The Swimmer

by Roma Tearne

  ‘I mean we are all a lot poorer in this country at the moment,’ he said crossly.

  ‘I don’t know why you need to tell us that,’ she retorted.

  Jack made a small, irritated sound and checked his watch.

  ‘Look, can we stop fussing and have this tea. I’ve got a long drive ahead.’

  She nodded instantly.

  ‘There’s going to be more snow tonight.’

  ‘Exactly. I don’t want to be cut off,’ he said. ‘I’ve work tomorrow.’

  He went soon after that, gathering his coat and briefcase. His mobile phone rang once and he answered it impatiently. I noticed that everything he did, every gesture, had an undertone of irritation. I had begun thinking in Tamil. My mind had switched into another mode and I could not think of a single thing to say in English. As he was leaving, kissing his sister briefly on the cheek, nodding in my direction without looking at me, the doorbell rang. I stood up and moved towards the hall as a draught of cold air was let in.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ I heard Jack say. ‘What are you doing out in this weather? Ria, it’s Eric. Sorry—can’t stay, long drive and all that.’

  I froze. The front door closed and I could hear Eric talking to Ria quietly. There was a sound of a car skidding as it turned and then the sound of it disappeared into the distance.

  ‘Anula,’ Ria called out, ‘Eric’s back to see you!’

  No one knew what to say.

  ‘You left this behind,’ he said, without looking at me, giving me my handbag.

  It was my best handbag, but in the reality that I was in, it looked small and shabby. I was ashamed.

  ‘I was thinking I’d call for you tomorrow,’ he said in a low voice, ‘and we’d go for a drive in the snow.’

  ‘Would you like a glass of wine, Eric?’ Ria asked, reappearing with a bottle.

  ‘I’d like that,’ I said awkwardly. ‘What time?’

  ‘You’ll need to wear something else,’ Ria said.

  We spoke at the same time. She poured the wine. In the firelight I was shocked to see how sick she looked.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘I feel sick.’

  And she went out, quickly.

  ‘Anula,’ Eric said.

  He turned towards me, but I was looking at the ground.

  ‘Look at me.’

  ‘I didn’t know what I was doing,’ I whispered.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I came here because I was worried about you, knowing what you must be thinking. I don’t want you punishing yourself. Let’s talk tomorrow? Can we?’

  Still, I couldn’t look at him.

  ‘Anula, we did nothing wrong. There isn’t anything to be ashamed about, you know. We haven’t hurt anyone. Anula?’

  He moved nearer to me. Already I loved the way he said my name, but I was also trying to hold on to thoughts of Ben.

  ‘Not now,’ I murmured.

  I felt sick with a myriad of emotions. We could hear the sound of Ria’s movements in the other room.

  ‘She’s not feeling too good,’ Eric said. ‘I’ll go now. Will you promise me one thing? Will you promise me you will not judge any of this until we speak tomorrow?’

  I could promise him nothing. Seeing this, understanding, in part, he put his hand on mine. Then he bent over and kissed me on the cheek. I knew he understood more than he said, I knew, too, that he was suffering, but the judgement I was rapidly making on myself blocked his words. He could see there was no talking to me.

  ‘Ten o’clock,’ he said, squeezing my hands. ‘Okay? Tell Ria I said goodbye.’

  And he left.

  The rest of the evening was terrible. Under any circumstances, even if I were not a woman who lived in a different culture, what had happened would be in bad taste. I wanted a priest; I wanted to confess to someone. Ria had made something to eat, but neither of us had any appetite. All I wanted was to rest a little until the morning came. She understood and gave me some pills. I knew she kept them in the bathroom cabinet upstairs. I knew where the rest of them were. Ria had hollows around her eyes, made darker by the firelight. We spoke a little but only of trivial things. She told me that she had not seen such a snowfall as this since she was a child. I told her that I had first heard about snow in books from England. I looked at her obliquely. What would she say if she knew what I had done today? We did not mention Ben. Accident had brought us all together but then abandoned us, unconnected.

  On the television that night the news was all about the war between Israel and Hamas. I saw bodies of children being removed from the rubble created by Israeli war planes. If you closed your eyes slightly, the images could be of Jaffna. Women crying as they do the world over, men watching in stunned silence while others held up machine guns as victory signs; dancing in the street. There was nothing new here. A small child, covered in blood, carried in her father’s arms, rushed screaming towards a waiting ambulance. I watched, impassively. The child had dark glossy hair, just like Ben’s. If you took away hope, I wondered, if you destroyed everything precious, if you showed no mercy, did you make a suicide bomber? My heart was a stone. To have nothing is a million miles away from having very little, I thought. Ria sat beside me. I thought of the endless wiping out of generations at home. Love that could never return. Images of the Israeli flag being burnt outside some embassy in London flickered on the screen. The camera panned the road outside Downing Street. Perhaps, I thought, if we had fought harder, if more of us had been slaughtered, the world might have noticed?

  ‘At least we can fight for justice,’ Ria said.

  Startled, I looked at her.

  ‘I mean, if we can get to court,’ she said. ‘If it is possible, I shall do it. I want people to know what happened. The disgrace of it.’

  I didn’t want to comment. In her very first phone call she had told me her plans to bring the police to account.

  ‘I will fight for it!’ she had cried. ‘I promise.’

  I wondered if she believed this was still possible or whether, like me, she now knew it was a hollow hope. The dead could never be vindicated.

  The news finished and she poured herself a glass of water. Then she turned to me.

  ‘What will you do when you get back?’ she asked. ‘How will you manage?’

  She looked a little wild. Tension coiled in me, hysteria bubbled up. I wondered if I might get to her bathroom cabinet after she was asleep. What I did was no longer of any importance to me, I wanted to shout. Why do you care? I wanted to scratch the calm off her face, make her react. Maybe it was myself I wished to hurt? The urge died as suddenly as it arose.

  That night I did not sleep. Hours went by; occasionally I went over to the window and looked out, but there was never anything to see. Snow fell invisibly in the darkness and the temperature dropped further so I could not even stand by the window for long. Several times I wanted to leave my room, but the light under Ria’s bedroom door stopped me. I had forgotten about Tara. All night I tossed around in the darkness. Several times I saw the light in the hall go on and once I heard Ria in the bathroom. She’s ill, I thought. Grief has sickened her and revealed me as a different kind of woman. Unscrupulous, without morals. The truth was out. On and on I went, unable to think of Ben, trying to forget Eric. And the worst of it was, I wanted him, again. Tomorrow, I decided, I would get the tablets from the bathroom and without fuss would end it.

  The coach has come to a halt, stuck in another traffic jam. Someone is asking the driver how long we will be. The passengers seem restless, anxious to move on to their final destination. All of them except me. I sit trying to make sense of the things that I did and didn’t do.

  The next morning, as promised, Eric arrived. Ria and I had both woken at the same time. I’d say neither of us had slept much. Ria gave me a pair of trousers and a pullover. She gave me some tights and socks, she gave me gloves and boots. Then she made us both breakfast, which neither of us ate.

  ‘I’m going to spend the morning working,’ she sai
d.

  But then she pulled a face.

  ‘Well…in theory,’ she qualified.

  Her eyes were red-rimmed and I thought she must have spent the whole night in tears.

  ‘Eric is being very sweet to you,’ she said.

  Does she know? I thought, petrified.

  ‘I think he liked Ben, that’s all,’ I told her.

  ‘If he didn’t like you, he wouldn’t bother this much. Eric isn’t polite. He hates my brother, for example. He can hardly bear to say hello!’

  I made a small sound of denial, which she didn’t hear.

  ‘Why shouldn’t he like you, anyway?’

  I knew her motives were admirable, but as I could not match them, I hated her for it. Suddenly it seemed to me that all I had ever despised in my own people, my hatred of their deceit and their destructiveness, their jealousies, their prejudices, applied to me too. I was filled with self-loathing. I went searching in Ria’s bathroom, but the bottle of tablets had gone. There was nothing to do but face Eric.

  He was dressed in an old-fashioned suit that made him look smarter, younger than he had yesterday. He took his cloth cap off and unwound the scarf around his neck. Then he handed both of us a white flower.

  ‘It’s a hyacinth,’ he told me. ‘I was growing them in my greenhouse and I noticed a few days ago that they were beginning to come out.’

  I didn’t know how to thank him, so I reached up and kissed him on the cheek, awkwardly. To cover my confusion, I told him I knew these flowers. We had our own varieties growing in the canals near Jaffna. Ours were water hyacinths and they grew wild but they smelt the same. Ria didn’t say anything. The scent of the flowers was strong in the warmth of the kitchen. The light from outside sharpened across the kitchen table. There was a feeling of suppressed violence in the room.

  ‘What will you do?’ he asked Ria, as I put my coat on and pulled on my boots.

  ‘Oh, I shall try to work.’

  ‘Why don’t you go back to bed, love?’ Eric said, and I was struck by the tenderness in his voice. ‘You’ll do no work today.’

  She shook her head without looking at me.

  ‘No, I must try.’

  I thought of all the things she must be longing for. For the funeral to be over, for me to leave, for her to get her own life back, or the pain of this relationship to die down, for another to take its place. Just like me, I thought bitterly. I’ve become like some white woman. Eric was watching me.

  Outside, the snow was falling more slowly. It would go on all day in this way, Eric said.

  He turned the heat up in the car. In the few minutes that he had been inside, snow had covered the windscreen.

  ‘I saw your deer,’ he told me.

  She must have spoken to him after I went to bed. Had they talked about me, too?

  ‘It’s lost. Mother killed by poachers, no doubt, and the rest of the herd’s probably rejecting it. Not sure how long it will survive. I rang the rangers, they’re going to take a look, see what they can do.’

  ‘Where did you see it?’ I asked.

  ‘Just by the copse, leaving my house, you know. On the brow of the hill.’

  In another life I would have marvelled at the way he spoke; the lilt in his voice, the storybook words. Our ex-colonial lives had been marked not only by violence, but also by the romance of the English language. Far more than we were prepared to acknowledge. My father would have loved to visit; Percy, too. And here I was, instead, sleeping with a stranger. It was a nightmare.

  ‘The snow is beautiful,’ I murmured.

  ‘You were brought here,’ Eric said, ‘by your lad. Think of it like that. He’s opened up this part of the world for you. And brought your world to me. Though that’s less important.’

  I felt myself beginning to shake. There were animal tracks all the way down to the frozen river.

  ‘Would you rather we didn’t go back to the house?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said before I could stop myself.

  Suddenly I desperately wanted him to touch me again. Appalled, I knew what else I wanted. Terrified, I wanted to run away.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with you,’ he said. He spoke very gently. I had heard him talk to the dog in this way.‘You’re just stunned. What do you expect? That your mind can take in everything all at once? It isn’t possible. You found some comfort. By chance. It came your way. Don’t question it. Accept. You have hurt no one.’

  We were driving through a white landscape of breathtaking beauty. Snow hung like fruit off the bare branches.

  ‘When my son was killed,’ Eric said, ‘everyone was sympathetic. The papers were full of the tragedy of the war in Afghanistan. I had public support. The locals all knew me, knew my son. They had known my wife, of course; some of them had even come to her funeral. So everyone was kind to me. They cooked me food, they did my laundry for me. Some of the lads, mates of my son’s who had got back safely, were already helping on the farm. And there was a woman I knew in Snape. She was called Ellen.’

  He paused. I said nothing, staring out of the window. We were turning into the lane that led to his house. The dog had heard the car and was barking. When we stopped, he first opened the door before helping me out into the cold. Snow fell on my face, on my lips and I licked it without thinking. He was watching me with a small smile, inscrutable. I wanted him to finish the story of his son, but the dog was racing around in the snow, joyously wagging its tail. It recognised me.

  ‘Floss,’ Eric called.

  He whistled and the dog came back obediently and shook itself all over the flagstones.

  ‘Something to drink,’ Eric said, and he put the kettle on.

  He took out a small fruit loaf and began to slice it.

  ‘My neighbour at the next farm baked this today. Try some.’

  He put out butter and mugs and a jug of milk. Then he poured us both some strong, bitter-tasting coffee and buttered a piece of the fruit bread.

  ‘I wanted you to taste the fruit from my trees,’ he said.

  I had not heard such a tone of voice for years. He took out his pipe and began to clean it. I waited.

  ‘Well, Ellen thought, I suppose, since I was, you know, a widower, just lost my only son, perhaps I needed comfort. I didn’t look too upset, you see. I looked as if I was just, well…lonely. There was no proper funeral because he was killed overseas and there was no body to bring back. I didn’t shed a tear at the memorial service, and afterwards I seemed to carry on in true British fashion. The war was still raging. But it was elsewhere.’

  Eric paused and emptied his pipe. Then he began to pack it with tobacco.

  ‘Ellen was very good to me. She was always cooking me little titbits I didn’t want but ate anyway because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. We went on like that for a few months.’

  He smiled and lit his pipe. Then he drew on it and puffed out the smoke. Instantly I breathed in the tobacco and something stirred within me.

  ‘It was winter when my son was killed. A winter just like this; heavy snow cutting off the farms, making it difficult to move around much. Weather from Siberia, everyone said, I remember. I had cows in those days, so there was milking to be done. The trucks came for the milk daily. Ellen was there for me, helping in every way she could. Then finally the snow began to thaw and the rivers to flow again. The weather was still bitter and now there was rain, too. In all this time I said nothing about my son, never even mentioned his name. Something was locked in me. Something had got stuck.’

  He sat quietly, the smoke from his pipe filling the room. The whole world was steeped in silence as Eric continued his story. He told me that spring had come before he felt anything. One morning he had been out with the tractor and the air was filled with the smell of earth. Fresh, clean smells. It had been a warm day, an exceptionally blue sky. He remembered it as if it were yesterday. Willow trees were beginning to grow leaves again. He had heard a cuckoo, the earth was on the move, restless to recharge itself. Eric, to
o, felt restless. He knew Ellen should not be there, doing his washing, cooking his food. She should have moved on and found her own life. She might have done, if he hadn’t been encouraging her with his silent acceptance of her presence. But he saw that she had been useful in bandaging up his emotions.

  ‘I was standing there, looking over the land, I remember,’ he told me, ‘whenever a formation of planes flew overhead. It was what they always did at that time of day, practising, I suppose, for the future. The war was hotting up. More and more young men were being killed and needed replacing, and I guessed there were secret plans for some big event. Anyway, the planes flew over like a flock of birds and I watched them disappear over the horizon. And suddenly, at that moment, something broke in me. Broke completely. I cried as I have never cried before. Or since. I cried for all the lost innocence over that horizon.’

  He stopped talking and re-lit his pipe.

  ‘Later,’ he said, with a sad smile, ‘I told Ellen it would not work between us.’

  We sat in silence. I had eaten the bread without noticing. The dog whined in its sleep and Eric sighed and stood up. He took my hands in both his and looked at me.

  ‘You are grieving in your own way,’ he said. ‘Not as others might expect you to, but in your own way. What happened between us…it need not be spoken of. Not because there is shame attached, but because it is something just for you…what little light I can give. Soon you will be gone. Take comfort where you can; one love does not cancel out another. You’ll see.’

  And then he led me upstairs to the little room with its funny crooked windows and its amazing view of the flat, white land.

  I am thinking of that moment, now, from the distance of this journey in the coach. That was all it was, a moment. Gone in a flash. Love of a kind, comfort too. I did not think of Ben. I had suspended thought. What was in that loving, that I never had before? Expectations, perhaps; hopelessness, certainly. He told me he was an old man, I said I was a woman nearly so. I know that touch was what I craved. I had never wanted anything in my entire life quite so much as him. The room was warm and familiar this second time. We were slower. He was looking at me; we were looking at each other with all awkwardness gone. He told me his son had died ten years ago and I guessed that Ellen had left him not long after that. How did he, a man from the other side of the moon, understand my needs?