Swimming Lessons(16)

“But what will Mum wear when she comes home?” Flora made a grab for the bin liner and the plastic ripped, underwear falling onto the floor.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Nan yelled, scrabbling about, scooping everything together. Flora joined her sister on the floor, snatching as many pieces as she could, stuffing them under her body, and lying on top of them while Nan tried to drag her off. Flora let go of the bundle with one hand and lashed out, clawing at her sister’s face. Nan drew back, her fingers against her cheek, and when she lifted them off, blood oozed from a long scratch. She struck Flora across the face. The two of them stopped, shocked into silence.

“Sit on the fucking bed, Flora,” her father said, “and don’t make this harder than it already is.” She sat in silence and watched her mother’s 1940s shirtwaist dresses, woollen palazzo pants, and A-line skirts being lifted from their hangers and folded into boxes. The cheesecloth tops and yellow crocheted minidress were squashed under the pairs of Oxfords, pumps, the makeup from the dressing table, the cheap necklace with the paste stone like a bird’s egg, and the perfume. And on top of them, the pink chiffon evening dress. And then the boxes and the bin liners were loaded into Nan’s car. Flora didn’t think about where they would end up; they were gone.

Two weeks after Nan had taken everything away, Flora went with her father into Hadleigh, and while he flicked through the secondhand books in the charity shop, she wandered to the back to rummage through the old tweed jackets and wide-collared shirts. A girl of about twenty came out of the changing room in Ingrid’s chiffon dress—the skirt dragging on the carpet tiles, the neckband too tight. The girl stood in front of a mirror and twisted sideways, stretching around to look. Flora grabbed on to a clothes rail to keep herself upright and glanced at the girl’s reflection. She remembered the day she’d seen her mother wearing the dress, a sandy-coloured towel draped over one arm and a book in her hand. There was a waft of coconut—the colour of golden honey again, and Ingrid turning and stepping, turning and stepping, out into sunlight.

“It doesn’t fit right,” the girl said to her friend, plucking at the gauzy fabric. “And there’s a rip in it.” She held up the bottom.

“It’s old-fashioned, but not in a good way,” her friend said, lifting the skirt and sniffing. “And it smells of dead people.” The girl wearing it twirled in front of the mirror and pretended to choke. They both laughed and returned to the changing room together. At the front of the shop Gil was still busy flicking through the books. Flora slipped a cheap and ugly bead necklace off the display and dropped it into her coat pocket.


Flora shut the wardrobe door and went into the bedroom she shared with Nan. It had a single window with a view of the tangled garden and Gil’s writing room and, from Nan’s side—since she was the elder sister—a glimpse of the sea. Nan’s teddy bear was propped up against her pillow, her bed made with sheets and blankets, hospital corners tucked under. A chest of drawers stood between both beds. Long ago Ingrid had painted a wide white band across the top, down the front of the drawers, and inside them. In her anger, desperate to stop her daughters arguing over which side belonged to whom, Ingrid hadn’t removed any of the contents when she yanked out the drawers and painted, so that for years afterwards Flora had worn clothes streaked with white. Now she opened the deep bottom drawer and looked inside. On the left, a pile of Nan’s winter jumpers, neatly folded, and on the right a knot of laddered tights, jeans that Flora had never got round to taking in, and bras with their underwire sticking out. She burrowed through her clothes, flipping the heap over, moving aside her father’s empty cuff-link box, searching for a flash of pink chiffon. The day after she had seen the dress in the charity shop, Flora had left school during morning break, stuffed her tie in her pocket, turned her blazer inside out, and walked the two miles into town. Using her lunch money she had bought the dress and taken it home, keeping it hidden at the back of the drawer. Flora found it now, took off her damp clothes, leaving them on the floor where they fell, and then pulled her mother’s dress over her head, reaching behind herself to do up the clasp, and stood facing away from her wardrobe mirror. The man in the sitting room was singing about a woman with yellow hair. Flora held the handle of the bedroom door and half turned, staring over her shoulder at her reflection. She was the same age as her mother had been when Gil had bought her the dress, shortly after Nan had been born—to celebrate the birth, Flora presumed. Many of the sequins and silver beads had gone from the bodice, leaving hanging threads. The skirt was stained and still ripped, but in the mirror, an image of Ingrid and her heart-shaped face looked back. Only the towel and the book were missing.





Chapter 10


THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 7TH JUNE 1992, 4:15 AM


Dear Gil,

They say that insomniacs are at their most creative in the middle of the night. It doesn’t feel like that to me, although these letters do come out in a rush of words that fly from the end of my pen, and when I read them back the handwriting is so poor many of the sentences are hard to decipher. I remember hearing about a poet (a famous insomniac) who would hire five hotel rooms and sleep in the middle one to guarantee complete silence during the night. What was her name? You would know if you were here. There’ll be a book of her poetry somewhere in the house, although even you wouldn’t be able to lay your hands on it. Some of the walls are two books deep. That poet, whatever her name was, wrote The Letter, and said her handwriting was like the legs of a fly and her heart chafed for the want of her lover. How appropriate. How easy it is to imagine the worst. I would prefer to know where my lover, my husband, is—who you’re with and what you’re doing. Maybe that’s why I never really became a writer of fiction. I am a writer of truths, a factualist. No more lifting of carpets or turning of blind eyes; what we’ll have here, in these letters, are bald, bare facts.