Swimming Lessons(73)

“How blind have you been all these years?” Nan said. “While you and I were in our beds, he was down the garden having sex with Megan or some other girl, and Mum would leave the house and go swimming.”

Richard took the milk out of the fridge and sniffed it.

“Megan?” Flora said. “Megan who used to babysit? I don’t believe you.”

“God, none of it matters now,” Nan said. “Just forget it.”

“You can’t drop a bombshell like that and then say forget it.”

“Look, he’s been making things up his whole life. The big important writer that everybody loved, speaking to Mum on the phone, seeing her in Hadleigh. It’s all been nonsense.”

The kettle rumbled.

“Not all of it,” Flora said, almost to herself, almost hopefully.

“Oh, Flora, there are so many things you conveniently remember wrong. Sometimes I wonder if you were living in the same house as Mum and me.” The metal spoon chinked against the glass of the bowl and some cream splashed onto Nan’s chin.

“Nobody told me anything,” Flora shouted. “I had to work it out by listening at doors, overhearing snatches of conversation, and filling in the gaps. Don’t blame me if I made it up.”

“Stop complaining,” Nan said. “At least you had Dad. Who did I have watching out for me? Not even Mum when she was here. And you didn’t have to suddenly become the adult at the age of fifteen because there was no one else to do the job of a mother.”

“No one ever asked you to do it.” Flora pushed her chair out from the table.

“Who else was going to make sure there was food in the house, that there were clean clothes, that you went to school? It wasn’t going to be our father. Overnight I had to become a mother to a daughter I didn’t want.”

Flora flinched as if Nan had struck her. The kitchen window clouded with steam.

“You have no idea how difficult it was finishing my training,” Nan continued, “when I had to keep coming back here and worrying what you were doing—staying out all night, drinking, smoking, sleeping around. Don’t think I didn’t know. Like father, like daughter.”

Flora stood up, her chair tipping behind her and knocking over some books stacked against the wall. “I was only out all the time because being at home was so fucking awful I couldn’t bear to be here.”

“You can’t blame me for that,” Nan said. “That’ll be because of the man lying in the bedroom, who you think is so bloody amazing. The two things he was good for were providing the money and the house, and the first came from a sleazy book which makes me ashamed to be his daughter, and the second was inherited from his own terrible father.” As the kettle reached crisis point, Nan took hold of the bowl with both hands and hurled. Flora ducked as it flew over her head, shards of glass and sour cream spraying the kitchen wall, table, and floor. In the doorway Nan turned. “Actually,” she spat, “I wasn’t telling the complete truth earlier. Yes, I think Mum drowned, but it could easily have been suicide, and if it was, it’s your precious daddy who bears the responsibility.”





Chapter 40


THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 30TH JUNE 1992, 4:35 AM


Gil,

I’ve been thinking about getting a job. (Although who’d have me—undereducated, inexperienced—with so many unemployed? Maybe I should learn to drive.)

In the suitcase under my bed there’s a photograph Jonathan took of you and Flora sitting on the steps of your writing room: you’re fifty and Flora’s nearly five—in a month she’ll start school. It’s late afternoon, the shadows are long, the light is golden. For once she’s wearing clothes—a bikini with a frill around the bottom. Her feet are crusted with sand, as if she’s just come up from the beach. You sit beside her in jeans and a T-shirt, leaning with your arms folded on your knees, your head angled towards her. The sun highlights your cheekbones and the fair hair on your forearms. Flora is looking up at you, an intense, concentrated stare, and it is clear that you’re deep in conversation. Studying the photograph brings back the childish sting of being left out. And the hardest thing to write is that Nan wasn’t enough compensation for your connection with Flora. Nan has always been complete, self-sufficient; she hasn’t needed anyone, least of all me. The one person in our family who I was meant to mother was my dead boy, George. Maybe I should have gone years ago.


It was less than a year ago (last September, in fact), when I saw the young man through the glass of the front door. I thought he was a junior reporter or an evangelist. He was holding a book with both hands as if it were ballast, a weight to keep him grounded on our doorstep, and if he were to let go he’d rise and bob in the rafters of the veranda roof. He tried to smile when he saw me approach, but it was strained.

“Who is it?” Flora called out from my bedroom, where she was lying on the four-poster, drawing. She was faking her headache, but that morning I hadn’t had the fight in me to get her out of the house and to school. Perhaps it was the delay of my answer or my tone of voice that made her get up and mouth “Who is it?” as I passed the open doorway.

“It’s OK,” I whispered, although I wasn’t sure it would be. A tabloid journalist had already stopped me outside the supermarket, asking if I wanted help carrying my bags before he began to ask questions about the book’s content and whether it was a true story. He grew aggressive when I wouldn’t answer. No one had dared come to the house before.