Swimming in the Shadows

by Diane Janes

  Assessing the risks posed by Disappeared!, I feared the Three Ts the most. They were incorrigible gossips and since the Trainspotter watched television every evening, she was the person most likely to catch the transmission on Thursday night. If Disappeared! was scheduled against any of the soap operas, I could be reasonably confident that she would ignore it, but if it was up against sport or anything political, the odds were well stacked in favour of her watching the wretched programme.

  And what about Rob’s mother, Mrs Dugdale? She was an elderly woman who lived alone and therefore might watch a lot of television – suppose she watched the programme? If they showed a photograph of Jennifer Reynolds – who was I kidding – when they showed a photograph, wasn’t it inevitable that she would think it was one likeness too many? It didn’t take a genius to join up the dots and make a trail from Nicholsfield to Lasthwaite via the Lake District. She was already a bit suspicious …

  Stop it. Stop it. There isn’t anything to connect the Heather Bank Hotel to Nicholsfield. They’re a cool two hundred miles apart. Besides which, hadn’t Mrs Dugdale said she went to the W.I. on Thursdays – or was it Tuesdays? Why, why, had I not paid more attention?

  I took a deep breath and reminded myself that whatever happened I had to carry on as normal – if anyone at work did watch the programme and remarked on my similarity to any old photographs, then a laughing denial ought to dispel any suspicions. I tried to put the whole thing to the back of my mind while I wrestled with the quarterly budget.

  Rob rang me at eleven fifteen. Mid-morning break. A respite from GCSE Geography. ‘What do you say to dinner at mine?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said.

  ‘Do you fancy a stir-fry?’

  ‘Anything you like.’

  I knew he would make a detour to raid the supermarket on his way home. School was finished by four, so even after calling in for some shopping he would certainly be at his cottage before me. By the time I arrived there would be piles of neatly chopped meat and vegetables, ready for the wok. He would cook without fuss and produce a good meal without the flourish which had been an inevitable accompaniment to masculine culinary efforts in my previous experience.

  On the rare occasions when he had prepared us a meal, Alan had always adopted his see-how-clever-I-am look. Not that my own efforts in the kitchen were expected to elicit praise or wonder. On the contrary, they were up for whatever criticism seemed appropriate: ‘A bit tough, isn’t it, Jenny?’ For years I had accepted this without question. It had never occurred to me to do otherwise.

  Rob never seemed to criticize anything I did, but that was not why I loved him. It was something much more fundamental than that. I was in love with him long before I found out about his uncritical nature. In fact, I was a little bit in love with him from the first moment I set eyes on him.

  It happened not long after I arrived in Lasthwaite to take up the job at the health centre. Since I was a newcomer to the district, the doctors and their wives had conspired to involve me in local life, so that I would meet people and make new friends – an alarming initiative which filled me with horror, until I realized that it was the best possible way to become accepted and blend in. The local people seemed to fall into three distinct, yet overlapping groups. At one extreme was the beer and bingo brotherhood, and at the other the rather smart dinner party set to which the doctors and their wives naturally gravitated. Between these two there was a middle ground of people who belonged to neither group but mingled with both – a community loosely bound by the churches and chapels, the Young Farmers and the various hobby classes which took place at the institute; the cricket club and the pub quizzers, all of whom were likely to be encountered at the summer barbecues and bonfire night held by Friends of the Hospice.

  One popular annual fixture was a barn dance held by the Metcalfe family (pie ’n’ pea supper, all the proceeds going to the Church Restoration Fund). The 1989 dance took place within a fortnight of my arrival and the McLearys insisted that I accompany them to it. When we got there it seemed as if the entire population of the dale had turned out and the McLearys appeared to know everyone. I must have been introduced to scores of people, but the only one that really mattered was Rob.

  I immediately fell for his smile, his open, easy-going manner. I liked his deep voice, his brown eyes and the way his hair jostled the back of his collar when he turned his head. Since he appeared to be about my own age, I expected a wife or a girlfriend, or perhaps even a boyfriend to turn up at any moment, but that didn’t happen. When I wasn’t being whisked around the floor in a series of hectic eightsomes, we sat together chatting between dances. He wasn’t the sort to pour out his life story, but by the end of the evening I had gleaned the information that he taught geography at the local comprehensive and that he lived alone, on the opposite side of the village to me.

  I had absolutely no intention of becoming romantically involved. Even overly close friendships had the potential to end in disaster, so I had developed a strategy for keeping all-comers at arms’ length, which included greeting any suggestion of a date with a polite refusal. Thus if Rob had suggested meeting up for a drink, or issued some similar invitation on the evening of the Metcalfes’ barn dance, I would have made an excuse and our relationship would have faltered at the first hurdle. If he had courted me ardently, I am almost certain that nothing would have happened between us – but of course he did not. Each time we met he continued to treat me with no more than the ordinary friendliness one might accord a casual acquaintance, and in this apparent lack of interest lay the seeds of my downfall.

  After the barn dance I caught myself thinking about him constantly. It was foolish, like a schoolgirl’s crush. Yet it persisted. A glimpse of him in the village store set my heart racing. When he smiled at me my stomach did a back flip in sheer delight. And since I knew that nothing could possibly come of it, I thought that I was perfectly safe to allow myself the indulgence of these feelings, secure in the knowledge that Rob had no interest in me at all. Every local event became coloured for days in advance by the possibility that he might be there, culminating in joy if he was, desolation if he failed to show. All of this studiously concealed from everyone else of course, because so long as no one ever found out, so long as he never found out, I was perfectly safe to indulge in my secret obsession.

  As those first weeks passed, I reminded myself several times a day that I had not fallen in love. That could not happen, because falling in love could not be countenanced under any circumstances. Falling in love represented a dangerous loss of control. I knew the feelings which swept through me were not only delicious and wonderful, but ultimately dangerous. It was a tidal wave which could sweep away my very existence; carry before it the fragile foundations on which my life was built, like a shanty town collapsing before the weight of a hurricane. And even on the rare occasions when I admitted to myself just how besotted I had become, I still knew that I was safe – because Rob had shown no interest at all. It never occurred to me that whereas chance meetings in towns and cities call for quick action on someone’s part, before a would-be date vanishes from view forever, in a community as small as ours, Rob could simply bide his time, knowing full well that we would bump into each other again and again.

  At the beginning of December I received an invitation to pre-Christmas drinks at Dr Woods’s house. Malcolm and Penny Woods lived in a spectacular barn conversion, whose interiors looked like illustrations from Home and Garden magazine. By the time I arrived there were already at least a dozen cars parked in and around the courtyard and, glancing at some simultaneous arrivals, I was glad that I had donned a posh frock made of black velvet with sparkly bits on its low-cut bodice, having fortunately been tipped off in advance about the form.

  Once inside I followed the established rituals of such events, sipping a drink and answering enquiries about whether I was ‘ready for Christmas’, filling any silences which developed by admiring the elaborate Christmas decorations which festooned firepl
aces and dripped from wall lights. After about fifteen minutes of this, as if from nowhere I found Rob beside me. The press of people forced us to stand close together and I found myself looking up into his eyes, fixated by his physical presence. The attraction was so strong that I had to concentrate in order to hear what he was saying – something inconsequential, the latest proposal for a new curriculum, or the forthcoming Christmas carol service – while all the time I experienced an overwhelming urge to touch him. In that moment I understood for the first time in my life what it was to desire someone so wildly, so desperately, that any kind of madness seemed possible. Yet somehow I kept my voice steady, managed to carry on chatting and smiling as if everything were perfectly normal. More people drifted across to join the conversation, and then Penny Woods eased herself between Rob and me, proffering a tray of nibbles in each hand, and in the general re-shuffle which followed, I somehow found myself edged out of our group and into another, where Dr Hindmarsh was making some kind of joke about whether the nineties would turn out to be the Naughty Nineties – and all the time I could think of nothing except how I might contrive to manoeuvre myself next to Rob again.

  More and more guests seemed to be crowding into the room; groups converged and dispersed, borne along by the ebb and flow of chatter. I tried to concentrate on the small talk while I cast around in search of Rob, but I was too short – even in my heels – to see beyond the tall, red-faced rugger buggers who had gathered to my left. I caught a glimpse of Dr Woods over by the fireplace, topping up glasses and flirting with all the women, while there by the front window was Mrs Woods, tall and slim, a gracious hostess to the tips of her manicured fingernails, soaking up the compliments of all the lady guests who wished that they had such a knack with evergreens and baubles. Dr McCleary was at the centre of a laughing crowd away to my right, but where on earth was Rob?

  The tide drifted me alongside the Christmas tree: a giant Scots Pine, whose twinkling white lights and decorations looked new and expensive. It took more than mere talent to make a room look that good. Mrs Lindsay-Scott, who owned the riding stables half a mile outside Lasthwaite, caught my eye.

  ‘The grandchildren dress our tree,’ she said. ‘We’ve been using the same decorations since 1952, give or take the odd fir cone.’

  I smiled in unspoken acknowledgement of a shared thought. The Lindsay-Scott grandchildren probably got a lot more fun out of their tree than the Woods children did from their look-don’t-touch version. Suddenly as if by magic, Rob was standing beside me again, sharing the smile, although he couldn’t possibly have known what it was about.

  ‘I hear you’re going to open your garden again next summer, Mrs Lindsay-Scott,’ he said.

  ‘Well, yes, we are. It is in a good cause and people seem to enjoy it. It’s mostly the locals who come, of course. One or two from a bit further afield …’ She boomed on for a while about her roses before abruptly cutting herself off short as she spotted some other acquaintances on the point of departure. ‘Do excuse me,’ she said. ‘I must have a word with Norma about the Christingle oranges before she goes.’

  We were left standing alone alongside the Christmas tree. There was a short silence. For all that the room was crowded, we might have been the only people left on the planet.

  ‘I’m about ready to leave,’ he said. ‘Can I give you a lift?’

  We both knew that he lived in the opposite direction to me.

  ‘I … I …’ I stumbled over the words. ‘I came in my own car. I’m parked just outside.’

  Another silence.

  ‘You could … if you would like … I don’t know – maybe come to my … have some coffee …’ I had become a burbling, useless creature.

  By contrast he seemed absolutely calm. ‘Let’s get our coats,’ he suggested.

  There was a huge coat cupboard built in under the stairs. As we were trying to find our coats he drew me gently aside to allow someone to pass. The effect of his hand on my bare arm was like an electric shock. As he helped me into my jacket, I was aware of the infinitesimally brief caress of his fingertips against my neck.

  ‘We ought to say thank you to the Woods,’ I said, looking back into the scrum of people.

  ‘Send them a card,’ he said, taking my arm and guiding me out of the front door. ‘My car’s here.’ He pointed towards the shadows alongside the garage.

  It did not seem to matter that I had declined a lift. He propelled me gently towards his car and held the passenger door open for me to get inside. Then he walked round and climbed into the driver’s seat. Once he had closed his door, we flung ourselves at each other. After several minutes we managed to disengage long enough for Rob to drive the short distance to his cottage and once there we spent several hours engaged in frantic lovemaking. Later we admitted mutual amazement at the intensity of our feelings. At the time we said very little.

  I knew that this was terribly dangerous. I believed that I had reconciled myself to a single life, but I had miscalculated the true potency of love and sex; the desire that had so easily overpowered me. I couldn’t resist the temptation for more. When Rob turned up on Valentine’s Day, bearing roses and champagne, I said ‘Yes’ without hesitation. I knew it was madness but I couldn’t help it. I had fallen into a raging torrent and been swept too far from the bank to climb back to safety.

  SEVEN

  Rob’s stir-fry majored on prawns and water chestnuts in a spicy, chilli sauce. We ate dinner, made love and did the dishes afterwards. In these simple, everyday activities lies true happiness. It is too easy to overrate the spectacular in favour of the comfortably mundane. As we told each other about our respective days, I managed to forget Disappeared!, but I remembered it as I drove home through the darkness, the wind still gusting audibly outside. It made our evening seem doubly precious and I tried to blot out the inner voice which warned me that there might not be many more evenings like that.

  The timer had activated the sitting-room lights, but in spite of their cheerful glow and the warmth of the central heating, I shivered as I stepped inside and shut the front door behind me, wishing now that I had stayed at Rob’s after all. We seldom stayed over unplanned on work nights. The pleasure was outweighed by the hassle of the following morning. I hated putting on yesterday’s knickers for the drive home, feeling that half the bloody village had spotted you and knew precisely why you were driving back to your own house at seven thirty a.m.

  Rob had marking to do as usual – conscientious and caring, he was a popular teacher with pupils and parents alike. Meantime, the remainder of my evening lay unconstrained before me. I had filched Rob’s newspaper before leaving, and now I settled down to read it. There was more about the new royal baby … and the police had revealed the identity of the girl found in the lake. Her name was Kelly Jones and she came from Northampton. She had last been seen trying to hitch a lift at a service station on the M42. The police were treating it as a murder enquiry, the paper said – well, obviously. The poor girl hadn’t disposed of all her clothes, then jumped into the lake herself, had she? Further down the page it explained that Kelly had been running away from home. It made a sort of bond between us – not that I had ever seriously considered running away from my parents’ home. In those days I was too much of a frightened little mouse to have contemplated any such thing, but later I had become a kind of runaway, and although I never hitched lifts, I had taken chances and perhaps been lucky – unlike Kelly.

  Until the day I married Alan, I had continued to live at my parents’ house in Orchard Lane, meeting their midnight curfew and taking my turn with the dishes. Although it was six full years since I had last set eyes on it, I could still picture the house clearly: detached and double fronted, the garden imprisoned behind shoulder-high privet hedges which grew along the front, and by the tall conifers which had been planted at the sides to preserve my father’s obsessive privacy. On sunny days my mother and her friends occasionally took afternoon tea out there, sitting self-consciously upright in deck cha
irs arranged around the concrete sundial which stood in the centre of the lawn. In cooler weather guests were taken into the sitting room, where they sat around the living flame gas fire, its polished surround topped with a tidy arrangement of knick-knacks – the only objects which could ever have been said to be left lying about. Obsessively tidy, my mother had been a great believer in putting things away and the house in Orchard Lane had offered her tremendous scope for this – indeed, it might have been designed with the specific provision for putting things away uppermost in the architect’s mind. Capacious cupboards had been incorporated into every room, and as if this were not enough, my parents had installed various tallboys, sideboards and hefty suites of bedroom furniture, which since no one ever came to stay, also became repositories for my mother’s putting away.

  To me had fallen the task of sorting everything out before the men from the auction house came to cart away the furniture. It was a task of weeks rather than days – something to be fitted between work and everyday life, punctuated by visits to the nursing home to see my mother, who was all the time unaware that her home of more than three decades was being dismantled piece by piece. Alan was seldom available to help, so I spent doleful hours sorting through drawers full of old-fashioned cutlery and kitchen utensils, baking trays rusted by neglect and strange little caches of safety pins, jam jar lids and sachets of sugar – whether warning signs of my mother’s impending confusion or the carefulness of a make-do-and-mend generation, I could never be sure.

  I found the key to my father’s desk hidden among the shelves of outdated textbooks in his study. The desk in question was one of those old fashioned, roll-top affairs, which had stood in the corner nearest the French windows for as long as I could remember. After my father’s death, I’d helped my mother sift the contents of the pigeonholes, but the drawers had remained obstinately locked. She had assured me that they contained nothing of importance and claimed the key had been lost for years, which surprised me, because my father – ever the headmaster – had habitually despised the loser of any article.