Swimming Lessons(26)

“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.