The Swimming Pool (5 page)

Gayle watched me scoop Inky's poop as a pair of picnickers averted their eyes in disgust. ‘Anyone would think you liked them,' she said. ‘Lara and her friend.'

‘Well, I see no reason to
dis
like them.'

‘You don't?'

And for the second time in five minutes, I had cause to note my surprising change of position. After all, hadn't I been suitably snarky to Lara during our first conversation? At least until she'd said she liked me –
I think I'm going to get on very well with you, Natalie
(yes, I remembered the exact phrasing)
.
Was that all it had taken to win me over? All the advice I gave Molly about beauty being only skin deep and the evils of vanity, and here I was in my mid-forties, responding to the fleeting favours of the pretty girls in the most predictable fashion imaginable.

Or maybe I was just keeping an open mind. Harnessing that new optimism.

‘I don't know,' I told Gayle truthfully, and dropped the bag of dog poo into the nearby bin. ‘I haven't decided yet.'

Molly's was not an inexplicable problem: it had its known beginning. What we did not know, and what made it so difficult to manage, was how it would end. Whether or not it
would
.

It
had begun when she was eighteen months old, with an incident in a toddlers' pool in a park in the Surrey town where I'd grown up and where my mother had remained after her divorce from my father.

Molly had been paddling happily, playing with her stack of plastic pots, filling and pouring and splashing. It was her favourite activity, the pool a perfect mid-calf depth, and when visiting Mum in good weather we came at least once a day. Seated at the edge with my feet in the water, aware of the deepening midday heat, I reached behind me into my duffel bag for my phone and saw that it was time for us to leave and return to the house for lunch. Tugging at the towel, rolled up tight and crammed into the bag, I paused, distracted, before adjusting the toggle and pulling it free.

When I next looked, the world had tipped. Molly was no longer standing but lying on her front, her left arm by her side, the right bent but too weak to lift her body on its own. Her head was twisted to the side and raised in a bid for air, ear and cheek exposed but nostrils submerged. The roar of adrenalin was as powerful as a jet engine. I leaped forward and scooped her up, clumsy but fast. ‘Molly? Oh, God! What happened?'

In my arms her body was rigid and her face contorted with such terror it seemed to alter her identity and I stared for a second as if at a stranger's child. After a pulse-stopping delay, she opened her mouth and wailed.
It had an alien new sound to it, a tone of primal shock, almost like the first scream after birth.

‘Is she all right?' A woman had appeared next to me, her own child in her arms, dark splashes of water on her clothes from having dashed across the pool to help.

‘I think she's fine,' I said, pressing Molly to me, ‘just a bit upset.' Blood churned in my head, made our voices remote and unreal. ‘She's coughing. That must be a good thing?'

That was when the trembling began, huge, wild convulsions, as if her muscles had a life of their own, her flesh as hysterical as her voice.

‘I wonder if you should get her checked out at A & E,' the woman said, ‘just to be on the safe side. Who knows what bugs there are in this water?' The kind soul even offered to drive us, saying her car was right near the gate, but I knew I wouldn't be able to bear a chaperone and, crying my thanks through Molly's screams, tore the greater distance to my own car. I drove to the hospital barefoot, my pumps abandoned by the pool.

‘Her face was only submerged for a few seconds,' I told the triage nurse, then the paediatrician, over the continuing wails.

‘She's had a shock,' came the reassurance, ‘but she's absolutely fine physically.'

I knew what Ed would ask first, was only grateful he didn't ask it in front of the hospital staff when he came to meet us, fear pinching his face and squeezing his voice. Or before Molly fell asleep, passing out in her car
seat as we left the hospital grounds. ‘Why weren't you watching her?'

‘I was,' I said. ‘I was right there, a foot away from her. I only turned away for a second.'

It was the sort of plea you might hear at a trial – or an inquest.

‘So how did she come to be under the water?'

‘I don't know. She must have lost her balance. Maybe she reached for one of the pots and fell sideways.'

‘OK. So it was longer than a second.' From the driver's seat, he turned his eyes to me, then back to the road, as if to demonstrate the acceptable length of a break in concentration. ‘I'm not having a go at you, Nat. I'm just trying to understand.'

‘It was a couple of seconds,' I admitted. ‘I glanced at my phone, then my bag's toggle got stuck so I couldn't get the towel out. Maybe four or five seconds.'

I couldn't tell him that three of those seconds I had spent immobilized, that the act of retrieving the towel, of plucking rugged fabric with damp fingertips, had caused a sensory memory that had torpedoed me. That a face I hadn't seen for at least three decades had sprung into my mind, so vivid, so three-dimensional, I'd thought it was real, that she was standing in front of me.

I couldn't tell him that it had felt like a haunting.

More than that: a warning.

Nineteen
degrees. One degree warmer than the previous week and yet I could have sworn the water was five colder. As I slithered in up to my waist, the entire surface of me pimpled, even my ears. Then, nailing the crucial shoulder dip, I felt pure shock, rather as revival by CPR might be: cardiac arrest followed by the restoration of spontaneous blood circulation.

‘It's about the same temperature as the Atlantic,' a passing swimmer told me, and his comradely tone implied either ‘Aren't we lucky?' or ‘Aren't we mad?'

Mad, I decided.

Predictably, I was alone, Gayle having insisted her fitness campaign begin strictly with the school holidays, Ed busy at the All Saints summer fair and Molly at tennis. Perhaps that was why I was experiencing the horrors of submersion so acutely: without her to monitor, I could concentrate on myself – and on the muscular low-hanging legs of a male lifeguard, in his raised seat, who, I noticed with a second, smaller, shock, could not have been out of his teens.

From the café terrace came the metallic clatter of cutlery on plate, the chime of coffee cup on saucer, the rise
and fall of conversation. It seemed a heroic leap to make in a single week, from granola with Ed and his
Guardian
to solo cold-water swimmer, and I had a sudden image of myself springing to my feet at the table, vaulting the rail and crashing into the water fully clothed. The thought made me laugh at just the wrong moment and I took in a large mouthful of water.

‘All right there?' In a trice, the lifeguard was down from his chair and at the water's edge. His reflexes were impressive, even if they had caused an embarrassing number of fellow swimmers to look over in concern.

‘Fine, thank you,' I spluttered. ‘I just swallowed some water.'

Resettled in his chair, he kept an eye on me, his red torpedo aid held benignly across his lap. Even when I swam into another zone, he glanced over regularly – I was one to watch. Still, I of all people was not about to fault him for his conscientiousness.

He really was remarkably good-looking – I could just picture the girls who'd be crowding the sundeck today, hoping to catch his eye. To think of all the young passions that would ignite on these terraces over the course of the summer, requited or otherwise – what a heroic thing Lara Channing had done if this were to become the meeting place for young people. A place of wholesome exercise and cleansing summer sun (provided they remembered sunscreen), better than some dreary shopping centre or, worse, a social media page and the ghastly, compulsive totting up of likes and shares.

Pausing
mid-length to recover my breath, I saw that the café table Lara had occupied last weekend was in use this morning by a family I knew from Rushbrook. The mother, Jo, and I had worked hard to help Sam progress in spite of his ADHD and dyspraxia. In the sunlight, strands of her hair glinted silver and when she bent her head you could see a thick band of pale roots along the centre of her skull. Her body language spoke of defeat. Mothers were so senior now. Lara Channing was a rarity in more ways than one: she couldn't have been much older than twenty-five when she'd had her daughter.

I decided not to wave to Jo and draw attention to myself. It threw parents off balance to encounter a teacher in the wild, especially the more formal ones like me. To them, I belonged in the classroom, all humanity suppressed but for the parts useful to their children, of course.

That's what you think, I thought. In less than a week I would be off duty and not due back in the classroom for almost eight weeks. Fifty-five days. Life was too short to work out what that was in hours.

I managed ten painful lengths before calling it a day.

Before Lara, I had no illusions as to how I was perceived by the people in my life. Middle-aged, middle income,
middling
. I was a primary-school teacher, a good citizen,
the sort you'd want to witness your signature on a passport application, not enlist to get the party started. I was Old Elm Hill, a known quantity, part of the furniture.

Recently, I'd given myself a bit of a buffing by leaving Rushbrook, the local four-class entry state primary, to take a post at the well-regarded independent Elm Hill Prep, a move driven by the desire for a less chaotic working day rather than any political realignment. In environment alone, it was a serious elevation. Rushbrook had been built in the 1970s on the site of a former rubbish tip and sometimes, when the windows were opened in the summer term, I'd fancied I could catch a whiff of the original malodour rising from the foundations. In contrast, Elm Hill Prep had begun as an Edwardian vicarage, every subsequent extension either faithful to the original period or conceived in bold contrast, and its parkside location was idyllic. In the whole of my first year there'd been only one less-than-fragrant incident: when the florist was late in delivering the weekly bouquet for Reception and the previous week's lilies were slightly on the turn. By break, they'd been removed, the air freshened with citrus and lavender.

My year-four classroom was on the second floor. With its polished parquet and shining, smear-free window panes, it was just the sort of classroom in which
A Little Princess
might have found herself, the kind in which we would all wish our children to learn their lessons. Most did not, of course, Molly included, what with the fees being five thousand pounds a term.

‘And
who can tell me what kinds of things were rationed?' I asked my class, that Tuesday morning, half of whom were restless as lunchtime approached and half enfeebled by the heat. It was the warmest day of the year so far, the air entering the open windows too soupy to give any relief. We were in danger of being gelatinized. Indeed Sophia, leaning against Theo, had lost control of her eyelids and fallen asleep. I thought of the clean cool water of the lido across the park and wished I could break my class out and take them there. ‘I'll give you a clue,' I said. ‘It was all the fun things.'

Now they began to call out.

‘Toys!'

‘I Phones!'

‘Pokémon!'

‘They didn't have mobile phones or computer games in the 1940s, did they? Think about what people like to eat and drink … Sophia?'

Her lids twitched, but I didn't have the heart to insist.

‘Cakes!' Theo suggested.

‘Good. Eggs and butter were rationed.'

‘Chips!'

‘Actually, potatoes weren't rationed here, so you could still have your chips, so long as you had the fat to fry them in.'

‘Chocolate! Bread! Coffee!'

‘Coffee wasn't actually rationed in Britain, but do you think it was always the nicest kind? Like the coffees your mums have in La Tasse or Carluccio's?'

‘No,
it tasted disgusting!'

‘If they didn't have real coffee, they drank ersatz,' said Alfie Mellor, who, it was fair to assume, would one day appear on
University Challenge
, cutting in on starter questions with crisp, faultless answers.

‘What's ersatz?' the others wanted to know, and my unprepared definition made me feel like an ersatz teacher.

I was saved by the scheduled knock at the door: a tour for prospective parents hoping for a chance place. These occurred considerably more frequently than the places came up, but Mrs Godwin had never been known to burn a bridge and was scrupulously gracious to all-comers. This morning, there were two couples. One comprised the familiar pairing of mother in her thirties at the peak of her ambitions and father in his forties at the peak of his earning power, each as eager to give a good impression as to gain one. The other, unexpectedly, was Lara Channing and her husband, Miles.

My energies stirred at once. ‘We've got visitors, guys!' I sang and, though the children were taught to proceed with lessons as if uninterrupted, their eyes settled immediately on Lara, who wore a thigh-skimming black sundress with heeled sandals laced to the knee. Over her shoulders was draped a fringed canary-yellow shawl.

‘Hello, Natalie,' she called to me, and the use of my Christian name caused the children to snicker and me to redden under my make-up. ‘Sorry, I mean
Miss
. We know
each other from the lido,' she told Mrs Godwin, as if confessing to a terrible indiscretion.

‘We're great supporters of the lido here,' Mrs Godwin replied. ‘The children did a sponsored silence for it, as I remember.'

‘Which just happens to be my all-time favourite way to fundraise,' Lara said. ‘I salute the genius who thought of
that
.'

Mrs Godwin allowed a rare public chuckle, causing the other mother to eye Lara with that mix of resentment and admiration that one-upped parents customarily extend to the one-upper.

As Mrs Godwin pointed out various features of the classroom layout, I took the opportunity to study Lara's husband. He was about my age, his face unremarkable in feature and colouring, at least from a distance, and his expression effortfully neutral. I guessed he was impatient to be done with this and get to the office, as most of the fathers I dealt with were. Likely he was one of those workaholic, socially disinterested husbands you often found with glamorous women; opposites on the colour wheel. He was to be commended for wearing a suit in this heat. I caught his eye and offered a sympathetic smile, but as I did so I thought I saw a flicker of query in his gaze, a flicker that caused an involuntary raising of my fingers to the right side of my forehead, masked though the skin was by concealer.

‘Mrs Steele, please don't let us interrupt you,' Mrs Godwin told me, in the way she had of disguising
an order as an apology. ‘It sounded as if you were having a discussion about the Second World War, were you?'

‘We were,' I agreed. ‘I was just about to ask everyone what they might wear to the end-of-year party next week. The theme will be VE Day.' Not the Riviera, I wished I could add for Lara's benefit, and I had an involuntary image of myself arriving at her party in the kind of glamorous, structured dress I had never owned.

‘Gosh, I don't hold out much hope for the catering,' she said, favouring a succession of pupils with an individual beam. Sophia, among the lucky ones, had sprung awake and begun slurping from her water bottle. A girl who liked to touch things she wasn't allowed to, she probably longed to finger the silky fringe of that yellow shawl.

‘It's going to be rock cakes,' I said, warming up now and smiling directly at Lara.

‘They're not
actually
rocks,' someone told her, and Alfie looked disgusted that such a statement should need to be made.

Miles Channing checked his watch. It was only when he slipped, phone in hand, behind another male adult, that I remembered the other couple were there and that I should spare them a little attention. If they hadn't already enquired, they'd be hoping the Channings' child was not in the same year group as their own because, if he was, it was a foregone conclusion as to who'd be offered any available place.

At the end of the school day, I dropped by Mrs Godwin's office. Originally the vicarage's drawing
room, it had a beautiful bay with French windows to the grounds. I imagined the smaller pupils appearing at the glass, mouths agape, then fleeing from it at the first sign of a raised eyebrow. I knew, even within a year of employment, that I would never come to occupy this room.

‘I was just wondering how the rest of the tour went this morning?' I said.

‘Oh, it was fine. All very smooth.'

‘It was a shame you didn't come by two minutes earlier. You would have caught Alfie Mellor using the word “ersatz”.'

‘Yes, that
would
have been impressive,' said Mrs Godwin, and we exchanged looks that concurred it was just as well he was precociously bright because his parents wouldn't be satisfied with anything less.

‘Which year are their children in?' I asked.

‘The Wilkinsons have twins for year two. They've moved back from the Far East unexpectedly and are in a bit of a panic. I've just come off the phone with Mrs Wilkinson, actually, and she has accepted the places.'

‘They're lucky two came up at once.'

‘Well, with Isabella moving out to Hampshire and Harry switching to City, they were in the right place at the right time.'

‘What about the other couple? They've got a little boy, Everett, I think he's called.' Just as I had in the park, I felt a thrill at being able to claim prior acquaintanceship with the Channings, but told myself that at least this time I recognized the vanity of it. After all, it was self-awareness
that separated us from the chimpanzees (and not, as Gayle claimed, Netflix). ‘He's at Westbridge, I think.'

‘That's right,' Mrs Godwin said, ‘he's just finishing year three. That was why I brought them to see a year-four class.'

I was pleased by the coincidence: somehow I wouldn't have liked to know that Lara had toured the premises and I'd missed her. Odd that she hadn't mentioned her planned visit when I'd told her my place of work – then again, even boho mothers knew that, when it came to school selection, discretion was the better part of valour.