Swimming Lessons(84)

Something gave way at the end of the veranda, the paint blistering and the wood turning black, the screech of the tin roof warping in the heat. Flora’s knees gave way too. “Daddy,” she called again. A crowd had gathered at the end of the drive, women standing in twos and threes, the men coming forwards past Flora and Louise to see if there was anything they could do. The heat drove them back, and when the engines arrived, they stood watching the firemen unrolling hoses and connecting things rather than looking at the flames and the burning house.

A man in a beige jacket and yellow hat spoke to Jonathan, and two firefighters in breathing equipment went into the house behind a jet of water. Louise tried to take Flora away, out to the lane where an ambulance had pulled up, but she shook her off and stood beside Gabriel farther down the garden, watching.

With the sprays of water, the black smoke turned to white billows and the ribs of the building stood out. And then the white billows gave way to wisps and smoulders. “They could probably see it as far as the Isle of Wight,” Flora heard someone say, and their neighbour replied, “Must have had something good in there to burn like that.” And she thought of the hundreds, thousands of books, their edges curling, all the words and things that people had left in them blackening and crumbling to ash. And then Richard and behind him Nan, wearing his jumper, her hair straggly, were pushing through the people, Nan grabbing them and shouting to get her father out; Richard running forwards and swearing like Flora had never heard before and later telling anyone who would listen that Gil had seemed fine and happy when Richard had said he couldn’t burn the books.

“I didn’t know,” Richard said, again and again. “I didn’t know Gil would do it himself.”


Flora wrapped a blanket around herself and crossed the garden towards the sea. The grass was long and damp, and although the morning was cold, there was a charge in the air, an awareness of the heat to come. She sat on one of the garden chairs—part of the set that had been given to her by the woman who lived in the big house down the road; odd that the chairs and the table had stood on the patio once owned by her grandparents, perhaps had even been theirs. The blanket was one that someone had wrapped around her the night of the fire, and since she didn’t know who it belonged to, she hadn’t been able to return it.

“Couldn’t sleep either, Daddy?” she said. “It’s going to be a hot day.” She laid her head sideways on the table. In front of her, the rising sun was a white puffball growing on the sea’s horizon.

When she woke, the wooden table had imprinted its ridges across the skin of her cheek. The chair beside her was empty, and Flora cried.

After the fire, Richard had stayed with her for a week in the writing room. He had tried to persuade her to go back with him, but once he understood that there was no changing her mind, he arranged a Portaloo and got the outside tap working. The landlord of the Royal Oak—the man who had bought the pub from Martin, Flora couldn’t remember his name—had found beds for Jonathan, Gabriel, Louise, and Nan. One by one, over the following days they had left Spanish Green, each taking Flora aside and trying to convince her to leave.

Two weeks later they had all returned to scatter Gil’s ashes. There had been a moment of tension when Flora had laughed at Nan deciding that Gil’s remains should be cremated. “They’re burning bits of books and letters and bedsheets,” she had said, but she stood beside Gabriel, Louise, Richard, and Jonathan on a swaying fishing boat one morning as the sun came up to watch Nan throw the ashes across the water. They had floated on the surface for a minute or two, light grey on grey-green, and then had sunk.

And a week after that, the coroner recorded an open verdict. All Flora’s questions again went unanswered.


After lunch she ducked under the police tape that encircled what was left of the Swimming Pavilion. Most of the contents and internal structure had gone, especially on the right-hand side where the fire had burned strongest. She stood inside the charred skeleton of a giant creature, within the rib cage of a whale or a dinosaur, rays of sunshine casting bands of light and shadow across the ground. The place still stank of burning, the only smell that was pure black. In what was once the front bedroom, she nudged the debris with her feet and bent where she thought the bed would have been, picking up bits of unidentifiable things and examining them up close. She would have been happy to find a piece of the bed, one of the pineapple finials or the fish with the open mouth, but what she was hoping for most was something else: a fragment of tibia, a splinter of radius, a molar. She imagined sealing it in a glass dome with a label handwritten in ink: A relic of the writer. She pushed her hair out of her face with her sooty wrist and shuffled forwards through the mess.

“Flora!” It was Nan’s voice, and when Flora stood up straight she saw her sister in front of the tape, the car behind her on the drive. “What are you doing in the house? It isn’t safe.”

“I didn’t hear you arrive.” Flora stepped carefully over the fallen beams and blackened remains, walked through the gap where the front door would have been, and crossed under the tape. “I needed some charcoal,” she said. “I thought I might start drawing again.”

“Drawing would do you good,” Nan said. “But I have something else that might make you even happier.” She went to the boot of the car and Flora followed.

“What is it?”