Swimming Lessons

by Claire Fuller

  “I came to return your book,” I said, sitting in the middle of the sofa.

  “Book?” You said from behind me, where you were flinging coffee dregs from the window. The machine rumbled and hissed on the desk.

  “Sorry I took so long. I hope you haven’t missed it.” I fished the novel out of my bag and held it flat across my white legs where my dress had ridden up.

  You put the cups down and, sitting on the arm of the sofa, took the book from my lap. I pulled again at my hem. You flicked through the pages, stopping at several points and smiling to yourself.

  “I found your notes very helpful . . . ” I trailed off.

  “What?” you said, looking at me as if only then remembering I was there. You shook your head.

  “Your margin notes,” I said.

  “Margin notes? You didn’t think they were mine?” You laughed, head tilted back, showing your teeth—an infectious laugh, so that, despite feeling young and stupid, I smiled.

  “Oh Christ, they’re not mine. I was trying to show you another reader’s interpretation—that we all take different things from books. I may have underlined a few phrases in my time, folded over some corners, but I can honestly say I’ve never drawn a cock and balls in the margin of a book.” Heat was rising up from my neck. You bent back the page you had open and held it up to me. “Juvenile marginalia,” you said. “Drawn by a boy, about fifteen, a virgin, never been kissed, masturbates frequently. Cocks aren’t ever drawn by girls. And they are always drawn by their owners—have you ever seen a frenulum in a margin?”

  I shook my head because that seemed the correct response. I’d no idea what a frenulum was. I knew my face was red, but you were gracious enough not to comment.

  After a moment you said, “I take it you didn’t like the book?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said. “It was one of the worst books I’ve ever read.”

  “You read it all?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh dear. You weren’t meant to read it—it is dreadful. I shall have to make it up to you.” You stood and put the book on a different shelf from where you’d taken it, stuffing it into a gap. “How do you like your coffee? Actually, don’t bother to answer that, there’s no milk and no sugar.”

  “Black would be fine.”

  “I know . . .” You turned once more and sat again on the sofa’s arm. “Let’s not have coffee; let’s go out and get a proper drink.” You slid over the rounded arm of the chesterfield and landed beside me in a puff of dust. “You didn’t have any other plans, did you?”

  I’d never been so close to your peppery smell before. “I have to go to the library,” I said, “but I can go later.”

  The side of your leg, your jeans, was touching my bare leg. In that moment after I replied, you looked down at my knees, my short dress, and your legs, wide open, pressing against me. And you jumped up.

  “The library?” you said, staring out of the window although there was nothing to see except blue sky. “I have some library books that need taking back. They’re here somewhere. I don’t suppose you could return these while you’re there, could you?” You picked up a pile of folders and a stack of papers and dumped them on the floor, uncovering six plastic-wrapped books. “They’ve been on at me for ages to get them back.” You put them in my hands. “God, I need a cigarette,” you said.

  There was a queue in the library, and I swore at you under my breath, and I swore at myself for being so ridiculous—for reading every signal wrong and for coming so close to embarrassing myself. “He’s an idiot,” I said, and realised I’d spoken aloud when the plump woman in front of me in a grey cape swivelled her pigeon head.

  At the front of the queue I handed your books over.

  “Eight pounds forty,” the librarian said. Eight pounds forty. That was forty-six loaves of bread, or about forty boxes of eggs, or twenty-eight glasses of Cinzano in the Duke of York. It was more than I’d ever had in my purse.

  “They’re not mine. I’m returning them for a . . .” I stopped. “Someone else,” I said. The librarian scowled, and the queue behind me shuffled and muttered. I found my chequebook in my bag and the woman stood over me while I wrote, signed, and tore out the slip. I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t bounce. I should have stormed into your office, demanded you pay me there and then, but I went to the bike shed, deflated, all the anticipation gone out of the day, and cycled home.

  I didn’t see you again properly until my next tutorial. One of your classes had been cancelled and another covered by the deputy head of the English Department. There were rumours you were ill, that you’d been suspended for drinking, that your wife had died. Wife! How that made my heart lurch. Everywhere I walked—around the English block, the library, through the streets of Bloomsbury—I looked for you. Once I saw you at a distance, hands shoved in trouser pockets, walking away from me, head lowered, and stooping handsomely near the history rooms. I turned and raced around the building, slowing on the final corner so I could saunter towards you, but by the time I got there you were talking to the bird-lady from the library. You laughed at something she said, touched the top of her arm, and I could see the pleasure in her face from your attention. The two of you walked away. I wanted to pluck that old woman’s feathers out.

  For a week I didn’t check my pigeonhole so I could claim ignorance if you cancelled my tutorial. Although I was still cross with myself for paying your library fine and with you for not knowing I had, I wore the yellow dress again.

  Like before, the window to your office was flung wide, but this time you weren’t leaning out. Upstairs, your office door was ajar, and when I knocked on it, it opened farther but you weren’t inside. I stood on the threshold, smelling you, and looking at your disorder.

  “Ingrid,” you said from behind me. I turned; you held that coffee jug full of water and you smiled. You were wearing espadrilles and creased linen trousers that you’d rolled up to reveal your ankles and a bit of tanned calf. Your big-collared short-sleeved shirt with its wide, off-centre stripe was open at the neck. You looked like a rich American from the 1950s, holidaying on the Italian coast. If I’d gone to the window and glanced out, I’d have seen a beautiful woman in a head scarf and sunglasses waiting for you in an open-topped sports car.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” you said. “You’ve missed some classes.”

  “I haven’t missed any,” I said.

  “Well, sit down.” You manoeuvred past me into your office and set the coffee machine going. I sat on the edge of one of the armchairs.

  “So.” You spun your desk chair around to face me. “How’s it been going?”

  “Fine.”

  “Well, that’s good.” Behind you the percolator’s stomach rumbled. Neither of us looked at each other. “So, I suppose we might as well get straight to it.” You slapped your thighs and pushed off against the floor with a foot so that the wheeled chair slid along a well-worn track in front of your desk. You stopped it at a stack of papers, which you searched through until you teased out my assignment from halfway down. My first name was trapped inside the brown circle of a coffee-cup stain. “Did you bring your own copy?”

  “No,” I said, folding my arms.

  “No,” you said.

  “No,” I said again.

  You flicked through the pages on your lap. “I take it this is set in Norway?”

  “The Oslo archipelago.”

  “Is that where you’re from?”

  “My father’s family.” I crossed my legs.

  “Right,” you said, glancing up and flicking through the pages again. I could see red writing on the white sheets. “The sense of place is very well developed.”

  “I’ve never lived there.”

  “Well, I liked it very much, but I was confused about where you were going with the ending.”

  “It isn’t finished.”

  “No,” you said, “I could see that.” You looked at me with a half smile and your head cocked while I stared, willing mysel
f not to smile back. In my head I repeated “Eight pounds forty pence,” over and over so that I could hate you, dislike you; not like you quite as much as I already did.

  “Maybe we should have a coffee,” you said, swivelling round and standing up to pour. “Black?”

  “Fine.”

  You handed me a cup with a saucer and sat in your armchair beside mine. “Ingrid,” you said patiently, “you might get more out of this tutorial if you say something other than ‘fine’ and ‘no.’”

  I took a swig of coffee. It was scalding, and I had to force it down.

  “Are you all right? You’re not looking very well,” you said. “Pale.”

  “And you’re looking very well-fed and tanned.” It was the sort of thing Louise would have said.

  You laughed, that big bold laugh, and swept your hand through your hair. “How about that proper drink I promised you last time?” I was surprised you’d remembered. “We can discuss this.” You patted the assignment on your lap. I must have appeared undecided. “A working drink?” You glanced at your watch. “We’d better be quick.” You stood up and took my cup. “Come on, come on.” You hurried me out of your office and to your car. If you’d held the door open for me like my father used to insist on doing, I wouldn’t have gone with you, but you got into the driver’s seat and turned the ignition before I’d even closed my door. The interior of your car was the smell of leather and your office, concentrated, as if it had been reduced to your essence.

  You drove east along narrow London streets, overtaking black taxis and appearing to know your way as well as any of their drivers. You pulled up outside a scruffy pub that looked more like a butcher’s—brown tiles on the outside. There were no lights showing, and when you pushed on the door it didn’t open.

  “Shit!” you said and slapped the tiles with the flat of your hand. “Seems we can’t have that drink after all.”

  “Cup of tea?” I said.

  “What?” You were like a sulky child who pretends not to hear the offer of an apple after the ice-cream van didn’t stop.

  “Let’s go and get a cup of tea,” I said.

  We sat opposite each other at a tiny table in the window of a café that smelled of the overripe bananas from the fruit-and-veg shop next door. You had coffee and I ordered tea from a surly waitress, which she brought to us in a metal pot. You chose an iced bun. Neither of us ate it. The café was full of yellowing spider plants, some lined up along a ledge running the length of the room, and others hanging from macramé baskets above our heads. I had the excited feeling that I was on the cusp of something and that at any moment my life could spin off in a direction I’d never intended or anticipated. We examined each other’s faces but didn’t speak, and I was giddy with vertigo. We were the only customers. A fly buzzed against the front window, and the waitress tuned in and out of stations on a portable radio—a burst of dance music followed by static and something orchestral, then a return to white noise. You leaned towards me as if to tuck a length of my hair behind my ear but it was to put your hand around the back of my head and pull me to you until your mouth was at the side of my face. It was the smell of you that kept me there, stretching over the cups and plate. The bristles on your chin were against my cheek. “I’m sorry about the library fine,” you whispered. You moved your face so your lips touched the corner of my mouth and I panicked, suddenly not clear what I wanted after all. I pulled away from you and stood up in one motion, so you pitched forwards across the table, upsetting your coffee onto the bun, the brown liquid spilling. The waitress, now paying us attention, stopped the radio at a station that was playing “Big Bad John” and stared at me as I reversed out of the door and onto the street.

  “Ingrid, stop, I’m sorry,” you said, following me out, but I fled. You were called back by the waitress, and as I glanced over my shoulder you were standing in the doorway, both hands resting on the frame as if you alone were keeping the building from collapsing.

  Your loving wife,

  Ingrid

  [Placed in Swiss Bakery and Confectionery, by Walter Bachmann, 1949.]

  Chapter 7

  By the time Flora reached the bottom of the chine—the narrow track up to the village—her shoulders and arms ached no matter how she held the suitcase and satchel. There had once been a path that zigzagged from the beach up to the Swimming Pavilion’s garden, but now the only way to reach the house was via the chine that ended at the bottom of Spanish Green. Even in the hottest summer the overhanging trees made the path shady, and the ferns and grasses dripped moisture that oozed out of the rocky sides.

  She took a few deep breaths and tilted her face to the sky. The clouds had cleared, blown away inland, and the stars were appearing. Once, years ago, her father had taken her hand and said that some people believed Ingrid was up there amongst them, shining in the dark. But Flora, who had been eleven or twelve, still watched Ingrid inside her head as if a short scene from a film had caught in a loop: her mother turning away from the front door of the Swimming Pavilion again and again. In her long pink evening dress with its beads catching the sun, she endlessly repeated the steps from the veranda, turned her head to take in the lawns, the flower beds, and the view down to the sea, then turned back so her eyes swept across the gorse bush Flora was hiding in before she walked out of the garden forever.

  Flora had pulled her hand from her father’s. “They’re wrong, Daddy,” she said.

  “It’s difficult to live with both hope and grief.” He spoke to her in the adult way he always had. “To keep imagining that we might come home one day and she’ll be waiting for us on the veranda, and at the same time living with the idea that she’s dead. A balancing act. It’s OK if you believe your mother’s gone; you can tell me and no one will blame you.”

  “Do you do the balancing act?” Flora asked.

  “I do,” her father said.

  “Then I will, too.”

  Gil had taken her hand again and squeezed it.

  It was the thought that Nan might have brought her father back early and that her mother could be at home that kept Flora walking up the chine, her bare feet knowing the way even in the dark, but when she reached the lane the idea that Ingrid might be around the corner made her hesitate. For years she had practised what she would say to her mother when she saw her again. There were plenty of choices—“Where have you been?” “How could you leave us?”—but mostly she came back to “Why?” Flora wasn’t certain she wanted to go on, and yet she found herself running along the short stretch of tarmac, clasping the suitcase to her front, and holding her breath when she reached the drive. But as soon as she came around the corner she saw there were no cars beside the house, not even Nan’s, and there were no lights on. There were just the silhouettes of the unrestrained bushes and trees in the neglected garden, and the low shape of the house.

  Flora’s feet also recognised the three steps up to the veranda—the depth of each tread, where the wood was smooth, how the top step was never quite as high as expected. Her right hand reached out to the square pillar and beside it the railing; even in the dark her fingers knowing the heart-shaped chip in the paint; touching it for luck. Two paces took her to the front door. She put down her shoes and suitcase and fumbled inside her satchel for her keys. She put the key in the lock but it wouldn’t turn. She tried the handle and the door opened.

  Inside, the house smelled the same as always: old books, damp in the bathroom, fried eggs; home was the colour of toasted fennel seeds—a warm, speckled brown.

  “Hello?” Flora whispered into the unlit hall. “Daddy? Nan?” She stretched a hand forwards and called out, “Mum?” The house was silent. She flicked the light switch and the overhead bulb came on.

  “My God,” she said.

  Chapter 8

  THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 5TH JUNE 1992, 4:20 AM

  Dear Gil,

  Yesterday afternoon I decided to do some clearing. I went through the wardrobes and the chest of drawers in the girls’ room to coll
ect clothes they’d outgrown. On Flora’s side, I found your old dressing gown, a formal shirt you’d spilled red wine over, which I thought had been thrown away, and that pair of reading glasses that went missing about a year ago. When Flora came in and saw me, she clutched the things to her, saying I was throwing away her “hair-looms.” We fought and I slapped her calf hard enough to leave the red print of my fingers on her skin. She didn’t cry; instead her face became stony, an expression I recognised in myself, and she strode outside. I was the one who ran to my room and wept into my pillow. Later, I turned out that suitcase of old papers kept under the bed. I was meant to be sorting, but each out-of-date passport, hand-drawn Mother’s Day card, and photo delayed me. They gave an impression of the perfect family: picnics on the beach, children digging in their flower patch, doting parents—like a photograph album flicked through by a distant relative, oohing and aahing at the happy times without knowing about the hundreds of pictures that had been discarded.

  And then, at the bottom of the suitcase, your letter.

  I sat on the floor with everything spread around me and imagined you all those years ago in your writing room at the end of the scrubby, gorse-filled field you called the garden, bashing out the letter on your typewriter. You might have been wearing those old shorts you loved so much and flip-flops with sand between your toes, and your hair standing stiff from the salt water after a swim. I reread the letter and felt again the presumptuousness that you could write about love when we hadn’t declared it, the absurdity of mapping out our whole lives when we’d only just met, the shock of you mentioning ageing when I wasn’t ever going to grow old, and laughing at how wrong you were about children. And I remembered too my secret pleasure that you’d chosen me. I was twenty then, a different woman from the one I am now.

  I read that letter so many times, wondering what you hoped your reader’s reaction would be. Rereading it yesterday made me cry for when we were starting out, before I’d come to this house, and because nothing turned out like you said it would. Well, maybe one thing—perhaps I shouldn’t have laughed so readily at the idea of children.