us, his grip digging into the flesh of my arm.
A grave corrective tone carried towards us: ‘Don’t let anyone near the pool. Rog, can you patrol?’
As voices responded, too numerous to be distinct, we reached the caging of the turnstile, the sinister blackness beyond. I thought, if they force me through, I’ll wait, I’ll call over the wall, I’ll go down to the main entrance and try to get someone’s attention, I’ll –
Miles’s breath was hot in my ear. ‘If you turn around and come back, the deal’s off.’
‘It’s not a deal! Stop this nonsense, please!’ But I was in the triangular grip of the turnstile now, the press of cold metal against my shoulder and arm, ready to be ejected into the park. The reality was registering, the absurdity fading: this was happening or Ed would be discredited, investigated, perhaps arrested.
Then came a sudden commotion of cries, names called out with urgency, even fear. There was something wrong – something beyond the wrongness of this.
Miles felt it too. ‘What’s going on?’ he said, his voice tense and imperative, and I felt a final flare of hope.
Now, a single distinct cry in a voice all three recognized: ‘Mummy!’
‘Is that Everett?’ Lara said. ‘He’s supposed to be inside with David and Suki.’
Now voices, cries, one above the rest, coming closer, its owner moving in our direction, a female voice too shrill to identify: ‘Lara! Lara, where are you? You need to come, it’s an emergency!’ Then, obliterating the rest, consuming all other sound within the site, the giant swooping noise of an alarm.
And in that instant, a click away from expulsion, I was forgotten, as the Channings dematerialized, drawn from one darkness to another.
36
Monday, 31 August, 9.40 a.m.
We stand facing each other, neither speaking. Less than twelve hours ago, we were crushed together, confined, breathing as one into the blackness, and he hated me as a lifelong enemy. My instinct should be to flee – he represents a threat to me, a bodily danger – but there is a twisting sensation at my softest core that I recognize as mercy.
It is his daughter, not mine, who is critically ill in an intensive-care unit above us. He told me I’d destroyed him, but he was wrong. This is what destroys us, a child’s life in jeopardy. The problem is that his is in jeopardy because she saved mine, which means it’s possible he hates me now with a depth he didn’t know existed last night.
Yes, my instinct should be to flee.
‘Lara said she’d seen you,’ he says. ‘You shouldn’t have come here.’
In my hand I feel Molly’s phone come to life and I slide it into my bag, feel it drop at exactly the moment my own starts to ring. Friends, having waited till a civilized hour to make contact; I haven’t answered the texts and they’re worried. Other people care. Other people in my life besides the Channings.
‘Can we talk?’ I say. ‘I know you need to get back upstairs, but just two minutes. Please.’
Miles says nothing, but gestures to the table where I’ve dropped my water bottle and pulls out the chair nearest him. I sink into the seat opposite, eyes lowered, aware of him placing his coffees in front of him. The second must be for Lara, upstairs at Georgia’s bedside. I picture their usual drinks of choice: champagne, Negronis, tumblers of whisky.
When I raise my eyes again, I find his already fixed on me. I read loathing, of course, but also anguish and terror. He’s never been more human to me, never less enigmatic – and yet I still cannot connect him with the boy he says he was
. The boy whose face I cannot dredge from memory because I didn’t care to look at it at the time, not properly. Too busy seeking Mel’s approval; too busy laughing. In thirty years, none of my residual guilt has been attached to those pale and anonymous boys whose faces had blurred into one.
And yet mine had remained clear to him, his experience of my cruelty a component part of the life that followed.
‘Whatever you want from me, you can have it,’ I say, just catching in time the gulp in my voice that would be sure to incense him for I have no right to distress. ‘You must know I would trade anything, anything, for this accident not to have happened.’
His reply is not immediate, but when it comes, stark and unyielding, it makes me shudder: ‘You’ve got nothing to trade.’
I bring my hands in front of me, pleading. ‘Tell me what you want from me, but please, please leave my family out of it.’
‘Your family is why we’re here,’ he says, in the same bleak tone.
I had meant Ed, but he means Molly, of course. Dare I hope that his threat regarding Ed has passed, the sword lowered? I drop my hands. On my lap I knit my fingers together, scrape the left palm with my right thumbnail until it’s too painful to bear without crying out.
In my bag, the ringing begins once more.
‘I told Lara how grateful we are to Georgia, and so incredibly sorry. I know Molly will want to thank her too.’ I pause. ‘And Ed.’
I watch him. He has not forgotten.
‘So that’s why you’re here,’ he says. ‘Not for Georgia.’
‘Of course for Georgia –’
He interrupts, more curious than cold: ‘You must think there’s something in it.’
‘Think’, not ‘know’ or ‘agree’: an admission, surely, that the accusation is fiction.
‘I assure you I don’t.’ A memory flickers then, a short-term memory, some time in the last week. I’d come into Ed’s office without warning and, as I did, I caught the click of his laptop closing, a sharp look my way. Had he been covering his tracks, deleting those emails to her, emails worth inspecting after all? I’d eradicated the thought, of course, but that wasn’t the same as not having had it in the first place. ‘Georgia’s what’s important,’ I say very firmly. ‘Her recovery, her future.’
The Swimming Pool Page 30