'Until tomorrow then,' she said as she began to walk off towards the showers.
'You have a breakfast meeting at 8.00 with that newspaper chap.'
Petra stopped and glanced up towards the visitor's benches where a blond head glistened under the lights. 'Oh,' she said.
Joe glanced at her downturned mouth. 'Now, Petra, publicity is important or I wouldn't have agreed to having him in the first place. When marathon swimming is in the news, funding is a snap.'
'I know,' she said, turning on her heel, 'but that doesn't mean I have to like it.'
Joe walked beside her, keeping up with her quick pace. 'We're going to get a lot of coverage for this swim, so you might as well get used to having him around.'
It took a second, but then the realisation dawned on Petra. 'You mean he's coming with us to the lake?' Joe looked uncomfortable. 'That's right.' 'Joe,' she hissed, pulling open the door to the women's shower room. 'You promised privacy, you said I'd be on my own, you…'
'Now, Petra.' Joe glanced back at that figure in the gallery and pushed Petra into the empty shower room, letting the door close behind them. 'You don't want to give him the idea that he isn't wanted.' 'Yes, I do,' she said heatedly.
'Bad publicity would be…'
'I don't want him probing around in my life. I don't want him asking questions. I'm a very private person, Joe. You know that.'
'You've got nothing to hide.'
Petra rolled her eyes to the ceiling. 'Only a father that skipped out when I was three and a mother who's a basket case. A charming family life that will look wonderful written up across the country.'
'That's not your story, sweetheart.'
'No, but that's how journalists think. Dig and probe. Scratch out the dirty parts. Look what happened to Caroline.'
Joe winced. Caroline was another one of his protégées, a racer who had gone on to win an Olympic medal. An enthusiastic press had followed her around for days after she'd returned to Canada and one eager beaver had discovered that Caroline was adopted, a fact that went out on the wire service to 200 newspapers. Caroline wasn't ashamed that she was adopted, but she was sensitive about it and so was her family. They'd cringed when they'd read about themselves in the press.
Petra saw the expression on Joe's face and softened. It wasn't his fault, she knew he was right. Renting the boats for a swim was expensive, training cost money and, although she had contributed her savings towards this swim, they'd needed extra money. A promise of publicity encouraged manufacturers to help back a swim, provided the swimmer wore one of their suits or a pair of their goggles or ate their health food. And private backers were not only delighted when their swimmer succeeded but also thrilled when the triumph was reported in the papers. It gave them the feeling that they'd been part of an historic moment.
'It's okay, Joe,' she said. 'I'll survive.'
It took a while for Joe's frown to unwrinkle. 'And you'll be pleasant to this fellow? You won't bite his head off?'
'I'll be on my best behaviour. Cross my heart and hope to die.'
Joe's grin was back. 'Good girl.' He glanced around him. 'Hey, I always did want to spend time in the ladies' shower. The trouble is…'
Petra filled in the pause for him. '… there's no ladies.'
Joe gave a dramatic sigh. 'The story of my life.' And then waving at her walked out.
Petra smiled to herself as she turned on a tap and stood under the hot, stinging water, letting its warmth flow down her. Joe, a former swimming champion himself, had a wife and twin daughters, now grown up and married. Neither of his girls had wanted to be anything more than casual swimmers, a fact that Joe had lamented long and loud to anyone who would listen. With that paternal gap in his life, he had been forced to take protégées under his wing, and many a medal-winner in Canada had once been a surrogate member of the McGinnis household. Joe and his wife, Sunny, nurtured his swimmers, coddled them, fed them and encouraged them. Petra was looking forward to her month's training, because she'd be staying at the McGinnis cottage on Indian Lake under Joe's tutelage and Sunny's motherly care. It was the closest she'd ever be to being part of a real family.
Petra sighed as she peeled off her bathing suit and hung it over the bar beside her towel. For the past few years, her mother had been an overriding concern. Sheila Morgan had had a nervous breakdown when Petra was in college and she'd never quite recovered from it. She still had trouble coping with life, not with the large problems that overwhelmed most people, but the smaller everyday concerns. Loud noises made her tremble, a day of events had her exhausted, the need to make a decision caused her to dither and ramble as if she were senile instead of fifty-five and in the best of health. Petra supposed that she could understand it.
Sheila had been under stress ever since her father had walked out of the house and never come back. She'd been forced to earn a living and care for a small, energetic child and, for a woman who was highly strung, nervous and prone to tears, it had been trying and difficult. She'd managed with minimal success for fifteen years, finally falling to pieces when she'd had that accident. It had been a small thing, a slide on an icy pavement, a cracked ankle and a twisted wrist. But, Petra supposed, it was the final straw in a life that had been one long accumulation of accidents and failures.
Now, Sheila spent half her time in a mental institution and half her time in her flat. With each release, Petra prayed that her mother would finally have returned to normal, but within a few months the same story was repeated over and over again. The teary phone calls would begin, the tales of strangers following her down the streets would start anew, food would be prepared and not eaten, and drugs would be taken to the point of overdose. It was a pattern of behaviour that had begun when Petra was a child and had only grown worse with time.
Even when she was very small, Petra had understood that there was something not quite right with Sheila, something that set her apart from the other mothers she knew. By the time she was eight, she had learned not to ask her mother for the sort of things most children wanted. Sheila couldn't have taken the stress of being class mother or baking cakes for Brownies or throwing a birthday party for exuberant children. And, by the time she was in high school, Petra was in charge of the flat, the shopping and the meals. With each passing year, Petra had taken over more and more of her mother's tasks until it had reached the point where the role reversal was complete. When she was sixteen, Petra had awoken one night to hear her mother whimpering in her bed. 'A bad dream,' she had said, crying. 'Such a terrible bad dream.' And Petra had put her arms around Sheila, comforted her until she went back to sleep again, and understood with a terrible sort of finality that she no longer had, in any true sense of the word, a mother.
Swimming had been her salvation. There had been a municipal pool close to her home, and she'd gone there all during the summers and every weekend in the winters. One of the lifeguards had noticed her and suggested that she take some classes. By the time she was fourteen, Petra had done the full round of Red Cross lessons, having already earned her bronze medallion in lifesaving. She took her National Lifeguard at sixteen and her Water Safety Instructor's course at seventeen. She'd had absolutely no urge to race so it wasn't until she heard Joe speak at a meeting for instructors that it occurred to her that perhaps she was a marathon swimmer. She'd gone up to him during the coffee break and waited until he was alone.
'Yes?'
'My name's Petra Morgan, and I'm interested in long-distance swimming.'
'Are you?' Joe had eyed her as if she were specimen under a microscope.
'Yes.'
'I don't take on anyone who's half-hearted.'
'I understand that.'
'And,' he'd growled, 'if you've got a romance going in your life, you might as well kiss it goodbye.'
She'd given him a shy smile. 'There's no one.'
'And it'll hurt. Really hurt.'
'I can handle it.'
'Hmmmph.' Joe had appraised her at length and then said, grudging
ly, 'Show up at the Lakeside Pool at six o'clock tomorrow morning. I'll try you out then.'
The try-out had been painful, utterly exhausting and one of the most exhilarating things she'd ever done. To this day, Petra didn't know exactly how many miles she swam that morning as Joe put her through the paces, doing the sprints, giving her ten-second intervals to catch her breath and then starting her on them all over again. All she knew was that she loved it; loved pushing her body to its limits, loved knowing that she'd conquered the distance, loved the sensation of euphoria she had while swimming. When it was over and she'd pulled herself out of the pool on shaking arms, he'd said gruffly, 'Well, think you can do it?'
Petra had lifted her chin. 'Yes.'
He narrowed his eyes and gave her a severe look which Petra later came to realise accompanied a softening of the heart. 'Think you can put up with me at five o'clock in the morning, Monday to Friday?'
'Yes.'
'And, what precisely do you want to swim?'
The answer to that question was easy. Petra could see it in her mind's eye: an enormous expanse of water, blue and sparkling under the sun, its waves capped in little white peaks. 'The lake,' she'd said.
He'd known, of course, which lake she was referring to. 'Is that right?' he'd asked.
'Yes.'
'Hummph.' A further narrowing of the eyes. 'And when precisely would you want to do it?'
'Next year,' she'd said.
'Next year,' he'd echoed. 'Next year. Well, we'll see.'
But the following year had brought so much disruption and financial difficulties into Petra's life that she'd been forced to cancel her plans. Sheila's mental state had finally disintegrated to the point that she had to stop work and go into an institution, leaving Petra with only the small amount of savings they'd accumulated over the years. The only way that Petra could attend university was to combine her scholarship with a thirty-hour-a-week job waitressing. Training for the lake swim had been impossible, but by then she'd become a treasured member of the McGinnis entourage, and Joe had waved off her apologies and said to just keep up with the work-outs. After graduating from college, she'd found a position teaching grade-three children and a summer job as a waterfront counsellor with a camp. It had taken Petra five years before she felt financially solvent enough to leave her summer job and start training again.
She'd spent the winter months with a relatively easy work-out programme that progressed to greater difficulty as the spring months rolled around. She was now up to ten to fifteen-mile swims in the pool. When she went to the McGinnis cottage on Indian Lake, Joe would push her up to twenty. Petra winced a bit as she contemplated it and then turned off the shower, reaching for the towel she'd hung over a bar. Twenty miles, she thought, rubbing her wet hair. Days and days of swimming, evenings of pleasant conversation, eating Sunny's good food and… Petra remembered the reporter and, making a grimace, rubbed her head furiously. She didn't want him at the cottage, poking around, asking questions, trying to delve into her psyche. She knew what he was going to want. A human interest story. What Makes Petra Swim So Hard? And she'd seen from his face that he wasn't going to be got rid of easily.
Her only conversation with Geoffrey Hamilton so far had been brief, casual and not at all friendly. She'd met him the morning before when she arrived at the pool at 5:00 a.m. for her usual work-out. Joe had made the introductions.
'Petra, honey, this is Geoff Hamilton. He's working for Allied Press, and he wants to do a story on you.'
'Hello, Miss Morgan.' He'd had to lean on his cane to stretch out his hand.
'Hello,' she'd said, letting her small hand slip into his large one.
'You don't mind if I watch you swim a bit, do you?'
She'd glanced up at him then. Although his voice held an amiable tone, his face was unsmiling, his mouth grim as if he were angry. But the severity of his expression didn't harm his good looks at all. Petra didn't think she'd ever seen any man so handsome. Blond hair the colour of wheat at sunset, deep-set blue eyes under golden brows, an aquiline nose, and a mouth that could have been carved in porcelain so firm was it… so… She'd looked away from him and back down to their clasped hands.
'No,' she said, 'I don't mind.'
But she hadn't known then that Geoff Hamilton was going to follow her around for the next month, trying to pin her down, trying to dissect her like a butterfly held to a board with its wings tacked down and spread wide so that every marking could be examined, touched, revealed. Petra wrapped the towel around her body, crumpled her wet bathing suit into a ball, her hands clenched tightly around it, and walked into the dressing room. She was a private person, just as she had told Joe. Private to the point that she was incapable of expressing emotion, of describing her inner feelings, of explaining herself. She'd always been that way. Even as a child she'd been quiet and restrained. Her teachers had found her easy to handle; she'd practically faded into the woodwork in high school. She hadn't wanted anyone to notice her, she hadn't wanted any friends. Petra had been well aware of the protocol of having friends. You were supposed to invite them to your house for lunch and for overnights. When you were a teenager, boys came to talk to your parents before they took you out on a date. But Petra had been ashamed and terrified of bringing anyone home, male or female. The flat was small, cluttered and, although she tried to keep it clean, often dirty. And Sheila was totally unpredictable. She could be congenial one moment or crazy the next. Petra had cringed at the thought of having any of her acquaintances meet her mother.
The habits of childhood and adolescence had stayed with' her. She knew she didn't mix well with people; she often felt awkward, stiff and uncomfortable. And she was worse with men, not men like Joe who treated her like a daughter, but men who looked at her with a sexual interest. They gave her the feeling that she was being pursued and, like any wild animal who was afraid of restraint, she fled from them. It wasn't as if Petra hadn't tried to have a normal relationship; she had and it had bombed unmercifully. She'd had a brief affair with another teacher that she had met at a friend's party. She had done what was asked of a modern woman in the hopes that proving herself at the rituals of a sexual encounter would mean that she was as psychologically sound as anyone else. She had gone out with him on one date and gone to bed with him on the second. There had been a flurry of activity over a month's time that had camouflaged his smugness at having possessed her and her growing panic at the discovery that, not only didn't she like him very much, she absolutely abhorred sex with him. It was a groping, loveless thing that left her feeling unsatisfied and close to tears. He, on the other hand, always wanted to do it again.
Petra had been too confused to know where to place the blame; she only knew that she had to cut the relationship off before she died of suffocation from his embrace, his closeness, his wanting of her. And, when it was finally over with relief on her side and recrimination on his, Petra had vowed to herself that she'd never get involved like that again. Life seemed far safer to her when she was by herself, free from anyone's wants and desires and accountable to no one. She accepted herself as different from other women and ignored any feelings of loneliness. She swam instead. Laps and more laps. Miles upon miles, her mind slipping into that other space, that other dimension where nothing hurtful or painful existed. She had never been able to describe that space to anyone. It defied measurement or analysis; it defied explanation.
Which was why Petra hated the thought of Geoffrey Hamilton probing away at her, digging through her protective layers, trying to find the core of her. And he didn't look like the type who would be easily fobbed off with superficial answers and facile explanations. He'd want depth, reasons, meanings, and he had a whole month in which to scrape away at her for them. Petra, who had looked forward to that month with Joe and Sunny, found herself no longer wanting to go. Not even all the McGinnis' love and affection would be able to make up for Geoffrey Hamilton's presence. His being there would poison the atmosphere and pollute her one little corner of t
he world.
Petra threw her bathing suit down on a bench, a small angry sound rising out of her lips. She'd be pleasant to him, all right, She wouldn't bite his head off, as she had promised, but she'd be damned if she'd do anything else for him. She would answer questions only when they were asked and talk only when spoken to. The rest of the time she would swim, swim and swim some more. She was going to make certain that Geoffrey Hamilton's stay at Indian Lake was one of the most wasted months of his life. And, if he wanted to keep up to her, he was going to have to swim. Lap after lap. Mile after mile. The thought of it made her smile a bit. There were very few men in this world who could match Petra Morgan when she was in the water and, as far as she knew, Geoffrey Hamilton wasn't one of them.
CHAPTER TWO
Petra and Geoff had breakfast in a small coffee-shop in a shopping centre near the pool. Petra had changed into a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt that said, 'I'm going, Joe', in bright red letters. Both her T-shirt and Joe's had been gifts from Sunny who claimed that now they wouldn't have to converse any more, they could let their shirts do the talking. She wore no make-up, and her hair was still damp from her swim and curled in a dark chaos around her head, tendrils sticking to her forehead and temples. On her feet were a scuffed pair of leather sandals with thongs, the kind that encircle the big toe and hang on from there. It was a typical Petra ensemble, and she was well aware that it did nothing to add to her femininity. Instead the snug fit of the jeans and loose T-shirt only served to emphasise the boyish shape of her figure. She liked outfits like that. They didn't advertise anything that she wasn't prepared to offer.
'That was quite a swim you did this morning,' Geoff said. He'd ordered cottage cheese and fruit and was watching Petra dig into eggs, bacon and toast.
Love is a Distant Shore Page 2