Swimming Lessons(58)

“Daddy?” She tapped on the wood. “Are you OK in there?”

“I’m fine,” Gil called. “Go to bed, Flo. We’ll see you in the morning.”

“Daddy, it’s the afternoon.” She crouched at the keyhole, but it was blocked by hardened toilet paper stuffed there by a seventeen-year-old Nan when she had tired of her little sister peeping in. Flora stood and knocked harder.

“It’s just your mother,” Gil said.

“Daddy.” Flora rattled the handle. She glanced down the hall, worried Nan would return soon, worried she wouldn’t. “Please unlock the door.” She heard the bath curtain being pulled and a couple of seconds later the door bolt was drawn back. Gil had his toothbrush in his hand, a swirl of striped paste on the bristles.

He moved to the bath. “Look,” he said, one hand on the edge of the watermarked towelling curtain, the bath hidden. The toilet and the sink spun around Flora; the altitude in the room was too high, the air too thin. Her father drew back the curtain with a flourish, like a conjurer delivering his most celebrated trick. The bath was empty. But the magician didn’t notice his mistake, didn’t realise that the trapdoor hadn’t opened, that the coloured handkerchief was showing from his sleeve, that the rabbit had hopped from the stage.

“Do you see her?” Gil said, looking in the mirror over the bath. “Do you see her? There, beside the sink.”

Flora saw herself and an old man, half his face yellow, grey bristles sprouting from a sagging neck, his eyebrows wild. There was no one else in the room.

“Yes,” Flora said. “I see her.”





Chapter 32


THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 23RD JUNE 1992, 4:15 AM


Gil,

We had another power cut last night. The three of us were in the sitting room when the lights flickered twice and then died. While Nan went out to the road I waited with Flora, holding her hand. She still doesn’t like being inside the house in the dark.

“The whole village is out,” Nan said when she returned. “I’ll get the candles.”

“Shh.” Flora gripped me. “Listen,” she said, with such urgency that Nan and I didn’t move, waiting for something. “There’s a noise,” Flora said, “in the kitchen.” And there was a slow creak, the sound of a footstep. “It’s the loose floorboard.”

“Which loose floorboard?” Nan said.

“The one in front of the cooker.”

I could hear the terror in her voice.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nan said, and marched up the hallway to find the candles, and of course there was no one in the kitchen.

I need to teach Flora that there is nothing to be scared of, that she can do anything she wants, be anyone she wants to be.

After I finished my previous letter, I thought about what had happened on the beach. At first I was angry that you weren’t there to help me. You brought me to this place, gave me children, and left; everything that’s ever happened to me in my adult life is because of you, and now you expect me to be able to manage on my own, like a fledgling deserted before being taught how to fly. And then it occurred to me that I survived that incident on the beach by myself; I didn’t need you or anyone else to rescue me. I did it on my own.


After my conversation with Jonathan in front of the Agglestone, I decided I would stay. No, perhaps it was more that I made no decision. Leaving was too momentous, too frightening, something I only thought about in the abstract. And while I stored our time in Italy away and tried to forget it, my third pregnancy was something I was surprised to find I welcomed. It wasn’t only that I stopped being sick earlier and felt healthy but also that it made me strong, invincible. I began to join in with your enthusiasm and the list of names which you taped to the fridge door (Herman, Leo, Ford, Günter). I, too, was certain it was a boy.

Jonathan called me after you’d told him.

“You’re still there then?” he said.

“I feel fantastic.”

“Do you want me to come down?”

“It would be good to see you, but you don’t have to come on my account.”

“Is Gil listening?”

“No, I mean it. There’s something about this baby, a connection. He’s not something alien like the others. He’s part of me, I’m part of him. Perhaps I was meant to do this mother thing after all, it’s just taken me a bit longer than everyone else.”

“If anything changes . . .” Jonathan said.

“It won’t.”

“. . . I’m just at the end of the phone.”

One morning in July I asked Martin if I could borrow his lawn mower. We leaned on the gate to the Swimming Pavilion and looked at the grass—coarse and knee-high. Martin loaned me his scythe, sharpened it with a whetstone, and in the gap between the pub’s lunchtime closing and the evening’s opening, he showed me how to use it. I swept the blade before me, only managing two or three jagged arcs before the muscles in my shoulders complained. (Different ones, it seemed, from those I used for swimming.) I cut the grass while Nan was sleeping, and it took me a week to shave it short enough to be able to mow it. After that I dug a flower bed below the veranda, a laborious job through the compacted earth. Milkwood Stables heard about my plans and dropped off a pile of manure. Every day I worked in my wide straw hat, long trousers, and one of your old shirts. Sometimes Martin would lean on the gate to watch and shake his head, telling me what I needed was a rowan and sea buckthorn windbreak and how the flowers Mrs. Allen’s sister had sent would never survive in our salty air. As the baby grew inside me, so did the garden.