The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club(2)

Part 1


April





1


Elizabeth


It was a week since Eric’s funeral – over thirty years of marriage and she thought she knew him inside out, but even now, beyond the grave he had tried to hide the truth from her. Elizabeth had come to Shanganagh Cemetery not to pay her respects on this overcast morning. No, rather she had made the journey because it was time to let Eric know exactly what she thought of him. The night had brought in howling winds, sheet lightning and a cacophony of thunder and rain that she thought might wake the dead. There was no sleeping for Elizabeth, or probably, she figured for anyone else in the village. She had wandered through the house, moving from one gloomy room to the next, waiting for the storm to move off so she might shake off the uneasy feeling of unrest that wouldn’t let her close her eyes.

Then, at around four o’clock, she decided to go down and take a look about the surgery. It was strange being down here without Eric. Somehow, his presence had remained here more than anywhere, still dominating everything. Thea Gilchrist – the locum, who’d filled in for the last few months, had been little more than an uncomfortable question mark. Elizabeth moved from the small waiting room, past the shadowy cubbyhole reception desk and into Eric’s surgery. She flicked on the light and listened while there was a crackling tickle, as if it was annoyed at being woken at this unearthly hour.

For a moment, she felt a rising note of panic. What if there was a power cut? What if she was left here in the dark, trying to grapple her way back through the narrow corridor and rickety stairs into the main part of the house. The storm seemed to be heightened down here. Of course, it was little more than a converted entrance to the larger outbuildings that ran along the side of the property. Eric had considered it more convenient to roof and fit out this mean little space, while at the side of the house, a long line of stone buildings ran into a huge coach house at the bottom of the garden. Of course, like the house, time had worn them down and they stood slowly crumbling over the years. Who wants every Tom, Dick and Harry in the back garden? he had mumbled and so he spent his working life with electric heaters hissing out dry heat and walls that smelled damp no matter how often he insisted that a fresh coat of paint could cure anything.

Elizabeth wasn’t sure why she did it, but it seemed as if somewhere she was answering a question; she walked behind Eric’s desk and sat in his chair. Any longing to feel his arms around her had long gone between them, if it had ever been there to begin with. It was a strange thing though, sitting here, looking about the room from his perspective; it made her miss him in a way she hadn’t felt before. It reminded her of when they had first married and she had admired him, not just because he was handsome, but because he had saved her. There had been something about him, a kind of presence that had as much to do with him being a doctor as it had with any other quality. The whole notion of him holding people’s lives in his hands, that within his understanding lay the answers to living and dying, to being well and being ill, to making people in so many ways feel better in themselves.

That was the part that she’d never really been able to articulate, but sitting here, she had a feeling that maybe it was not all as clear-cut as she’d imagined. It was a responsibility – she could almost feel it pressing in on her from all sides. Perhaps it was enough to drive you to drink, even if you hadn’t already been predisposed to it.

She sighed deeply. There was no point thinking of these things now. The time had passed where understanding could do very much to change how things would pan out. Then, something small and silver caught her eye. A key? A silver glinting stem poking out from underneath the corner of the half file unit crouched beneath the desk. She bent down, a little gingerly and picked it up. Elizabeth looked at it, for a moment, supposing that it had just dropped from the desk, but then she remembered Thea Gilchrist calling to the house one evening, looking for a key. She had gone away without it. For one thing, Elizabeth hadn’t the foggiest about any keys and for another, Eric, with a grumbling menace had told her that cabinet was no concern of hers.

Elizabeth picked up the key, slipped it into the cabinet, turned it easily and inhaled deeply as she pulled out the top drawer. Outside a crash of lightning lit up the back garden, so for a moment, it felt as though Eric himself had come back to warn her off. The ominous roll of thunder that followed almost rattled the nerves out of her, but she sat holding open the door for a moment, watching as the garden jerked back into the darkness.

Then, she peered into the open drawer. It was not a deep drawer, rather it was long and the few bits of paper were only to cover over empty bottles that Eric had dumped there to hide from a world he obviously assumed had never guessed his weakness. Elizabeth sighed at the waste of it all. He’d spent forty years drinking himself into a grave that he’d worked so hard to keep others out of. The drawer below that was deeper. It too was a storage space for empty bottles, but there was one file, in itself unusual. Eric was not the sort of man who kept files or indeed records really of any sort, so far as Elizabeth had ever known.

This file was encased in a brown folder with a thick elastic band holding it together. She pulled it out and placed it timidly on the faded and marked blotter that took up most of the desk. With her foot, she mindlessly pushed in the drawer. Another crash of lightning outside lit up the garden eerily at her back. This time, it had less bite to it and although it halted her hands midway on the elastic, it did not make her want to run for the house next door. Elizabeth found herself intrigued by the very fact that Eric would keep a file locked away and hidden. She couldn’t help but wonder who he might have been burying it from. Some deep part of her knew – the only person he concealed anything from, really, was Elizabeth.