The Swimming Pool (20 page)

‘Show-off,' Mel said loudly.

‘Slag,' I agreed. Though neither of us looked in Nessie's direction, everyone who knew us would guess who we meant because it was common knowledge we had it in for her.

‘Who are those girls?' Nessie's mother asked. ‘Are they your friends?'

‘In your dreams,' Mel drawled, under her breath. That was one of our lines that summer:
In your dreams
. We never said it to each other: it was as if we understood at some elemental level that the other would not dare have dreams of her own.

‘You know what?' Mel said. ‘We should do her some time.' She meant ambush, strip, humiliate.

‘Who – Nessie? Seriously?'

A decorum of sorts prevailed in our dealings with the group. A boy could be stripped and insulted and left to wriggle his way home, but his hands could cover all there was to cover and he'd usually come back the next day. (In Stoneborough that summer, there was nowhere else to go.)

A
girl was different. We hadn't done a girl before.

‘Actually, forget it,' Mel said, lighting a cigarette stolen from her father and sending smoke in Nessie's mother's direction, challenging her to tell us off for it. When she passed it to me, the end was damp from her mouth. ‘We need something better for her.'

Better as in worse.

I push open the main doors of our building, moving blindly, by memory, and almost crash into someone arriving. It is only when she says my name that I focus: Gayle.

‘I didn't expect to see you,' she blurts, and it takes her a moment to recover herself. Her eyes are prominent and raw, her neck blotched with a rash. The last time we stood face to face like this, I wondered if we would ever speak again. ‘I heard about last night. I'm so sorry.'

Automatically wary, I listen for the bitter edge to her voice, but cannot find it. ‘Thank you.'

‘How is she?'

‘She's all right,' I say, ‘thank God.'
Thank God
: I hear it in a different place, another time, and feel a rush of shame so intense it threatens to knock me off balance. I can't deal with this now. I make off down the path towards the car, but of course she follows.

‘Wait, Nat! What happened exactly? Is it true she fell in and the Channing girl went in to rescue her?'

My fingers on the car door handle feel icy. It's early, but I sense the air temperature will stay low all day – it's
as if the season has turned overnight. ‘She has a name,' I say. ‘It's Georgia.'

‘Of course, sorry. What I mean is, wasn't there a guard on duty?' There's a touch of familiar indignation in her voice now. ‘That place isn't safe, if you ask me.'

‘It wasn't their fault,' I tell her. The ferocity of emotion in her eyes is too intense to engage with for more than a second or two. ‘The kids weren't supposed to be anywhere near the water. It was all roped off.' And I remember then: Lara used the security budget to help pay for the band. ‘I don't mean to be rude,' I add, ‘but I can't really talk. I need to get somewhere.'

‘Right.' She's puzzled: why would I be going somewhere that will take me away from Molly?

‘But Ed is upstairs with Molls if you want to see them?'

‘No, I don't want to bother him. I wasn't going to come up, I just wanted to deliver this.'

I notice now the item under her arm, a small cream tote patterned with roses. ‘Is that Molly's bag?'

‘Yes. Alice brought it home last night. She said she found it unclaimed after … after you'd left, and Liam said it was Okay to look after it for you. Her phone's in there. I thought she might want it today. She'll be getting messages from her friends.'

‘Thank you, she'll be pleased.' I stand by the car, stranded and awkward.

‘What happened to your face?' she says. ‘You look like you're getting a bruise.'

‘I
don't know.' I shrug. ‘I must have knocked it last night in all the chaos.'

‘We'll talk when everything's back to normal,' she says, gauging my mood, pledging her support and saying the right thing in one fell swoop. That, I suppose, is what a true friend does, and I feel a second, hotter, gush of shame, a yearning for some breath-sucking velocity that might transport me back in time and let me do better what I have done so badly.

In the car, I sift through Molly's bag on the passenger seat: lip balm, keys with a starfish key-ring, a notebook. Her phone in its lilac-coloured case, low on power, probably only good for another hour or two. The passcode doesn't work; she must have changed it. Hardly a crime – it's natural to want privacy, to keep secrets. That makes me remember her journal on the laptop. Might the police ask for access to her devices, if and when they come knocking? If Georgia were to … to not make it, a diary or email exchange might cast light on the girls' state of mind.

Well, whatever helps their investigation, I think. Georgia is the victim, but Molly is hardly anything less. She has nothing to hide.

I return the phone to the bag and start the car. I have no doubt I'm still over the limit. Margaritas last night, Lord knows how many, very little food, no sleep. I could easily cause an accident. It's the kind of thing you read about in the papers: one poor decision leads to another, blunder begets disaster.

And
I would be able to say exactly how mine began, too: with Lara's voice, the private, grainy seductions of it; with Lara's eyes, dark with kohl and glittering with caprice.

I thought she chose me because I was special, but it turns out I was only special because she chose me. And if that still matters to me even the smallest of jots then I am a terrible, terrible woman.

‘Thank
God
you're back!' Resplendent in a metallic-grey silk playsuit no mortal had the right to carry off, hair ablaze with gold in the high sun, Lara leaned on the balustrade with one foot poised on the lower rail as if she might at any moment spring up and jump. Below, sunlight struck off the silver lettering at the lido entrance and rinsed the brickwork clean. The building was ringed by its queue, a double string of figures in bright clothing and sunglasses, while more customers arrived on bikes, carrying the light with them in little flashes. In the distance stood the pearlescent cluster of skyscrapers of the City, our own Manhattan.

Though I could see London, I could smell only countryside, the lush, loamy fragrance of the horse-chestnut trees, the rich earthiness of the park after a week of rainfall.

As a sudden eruption of laughter caught on the breeze, Lara turned to me with a lavish, almost ardent look. ‘You're obviously some sort of solar deity, Natalie. It rained every day last week and now look at it!'

She
reached to grasp my hand and I responded like any willing audience to the star turn: riveted, motionless, all disbelief happily suspended.

‘
Promise
you'll never leave us again.'

I promised. No matter that it had rained
everywhere
the previous week, washing out my own family holiday. Lara wasn't interested in
that
. The glass of champagne in her hand was her second since my arrival thirty minutes ago.

‘Good. For a moment there last week, I thought it wasn't going to be the perfect summer after all. I was really quite cross.'

I felt a flush of pleasure that this was as special a time for her as it was for me.

The music she was playing today was the Byrds.

Miles was working from home that afternoon, a rarity, I gathered, though I assumed he was senior enough in the company hierarchy to do as he pleased. I was aware of him inside, circling the living room, talking into his phone in presidential tones, on one occasion exclaiming in exasperation. After an hour or so, he joined us on the terrace for a cigarette (Lara's plan for Bryony's intervention had not yet been implemented, evidently). It was the first time I'd been with the Channings since that discussion with Angie, and then Ed, about their alleged infidelities, and I couldn't prevent a certain heightened interest in the dynamic between the two of them.

‘What's wrong?' Lara asked him, that restless foot back on the rail.

‘Oh,
just the usual screw-ups,' he said.

‘Well, at least you know you're indispensable.' She lifted her foot rather spectacularly to the upper rail, stretching the hamstrings with no apparent discomfort.

‘Hardly,' Miles said. He held his cigarette in a careful, almost precious, way. ‘They happen whether I'm there or not. Watch yourself on that railing, La. We don't want our nice white pebbles getting bloodstained.' And the way he looked at her was suddenly different, surprising, the way you would look at someone you didn't know at all, almost as if he were deciding whether he could trust her. That was her allure, I thought. Her spontaneity. It kept us all guessing, even her own husband. I remembered Angie's angle: that
she
'd do anything for
him
. She knew the couple far better than I did yet I couldn't help thinking she'd got it wrong. That I, the newcomer, knew better.

‘Have you noticed,' Lara said, ‘that in film and TV, no one smokes any more? Or if they do, it's only to signify villainy. James Dean, Steve McQueen, Delon, of course: they smoked and they were the heroes.'

‘Anti-heroes, don't you think?' I said, recalling Delon's character's actions in the only film of his I'd seen: strong arms denying his enemy air, forcing the other man's lungs to fill with water. ‘And didn't everyone smoke in the sixties? Heroes, villains …'

‘Small children, farmyard animals,' Miles said, smirking. When he exhaled, his facial muscles froze in a kind of grim rapture.

‘My
point is that now it's
only
the villains,' Lara said, holding his eye.

‘What are you trying to say about me?' There was a note of challenge in his tone. ‘Or is this just more of your GCSE media studies gibberish?'

Offended, I opened my mouth to protest, but of course Lara could defend herself.

‘Don't be tedious, Miles,' she said, and sighed, half amused, half exasperated. (I imagined using those words, that tone, with Ed.
Don't be tedious, Ed
. It would be satisfying, for sure.) She finished her champagne and, noticing my empty glass, demanded, ‘Do we need a new bottle?'

‘What you “need” is a job,' Miles said.

‘I have one, remember?' She held his eye before adding, ‘Being me
is
a job,' and as she drifted past us towards the kitchen I laughed, both at the remark and Miles's indulgently defeated expression.

In his wife's fragrant wake, he turned his attention to me. ‘I hear you're joining us for the bank-holiday party?'

‘Yes, I hope so.'

‘And it's your birthday that day?'

‘It is.'

‘Good.'

Flattered that he knew – and approved – I had an odd sensation, like pins and needles in my lungs, that he was going to say something important. But then Lara reappeared and he looked away, grinding out his cigarette in a glass saucer. I watched as he used his fingertips to tidy
the ash from the edges of the saucer into the centre circle, a curiously fastidious act. I imagined those ashy fingers touching Lara's skin after I'd gone. In her fist, the champagne bottle foamed, eager to spill into our glasses. Miles took the tumbler she offered – I wasn't sure if it was whisky or brandy but in any case it was decadent for a homeworker mid-afternoon on a Monday.

It took effort to remember my own working week, the daily structure: assembly, maths, break, literacy, lunch; in the afternoon, something creative, the making of a collage depicting London during the Blitz, perhaps. Fire-red skies and ruined buildings. I had not forgotten my stated aim at the beginning of the summer break to forget being a teacher and live like a civilian, but this rarified version surely exceeded the greatest of expectations. Drinking champagne with a couple from a social stratum normally well beyond my powers of access, sitting with a heart-stopping view across London – and getting so used to it that I was mesmerized instead by the sun-fired hair of my hostess. My mood soared higher.

But when Miles's office rang and he retreated to his study on the ground floor, I found Lara's spirits had, conversely, dipped somewhat. She plucked idly at one of her photography books, a Slim Aarons collection of swimming pools on the French Riviera, in the California desert, on the Florida coast. Her favourite was California, she said. She showed me a picture of a modernist house in a seared landscape, a pool of untroubled blue: ‘Don't you wish you could reproduce that feeling?'

When
she closed the book with a little gesture of defeat, I longed to make it better. ‘What – of living in Palm Springs? I don't think that's possible here. Even with my return, the sun isn't hot enough.'

She barely registered the reference. Having declared herself delighted by my attendance, she now had the air of keeping her chin up under house arrest, rather like Molly in the rain-pummelled cottage in the New Forest. Miles's mockery had hurt her feelings after all, perhaps, and I longed to let her know I was on her side.

‘I went there once, you know.' She leaned on her elbow, steering the branch of a potted oleander from her hair. ‘To LA. To try to “make it”. I had an agent there.'

‘What happened?'

‘Nothing. That was the problem. I wasn't special. They didn't like my teeth, kept saying I should fix them. But I like flaws. They're the interesting bits. Who wants to be “fixed”?'

‘I completely agree. I was just saying that to someone yesterday, in fact.' I couldn't believe it was only twenty-four hours since I'd been in the same room as Mel. She was a mythical creature now, had no place in this sphere, not even in my thoughts.

‘And my voice,' Lara said. ‘They said it was too husky, like I had a throat condition.'

‘Your voice is wonderful,' I said.

‘That's sweet of you.' She shrugged. ‘So I came back. I met Miles. I suppose I just gave up. I thought being twenty-two lasted a lifetime. I thought I'd have a hundred more chances.'

‘Well,
at least you tried,' I said. ‘That's more than most.'

But they sounded such mundane platitudes and had no useful effect. I tried to express some of the passion I truly felt: ‘You've done things other people can only dream of, Lara. Look at your life here.' I gestured to the park, the glowing grass, the threads of pathway that gleamed like metal. ‘Seriously. What could be better than this? It's our green and pleasant land right on your doorstep.'

‘Oh, that. Blake. “Bring me my arrows of desire”.' She surprised me sometimes with her sudden quotations, though she was an actress, of course, and it was natural she should have a memory for them. She tore off her sunglasses and I saw that her eyes were full of melancholy. The shock of it made my heart hammer.

‘Are you all right, Lara? Is it Miles, what he said about – ?'

‘God, no, Miles is fine. I'm just feeling a bit …'

If not prepared to criticize her husband, she might, I thought, talk more about her acting career, those dreams of Hollywood that didn't get off the ground, but what she confessed was rather closer to my own realm of neurosis: ‘Georgia will be leaving home soon. It makes me sad, that's all.'

‘Georgia?' I laughed in surprise. ‘She hasn't even done her GCSEs yet. She's still got three years left at school.' Molly had five, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered how I was going to feel when she left, especially this week when I was without her. Our family reduced by a third, our life would flatten, darken. As the younger's world opened, so the elders' would
shrink, a natural process but not necessarily a welcome one. Perhaps Ed and I would drift apart and I would, in time and without fanfare, enter the Stoneborough house for abandoned females. ‘Plus you've got Everett,' I pointed out. ‘It's a long time before you have to worry about being alone. I'll be an empty-nester before you.'

‘That's true.' She smiled at me, grateful, fond. ‘I'm just being silly. We all have our sad days, don't we?'

‘We do.'

‘I miss Angie when she's away. But my sister Iona is arriving tomorrow. She'll cheer me up.'

I agreed that her sister would, though not without a pang of dismay that, in spite of her earlier pronouncement, I had not proved equal to the job.

‘Shall we swim together this week, Natalie?'

My spirits leaped. ‘You won't be going with Iona?'

Lara's normally expressive eyes were suddenly opaque. ‘Oh, she doesn't swim.'

‘Then I'd be happy to step in.'

‘Tomorrow at three?'

‘I'll be there.' And I strolled home across the park with the exhilaration of an unexpected promotion.

Mindful of the sourness of the night before we went to the New Forest, I was careful to get dinner started at a reasonable hour, only to find I had forgotten another duty: Inky's early-evening walk.

‘Sarah counts on us, Nat,' Ed said. ‘What was so important that you decided to blow her out like that?'

One
day back and already I was disappointing him. And lying too, apparently: ‘I bumped into Gayle and got chatting, that's all. But it's not a big deal, I'll take him out now, it's still light.'

‘It's fine. I did it myself,' Ed said. ‘But you will be able to do the afternoon walk for the rest of the week, won't you? I'm chocker.'

‘Yes, yes, don't worry.' I didn't need reminding that I was the one on holiday, not him.

‘Don't leave it too late, because Sarah has her evening routine. They've reduced her painkillers and she's in quite a bit of discomfort. She said she's going to bed earlier than usual.'

‘Poor thing. Leave it with me.' Of course, I'd just agreed to meet Lara at the lido the next day at three, which was about the same time I'd called around today – and yet I'd only been able to leave when I had because she'd grown uncharacteristically glum. How was I going to fit Inky in?

Naturally, it was out of the question that I should cancel my plans with Lara for the sake of an old friend in chronic pain.

It's easy to see, in retrospect, where my instincts went awry.

She was not glum. She was a woman who had never known a moment's glumness in her life. ‘Don't get me
wrong, Natalie,' she giggled, ‘he's an absolute angel, but is he
ever
going to stop yapping?'