by Clare Boyd
The last of their underwear was left on the side. They held hands and ran and jumped into the water, screaming with the shock of the cold. He held her tight, pulled her under, their nakedness slippery and other-worldly. His unflustered, contained appearance of before was gone, replaced by a wild excitement. The sex was heart-stopping. The broken mosaics left small cuts down her back. Her bones were chilled. The pads of her fingers shrivelled. She was dizzied by him, tumbled, unaware of where his feelings stopped and hers began.
They walked back up to the house shoulder to shoulder, their fingers entwined, dressed again in their clothes, which clung to them in patches. Elizabeth felt exhilarated, victorious. She could think of only one thing: Isla’s boarding school place. This was the moment to broach it. The perfect moment.
‘I’ve got a confession to make,’ she said.
‘Uh oh,’ Lucas said, clipping his Rolex back onto his wrist.
‘I tore up that offer letter from Channing House.’
He stopped walking to stare at her, but a smile played on his lips. ‘You did?’
‘I really want to keep Isla at home for just one more year. I think I can do it. She needs me.’
‘You do seem better. This party has given you a focus, hasn’t it?’
‘I am better, I really am. I’m so sorry I worried you, and poor Isla … but I feel I can handle anything now. I haven’t even had any migraines this month, and when I saw the Isla in the pool today … I thought … oh my God … I …’
He held her chin and pressed his finger on her mouth to stop her talking.
‘I’ll call Mrs Hepburn tomorrow and tell her we don’t want the place.’
‘Really?’ she cried.
‘Really.’
She threw her arms around him and buried her face in the crook of his neck. She was off the ground. He had lifted her up and her toes dangled as he walked on. Both of them were laughing. She wrapped her legs around his waist. As he carried her up to the house, she rested her chin on his shoulder and looked out across the hills. The lights of London twinkled at her in the distance. As long as she was in his arms, she had no desire to put on her old trainers and walk towards them and over the horizon.
* * *
Later that night, in bed, she couldn’t sleep. Her mind switched back and forth. One minute she was obsessing about finding a last-minute day school place for Isla; the next she was imagining mood boards for the barn renovation and the party. Briefly she fell asleep and awoke again in the middle of the night, still thinking.
Her alarm clock read 2 a.m. Then she noticed that Lucas was gone from their bed. She crept out of their room and along the corridor to find him. The kitchen was empty. His study was dark. Through the window of the hallway, she checked that their cars were still there on the driveway.
Before heading to the family bathroom, where they kept the medicines, wondering if he had woken with a headache, she noticed that the sliding window to the garden was open a fraction. She froze. Something told her she should not go outside. The spectral image of the unsteady camper van loomed out of the darkness and imprinted itself on her eyelids. She rubbed her eyes, erasing the thought.
In bed, she pulled the covers over her head. She’d told Lucas she was better. She hadn’t been lying. She had believed that she was. Yes, I am better, she said to herself, over and over as she fell into a light, fretful sleep.
Seven
I was jiggling around, crossing my legs and pretending I didn’t need the toilet. Every time I needed to go, I cursed my weak bladder. Going inside the house meant seeing Lucas and resisting the urge to ask him direct questions about the camper van. Holding back my feelings on this subject was wise if I wanted to keep my job. Until I knew more, I would try very hard to be polite and open-minded.
Agata was vacuuming under the cushions of the sofa when I came in. I had to wave at her to get her attention. Her legs got caught in the tangle of the cord when she tried to turn the hoover off.
‘Sorry,’ she said. The closeness of her eyes and her small mouth, like a rosebud, exaggerated her shyness. Her clothes were less demure. She had the style of an American teen, with her white teeth, peroxide hair and stone-washed jeans. I noticed a hole where a nose ring might have been.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I’m just going to the toilet, if that’s all right.’
‘Yes, yes.’ She pointed in the direction of the bathroom door, which she knew I had used every day I had worked there.
Before she switched the vacuum cleaner on again, I whispered, ‘Is Elizabeth here?’
Her expression changed. A shadowed thought seemed to run across those close brown eyes of hers, which I thought looked redder than usual. She shook her head and glanced over her shoulder, before giving me a quick nervous smile. It was a small moment but it signified an alliance.
Feeling childish, trying to build on the moment between us, I made a big deal of slipping and sliding across the polished concrete in my socks, making out that I was on a surfboard.
Agata let out a brief, skittish laugh. ‘Dangerous,’ she tutted. Her smile could not hide the unease underneath.
‘When is the toilet in your camper going to get fixed?’ I asked, fishing for information, for an invitation even.
She shrugged and returned to her vacuuming.
While I was sitting on the toilet, I looked around me at the hexagonal black tiles and antique gold taps and the matching green bar of soap and felt a sudden and shameful pang of envy for everything the Huxleys had. I did not feel proud of myself for it, and quickly swiped it out of my mind, chiding myself, hoping it was not the reason I was fixating on the camper van. If you search for fault, my father had always said, you’re bound to find it. And if I had, it was the only anomaly in the midst of perfection.
I flushed the antique chain and chuckled at the words that were embossed on the cistern: Crapper’s Valveless Waste Preventer No. 892. Grinning, I made a mental note to tell Rob that I went to the toilet on a real crapper every day. The soap that I lathered on my hands smelt delicious enough to eat. There was another bottle next to it with what looked like Roman numerals on the label. Greedily I took three large pumps to try it. It flew out too fast, blobbing all over me and the sink, turning out to be hand cream. In a minor panic, I wiped it off the surfaces with wads of toilet paper, leaving fig-smelling white smears everywhere. My hands were so over-moisturised, I couldn’t turn the tap off. While I held it with a towel to twist it closed, I heard voices coming from the living room. I leant my ear to the door. It was Lucas and Agata. My heart missed a beat. Opening the door a crack, with as little sound as possible, I listened in. I was rewarded by the tail end of a sentence.
‘… ask you to do something you don’t want to do, please tell me, okay?’ Lucas was saying gently, with an edge of anxiety. I didn’t hear Agata’s response. He added, ‘Promise?’
I felt a tickle in my throat and knew I couldn’t hide myself any longer. ‘Hello, sorry, just using the toilet,’ I said, coughing, stepping out, conscious that I might smell like a perfumery.
They were sitting next to each other on the low sofa. His arm was around her shoulder and her head was bent low. They did not flinch or pull apart when they saw me.
Unfazed by my sudden appearance, Lucas said, ‘Agata’s not having a good day.’ He handed her a tissue. Seeing his kindness stirred up a familiar sense of how he had once been towards me. A blond curl fell over the mole on his cheek when he looked up at me. Blood rushed to my head. I forgot how to speak.
Agata blew her nose and stood up, ‘Thank you, Lucas. I work now.’
My only focus was on my boots by the window. The floor under my socks felt slippery, like thin ice. As I tied my laces, my fingers quivered. Adrenalin was firing through my veins. I dared once to glance up, hoping to catch his eye. He was at the fridge, humming, and Agata was pushing the vacuum cleaner to the other sofa.
As I hurried out, leaving one lace undone, I heard Lucas say casually, ‘I’
ll take lunch in my study, Agata. And help yourself to some of this Brie. It’s bloody delicious.’
My presence had been already forgotten.
* * *
I turned the soil in the newly dug flower bed, slamming the spade into the hard ground. The sun burnt the back of my neck: the spot where Lucas’s arm had hung over Agata. When I stopped to rest, to wipe my nose or push a piece of hair back into my cap, the past came rushing back in. I reminded myself that the tremble in my fingers up at the house had been my body’s reaction to the memory of Lucas, not the reality of his handsome face, of the mole that accentuated his high cheekbones, of his dark blue eyes. I kept digging, harder and faster.
A few feet away was the gate snuggled into the laurel hedge, where the stone path ended and the flagstones of the pool terrace began. The repetitive gulp of the water in the filter tormented me further, pulling the present away like the draw of a wave.
* * *
The hedge scratched my arms and my towel got caught on a bramble, but I made it through and out into the Huxleys’ garden. As I dashed along the pathways, I grabbed the heads off a couple of poppies. Poppies were my father’s favourite and I hated them with a passion that equalled their colour.
When I came to the pool, I was disappointed. I had imagined it would be sparkly and spotless, with smart tiles, a diving board and bath-like warm water. The steel steps wobbled as I got in. A mosaic tile came loose and twirled to the bottom. The chill of the water stopped my breath and I paused before fully submerging. But once I was in, I was in, and I let out a little cry of exhilaration. I doggy-paddled to the far side, barely keeping my head above water, and then returned. Soon I was attempting lengths, trying front crawl, but my head was out of the water. I didn’t know how to breathe properly. Choking, ineffective, I was getting tired, but I wouldn’t stop swimming, not until I hated my father a little less.
It was just becoming dark when I heard the sound of a man’s laugh.
* * *
‘I’m off to the garden centre. Need anything?’
I jumped. It was my father’s voice. He had come out of nowhere, disturbing my reverie. I felt the spade, solid in my hand, and steadied myself upon it.
‘No thanks,’ I said.
‘Looks like you need a swim to cool off!’ he said, reading my mind.
As he strode off, I wanted to chuck the shovel to the ground, run to the pool and jump in, but I dug on; dug and turned and dug and turned, trying to rid myself of the tangles of my memories.
The water was close; I could almost taste it, like a slippery temptress luring me in with gentle watery sounds.
My favourite strip of sea near Rye would be rolling into shore without me, over two and a half hours away. Neither of my parents went near the water. The closest beach at Worthing was an hour and fifteen minutes away from Cobham by car. Our start time at the Huxleys was 6 a.m., and we would finish at 7 p.m., leaving me no time on weekdays to swim. At the weekends, every penny of my hourly rate would have to be saved in an envelope rather than wasted on petrol.
I wondered if Lucas and Elizabeth would ever grant me official permission to use the pool to keep up my fitness. There would be irony in that, after years of sneaking through the hedge and jumping into its unheated water while the Huxley Seniors were away. I remembered how the shock of the cold had opened my eyes to the thrill of the world that awaited me, shimmering and glittering in the sunlight; beyond my solitary childhood, beyond that waxy hedge.
A quick peek, I thought. Maybe dip my toes in. For old times’ sake.
I left my spade sticking out of the ground and opened the squeaky gate.
The blue and white mosaics wobbled through the crystal-clear water.
I dipped my hand in. The ripples tinkled and shimmered.
Nobody was around. I would be hidden by a thick hedge at the bottom of the five-acre garden. I would never be discovered. Dad had left for the garden centre. Elizabeth and the children were out somewhere. Piotr was in London. Agata was making lunch for Lucas, who was in his study, working hard, straining his blue eyes at the screen, making more money than he needed.
Just a quick dip to cool me off, to bring him back to me. Just two minutes of that feeling again, in and then out.
I stripped down to my underwear, hooked my toes over the lip of a tile and hovered above the glistening surface, splitting the water with a dive. My limbs drove me like a machine to the other end. I plunged my head under to turn my body around in the silent world, cut off from the air and noise and confusion of the outside. The chlorine was bitter at the back of my throat and the water ice cold but like silk over my skin. It felt more expensive than any water I had ever swum in. The weeks deprived of this feeling had been torture.
Back then, as a girl, Lucas had taught me how to feel this good, to know euphoria and freedom.
* * *
‘Is that … you? From next door?’ the Huxleys’ son asked.
I scrambled to the side and spluttered a no, leaving a puddle on the stone slab at my fingertips. He laughed again.
Too startled and worn out to risk swimming to the steps, I shuffled along, gripping the edge, kicking my feet beneath me to stay above the surface. When my foot felt for the first rung of the ladder, the Huxleys’ son said, ‘Hang on a sec, no need to get out. I’ll give you a few pointers so you don’t drown next time.’
Blinking away the blur of chlorine, I watched him undo his wristwatch, strip down to his shorts and perform a perfect racing dive. His beautiful blond hair blackened and slickened under the water. He pounded to the shallow end, where I stood shivering and rubbing my stinging eyes. His muscles ran with rivulets. His irises were as blue as the water.
‘Lie on your tummy,’ he instructed me. ‘Kick your legs. Keep them straight. That’s right. Good girl. Well done.’
I did as I was told, and he held me around the middle and manipulated my limbs into swimming strokes. At his touch, tingles rolled through my body from the tips of my toes right up into the roots of my hair. Under his tutelage, I let go of my scratchy home life, feeling as though I was turning from a child into an adolescent in the space of that one dusk-lit hour.
* * *
As I thrashed out more lengths, I reminded myself of how far I had come. My new life with Rob was everything to me now. I slowed my strokes and swam to the edge, ready to get on with the garden: I was grateful to Lucas for the job – and nothing else.
Then I heard the squeak of the gate. I plunged under the water again and swam to the other side in a panic, hoping whoever it was would leave. My stupidity came crashing in on me. I was trapped, like a fish in a tank, swimming in circles. A dark form shimmered through the water, peering downwards. If it was Lucas, I contemplated drowning rather than facing him. Unable to hold my breath a second longer, I rose, spluttering into the sunshine. It was not Lucas.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Elizabeth said.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I muttered, shooting out of the pool, chilled by the air, exposed in my black underwear. Head down, I followed the ground to my clothes. Water pooled at my feet as I tried to untangle them.
Her pretty eyes bored into me. ‘This isn’t your pool,’ she stated.
I forced my wet legs into my jeans and gulped my heart back down my throat. I would be sacked. Perhaps both my father and I would be sacked. I couldn’t believe what I had done. I picked up my socks, wondering how I could have risked everything for two minutes in the water.
‘What were you thinking?’ Elizabeth asked.
I could say I had fallen in.
I could say I was rescuing a small animal or a piece of jewellery.
I could prostrate myself at her feet and beg for her mercy.
I could feel the drips wiggling down my cheeks.
‘I wasn’t thinking,’ I replied, utterly humiliated.
She was so close to me, I could see the pulse in her throat. Her expression changed, as though her anger was a thin veneer that had melted away.
‘What are those? How did you do that?’ she said. She twisted both my arms outwards.
I pulled them away and rubbed at the healed scars. Mostly I forgot they were there. I put on my T-shirt. ‘They’re grazes from the lane ropes at the lido. I was training for a long-distance swim.’
She smiled, unevenly. ‘That’s why you’re swimming now? You’re training for something?’
I should have lied; she seemed to want me to say yes. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I was hot and I just … I’m sorry.’
She moved even closer and whispered, breath sugary sweet, ‘I know about you.’
My stomach rolled. ‘I …’ I faltered.
‘You can go now,’ she said, raising her chin. ‘But I’m afraid I’m going to have to talk to Lucas about this.’
I put my cap on, grabbed my boots and rushed away down the path to the meadow, where I jumped over the low wall and ran as fast as I could into the long grass. I felt dizzy and sick by the time I had slowed to a walk.
I lay in the tall flowers, and picked one of the bendy, floppy poppies, waiting to hear my father calling me for lunch. My hair was splayed out, drying in the sun.
When I finally heard Dad’s voice, I tied up my hair and hurried to the wall.
His familiar face was reassuring. He was holding the Tupperware box filled with our home-made chicken sandwiches. I found his sticky-out ears and reliable stride endearing, but seeing his trusting smile, I wanted to fall back into the meadow grass and sink into the earth.
We looked out across the South Downs as we ate.
‘Arthur turned up last night,’ my father said, staring down at his sandwich before taking a bite.
I swallowed my first mouthful with a dry throat. ‘That’s a relief,’ I said, genuinely happy that the lonely alcoholic at the soup kitchen was alive and well. ‘Where had he been?’
