The Swimming Pool (21 page)

Inky, making his lido café debut, was too stimulated by the shrieking and yelling, by the ceaseless slap and thump of bare feet on stone, to do anything but bark.

I could understand his awe. Alone with Lara at the VIP table on the terrace, her special guest and chosen companion, her substitute Angie, I was exactly like a teenager falling in love for the first time. My head had not only been turned, it was spinning.

Lara scooped Inky into her arms and babied him, blowing gently into his face to calm him. Her fingernails today were cranberry, her sunglasses nude Stella McCartney cat-eyes.

‘You'll make up the numbers, won't you, darling?' she said, sing-song and silly, ‘while Choo-choo's away? Stop us being lonesome?'

Inky watched, silent at last.

Of course, the idea of Lara as some neglected, unfulfilled figure was preposterous even before you took into account the constant stream of courtiers to our table that week. I'd thought I knew everyone in Elm Hill but plainly I knew none of those Lara had collected in her brief tenure, not only the rich high-maintenance women and successful, driven men, but also receptionists, shopgirls, litter-pickers. Occasionally, she invited someone to join us for a glass, and that person would look at me, talk to me, as if I must be worth knowing too.

‘You'll
miss La when she's off on holiday, I expect?' said a man called David, a neighbour on The Rise. ‘Do you two swim together every day?'

‘For now, yes, but I'll be back at school in a couple of weeks.'

‘What do you mean,' he said, ‘“back at school”?'

‘I'm a teacher,' I told him. ‘I teach at Elm Hill Prep.'

‘A teacher?' He was astonished. ‘I thought you were one of La's ladies who loaf.'

‘Sadly not,' I said, smiling. ‘The loafing has just been a summer job.'

If only it could go on, I thought. If only it could be the lido's opening season, the hottest summer in ten years, the year I met Lara, for ever.

David moved on. The lifeguards rotated and it was Matt's turn to climb the rungs of the chair nearest our table.

‘
That
's better,' said Lara, lowering her sunglasses for a full-glare vista.

A second guard took his perch at the far end, another youngster wearing flashy gold aviators. Not so long ago I would have assessed him purely for signs of former professional acquaintance, but now … when in Rome. ‘Look how well he handles that flotation aid,' I said, in a wicked undertone.

Lara cackled, delighted. ‘We can only hope he's left full-time education – just think of your place in the Establishment,' she teased. ‘Actually, they have to be eighteen to apply, so you're off the hook. Oh, bless Inky,
he's falling asleep.' She ruffled his curly ears, then, as R&B came over the pool's sound system, she was on her feet and passing him back to me. ‘I just need to go and have a word with Reception …'

When she came back, they were playing ‘Heatwave' by Marilyn Monroe, which made me remember that ridiculous conversation with Ed when he'd said that no one ever thinks a homeless person is glamorous.

I watched, giggling, as she lip-synced and angled her face in coquettish Monroe poses, finishing with a little kick in the air, a flourish of her foot.

‘I suppose I ought to get back to Iona. ‘I said I'd only be an hour and it's been, God, what,
three
? Why don't you come and meet her, Natalie? Inky too, of course.'

After the event, I wished that this had been one invitation of Lara's I hadn't accepted, for the encounter marred an otherwise idyllic stretch. Unsure of Inky's reliability in so expensively furbished a house, I left him in the shade at the front door before going up to the sitting room alone, Lara having diverted into her bedroom to take off her damp clothes. But Iona hardly glanced at me when I walked through the Diana doors. Sprawled on one of the petrol-blue sofas, she was playing with Everett, his blond head bent over a scattering of dice on the coffee table; only when he was dispatched to the freezer for a victor's ice lolly did she favour me with her attention.

‘He's been teaching me how to play Perudo.' She spoke in the lazy tones of a cut-glass accent deliberately
scuffed. ‘Honestly, it's the most I've achieved in about six months.'

So she had Lara's flippant manner if not her beauty. Though her face bore traces of Markham heritage in its fine-boned nose and oversized eyes, the arrangement, head-on, was askew, a face with a touch of the Cubist to it. She was fleshier, with none of Lara's mercurial elegance, and I would have put money on her having been one of those girls whose attractiveness had peaked in her early teenage years before she could make use of it, which made it the cruellest of gifts.

‘You're Natalie, are you? La said she might bring you back. Where is she?'

‘Just changing downstairs,' I said. There was a sense of reckoning about the way this woman was looking at me and I hesitated to join her on the sofa without a direct invitation. Instead I hovered, unsure whether to offer her a drink or to wait to be offered. ‘You didn't fancy a dip in our new lido?' I asked cheerfully.

‘You've got to be kidding.' Iona looked at me with barely concealed displeasure. It wasn't only her physical form that was heavier: where Lara's personality ran a gentle finger down your arm, hers threatened to shake you till your teeth rattled.

‘I don't understand,' I said.

‘You're talking to someone who finds the Red Sea too cold,' Lara said, joining us in her fluffy robe, and within moments she'd uncorked the inevitable bottle of bubbly. ‘She never used to be like this, Natalie. She used to
be amazing in the water. But now she's a scaredy-cat, just like Mary-Lou.'

Iona's voice grew shrill in playful retaliation. ‘Yeah, right, Amanda. Olympic wannabe.'

‘Who are Mary-Lou and Amanda?' I asked. ‘Old synchro teammates?'

‘Teammates? They're characters in
Malory Towers
.' Iona said this as if she should really not have to explain something so blindingly obvious. I could see she must have been the know-it-all Alfie Mellor of her own school (I often thought how easily we announced our childhood selves and how rare it was to come across truly convincing reinvention).

She went on: ‘Mary-Lou's scared of swimming in the rock pool and Gwendoline Mary holds her under to give her a fright. And Amanda swims out to sea and almost drowns, so she misses the Olympics because of an injury. Just like our little nymph here.'

‘I see.' I wasn't sure if it was the stories of near drowning – old habits died hard and I was used to people censoring themselves in Steele company, I suppose – or the nymph reference, but I felt myself startle.

Noticing my confusion, Lara laughed. ‘You must think we're nuts, Natalie. I need to explain that we had a summer when we were little when we read all the books and went around speaking like the characters. Mum was completely fooled – she thought they were our real friends.' Everett had reappeared bearing an ice lolly shaped like a dagger and Lara pulled him on to her lap.

‘At
first it was quite piggy-hoolier talking like them, but then it became rather smashing,' Iona said.

‘What's piggy-hoolier?' I asked.

‘Don't you remember the Mamzelles?' Lara cried. ‘It was how they pronounced “peculiar”.' As if finding himself bombarded with a foreign language, Everett slipped from her grip and disappeared downstairs. The sisters hooted. ‘Oh, Iona, we're clearing the room. I don't think anyone else gets it but us!'

‘Everyone gets it,' Iona said, in her scathing way. ‘Otherwise those books wouldn't have sold zillions of copies, would they? Maybe it's because Natalie's a teacher. That's what you are these days, aren't you? Old Enid's frowned upon by the PC crowd, isn't she?' It was not quite an accusation, rather an exposure of mediocrity, and I knew that by becoming riled I would only be falling into her trap. I was bewildered too by that ‘these days': she spoke as if she'd met me before. I satisfied myself with a faint raising of the eyebrows.

‘Natalie isn't PC,' Lara objected. ‘She doesn't even work in a state school. Didn't Molly read
Malory Towers
, darling?'

‘No, she wasn't really interested in stories set in schools.' This struck me only now as odd; normally young children enjoyed any connection with the professions of their parents.

‘Are you OK?' Lara asked.

‘I've just got a bit of a headache. It must be the heat.'

Iona
held up a palm, terminating a remark already made. ‘
Never
blame the sun,' she chastised. ‘We need to keep on its good side or it won't come out again.'

She appeared to share Lara's rather pagan veneration of the sun. I was not enjoying her company.

‘Go and grab something from the Pharm,' Lara suggested. ‘That'll sort it out.'

‘I'd forgotten you call it that,' Iona said. ‘Promise me it's kept under lock and key, safe from underage fingers, La?'

Lara rolled her eyes. ‘No, I leave it open. I want nothing more than to have my offspring and their friends die of an accidental overdose of Valium. The code is my birthday, Natalie.'

‘Wow, we won't need an Enigma machine for that,' Iona sneered, and Lara flapped a hand in her direction. Iona seized it to begin some sort of play fight, calling out, ‘Beast!' and ‘Smelly!' and I left the room to the yelping sounds of puppies.

Arriving in the main bathroom, I thought how Lara had rightly assumed I knew the date of her birthday. What else did she assume? Was this how all friendships worked between those with Wikipedia pages and those without? Tapping in the combination and releasing the lock, I was taken aback by the sight in front of me. It was as if someone had robbed a hospital: pots of prescription medication three or four deep, as well as over-the-counter items from the UK and other countries. Don't get me wrong, there were no bags of cocaine (at least, not that I identified); if Ed had been
right in his suspicion of street drugs then they were certainly not stored here.

Street drugs
: I sounded like my mother.

I helped myself to two Nurofen and carefully closed the cabinet door.

Upstairs the sisters had moved outdoors, the chatter continuing ceaselessly in voices raised over the rush-hour car engines of returning residents and arriving evening swimmers. Walking barefoot across the sitting room towards the kitchen for a glass of water, I thought I heard my name mentioned and out of instinct rather than guile I kept the water flow light and soundless so I could listen.

‘They really haven't got a clue?' Iona said.

‘No, and you're the only one I've told.'

‘You guys are crazy. I don't know how you get away with this stuff.'

‘I can't help it if other people aren't as inventive as we are.'

‘
Inventive?
What kind of a euphemism is that?'

There followed a scramble of giggling and snorting, one sister indistinguishable from the other. It was impossible not to call to mind Angie's hints of an open marriage, and when I finally turned off the tap and stepped out into the evening light, I knew I was blushing.

Seeing me, Iona said: ‘Natalie, can you believe it? This slut hasn't got any underwear on.'

My mouth opened.

‘She
means because I took off my swimsuit,' Lara drawled, unruffled. ‘I didn't want to sit on a damp gusset. I really don't think Nat's interested, Iona.'

‘Oh, I don't know,' Iona said, and the giggling resumed. What an unpleasant woman she was.

Below, Inky had begun to bark and at the next interruption from Everett I made my excuses and prepared to leave. ‘I'll leave you to enjoy your evening,' I said, with clumsy formality, and it seemed to me that Iona made it clear in the tone of her goodbye that she didn't expect to see me again.

‘It's the Land of Do As You Please here, isn't it, Natalie? Remember what happened there, eh?' This was the last thing she said to me.

‘Iona, you're being very weird today!' Lara protested, but weakly because she was drunk and giggling. I knew I had no right, but I couldn't help feeling betrayed.

In spite of myself, I looked up the reference as soon as I'd delivered Inky to Sarah and got home. It was Blyton, of course, from
The Faraway Tree
. (Who was this woman who could make
The Faraway Tree
sinister and threatening? She was surely suffering from some sort of arrested development.) The children didn't enjoy their time in the Land of Do As You Please, where they drove a runaway train.

Breakneck was exciting for only so long, seemed to be the message.

The next morning, I lacked the mojo I'd grown accustomed to feeling on waking and experienced instead a disappointing throwback dullness that made it hard to raise my bones at all. I didn't like to dwell on what had caused it, but as I shuffled to the kitchen for coffee, I considered giving the lido a miss that day. No firm plan had been made with Lara, so I wouldn't be letting her down.

To cheer myself up, I phoned Molly. Mobile signal being uncertain at the Stoneborough house, I'd been calling her there on the landline, trying not to feel hurt on the occasions she chose not to come to the phone but have her news relayed through an elder. When she did, she released few snippets. Great-grandma's glasses had fallen off her nose into the trifle. The custard in said trifle hadn't set properly and Molly didn't want to eat it. (‘You know I can't eat anything sloppy.') It was too hot. Her bedroom smelt weird. Also, she hadn't been able to WhatsApp her friends because the house was the only place in the western hemisphere without WiFi.

‘Have you seen Rio again?' I asked.

‘We
saw him with his great-gran yesterday. Grandma says there isn't a great-granddad, not because he's dead but because he's a deadbeat.'

‘I see, how witty. Well, he used to be around, in the old days.' I had a memory then of Mel's father, a muscle-bound pit bull of a man, arguing in the street with another kid's mother. Not Nessie's – I would have remembered if it was hers. Someone else's, one of the boys'. ‘Your daughter is a hooligan,' she'd shouted, ‘and so is her horrible friend.' And Mel's dad had shoved her and sworn at her. Mel and I had taken pleasure in being called hooligans.

‘Don't get involved,' I said, glad to be out of earshot of Ed, who was in his study prepping for his eleven o'clock.

‘Get involved in what?' Molly asked.

‘Just them. That family. You know, if they approach you …'

‘Why? What're they going to do to me? Drag me into the woods and tear my clothes off? He's, like, eight years old, Mum! That's messed up.'

At the sound of her snickering, I sighed. ‘Even when I'm being mocked, it's lovely to hear your voice. We miss you, Molls.'

‘Actually, I did go to the woods yesterday,' she said unexpectedly, ‘with Grandma. She showed me the pond where you and Mel used to go.'

‘Oh.' Immediately, I cursed my mother. I had briefed her minutely on Molly's recent progress and my thoughts
for avoiding any relapse, yet she'd apparently decided it a good idea to lead her straight to a body of dark water hemmed in on all sides by tall trees. ‘I hope you were all right, sweetie?'

‘I was fine,' Molly said, her tone a little shorter. ‘The water's drained now.'

‘Is it?' There was a pause as I asked silent forgiveness of my mother. (Would Molly do this one day, always assume the mistake was mine? Perhaps I'd never know, not if both accusation and apology, like so many of mine, went unvoiced.) ‘Well, I'm impressed she managed to get you out for a walk,' I said. The pond was a good couple of miles from the house.

‘I thought I might be able to get a signal on my phone,' Molly said. ‘But it was still rubbish.'

‘In the middle of the woods? That's a surprise.' That made me smile. ‘Can you imagine a whole summer, a whole childhood without technology? Only a landline nailed to the wall that you had to ask permission to use. That's all
we
had.'

‘I'd rather be dead,' Molly said.

As I hung up, the sound of the intercom rang out, presumably Ed's student arriving. It was one of his older ones, attending without a parent, and I decided to keep out of sight. Though I was out of my pyjamas, you'd be hard pushed to know it since I'd traded them for sloppy leggings and a T-shirt and hadn't yet cleaned my teeth or brushed my hair.

‘It's Lara,' Ed called. ‘She's on her way up.'

‘For you?'

‘No, you.'

And before I could make any attempt to improve my appearance, he was opening the door and exchanging pleasantries with her. I smoothed my fringe over my birthmark from nervous memory as much as anything else: Lara had seen it before; she didn't care.

‘So this is where the mysteries of quadratic equations are laid bare,' she teased Ed, and I thought how incongruous that throaty speakeasy drawl sounded in this sober and orderly space.

‘Lara,' I said, emerging, ‘what a lovely surprise. You must excuse my bag-lady scruffiness. I'm not exactly up yet.'

‘Bag-lady scruffiness is what I aspire to,' she said gamely, though she wore on this insignificant weekday a beautiful burnt-orange crêpe maxi dress with a piped keyhole neckline, the type of garment I had little chance of carrying off at a wedding.

I led her into the living room. It was the first time she'd been in our flat and, having mentally rehearsed the event several times, I succeeded in keeping at bay my natural feelings of shame. It was a perfectly nice place to live and there was nothing to be gained from comparisons with the palatial glamour of La Madrague.

Of course, I'd not allowed for the fact that she conferred glamour on all that met her eye, all that bore her weight. The IKEA armchair with sheepskin throw became suddenly exotic, a reindeer skin worthy of the set of
Doctor Zhivago
; a bare foot rested on the corner of
the coffee table announced to the world that this was
the
place for feet to rest. The filtered light caught the folds of her dress and made me think of celestial drapery in Renaissance painting.

Crazy. Even so, when I brought in coffee I was pleased to be able to offer costly chocolates from the last of my EHP end-of-year gift stocks.

In my absence, Lara had been casting her own eye about the room. ‘I had no idea you were such a neat freak,' she said. ‘Look at your shelves – are those books colour co-ordinated?'

‘Better than in alphabetical order,' I joked. I considered blaming Ed for the obsessive-compulsive vibe, even wondered if, had I been given warning of her visit, I might have faked dishevelment. At least she knew to attribute the tidiness to one of us and hadn't assumed we had a cleaner. ‘You have to stay on top of things in a small flat. And Molly's not here to create chaos.'

‘Mmm. Prestat, my favourite.' Her attention turned to the chocolates, she chose the one wrapped in gold foil, unsheathing and eating it quickly, before announcing, ‘
Please
can we tackle the elephant in the room before it breathes all our oxygen.'

‘I don't think an elephant would fit in here,' I said, adding, ‘but I'm not sure what you mean?'

‘Seriously? Yesterday at my place?'

‘Oh, your sister.'

Lara's gaze grew filmy and tender. ‘She was a horrible old witch to you, wasn't she?'

I
hesitated. ‘I thought she was very entertaining.'

‘Really?'

‘Really.'

Now it was she who paused. ‘So you didn't hear what she said when we were on the terrace? When you came up from the bathroom?'

If she meant that inappropriate inference about Lara's underwear, I was not about to acknowledge it.

‘She was being a bit outspoken about Miles and me. She has firm opinions about our marriage, let's put it that way.'

‘Well,' I said, ‘we all know what they say about opinions, don't we?'

Lara beamed. ‘I'm so glad. I was worried we might have put you off.'

‘Put me off what?'

‘Off me.'

Our eyes locked. A gaze of this length was an intimacy I shared with few, if any, beyond Ed and Molly.

‘No,' I said simply. ‘I haven't been put off.'

‘Oh, good.' She sighed, stretched, selected another chocolate. ‘I always feel slightly depressed after a visit by Iona. That's probably why I'm eating all your chocs.'

‘Go ahead.' I remembered Sarah and I had laughed about Lara liking to gorge on pralines, and considered making a thing of finding one for her, then thought it might seem like the behaviour of a stalker. ‘It must be difficult, your being so close and her living so far away.'

‘Oh,
I don't mind about that,' Lara said. ‘I meant because she's so young and pretty. She makes me feel like a has-been.'

I was flabbergasted. Lara was not one to fish for compliments so this had to be a genuine perception of sororal rank. ‘I didn't realize she was younger. She doesn't look it. And, no disrespect, she seems like a lovely person, but you are far more attractive, Lara.'

‘Bless you, Natalie.'

And I did feel blessed. Blessed to have her to myself for the rest of the week, Iona being off with an old friend for the day, I learned, and due to leave for her home on the Devon coast early the following morning.

Angie would not be back from Italy until Friday.

‘Are we swimming today?' I asked.

‘I certainly hope so,' Lara said, adding, with an extravagant air, ‘To swim is to survive.'

‘Who said that?' I thought it was another of her quotations.

‘I did.' She chuckled. ‘Do you think people will quote me when I'm dead?'

‘Oh, without a doubt,' I said.

It was Mel's idea, of course, our moonlit swim. She released the idea into the wild one afternoon, like a baby shark into a mangrove, and by the time we headed home for tea it had
chased down every life form in its path. One o'clock was deemed safe: even the night owls among the village's parents would be in a deep sleep by then (my own grandparents turned in at ten; Mel's parents, drinkers, were less reliable).

About twenty of us assembled at the mouth of the footpath, including former victims of our strip-and-run prank. There'd be none of that tonight, however, for there was an unspoken agreement that we'd stick together, look out for each other, all return home in the same clothes we'd arrived in. Tonight, the joke was on the adults, not on each other.

The trudge through the woods was creepier than anticipated, the light from our torches little more than pinholes in the claustrophobic blackness, our breathing louder than our footsteps. ‘Zombies,' someone groaned, and ‘Werewolves', which caused squeals among the girls. One of the boys mimicked the banjo music from
Deliverance
(it was a badge of honour to have seen the film, with its adult rating).

But our legs knew the way, delivering us dependably to the clearing and the welcoming silver gleam of moonlight. There were relieved giggles as our eyes adjusted and we began undressing. The straps on my swimming costume had twisted and Mel straightened them for me, her fingers continuing to move on my skin after the adjustments were made.

‘Hang on a minute.' Her ears picked out a voice she didn't care for. ‘Who invited that cow?'

‘Not me,' I said quickly.

‘She
wasn't supposed to know about it. Who told her?'

Nessie pretended not to hear, but continued to slip out of her clothes. She was one of the first to slide into the water, slighter in the pale light, her blonde hair ghostly. As Mel and I waded in after her, the water colder and silkier at night, I watched as she disappeared from view, swallow-diving in that sudden nerveless way of hers. There was a sensation of dread like fingernails clawing inside me; you couldn't see the bottom in daylight either, but somehow it bothered me far more now in the darkness.

At last she resurfaced, an elegant eruption, hair flying in a liquid arc, her upper body heaving, the boys staring.

Mel said loudly, ‘Shame she didn't stay under. No one would have noticed. Then they'd find her body in a year's time, all rancid and rotting. Like when crocs pull you under and store you till you're soft enough to chew.'

On the way back to the village, Nessie stuck close to the boys, which displeased us. Not that Mel and I were interested in boys, not in that way, but it didn't mean we wanted them to ally with another girl against us.

‘If anyone breathes a word about this, the hillbilly inbreds will come and get you,' Mel debriefed the group before we parted, and as that twanging sound effect started up once more, I knew she'd be giving Nessie the evil eye.

And I turned away slightly for fear of her eye falling on me next. I knew just how it would look: soft and relenting at first, then a little more complex, seeking of me something more than loyalty.