Swimming Lessons(30)

Flora narrowed her eyes at Richard but he didn’t appear to notice. He followed Nan out of the kitchen.


Flora thought about sleeping with Richard in the room at the end of the garden, but there was something about the two of them being there, using her father’s private space, that made her uncomfortable. So when she woke with the early light creeping through the window, it was Nan’s bed she saw with its covers thrown off and the sheets showing. There were voices across the hall—her father’s and her sister’s. Flora got out of bed and put on a spare dressing gown of Nan’s.

“Give me the phone,” Nan was saying in her midwife’s voice.

Nearly all the lights in the house were lit. The power must have come back on in the middle of the night, and the lamps in the sitting room glowed orange. Gil was perched on the arm of one of the sofas in his pyjamas, the telephone receiver pressed between his shoulder and his ear. He held the index finger of his right hand up at Nan, as if telling her to wait while he finished his conversation.

Gil nodded. “Yes, yes, of course.”

“Dad,” Nan said. “Give me the phone.”

“Who is it?” Flora said, yawning. “What time is it?”

“Half past five,” Nan snapped. “Go back to bed.”

“But who’s he speaking to?”

“Shh,” Gil said to Flora, and then into the phone, “OK, I’ll pass you over. It’s been lovely to speak to you, finally.” He paused, listening. “Me too,” he said, and Flora felt she was intruding on a private moment. Gil pressed the receiver against his pyjama top.

“It’s for you,” he said to Flora.

“Dad,” Nan said, exasperated.

Flora frowned at her sister, shrugged, and stepped forwards to take the phone from him. She was nervous about holding the receiver up to her cheek, as if something dreadful might slide out of the earpiece.

“It’s your mother,” Gil said. “She wrote and told me she would call.”

“Oh, Dad,” Nan said, the exasperation gone and her voice now full of pity.

But on his face Gil wore an expression of just-you-wait-and-see, and Flora’s stomach jolted with an excitement she couldn’t control. She hesitated, looked at Nan and her father, and lifted the phone to her ear. She heard a fuzz of white noise and then the multitoned dial sound. “There’s no one there,” she said.

“Come on,” Nan said to Gil. “Let’s get you back to bed.” She shepherded their father, who went willingly now, saying to Flora over his shoulder as he left the room, “She must have hung up.”

Flora moved some hardbacks and sat on the sofa. She dialled 1471 and listened to the recorded announcement: “You were called at five twenty-six. The caller withheld their number.” She returned the phone to its cradle and pulled her legs up to her chest although the night was warm. The piles of books surrounding her collapsed, hedging her in.

The one time she could remember speaking to her mother on the telephone was when she had been made to stand in the school office a few days before Ingrid disappeared. Her headmistress—backcombed hair and tweed suit—had spoken to Ingrid first, explaining that Flora had been discovered standing on the side of the main road with her thumb out when she should have been in school. And that it was only luck that Mrs. May, who taught craft and home economics, happened to be passing, or who knows what would have happened. The headmistress passed the phone over and Ingrid’s voice buzzed with suppressed anger in Flora’s ear.

“What were you thinking?”

Flora shrugged although Ingrid couldn’t see her.

“You could have been picked up by God knows who,” her mother said. “Abducted, disappeared, or worse.”


Flora stretched out on the edge of the sofa, making a prop for her head from four books. She stared at the paperbacks squashed under the coffee table—The Pursuit of Love, Valerientje aan Zee, Room at the Top, The Cocktail Party—until the titles blurred and she heard Nan return.

“Do you think that was Mum on the phone?” Flora said.

“Of course it wasn’t Mum. He’s imagining things. There wasn’t anyone on the other end, was there?” Nan sighed, ran her fingers through her hair, and Flora saw streaks of grey at the temples. She tried to remember how old Nan was; her birthday had only been a couple of days ago. Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Too young to be going grey.

Nan switched off the lamps in the sitting room. “You should come back to bed too,” she said. “We could all do with some rest.”

When Nan left, Flora couldn’t resist picking up the handset and listening again. The dial tone murmured at her. She put the phone down and went over the conversation she’d had earlier with Richard and Nan, trying to work out if there was something she’d missed.





Chapter 16


THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 9TH JUNE 1992, 3:30 PM


Dear Gil,

Yesterday morning when we were having breakfast, Flora told Nan and me she didn’t go to school on Friday.

“The school pool was closed,” she said. “So what was the point?”

“To learn stuff?” Nan said, shaking her head.

“I have to practise. I went to the sea and swam there.”

“Flora,” I said, clenching my stomach muscles, and my throat. “You must go to school. And you mustn’t swim in the sea on your own. It’s too dangerous.”