Swimming Lessons(64)
Flora met the search party as she was going down through the trees: torchlights moving amongst the branches and people calling her name: her father, Martin, and some other neighbours. Gil picked her up and hugged her and the small crowd gathered around. She was never sure if the next part was true memory or nightmarish imagination, because Flora recalled a white wraith flowing out from under the tree shadow, its skin luminous in the moonlight, and her father stepping forwards to strike it so that the creature turned and fled, before her father carried her home.
The autumn after her mother had disappeared, Flora went again to the narrow track leading out to sea, and, lying on her stomach with her head over the edge of the cliff, she let fall one of Annie’s teeth. The small white nugget was in her fingers, and the next moment it was gone, too tiny, too insignificant to be seen. She imagined it spinning downwards and passing through the surface of the water without a disturbance, then carried along by the tide, deeper and deeper and farther out to sea, until it settled amongst the weed and the rocks.
“You can’t draw on my hand,” Richard said, snatching it away and leaving a snaking black line down to his middle finger. Flora looked up, surprised her model had moved. “I will have to return to work soon.”
Flora had forgotten Richard had a job, that there were places of business where people took money and sold things from nine to five thirty on the other side of the ferry crossing. The sea, the land, the Swimming Pavilion often did that to her; made her forget that the rest of the world existed. “Well, if the bookshop is more important to you than having your limbs and appendages in full working order and staying in bed with me . . .” she said, and went to jump off him, but he caught her by the arm and pulled her back to bed.
Later, with Richard asleep behind her, she looked at the sky and the clouds passing by the window on their way from the sea to the village, feeling the dry warmth of the stove mixing with the fresh air. After a time she whispered, “Richard, are you awake?” and his breathing changed as he returned to consciousness. “Are you really going to burn Daddy’s books?”
“Of course not.” He kissed the nape of her neck and the bristles on his chin raised goose pimples along the length of her body. She pushed against him so he would wrap his arms more tightly around her.
“Have you told him that you won’t do it?”
“Not yet. He’s so insistent; I’m not sure how to tell him. How to deny Gil Coleman his dying wish? But I won’t burn them. Not books.”
She got up and put the kettle on the stove. “I can’t wait until Jonathan gets here. He’ll know what to do.” She crouched to pull open the air vent at the bottom of the stove.
“I’ll tell Gil I won’t do it,” Richard said, putting on his glasses. “Later today, I promise.”
Chapter 36
THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 26TH JUNE 1992, 5:00 AM
Gil,
For nearly four years the dry sticks of George’s dismantled cot lay in the loft, weighing on my head wherever I was in the house, the smell from the box of Nan’s old baby clothes under the bed changed from fresh laundry to dust, and the space under my jaw and against my shoulder where a baby’s head should rest remained empty. The world had become harder, more abrasive; sheets scratched, clothes irritated, and people grated. It was when I was underwater or in the garden that I felt relief. But precise moments of grief, like the pangs of childbirth, are hard to recall after the most intense pain has passed: nature’s trick to ensure we survive and continue to reproduce.
We must have carried on with normal life, I suppose; I gardened, making the rocky zigzag path down the bank to the beach and planting it with sea kale, horned poppies, and fennel. Our neighbours would leave cuttings wrapped in damp newspaper on our doorstep, or pots of lady’s bedstraw, kidney vetch, and sea lavender. I planted, watered, and cared for them; and I looked after Nan. And you started another novel (all pretence of trying to find a paying job long given up). I could tell it wasn’t going well. We stayed at home and counted the pennies. When you sold a story we celebrated with Jonathan, who was often with us, typing up his travel notes and helping with the heavy work in the garden while you were in your writing room. He no longer brought crowds of people with him, only sometimes a woman (remember that American who came for Christmas in 1980?). I tried to like them, tried to make them welcome, but most of them were ridiculous. The American insisted Jonathan buy the ingredients for a gingerbread house, even though none of us liked gingerbread, not even her. It gathered sticky dust in a corner of the kitchen until March, when its roof fell in.
Every night you didn’t sleep in the house I went swimming. Once, after it rained for two weeks and the streams burst their banks, I walked inland as the sun came up, to the field at the rear of Milkwood Stables where the land dips down to the brook. I hung my clothes over a fence and stepped into the grey water. The thought of the submerged paths and hedges and barbed-wire fencing lying just beneath the surface was exhilarating.
And I often swam in Little Sea Pond before it became popular, with its official signposts and designated paths. The water was briny and the mud cool. I laboured out between the reeds and turned to face the bank, lowering myself backwards, letting the water support me until I lay supine, my head reclined, my hair trailing. If I remained motionless I could open my eyes and watch the colour of the sky change from deep purple to orange as the sun rose. Returning to the land was never so elegant, but despite the sulphuric smell of the disturbed mud, swimming there made me feel alive.