Swimming Lessons(32)

After a week there was one morning when you were gone from the bed, and when I pulled open the curtains the world outside had gone, too, hidden by the mist that had come up from the sea in the night. I opened one of the windows in the bedroom and heard the tapping of your typewriter, dulled and distant, and considered whether I might have misidentified my enemy—it wasn’t other women, or Jonathan, but your writing. Perhaps, I thought, during our month alone you’d been waiting for someone else to come and entertain me, to take me off your hands so you could go back to your room and the people in your head.

I packed my belongings into a small blue case I found under the bed, not that I had many—some clothes you’d bought for me in Hadleigh, a sun hat, and a toothbrush. Outside, the mist obscured everything like the light in an overexposed Polaroid. I walked blind out of the drive and stumbled to where I thought the lane must be. The silence was a thick blanket, and even the normal morning crockery clinking and shouts from the kitchen staff in the pub were muffled as I passed. By the time I reached the bus stop on the main road, beads of water clung to my clothes and my hair.

The headlights showed first and then the bus crawled out of the fog, pulling up a little way past me. The door opened and Mrs. Allen, the pub cleaner, got off. She looked at me, shivering in my summer dress and sandals.

“Reckon this haar will blow over in an hour or two.” She gave my arm a pat. “Then the sun’ll come out, just you wait and see. Don’t you go running off so fast now.”

“You getting on, young lady?” The driver was hanging out of the bus. “Only it’s a bit miggy with the door open.”

And as I picked up my case, there were footsteps running up from the lane. Jonathan appeared out of the mist. “She’s not going,” he said, panting.

“Did Gil tell you to come?” I said.

“What do you take me for? He’s still typing. It’s me who wants you to stay.” Jonathan took the suitcase from me. “Come on, will you?”

I looked at the driver, undecided.

“You don’t get an offer like that every day,” he said, and disappeared inside his bus, the door closing behind him.

As Jonathan and I walked through the lanes, we saw that Mrs. Allen was right: the sun glowed over our heads. By the time we reached the drive the sea mist had cleared, and I felt I was coming home.

After that, Jonathan and I spent every day together, swimming and walking through the heath to Little Sea Pond. Post came for him sometimes, with writing commissions, and when he agreed to them there would be telephone calls a week later asking where his articles were. We went out in the morning before the holidaymakers, or in the dusk when our only company was the bats. Occasionally we persuaded you to come with us for a swim or a picnic, and of course you always emerged in the evening for the food I’d cooked and the whiskey Jonathan provided in payment for his board and lodgings. While we tramped across the heath and around the Agglestone, it was Jonathan who explained that you’d grown up in the big house down the road with your ill and controlling father and beautiful Catholic mother. You’d watched the disaster of their marriage, escaping to London as soon as you were old enough, and vowing that you wouldn’t make their mistakes. It was Jonathan who told me the real version of the story you’d given in that first creative-writing class: that your father didn’t tell you your mother was ill, instead he sent a telegram when it was too late. “Your mother’s died. Funeral Friday,” or some such thing. And he’d made you see her body, so changed in death that you found it difficult to remember what she’d looked like alive. He told me your mother left you a small amount of money in a trust fund, but how, when your father died of lung disease, there were debts so large the house had to be sold. The Swimming Pavilion was rolled on logs through the lanes of Spanish Green, and I like to imagine the men levering it along with giant poles, and cart horses pulling it, until it rested in its current position overlooking the sea.

Once Jonathan went up to London and returned with people he’d picked up on his travels: hitchhikers with guitars and Dutch girls with dusty feet. Bums and hangers-on, you called them, but I knew you didn’t really mind. They camped in the grass, not bothering with tents, and I got used to seeing strangers in the kitchen spreading jam on dry Weetabix or sitting around the table like it was their home. I liked the house busy with people and music. There was an impromptu party that started in the pub, had a stop-off in the Swimming Pavilion, and ended at dawn around a campfire in the dunes. And there were one or two girls who I could have made friends with but after a couple of days they were gone. Even while these people slept in your garden, used your bathroom, and cooked in your kitchen you locked yourself away in your writing room. Sometimes you came out for the drinking and the food, and occasionally you came out to spend the night with me in the four-poster bed.

Then, at the beginning of September, when the fog rolled in from the sea once more, I realised I was pregnant.


Yours,

Ingrid


[Placed in Small Dreams of a Scorpion, by Spike Milligan, 1972.]





Chapter 17



When Flora got up she was surprised to see her father dressed and sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee and a plate smeared with egg in front of him. Two rashers of bacon lay on the edge, untouched. His left eye looked grotesque in the morning light, puffed and purple like a rotten aubergine. Another bruise spread out under his bottom lip and over his chin, which was stubbled with grey hairs. His left arm still rested in its sling. She was even more surprised to see Richard sitting in the chair opposite.