Swimming Lessons(46)

I shook my head, starting to interrupt, but Louise hadn’t finished: “Your husband spends his time working on some fiction you don’t believe will sell. When the baby pops off the boob, you cry yourself to sleep and then get up the next day and do the whole thing again.”

“How dare you!” I stood up and hefted Nan to my shoulder, feeling a trickle of milk run down my stomach under my blouse. “You know nothing about what it’s like to be a wife and mother. Nothing.”

“And I don’t want to,” Louise said. And then more calmly, “I can help you.” She put her hand on my arm. “If you want to leave him, I could help now, with the money.”

I pulled away from her. “I don’t think so.” I put Nan in the pram, not bothering to tuck her in. She’d had enough food and was floppy with sleep.

“Just think about it.” Louise stood up too.

“I have to go.” I released the pram’s brake. “Thank you for . . .” I was unsure. “The pork pie,” I said, and wheeled Nan out of the park.

I spent half an hour in the ladies toilet at the railway station, sitting in a cubicle to compose myself before the train came. I had to keep the door ajar to make sure no one walked off with that damned pram. The station was crowded with youths with spiky hair and rings in their noses, and girls in jeans so tight the fabric might have been sprayed on. No one in London was wearing patterned flares or platform shoes. The punks lounged over the public benches, smoking, pushing each other, and laughing. When I walked past one of the girls, her eyes rimmed in black and her face pasty, she opened her mouth and stuck out her thick pink tongue, curling it over her bottom lip to touch her chin. I realised she was about twenty-one, the same age as I was.

I tried to call you from a phone box outside the station, parking the pram up against the grimy windows so I could see the baby and terrified of the trouble I’d be in if someone were to run off with her. London was too crowded, too noisy, too dirty; it scared me.


It was dark when I got off the bus beside the village shop. Nan had slept all the way in the guard’s van, on the ferry, and on the bus while I dozed. The smell of the sea, the pitch-blackness, and the beautiful silence after the bus had pulled away all made me determined to prove Louise wrong. I would try harder to be happy. I was home. Nan and I took a detour through the car park to the edge of the beach so I could hear the sea shushing against the sand and farther away a hollow gulping as the water bumped against rock. I would have liked to walk along the beach and up the chine, but not even a Silver Cross could have coped with sand.

Your car was on the drive and there was a light on in the house when I arrived home. I pulled the pram backwards up the three steps and parked it, with Nan still inside, at the end of the veranda. The front door was unlocked and, when I opened it, music was coming from the sitting room, where a light shone.

“Hello!” I called out. “We’re home!” The music finished and there was the fuzz and click from the end of an album. I pushed the door open—the room was empty. I lifted the needle and stopped the turntable. The lights were off in the bedroom, but when I put my head in the door I saw that the bedcovers were still untidy from where I’d left them unmade that morning. I went up the hall. I don’t know why I felt the need to check everywhere, but I looked in the spare room, now the nursery. Nothing had changed. I stood in the kitchen doorway. No one was there either, but the air smelled of hot oil and old food. The silence in the house was thick, and it felt like there was somewhere else I hadn’t looked.

When I’d first arrived at the Swimming Pavilion, you and everyone else in the village didn’t lock their doors. But when the holiday park was built, with its prefabricated chalets and offer of cheap holidays by the coast, the permanent residents of Spanish Green began to use their keys at night. I knew you wouldn’t have left our front door open without good reason.

I’d walked into the hall and was facing the bathroom, also empty, when I heard the noise: similar but lower in tone to the cry of a young seagull; the sound of an animal, made every minute or so—repetitive, insistent. I listened. It was coming from outside the house. I returned to the veranda where the sound was louder. I checked on the sleeping Nan and stepped into the garden. There was a light on in your writing room, and I followed the cry along the path of bent grass. I thought a bird must have flown in and become trapped. I took two steps up to look through the window. The paraffin lamp was burning, casting a yellow light across your writing table and a small patch of floor, leaving the rest of the space in shadow. I pressed my nose to the glass.

It took me a while to make sense of the shapes: at the end of the room I saw you, kneeling on the floor in front of the bed, your spine curving away from me so I could see your highlighted vertebrae throwing triangular shadows as if you were a lizard or dinosaur. At first I thought you were bending forwards to pray. I could see the crack of your bottom and the soles of your feet, one crossed over the other. Under your knees for comfort, I supposed, was a pillow from the bed. The birdlike cry came again, and you bobbed your head. I tried to understand what I was seeing even while I was thinking, Gil can’t be praying, he doesn’t believe in anything.

Do you know that drawing? Look at it one way and you see an old crone with a hooked nose; look again and you see a beautiful girl in a fur coat with a feather in her hair. Finally, I saw the woman spread-eagled on the velvet cover of the bed, your hands pushing her thighs open, her calves and feet either side of your body. As I watched, she reached forwards to put a hand on your head, guiding you, pulling your face into her. She lifted her own head, with light brown short hair, and opened her eyes. Like Nan’s when she was born, this woman’s eyes were glassy, and although she looked straight at the window, she was lost in the moment and didn’t see me. She opened her mouth to make the cry again, her body convulsing in rhythm to the sound she made.