Swimming Lessons(63)

“Fish?” Richard said.

“Yes.” She began on his other elbow. “They fell all over the road—tiny mackerel.”

“I’ve read about that,” he said. “Water spouts or miniature tornadoes form over the sea or sometimes ponds and suck up small aquatic animals—fish or frogs—and drop them somewhere else.”

Flora sighed and shifted her knees on the bedcover. “I wasn’t after the scientific explanation.”

“What then?”

“Don’t you think it’s significant?” Flora lifted her pen from Richard’s skin, considered her drawing. “That it happened just as I was coming home? Some kind of omen?” She looked up at his face but saw no connection in his expression to what she was saying. “Forget it.” She went back to her work.

After a while, Richard said, “I can’t believe I’m in the room where Gil Coleman wrote A Man of Pleasure.” He turned his head towards the door. Flora looked too. It still felt illicit to be there with Richard, in her father’s space. The side window, which was propped open, gave a view over the nettles and a glimpse of the sea. A fold-down flap below the sill created a narrow table which could be used for writing or eating, and a wooden folding chair was hanging high up on the wall until it was needed. At the door end, an old oven glove, two chipped mugs, and a paraffin lamp dangled from hooks above the stove. Under Richard, the puce-coloured cover—bald in patches and water stained—was rucked and pushed to the side, revealing grey, musty-smelling sheets and pillows. A colour like the undersides of mushrooms came and went.

“How much of it do you think happened here?” Richard said.

“What?” Flora said. “You don’t think it was autobiographical, do you?” She laughed and the lines she was drawing on Richard rippled. “For fuck’s sake.”

“That’s what everyone said.”

“I didn’t think you would listen to literary gossip.”

“OK, at least it was here he wrote it, at that table, looking out at that view.”

“I suppose so. We weren’t allowed in.” She stuck the tip of her tongue out from between her lips. She’d got as far as Richard’s wrist, and the carpal bones were complicated.

“Why not?”

“It was the rule.”

There had been one time she’d gone into the room on her own. For a reason Flora could no longer remember, she had climbed out of her bedroom window one night. Nan was in the kitchen; she wasn’t sure where her mother was. It was raining, a thick, warm rain that soaked through her pyjamas as soon as she jumped down onto the flower bed. She ran along the gravel paths in between the lawns, thinking her father might be writing, but although the light was on and the door unlocked, his room was empty. Flora stood on the threshold for a minute, and even though she understood it wasn’t allowed, she stepped inside. The place smelled of her father—musky, rich, otter brown. The bedcovers were thrown back, as if her father had just got up. She would have liked to crawl under them but was distracted by his typewriter and a curl of paper that rolled out from the top. “I ran my hand over the downy curves of her buttocks,” she read. Flora wasn’t sure what “buttocks” meant, and she leaned in closer to read the next line. Her wet hair dripped onto the ink, the letters spreading one into the other.

She hurried from the room, across the garden, running out to the lane, and took the uphill footpath through the small beech wood, the trees stained by streaks of copper where the rain dripped in slippery runnels. She slapped their trunks with the palm of her hand as she passed, as if she were whacking the meaty rumps of giant horses. By the time she emerged from the trees she was warm and panting and the rain had stopped. The path came out on the rising slope of Barrow Down, where the grass was cropped short by rabbits and the land rolled in undulating waves. In a burst of energy, Flora ran up to the highest point. The footpath continued rightwards along the coast to Hadleigh; to her left the shorn grass fell away to the cliff at the end of the beach, while in front of her the ground was level, facing out to sea. She spread her arms wide and ran into the wind and across the grassy slope towards the cliff top. The edge here had been eroded into a narrow spit—two feet wide and twelve feet long—that pointed accusingly out to sea at Old Smoker, the column of chalk to which, hundreds of years ago, the land must have been attached. The forty-foot-high sea stack rose straight up out of the water like the funnel from an oversized and sunken ocean liner, and once upon a time Old Smoker’s Wife, a smaller rock, had hunkered low beside him. Along the middle of the finger of land, a track had been worn through the grass by daredevil teenagers and reckless adults. Flora and Nan, and all the children they knew, had been forbidden to walk out along this peninsula, had been forbidden, Flora suddenly remembered, from walking on the Downs unaccompanied. She took one step onto the track, the width of a shoe, and then another—one foot in front of the other, heel to toe—until she could no longer see the land hulking behind her. Below on either side was the pitchy shifting mass of the sea, which Flora couldn’t look at for fear of tipping, so she stared straight ahead at the clouds scudding across the moon and at the immensity of Old Smoker rising like a beaconless lighthouse from the water. Flora held her arms out and the wind lifted her hair. She took another step, sweat breaking out on her fingertips, and another step until she was at the very end of the spit. If she were to take one more, there would be nothing under her foot, only empty air and a long fall, tumbling through space to the water and the rocks below. A gust came, strong from behind her, willing her to step out, the force of it pushing her forwards. She dropped to her knees, clutching on to the tufts of muddy grass at the edge, and when she was calmer, shuffled backwards up the path, using the grass either side to pull herself to safety.