The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club(52)

‘Thanks, Mum,’ he said and he did something he hadn’t done in a very long time; he reached across and put his arms around her shoulders. ‘I can’t wait.’





Part 4


July





21


Jo


Jo always thought she was that rare breed, both lark and owl. Quite simply, she went to bed late and got up early – all her life. She smiled sadly now, thinking of one of her favourite mantras when Lucy was a teenager: There’ll be time enough for sleeping when we’re dead. Well, it looked like she’d know the truth of that either way soon enough. She wasn’t being negative, but she knew, not just in the early hours of the morning, but rather with every ticking second that her time was drawing to a close much more quickly than either the doctor or Lucy would admit.

She was tired all the time. A trip down to the cove for a midnight swim now took days to recover from and a full day’s bed rest to prepare for. It was worth it. Apart from when Niall came and sat on the end of her bed and tried to coax her into a game of cards, the sea was her one true joy. Swimming with Lucy and Elizabeth had become the oxygen she needed to carry on. It was cathartic and invigorating, even if it left her physically depleted for days afterwards.

Lucy understood and Jo was just grateful that her daughter had managed to discard her doctor’s knowledge and allow her mother to carve out what remained of her time as she wished. There would be no operations or chemotherapy or any other kind of interventions that would lessen the quality of the time she had left. Jo had insisted there would be none of that pretending that everything was going to be all right, when it so clearly wasn’t. She couldn’t bear the notion that tears would be bottled up now, so that the people she loved would be flooded with sadness when she left them. She wanted them to get it over with, so when she was finally gone, they could start again.

‘I want to be celebrated,’ she said as they swam in temperatures that seemed to her to be icier than mid-January. Of course, she knew, the water was perfect for July, but everything about her body was letting her down at this point. ‘None of this nonsense with people going about with long faces; I want people to remember me and smile.’

‘We’ll certainly do that,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Do you remember that day when I bumped into Eric leaving the Maynard house?’

‘What’s this?’ Lucy asked.

‘Oh, dear,’ Elizabeth said then, realising that she would have to share the memory with Lucy also. ‘Your mother was there the day I realised that Eric was…’

‘He was paying out-of-hours visits to a man who lived in the square.’ Jo tried to be diplomatic.

‘It turned out, he’d been seeing Bobby Maynard for years,’ Elizabeth added sadly. ‘I only realised when I saw him leaving the house and righting his jacket on the way.’

‘We were coming out of old Mr Abbott’s bookshop.’ Jo smiled, remembering well the day. The sun had been breaking through after days of rain and she’d felt oddly optimistic that perhaps summer might finally be about to arrive. ‘He had the bloody cheek to tell you to go home and not spy on him, if I remember rightly,’ Jo said.

‘Thank goodness your mother was there,’ Elizabeth said a little wistfully to Lucy. It had been the start of their real friendship. That day, Jo had learned the secret at the heart of Elizabeth’s marriage and she’d proved herself a loyal and strong friend over the years afterwards.

‘Oh God. I can imagine, poor old Eric.’ Lucy laughed now, knowing only too well the tongue-lashing Jo would have given him for treating her friend so badly.

‘Safe to say, he never crossed her again,’ Elizabeth said softly.

‘It didn’t really change things for you though,’ Jo said sadly. It still bothered her that Elizabeth had spent a lifetime shackled to a lie of a marriage when she might have made a life with someone who cherished her and maybe even had a family of her own.

‘No. But if you hadn’t stood up to him that day, we both know my life would have been a lot worse.’ Stillness wafted across the water and they both remembered Eric pushing Elizabeth to the ground and with that one horrible move, Jo had known that she would end up another statistic of ongoing domestic violence if she didn’t step in straight away. ‘She has a deadly right hook. Did you know that?’

‘Yes, well, he bloody deserved it and let me tell you, if I run into him in the next world, he’s in for another bashing for leaving you up to your bloody eyes in debt at the end of it all.’

‘What if we were to have a charity swim?’ Elizabeth said suddenly. ‘We could have it in aid of whatever you’d like, Jo, and you could be part of it…’ She didn’t continue, because they all knew she’d only be part of it this year and that was if they were very lucky indeed.

‘We could,’ Lucy said then, turning over from her back. Jo could feel her daughter’s eyes on her. ‘We could ask all the women in the village to join us for a midnight swim and…’

‘The Ladies’ Midnight Swimming Club could keep on going…’ Jo said softly, but she felt an unexpected swell of emotion at the idea of it.

‘We’re going to keep on going – you know that already,’ Elizabeth said good-naturedly. ‘But this would be different. This would be every woman in the village. All of us, out here in the darkness and raising money for…’