Swimming Lessons(86)

“No.” She smeared the tears across her cheeks, wiping her fingers on her shorts. “No, it’s fine. It’s not that. I suddenly thought that I can’t lend you any trunks and I haven’t got a swimming costume. Stupid really. What does it matter? They’re just things.”


They took the picnic, the blanket, and a towel donated by the pub landlord and walked to the nudist beach. They set the blanket in the lee of a sand dune and looked out at the water. A heat-haze blurred the horizon, while closer in, four anchored yachts swung in the current, the chink, chink, chink of their halyards against the metal masts carrying over the water.

“Was this where your mother sat?” Richard said.

“Before she went for her final swim? I’m not sure. Maybe. It’s a nice place.” Flora smiled. “Shall we?” She plucked at the sleeve of his shirt.

Richard looked up and down the beach. The nearest people were fifty yards away, pink and brown bodies lying on towels. “I’m not sure I’ve ever taken my clothes off in public before.” A group of hikers followed the line of the surf away from the village; they were so determined to look straight ahead, they might have been wearing blinkers.

“Nobody cares, no one’s looking.” Still sitting, she kicked off her shoes and slipped her shirt over her head. She reached behind her and unclasped her bra. She put her arms up in the air. “Freedom,” she said, and laughed. She took off her shorts and Richard unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it out from his work trousers. “Come on, bottom half,” she said. He removed his shoes, tipped out the sand, and placed them side by side. He tucked his socks into them and, lifting his bottom, took off his trousers and folded them on top of his shoes. His glasses went on top of his trousers. “Ready?” she said. They both stood and slipped off their underwear. Flora took Richard’s hand. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

The water was like stepping into a shadow from hot noonday sun. They inched forwards, rising on tiptoes as each wave lapped against them. When the water was up to the middle of his thighs, Richard said, “There’s something I need to tell you.” His tone was serious, and Flora felt nauseous, dreading already what he had to say. “I don’t know how to swim.” She stared at him. “Really, I can’t swim.”


She knew he was standing in the shallows, watching as she moved off, but she didn’t turn around. She swam hard and fast until she was level with the distant buoy and the muscles in her legs and arms complained. When she returned to the beach, Richard was sitting on the blanket. He had put his glasses and trousers on. Flora stepped into her knickers, dragged on her shorts, and sat beside him.

Richard looked at her sadly and she stared back. She kissed him, and at the same time put her hand in her pocket and took out the toy soldier.

“Do you think this is going to work?” Richard said. “You and me?”

Without him seeing, she pushed the soldier deep into the sand beside her: a burial her mother had never had and never would. In her head, she said, “May your bones be washed by the salt water, your spirit return to the sand, and the love we have for you be forever around us.” To Richard she said, “I hope so.”





…


A breeze sprang up over Hadleigh. Shoppers and walkers heading down the high street toward the beach angled themselves forwards, their faces sculpted smooth by the wind. The tide was in and the waves crashed and seethed where they met the sand and the boulders, while farther out the water rolled in the sun, topped by white spume. A teenager on the promenade threw a handful of chips into the air, and the seagulls flapped around him like sheets of newspaper tossed into the squall.

The plastic bag that had been caught by the Tyrannosaurus rex six weeks ago filled with air, and the wind lifted it from the fibreglass claw. It sailed up and over the wire fence and came down in the car park, cavorting over the markings for the exit until it inflated and a gust carried it high like a thrown beach ball. The bag rose over the cars and the gardens and the terraced houses and the bookshop, up above the chimney pots—a small white balloon travelling north until the houses petered out to fields and hedgerows.

It was caught by the spike of a barbed-wire fence, where it flapped and rustled, demanding release, until it puffed up again and was unfettered by the wind. It blew over the Downs, past Old Smoker, skimming the tops of the beech trees and the wooden roofs of Milkwood Stables. There, the offshore breeze buffeted the bag inland to the heath and flew it over the sandy paths, boggy patches, and stunted trees. And where the land rose up to the Agglestone, the white bag was captured by the thorny stalks of a gorse bush, and when the wind yanked it again, it ripped and remained there, pinned in place. The breeze moved on, flowing around the rock, lifting gritty particles, scraping them over the limestone, flattening the boxer’s nose even further and smoothing out the etched graffiti.

The woman came around the Agglestone and faced into the wind. It blew her straw-coloured hair about her face and she pushed it out of her eyes with the back of her wrist and then caught the strands in her fist, as if to get an uninterrupted view. Laid out before her was a woven cloth of purple heath and gorse rolling down to the glittering sea, and in the distance the rooftops of Spanish Green.