Swimming Lessons(31)

Flora picked up her spoon, sank it carefully into her bowl of cereal so it filled with chocolatey milk, and slurped like it was soup.

“You do,” she said.


After the party, we were on our own for almost a month: in bed with the windows open and the sound of the sea in our ears, sleeping, talking, eating toast, and making love amongst the crumbs. You liked to look at me when we’d finished; you would lie at the end of the bed with your head propped up and watch me while I fell asleep. It was too hot even for sheets but I wasn’t shy. You said everything was beautiful. Sometimes when I woke you’d drawn parts of me in the margins of your books. (Juvenile marginalia.) Everything was beautiful.

Or we lay front to front, no space between us, our skin fused by sweat. “Promise you won’t die before me,” you said, your face pressed into my hair. “I couldn’t live without you.”

“Don’t worry.” My lips were against your ear. “If I do, I’ll come back to haunt you. I’ll call you in the early morning; I’ll wake you from your bed and down the telephone wires I’ll tell you that I love you.” You laughed.

When we got up, our bodies would be marked by the imprint of creased sheets and speckled with crumbs. We’d have a bath, me leaning back against your chest and you whispering, “Tell me what it is you want me to do. Anything.” I didn’t know what you meant the first time you said it. Afterwards we would lie in the grass in the garden like you’d said we would, surrounded by books and the hurrying of insects. It was still a field then, the old pasture for your mother’s long-dead horses; scrubby gorse bushes, clumps of deergrass, rowan, hawthorn and hazel grew on the southern edge above the chine, a nettle bed at the sea end.

We picked up paperbacks and read to each other: a chapter from Barbara Comyns, a paragraph or two from As I Lay Dying, a line from Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

“‘What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist,’” I read aloud.

You put your hand on my thigh, stopped me from going on. “That’s not true,” you said. “You existed for me before I’d ever set eyes on you. I knew I’d find you; it was only a matter of waiting.”

“I don’t think that’s what Lawrence means, is it?” I lowered the book and stared at you over the top of my sunglasses.

“It doesn’t matter,” you said. “It’s what I mean.”

We took the phone off the hook, didn’t switch on the radio, and the newspapers piled up in the hall. If visitors arrived uninvited, you scared them away by shouting over the closed gate that we were quarantined because of smallpox. Once, remember, you made me stagger out of the house, dotted with lipsticked spots.

We played your records, drank red wine, and danced in the sitting room until late. We took picnics to the beach, and when night came we made love in the sand dunes, and again you said, “Tell me what you want me to do,” and this time I knew what you meant but I’d nothing to tell you; all that I wanted I already had. We must have spent most of that time without clothes when we were indoors; do you remember me surprising the postman as he stood at the front door with a letter to be signed for? After I returned to bed I told you how his gaze had started on my face and slid downwards at the same rate as his eyebrows went up. You asked if I liked him looking.

The envelope stayed where you’d dropped it, unopened on the floor, another document marking time with the rings of coffee cups. (Later I found burned pieces of it amongst the nettles, and it was years before I understood its significance.) I thought Jonathan had been wrong when he warned me about you, and I’d been right. Things would be different for us.

You didn’t pick up a pen or go to your writing room for almost four weeks. The path that had snaked through what we optimistically called the lawn began to disappear as the grass sprang up, even while it yellowed in the sunshine. I wrote, though, to Louise in London to say I was staying with a friend on the south coast for the summer and not to worry, and to my aunt to say London was hot and I was working hard. I blocked October and the beginning of term from my mind.

One day when we were lying out in the garden, my head in your lap, we heard an Irish voice.

“I thought you were dead,” it said.

Jonathan.

You stood up, my head dropping onto the ground with a bump, and I remember a stab of something like anger that the day had been interrupted by your friend. You opened the gate for him, and when I stood up the two of you were hugging.

“Ingrid,” Jonathan said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

“Ingrid’s been teaching me how to live the Scandinavian life,” you said, turning towards me. “Did you know she’s half Norwegian? It’s been a smorgasbord of delights.” He slapped Jonathan on the shoulder. “How about a drink?” he said, leading his friend into the house.

“It’s not a smorgasbord,” I said to no one. “The word is koldtbord.”


That first evening you and Jonathan sat out late, drinking on the veranda. I couldn’t keep up with the whiskey intake and went to bed. The next morning when I walked past the spare room I saw the chest of drawers gaping and Jonathan’s suitcase open and empty on one of the beds, and I understood that our time alone together (yours and mine) was over.

I tried to freeze Jonathan out, not speaking to him unless I had to answer a direct question, leaving the room when he came in, letting the two of you go to the beach without me, saying the sun was too harsh. I thought about packing up and returning to London.