by Libby Page
“We’re really lucky to have you,” Geoff often says to Ahmed after they have gone, and Ahmed’s whole body fills to bursting with a warmth he only later recognizes as pride.
CHAPTER 14
Rosemary’s swimming bag is always packed. It sits on a chair by her front door with her raincoat and umbrella. Inside there is a swimsuit; she has three of the same navy one from Marks and Spencer. It always surprises her when she sees the number in the label. She was always slim. She is a slim young woman wearing a fat old lady’s clothes. In the bag there is also her towel, goggles, a purple swimming cap, a comb, a pot of Astral moisturizing cream, and a Colman’s mustard tin full of 50-pence coins. She rattles when she walks.
This afternoon, though, she leaves her swimming bag by the door as she exits her flat and heads to the lido. On her way to the Lido Café she stops to say hello to Ahmed at the lido reception desk.
“How is the studying going, Ahmed?” she asks him.
“Slowly, Mrs. P,” says Ahmed, “slowly.”
“Well, we all know what happened to the hare.”
Rosemary pushes through the turnstile and out of the door that leads to the lido decking. After crossing alongside the pool she reaches the Lido Café. Tables face the water and she picks an empty one and sits down.
Kate emailed her first thing that morning.
“I swam yesterday,” she said. “It was so cold! So will you let me interview you now? I could do this afternoon if you are free?”
Rosemary has arrived early—she likes to just sit and watch her lido nearly as much as she likes to swim in it. As she watches children splashing in the shallow end she thinks about when she first learned to swim, just after the lido had opened with a celebration in which the mayor threw a young woman, fully clothed, into the water. (The young woman’s father was proud that his daughter had been the one to get chosen for such an honor.)
“I promise I won’t let go,” said her mother as Rosemary kicked vigorously.
“I won’t let go, you’ll be okay.” Her mother did let go that day and Rosemary sank and swallowed a mouthful of water. But she’d been okay.
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
The sound interrupts Rosemary’s daydream and she looks up; Kate is standing above her, smiling.
“You’re not late, I’m early,” Rosemary replies.
Kate sits down and pulls her notebook and Dictaphone out of her rucksack.
“Thank you for meeting me, Rosemary,” she says. A waiter comes over and Kate orders them both tea.
“So how was your swim then?” Rosemary asks.
Kate’s mouth twitches into an almost smile.
“It was very cold!” she says. “I don’t know how you do it every day.”
Rosemary laughs.
“You wait and see. It becomes addictive.”
“I did enjoy it—after the shock of the cold,” Kate admits.
Rosemary raises an eyebrow and smiles.
The waiter returns with two small teapots. Once they are alone again Rosemary reaches into her handbag.
“I’ve got a photograph to show you,” she says, digging around in the contents. She pulls out a book; the photograph is slipped within the pages.
“It’s just me left now,” says Rosemary, her thumb leaving a print on the photograph as she passes it to Kate.
There are three rows of girls, some with their arms around each other, others with hands on hips or arms crossed tightly over their flat chests. The swimsuits are plain one-pieces that sit low over their hips like shorts. They must be between ten and thirteen years old, all grinning in black and white. The children in the photograph look so energetic that Rosemary still can’t believe that she is the only one left alive.
“The oldest were at the back and the little ones at the front,” she says.
“Which one is you?”
Rosemary smiles and points at a little girl in the front whose short hair is spiked with water and whose face is dirtied with freckles.
“Hello, Rosemary,” says Rosemary. She looks at young Rosemary with the affection a mother might show for her child. As she looks up she catches Kate watching her.
“When you’re my age you’ll understand,” she says. “You begin to miss yourself.”
Kate looks at the photograph and then the old woman sitting in front of her.
“Do you have any brothers or sisters, Kate?” asks Rosemary.
Kate laughs and then covers her mouth as though the noise has surprised her.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just that I’m supposed to be interviewing you! But, yes, I have an older sister, Erin.”
“Do you love her?”
Kate looks startled for a moment, but then she smiles. “I love her more than anyone.”
Rosemary turns to her.
“I wish I’d had a sister,” she says. “Or a brother. I was an only child.”
Kate scribbles in her notebook.
“And you say you’ve been coming to this lido as long as you can remember? Tell me something about it from when you were a child.”
There are so many things to say, but it is hard to make words work. Pictures and sounds and sensations fill Rosemary like helium until she begins to feel dizzy.
“When most people tell you about their childhood, the sun is always shining,” she says. “In their memories we were angels too. I’ll tell you now that they are lying.”
She flashes Kate a smile. Kate looks up from her notes and smiles back.
“There were beautiful sunny days, of course there were, but it’s swimming in the rain that I remember. I remember coming here for swimming lessons at school before the war. Even though we were only very little then, our teachers would make us go in whatever the weather. Most of the time we didn’t mind it because we loved the lido. We loved getting out of the classroom, we loved the walk through the park—although often we would run it.
“So most of the time we were happy to swim, even if the sun wasn’t shining. But there was one day . . . I think it was a Thursday because we were all feeling that sluggish end-of-week feeling but weren’t cheerful enough for it to have been a Friday . . . Anyway, one day when we had swimming in the afternoon it was really raining. It had been raining all day. The tarmac in the playground was flooded and we could hear the roar of buses making waves out of puddles outside our classroom.
“We begged the teachers not to make us go. Some of the bolder girls told them we’d get hypothermia or trench foot. The teachers just gave them a telling off for joking about the trenches.
“That afternoon no one ran. We trooped under umbrellas and huddled into our raincoats, the puddles soaking our shoes. When we got there, we got changed slowly, our teachers waiting under shelter.
“I can’t remember who it was, but someone suddenly had an idea to get back at the teachers. When we came out of the changing rooms, we were all wearing our raincoats over the top of our swimsuits. Before the teachers could do anything we ran and jumped into the pool, our coats spreading like dresses around us. The whole class started swimming their lengths like that.
“The teachers went mad, of course. They dragged us out and told us we were a disgrace. We were sent home, dripping, to our families and the mothers were furious at all the sodden raincoats. But my father found it hilarious. He didn’t stop laughing all evening.”
“That’s wonderful,” says Kate. “And what about now? There are other pools in the area, so why here?”
Rosemary turns to watch a mother and child in the shallow end. The child is swimming a determined doggy paddle toward the mother who holds open her arms, beaming. Above them is open sky. Watching them she wonders why Kate needs to ask. She can’t begin to say everything so instead she says the start of the truth.
“It is familiar,” says Rosemary. “It is special and it is familiar and nothing else would be the same. The way the sun shines on the water in the morning. The view of the lido from the top of the hill in Brockwell Park. Even the smell
is familiar. When I walk through the park toward it, I can smell it before I see the brick building. It’s the wet concrete that smells like storm, but mixed with cut grass from the park. And the chlorine . . . my skin always smells of chlorine.”
Rosemary lifts her forearm to her face and breathes deeply. It is there, the scent of chlorine that permeates her skin like campfire smoke seeping into tent fabric. She closes her eyes. George always used to say that he never had to give her perfume because she had the lido. Chlorine was her perfume, he’d say.
After they married they didn’t go away for a honeymoon. They couldn’t afford one and the weather was so perfect in Brixton that summer that they didn’t need to. They took a week off work and spent every day swimming at the lido, George stretching out in the sun and going brown like stained wood, and Rosemary sitting in the shade and watching him as though he was a snowflake that might melt away any second. When they were both warm they would dive into the water and swim up and down—George in the fast lane and Rosemary in the medium. It didn’t matter that they weren’t swimming together because they knew they were sharing the same experience of cool water on their hot skin and the way the light made a checkerboard of the bottom of the pool. With George, swimming felt like flying.
Once they were both tired they would clamber out of the pool, tug their clothes on over their swimming costumes, and walk back to the flat. As soon as the door clicked shut they peeled each other out of their swimsuits as though greedily peeling ripe fruit. Sometimes they didn’t make it to the bedroom and they would collapse on the sitting room floor, kissing the chlorine off each other’s bodies. He kissed her everywhere, breathing deeply her smell, their smell, of the pool and the summer and their passion for the afternoons.
Rosemary opens her eyes.
“Are your children big swimmers too?” asks Kate. Rosemary feels a shiver run through her.
“That is,” says Kate anxiously, “if you have any children?”
“Next question.”
“Is that a no?”
“Yes. That’s a no.”
“I’m sorry.”
Rosemary looks at the pool and back at Kate.
“What’s your next question?” she says.
“Why do you swim?”
Rosemary laughs.
“Asking me why I swim is like asking me why I get up in the morning. The answer is the same.”
They talk for another thirty minutes. After their conversation Kate has her profile piece and Rosemary walks home smiling.
“See you in the pool next time?” Rosemary had said to Kate as they parted. Kate’s face had softened into the suggestion of a smile.
“Maybe,” she’d replied. “And I’ll send you a copy of the article when it’s finished.”
Arriving home, Rosemary locks the door, takes off her clothes, and pulls on her swimsuit. Then she reaches for her raincoat, pulls it on over her shoulders, and sits like that while watching television until it’s time to go to bed.
CHAPTER 15
Later that week Kate keeps her promise to herself and tries another swim. She has come prepared this time and is wearing her swimsuit under her clothes. Anything to avoid the stomach-twisting feeling of being naked in front of strangers.
She disrobes in a corner and listens to the conversations in the changing room, focusing in and out of them as though she is tuning a radio. Listening to them helps her to stay calm.
An older woman with a strong Caribbean accent: “I haven’t seen you here for a while. Where have you been?”
Another older woman: “Don’t laugh . . .”
“What is it, where have you been?”
“I went on a singles holiday. In France.”
“Girl! Good for you! So did you meet a handsome Jean-Marc?”
“Well, we exchanged email addresses . . .”
The two women look at each other, raise their eyebrows, and laugh.
Alongside the conversations is a backing track of showers running, the toilet flushing, and splashing that gets louder every time someone opens the door and steps outside.
Kate shuts her clothes in a locker, wraps her towel around herself again, walks quickly out, and lowers herself into the slow lane before she can change her mind. The cold is less shocking today. She is prepared for it and feels an unexpected sense of pride as she hears the yelp of a swimmer entering the water next to her. Again, Kate senses that her body is waking up like a sleepy dog pricking its ears up at its name. She lowers herself under the surface, takes a deep breath, and kicks off.
As she swims she looks around her. The lifeguard is drinking from a thermos and talking to a middle-aged woman, perhaps a regular swimmer, who holds the hand of a young boy in shark-patterned swimming trunks. At the deep end a man with a sculpted chest and shoulders and wearing a white swimming cap and streamlined red goggles dives neatly and begins heaving his arms out of the water. Waves surge and heads turn in respect of the man who has become a butterfly.
The sky stretches above her and for a moment Kate feels completely free. She rolls onto her back and tries backstroke so she can watch the birds crossing back and forth and the spring buds waving on the arms of the trees around the lido building. She stops swimming for a moment and floats; for the first time in a long time she lets herself relax. The water holds her. She breathes deeply, the water lapping at her cheeks. She feels almost like she might cry but it’s okay.
Eventually she rolls back onto her front and goes back to her slow breaststroke, swimming toward the shallow end. That’s when she spots Rosemary. The old woman is swimming elegantly toward her. She is wearing a navy swimsuit and a purple swimming cap. As she swims closer, Kate notices that her eyes are the same color as the lido. Rosemary recognizes her and smiles.
“Hello!” says Kate, putting her feet down and raising her hand in a wave.
“So you came back,” says Rosemary.
“I came back.”
Rosemary swims to the poolside and rests her neck on the wall, kicking her legs gently in front of her. She gestures at Kate to join her, and after a moment’s hesitation, she does. For a while they stay like that. Kate leans her head back and looks down the pool at the other swimmers. The sun is warm on her face.
“So how are you finding it?” says Rosemary. “Have you gotten used to the cold yet?”
“It’s strange, I know, but I quite like the cold,” says Kate. “It wakes me up.”
“Why do you think I come in the mornings?”
They both laugh.
“I think I’m starting to understand it,” says Kate, looking around her. Her heart beats fast but she feels calm. “Why you love it here so much, I mean,” she says.
“There’s nowhere like it,” Rosemary replies, leaning back a little farther until her toes poke out of the surface of the water.
Kate watches her, this old woman in her navy swimsuit who has swum here all her life. She imagines what it might feel like to see your city changing around you like that and to lose the place that feels like home. As she thinks it she is reminded of her conversation with Erin, and how she had listened to her sister tell her things weren’t perfect, and she herself had said nothing—done nothing.
“You really want to save it, don’t you?” Kate says after a moment.
“Oh, I do.”
“Maybe I can help you.”
As soon as she says it she realizes that, without knowing exactly how or why, this is something she needs to do. She needs to keep swimming, and she needs to help Rosemary Peterson save her lido.
Rosemary looks at her for a moment, the wary expression that Kate had noticed the first time they met returning for a moment. But then she smiles.
“Okay then,” says Rosemary.
“Okay then,” says Kate.
CHAPTER 16
In one corner of the men’s changing room a boy of fourteen is pulling on a swimming cap. He watches himself in the mirror as he tugs the cap over his ears, a serious frown on his face that looks too old
for his young, skinny body. He rolls his shoulders and stretches his arms across his chest.
Once on the deck he dives quickly into the water and starts a smooth front crawl.
No one noticed him leaving his house. The night before, he came downstairs for a glass of water and saw them in the sitting room together drinking wine. They didn’t notice him so he watched them for a while, enjoying the rare moment of calm. And then he heard a conversation that he wished he hadn’t: he heard them agree that they would divorce once he had left home. The scene looked remarkably calm for something that made him feel sick. They drank their wine quietly and sat close to each other on the sofa, staring ahead at the fireplace that was topped with family photos. Perhaps they were too tired to shout, like two old lions with too many scars, but the quiet somehow disturbed their son more than the fighting.
He should be at school now. He has never skipped it before; he has never missed a homework deadline or been late to a lesson. When he woke up that morning he did his usual two hundred sit-ups in his bedroom and counted the hairs on his chest (eleven). Then he went downstairs in his pajamas and made himself breakfast in the kitchen. He ate alone, reading his way around the breakfast table from the back of the cereal box to the carton of juice. As he ate he listened to the muffled sound of his mother crying upstairs. She sounded like a wounded animal when she cried. He wanted to go up and comfort her but he realized he wouldn’t know what to say. Words knotted inside him like a ball of string that wouldn’t untangle. He wanted to help her fix her marriage; he wished he was a hundred years old so that he might have some advice from all that living that he could give to his mother. But he only had eleven-chest-hairs’ worth of life inside him, and he knew that wasn’t enough to help her.
The words on the back of the cereal box jumbled until they didn’t make sense and his eyes filled with tears. The table was a confusion of semiskimmed orange juice and whole-grain spread. He wanted to scream like a toddler and to empty his lungs of all the rage that lived inside his chest. Instead he neatly cleared away his breakfast things and padded quietly up the stairs. In his bedroom he changed into his tracksuit and a hooded sweatshirt, throwing his school uniform into his wardrobe. He reached for his swimming bag and slung it over his shoulder. On the way to the lido he phoned his school and told them that his son was sick.