Swimming Lessons(82)

They left Gil sleeping, still wearing the pink dress and with an empty glass beside him. Gabriel turned the music down, and Jonathan took the bottle with a drop of whiskey remaining out to the veranda. The rain stopped and the eaves dripped onto the rail and splashed onto the weeds below.

Jonathan lifted a fat hand-rolled cigarette from the top pocket of his shirt and held it out to Flora.

“I brought this for Gil, but perhaps the whiskey has done the same trick. You should have it.”

She took it from him, rolled it between her fingers, and held it up to her nose: the faintest whiff of tobacco and marijuana, waves of dusky orange.

“Or smoke it now. Why don’t you and Gabriel take it to the beach?”

Flora looked at Gabriel, who shrugged. She stared at the window into the bedroom.

“Go on,” Jonathan said. “He’s sleeping. He’s fine, and Nan will be home soon.”

Richard had phoned to say he had discovered a muddy and wet Nan on the promenade in Hadleigh. She’d got a lift in a passing van halfway there and walked the rest of the way across the fields. Nan had gone to find Viv, but a notice was pinned to the door saying the bookshop was closed due to staff illness, and Nan didn’t know where Viv lived. Richard said he would take her for a warm drink and then drive her home.

Flora stood up, still hesitating. There was something she was meant to tell Jonathan, something that Nan would have said, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

“Do you want to come to the beach again?” she said to Gabriel. “Where we went last time?”


They sat on the rocks at the bottom of the chine and looked out at the sea, grey and choppy in the wind. A couple of boys were lobbing stones into the waves. It was chilly, the tide was in, and only pebbles and a strip of seaweed showed along the edge of the water.

“I was sorry to hear about your mother,” Gabriel blurted out. “Her disappearance, I mean.” He hugged himself and blushed. “I still think of that afternoon I spent with the two of you. I should have got in touch but I wasn’t sure it would be welcome.”

They watched the boys flicking seaweed with sticks and bending to poke at whatever it was they had found underneath.

“What do you think about smoking this?” Flora said, holding the joint up.

“Yes, sure,” Gabriel said. “Do you have any matches?”

“Shit,” Flora said. “I don’t suppose you do? What was the point of Jonathan giving it to us without matches? Do you think those boys might have a light?” One of them picked something up with two fingers, yelling with delight and disgust as he threw it at his friend.

“Here.” Gabriel took the cigarette and put it in his mouth. At the twisted end he formed his hand into a fist and flicked his thumb up. He inhaled and closed his eyes. He pushed his heels into the pebbles and took the joint out of his mouth. Still holding his breath, he said, “Strong stuff.” Flora smiled, and he passed it to her. She put the unlit joint between her lips and breathed in.

“I used to tell Nan stories about you after we’d gone to bed,” she said, holding the joint in her fingers. She bent to pick up a pebble, dull and brown. “What you looked like, what you were doing, stupid stuff, like maybe you were in a band and we had a pop-star brother. She was so jealous she never got to meet you.”

“I’m looking forwards to meeting her now.” He took the joint, let it hang from his mouth.

“I would pretend that you had visited us again and played your guitar on the veranda.” Flora licked the pebble and ran her thumb across it. The matt surface sprang to life, a rich brown threaded through with veins of red. “No one ever told us what happened,” she said, suddenly embarrassed. “To make Daddy behave like he did.”

“It’s a simple story,” Gabriel said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth. “He and my mum went out with each other for a few weeks. She got pregnant. He was really into it for a while, apparently, read all the books he could get hold of, but he wanted to get married and she didn’t, she didn’t buy into all that conventional settling-down stuff he wanted. And so he denied the baby—me—was his, said she must have slept with someone else, and then left.

“She hadn’t, of course. But she wasn’t bothered. We were happy, only the two of us. She wouldn’t tell me who my father was for years, but I wheedled it out of her in the end. And when A Man of Pleasure came out, she made me promise not to go and see him. I didn’t listen. But once was enough.”

“I’m sorry,” Flora said. “Here.” She took the joint from him.

“You don’t have to apologise.”

They were silent while the boys ran past them and up the chine.

“A week or so ago it rained fish,” Flora said. “When I was driving home from the ferry. There was a massive storm and loads of little mackerel fell onto the car and the road.”

“Fish?” Gabriel said, and was quiet for a moment. “Maybe it was a sign that something was going to happen—or,”—he touched her arm,—“maybe it was a sign that something had already happened—that your mother had come back.”

“I don’t know about that anymore,” she said. She nudged him with her shoulder and laughed. “But I think I’m going to like having a brother.”

Gabriel laughed, too, took the cigarette, and said, “I think this stuff is working.”