Swimming Lessons(62)

“Oh, Flora,” Richard said, and leaned forwards to touch her ankle.

“I know, what a terrible childhood.” Flora barked out a laugh. “There’s more. The following day in class, the girl I sat next to passed me a note. I recognised Kathy’s handwriting. I opened it under the desk. It said, ‘I know what you done.’”

“What?” Richard said.

“I told you, she thought I had lost my mum. And I believed it as well. Maybe I still do.” Flora didn’t tell Richard the rest of the story: that she’d taken the note home and when she was sitting at the kitchen table she read it again. Nan was out, but Gil was there, cooking a fry-up. She wanted him to see it, to read it, and tell her that she wasn’t responsible for losing Ingrid.

Her father set a plate in front of her, the egg sliding over the sausage, its yolk heart broken and leaking into the beans. She wasn’t sure she could eat it. Gil looked over Flora’s shoulder and read what Kathy had written.

He tutted. “It should be ‘I know what you did,’” he said. “Not “done.’” Flora slipped the note under her plate and later put it in the bin with the food her father didn’t make her eat, hadn’t noticed she didn’t eat.

Flora got up from the sofa and, stepping between the books, went to the French windows and stared out at the sky, where dark clouds raced across the moon. “I think we’ve had the last of the good weather.”

“Flora?” Richard said.

“I’m fine. It was a long time ago.” With her back to Richard, she saw her mother closing the door of the Swimming Pavilion, the book in her hand. Flora strained to see the title—a question, perhaps. She remembered crouching in the space she had made in the middle of the gorse, a thorned fortress. She remembered willing her mother to hurry up, to leave. And when Ingrid had turned, stepped into the sunlight wearing the long pink dress, walked around the corner into the lane, and disappeared into Spanish Green, Flora hadn’t thought about her again.

To Richard she said, “Let’s go to bed.”





Chapter 34


THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 25TH JUNE 1992, 11:50 PM


Gil,

Today I had a phone call from Flora’s headmistress. I could hear our ten-year-old daughter complaining in the background while I was told what she’d done wrong. She’d been found standing on the main road outside the school gates with her thumb out. She told me later she was hitchhiking to London to go and live with you. I asked her how she’d find you in London when she doesn’t know where you’re living. She said she’d go to a bookshop and find the name of your publisher and then go to their offices. (Clever, independent girl, our youngest daughter. Maybe I should have let her go.)

I find myself thinking about you less as I write these letters—I mean today’s Gil, where you are, what you’re doing. Meanwhile, the Gil of the past fills my head. I work in the garden when the girls are at school; there’s always something that needs doing. The view from the house to the sea needs clearing, there’s a cordyline that has grown too big, and I should have pruned the tamarisk in March. I sometimes think about what the garden would become if I weren’t here to look after it. (The nettles at the top of the bank reclaiming their old territory, the grass going to seed after a few weeks, the flower beds full of interlopers.) Is imposing our will on nature wrong? All that work to keep the garden as I want it—the weeding, the pruning, and the mowing. Perhaps it would be more honest, more truthful, to let the land slip back to how it wants to be.


Do you remember the time Flora ran away when she was seven? Another of those things we never talked about. You were in London at an event, due to return the next morning. The weather drew me down the chine after the children had gone to bed. I liked to lie on the sea’s rocking surface and let the waves sluice me and the rain pock my skin. When Flora climbed out of her bedroom window, I wasn’t there to stop her. But you came home early on the last ferry of the evening, or you hadn’t gone at all, and must have found Nan crying, the girls’ window open and our youngest child flown.

I came up the chine in my bare feet. The path was muddy and I was watching my step when I heard the voices of your search party calling out for Flora, and when I glanced up, torchlights were bobbing through the copse. I knew I should have been looking after the children and so I ran through the woods, my towel dropped somewhere behind me, but by then you’d already found her, and when I pushed through the small group of people crowding around you, Flora was in your arms. In front of our friends and neighbours you slapped me, and the crack echoed across the Downs like a gunshot.

I don’t deserve to be looking after our children.


Ingrid


[Placed in The Last Gamble, by Harold Q. Masur, 1958.]





Chapter 35



“Keep still,” Flora said, straddling Richard’s hips. “Or your bones will be wonky.” He lay on the bed built into the far end of the writing room. The morning light coming through the window and the open door warmed the colour of his skin, and she concentrated on drawing his elbow joint, trying to visualize how the knuckle-like end of the humerus slotted around the bones of his forearm.

“It rained fish,” Flora said, still drawing, “the night I borrowed your car.”