by Libby Page
“We’ll see,” says Jay, hopping down from the end of the desk where he had been perching, and picking up his camera bag. “If I’m as good a photographer as I am a mind reader, you might be surprised. Right, now I’m off to photograph that new Mexican restaurant. I can probably get you some free nachos if you want? They don’t know yet that we’re only giving them two stars.”
“That’s okay, the coffee is hitting the spot. Thank you.”
“No problem. See you later.”
As Jay leaves Kate realizes that it has been a long time since she has had a conversation with a man who isn’t her boss or interview subject. She also notices she has stopped feeling quite so anxious.
CHAPTER 31
After Rosemary’s third miscarriage, George suggested a holiday. “I want you to feel the seawater between your toes, Rosy,” he said one evening, and she smiled, imagining what it would feel like. He was sitting in the armchair by the fireplace and opened his arms. She crossed the living room and climbed onto his lap. She still remembered his descriptions of Devon so vividly that she could taste the salt water on her lips and hear the sound of the waves whenever she thought about it, but she had never seen it for herself.
“I want to go away, just us,” he said. It was always just the two of them but she understood what he meant; she also longed to escape the memory of that person she had never met. She wanted to feel like they were teenagers again. So they decided on a holiday and were suddenly swept up in the excitement of it.
It was the first and only time that he had closed the shop for a whole week since they were married. He put a sign in the window announcing the planned closure several weeks before they were due to leave and every conversation he had with his customers during those weeks was about the holiday. He talked proudly about the planned trip, using the American word vacation occasionally. Rosemary and George were not vacationing people. They had never been on a holiday before in their lives.
Devon was too far away so they opted for Brighton, booking a week in a B&B and saving for the two shillings six pence extra to travel on the Brighton Belle from Victoria, the chocolate-and-cream-painted Pullman train known for its beautiful carriages.
“You’re my Brixton belle,” George said into Rosemary’s ear as he helped her onboard at the crowded platform, carrying the small suitcase that they had borrowed from one of Rosemary’s friends. Once they had found their seats Rosemary took in the carriage around her—the brown art deco wallpaper, the soft glow of the table lamps and the faint smell of toast, coffee, and kippers.
Rosemary tried to hide her nerves—she had never left London before and felt an ache in her stomach as she watched the station platform drifting away. It felt like an untethering and she was floating free. George squeezed her hand.
“What do you think that’s for?” asked Rosemary, pointing at a bell push on the wall.
“It’s for the waiter,” said a woman opposite them, raising an eyebrow. George and Rosemary looked at each other and smiled. He pressed the button. A few moments later the waiter was there, showing them the menu and addressing George as “sir” (Rosemary covered her mouth with her hand to hide her laughter). They could only afford a pot of tea, but it could have been champagne. The journey was rickety and the seats uncomfortable, but they didn’t care.
When they arrived Rosemary wanted to see the sea straightaway, so they followed the families and couples down Queens Road to the waterfront. Everyone was dressed for the beach—dark round sunglasses on the faces of men and women and sunhats on children’s heads. They passed by ice cream shops and tea shops and jazz bars, but Rosemary barely saw them, she was so focused on getting to the sea.
She walked faster as they got closer. She could hear seagulls screeching as they wheeled above her in the sky. Then she finally saw it: the vast expanse of green water that seeped like ink into the blue horizon. Jutting into the water was the Palace Pier, with its mismatch of buildings and domes and the two helter-skelter spiral slides at the end facing the water.
A sea wind blew against them as they walked down to the beach. Rosemary licked her lips: they tasted like fish and chips.
On the beach, striped deck chairs held reclining families and young couples. A man in briefs ran after a woman in a one-piece and swimming cap and together they dove into the water. A child sat on the pebbles pointing at seagulls and eating a sugar sandwich. A group of teenagers lay in the shade of an upturned boat, smoking.
Rosemary and George took off their shoes and socks and placed them on top of the suitcase. Then they walked over the pebbles and down to the water, fingers locked together. The seawater was as cold as the lido. They stood at the edge, looking out at the sea that seemed to go on forever. George, watching her, seemed to smile with his whole body.
At the pier they bought baked potatoes dripping with butter and ate them leaning against the railings, seagulls circling them hoping for scraps. Rows of men in white caps fished for mackerel at the sea end of the pier; women in summer dresses walked arm in arm and children queued at a stand for freshly fried doughnuts. The stallholder passed a small girl a greasy paper bag and she grinned with delight.
George turned away from the sound of the children’s laughter and leaned back against the railings. Rosemary turned to him and smiled, hoping that he saw enough in her face to fill his life.
They spent the week investigating the town, roaming the beach, eating cake in Lyon’s tea shop, and exploring the smoky jazz cafés in the evenings, before returning to the B&B, their skin sticky with a layer of tar from the sea.
“You just need to rub yourselves with butter and it will come right off,” said the B&B owner, so they took a stick of butter to their room and rubbed each other up and down with the pale fat, laughing like teenagers as they did. They fell asleep smelling of butter, their soft bodies a muddle of bare limbs in the sheets.
After their last day at the beach, when their faces were brown and sore from the salt water and the sun, they headed to a café to drink hot chocolate and listen to the jukebox. The room was foggy with smoke and steam from the coffee machine. George paid for a song, and the sound of Elvis Presley singing “My Wish Came True” filled the bar.
“Dance with me?” he asked. They pushed aside their table and held each other in the middle of the shop. Rosemary rested her face against his chest and listened to his heartbeat, thinking that it sounded like home. She loved the sea, but now she wanted to be back in her lido. She had enjoyed feeling for a week as though they were young again, hiding from each other in the maze of mirrors on the pier, making love on a squeaky bed in the B&B, and escaping thoughts they both wanted to forget. But she wanted to be home in their small flat. Even though their shared sadness was dislodged every now and then with a surge of billowing emotion, it was their home and their life and it was enough for her.
Elvis Presley sang to them as they danced and George kissed her.
CHAPTER 32
Rosemary stands on the steps of the town hall, looking at the confetti at her feet. A breeze blows a paper heart onto the toe of her black Mary Jane with the low heel. She stares at it clinging there.
“Ready?” asks Kate, reaching and squeezing Rosemary’s hand. Rosemary looks down, surprised by the contact. Kate smiles before quickly letting go.
The others wait behind them on the steps. The lido and café staff sped through closing up in order to be here in time; the barista is still wearing his apron. Ahmed and Geoff, Ellis and Jake, Hope, and Frank and Jermaine stand in clusters close to Kate, Sprout at their feet. Betty is there with her granddaughter. A woman is there with her new baby, who sleeps in a fabric sling across her chest, and her husband who holds her hand. A yoga instructor who teaches in the studios at the lido is there, too, with some of her students gathered around her. There is a skinny teenage boy and two people who stand close to him but slightly apart on the pavement who Rosemary assumes are his parents. The department store security guard is there, along with several local teachers and a g
roup of children from the swimming club, their parents, and the coach. And at the back there is Jay, his camera strap slung around his neck as he takes photographs of the group gathered on the town hall steps.
“We’re all behind you, Mrs. P,” says Ellis.
Rosemary looks up at the columns that frame the door to the town hall, takes hold of the handrail, and slowly climbs the stairs. The others file behind her into the meeting room.
Behind a long table sits a group of men in suits; the councillor Kate met is in the middle and several others sit on either side of him.
“Welcome,” he says as they arrive, his voice carrying over the scraping of chair legs as they pull up seats opposite the panel. “How good that so many of you could make it. We might need to get more chairs!”
Eventually enough chairs are dragged over and the group settles, Rosemary and Kate in the front.
“Let me help you take your coat off, Rosemary,” says Kate, reaching across to help her. But Rosemary pulls away, tugging the belt on her coat tightly around her.
“No. I’m cold.”
Once everyone has sat down the councillor starts the meeting. He talks quickly and his speech is peppered with jargon that makes the group of residents shuffle in their seats. He talks about cuts to funding and slashed budgets and says that the pool is “leaking money that could be spent on other valuable local amenities and resources.”
“Surely you want that money to go to other services, like the local schools?” he says, looking across at the room of lido users as if to shame them.
“Now, it’s time to hear from you. Who would like to share your thoughts on the closure? Sorry, the potential closure. Do you have a nominated speaker?”
Rosemary stands up slowly, using Kate’s shoulder to help her up. She pulls her coat tightly around herself and adjusts the scarf at her neck.
“You have three minutes to speak, let’s hear it,” says the councillor.
Rosemary is aware of the faces of her friends, turned up to her expectantly, relying on her.
She thinks about her morning swims with Kate, coaching her on her corkscrew kick and then sitting together on the bench and talking. She thinks about George doing handstands on the bottom of the pool, the pale soles of his feet pointing up toward the sky. She thinks about the people she sees every day who have found somewhere to escape their problems, swimming out their tensions length after length. She clears her throat, and then she begins.
“When the old library closed down no one realized the importance of what we were losing until it had gone. It was a place for learning and also a center of our community. And it’s the same with the lido. We all take it for granted and that is why it is so important. We rely on it being there for us. It is somewhere that you can go for a moment to yourself, whatever your reason might be for needing that moment.”
She turns around and looks at the people sitting behind her, all carrying their own reasons on their shoulders.
“The lido holds so many memories for us all. For children who have never been to the seaside it is their summers and their freedom. For parents it is the memory of seeing their child swim for the first time—that moment when you just have to let go and let them fly. And for me . . . well, for me it is my life.” She pauses.
“But have you thought about the colder months?” the councillor interrupts. “Yes, the lido might be busy on sunny days, but when the weather is bad, it loses even more money. People just don’t want to swim in an outdoor pool when it’s cold and raining, which, let’s face it, is a lot of the time. Surely a woman of your age must understand the health risks of swimming in such cold water?”
As the councillor talks Rosemary slowly starts unbuttoning her coat. There is a flash of black as Rosemary unwinds her scarf from her neck. She shrugs her coat off her shoulders and her friends around her start to clap.
“As you can see, I am perfectly well equipped.”
Her pale head and neck poke out from the top of the wetsuit that hugs tightly to her plump body. It stops at the knees and reveals her bent legs and the black Mary Janes on her feet. The councillor is seized by a coughing fit as Jay’s camera snaps the picture that will make the front page of the Chronicle.
“We thought it would be worth diversifying the products we sell at reception,” says Geoff, patting Rosemary on the arm of her wetsuit. “You’re quite right that it can be quite chilly in the water—but now there are no excuses!”
Rosemary does a slow turn to better show off her outfit, and her friends cheer. She catches Kate’s eye—she looks like she is trying not to laugh, but then she is failing and laughing with everyone else. The council members have obviously never seen an eighty-six-year-old woman in a wetsuit in the town hall before. The meeting is adjourned.
CHAPTER 33
The next day, Jay’s photograph of Rosemary in her wetsuit makes the front page of the paper. Kate writes the story, mentioning that customers will now be able to buy wetsuits from the lido once the summer is over and the weather gets colder.
When Kate arrives at work she is greeted by Phil, who waves the paper at her. Jay is at his desk and lifts a second cup of coffee at Kate when he sees her.
“I heard people talking about this on the bus this morning,” Phil says as soon as Kate is through the door. He points at the photo of Rosemary. “Do you know how often I hear people talking about the Brixton Chronicle? Never. It’s there in every local newsagent and at the tube station but sometimes I just think people take it home to peel their potatoes into.”
Kate and Jay look at each other, raising their eyebrows.
“But this—where did you find her?”
Kate doesn’t reply. She’s starting to wonder if it was she who found Rosemary or the other way round.
“That’s what this lido story needs: more pictures. Kate, I want you to take Jay down to the pool, introduce him to the people you have met there. Jay, I want human interest pictures, a view of the ‘beating heart of the community’ as Rosemary Peterson says.”
“Righto, boss,” says Jay, picking up his camera bag.
Phil sits down at his desk, tears open a paper bag stained with grease, and starts work on a ham-and-cheese croissant. Pastry flakes fall onto the newspaper as though showering Rosemary in autumn leaves.
Kate is packing up to leave, when her mobile buzzes on her desk. She picks it up and reads a text from Erin: “I love Rosemary Peterson! She is amazing—that photo made Mark and me laugh so much this morning! So happy to see your article on the front page. E x.”
Kate grins as she reads.
“Are you coming?” Jay says to Kate, his bag slung over his shoulder and a tripod under his arm.
“Yes, sorry!”
She sends Erin a swimmer emoji and some kisses and puts her phone in her bag.
“Let’s go.”
As Rosemary eats her breakfast she reads about herself and looks at her photograph on the front page.
George would not believe that she has made the front page of a newspaper, even if it is just a local one. When she went to the newsagent to collect it this morning she saw several people looking at it.
“Look at this, this is amazing,” said a young man to his girlfriend as Rosemary quietly walked past and paid at the till.
She hardly believes it herself. The wetsuit is hanging up on the back of her bedroom door as a reminder. When she saw it this morning she smiled.
It had been a struggle to get into it before the meeting. She put plastic bags on her hands and feet to push them through the tight arm and leg holes, and when she caught her reflection in the bedroom mirror she couldn’t stop laughing. Then the laughing made her wheeze and she had to sit down for a moment, wetsuit half on and plastic bags still on her hands and feet. As she sat on the bed she had looked across at the photo of George that sat next to her pillow. It was one of him outside the greengrocer wearing his apron and holding the biggest pumpkin they had ever seen. He was grinning.
“What am I doing, George
?”
Doing the zip up at the back by herself had been difficult. She spent a long time twisting and reaching for the zip and nearly fell over twice. Once she was zipped up she buttoned up her coat and wrapped her scarf tightly to hide the neckline of the wetsuit. There was not much give in the suit so she had to get onto all fours to reach for her shoes.
In many ways the council meeting had not gone well. The councillors looked down on them, she could tell, and made her feel as though she was at school again and they were the teachers. Halfway through her speech she remembered the teachers who’d made them swim in a storm, and the look on their faces when they’d jumped into the water in their coats. The memory made her smile: Just wait until they see under this coat, she’d thought.
It had been hard to tell what the outcome of the meeting was. Once Rosemary had put her coat back on and the councillor had stopped coughing he told them that their concerns would be submitted to the Board (whoever they were) and filed for consideration. The residents and lido staff would be kept informed, he said, but there was no date set for another meeting. Despite the uncertainty, for a moment her worries were put aside by the pats on her back and the laughter of her friends as they left the town hall. They even went for a drink afterward at the pub around the corner. Kate and Ellis helped her up onto one of the high barstools, which meant her feet couldn’t touch the ground. Ellis bought her half a pint of cider. She got a few strange looks from the other customers as she sat there in her wetsuit and coat. She just raised her glass and smiled.
As she drank she watched the group of people around the bar. Ellis, Hope, and Betty laughed and shared a bag of peanuts and memories about Brixton. Frank and Jermaine slipped pork rinds to Sprout, who lay on the sticky carpet under one of the tables. They talked to Kate, whose eyes lit up as she told them about the latest book she was reading, her cheeks pink. Ahmed spoke with the nice photographer who had told Rosemary that she had a face for the front page.