Swimming Lessons(51)

It was cold that January, and while I waited for you and Jonathan to return I got into bed with Nan to keep warm. When the evening arrived and neither of you had come home, I put the oven on, keeping the door open to warm the room, and cooked and mashed some carrots. After Nan fell asleep I ate the last of the bread, sitting alone at the kitchen table. I went to bed and heard the front door open and someone go into Nan’s room, the spare bed creaking up against the adjoining wall. I rapped my knuckles on it, and Jonathan returned the knock. I lay in the dark and stared at the nearest bedpost rising up and disappearing into the shadowy ceiling, my fingers threaded together across my stomach. I was numb. I heard you and a crowd of people come back, long after closing time. Your celebrations continued in the kitchen.

I must have slept because when I woke in pain in the dawn you were snoring beside me and I hadn’t noticed you come to bed. The sheet under me and my legs were red and sticky with blood. In the kitchen I leaned over the back of a chair, breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth. When the cramp passed, the only sensations I felt (facts and truth, remember) were relief and guilt.

I went to the toilet, and as I flushed our second baby away, I listed all the un-telling I would have to do that day, starting with you, Gil, and afterwards Jonathan, and then our neighbours. And I worried—considering the number of empty bottles in the kitchen, none of which you’d have paid for—whether they would believe I’d ever been pregnant.


Ingrid


[Placed in Money, by Martin Amis, 1984.]





Chapter 27



In the afternoon, Flora sat opposite her father on the veranda. It was still warm and the bees droned in the honeysuckle that her mother had planted and now ran wild over the side of the house. She and Nan had excavated one of the high-backed armchairs from the sitting room, placed it in a strip of sunshine, and tucked Gil into it with a blanket. The last time she was home he had just been her father, a reclusive eccentric who was always there in the Swimming Pavilion or his writing room, even when she wasn’t thinking about him. Now he was an old man who was dying. She hadn’t been able to discuss her new knowledge with him; she wasn’t even sure it was new—perhaps she had known as soon as she’d seen him struggling out of the car two days ago.

After the punch, Flora had apologised over and over to Nan. The sisters sat side by side on Gil’s bedroom floor, and Flora learned that their father’s early symptoms of indigestion and sickness had been ignored—firstly by himself, and then by his GP—until it was too late. There had been some treatment offered that Gil had refused, saying it would only delay the inevitable and insisting on coming home as soon as he was able.

From the veranda they watched the sparrows pecking at the crumbs of toast Nan had thrown out, taking turns with a dust bath in a dip they had made in front of the gorse bushes, and then Flora watched Gil sleeping, his eyeballs moving under his closed lids like a dreaming dog’s. She took her sketch pad from under her chair and got out a charcoal pencil, putty rubber, and a small piece of rag that she kept wedged in between the sheets. The smell of drawing was cream, a clotted and buttery yellow.

She moved into the shade to stop the glare coming off the blank page and drew her father, his head tipped against the wing of the chair, his right hand resting in his lap and the other in the sling, his good cheekbone polished to a knuckle by the clear light reflected off the sea. With the rag she moved the charcoal across the page, lifting it with the rubber, smudging it with the tip of a wet finger.

“Have you had an argument with your young man?”

Flora looked up. She’d thought he was still sleeping.

“Not really.” The angle of his head had changed and she redrew the line that ran from his temple past the hollow of his cheek to under his chin.

“It’s not worth it,” Gil said.

“What isn’t?”

“Upsetting someone you love.”

Flora glanced up. “Who said I loved him?”

“You never know when you’ll see them for the last time.”

Flora stared at her drawing, tore it out of the pad, and crumpled it up.

She began again, a series of dashes, shadows, and lines—the bones in Gil’s head no different from the chair’s structure. She liked to see how much could be left out of a drawing while keeping it recognisably human. People’s brains always wanted to fill in the gaps—imagine a nose where there was only a hint of a nostril, or the fully formed whorl of an ear where she drew a short coil. Everyone saw a different picture. Flora’s fingers were grimed with black and there was dirt under her nails. The man on the paper didn’t look like her father: he was healthy and young, and he would live forever. She ripped this page out too, and tore it in half.

“Aren’t you going to show me?” Gil said.

“They’re rubbish. I can’t do it anymore.” She leaned forwards in her chair, picking at the rinds under her nails. “Daddy?” she started, but when her father looked up she didn’t know which question she wanted to ask—whether he was certain he had seen Ingrid in Hadleigh, what it felt like to know he was dying, or why he really wanted all the books burned. Instead she said, “Did I tell you that it rained fish the other day, when I was driving here in Richard’s car? They were bouncing off the roof and the bonnet.”

“I don’t know why you think you can’t draw anymore, Flo. It seems to me you did a bloody good drawing in Queer Fish.” Her father winked.