Swimming Lessons

by Claire Fuller

  “Wait,” he said, sitting up straight, with one hand on his forehead and the other in the air, as if she had been doing something to stop him thinking. “Wait, I know this story.”

  “It isn’t a story, Richard. It’s my family.”

  “No, of course, sorry.” He was still trying to remember when she turned away from him and dropped the tablecloth around her feet. She opened the case again, took out a clean pair of knickers and pulled them on. She found her jeans, sniffed the crotch, and stepped into them. She didn’t look at Richard because she couldn’t bear to see the dawning of that little piece of knowledge.

  Flora picked up a bra, tried to hook it together, missed the catches, tried again, and heard him say a short, embarrassed “Oh.” When the bra caught, she squatted beside the bed and fought her way into a T-shirt that had been lying there. Richard leaned forwards and gently took hold of her wrist. The black shoulder socket she had drawn on him flexed as his arm moved, and he said, “I’m sorry. About your mother.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Flora said brightly. “She might not be dead.”

  “But,” Richard said, “I thought she—”

  “The newspapers,” Flora spoke over him, “got it wrong.”

  “—drowned . . . a long time ago,” Richard finished.

  “I . . .” Flora started. “She’s lost, that’s all.” The coconut smell and the golden honey colour came again, her mother turning in sunlight. “We don’t know what happened. And it was eleven years ago. But now she’s back. Daddy saw her in Hadleigh.” Flora couldn’t hide her excitement.

  “What?” Richard still had hold of her wrist.

  “I can’t go into it now. I just have to get home. He needs me.” She sat on the bed beside him. She knew she wouldn’t see Richard again, because he would look at her differently now that he had learned who she was. She hated it when her parents became the thing men found most interesting about her.

  “Let me drive you.” His hand slipped from her wrist and held her fingers. “Is Hadleigh where your father lives?”

  “Nearby. I’ll get the last train; it’s no problem. You probably need to get back too.” She was aware of the change in his posture at these words, a realization of what she might mean.

  “When does it go?” Richard stood up, pressed his phone.

  “About ten, I think.”

  “That’s in fifteen minutes. Flora, you won’t make it. Take my car.”

  Chapter 2

  THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 2ND JUNE 1992, 4:04 AM

  Dear Gil,

  It’s four in the morning and I can’t sleep. I found a pad of this yellow paper and I thought I’d write you a letter. A letter putting down all the things I haven’t been able to say in person—the truth about our marriage from the beginning. I’m sure I’ll write things you’ll claim I imagined, dreamed, made up; but this is how I see it. This, here, is my truth.

  If I asked, could you say when we first met?

  I can tell you. It was the 6th of April, 1976, although I’m being easygoing with the word ‘met.’ It was a Tuesday. Sunny and warm, with an excitement that spring had arrived and was going to stay. Louise and I had been sitting on the lawn outside the university library ignoring the notices to keep off the grass and talking about what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. Of course, neither of us knew what it would be, but we both agreed it would be different from our mothers’ lives (keeping house, looking after children, not working), which we dismissed as parochial and pointless.

  “I’m not worried about having money,” Louise said.

  “Or things,” I said.

  “God, no. Things—children, husbands, houses, men—just tie you down. Stop you doing what you want to do. It’s all about education now. That was the problem with our mothers—no education. No degree. What use were they to anyone?”

  “No use at all,” I said. (We were so critical, so uncompromising.) I lay back on the grass. “But I’d like to keep having sex. Now and again.”

  “Of course. We can have as much as we want when we’re away. No strings. No commitment. They have it; why shouldn’t we?”

  By “they,” Louise meant “men.”

  When we finished university, Louise and I were going to see what the world had to offer (places, people, and—inconsistently—men of course). We spent our evenings studying maps of South America, Australia, China, tracing routes, making plans, and drinking cheap red wine.

  That afternoon, Louise went to her history class and I went to fetch my bicycle from the racks. There, I found a note tucked between the brake cable and the handlebars of the man’s bike I’d bought from a fellow student. The note, which was folded in four, said (I memorised it): “Sir, in future, please be more careful when locking your bicycle. You appear to have attached yours to mine, and now I have to walk home in the rain without an umbrella.”

  The day was sunny, remember? The words had been written in pencil and in some places the point had gone through the paper, as if the writer had rested it on a trousered knee. There wasn’t a signature.

  I glanced around, tucked the note into my pocket, put a clip around one leg of my jeans, and unlocked the bikes. I picked a daffodil from a nearby flower bed, threaded it through the spokes of the bike next to mine, and rode home. The next day another note had been tucked under the brake wires, although I’d propped my bike in a different spot. This one, in the same handwriting, made me laugh: “You shouldn’t pick the university’s flowers,” it said. “The bigwigs won’t like it, and, no doubt, were the dean to hear, you’d have to sit through one of his interminable speeches about university standards. I can assure you it’s not worth it, however beautiful the flower and welcome the gesture.”

  After supper with Louise, I lay on my bed in the flat. I should’ve been working on an English paper but cut up a yellow envelope that I’d taken from the wastepaper basket. I shaped daffodil petals from it and glued them to a pencil, and when it was finished I laid the flower on my bedside table. It was the last thing I saw before I switched off the light. The next morning, I tucked the homemade daffodil between the handlebars and the brake cable of the note-writer’s bike. The bike was gone when I returned that afternoon, the flower with it.

  Then it was Easter and, on a crackling telephone line to Oslo, I convinced my aunt that since my rent had been paid for the whole year, I might as well stay on in London. Every morning during the holidays, Louise and I cycled north through Regent’s Park to the swimming ponds at Hampstead Heath, no matter the weather. We took hard-boiled eggs and Ritz crackers, towels, and swimming costumes. Louise always wanted to go to the ladies-only pond, and although it was farther and I’d have been happy to take my chances in the mixed pond, I didn’t argue—it was the water I went for: the chill of it as I lowered myself from the ladder, the verdigris hue of my legs as they kicked, the coot’s-eye view of the pond as I swam, with the insects hovering and the sunbeams refracting and reflecting, or rain speckling the surface. I liked the slap of the water against the boards of the wooden jetty, the distant laughter and shouts of other swimmers, and how, if I ducked below, I could open my eyes into a secret underwater world of weeds, mud, bubbles, and the quick flashes of other swimmers’ limbs. I was disappointed that, unlike the men in their pond, in the ladies-only we were forbidden to swim naked.

  When summer term started, so did the creative-writing module I’d signed up for, and in that first session we were still chattering at our desks when you came in. You put down your bag and leaned back on the lecturer’s table at the front of the room and crossed your ankles until one by one we noticed you and stopped talking. You looked young for thirty-nine, and handsome. On the blackboard behind you was a pie chart showing the chemical composition of seawater.

  The first thing you ever said to me was “What’s your name?” I remember thinking that your voice had been made for bedtime radio. The second thing you ever said to me was “Ingrid Torgensen, please would you lock the classroom door.
”

  I shuffled on my chair and glanced at my neighbour, who gave an embarrassed laugh.

  “Well, come on. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  I hesitated another moment, then went to the door and put my hand on the locking catch. Behind me there was talk and laughter as you directed the class to push the tables and chairs to the side of the room. I looked over my shoulder and saw you unpacking your bag. You took out an object wrapped in tissue paper and unrolled it from its covering—an empty jam jar. It was 1976, remember; we were young and ready for something new, excited by possibility. You placed the jar on the carpet, then sat cross-legged while you took out something else, also in tissue paper, and unwrapped it as if it were a precious thing. One by one the other students sat in a circle. You bent over the jam jar and inside it you put my homemade daffodil. The door lock turned under my fingers.

  “I’m going to tell a secret,” you said when I’d edged into a gap in the circle and sat down too. “And afterwards it’ll be your turn. Something you’ve never told anyone before. Something you’ve always been hiding.” You stared at the daffodil, your words slowed and quietened, and we leaned in to catch them. “Secret truths,” you said, “are the lifeblood of a writer. Your memories and your secrets. Forget plot, character, structure; if you’re going to call yourself a writer, you need to stick your hand in the mire up to the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder, and drag out your darkest, most private truth.” You came forwards and squatted on the floor in front of us.

  “I didn’t make that daffodil,” you said, nodding towards it. A couple of the petals had come off and the others were bent. I could feel the pump of blood around my body, the flush of heat up through my neck, to my cheeks.

  “I stole it,” you continued. “When I wasn’t much older than some of you, my mother became very ill. She was rushed into hospital and my father telephoned and told me to come immediately because she wouldn’t last the day. I lived a long way from the hospital and so I left what I was doing—writing or reading, perhaps—and jumped in my car. I had a distance to go, hours of driving, and I went fast without stopping, thinking about my mother, who I was very close to, in her hospital bed. I arrived in the early evening, parked the car haphazardly, and ran in.

  “My mother was an old-fashioned woman. She had rules of behaviour that had to be followed—an etiquette that we’ve almost forgotten now—and as I rushed into the building, even on her deathbed I knew my mother would want it done properly. I couldn’t turn up without a gift or some flowers, but the small hospital shop was closed.

  “So I went into the first ward I came to: a children’s ward. No one questioned who I was or what I was doing there. I’d hoped to find a bunch of flowers or some chocolates that I could take, telling myself I’d replace them as soon as the shop opened, but of course no one brings flowers or boxes of chocolates to ill children. Just as I was thinking I would have to go to my mother without taking anything, I saw a homemade daffodil alone in a vase on a bedside table.” You nodded towards the flower. “The child in the bed was asleep and he had no visitors, so I took the flower and found my way to my mother’s room. We said our good-byes and she died a few minutes after I gave it to her.”

  We were silent, watching you, watching the daffodil. One of the girls opposite me sniffed and wiped her eyes. And what did I think? Your story sounded so true, so heartfelt, that I nearly found myself believing it and questioning whether it was the same daffodil. It took me a long time to work out the truth from the fiction.

  I don’t remember what secrets my fellow students offered up in that lesson—none of them have stuck with me. All that remains is the stunned silence when we picked up our bags and coats to leave. I gave you no secrets; I didn’t stick my arm in the mire during that class or any other. It was much later that I made up a story for you. That afternoon, when I told Louise about the lesson, she said, “That man’s an idiot; you should stay away from him.”

  Gil, we miss you, please come home.

  Yours,

  Ingrid

  P.S. Whatever happened to your bicycle?

  Chapter 3

  Richard’s Morris Minor was the only car on the last ferry. Before Flora set off, he had given complicated instructions about how much choke she needed to get “the old girl” started, how the clutch was a “little sticky,” and how Flora mustn’t put the car into first gear when it was rolling or she might break a tooth. Flora imagined one of her canines cracking and splitting up the middle. But the car, even if it wasn’t practical, was pretty and smelled of raspberry-coloured warm plastic.

  The ferryman, wearing fluorescent-yellow oilskins, waved Flora on and told her they would be closing the service because of the bad weather.

  “High winds, my love,” was what he actually said.

  “But my sister is coming across tonight,” Flora shouted through the small gap she had wound in the car window, although now she couldn’t remember what Nan had said about when she was coming home, and Flora thought perhaps she should have gone to the hospital after all.

  “Not tonight she isn’t. She’ll have to go the long way round. Got your hand brake on?”

  Flora got out of the car, although the ferry only took ten minutes to cross The Pinch, to the curl of land shaped like a beckoning finger where she had grown up. She stood at the front barrier, pelted by slanting rain, while the engine strained and vibrated as it pulled the ferry across the short stretch of water on its chains. Flora’s stomach pitched and rolled with the boat. This night there were no lights on the opposite bank and they might have been sailing out to sea. She had never been the last passenger—the only passenger—and she wondered whether her mother had recently stood here to cross The Pinch, and whether they would recognise each other when they met. As the boat juddered and struggled, Flora imagined that each clank was the chains snapping, setting the little car ferry free to follow the rushing tide. The waves would roar over the ramp until the car deck was awash and the water flowed through the gap in the window of Richard’s Morris Minor. She would climb the ferry’s steps to the viewing platform and lean over the railings as the boat listed and its lights were extinguished one by one until the last, beside the navigation station, stuttered and was swallowed by the sea. Black waves would lift the boat up and roll it with the swell, like mountains rising where there had been no mountains before. The air would escape from each of the cavities and pipes and human lungs, and bubble to the surface while the ferry upended, nose first into the water, and she and Richard’s little car and all the yellow-jacketed men would sink to the bottom.

  It took two or three goes for Flora to start the car while the man waited impatiently on the ramp. He took a couple of steps towards her, but Flora swore, pulled the choke out, and with a jerk the car started and kept on going. The tollbooths on the road were unlit and the barriers were up; a free ride. The car’s headlights appeared to be weaker than when she had set off, and the rain drummed on the thin roof. The wipers were unable to cut through the blur fast enough, so Flora leaned forwards over the steering wheel to where the dim beams showed the road disappearing in black and white. Even with the heater going full blast, every few minutes she had to swipe at the windscreen with the side of her arm.

  The road from the ferry to the village cut through a nature reserve: salty wetlands crisscrossed with tracks, swampy in the hollows, rising to dusty dunes near the sea, and rocky outcrops inland. The sandy trails sliced through fields of marram grass and heather, skirted Little Sea Pond, a brackish lake lying low between the road and the sea, and passed by stands of wind-humped trees huddled together for protection.

  Darkness didn’t stop Flora from knowing every bend and sway of Ferry Road although she had never driven it, had always been the passenger, either in the front beside her sister or in the back, when they were children, in her father’s car. She had been almost ten when her mother had disappeared, and Flora couldn’t remember ever having been in a car with her, although that must have happened. S
he fiddled with the radio, sliding the dial, but only got static and an occasional faraway voice.

  The first bump on the car roof came when she must have been passing the Agglestone, a massive rock eroded into the shape of a boxer’s head, its broken nose flattened by the wind. It rested on a hill to her right, although there was no view of it through the misted windows. She wasn’t even certain she had heard anything over the rain and the throaty noise of the engine. Then something hit the windscreen and was swooshed away by the wipers. Flora reared back in her seat, hands gripping the thin steering wheel, her foot pressing the brake. The car slid across the wet surface to the other side of the road, and she tried to remember if she was meant to turn into a skid or away from it. Something else fell onto the bonnet and seemed to throw itself into the road, and then another, and another. The car came to a halt, stalling with one back tyre in the sandy verge and the rest on the tarmac. The gorse and hawthorn bushes pressed up against the side window as if shading their eyes to gaze in.

  Flora peered forwards and rubbed at the glass with her fist. The short beams thrown out by the headlights revealed objects falling and bouncing onto the road. When they stopped and she was sure the drumming on the roof was only the rain, she lifted herself over the hand brake and into the passenger’s seat, and then opened the door. The wind in the pines was a roar, and the rain slammed against the road. Without stepping down, she saw on the slick black tarmac a fish lying on its side with its mouth open. It was the size of her palm and shone with a silvery-blue iridescence. She stuck her left foot out to flip the thing over, and even in the rain she saw that the underside was lacerated, crushed when it had hit the ground. Shielding her eyes, Flora looked in the direction of the fading headlights: hundreds of the creatures lay across the road, a handful flapping feebly. They may have been baby mackerel. The wind pulled at the open door and Flora yanked it shut, climbed back over to the driver’s seat, and sat staring. She wasn’t sure she could bear to drive forward. She closed her eyes and turned the ignition. The engine clunked and wheezed twice, and when she tried it again it produced an old man’s cough—slow, painful, and phlegmy. She pulled the choke out, although Richard had said she wouldn’t need it when the engine was warm, but this time the car wouldn’t start. On the fourth try, the headlights went out and she was sitting in the dark.