Flora met the search party as she was going down through the trees: torchlights moving amongst the branches and people calling her name: her father, Martin, and some other neighbours. Gil picked her up and hugged her and the small crowd gathered around. She was never sure if the next part was true memory or nightmarish imagination, because Flora recalled a white wraith flowing out from under the tree shadow, its skin luminous in the moonlight, and her father stepping forwards to strike it so that the creature turned and fled, before her father carried her home.
The autumn after her mother had disappeared, Flora went again to the narrow track leading out to sea, and, lying on her stomach with her head over the edge of the cliff, she let fall one of Annie’s teeth. The small white nugget was in her fingers, and the next moment it was gone, too tiny, too insignificant to be seen. She imagined it spinning downwards and passing through the surface of the water without a disturbance, then carried along by the tide, deeper and deeper and farther out to sea, until it settled amongst the weed and the rocks.
“You can’t draw on my hand,” Richard said, snatching it away and leaving a snaking black line down to his middle finger. Flora looked up, surprised her model had moved. “I will have to return to work soon.”
Flora had forgotten Richard had a job, that there were places of business where people took money and sold things from nine to five thirty on the other side of the ferry crossing. The sea, the land, the Swimming Pavilion often did that to her; made her forget that the rest of the world existed. “Well, if the bookshop is more important to you than having your limbs and appendages in full working order and staying in bed with me . . .” she said, and went to jump off him, but he caught her by the arm and pulled her back to bed.
Later, with Richard asleep behind her, she looked at the sky and the clouds passing by the window on their way from the sea to the village, feeling the dry warmth of the stove mixing with the fresh air. After a time she whispered, “Richard, are you awake?” and his breathing changed as he returned to consciousness. “Are you really going to burn Daddy’s books?”
“Of course not.” He kissed the nape of her neck and the bristles on his chin raised goose pimples along the length of her body. She pushed against him so he would wrap his arms more tightly around her.
“Have you told him that you won’t do it?”
“Not yet. He’s so insistent; I’m not sure how to tell him. How to deny Gil Coleman his dying wish? But I won’t burn them. Not books.”
She got up and put the kettle on the stove. “I can’t wait until Jonathan gets here. He’ll know what to do.” She crouched to pull open the air vent at the bottom of the stove.
“I’ll tell Gil I won’t do it,” Richard said, putting on his glasses. “Later today, I promise.”
Chapter 36
THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 26TH JUNE 1992, 5:00 AM
Gil,
For nearly four years the dry sticks of George’s dismantled cot lay in the loft, weighing on my head wherever I was in the house, the smell from the box of Nan’s old baby clothes under the bed changed from fresh laundry to dust, and the space under my jaw and against my shoulder where a baby’s head should rest remained empty. The world had become harder, more abrasive; sheets scratched, clothes irritated, and people grated. It was when I was underwater or in the garden that I felt relief. But precise moments of grief, like the pangs of childbirth, are hard to recall after the most intense pain has passed: nature’s trick to ensure we survive and continue to reproduce.
We must have carried on with normal life, I suppose; I gardened, making the rocky zigzag path down the bank to the beach and planting it with sea kale, horned poppies, and fennel. Our neighbours would leave cuttings wrapped in damp newspaper on our doorstep, or pots of lady’s bedstraw, kidney vetch, and sea lavender. I planted, watered, and cared for them; and I looked after Nan. And you started another novel (all pretence of trying to find a paying job long given up). I could tell it wasn’t going well. We stayed at home and counted the pennies. When you sold a story we celebrated with Jonathan, who was often with us, typing up his travel notes and helping with the heavy work in the garden while you were in your writing room. He no longer brought crowds of people with him, only sometimes a woman (remember that American who came for Christmas in 1980?). I tried to like them, tried to make them welcome, but most of them were ridiculous. The American insisted Jonathan buy the ingredients for a gingerbread house, even though none of us liked gingerbread, not even her. It gathered sticky dust in a corner of the kitchen until March, when its roof fell in.
Every night you didn’t sleep in the house I went swimming. Once, after it rained for two weeks and the streams burst their banks, I walked inland as the sun came up, to the field at the rear of Milkwood Stables where the land dips down to the brook. I hung my clothes over a fence and stepped into the grey water. The thought of the submerged paths and hedges and barbed-wire fencing lying just beneath the surface was exhilarating.
And I often swam in Little Sea Pond before it became popular, with its official signposts and designated paths. The water was briny and the mud cool. I laboured out between the reeds and turned to face the bank, lowering myself backwards, letting the water support me until I lay supine, my head reclined, my hair trailing. If I remained motionless I could open my eyes and watch the colour of the sky change from deep purple to orange as the sun rose. Returning to the land was never so elegant, but despite the sulphuric smell of the disturbed mud, swimming there made me feel alive.
There was a morning in 1980—October, I think—when I swam beyond my usual marker (the buoy) and struck out for Old Smoker. The rock is a long way, but I was a strong swimmer (I still am) and it was good weather—overcast but calm. I was nearly there when, without warning, the sea around me flowed with a strength I would never have believed possible. Like an invisible monster it took me and swam with me out to sea. I fought, tried to kick and push towards the beach, but the thing was powerful—determined. I yelled, but after only minutes I was too far out to be heard, too tiny to be seen by anyone. The creature wrenched me under, turned me over, filled my mouth with water. Once, twice, I rose to the surface, spluttering, coughing, and shouting, and then I was under again, spinning until I was adrift, lost. Under the surface, the water boiled as if storm clouds were massing and dispersing at great speed, and I spiralled through them, a leaf in a whirlwind. My chest burned and beams of light shone all about, illuminating the air bubbles attached to the swaying eelgrass which was sometimes above me and sometimes below. I remember thinking how beautiful it was under the water, and that I must tell everyone about it, but then realising quite calmly that I wouldn’t be able to because I was drowning and I would never see anyone again. But perhaps the sea just required me to submit, because once I’d given up struggling, my head popped out of the water like a cork, my legs pedalled in the undertow, and I went with it. The sea current took me to Old Smoker and shoved me against its side, lacerating my knees and my cheek, but I clung on, embracing the flinty chalk. When I’d caught my breath, I edged around to the south side of the pillar, out of the tearing flow. I took a moment in the slapping water on the leeward side to look up. Old Smoker rose vertiginously into a clearing sky, and when the sun appeared, the chalk on the southern side was blinding. Have you ever pressed your face against the wall of a skyscraper and stared up? The building will appear to overhang, to loom and force the dizzy visitor backwards. In a few hundred years Old Smoker will disappear, eroded and vanished into the sea like his late wife.
From the chalk stack I swam south, past the shingle bays that have no access to the land, until I reached Hope Cove. There I dragged myself out of the water, onto the tumble of seaweed-coated rocks that have fallen from the cliffs. I clambered, naked, on all fours, over the boulders, my knees bleeding and my hair hanging in clumps—a mermaid with a severed tail. A family had set up camp on top of a flat rock, with buckets and nets for catching shrimp. A mother uncapping a Thermos flask, a father untangling a
crabbing line, and a child of about seven sitting on a hard picnic box, all watched me crawl towards them, their mouths open. I was lucky.
I remember now the intoxication that I felt after the incident on the beach, drunk on survival. I laughed every time I looked out to sea; I’d fought the water and won. All things were miraculous. I found joy not only in the garden but in washing clothes, in counting out coins in the village shop in front of the patient Mrs. Bankes, in being woken at five by Nan when I’d just fallen asleep.
Did you notice the change in me? You didn’t say so if you did, but you spent more time at home, and we made the kind of love that we had when we’d first met, and you began again to ask me what I wanted you to do—what we could do together. I made up stories about making love in the sea, in the sand dunes, on the back seat of your car, but none of them were enough. “Tell me what you’d like us to do with Jonathan,” you said. The story hadn’t been in my head until you planted the idea, but I enjoyed letting it grow, develop, blossom. And I told it to you each night, inventing and describing it line by line—the three characters, the plot, the twist, the denouement. Dictating you a novel, so that in the morning you would hurry to your writing room and all day the tap, tap, tap of your typewriter keys would sound across the flower beds and lawn.
“You know that the things you’ve been describing are just imaginary?” you said one evening when we were alone at the kitchen table. You were flicking the corners of a book, looking at the drawings a previous owner had sketched on each corner. A cat stood up on its hind legs and danced a modern dance with a fish. I knew what you meant without your having to explain, but you went on: “I don’t want us to do those things with Jonathan in real life.”
“OK,” I said.
“You know what I mean?” The cat raised its front paws and bent over backwards, the fish balancing on the cat’s nose. “Promise me you won’t really sleep with Jonathan.” You stopped flicking and looked up at me.
“OK,” I said again.
The cat flipped the fish into a somersault and opened its mouth, and as the mackerel came down, the tabby snapped its jaws closed.
And then, once more, I was pregnant. We didn’t tell anyone; you just wrapped your arms around me as we sat on the bench at the top of the zigzag path. The feeling I’d had with George didn’t return. In the night, my mind filled with plans for escape which by morning seemed ridiculous and untenable. Flora arrived two weeks late, screwing up her eyes and crying, kicking her legs at the world, her tiny hands clenched into fists. You fell in love with her (your Flo); I could see it in your eyes, and in the way you held her.
“Number two,” you said. “Four more to go.”
But your counting was off. By my reckoning, we were at number four already. I did my best to hide my disappointment when Flora slid out of me, a slippery eel caught by a midwife in the hospital. But here, in this place of truths, I can say it. Flora wasn’t George. Flora wasn’t even a boy, and I grieved again for the child I’d lost.
Ingrid
[Placed in Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare, 1968 edition.]
Chapter 37
Flora was sitting on the top step of the writing-room stairs when Richard came out of the house.
“I told him.”
“What did you say?”
“That it wasn’t in me to burn his books. That it was a bit too much like Fahrenheit 451.” He sat beside her, nudging her along. “But he was OK about it. He didn’t seem surprised.”
“Didn’t he say anything at all?”
“He quoted some German at me, and when I asked what it meant, he said it was from a Heinrich Heine play.”
“Who?”
“A German Romantic poet. ‘Where they burn the books, so too, in the end, will they burn the people.’ He asked me to do something else, though. He wants me to help him down to the sea. This afternoon.”
“That’s impossible—he wouldn’t be able to get there. How would he make it to the beach?”
“I said I would carry him.” Richard stretched his legs out into the sunshine.
“What’s going on with you and Daddy? How is it you suddenly know what’s best for him?”
“It’s not that I know what’s best,” Richard said, without rising to the anger in her voice. “Perhaps it’s just that I’m not family—you know, not so close.”
Flora turned her head away, dared herself to look straight at the sun.
Richard put his arm around her. “Hey, I’m only talking to him about facing reality.”
“Did you know he asked me to get him a baby’s boot? One of those knitted ones.”
“A what?” Richard said.
“And he only wanted one. He was very specific.” She turned and stared at Richard’s face. He seemed genuinely surprised. “I thought maybe you’d put him up to it.”
“Why would I suggest something like that?”
She shrugged.
“It’ll be all right. It’s one last trip to the water. What harm can it do?”
Without talking about it, neither Flora nor Richard told Nan what they were planning. After lunch, Nan said she was going into Hadleigh again, that there were some things she had forgotten. She came out to the veranda wearing a pencil skirt and a black top with a sequinned butterfly sewn across the chest.
“He’s resting, but I’ve got my phone.” Nan reached inside the top and adjusted her bra strap. “I’ll keep it switched on, so call me if you need to.”
“Look at you!” Flora said. “You’re not just going to the supermarket.”
Nan stared down at herself and smoothed her hands over the top, the sequins moving and catching the sunlight—tiny flashes dancing across the front of the house. “If anything changes, anything at all, promise you’ll call me.”
“I promise. Turn around,” Flora said, motioning with her hand.
“I can come home straightaway.” Nan peered over a shoulder, trying to see her bottom packed into the skirt. “Is it OK, do you think? Not too much?”
Richard gave a long low whistle and Nan smiled coyly. “I thought I’d better go and ask Viv about Dad’s book.”
“You look great,” Flora said. “Amazing.”
“I have my phone,” Nan repeated. “You know the number.”
“Don’t worry,” Flora said. “Everything will be fine. Have a lovely time.”
Flora walked in front, down the chine, carrying a blanket, a pillow and a folding chair which Gil said he didn’t need but she had insisted on. Richard carried Gil.
He wore a large straw hat, one of those that lived on the pegs in the hallway and were no longer owned by anyone, and a pair of women’s sunglasses Flora had found in the kitchen-table drawer. He was thinner than a few days ago, but he could open his left eye now, and the purple on the lid had changed to a lurid yellowy-green. He reclined in Richard’s arms without embarrassment, examining and commenting on the sky and trees as he passed beneath them, as if it would be his last opportunity.
When Flora stepped onto the sand, she saw Martin standing by the edge of the water. The wind was light and the sea lolled, only bothering to break into lazy wavelets when it touched the beach.
“Daddy,” Flora said, “what’s going on? Why is Martin here?”
“You can put me down now. Thank you, Richard,” Gil said, and he made his way towards the sea. “Martin,” he called.
“How are you doing?” Martin didn’t come forwards, and Flora saw that he held a rope in one hand and behind him a boat was lodged in the sand.
“Who’s Martin?” Richard said to Flora.
“Shit,” Flora said, under her breath. “I knew it wouldn’t be a simple trip to the beach.” She went forwards to help her father. Gil and Martin shook hands.
“Your shiner’s coming along well,” Martin said. “Nice to see you on the beach. Not too choppy, good day to go out on the water.”
“You got the boat, then, and the bird?” Gil peered behind his friend.
“Couldn’t get a
rubber dinghy or a motor, but I thought a nice little rowing boat would be fine. This young man looks like he’s got some muscle on him.” Martin raised and bent his own arm, clenched his fist, and laughed. His bicep didn’t get any bigger. “We could have managed it ourselves once upon a time, eh?” Martin said, slapping Gil on the shoulder.
“But you got the bird?” Gil asked again, staring at Martin over the top of his sunglasses. “There’s no point in having the boat without the bird.”
Swimming Lessons Page 20