I heard you bought your own drinks in the pub that time; you bought the bottle. I don’t blame you, sitting at the bar in the far corner on Mrs. Passerini’s seat, while Martin and his regulars whispered, casting worried glances at you.
“Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,” you said into your glass, according to Martin.
And that idiot, George Ward, at the other end of the bar, almost under his breath, said, “Must have got the priest in there pretty damn quick if that baby made it to heaven.” He didn’t say it quietly enough, because you got off your stool, staggered up to him, and when he turned, you punched him in the face. Martin told me he heard George’s nose crack under your knuckles as he staggered backwards, blood running from his nostrils (so much blood). You swayed, took another swing, and then Martin was around the front of the bar, holding you off, saying, “Gil, it’s all right, Gil, Gil.” As if he were soothing a baby.
Sometimes I think about George Ward in the accident and emergency department, lying on a bed behind a curtain, holding a blood-soaked bar towel to his face while his nose was reset, and at the same time, somewhere in the same hospital, there was our own George, cold and alone. A little fish, swimming too early from his private sea.
Ingrid
[Placed in Joe Strong, the Boy Fish, by Vance Barnham, date unknown.]
Chapter 33
Richard and Flora sat opposite each other on the sofas, books crowding around them. Gil and Nan had gone to bed. Flora tried to ease a paperback out from one of the towers behind her: Joe Strong, the Boy Fish, written on the spine. Above her, the tower shifted.
“Careful,” Richard said. Flora pushed the book back in and took another from higher up. A hardback called Pruning Fruit Trees and Shrubs. She flicked through it, and heart-shaped pieces of sugar paper fluttered out over her lap.
“A heartfelt invitation,” she read from the typed text. “Please come to Michael and Clementina’s engagement party on 14th February 1957.” The paper was soft, fragile, purple faded to pink.
“Perhaps they fell out of love before Valentine’s Day,” Richard said.
She chose another. Moby-Dick. A giant flat-nosed whale reared up from the sea, dwarfing a wooden boat of sailors. Inside the front cover someone had glued in a bookplate. “This book belongs to,” Flora read out, “Sarah Sims.” The writing was laboured, the pen scoring the paper, and she imagined a young girl, hardworking, her tongue sticking out in concentration. Under her name, Sarah had added, But I don’t want it. Flora laughed and held the page up for Richard to see. “Your go,” she said.
He reached behind him and extricated a book, patting the stack so that it dropped with a jolt but didn’t topple. “Red Sky at Midnight,” he said, reading the title. He flicked through the pages but nothing fell out. He turned them more slowly and stopped when he reached the middle. He smiled.
“Marginalia.” He lowered his voice, lengthening his vowels, making his consonants more pronounced, a good impersonation of Gil: “It’s a female vulva, drawn by a fucking male of the species.”
Richard handed her the open book.
“Nicely drawn,” she said. “Good technique.”
She picked another, Thrilling Stories for Girls. On the flyleaf someone had sketched a small barren island surrounded by water. In the style of a textbook diagram the cross-section of the island had been labelled with an “escape shoot” running down through the middle, hidden by a hinged hatch disguised as the island’s peak. Under the water, a “secret submersible” waited for passengers.
“After Mum went, I was embarrassed about how we lived,” Flora said, closing the cover. “The garden like a jungle, the number of books in the house, that I had a sister who behaved like a mother, a father old enough to be my grandfather, who locked himself away with his typewriter but never wrote a word.”
Richard pushed his glasses up his nose and waited.
“I never invited anyone home.” Flora put her heels up on the edge of the sofa, wrapped her arms around her knees. “I didn’t have many friends, but there was one girl, Kathy. I made friends with her so I could go to her house after school rather than come back here.” Flora picked at a scab on her knee. “The first time, when we stood on Kathy’s doorstep, she shuffled her feet and said, ‘There’s something I need to tell you about my mum.’ I remember thinking, Shit, she’s going to say her mother’s disappeared. But she said, ‘My mum’s really fat.’
“She was right; her mum was enormous. She overflowed the sides of her armchair and wore flowery dresses which rode up when she sat down and showed her meaty legs. If someone had pricked them with a fork they would have spat grease. Kathy was apologetic, but I loved her mum. That term I went home with Kathy after school at least twice a week and ate dinner on my lap with her family in front of the telly. I liked to pretend that her car-mechanic brother was my brother, too; that her father, who commuted to a normal job in an office, was my father; that her semidetached estate house was my house. I’m sure now that her mum felt sorry for me, for what had happened, but I didn’t know it at the time. She would give me a hug before I left, and it was like I was sinking into her flesh, as if she could take me into her body and I could become her child. I would lie in bed on the nights I had been to Kathy’s and remember the smell of her mother’s bosom, the whiff of cooked food coming off her clothes and the sweat rising up from her cleavage. Mixed together I thought they made the smell of a mother: carmine pink.”
“Pink?” Richard said, but Flora carried on talking.
“It was Kathy that I first read A Man of Pleasure with, under the bedcovers, shining a torch on the rude bits. I think one of her uncles owned a copy. Most of it went over our heads, of course. It was later I realised the significance of those words at the beginning, and even then I didn’t fully understand.”
Richard began to say something, but Flora interrupted. “Wait. I have to tell you all of it now I’ve started.
“After a few months Kathy hinted that she wanted an invitation to my house in return. She’d say stuff like, ‘Your dad’s famous. I’ve never met anyone famous before,’ or ‘Is it true you live in some swimming changing rooms?’ And I considered what I’d have to tell her on the doorstep about my mum, but I didn’t know how to say it—There’s something I need to tell you: my dad’s a writer who doesn’t write but collects other people’s books, and this is my sister-mother, and by the way my mum’s disappeared, but don’t you dare say she’s dead. She would have known about that, though. Everybody did.
“The last time I visited Kathy’s house one of their neighbours was round. Her mum and this woman were sitting in the kitchen having a cup of tea. Kathy and I were playing at being spies or something; we were listening outside the door, pretending we were riveted by knitting patterns or recipes. Then their conversation changed.
“‘I see Flora’s round again,’ the neighbour said. ‘That poor girl.’”
“‘She comes round nearly every day after school,’ Kathy’s mum said. ‘Can you imagine? It doesn’t bear thinking about. And her father, hiding away in that shack of his, or gadding about goodness knows where.’”
“‘I worry about the older sister,’ we heard the neighbour say. ‘Having to be a mother to a ten-year-old at, what? Fifteen?’”
“‘Oh, but what about that poor little Flora? Losing her mother when she’s still so young.”’
Flora paused in her story, looked across at Richard. His face was blank, still waiting. “Losing her mother,” Flora repeated. “They thought I lost her.”
“It’s just a turn of phrase. They didn’t really think you were responsible . . .” Richard started, but Flora shook her head.
“I stared at Kathy and I was sure she thought that too: my mother disappeared when I should have been watching.
“And I was watching—I was hiding in the gorse, outside the house.” Flora nodded towards the window. “Nan had made sure I caught the school bus that morning, but I got off at the next stop and walked home.
I couldn’t wait for Mum to leave the house so I could sneak indoors to get my costume and go for a swim. I watched her go and I didn’t stop her.
“I ran out of Kathy’s house,” Flora continued, talking over Richard. “She called for me to come back, but no one came looking. Perhaps Kathy told them I’d gone home.”
“Oh, Flora,” Richard said, and leaned forwards to touch her ankle.
“I know, what a terrible childhood.” Flora barked out a laugh. “There’s more. The following day in class, the girl I sat next to passed me a note. I recognised Kathy’s handwriting. I opened it under the desk. It said, ‘I know what you done.’”
“What?” Richard said.
“I told you, she thought I had lost my mum. And I believed it as well. Maybe I still do.” Flora didn’t tell Richard the rest of the story: that she’d taken the note home and when she was sitting at the kitchen table she read it again. Nan was out, but Gil was there, cooking a fry-up. She wanted him to see it, to read it, and tell her that she wasn’t responsible for losing Ingrid.
Her father set a plate in front of her, the egg sliding over the sausage, its yolk heart broken and leaking into the beans. She wasn’t sure she could eat it. Gil looked over Flora’s shoulder and read what Kathy had written.
He tutted. “It should be ‘I know what you did,’” he said. “Not “done.’” Flora slipped the note under her plate and later put it in the bin with the food her father didn’t make her eat, hadn’t noticed she didn’t eat.
Flora got up from the sofa and, stepping between the books, went to the French windows and stared out at the sky, where dark clouds raced across the moon. “I think we’ve had the last of the good weather.”
“Flora?” Richard said.
“I’m fine. It was a long time ago.” With her back to Richard, she saw her mother closing the door of the Swimming Pavilion, the book in her hand. Flora strained to see the title—a question, perhaps. She remembered crouching in the space she had made in the middle of the gorse, a thorned fortress. She remembered willing her mother to hurry up, to leave. And when Ingrid had turned, stepped into the sunlight wearing the long pink dress, walked around the corner into the lane, and disappeared into Spanish Green, Flora hadn’t thought about her again.
To Richard she said, “Let’s go to bed.”
Chapter 34
THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 25TH JUNE 1992, 11:50 PM
Gil,
Today I had a phone call from Flora’s headmistress. I could hear our ten-year-old daughter complaining in the background while I was told what she’d done wrong. She’d been found standing on the main road outside the school gates with her thumb out. She told me later she was hitchhiking to London to go and live with you. I asked her how she’d find you in London when she doesn’t know where you’re living. She said she’d go to a bookshop and find the name of your publisher and then go to their offices. (Clever, independent girl, our youngest daughter. Maybe I should have let her go.)
I find myself thinking about you less as I write these letters—I mean today’s Gil, where you are, what you’re doing. Meanwhile, the Gil of the past fills my head. I work in the garden when the girls are at school; there’s always something that needs doing. The view from the house to the sea needs clearing, there’s a cordyline that has grown too big, and I should have pruned the tamarisk in March. I sometimes think about what the garden would become if I weren’t here to look after it. (The nettles at the top of the bank reclaiming their old territory, the grass going to seed after a few weeks, the flower beds full of interlopers.) Is imposing our will on nature wrong? All that work to keep the garden as I want it—the weeding, the pruning, and the mowing. Perhaps it would be more honest, more truthful, to let the land slip back to how it wants to be.
Do you remember the time Flora ran away when she was seven? Another of those things we never talked about. You were in London at an event, due to return the next morning. The weather drew me down the chine after the children had gone to bed. I liked to lie on the sea’s rocking surface and let the waves sluice me and the rain pock my skin. When Flora climbed out of her bedroom window, I wasn’t there to stop her. But you came home early on the last ferry of the evening, or you hadn’t gone at all, and must have found Nan crying, the girls’ window open and our youngest child flown.
I came up the chine in my bare feet. The path was muddy and I was watching my step when I heard the voices of your search party calling out for Flora, and when I glanced up, torchlights were bobbing through the copse. I knew I should have been looking after the children and so I ran through the woods, my towel dropped somewhere behind me, but by then you’d already found her, and when I pushed through the small group of people crowding around you, Flora was in your arms. In front of our friends and neighbours you slapped me, and the crack echoed across the Downs like a gunshot.
I don’t deserve to be looking after our children.
Ingrid
[Placed in The Last Gamble, by Harold Q. Masur, 1958.]
Chapter 35
“Keep still,” Flora said, straddling Richard’s hips. “Or your bones will be wonky.” He lay on the bed built into the far end of the writing room. The morning light coming through the window and the open door warmed the colour of his skin, and she concentrated on drawing his elbow joint, trying to visualize how the knuckle-like end of the humerus slotted around the bones of his forearm.
“It rained fish,” Flora said, still drawing, “the night I borrowed your car.”
“Fish?” Richard said.
“Yes.” She began on his other elbow. “They fell all over the road—tiny mackerel.”
“I’ve read about that,” he said. “Water spouts or miniature tornadoes form over the sea or sometimes ponds and suck up small aquatic animals—fish or frogs—and drop them somewhere else.”
Flora sighed and shifted her knees on the bedcover. “I wasn’t after the scientific explanation.”
“What then?”
“Don’t you think it’s significant?” Flora lifted her pen from Richard’s skin, considered her drawing. “That it happened just as I was coming home? Some kind of omen?” She looked up at his face but saw no connection in his expression to what she was saying. “Forget it.” She went back to her work.
After a while, Richard said, “I can’t believe I’m in the room where Gil Coleman wrote A Man of Pleasure.” He turned his head towards the door. Flora looked too. It still felt illicit to be there with Richard, in her father’s space. The side window, which was propped open, gave a view over the nettles and a glimpse of the sea. A fold-down flap below the sill created a narrow table which could be used for writing or eating, and a wooden folding chair was hanging high up on the wall until it was needed. At the door end, an old oven glove, two chipped mugs, and a paraffin lamp dangled from hooks above the stove. Under Richard, the puce-coloured cover—bald in patches and water stained—was rucked and pushed to the side, revealing grey, musty-smelling sheets and pillows. A colour like the undersides of mushrooms came and went.
“How much of it do you think happened here?” Richard said.
“What?” Flora said. “You don’t think it was autobiographical, do you?” She laughed and the lines she was drawing on Richard rippled. “For fuck’s sake.”
“That’s what everyone said.”
“I didn’t think you would listen to literary gossip.”
“OK, at least it was here he wrote it, at that table, looking out at that view.”
“I suppose so. We weren’t allowed in.” She stuck the tip of her tongue out from between her lips. She’d got as far as Richard’s wrist, and the carpal bones were complicated.
“Why not?”
“It was the rule.”
There had been one time she’d gone into the room on her own. For a reason Flora could no longer remember, she had climbed out of her bedroom window one night. Nan was in the kitchen; she wasn’t sure where her mother was. It was raining, a thick, warm rain that soaked through her pyjam
as as soon as she jumped down onto the flower bed. She ran along the gravel paths in between the lawns, thinking her father might be writing, but although the light was on and the door unlocked, his room was empty. Flora stood on the threshold for a minute, and even though she understood it wasn’t allowed, she stepped inside. The place smelled of her father—musky, rich, otter brown. The bedcovers were thrown back, as if her father had just got up. She would have liked to crawl under them but was distracted by his typewriter and a curl of paper that rolled out from the top. “I ran my hand over the downy curves of her buttocks,” she read. Flora wasn’t sure what “buttocks” meant, and she leaned in closer to read the next line. Her wet hair dripped onto the ink, the letters spreading one into the other.
She hurried from the room, across the garden, running out to the lane, and took the uphill footpath through the small beech wood, the trees stained by streaks of copper where the rain dripped in slippery runnels. She slapped their trunks with the palm of her hand as she passed, as if she were whacking the meaty rumps of giant horses. By the time she emerged from the trees she was warm and panting and the rain had stopped. The path came out on the rising slope of Barrow Down, where the grass was cropped short by rabbits and the land rolled in undulating waves. In a burst of energy, Flora ran up to the highest point. The footpath continued rightwards along the coast to Hadleigh; to her left the shorn grass fell away to the cliff at the end of the beach, while in front of her the ground was level, facing out to sea. She spread her arms wide and ran into the wind and across the grassy slope towards the cliff top. The edge here had been eroded into a narrow spit—two feet wide and twelve feet long—that pointed accusingly out to sea at Old Smoker, the column of chalk to which, hundreds of years ago, the land must have been attached. The forty-foot-high sea stack rose straight up out of the water like the funnel from an oversized and sunken ocean liner, and once upon a time Old Smoker’s Wife, a smaller rock, had hunkered low beside him. Along the middle of the finger of land, a track had been worn through the grass by daredevil teenagers and reckless adults. Flora and Nan, and all the children they knew, had been forbidden to walk out along this peninsula, had been forbidden, Flora suddenly remembered, from walking on the Downs unaccompanied. She took one step onto the track, the width of a shoe, and then another—one foot in front of the other, heel to toe—until she could no longer see the land hulking behind her. Below on either side was the pitchy shifting mass of the sea, which Flora couldn’t look at for fear of tipping, so she stared straight ahead at the clouds scudding across the moon and at the immensity of Old Smoker rising like a beaconless lighthouse from the water. Flora held her arms out and the wind lifted her hair. She took another step, sweat breaking out on her fingertips, and another step until she was at the very end of the spit. If she were to take one more, there would be nothing under her foot, only empty air and a long fall, tumbling through space to the water and the rocks below. A gust came, strong from behind her, willing her to step out, the force of it pushing her forwards. She dropped to her knees, clutching on to the tufts of muddy grass at the edge, and when she was calmer, shuffled backwards up the path, using the grass either side to pull herself to safety.
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