Swimming Lessons(27)

I wandered into the hallway. “Gil? Jonathan?” I called out. There was no reply. I knocked on your bedroom door and, after a moment, opened it. The place smelled of you, musky and male. (Bedrooms always smell of their owners.) The bouncing couple from the previous night had gone. I hadn’t appreciated the bed then, but I saw now that it was huge. Four intricately carved oak posts rose up from each corner, as if they should have supported a missing canopy. I ran my fingers over the nearest—scrolls, leaves, and vines entwined. A cover had been smoothed over your bed, or perhaps the bed hadn’t been slept in. It was made of faded silk, embroidered by hand in a Japanese style—willowy plants, flowers, and exotic birds against a pale-blue background. Many of the stitches had come apart through age and use, and the whole thing looked as if it was in the wrong house, like it ought to be in a much bigger, grander room. I ran my hands over the cover too, wondering about the person (surely a woman) who’d had the patience and the time to create every tiny stitch. I pulled back your wardrobe doors and inhaled you. I opened your chest of drawers and looked at the neatly curled ties. I lifted the lids on dusty pots containing matching cuff links and a watch that was silent. Your things. I peered at the oil paintings in gold frames hanging on the wooden walls—fishing boats heading out of a harbour on a violent sea; a girl in a white dress with a veined turquoise necklace at her throat and a dog on her lap. I examined the books in this room too, on the shelves and stacked into precarious towers on the bedside table. They were topped with half-drunk glasses of wine and an empty whiskey bottle. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched four bars of sunlight drift across the front of the chest of drawers and onto the wall opposite, and I listened to the noises of your house: water glurping in the pipes; the wooden walls moaning and creaking where the afternoon sun warmed them.

The party debris continued into the second bedroom and the kitchen: dirty glasses cramming every surface, overflowing ashtrays and used cups. I drank three glasses of water, one after the other, while I gazed out of your kitchen window at a washing line slung from a corner of the house to a metal pole. A dozen clothes pegs clung like birds on a wire, and a sock dangled from one of them. No woman lives here, I thought. I went to the toilet, tidying myself in the mirror over the bath and using a toothbrush I found in the cabinet, hoping it hadn’t been used to clean anything other than teeth. And then I went out of the front door and into the grass where I’d stood with Jonathan the night before. Everything was still. Your car was on the drive but all the others had gone.

There was a path through the grass, one I hadn’t seen in the dark, a trampled route from the house to your writing room at the far end. I can turn my head and see the room from where I sit now, with the morning sun lying on its tin roof. I thought then, and it still makes me think, that the tiny room—with its two long metal legs to keep it level—was balancing at the very edge of the garden, where the zigzag path I made now leads down the bank to the bottom gate and the beach, as if at any moment it might fling off its wooden walls and roof and leap into the water far below. The stable door to your writing room faces the house, and that morning I sidled up to it with a sense that I was trespassing. I stood on the bottom step and knocked. No reply. I knocked again and pressed my ear up against the wood. I turned the handle. The door was locked. I moved up a step and, shielding my eyes from the glare of the day, looked inside. Nothing has changed since that time: I saw the double bed built into the far end with its drawers underneath, the wood-burning stove just big enough to boil a kettle, and a folding desk with your typewriter facing a window that overlooked the sea. You weren’t inside.

I was trying to angle my head to read the title on the sheaf of papers lying beside the typewriter when you called my name. I turned to see you standing in front of your wooden house with two shopping bags in your hands. You waited for me to walk to you.

“I don’t let anyone go in there,” you said, and you were smiling but I knew I’d been warned off. There was a moment of embarrassment until you held up a bag and shook it.

“Would you like some breakfast, or perhaps we should call it lunch?”


You fried bacon and eggs, I started on the washing up and made coffee and toast, and we ate on the veranda in the sunshine. Afterwards you packed a bag for the beach (rug, apples, cheese), and led me down the chine to the sea.

The beach was crowded, a boiling Sunday afternoon in early July with the tide out: damp towels hanging on striped windbreaks, sun-faded folding chairs, terry nappies drooping with seawater, hand-dug sand holes with little boys inside, tiny crabs overheating in buckets, and curling sandwiches in greaseproof paper. You rolled up your trousers and we waded out up to our knees amongst the air beds and beach balls. We kissed, and the idea that people who knew you were watching thrilled me. We walked around Dead End Point and past the beach huts where the families would soon pack up for the day and get into their hot cars to wait in the queue for the ferry. We walked past the car park and the ice cream van, along the perfect curve of the bay, and at the sign for the nudist beach you raised your eyes and I laughed when we passed it. We undressed and neither of us was shy, only curious. I didn’t think about how old you were: your body was tanned that summer, and still firm. You held my hand and we tiptoed together, wincing, into the water. Walkers turned to watch. Something about the two of us together has always made people look: our bodies suit each other, look right together. I remember thinking that the air and then the water on every part of my body was like a lover; a new, fresh, cold lover.