The Swimmer

by Roma Tearne

  ‘Here he is,’ the policewoman said.

  She’d been talking to me all this time. I hadn’t said much, but she had kept up a steady stream of soft conversation. Like the brook at Withy Common, she’d been.

  ‘Did you resent her?’

  ‘No.’

  She had realised quite early on that I didn’t want her to touch me. I suppose they are trained to work these things out. Anyway, she just talked; giving me the facts, knowing this was what I wanted most. When she saw Eric’s car, she turned to me.

  ‘I’ll have a word with him, love. Then you can come out, okay?’

  I nodded, unable to speak. She got out of the car. I caught a glimpse of Eric, his long legs unfolding as he climbed out of his car. Then I saw Flossie bouncing around and I heard her bark once or twice at the policewoman.

  ‘Be quiet, Floss,’ I heard Eric say, and I imagined Floss sniffing the policewoman and then wagging her tail. I saw all these things without looking. I saw them in my head. There was a pause. A silence. Then I heard a sound, soft and muffled, not like any sound I had heard before. And then the policewoman was opening my door and helping me out and Flossie was running around in circles between my legs while Eric simply stood absolutely still, his shoulders hunched, staring at the ground. We must have seen each other at the same instance.

  ‘Lydi,’ he said, in his old, familiar voice, only now it was quivering and shocked.

  I stop. Stephanie waits for me to continue.

  ‘That’s all I can remember,’ I say flatly, knowing she wants more, knowing she’s waiting for me to say that I ran to him crying. Or that he cried, or that the policewoman cried. I know she wanted a conclusion of some sort. But she isn’t bloody getting one.

  I don’t recall a great deal more of the rest of that night. I think Eric and I clung together without saying too much. Eric absorbed the impact without any showiness. His face hardly changed. Tears rolled down his lined face without sound, he held me gently and then took me inside into his huge old kitchen where he sat me down beside the dying fire. I had known this place all my life. My mother used to take me there from the moment I had been born and set me down in my Moses basket on the dining table beside the fire. I had taken my first footsteps on these very flagstones. It was to this kitchen I had returned after my first day at school, hungry and full of excited news about my day. And now here I was again, sitting staring at Eric’s hands as he deftly made up the fire. And my mother was dead. The thought had no meaning to it.

  After a while, during which he sat in shocked, subdued silence, Eric offered the policewoman some tea. I suppose she felt uneasy about leaving us in this state; perhaps she was more used to people who cried and screamed, and perhaps our joint silence unnerved her. So she drank some tea with us before leaving. Promising to return the following day, urging us to eat something, hoping we would get through the night. And then at last we were alone together. Eric and I.

  Looking back, I think Eric began to tell me the whole story on that very night. I barely understood, of course, but I think he wanted me to understand certain things before Uncle Jack returned.

  ‘You will have to live with them,’ he warned. ‘Jack is your legal guardian.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  He nodded, staring at the ground.

  ‘It will be said that I am too old anyway, and the other side of your family is not an alternative.’

  He had never said anything like that before. I registered his words, but all else was so overwhelming that I did not pick up on them. The full impact of what had happened was beginning to dawn on me by now and there was no room for any other thoughts. A little later there was the sound of a car and our local GP arrived, followed by Sarah’s mother. I did not want to see her and so I went up to the spare room to hide while Eric dealt with the visitors. I was crying now, quietly and in earnest, although even through my tears I had the sense that what I was feeling wasn’t really proper grief. That would come much later on. After the visitors had left, I heard Eric coming up the stairs. His footsteps were slow and weary. He was carrying a bowl of warm milk with bread and honey and he sat on the end of the bed and fed it to me.

  ‘He really loved you!’ Stephanie says, pointlessly.

  I ignore her. There is nothing this woman can tell me that is of any use. I really don’t know what I’m doing here.

  ‘You’ll have to live with them,’ he said again, ‘but your home is here. Any time, every holiday. Always. I shall tell them.’

  I had always known in some subliminal way that Eric did not like Uncle Jack and Miranda.

  ‘Had you ever wondered why this was?’ Stephanie asks.

  I shake my head and look at her pityingly. Didn’t she know; that wasn’t how children’s minds worked, the fool!

  ‘They were all there at the funeral,’ I say.

  Jack, Miranda, Sophie and Zach. My ex-friend Sarah, her parents; the whole of Orford, really. Except, of course, the bitch Heather, who couldn’t come because of Jack. The policewoman, standing at the back, coming up to me afterwards to hug me. Oh God, everyone was there.

  ‘You call her your “ex-friend”. But she wasn’t that yet, was she?’

  ‘Sarah? Oh, she was. She was that instantly. From the moment my mother died, the relationship between us was uneven. She knew that. We both did.’

  ‘But she still wanted to be your friend, didn’t she?’

  ‘She wanted to pity me.’

  ‘Do you think your response was right?’

  I give Stephanie a contemptuous look.

  ‘What if it wasn’t?’ I say. ‘The friendship could no longer work, don’t you see?’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘It was almost the summer holidays.’

  I had gone back to school briefly, but everything had changed in some strange and subtle way. The school and the teachers were sympathetic, the other girls tried to be nice to me, everything was as before. It was I who had changed. For the first time I noticed the way other families were made up and what difference it made to have an older or younger sibling. I saw that those of my friends who had complained about members of their family in the past—the younger sister who used all their make-up, the older brother who bossed them around—did not really mean what they said. Their complaints were fake complaints and the realisation filled me with bitterness. I was beginning to see that the world was not the place I had believed it to be.

  But all this was still buried in me. I spent what was left of that summer living with Eric. There were a lot of loose ends to be tied up. It shocked me (and I tried to hide the shock) that such a momentous thing as a person dying could be dealt with so quickly. Eric knew what was going on in my head, but he said nothing. When he finally got round to talking about the past he told me he was simply biding his time that summer, waiting for the outer wound to heal before he disturbed the ashes of the past. So for the moment, all that summer, in weather that was unimaginably wonderful, I stayed at the farm while Eel House was packed up and rented out to tenants from overseas and Uncle Jack attended to the legal matters resulting from the accident. I understood vaguely that I was going to be rich when I grew up. I learnt this uninteresting fact from Sarah. She came once to visit me at the farm before going on holiday with her family. The visit was not successful. Eric was out checking his trees and Sarah and I had the run of the house. We decided to walk to the river the long way round. Without a word being said, both of us wanted to avoid the path that led to Eel House. I remember thinking with surprise that we could still read each other’s minds even though we were only fake friends now. Perhaps this is always the case. Having known someone well, you never really forget the way their mind works. Anyway, by tacit agreement we went down to the river via the matchstick wood. In the past we had often walked this way, looking for the fossils that my mother said existed in this forest. We were no longer interested in fossils, of course. Sarah was a year older than me and she’d got herself a boyfriend. She began to talk
about him now. He wanted to sleep with her, she told me, but she wasn’t sure if she should wait a few weeks. She spoke seriously, there was none of the smutty humour of the summer before. So we were changed.

  ‘There’ll be lots of boys interested in you now,’ she said.

  I would be starting at a new school in London in the autumn when I moved in with Jack and Miranda. I had not wanted to discuss the move, hoping that if I didn’t it might go away. For the first time I became aware of the concept of happiness.

  ‘Children do not perceive happiness the way adults do,’ I tell Stephanie. ‘And I was now an adult.’

  Stephanie says nothing. Her face is a perfect blank, waiting for me to continue.

  ‘I remember that walk particularly vividly. It was the last time I ever saw Sarah,’ I say.

  ‘You’re going to be very rich,’ Sarah said as we reached the river and went over to where Eric had moored his boat. ‘My mother says you will never have to worry about anything because the insurance money from your mum’s accident will pay for everything.’

  She didn’t say it, but I knew she was thinking I was lucky. Sarah’s father had been unemployed for years. Their family had lost all their savings in the depression of 2009 and later on their house too. And here was I, about to go to a private school paid for by the money from my dead mother’s insurance.

  ‘Your family does rather well from insurance, my mum reckons,’ Sarah said, trying not to sound nasty.

  I had no idea what she meant.

  ‘Why didn’t you ask her?’ Stephanie interrupts.

  I shake my head. It’s difficult to explain the disjointed way in which we conversed with each other. Nothing revealed itself simply. Perhaps this had been my failing.

  ‘Surely you were curious?’ Stephanie asks.

  I don’t bother to reply.

  All that hot summer’s afternoon, with my mother not long dead we messed around on the river as though there was nothing different in the way we were. I noticed my legs had begun to turn a deep nut brown. Always in the past when this happened my mother used to comment on the way I tanned. I was secretly filled with loathing. I knew she was trying to make me feel proud of my Mongolian half, but I felt it was more important to her than to me. I just wanted to be like her. She herself was so fair that it took the whole summer for her to change colour, and even then she would have to be careful not to burn. At some point when the sun was at its brilliant highest, while we were moored under one of the willow trees upstream, a flock of birds were disturbed by some RAF planes flying overhead. They were going in the direction of Mildenhall airstrip, reminding us that we were a country on the brink of war with some Middle Eastern country or other, yet again.

  ‘My brother’s joined the army,’ Sarah said, watching the planes until they disappeared. ‘Mum’s angry with him. She says he should have told us before he did.’

  ‘Will he go to the Middle East, then?’

  ‘Probably,’ she said shortly.

  I digested this fact. So her brother might die, too.

  ‘Everybody might die at any time,’ I told Eric that night. ‘We are all skittles, waiting to be knocked down.’

  The journey from childhood to being grown up had been quick.

  ‘Before you go to London,’ Eric said. ‘I’ve some things I want to give you.’

  I didn’t want to go to London.

  ‘You’ll be back,’ he said. ‘It won’t be for long. These private schools have short terms.’

  The funny thing was, we didn’t talk about Mum but it felt as if we were talking about her all the time subliminally. Sometimes one or other of us started to cry in the middle of a silence, as if we’d just been saying something about her.

  The house was now packed up. The piano had been removed to Eric’s place because we didn’t want the renters to use it. All my mother’s stuff and the things I didn’t want in my new room at Uncle Jack’s house were being stored in Eric’s attic. I felt glad that they were out of the way of my relatives’ prying eyes even then. The summer wore on, a summer of outstanding weather.

  ‘Always the way,’ Eric muttered, ‘during a war.’

  I knew he was thinking about the other wars he had lived through.

  ‘This is your home now,’ he said on another occasion. ‘Don’t forget that. Your things are here, your piano. You’ve a bedroom here, too. So whenever you want, you can come over.’

  We were shelling peas in the kitchen, with the back door open. It was the last day of August and although still light there was a feeling of slight change in the way it fell. Soon the nights would be drawing in.

  ‘You’ll have no one to talk to much,’ I said, meaning when I left for London.

  ‘Oh, don’t mind me. I’ll keep busy. And don’t forget I have the house to keep me company.’

  The farmhouse was a living, breathing thing to him in the way Eel House had once been to me.

  ‘And will be again,’ he corrected me. ‘Your early years are there,’ he said. ‘Your ma’s there. And others too.’

  We had scattered my mother’s ashes along the riverbank. Strangely enough it had been Jack’s idea. It had pleased Eric.

  ‘She’ll be there,’ he said. ‘Walking along the path. Like she used to when she was a girl. Her father, your grandfather, used to tell her off. She was always coming home with some animal or other she had found in the river. Once she slipped and fell in! There had been a lot of rain at that time. But your ma was a strong swimmer. No water would get the better of her!’

  He sounded pleased; as he should be, for it had been Eric who taught her to swim. My mother had been dead for three months by now and the strange thing was that the more time that passed, the worse things felt. Eric seemed to understand this for suddenly, with only one week to go before Uncle Jack came to collect me, he took me out in the boat. He had received a letter from abroad and wanted my advice, he said.

  19

  MAY 2ND. THIRD SESSION.

  ‘And that was when you heard of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The sound of a lawn mower drifts in through the open window making it impossible for us to speak. Grass scents and piercing birdcalls fill the air. The light is luminous. Stephanie is watching me like a hawk. We have reached this point quicker than I expected. I dislike her less.

  ‘Tell me?’

  I frown. I am used to arranging my emotions like a row of shoes, all polished and ready to be worn, but somehow, never used. I don’t care to be ordered about in this way. Watch it, Stephanie, I think.

  ‘He took me upstream for a day’s fishing. That’s how I knew he had something important to say.’

  Someone was flying a kite. It floated lazily in a hard, diamondblue sky. There were no clouds, not even wisps of ones. When we had rowed out a little way to his favourite spot, we settled down and Eric cast his line.

  ‘Imagine what it must be like in the tropics,’ he said.

  That was how he began. I watched a dragonfly hovering above the waterline. Small insects bumbled about. The sun shone like cut glass on the water as he told me this story.

  ‘There is a small island in the Indian Ocean that once lay on the trade routes for the western world,’ he said.

  The Dutch had travelled there and the Portuguese in their fleets of sailing ships. By the time the English arrived there were gardens of splendour, irrigation systems of remarkable intricacy and forts built around the harbour. The English were enchanted by the sight; never had they seen such a perfect place in all their travels, never had they seen such wide sandy beaches, such blue hills, such smiling people. They set to work. They built roads, and astonishing narrowgauge railways. They cleared some of the jungles and they planted forests of rubber trees to supply the world with raw rubber. They covered those blue hills with a soft cloak of tea bushes. Ceylon tea became the finest tea in the world and the English set the native people to work to help them keep it this way. But that was long ago, so long as to be now considered unimportant. Then t
he day came when the Union Jack was taken down and the English left for home again. A new flag of saffron and maroon was raised. The island of Ceylon was no more and the natives, without the masterly watch of the masters, began to fight. What began as a playground fight continues today, stopping and starting, rearranging itself, pretending to be over but continuing regardless.

  ‘Tamils,’ I said, for I had heard about them in the news.

  ‘Not just the Tamils,’ Eric corrected me. ‘The government is made up of another ethnic group, much larger than the Tamils.’

  ‘But that was all years ago, wasn’t it?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘It’s in remission at the moment. Not over, just waiting to mutate into another, deadlier form. These things don’t just go away.’

  I wondered why he was telling me all this. What had it to do with me? Opening my mouth to ask him, I was distracted by a large water bird wading into the river beside us, eyes intently on the lookout for fish. Then, in the gentle glare of that summer’s afternoon, nearly three months after my mother’s death, I listened to the story of a man who had once lived on the northernmost tip of the island of Sri Lanka.

  His name was Ben Chinniah and he had grown up in a country wracked by a sadistic civil war. This war had gone on for so long that there was no means of distinguishing myth from reality, statistics from propaganda, facts from fiction. The war itself was the thing that mattered, and all was fair in it. Ben Chinniah, Eric told me, was only about thirteen when his father disappeared, and by the time he was twenty-four it was clear that he would either have to go into hiding or leave the country. He was a fully qualified doctor and his desire to help people had not gone unnoticed.

  ‘In a war,’ said Eric, ‘you must kill, not help one another.’

  I supposed he was thinking about his son, Kevin. I had heard the story of Kevin from my mother when I was younger.

  Ben Chinniah decided to leave his home. He had heard stories of others who had migrated successfully and so he began to save his money for his illegal fare for Europe. He wanted to come to England because, well, because for one thing he spoke English, and for another his country had a history of connections with Britain.