Swimming Lessons(65)

There was a morning in 1980—October, I think—when I swam beyond my usual marker (the buoy) and struck out for Old Smoker. The rock is a long way, but I was a strong swimmer (I still am) and it was good weather—overcast but calm. I was nearly there when, without warning, the sea around me flowed with a strength I would never have believed possible. Like an invisible monster it took me and swam with me out to sea. I fought, tried to kick and push towards the beach, but the thing was powerful—determined. I yelled, but after only minutes I was too far out to be heard, too tiny to be seen by anyone. The creature wrenched me under, turned me over, filled my mouth with water. Once, twice, I rose to the surface, spluttering, coughing, and shouting, and then I was under again, spinning until I was adrift, lost. Under the surface, the water boiled as if storm clouds were massing and dispersing at great speed, and I spiralled through them, a leaf in a whirlwind. My chest burned and beams of light shone all about, illuminating the air bubbles attached to the swaying eelgrass which was sometimes above me and sometimes below. I remember thinking how beautiful it was under the water, and that I must tell everyone about it, but then realising quite calmly that I wouldn’t be able to because I was drowning and I would never see anyone again. But perhaps the sea just required me to submit, because once I’d given up struggling, my head popped out of the water like a cork, my legs pedalled in the undertow, and I went with it. The sea current took me to Old Smoker and shoved me against its side, lacerating my knees and my cheek, but I clung on, embracing the flinty chalk. When I’d caught my breath, I edged around to the south side of the pillar, out of the tearing flow. I took a moment in the slapping water on the leeward side to look up. Old Smoker rose vertiginously into a clearing sky, and when the sun appeared, the chalk on the southern side was blinding. Have you ever pressed your face against the wall of a skyscraper and stared up? The building will appear to overhang, to loom and force the dizzy visitor backwards. In a few hundred years Old Smoker will disappear, eroded and vanished into the sea like his late wife.

From the chalk stack I swam south, past the shingle bays that have no access to the land, until I reached Hope Cove. There I dragged myself out of the water, onto the tumble of seaweed-coated rocks that have fallen from the cliffs. I clambered, naked, on all fours, over the boulders, my knees bleeding and my hair hanging in clumps—a mermaid with a severed tail. A family had set up camp on top of a flat rock, with buckets and nets for catching shrimp. A mother uncapping a Thermos flask, a father untangling a crabbing line, and a child of about seven sitting on a hard picnic box, all watched me crawl towards them, their mouths open. I was lucky.

I remember now the intoxication that I felt after the incident on the beach, drunk on survival. I laughed every time I looked out to sea; I’d fought the water and won. All things were miraculous. I found joy not only in the garden but in washing clothes, in counting out coins in the village shop in front of the patient Mrs. Bankes, in being woken at five by Nan when I’d just fallen asleep.

Did you notice the change in me? You didn’t say so if you did, but you spent more time at home, and we made the kind of love that we had when we’d first met, and you began again to ask me what I wanted you to do—what we could do together. I made up stories about making love in the sea, in the sand dunes, on the back seat of your car, but none of them were enough. “Tell me what you’d like us to do with Jonathan,” you said. The story hadn’t been in my head until you planted the idea, but I enjoyed letting it grow, develop, blossom. And I told it to you each night, inventing and describing it line by line—the three characters, the plot, the twist, the denouement. Dictating you a novel, so that in the morning you would hurry to your writing room and all day the tap, tap, tap of your typewriter keys would sound across the flower beds and lawn.

“You know that the things you’ve been describing are just imaginary?” you said one evening when we were alone at the kitchen table. You were flicking the corners of a book, looking at the drawings a previous owner had sketched on each corner. A cat stood up on its hind legs and danced a modern dance with a fish. I knew what you meant without your having to explain, but you went on: “I don’t want us to do those things with Jonathan in real life.”

“OK,” I said.

“You know what I mean?” The cat raised its front paws and bent over backwards, the fish balancing on the cat’s nose. “Promise me you won’t really sleep with Jonathan.” You stopped flicking and looked up at me.

“OK,” I said again.

The cat flipped the fish into a somersault and opened its mouth, and as the mackerel came down, the tabby snapped its jaws closed.


And then, once more, I was pregnant. We didn’t tell anyone; you just wrapped your arms around me as we sat on the bench at the top of the zigzag path. The feeling I’d had with George didn’t return. In the night, my mind filled with plans for escape which by morning seemed ridiculous and untenable. Flora arrived two weeks late, screwing up her eyes and crying, kicking her legs at the world, her tiny hands clenched into fists. You fell in love with her (your Flo); I could see it in your eyes, and in the way you held her.

“Number two,” you said. “Four more to go.”

But your counting was off. By my reckoning, we were at number four already. I did my best to hide my disappointment when Flora slid out of me, a slippery eel caught by a midwife in the hospital. But here, in this place of truths, I can say it. Flora wasn’t George. Flora wasn’t even a boy, and I grieved again for the child I’d lost.