The Swimming Pool (2 page)

Giving up on Ed, I spooned my granola, enjoying the erogenous touch of the sun as I continued to watch. But it was a risk to scrutinize someone in sunglasses when you were bare-faced yourself and, sure enough, she soon sensed my attention and returned it, even lifting her sunglasses in a playful peekaboo gesture. I blushed. Never in my life had I so regretted not making an effort with my appearance. My skin was makeup-free – caked in foundation during the working week, I tended to let it air at weekends, hardly noticing after all these years the looks that strayed to the birthmark above my right eyebrow; my hair was limp and in need of a wash, with a rather Tudor centre parting I didn't normally wear; my clothes were shapeless and unflattering. Not at all the right look for Miami Beach, for the eye of Ms Channing.

There was worse to come. I became aware of her husband/companion twisting in his seat to stare across to our table – at exactly the moment Ed happened to glance behind him with a frown. As I squirmed, mortified, there was a sudden heightening of energy at the other table, an exchange of urgent mutters, before Lara's laughter sprayed the air, musical and delighted and, it seemed to me, a little contrived. I adjusted my seat so that Ed blocked my view of them and theirs of me, my
heart stuttering as if something significant had just occurred.

‘What?' Ed said, seeing my face. His expression softened. ‘Thinking about Molls? You're allowed to like it, you know.'

‘Like what?'

‘This. The pool. There's nothing to stop
you
coming here.'

‘I know.' I didn't say that I hadn't been thinking of Molly at all.

We'd hardly finished eating when the bill came, unbidden. ‘I think Liam wants the table back,' I said. ‘Look, the queue's out the door. Shall we go?'

Ed sighed. ‘If this is what it's going to be like, I don't think I'll come here again.'

But we both knew it was a moot point for soon his Saturdays would not be his own. Change was afoot in the Steele household: this summer, he would be offering himself as a private maths tutor, to continue at weekends during the autumn term and until the entrance exam season in January. If it went well, it was possible he might be able to do it full time from the 2016/17 school year, and as a family we would prioritize this mission. All Saints, like any conflict zone, was no place for middle-aged men.

In any case, once Molly's term-time Saturday-morning tennis finished and she was free to join us on such outings – well, this was the last place she'd want to come.

I
remember exactly how I felt as we strolled home from the lido that day, a restless blend of exhilaration and frustration that struck me as overdue, even inevitable. I remember thinking how effortlessly I could predict the unfolding of the day and how it might be more interesting if, for once, I could not. Molly would arrive back from tennis and hole up in her room – she had the larger of the two bedrooms: we'd recently swapped after she'd accused us of never using the superior square footage while conscious, which was more or less true – or at the kitchen table where the laptop and other electronic devices lived. (None was allowed in her bedroom, a child internet-safety rule and school recommendation we obeyed religiously.) Later, she'd hang out with a local friend, probably at the friend's since that was more likely to be a house with a garden, siblings and pets, amenities we couldn't offer.

Meanwhile, Ed had year-ten exam papers to mark, and I, having risen early to take care of next week's lessons preparation, thought I might steal a march on the laundry (racy stuff). Later, I would pay a call on our upstairs neighbour Sarah, whose recovery from hip-replacement surgery was proving slower than hoped. Ed and I often ran errands for her or popped in for a cup of tea. Homework and chores being duly completed, we would then slide pizzas into the oven (nutritionally supplemented with broccoli spears or sliced peppers) and gather as a three to watch TV or a film. Ed and I would share a bottle of red and Molly
would have a fizzy drink of her choice. It was that kind of life: casual on the surface but orderly, strictly managed. Rules were in force, standards upheld.

‘Is it me or does it feel very small in here today?' I said, as I plucked back the curtains to expose the very edges of the windowpanes. Our flat, on the first floor of a 1980s block in a quiet lane off the high street, was north-facing and, though it was bright outside, the light in the living room was indirect and dreary. Even our furniture felt wintry: the indestructible Indonesian wood that had been in vogue twenty years ago and never replaced (a victim of its own success); the brown leather sofa that had looked so stylish in the store but leached the light like a plug hole sucked bathwater; the glass vases that held fresh flowers far less frequently than had originally been intended.

‘It
is
small,' Ed said, ‘but there are plenty of migrants who'd consider it palatial.'

I'd noticed before that this was a difference between us – he always compared down, I up – but today it felt defining. It felt problematic.

The flat had been ours long enough for us to feel as if we owned it, though it was in fact a housing association sub-let, the reason we could continue to afford to live in a suburb like Elm Hill since an upgrade of the overland line had caused both house prices and private rents to rocket. These days, when people remarked on how the place must have tripled in value since we'd bought it, I simply nodded, weary of explaining again our tragic missteps in the London
property dance. At the beginning, we'd saved and sacrificed like normal couples, had been mere months from having the deposit for the modest terrace of our ambitions, when all at once prices had begun to race out of reach. It was no more than a fever, we told each other: best to keep our cool and wait it out. By now, of course, the deposit that might once have bought a terrace was barely sufficient for a one-bed. We'd still look at the property websites sometimes, watch the numbers rise and rise. It was like hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, we would say.

But we were not the only ones in this situation, and if you were in the mood to count your blessings you could find plenty of them. There was the relatively modest rent, of course, which had saved us thousands of pounds over the years; the park was a ten-minute stroll away; Molly took the bus to her school, while Ed and I walked or cycled in separate directions to ours. I had nothing to complain about.

Why, then, on that Saturday afternoon, as Ed frowned at his malfunctioning All Saints software and I lugged the laundry hamper from bathroom to kitchen, was I suddenly feeling so discontented with my lot?

‘I bet they live in one of those big houses on The Rise,' I told Ed.

‘Who?'

‘The Channings.'

‘Who are the Channings?'

I sighed. ‘It doesn't matter. I'll ask Gayle. She'll know.' Indeed, Gayle kept herself so thoroughly abreast of
local gossip that when we'd worked together at Rushbrook Primary I'd sometimes had to tune out of her bulletins to keep myself from spontaneous combustion.

Definitely The Rise, I thought, closing the washing-machine door with a mildly resentful thump. Overlooking the southern edge of the park and with views of the city, The Rise was hands-down the best street in Elm Hill and the new lido would raise its status even higher. I had visions of snakeskin sandals kicked off in a huge central hall, a softly lit mirror for the adjustment of blonde loveliness on departure. There would not be, as there was in our entrance nook, a noticeboard pinned with calendar, timetables and a chore schedule, set dead centre above a shoe-storage unit checked daily for disorderliness. (About as welcoming as an army barracks, my mother said, the last time she visited, adding, ‘I don't know who's worse, you or Ed.')

‘I think our focus needs to be our pensions,' Ed had concluded eventually on our prospects for home ownership.

Imagine being (relatively) young and your husband saying that! And imagine being able to suggest no better idea for a shared
raison d'être
, not when you were as busy as you were pairing shoes, separating coloureds from whites and generally bringing control to bear on systems that would have thrived perfectly well on their own. It was pitiful, truly.

All of this is, I think, important background.

‘You
know what?' I said to Molly. ‘How about we just do this straight away before it becomes a big thing?'

Honed over the course of a decade, my tone neither coaxed nor demanded, only neutrally suggested – ‘big thing' was not ‘Big Thing'. Her objections I pre-empted deftly: ‘Just you and me. No little exercises. We'll sit right at the back and we won't stay long.' I no longer made such rookie errors as asking what the worst that could happen was. As far as she was concerned, it was the
very
worst.

Even so, I wasn't expecting her to agree quite so readily to a trip to the lido.

‘Fine,' she said, with a sigh forceful enough to lift a strand of hair. (Like mine, hers was neither dark nor light, neither straight nor curly; recently she had begun blaming me openly for its lack of distinct identity.)

‘Really? That's great, darling.' I guessed she must have been expecting the proposal and had decided that if she humoured me this once I might not ask again and she'd have her summer to herself.

In the same spirit of getting it over and done with, I drove, which was a mistake because the roads off The
Rise were fully parked and soon we had circled almost for as long as it would have taken us to walk. As I hunted, Molly gazed into her lap, ominously silent. Her chin sank low, fringe dipping over her eyes; it was as if she hoped it might cover her whole face and screen her from the rest of the world. At last, I spotted a Fiat 500 vacating a space by the side wall of one of the large villas I'd ascribed to Lara Channing, and reversed my old Mazda into it.

‘Finally.' Molly groaned with a world-weariness I knew to conceal nerves. Delays did not sit well with her: they were unscheduled minutes in which she might work herself up to a change of mind. As we approached the lido entrance, she remained a careful pace behind me. You could already hear the screams.

Inside, the terraces teemed (I read later that a thousand people went through the turnstile that first full weekend), almost every square inch patch-worked with towels and bags and picnics, and the general explosion of paraphernalia that came with a family day out. It felt more like a lake than a pool, so vast was that expanse of aquamarine, its straight edges made jagged by the heads and shoulders of bathers clinging to the side rail. I had imagined us taking a pair of deckchairs, Molly's angled strategically away from the water, but all were occupied. We settled instead at the rear of the far terrace next to the exit turnstile, Molly sitting with her back to the wall, as if the pool were a terrifying precipice to be kept at extreme distance.

Which,
to her, it was: 50 by 25 metres of water, with a depth that increased from one to 2.5 metres. I had no idea of the cubic volume but suspected that she did: before this outing, she would have armed herself with all published facts about Elm Hill lido. I suspected, too, that she was itching to get up and give the turnstile a push, check that it was in working order in the event of an emergency evacuation. And the reason her gaze strayed frequently to the gate that divided the café from the pool area? She was scanning for the nearest alternative exit route, having noted that re-entry to the reception area was impossible, thanks to steel barriers.

It goes without saying that she was the only young person here behaving in this way. The rest thronged at both shallow and deep ends, noise levels pitched somewhere between frenzied and hysterical.

‘No wonder everyone's screaming,' I said. ‘It's only eighteen degrees in the water, according to the noticeboard.' I spoke in a we-know-better tone, as if the temperature were the reason she wouldn't be going in. Enabling, a therapist would call it, or collusion, as Ed would have it, but for God's sake, wasn't it really just compassion?
Love?

‘OK, Molls? I'm so glad we've come.'

She must have noticed the gratitude in my voice because she gave me a co-operative half-smile before extracting her book from her bag. Without further comment, I began pulling off my clothes. The sooner I swam on our behalf, the sooner we could persuade
ourselves that it was acceptable to leave, in spite of the steep entrance charge that had encouraged others to make a day of it. For us, thirty minutes would be a success.

Dodging the pumping legs and wayward elbows of small children, I lowered myself into the shallow end, sucking in my breath as coldness crept over my bottom half. Across the water on the café terrace, vast umbrellas swelled with the breeze; overhead, a plane scratched a pale line across the blue. Still delaying, I waded to the roped swimming lanes with my arms held high, as if navigating a river with my possessions balanced on my head, and only when laughed at directly by a group of teenagers, who might or might not have been past pupils of mine, did I submerge fully.

There was an instant surge of pleasure. In the last ten years, when I'd all but eliminated swimming from my life, I'd forgotten its curative charms, the optimism it stirred; I'd forgotten that I associated it with joy. Holidays in Devon when I was very young and my parents still enjoyed each other's company; my honeymoon in Greece, with that mesmerizing blur where turquoise infinity pool met the silver-blue of the Ionian Sea; and, steeped in nostalgia of a more unsettling kind, the summer spent in my grandparents' village in Hampshire, when a neighbour's daughter and I had disappeared for hours every day to the bathing pond in the woods.

After the first length, I looked across to check on Molly, glimpsed her face in profile, her expression stoic
rather than miserable, which was as much as I could hope for. She could break through at any time, the therapists said. Never give up. And yet, with each new expert, we
had
given up.

Resting already, I touched my midriff under the water, felt the extra inches I affected not to loathe, evidence of another long winter – and spring – of staff-room snacking, birthday cake after birthday cake, Friday treats every day of the week. At Elm Hill Prep, Christmas and Easter meant high-end chocolates from twenty-four sets of top-earning parents and, well, it was rude to refuse them.

I was pitifully out of shape and managed only four or five more lengths before, afraid my lungs would burst, I climbed out.

It was as I was drying myself – casually out of range of Molly, who had been known to shrink, even scream, if dripped on – that I saw Lara Channing again, passing through the gate from café to sundeck with a boy of eight or nine by her side. Her hair was piled on her head in a careless beehive, thick fringe tumbling over the gold-rimmed mirrored aviators perched on her nose. She wore a pale-blue sarong crossed at the chest and tied behind the neck, a style that accentuated her well-toned shoulders and delicate collarbone. I wanted both to watch and avoid watching when she removed it for swimming and revealed that photogenic, age-defying figure, the kind I had never come close to owning even in my twenties.

I
focused on Molly. ‘What are you reading?' Then, when she showed me the somewhat juvenile title: ‘Didn't you read that years ago?'

She shrugged, didn't need to explain. Re-reading books for younger children was a comfort, a safety behaviour. An imagination alert to danger – hypervigilance, they called it – could not cope with anything too complicated and now was not the time to begin
Crime and Punishment
. Her posture was even tenser than on arrival, sweat visible on her forehead and lip, and I felt the rush of tenderness I always did when her fear became tangible, the longing to draw her close and murmur protective words. But I'd learned she didn't like that.

‘I had an idea,' I said instead. ‘Dad knows the café manager, Liam. Why don't we ask him to arrange a behind-the-scenes tour? See how it all works? They'll have state-of-the-art systems, I'd have thought, or maybe they've restored the original plumbing.'

Her expression was unyielding. ‘You said no little exercises, Mum.'

‘It's not an exercise, I just thought it might be interesting. You know, historically.'

‘
Historically
,' she echoed, with teenage disdain.

‘Well, it was just a suggestion.'

It was then that I became aware of a pair of bare feet at the edge of my outspread towel. They were narrow and fine-boned with pretty little toes and nails painted a glittering black. Above, silver and green threads had been worked into the blue fabric of the sarong, a raised
woven texture that I wanted to rub between thumb and forefinger.

‘Hi again,' a voice said and, though I'd never heard it before, I would have known even without those visual clues that it belonged to her. It was the sultry, rough-grained voice of a lifelong habitué of some smoke-filled speakeasy – or at least a woman with a sore throat – a voice that didn't try to please so much as expect to.

I looked up, unable to make direct eye contact thanks to the reflective lenses of her sunglasses (Ray-Bans; the ones the previous day had been Gucci – evidently there was a collection). By her side, the small blond boy smiled down at us with the self-confidence of a young ambassador. I was familiar with the type from my year-four class.

‘We saw you in the café yesterday,' she said. ‘I was here with my husband, Miles.'

‘Oh, right. OK.' Under her deluxe gaze, I adjusted my sitting position so my thighs didn't splay so much, sucked in my stomach, which barely helped; you could suck in muscle but you could not suck in adipose tissue. My swimsuit was royal blue with white piping and now I wished it was plain black or, better still, that I was not fat. I'll swim every day, I resolved. I'll come after work – no, not enough time, plus there was Sarah's dog to walk. When term breaks up, that's when I'll start. Every morning, no excuses.

While these thoughts chased one another in circles, Lara had begun smiling in a perfect pink crescent that
made dimples. ‘
Your
husband is a teacher at All Saints, they tell me. I bet the girls love him.'

‘Well …' Though I didn't look at Molly, I could easily imagine her expression at this declaration, not to mention the suggestive tone. ‘As much as any maths teacher can be loved.' I wondered how Lara Channing knew Ed was a teacher at All Saints. She was not a parent there, of that I was more certain than ever.

She tipped her head a fraction, as if I'd tempted her to break an important confidence, which caused strands of blonde fringe to curve over the sunglasses. ‘He looks a bit like Alain Delon, we think.'

We
think,
they
tell me. She was utterly self-assured.

‘Has anyone else said that?' she demanded. ‘I like to think I've got a bit of a gift.'

‘I'm not sure. I don't think people know who Alain Delon is, these days, do they?' Indeed, I had only the vaguest notion myself: a French film star with dark hair and moody attitude. In any case, it seemed unlikely that Ed resembled a film star of any nationality or vintage. If he did, he'd hardly be married to someone like me. He'd be married to someone like her.

‘He was a famous actor in the sixties,' Lara told Molly, who was regarding her with admirable sangfroid. ‘He was kind of like a young Michael Caine or maybe Terence Stamp. Cool,
very
cool. He's in one of my all-time top ten French films from the sixties.'

Cultured though I liked to think I was, I wasn't sure I could name more than a handful of French films I'd
seen in my whole life, much less be able to pick out ten favourites from a single decade. Nonetheless I sneered secretly at the phrase ‘all-time top ten', which struck me as rather adolescent. Molly, meanwhile, only nodded, her expression knowing, even faintly doubtful, as if she watched Terence Stamp and Michael Caine films every day of the week and had her own opinions on them.

‘
Belle de Jour
?' I suggested gamely. ‘The one with Catherine Deneuve?'

Lara raised her pretty chin and laughed. It was a beautiful thing, melodious and commanding, and even amid the general clamour people turned their faces to heed its call. Her teeth were large, white and imperfect, with little gaps, and even that was charming, as if she had no time for impeccable dentistry, life being the carousel that it was. ‘No, he's not in that. That was Jean Sorel, I think. The one I love is
La Piscine
.'

‘I don't think I've seen it,' I said, grateful at least to be able to explain to Molly that
la piscine
was French for swimming pool.

‘I know,' she replied crossly. ‘I'm not an idiot.'

I sucked back a reprimand, mindful of the circumstances.

‘Well, you must see it,' Lara told us. ‘Lust and deception in Saint-Tropez. Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. A classic.'

At this the boy spoke for the first time: ‘My sister's middle name is Romy.'

‘Exactly.'
Lara looked delighted with him, as if he'd named the capital of Mauritania. ‘After the actress, that's why.
Your
middle name, my love, was inspired by Sinatra. Everett Frank Channing.' She stooped to kiss the top of his head, and as her sunglasses slid down her nose, I caught a glimpse of oversized dark eyes smoky with kohl. She winked at me before pushing the sunglasses back into place. ‘Miles and I did look up whether Frank and Romy ever slept together. Hard to verify, it
was
the sixties, but if they'd ever been a proper couple, well, that would have been too weird.'