Something gave way at the end of the veranda, the paint blistering and the wood turning black, the screech of the tin roof warping in the heat. Flora’s knees gave way too. “Daddy,” she called again. A crowd had gathered at the end of the drive, women standing in twos and threes, the men coming forwards past Flora and Louise to see if there was anything they could do. The heat drove them back, and when the engines arrived, they stood watching the firemen unrolling hoses and connecting things rather than looking at the flames and the burning house.
A man in a beige jacket and yellow hat spoke to Jonathan, and two firefighters in breathing equipment went into the house behind a jet of water. Louise tried to take Flora away, out to the lane where an ambulance had pulled up, but she shook her off and stood beside Gabriel farther down the garden, watching.
With the sprays of water, the black smoke turned to white billows and the ribs of the building stood out. And then the white billows gave way to wisps and smoulders. “They could probably see it as far as the Isle of Wight,” Flora heard someone say, and their neighbour replied, “Must have had something good in there to burn like that.” And she thought of the hundreds, thousands of books, their edges curling, all the words and things that people had left in them blackening and crumbling to ash. And then Richard and behind him Nan, wearing his jumper, her hair straggly, were pushing through the people, Nan grabbing them and shouting to get her father out; Richard running forwards and swearing like Flora had never heard before and later telling anyone who would listen that Gil had seemed fine and happy when Richard had said he couldn’t burn the books.
“I didn’t know,” Richard said, again and again. “I didn’t know Gil would do it himself.”
Flora wrapped a blanket around herself and crossed the garden towards the sea. The grass was long and damp, and although the morning was cold, there was a charge in the air, an awareness of the heat to come. She sat on one of the garden chairs—part of the set that had been given to her by the woman who lived in the big house down the road; odd that the chairs and the table had stood on the patio once owned by her grandparents, perhaps had even been theirs. The blanket was one that someone had wrapped around her the night of the fire, and since she didn’t know who it belonged to, she hadn’t been able to return it.
“Couldn’t sleep either, Daddy?” she said. “It’s going to be a hot day.” She laid her head sideways on the table. In front of her, the rising sun was a white puffball growing on the sea’s horizon.
When she woke, the wooden table had imprinted its ridges across the skin of her cheek. The chair beside her was empty, and Flora cried.
After the fire, Richard had stayed with her for a week in the writing room. He had tried to persuade her to go back with him, but once he understood that there was no changing her mind, he arranged a Portaloo and got the outside tap working. The landlord of the Royal Oak—the man who had bought the pub from Martin, Flora couldn’t remember his name—had found beds for Jonathan, Gabriel, Louise, and Nan. One by one, over the following days they had left Spanish Green, each taking Flora aside and trying to convince her to leave.
Two weeks later they had all returned to scatter Gil’s ashes. There had been a moment of tension when Flora had laughed at Nan deciding that Gil’s remains should be cremated. “They’re burning bits of books and letters and bedsheets,” she had said, but she stood beside Gabriel, Louise, Richard, and Jonathan on a swaying fishing boat one morning as the sun came up to watch Nan throw the ashes across the water. They had floated on the surface for a minute or two, light grey on grey-green, and then had sunk.
And a week after that, the coroner recorded an open verdict. All Flora’s questions again went unanswered.
After lunch she ducked under the police tape that encircled what was left of the Swimming Pavilion. Most of the contents and internal structure had gone, especially on the right-hand side where the fire had burned strongest. She stood inside the charred skeleton of a giant creature, within the rib cage of a whale or a dinosaur, rays of sunshine casting bands of light and shadow across the ground. The place still stank of burning, the only smell that was pure black. In what was once the front bedroom, she nudged the debris with her feet and bent where she thought the bed would have been, picking up bits of unidentifiable things and examining them up close. She would have been happy to find a piece of the bed, one of the pineapple finials or the fish with the open mouth, but what she was hoping for most was something else: a fragment of tibia, a splinter of radius, a molar. She imagined sealing it in a glass dome with a label handwritten in ink: A relic of the writer. She pushed her hair out of her face with her sooty wrist and shuffled forwards through the mess.
“Flora!” It was Nan’s voice, and when Flora stood up straight she saw her sister in front of the tape, the car behind her on the drive. “What are you doing in the house? It isn’t safe.”
“I didn’t hear you arrive.” Flora stepped carefully over the fallen beams and blackened remains, walked through the gap where the front door would have been, and crossed under the tape. “I needed some charcoal,” she said. “I thought I might start drawing again.”
“Drawing would do you good,” Nan said. “But I have something else that might make you even happier.” She went to the boot of the car and Flora followed.
“What is it?”
“Here. Don’t look.” Nan passed her a bag and lifted out a heavy box the size of a small suitcase.
“What have you brought?” Flora asked.
“Wait and see.” Nan was as excited as a child. She carried the box down through the grass and put it on the table. She undid the catches on the side and lifted the lid. “It’s a windup record player,” she said, pleased with herself, delighted with the look on Flora’s face. “I managed to get you an album I think you’ll like. You have to turn your back.”
“Really?”
“Yes, turn around.”
Flora turned and she heard Nan take something out of the bag, heard her pressing buttons, winding the machine up, and the crackle as she placed a needle on the vinyl. The familiar opening chords of “Rubylove” played out over the tangled plants of the garden. Flora spun, laughing, and Nan clicked her fingers up near her head. “Greek, not Spanish,” Flora said, smiling.
“Who cares,” Nan said, and began to dance, giving her hips a little wiggle. She twirled where the grass had been flattened, Flora swaying with her. They found it impossible not to smile, dancing around the table with the sun shining on the sea below them, and singing along, making up the foreign words with anything that came to them, holding hands and laughing together until the track finished and Nan flung herself, panting, onto the ground. Flora lay beside her sister, staring up at the blue sky, the grass prickling her legs.
“I should have told them,” Flora said.
“Who?” Nan said, still breathless.
“Jonathan and Louise.”
“Told them what?” Nan moved onto her side, propping her head up with her hand.
“What you were always telling me.” Flora put her hands over her eyes. “That they shouldn’t leave Daddy on his own.” Her blood pulsed in her ears, the whirr of an approaching helicopter. “I’m sorry,” she managed.
“Oh, Flora. None of it’s your fault.” Nan tucked some of her sister’s hair behind her ear.
“You’re wrong.” Flora closed her eyes, tried to stop herself from crying. “It’s all my fault.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw Mum the day she disappeared.” Nan was silent, listening. “I didn’t go to school. I hid in the gorse and I watched her leave the house.” Once more, Flora saw Ingrid in her pink chiffon dress, turning into sunlight. “And I didn’t stop her.”
“But how could you have known? None of us knew she wouldn’t come back. And besides, you were a child—it wasn’t your job to stop her.”
Flora put a bent arm over her eyes, her chest heaving, and Nan pulled her in. They lay there, the two sisters, arms around each other wi
th the sun shining on them until the album finished.
In the afternoon, when Nan had left, Flora pulled out one of the drawers from under the writing-room bed and took it, together with a cup of tea, to the table outside. The drawer was full of pieces of paper: snippets of typed stories, paragraphs describing landscape and birdsong, pages of sex. They had been scribbled over by her father, lines crossed out and annotations made in the margins: shit and move here and fucking rubbish. They made her smile, and she found it difficult to understand that these words could exist when her father did not.
The next morning Flora walked to the village shop. She selected a loaf of sliced bread and stood in front of the upright chiller with the door ajar, the pain of the cold air welcome. The second Mrs. Bankes, a younger, slimmer version of the previous one, coughed, and Flora took out a packet of bacon. She picked up half a dozen eggs, and when she opened the box to check none of them were cracked, something about their shape, their fragile brownness, made her grip the edge of the shelf for support. Tears plopped onto the box and spread into the cardboard. When she paid for the food, the second Mrs. Bankes gave her too much change. Flora knew it was on purpose, and she dropped the extra fifty pence into the collection box outside the shop.
As she balanced the frying pan on the writing room’s stove and tried to flip an egg, Flora heard the unmistakable rumble of the Morris Minor. She leaned on the bottom half of the stable door, eating bacon with her fingers, waiting for Richard.
“Hello,” she said.
He kissed her on the lips. “How have you been?”
“Breakfast? I could fry you an egg.”
“Just a coffee. You should eat at the table, you know, sitting down,” Richard said.
She fetched another cup, poured him some coffee, and they went to the table. The drawer was still there, the pages weighted with a rock.
“Nan brought me a record player,” Flora said, but Richard was busy sifting through the papers.
“What are these?”
“Some bits Daddy wrote. Scraps, really.”
He peered at the writing. “Do you think there’s anything publishable?”
She could tell he was excited. “Richard.”
He looked up. “Sorry. It was you I came to see. I brought a picnic. I thought we could go for a walk to the sea. Or you could even go for a swim. What do you say?”
She felt the sting in the bridge of her nose and turned her head away.
“I’m sorry,” Richard said. “It’s too soon. We can go some other time. When you’re ready.”
“No.” She smeared the tears across her cheeks, wiping her fingers on her shorts. “No, it’s fine. It’s not that. I suddenly thought that I can’t lend you any trunks and I haven’t got a swimming costume. Stupid really. What does it matter? They’re just things.”
They took the picnic, the blanket, and a towel donated by the pub landlord and walked to the nudist beach. They set the blanket in the lee of a sand dune and looked out at the water. A heat-haze blurred the horizon, while closer in, four anchored yachts swung in the current, the chink, chink, chink of their halyards against the metal masts carrying over the water.
“Was this where your mother sat?” Richard said.
“Before she went for her final swim? I’m not sure. Maybe. It’s a nice place.” Flora smiled. “Shall we?” She plucked at the sleeve of his shirt.
Richard looked up and down the beach. The nearest people were fifty yards away, pink and brown bodies lying on towels. “I’m not sure I’ve ever taken my clothes off in public before.” A group of hikers followed the line of the surf away from the village; they were so determined to look straight ahead, they might have been wearing blinkers.
“Nobody cares, no one’s looking.” Still sitting, she kicked off her shoes and slipped her shirt over her head. She reached behind her and unclasped her bra. She put her arms up in the air. “Freedom,” she said, and laughed. She took off her shorts and Richard unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it out from his work trousers. “Come on, bottom half,” she said. He removed his shoes, tipped out the sand, and placed them side by side. He tucked his socks into them and, lifting his bottom, took off his trousers and folded them on top of his shoes. His glasses went on top of his trousers. “Ready?” she said. They both stood and slipped off their underwear. Flora took Richard’s hand. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
The water was like stepping into a shadow from hot noonday sun. They inched forwards, rising on tiptoes as each wave lapped against them. When the water was up to the middle of his thighs, Richard said, “There’s something I need to tell you.” His tone was serious, and Flora felt nauseous, dreading already what he had to say. “I don’t know how to swim.” She stared at him. “Really, I can’t swim.”
She knew he was standing in the shallows, watching as she moved off, but she didn’t turn around. She swam hard and fast until she was level with the distant buoy and the muscles in her legs and arms complained. When she returned to the beach, Richard was sitting on the blanket. He had put his glasses and trousers on. Flora stepped into her knickers, dragged on her shorts, and sat beside him.
Richard looked at her sadly and she stared back. She kissed him, and at the same time put her hand in her pocket and took out the toy soldier.
“Do you think this is going to work?” Richard said. “You and me?”
Without him seeing, she pushed the soldier deep into the sand beside her: a burial her mother had never had and never would. In her head, she said, “May your bones be washed by the salt water, your spirit return to the sand, and the love we have for you be forever around us.” To Richard she said, “I hope so.”
…
A breeze sprang up over Hadleigh. Shoppers and walkers heading down the high street toward the beach angled themselves forwards, their faces sculpted smooth by the wind. The tide was in and the waves crashed and seethed where they met the sand and the boulders, while farther out the water rolled in the sun, topped by white spume. A teenager on the promenade threw a handful of chips into the air, and the seagulls flapped around him like sheets of newspaper tossed into the squall.
The plastic bag that had been caught by the Tyrannosaurus rex six weeks ago filled with air, and the wind lifted it from the fibreglass claw. It sailed up and over the wire fence and came down in the car park, cavorting over the markings for the exit until it inflated and a gust carried it high like a thrown beach ball. The bag rose over the cars and the gardens and the terraced houses and the bookshop, up above the chimney pots—a small white balloon travelling north until the houses petered out to fields and hedgerows.
It was caught by the spike of a barbed-wire fence, where it flapped and rustled, demanding release, until it puffed up again and was unfettered by the wind. It blew over the Downs, past Old Smoker, skimming the tops of the beech trees and the wooden roofs of Milkwood Stables. There, the offshore breeze buffeted the bag inland to the heath and flew it over the sandy paths, boggy patches, and stunted trees. And where the land rose up to the Agglestone, the white bag was captured by the thorny stalks of a gorse bush, and when the wind yanked it again, it ripped and remained there, pinned in place. The breeze moved on, flowing around the rock, lifting gritty particles, scraping them over the limestone, flattening the boxer’s nose even further and smoothing out the etched graffiti.
The woman came around the Agglestone and faced into the wind. It blew her straw-coloured hair about her face and she pushed it out of her eyes with the back of her wrist and then caught the strands in her fist, as if to get an uninterrupted view. Laid out before her was a woven cloth of purple heath and gorse rolling down to the glittering sea, and in the distance the rooftops of Spanish Green.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many people I’d like to thank:
Adrienne Dines for helping with early direction. My first readers: Jo Barker-Scott, Louise Taylor, Henry Ayling, India Fuller Ayling, and Tim Chapman. All those who have given such constructive feedback on this b
ook in the St. James Tavern, including Amanda Oosthuizen, Sarah Wells, Rebecca Lyon, Natasha Orme, and Kate Patrick. All the Friday Fictioneers past, present, and future. The lovely people at Lutyens & Rubinstein, especially Juliet Mahony, and Jane Finigan for her support and enthusiasm. Everyone at Penguin and Fig Tree, including Anna Steadman and Anna Ridley, and in particular my fine and straight-talking editor, Juliet Annan. Caroline Pretty for catching my mistakes. Masie Cochran for her eagle-eyed advice, and all the rest of the wonderful team at Tin House. Isabel Rogers for her cockerel-wrangling know-how. Tommy Geddes for advice on 1970s university administration. Angela Lam for help with research on childbirth in the 1970s. Jill Kershaw for her patience with my medical questions. Matt Holt for Morris Minor information. Ursula Pitcher, Stephen Fuller, and Heidi Fuller for their love and support. And Townes Van Zandt for my writing soundtrack.
PRAISE FOR Swimming Lessons
“As in her gorgeously harrowing Our Endless Numbered Days, Claire Fuller returns to the territory of a mother’s disappearance and a father’s lies with bewitching and page-turning results. If anything, Swimming Lessons is an even more complex puzzle box of a book, excavating darkly knotted family secrets, intricately cruel betrayals, and layers of ambiguous loss. Fuller is so clear-eyed, poised, and psychologically shrewd in the unfolding of her tale, you will be kept guessing until the final penetrating sentence. An extraordinarily smart and satisfying read.”
—Paula McLain, New York Times best-selling author of The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun
“Swimming Lessons hovers in the electric space between secrets and connection, between the desire to love and the urge to hide. This is a biting, soaring novel.”
—Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and No One Is Here Except All of Us
“Claire Fuller has captured love in its fullest form, nursed on betrayal and regret and guilt. Gil cheats on and abandons his wife too many times, until she disappears, leaving her clothing on the beach, and he can’t know even if she’s still alive. She leaves only letters, hidden in a great library of books, and he’ll search for her until his end. Swimming Lessons is so smoothly, beautifully written, and the human failures here are heartbreaking.”
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