Swimming Lessons

by Claire Fuller

  I couldn’t see his features, couldn’t make out his expression.

  “That’s ridiculous. He’s having a party.” I flung my arm back toward the house. “Which he invited me to. And he’s writing?”

  “He does that. Sometimes. You won’t want to be disturbing him now.” Jonathan took my hand, led me up the steps. “Come on, time for another drink and a dance—you do dance, don’t you?”

  I looked over my shoulder at the yellow square of light.

  This morning, as I write this letter, the garden is missing the tap, tap, tap of your typewriter.

  We love you.

  Ingrid

  [Placed in The Cocktail Party, by T. S. Eliot, 1950.]

  Chapter 13

  In the morning when Flora got up, Nan was already in the kitchen making breakfast.

  “Glad to see you managed to put some clothes on,” Nan said. Flora was wearing Ingrid’s pink chiffon dress again. Nan set a plate on the table. “I phoned the hospital. I thought we could go and see if you can get that car working, and then you can follow me there.”

  “Can you pass the marmalade?” Flora said.

  “I’ve already put marmalade on your toast.”

  “Don’t worry,” Flora said. She got the jar and a knife and took them to the table.

  “Flora, there’s something . . .” Nan sat opposite her.

  “What?” Flora looked up. Nan stared at the toast. “I’ve always liked my marmalade to go right up to the edge.”

  “Yes,” Nan said.

  Flora saw purple shadows beneath her sister’s eyes. She took a bite of toast, and after a while Nan stood and began to tidy the kitchen, eating her own breakfast as she wiped the surfaces.

  “When did the number of books in the house get so crazy?” Flora said.

  “You know he’s been buying them for years,” Nan said.

  “Yes, but it’s never been this bad. You can hardly walk down the hall.”

  Nan sighed. “It was even worse a few weeks ago. I popped over one morning and Dad had spent the night pulling nearly all the books off the shelves—mountains of them in the sitting room and the bedroom, like there’d been an explosion. He said he was looking for something.”

  “What?”

  “Goodness knows. He became all evasive. ‘Letters’ was all he would say. It seemed he’d been up for the whole night, flicking through every book. The ends of his fingers were red raw.”

  “What letters?” Flora yawned.

  “I have no idea. All the books are full of letters and bits of rubbish.”

  “You should have called me. I would have come.”

  “It was all right in the end. I got him into bed, and when he was asleep I put most of them back. But I did manage to fill a few carrier bags to take to the shop in Hadleigh without him knowing. Viv was really pleased to have them.”

  “Viv?” Flora said.

  “She bought the bookshop a couple of months ago. She’s trying to turn it around.”

  “I bet she was pleased to have them,” Flora said sarcastically. “Daddy bought most of them from her in the first place.”

  “It’s a lovely bookshop now. Viv’s very choosy about her stock.”

  “I remember the smell of it. Old brown wood and smoke, like the smell of a country house with open fires. I haven’t been in it since Daddy took me years ago. I must have been about eleven or twelve.” Gil had told her to choose any book in the whole shop—whatever she wanted. Flora had picked out Lady Chatterley’s Lover without knowing fully what it was about, but somehow understanding it was a dangerous choice. Gil had raised one eyebrow but let Flora take it to the desk to pay.

  “Does your father know you’re buying this?” Harrold, the shopkeeper, had looked at her over his glasses.

  “Of course, Harrold,” Gil said, appearing from behind the Local History section. “It’s not up to you what my daughter reads.” He handed over the money. Outside the shop Gil took the book from her and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “You won’t be reading this for a while.” He laughed. “Let’s go and get an ice cream.”

  In the kitchen Nan said, “Oh, you should go again. Viv is so welcoming and happy to show people around and recommend things.”

  “You seem to know a lot about her.” Flora licked marmalade off her knife. She looked up at Nan. Her sister’s cheeks were flushed. “Really?” Flora said, smiling, her head on one side.

  Nan rinsed a dishcloth under the tap and wrung it out. “She’s just . . . she’s just a very nice woman.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Flora said. She got up and hugged her sister, whose arms hung limply by her side, the dishcloth still in one hand. “I’m so pleased for you.”

  “I think you should change out of that dress,” Nan said.

  Once more, Flora sat in the driver’s seat of the Morris Minor. Nan leaned in through the open passenger window. There was no sign of last night’s storm and no fish on the road. The sky over the heath was blue and cloudless. Cars disgorging from the ferry streamed past, and the road verges were packed nose to tail. A queue had built up in front of the Morris Minor, impatient motorists wanting to pass to catch the ferry. Flora, picturing her father waiting for them in hospital, wanted to get going too. “Can’t we just go in yours?”

  “We can’t leave this car here,” Nan said. “It’s blocking the road. Try the ignition one more time.”

  “It’s not going to start.” Flora felt like weeping.

  “Aren’t you meant to pull out the choke or something?” Nan said.

  A driver in one of the cars in the queue tooted a horn.

  “It’s broken.” And to prove it, Flora turned the key once more. The awful clunk sounded again.

  “I’ll call the garage and you’ll just have to wait with it. I’ll go and get Dad on my own.”

  “But I want to come.”

  “You shouldn’t have driven, then. You should have come down this morning by train like I suggested.” Nan took her phone out of her handbag, looked at the time, rolled her eyes, and called the garage.

  In the cab of the tow truck, Flora stared out of the rear window over the roof of the Morris Minor as they drove away from the ferry and the hospital, towards Hadleigh. The line of traffic heading in the opposite direction stopped to let them out, and she saw on the road a single fish that must have been under the car, its scales winking in the sunshine.

  “Fan belt,” the man said as he withdrew the top half of his body from under the bonnet.

  “Is that important?” Flora said.

  He laughed. “It’s not going to go without it. Take a walk, get yourself a cup of tea, and come back in three hours or so. We should have her all fixed by then.”

  The route from the garage to the sea took Flora through the public car park. Halfway across she noticed her father’s car, a parking ticket stuck to the windscreen. When she peered through the window, she saw that all the footwells and the seats, apart from the driver’s, were full of carrier bags spilling out secondhand books.

  She took an alleyway to the sea and walked the length of the promenade. At the town end she leaned on the railings and tried not to think about her father tumbling over them, how he could so easily have died from the fall. She ducked under the bottom bar and sat on the lip of the concrete for a moment, her legs dangling over the rocks, before she jumped. Maybe her mother had been there; perhaps she had been the one who called the ambulance. Flora clambered across the rocks close to the promenade, out towards the rounder boulders next to the sea—searching without knowing what she was looking for. She found a jelly shoe—slimy with age, its buckle permanently fused shut by salt water—five rusty beer-bottle tops, and a plastic toy soldier wedged in a crevice that her mother might have crouched beside. The soldier stood sideways on its base, legs akimbo, one arm raised as if waving on an invisible army. Most of its green pigment had been leached by the sea, so that when she held it up to the sun it was almost translucent.

  Flora climbed back up and s
at on a bench on the promenade overlooking the water. The view was so familiar she barely noticed it. Below, people rested in deck chairs and three hardy children ran about in swimming costumes. She held the soldier close to her face and shut one eye so that the little man became huge and out of focus, balancing on the horizon, and she imagined her mother sitting on this bench, in this spot, and wondered what she had been thinking.

  After Ingrid disappeared, neighbours and friends searched the nearby coves, walked over Barrow Down, tramped through the heath with sticks and dogs, and dredged Little Sea Pond. Jonathan and, later, her mother’s old university friend, Louise, came down to Spanish Green although there wasn’t much they could do, and they spent their time in the pub avoiding the reporters who massed around the village like swarms of wasps. They took two rooms above the bar and didn’t come to the house. One evening, when Flora went to the pub with her father—who bought her a Coke and a bag of crisps and told her she could stay, as long as she sat in a corner and kept quiet—Jonathan suddenly remembered a conversation he’d had with Ingrid about Ireland, and Gil shouted, broke a barstool, and was asked to leave. Sometime later Louise resigned from Parliament.

  Gil refused to give up hope. He went to Ireland but returned alone. He had posters made and placed adverts in the local papers. Flora and Nan spent their weekends in the car, sleeping, eating, and watching the countryside and towns speed by, chasing possible sightings of their mother.

  Flora asked someone the time and was disappointed to find that only an hour had passed, so she crossed the road into town. She got a window table in Sea Lane Café and read through their menu. She ordered toast, the cheapest item, and a cup of tea. The waiter’s hair was gelled forwards as if he were in a constant battle with a backwind. Flora would have liked to make him sit so she could draw him, but the café was full and he was busy. When he brought the food over she said, “Did a woman come in here yesterday? On her own, I think.”

  “A woman?” the waiter said, raising an eyebrow. “Don’t get many of those in here.” He smiled. His teeth were the size of a baby’s, small and square with a gap between the front two. “What does she look like?”

  “I’m not sure.” Flora blushed. “Straight hair, maybe. Light coloured. Pale skin.”

  “How old?”

  “Forty-eight . . . no, forty-seven.”

  “A bit old for me.” He winked. When Flora frowned, he said, “Do you have a photo?” He put down her plate of toast.

  “No.”

  The man set her cup of tea on the table. “Get a lot of work as a private detective, do you?” Another wink.

  “I’m in great demand,” Flora said. She picked up her knife and a pat of butter, pleased they hadn’t spread it on for her, suddenly starving.

  “I’m afraid it was my day off yesterday. I wasn’t even here.” He seemed like he wanted to carry on talking, but he was called to the kitchen for another order.

  When she had finished eating, Flora pulled the toy soldier from her pocket. The small man stood in heavy boots, a pair of binoculars hanging around his neck. She thought about the child who must have lost him on the beach. How long had it been before they realised the soldier was missing, and did they blame themselves for not noticing when it became buried in the sand, was swept out to sea, or fell from a boulder into the crevice? And did the child remember it every time they returned to the beach? Flora balanced the soldier on the crust of toast she had left, took her sketchbook and a pencil out of her satchel, and stared at the tiny man with his arm raised. But when the waiter came over and asked if there was anything else she wanted, Flora realised she had drawn her mother standing in front of the Swimming Pavilion. In her mind, the tin roof shimmered in the heat and the long dress flowed around her mother’s ankles.

  “It rained fish last night,” Flora said to the waiter when he returned with the bill. “On the road from the ferry.”

  He looked over her shoulder at her drawing and at the soldier propped on the toast. “I like a girl with a vivid imagination,” he said. “It makes a change,” and he smiled his baby smile. He left the bill, and Flora put some money on the table and packed her sketchbook and pencil into her bag. As she glanced up, a woman walked past the café window, gone in an instant, but leaving an impression of fine hair the colour of ripe wheat. Flora cried out and jumped up, knocking her chair into the man sitting at the table behind. She snatched up her satchel and was nearly out of the door when she turned to grab the little plastic soldier.

  “I’ve got another day off tomorrow,” the waiter shouted after her, but she was gone.

  And so was the woman.

  Flora ran along the pavement, stepping into the road to dodge slow walkers, along past the library, the supermarket, the butcher’s with the closing-down notice, the estate agent, two hairdresser’s, and another estate agent, and once she was around the corner and on the road beside the promenade again, she stopped and bent with her hands on her knees to catch her breath. The pavement was empty, so she turned around and went into each shop she had passed. There were a few customers in each—no one like the woman. In the small supermarket, Flora worked her way up and down the aisles toward the checkouts. The woman wasn’t there.

  She hesitated outside the library. The last time she’d been inside she was eight and on a junior-school trip. Now, she put her hand in the pocket of her jeans and rubbed the soldier between her thumb and finger, lifted the strap of her satchel over her head, and pushed through the glass doors.

  The smell inside took her back to when her family was complete: saffron-yellow upholstery and warm 1970s orange wood. A man sat behind a desk in front of a wall of exposed brickwork. He looked up at Flora and smiled encouragingly, as if he knew she hadn’t been in a library for thirteen years. She had been a voracious reader until her mother was lost. Overnight, on the 2nd of July 1992, she had stopped reading. She tried to rearrange her expression into that of a regular library goer and strode toward the shelves, ducking down an aisle and removing a random book from the row in front of her. She opened The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and flicked through the pages until she was sure the librarian must have gone back to his work. When she had replaced the book, Flora searched the room for the woman with the long hair. After she had been into the children’s corner, down each row, and glanced at every browser, she took the stairs up to a mezzanine floor that had racks of magazines and newspapers, and study tables, most of which were empty.

  The woman sat at a table farthest from the stairs with her back to Flora, her hair touching the top of her chair. She was flicking through a large book, and before she turned each thin page the woman licked a finger and stuck it to a corner. Flora thought that might not be allowed in libraries. She stared at the woman’s hair, remembering how she used to beg to be allowed to play with her mother’s, to brush it and plait it, but that when she did, Ingrid would complain Flora was too rough, that she was catching her fingers or tugging on purpose. And sometimes, Flora knew, her mother was right.

  She moved towards the woman until she was a foot away from the chair, and leaned forwards. She closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose. The woman’s hair smelled of lemons, a bright eye-blinding yellow.

  When Flora looked up, her eyes met those of the man sitting across the table, a newspaper in front of him, and she became aware of other people at other tables turning to stare at her. Flora straightened and, as she did so, the woman raised her head and must have caught the expression of the man opposite. She twisted around slowly, as if nervous of whom she would find standing behind her. Flora held her breath, milliseconds seeming like minutes.

  Chapter 14

  THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 9TH JUNE 1992, 5:15 AM

  Dear Gil,

  Yesterday evening the phone rang and Flora answered it before I could get there. She was in the sitting room playing your records.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Who is it?” I asked, going in.

  “Hello?” Flora repeated, louder. I
went up to her, close enough to know the person at the other end was talking perfectly clearly. “I can’t hear you,” Flora bellowed.

  “Flora, who is it?” I asked again, trying to take the receiver from her.

  “Nope,” Flora shouted. “I’m sorry, whoever you are, but no one in this house is listening to anything you have to say.” And she put the phone down.

  “Flora, you mustn’t do that. Who was it?”

  “Louise,” she said.

  I was worried she’d worked it out, overheard something I shouldn’t have said, but I’m sure now there hasn’t been anything for her to overhear; she’s picked up on a feeling she doesn’t fully understand. I couldn’t help myself: I laughed. Flora laughed too, standing on the sofa arm and leaping on the cushions. “No, we can’t hear you,” she yelled. She turned up the volume on the record player: Cat Stevens singing “Rubylove.” We both started dancing, doing a little shimmy on those Greek guitar bits, spinning each other around. Nan came in—of course she wouldn’t have been able to avoid the noise—but instead of switching it off like I thought she would, she danced. Moving her feet stiffly at first, clicking her fingers, until Flora grabbed her and soon they were both jumping on the sofas. I stopped to look at them laughing and making up the words they didn’t know, and I was strangely removed from the scene, as if I were watching a film about somebody else’s children.

  The day after your party I woke to the sound of women’s laughter and the front door slamming. A car revved on the drive, reversed onto the lane, and sped away. The house was silent. I lay on the sofa still dressed, with someone’s left-behind coat thrown over me. Bright sunshine poured through the open French windows and struck the empty bottles and dirty glasses, fracturing the light. The place smelled like a pub—stale booze and cigarette ash. My watch said it was a little after two. There was a hiss and a repeated click from the corner of the room where the record player’s needle had come to the end of an album, possibly hours ago. When I sat up I saw the skeleton, Annie, reclining in an armchair, her grotesque head tilted at a crazy angle and her arms hanging over the sides as if she had flopped there, too drunk to move. And I saw what I hadn’t taken in the night before with the crush of people: your books. Every wall was lined with shelves, and every shelf was crammed with books, jammed in any way possible. I scanned some of the titles, fiction mixed with nonfiction and reference. There was no order and no way of judging your taste: Anna Karenina wedged under Secrets of the Jam Cupboard and The Country Companion: A Practical Dictionary of Rural Life and Work. Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss sandwiched between Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and The Missing Muse and Other Essays by Philip Guedalla.