The Swimmer

by Roma Tearne

  He reached up and touched my face, wiping away my tears with his two thumbs. Speechless, I stared at him.

  Grief had unhinged me. What happened next was beyond compre-hension. There was no shame; not at that moment, anyway. When he touched me I felt a rush of excitement in my throat. I had not realised how physical, how taut my feelings were. Or how much I needed to be held. I stood at the edge of an oasis, my heart quivering with its grief, desperate for some relief. I had the curious feeling that Eric too was weighed down by some mysterious and wordless pain that had nothing at all to do with me yet was connected in some awful way. Perhaps it was this thought that loosened my sanity finally, this recognition of a kindred spirit. Dumbly I reached up and brought his face towards me. Who will understand that moment? Love had been murdered and only love would suffice. I felt him resist me and then it happened and he was kissing me. Nor did it strike me as anything more than curious, afterwards, to find myself in a room at the top of the house with Eric beside me. A sharp light fell slantways across the threadbare carpet. The soft white sheets, the plumped-up duvet, the faint fragrance of the washed cotton, gave my tired, wracked body warmth; it was comforting, like a bird’s nest. If I told myself I had no knowledge of what I did, I would be lying. I did. Percy, what would you make of me now? I must be honest, it was I who made the first move. It is astonishing how need transcends all else, miraculous how the old ways of loving survive.

  Sitting on this coach with my locked-up secret, I see that it was a kind of blind loving. Afterwards. I would be filled with shame, shocked into a dead-ended silence. Afterwards, I would think, oh God, why? How? But at that first moment, with the soft amnesia of snow outside, it was another matter. I have to remember.

  I have to remember how he tried to save my sanity. At least he tried, Percy. When he entered me, I just thought, It’s not so bad, really, just something going in and out of me somewhere far down my body. So what? I thought, brazenly. Who will know? The dog whined outside the door. Truly, I felt nothing then. I had stopped thinking of Ben. Yes, that’s the brutal fact. What we were doing was lessening the pain. It was the end of the story; only it wasn’t. If I felt nothing to start with, that didn’t last. Lust entered the room with stealth and tore the celibacy off me. I must admit, it was a relief to stop the grief. Defiance that had been knocked out of me, because of who I was and how I had lived, returned. I stopped thinking. Desire, anguished and fearless, overflowed in me. If he was taken aback, he didn’t show it. It had been years for him too. We were in this together. At last, after decades I was engaged in something I had not known I missed. Of course, I didn’t think like this at the time. That would have been real madness. No, I didn’t think at all.

  He entered me in silence. I was the one who made the noise. There were goose pimples on my exposed arm, whether from the cold or fright I have no idea. I remember at one moment, I think perhaps when his hand strayed helplessly to my breast, I opened my eyes and saw fragments of things. A bit of curtain, a yellowed wall, the edge of a mirror. A thin shoulder. But at least, one part of my brain screamed, at least he was alive. I didn’t care, you see, that I was a widow, betraying a dead husband, a mother waiting to bury her son, a guest in Ria’s house. We were in a hurry and slow at one and the same time; ending and starting again almost without pause. How hungry for sex must we have been? It was astonishing. Finally—it felt like a long finally—he tired before me and fell back, grey-faced and exhausted, on the bed. Still shame did not come to me. I could look at him at last and what I saw was this. His body was very white and long and there was the thinness that came from old age. I reached down and placed my hand between his legs, and then I saw him gazing into my eyes as though they were precious stones. Before I could speak he placed a finger on my lips.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ he said.

  The sky had darkened.

  ‘There will be a fresh fall of snow, soon,’ he said. And then he said, ‘All of you is very beautiful.’

  There was a curious softening and mounting ache in my limbs. I must have fallen asleep because I don’t remember much after that. The next I knew was Eric sitting beside me on the bed, holding out a bowl of soup, without a word, just a small sideways smile. He handed me a spoon with this smile still on his face and I ate. This was the first food that I had actually tasted since the accident. Was I enjoying myself, now? Guilt knocked but did not enter as he kissed me again.

  ‘I don’t know why…’ I began, after I had finished eating.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, why.’

  He took the bowl out of my hand and shook his head.

  ‘Between us,’ he said, ‘there is no need for explanations. You are beautiful,’ he said again.

  Percy, I thought. As yet I felt no sense of the betrayal.

  Later, he helped me dress with a tenderness locked into his fumbling fingers, holding my sari while I wound it around me. Snow was falling again and it made me cry. Things were coming back, like spiders, slowly out of the corners. Seeing how it was going to be for me, quietly, tactfully, he distracted me by telling me about his passion for eels. I listened passively, watching his hands. I wanted him to touch me again. Perhaps, I remember thinking, I am finally going mad.

  ‘They came all this way, only to be caught in traps,’ Eric said.

  Startled, I looked at him, but he was still talking about the eels.

  ‘I told your lad about them. He was interested. “Maybe I can catch some,” he said.’

  I breathed in sharply. I didn’t want to talk about Ben.

  Overhead, geese plotted a line across the sky. Eric was looking at me steadily. He took my hand in his large warm one and the dog whined, jealously. There was a hard, merciless piece of guilt forming inside me. I would have to deal with it, soon.

  ‘I took him out in the boat at dawn to check the traps. He was in the middle of weaving one of his own when it happened.’

  He poured more wine out and as I stared tears fell from my eyes in huge drops on the table. Like the monsoon, with the same tentative beginning. The tablecloth was checked with faded baskets of fruit. Once it must have been lurid, I thought. Hysteria threatened. Eric’s hand, gnarled and roughened, squeezed mine.

  ‘There have always been migrants in the world,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the wonders of nature. But there’s a risk attached to the journey. Always. We don’t think of that.’

  I nodded. There were fine lines on his face.

  ‘He brought you here. This was his home, however briefly. It will be yours now. Forever. Because of him.’

  A clock in another room chimed. Time hesitated. Eric sliced his hand through the air. Certain. I could see he wasn’t going to stop talking until he was sure of me. He put another log on the fire and then he came and knelt by me, rubbing my hands with his.

  ‘I can see you’re going to, but you mustn’t think badly of what happened,’ he said. ‘We have shared love. If it has helped in any small way, then it is a good thing.’

  I said nothing, hanging my head, staring at his hands.

  ‘Tomorrow is Sunday. I’ll get Ria to bring you here again. Or I can fetch you?’

  Seeing the look on my face, he shook his head.

  ‘Don’t think…I’m not expecting…’ He broke off, looking helpless. ‘There is nothing you can do except wait until Monday morning. I want to show you some of the countryside under snow; the places where your son roamed. That was all I meant. It will make the waiting a little easier, perhaps.’

  I told him Ria would probably want me to stay at her house.

  ‘Don’t worry about Ria. She will want you to do whatever makes you feel comfortable.’

  He put both his hands on my arms and shook me very slightly.

  ‘She’s devastated, too,’ he said. ‘I know she’s being very detached. But when it happened, she came here. She had run off to her place on the beach and then, not knowing what to do, she came here. Homing. She didn’t want to speak to that bloody brother of hers.’


  I was momentarily distracted, puzzled.

  ‘Jack,’ Eric said. ‘He’s…ah, well…he was messed up long ago. Through no fault of his own. Maybe we could all have done more…but, well, it all happened so quickly and we didn’t react fast enough, and then it was too late, the damage was done. He’s a strange man…he always wanted to hurt his sister, his wife—everyone. Ria was her father’s favourite and when he died I think Jack resented this. Who knows, really? He’s lost. They both are, because of what the mother did.’

  I was getting cold and had begun to shiver. Eric glanced quickly at me. His eyes were like bright marbles.

  ‘Ria is…not like him. Jack was shocked to hear how much…how…’ he hesitated, swallowing. ‘She loved your lad,’ he said softly.

  I knew my thoughts were showing on my face.

  ‘You find her lacking in feelings, perhaps? But, you know, it’s her way of dealing with it. She shuts down. Ever since she was little. It’s her way of surviving.’

  He fell silent.

  ‘She is suffering too,’ he said at last. ‘I know it isn’t the same, of course I do. I haven’t been a farmer for all these years for nothing. I have seen the mothers.’

  He looked directly at me, then. I saw he was exhausted too, and worried about what we had done. And I saw also that there were no regrets in him.

  ‘I’m not good with words, but for what it’s worth, I know how you feel,’ he said again.

  ‘There was someone else in Jaffna,’ I told him. ‘Someone who thought…who hoped…’

  I couldn’t go on. Eric sighed.

  ‘That’s all right, too,’ he said. ‘The boy was only trying to survive. Like all of us, just trying to survive, really. Ria knows, anyway, about that girl. It’s painful for her.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘He did what he had to do. It’s a part of his life.’

  The dog rose and whined, then sat down again and yawned.

  ‘If you stand watching the shoals of fish as they pass,’ Eric said, ‘that is all you’ll ever see. But you must look at the patterns they make, the way the currents flow and how many pass through the corridor of departure on their journeys elsewhere. And only then do you understand that some will survive. And these ones are like you and I, living on to tell the story.’

  The fire suddenly flared up, lighting his face in profile. He rose and stirred it and then he fed the dog and after that the cat. The walls of the kitchen were tobacco mellow with age. Yet the soup had been delicious and the floor was swept clean.

  ‘Look to the land,’ he said when he had finished his tasks and filled the kettle. ‘That’s what I always do. My son was killed in Afghanistan. When my wife died, and then, after, when the boy died, I just kept going. And I looked to the land. It’s all that endures.’

  But our land was war torn, I told him. There was nothing there any more.

  ‘No,’ he disagreed. ‘The land is still there. Hurt—that’s what it is. Damaged by bloodshed. But still there. What has happened in this new century is wrong, but it will pass.’

  He placed a mug of tea before me.

  ‘The twenty-first century is full of non-places,’ he said with distaste. ‘There are waiting rooms and stations and airports. There is no fixed place called home any more, so they tell me.’

  It shocked me to see how handsome he was.

  ‘People carry their home in their heads. It’s how things are now, and we have to live with this change. To find home wherever we travel is a gift.’

  He looked tired. I felt he had loved Ben.

  ‘Your son was trying to do this. As you will, because of him. It’s the only thing left.’

  The dog sat up suddenly and pricked his ears, listening to a sound out of our range.

  ‘When the war was over, half the dead were in foreign places. Those that survived knew they would have to migrate in their mind’s eye to those places.’

  He took his pipe out of a pocket. Watching him, I was reminded of Percy. I thought of him smoking his pipe, squatting on the verandah, staring at the tamarind tree in the furthest part of the garden. He had known that peace would not last for ever.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said out loud. ‘I am in a state of transit between different worlds. My home is a thing of the past. There is no return to it.’

  ‘Make your home wherever you and those you love have walked, Anula,’ Eric said. I almost smiled at the way he pronounced my name.

  Tobacco filled the room with comfort. Just for a moment, I had been given respite from the darkness. What more could I ask for? I thought. The dog barked, there was the sound of a car. Ria. The sunlight moved a little. In some other life I might have looked for some sort of future with the man sitting opposite. In some other place.

  ‘There’ll be even more snow later,’ Eric said. ‘I can feel it in the air. Tomorrow.’

  He did not mention what we had done, how we had touched each other’s nakedness, but I knew he was filled with a sort of wonder. And I thought of the transparent glass eels he had talked of, carried on currents each year towards the cold waters of the spring tides, to the rivers of England; and how some of them returned and some of them did not.

  12

  EIGHT THIRTY-FIVE. TOWARDS STANSTED. GRIEF WEARIES the mind in inexplicable ways. It sticks close, becomes your second skin, suffocating you slowly behind closed doors. But guilt is a different matter. Guilt burns a hole in the psyche, spilling adrenalin restlessly, always watchful in case the truth is uncovered. Until that moment I had been awash with grief, ebbing and flowing steadily. It had weakened me with its strong current. But now, in an instant, that changed. In the car, going back with Ria, we were both silent. Small talk had never been an option. Unsaid things shook like water in a bottle between us.

  ‘How did you get on with Eric?’ she asked.

  We drove through the dying light. Feathery tree-skeletons dotted the fields. It had stopped snowing but the daylight had almost gone. The wide, flawless landscape had become static. Low clouds suggested further snow some time soon. Sensations of all kinds assailed me; I was in a state of shock. I wanted to talk to Ria about Eric. I wanted to say, in a different sort of life, anything might have been possible after today. But in a different sort of life I would not be the person I was now. What I had now wasn’t what you would call a life.

  ‘He was very kind,’ I said instead.

  I couldn’t look at her. Madness was propelling me towards further deceit. Petrified, I sat without speaking.

  ‘Did he talk to you about the animals that migrate here each year?’

  I nodded.

  ‘It’s his special subject. Did he tell you about his dead son?’

  ‘Just that he died in Afghanistan.’

  ‘I don’t think Eric ever got over his death. He was tortured, you know. And then beheaded. There was no body.’

  ‘What?’

  I glanced at her profile. She was giving nothing away.

  ‘Probably he didn’t want to detract from what has happened. He’s that kind of man. I’ve known Eric for a long time. He told me once…’ she hesitated, ‘he felt the world itself had died with that boy. It was such a horrendous event. He was taken hostage, you know. There had been nearly a year of agony before they killed him. Not long before they did, while there was still hope, Eric’s wife died. He said he was glad she had been spared the grief.’

  ‘He never said a word.’

  Ria smiled. I felt her relax very slightly.

  ‘Eric is a complicated person. Probably he didn’t want you to think he was encroaching on your feelings.’

  I digested this in silence. What have I done? I thought. As we approached the house, I noticed something move by the line of matchstick trees.

  ‘Oh, look,’ Ria said, pointing. ‘Look over there. A deer!’

  The animal stood motionless. The more I looked at this beautiful creature, the sadder I became.

  ‘A young deer. Its mother must have been killed, I suppose.’
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br />   ‘Look how still it is,’ I said.

  ‘It’s petrified by the headlights.’

  She slowed the car, but the deer continued to stare in our direction. Then, as she cleared the windscreen, suddenly, it was gone. The snow was veiling the dirt and the death that was everywhere. Hiding reality, pretending it didn’t exist.

  Her brother was in the sitting room reading the newspaper when we arrived. There was a fire made up in the grate.

  ‘I have to go soon, Ria,’ he said, without looking at me.

  He was a man in a smart suit, the sort of man I had seen in Jaffna when there had been some peace talks.

  ‘This is Anula,’ Ria said.

  Next to him, she suddenly appeared frail.

  ‘My sister is very upset by what has happened,’ he said when she left the room. ‘Hence her generosity.’

  He smiled thinly. I presumed he meant the money for the airfare and the visa. He wanted gratitude, I saw.

  ‘Not just that,’ he corrected me. ‘I mean, she’s had to guarantee your trip too.’

  Of course I knew. I told him she had insisted she would help. That I had not asked.

  ‘Yes, well,’ he said.

  I could hear him rattling the loose change in his pocket. What did he want me to say? That I would pay her back? I had no money. Did he not know I had paid for Ben to leave and so had nothing? He was silent, staring at the fire and then his feet. I could hear Ria clattering cups in the kitchen. Shame spread its heat over me. I was a beggar in this country, unwanted, despised. I stood, caught in the dim glow of the fire, not knowing what I should do. Ria came in with a tray and switched on a light.

  She went back out again.

  ‘I will try to pay her back,’ I said, speaking softly, so she wouldn’t hear.

  ‘Good!’ Jack said, shortly. His voice was like his sister’s. ‘These are difficult times for all of us, you know. With the fall in the stock market and problems with investments,’ he mumbled.

  ‘What do you mean, Jack?’ Ria said sharply, coming in with a jug of hot water.