Swimming Lessons(57)

I didn’t slow until I reached our beach at the bottom of the chine, and it was only there that I felt my own pain. The sun had fully risen, a yellow light streaming through tattered clouds, and I saw the white scalded skin across my palm and fingers. I stared along the beach while I squatted in the waves with my hand under the surface, and I began to laugh. The bottom of your coat was sodden with seawater.

When I got home, goose-pimpled and muddy, I went into the girls’ room. I’d been gone less than an hour. I bent over them, the ends of my hair dripping onto the cheeks of our sleeping children. They hadn’t woken; nothing bad had happened to them while I’d been gone.

I bandaged my hand, and when Nan asked about it I said I’d burned it while boiling eggs for breakfast. She wanted to see, wanted me to go to the doctor, but I told her not to fuss. And an hour ago, when the girls left to catch the school bus, I stuffed the coat into a bin liner and, with the pole that props up the washing line, pushed it as far under the house as it would go.


Ingrid


[Placed in Warne’s Adventure Book for Girls, 1931.]





Chapter 31



On her way out of the house in the afternoon, Flora pressed her ear up against Gil’s door to listen to the conversation he was having with Richard, but their voices were too low for the words to make sense. She considered knocking, but Nan shooed her away. On the beach, Flora kicked through the foam that fanned like a bridal train across the sand. She walked from Dead End Point to the cliff, staring at the ground, trying not to think about her father, and not looking at the people on the beach, controlling her habit of searching for women with fair skin and straight hair. She thought about going for a swim, but even that seemed pointless. She flapped out her towel, lay down, and closed her eyes.

She tried to imagine what Louise would look like now. Just before Ingrid had disappeared, Louise had been elected to the House of Commons, and Flora had seen her picture in the paper. She was wearing a fitted jacket, a pearl necklace, and matching earrings—not someone she could imagine her mother being friends with. The newspaper had been spread out on the kitchen table and Flora had seen that Ingrid had doodled in red pen on the photograph: devil’s horns rising out of the coiffed hair.

Flora might have dropped off to sleep, she wasn’t sure, but she was aware of a shadow across her face. She opened her eyes, shielding the glare with her hand. Richard was looking down at her.

“What?” she said.

“I wasn’t sure if you were sleeping. It’s not good to lie too long in the sun.”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“Someone with your colouring—it’s very easy to burn.” Richard had a long-sleeved T-shirt on, shorts, and walking boots.

“I’ve lived by the sea for my whole life, Richard,” she said.

“Anyway, Nan wants to go shopping and I said I’d go with her. Your father shouldn’t be left on his own.”

“Oh God, is he worse?” Flora jumped up.

“He’s sleeping. He’s the same.”


Gil breathed—a slow, rasping exhalation, and a too-long gap in which Flora waited, holding her own breath. She rested back in the chair beside his bed and closed her eyes, then was jolted awake by her father saying, “I haven’t seen you do any drawing today.”

“Do you want me to do one now?”

He closed his eyes again and she took that as a yes.

When she returned with her sketch pad, the charcoal, the rubber, and her rag, he said, “Sit me up.”

She lifted him under his armpits, the folds of skin nearly empty of muscle. She drew what she saw: his head and shoulders propped up by the pillows, his prominent cheekbones, the hollows below them, his eyes smudged by black, and all the creases and lines in his sallow face. The swelling had gone now, but some discolouration remained. She looked harder this time, recording how his eyes receded inside the cavities of his skull, his thin, downturned lips, the sag of skin under his chin.

“Do you remember when I found that whale’s head on the beach?” Flora said.

Gil opened his eyes. “A real whale’s head?”

“No, plastic or fibreglass I think.”

“A toy?”

“It was life-sized. I wanted you to hang it on the wall.”

Gil shook his head.

“But you must remember.”

“No. I don’t.” His eyes moved to Flora’s sketch pad. “Let me see.” When she showed him he said, “It’s good. I look like my father just before he died, as if parts of me don’t work like they used to and other bits have fallen off.” He smiled and pushed the bedcovers away with his good hand. “I need the toilet,” he said.

“Can I bring you the bedpan? Doesn’t Nan usually bring you the bedpan?” Flora was nervous of looking after Gil on her own.

“And I always refuse it. She’ll have me in nappies next.”

Flora didn’t tell him she’d seen a packet of adult-sized incontinence pants in the airing cupboard. She offered her arm and together they shuffled down the hall, negotiating the books. She waited in the kitchen, staring at the washing Nan had hung on the line. She put the kettle on, searched in the tin for biscuits, yawned, and stared out of the window again. After five minutes Flora pressed her ear up against the bathroom door and heard her father whispering.