Swimming Lessons(7)

The road from the ferry to the village cut through a nature reserve: salty wetlands crisscrossed with tracks, swampy in the hollows, rising to dusty dunes near the sea, and rocky outcrops inland. The sandy trails sliced through fields of marram grass and heather, skirted Little Sea Pond, a brackish lake lying low between the road and the sea, and passed by stands of wind-humped trees huddled together for protection.

Darkness didn’t stop Flora from knowing every bend and sway of Ferry Road although she had never driven it, had always been the passenger, either in the front beside her sister or in the back, when they were children, in her father’s car. She had been almost ten when her mother had disappeared, and Flora couldn’t remember ever having been in a car with her, although that must have happened. She fiddled with the radio, sliding the dial, but only got static and an occasional faraway voice.

The first bump on the car roof came when she must have been passing the Agglestone, a massive rock eroded into the shape of a boxer’s head, its broken nose flattened by the wind. It rested on a hill to her right, although there was no view of it through the misted windows. She wasn’t even certain she had heard anything over the rain and the throaty noise of the engine. Then something hit the windscreen and was swooshed away by the wipers. Flora reared back in her seat, hands gripping the thin steering wheel, her foot pressing the brake. The car slid across the wet surface to the other side of the road, and she tried to remember if she was meant to turn into a skid or away from it. Something else fell onto the bonnet and seemed to throw itself into the road, and then another, and another. The car came to a halt, stalling with one back tyre in the sandy verge and the rest on the tarmac. The gorse and hawthorn bushes pressed up against the side window as if shading their eyes to gaze in.

Flora peered forwards and rubbed at the glass with her fist. The short beams thrown out by the headlights revealed objects falling and bouncing onto the road. When they stopped and she was sure the drumming on the roof was only the rain, she lifted herself over the hand brake and into the passenger’s seat, and then opened the door. The wind in the pines was a roar, and the rain slammed against the road. Without stepping down, she saw on the slick black tarmac a fish lying on its side with its mouth open. It was the size of her palm and shone with a silvery-blue iridescence. She stuck her left foot out to flip the thing over, and even in the rain she saw that the underside was lacerated, crushed when it had hit the ground. Shielding her eyes, Flora looked in the direction of the fading headlights: hundreds of the creatures lay across the road, a handful flapping feebly. They may have been baby mackerel. The wind pulled at the open door and Flora yanked it shut, climbed back over to the driver’s seat, and sat staring. She wasn’t sure she could bear to drive forward. She closed her eyes and turned the ignition. The engine clunked and wheezed twice, and when she tried it again it produced an old man’s cough—slow, painful, and phlegmy. She pulled the choke out, although Richard had said she wouldn’t need it when the engine was warm, but this time the car wouldn’t start. On the fourth try, the headlights went out and she was sitting in the dark.

She looked over her shoulder again; perhaps the man had been wrong about the ferry, maybe it would return once more before they closed it, but there was only the night behind her. She waited for another five minutes and tried the ignition again, but now the clunk sounded deadly. She took her suitcase and satchel from the back seat, and once more shuffled over and out of the car.





Chapter 4


THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 4TH JUNE 1992, 3:55 AM


Dear Gil,

Of course I couldn’t write the story of a marriage in one letter. It was always going to take longer.

After I finished my first letter I meant to send it straightaway. I found an envelope from an old electricity bill in the kitchen table drawer, and thought I’d walk to the postbox as the sun came up before I could change my mind. But as I perched on the arm of the sofa in the dark with the pen in my hand, there was a noise from the girls’ room (the squeak of bedsprings, the creak of the door), and without thinking I grabbed a book from the nearest shelf, shoved the letter inside, and pushed it back into place.

Flora stood in the doorway, the sunrise coming through the windows of our bedroom, silhouetting her skinny nine-year-old body in a nightdress.

“Is it morning?” she said.

“No, Flora,” I said. “Go back to bed.”

“Has Daddy come home?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

I put the first letter I wrote to you inside The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. Appropriate, for all sorts of reasons. I’ve been thinking that I’ll leave all my letters in your books. Perhaps you’ll never find them—maybe they’ll never be read. I can live with that.


So, 1976. We, the chosen four, sat in your tiny office, high up in a corner of a sixties block of whitewashed corridors, lecture rooms, thin carpets on concrete floors, fluorescent lighting, and metal-framed windows that let in the cold. Apart from the narrow desk overflowing with paper, you’d made your office into a cramped version of a gentleman’s club: rugs, lamps, book-lined walls, an old leather chesterfield, and low armchairs crammed around a buttoned footstool. The room had a smell—of coffee, warm upholstery, and tobacco—a smell I loved to inhale, a grown-up’s space. You wore a black ribbed cardigan zipped up to your chin, and you reclined in your usual chair.