As Bella’s eyes adjusted to the relative darkness inside the hut, she picked out a desk and chair and a load of life-saving equipment hanging on the wall. To one side was a shower stall, and to the other a row of pegs, on which hung a rucksack and some clothes, presumably Sean’s.
Bella went up to the jeans dangling from one of the pegs and buried her face into them. She could smell him, and the tang of bonfire from the night before. She closed her eyes, and let the tingle in her body reach through to her fingers.
She peeled off her sawn-off shorts and T-shirt, and adjusted her bikini. Taking her towel out first, she bundled her clothes into her duffel bag, hanging it up next to Sean’s things. It felt like staking her claim on him.
‘First take a cleansing shower,’ she recited the rule she had seen on the notice outside the gate, and, reaching into the shower stall, she turned on the tap. At first the water gushed out icy cold, making her gasp as it hit her arm, but soon it heated up and she stepped inside, letting it spray over her and wash away the sweat from her short journey through the village.
The tap still running, she wiped her eyes and opened them to see Sean standing there, watching her. She smiled at him and nodded. He stepped into the shower and took her to him, wrapping his arms around her body and pressing himself against her.
‘Now, where had we got to last night?’ he said, then bent to kiss her. Bella gasped as his hand reached up and under her bikini top.
‘Is this OK?’ he said.
‘Go on,’ she said and pulled him closer to her; his erection burned into her belly. The shower water dissolved them together as her hands reached under his swimming shorts, hooking them down so he sprang free against her. Helped by him, she wriggled out of her bikini bottom.
‘Did you lock the door?’ she asked.
‘And the gate,’ he said.
He lifted her up against the wall. She looped her feet around him and welcomed him, letting his touch, inside and out, erase the traces of shame left by what she and Olly had done when they were younger, the thing no one else, not even Jonny, had done with her since.
About bloody time, she thought.
Bobby arrived just as they were coming out of the lifeguard hut. He was clearly not pleased to see the pool still shut and a small queue of mothers and toddlers in sunhats at the gate. He let everyone in, smiling and greeting them by name, then waddled over to Sean and Bella.
‘For fuck’s sake, McLoughlin you faggot, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ Bobby said, his post-orthodontist, Novocained mouth sloping down the right hand side of his face.
‘Hi Bobby,’ Sean said, smiling. ‘This is Bella. She’s from England.’
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ Bobby said, without making any eye contact at all.
‘How did it go at the orthodontist?’ Sean said.
‘I am not happy,’ Bobby said. ‘I’ve gotta wear these fucking braces, look.’ He gurned to reveal an expanse of ironmongery surely too large to fit into such a small space – as if someone had tried to cram the George Washington Bridge into a pomegranate. ‘How am I going to get pussy now, McLoughlin?’
‘I apologise for my co-worker,’ Sean said to Bella.
‘Let’s get the show on the road.’ Bobby shuffled off to the lifeguard’s hut.
‘Sorry, Bella. Gotta work now.’ Sean touched her arm, brushing her breast as he drew his hand away.
‘I think I’ll hang around a bit. Have a swim. That sort of thing.’
‘There’s nothing I’d like better.’
Bobby re-emerged and took up his position at the shallow end of the pool, opposite Sean. Bella dived into the cool blue water. As she surfaced, Bobby blew his whistle.
‘No diving,’ he said, as if he were bored with the complete stupidity of people who dared to swim in his pool.
Bella swam a couple of lengths, loving the feel of the water as it streaked along her limbs. Then she pulled herself out and pushed her hair back so it slicked over her head. She looked over at Sean, who was busy overseeing the small children who now filled the pool like so many maggots in a tin.
He turned his gaze over to her, and their eyes locked for a second. Bella smiled at him and he smiled back. She thought perhaps this was what love felt like.
‘McLoughlin! Eyes on the game!’ Bobby shouted from his seat, his high-pitched voice echoing above the laughter of the children ducking for quarters thrown by their sun-lounging mothers. Sean shrugged an apology to Bella, and looked back towards the middle of the pool.
Bella went into the hut to get her duffel bag. Then she laid her towel on the scrubby grass at the water’s edge and stretched out in the sun like a cat that had got the cream, the early bird and its worm. Her body felt different. She wondered if she looked any different. She hoped not; she couldn’t bear to think what Olly would say – or do – if he found out what she had been up to.
She got her copy of
Wuthering Heights
out of her bag. Alongside her plans for the photo-journal – which she kept thwarting by forgetting to take her camera out with her – another summer resolution was to start reading around her AS level books for next term. She didn’t hold out much hope for this one – she preferred modern American writers.
Oh, but it was hard to concentrate. She shielded her eyes from the sun and, as she spied on Sean up on his high lifeguard ladder, she had to restrain herself from pulling him down off it and back into the shower.
Was it right that they had done it so soon after meeting? As far as sex went, for Bella the boundaries had been blurred a long time ago, in the separate tent she and Olly shared when their mother took them camping. Lara had been far too preoccupied with her new baby Jack to notice anything odd going on; she just saw what she wanted to see.
‘Olly and Bella live in each other’s pockets,’ was what she said, proudly, to her friends. Then she’d go on about their ‘special connection’.
But Bella had felt sick and ashamed and knew that what had happened was wrong. This, with Sean, though – however premature it might look from the outside – seemed to be nothing but right.
She returned to her book, but her eyes kept blurring over the words. Her hand turned the page, but her mind couldn’t stay with Lockwood’s first encounter with his landlord in that buffeted, bleak landscape. She was lying by a pool in New York in the twenty-first century. How on earth was she supposed to connect with all that stuff from the past? And, oh, she couldn’t help it. She looked up at Sean again, at that dark, curled hair that she had wrapped her fingers in and held on to …
‘Bella! There you are! Mum’s going mental.’
It was bloody Olly. He had spotted Bella through the fence and now he was calling right across the pool, his accent and his scolding tone causing every head to turn. Bella looked up and saw some of the mothers – all scrubbed complexions, no make-up and middle-aged before their time – look at each other and tut as Olly dragged Jack all the way around the pool towards her.
‘Want a swim, want a swim, want a swim,’ Jack chanted, tugging at Olly’s hand and leaning dangerously close to the water.
‘Shut the fuck up, Jack,’ Olly said, causing a collective intake of breath in the pool enclosure.
Bobby blew his whistle and pointed at Olly. ‘No cursing.’
‘Chill, dude,’ Olly said.
‘Shut up, Olly,’ Bella hissed.
‘Oh look,’ Olly said, seeing Sean, who sat coolly eyeing him from the shallow end. ‘So this is where lover boy hangs out. Should’ve guessed.’
‘Give it a break,’ Bella said, under her breath. She really didn’t want him making a scene.
‘And Bella in her itsy-bitsy bikini.’ Olly leaned over Bella and snapped the strap on her top.
‘Stop it!’
‘Mum’s
incandescent
. You said you’d only be gone for a quick swim and that was hours ago.’
‘Shit.’ Her promise to her mum had slipped so far out of Bella’s mind that it shocked her.
‘Anyway, she says might as well forget about the morning now. But you’d better be around this afternoon to help her clean up. You’ve got to look after Squirt now, so she can get on. He’s been a right pain in the arse too, because we can’t find Cyril.’
‘Why can’t you look after him?’
‘Things to do, people to see. And I had him all morning.’
That Bella doubted. He looked like he had fallen out of bed a minute ago, all uncombed, unwashed and bum-fluffed round his chin.
Olly handed Jack to Bella, who sat up and pinned him between her knees so that he couldn’t escape to the water.
‘She says you’re not to let him in the pool on his own,
do
put his sun cream on after and
don’t
take him in without his armbands on. The stuff’s all in here, and there’s a snack which he’s to have in about an hour.’ Olly threw a bag at Bella. ‘She says meet them in the diner for lunch at one. All the poofs and ponces are going to be there. Ta-ta.’
He turned on his heel and left, giving Sean the finger as he passed behind him. If it hadn’t been for the seething mass of small bodies in the water underneath Sean’s platform, he would probably have pushed him in. But even Olly wasn’t that psycho.
‘Want a swim,’ Jack said, trying to escape from her legs.
‘All right. Just hold on a sec.’ Bella blew up the armbands and fitted them on him. Taking him by the hand – she loved the way he slipped his index finger into her fist – she led him to the shallow end, to get him into the water.
‘No unapproved flotation devices!’ Bobby blew his whistle, and clambered off his ladder, lumbering over to prevent Bella from letting her little brother go in the knee-deep water wearing dangerous English armbands.
Thwarted, Bella thought. As ever.
‘WE’RE DUE TO TAKE THE CAR BACK THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
,’ Lara said.
‘We can’t afford to keep it,’ Marcus said.
Lara looked up at the wooden ceiling-fan as it swept round and round, stirring up the bacon-scented air in the Trout Island Diner.
‘How will we manage though, out here without a car?’
‘Something’ll turn up.’
The time was quarter past one, and there was still no sign of the kids. Lara tried to relax. It was a rare moment when she and Marcus were together without anyone else around, but she was having difficulty finding things to say to him as they sat over two cups of horrible percolated coffee.
‘This is disgusting,’ she whispered to Marcus.
‘Shhh.’
‘Isn’t America supposed to be the home of good coffee?’
The diner was furnished with chunky pine tables and chairs, with vinyl-padded booths running down one side, where Lara and Marcus had been seated. Near to them sat an elderly man with a glass of lemonade who looked up and nodded when they walked in, but who had since returned to his tractor catalogue. There were only two other customers: a young man in double denim slumped on a bar stool at the counter and a large woman of indeterminate age, dressed entirely in shades of brown – including a tan baker boy cap – who sat with her back hunched towards them over by the rear wall.
‘You must be the English folks then,’ the waitress said as she handed them two laminated menus.
‘That’s right.’ Marcus leaned over, turned on his smile and held out his hand. ‘Marcus Wayland, pleased to meet you. And this is my wife, Lara.’
‘Well hello! I’m Leanne,’ she said, patting her matted blond curls. ‘The others should be here any minute.’ She bustled off to her spot behind the counter to carry on her business of drying cups with a pristine tea towel.
Marcus had arranged with James to join the cast of
Set Me on Fire!
for lunch. Part of the Trout Island Theatre Company deal, to compensate for the low pay, was that the actors had one meal a day in the diner and the company picked up the tab.
Lara scanned the menu, which seemed to offer little else beyond fried meat, refined carbohydrates and sugar. ‘There’s nothing here I really want to eat,’ she said. She also had not the slightest appetite after the shock of the night before. Even her run had failed either to steady her nerves or to make her hungry.
‘Come on,’ Marcus said. ‘When in Rome.’
‘I’d be happy to tackle a Roman menu. But what is all this? Biscuits? With gravy? Sounds vile.’
Lara was, it had to be said, in a foul mood. She was cross at Bella for disappearing to the swimming pool that morning, at Olly for not waking up until gone ten, and at Marcus for sitting around with his script when he had been the first to agree that a massive clean-up of the house was needed. And all of this mess of family now stood underscored by Stephen’s
what-if
. With those words came the hint of an alternative life which, had it not been for four cells joining and splitting, might have been hers.
She had tried to work her irritation out on the house. So the kitchen was now clean enough for food preparation, the wooden floor and paintwork in the vast, dusty living room had been washed down and the rug-painted Chekhovian floorcloth beaten into submission over the porch banister.
She had been on her knees, rolling it up to take outside, when Marcus wandered in from the porch swing seat, script tucked comfortably under his arm, to get a glass of water.
‘Aren’t you getting a bit carried away?’ he had said.
But the undercurrent to the day had been, and remained, Stephen Molloy. She had always suspected that when he left so suddenly he had taken a piece of her with him. Now she realised his departure had simply put a part of her to sleep, to lie dormant all this while. And that part had been just woken up. Not gradually, like a princess after a long sleep, but slapped to consciousness, like a baby pulled blue from its mother.
Everything now was coloured by that awakening.
She saw, for example, that the reason she hadn’t let Marcus touch her recently was because she couldn’t bear the lily-livered sight of him. The way he had behaved when she had told him of her recent, blighted, pregnancy – banging his head, crying, not even considering the possibility she might want to let it continue into a baby – had led her to view him less as a man and more as another child that she had to look after. And she couldn’t make love to a child. That would be wrong in every way.