Swimming Upstream (11 page)

“Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands up.

Catherine looked up at me. “When you are in a
relationship there have to be some compromises, you know.”

 “What are you saying?” I asked her. “That I’m
uncompromising? That I should have tried harder with Larsen, given up more for
him?”

 “No. I’m not saying that. That’s you and Larsen. That’s
different. You wanted different things. But this is what I want. Martin. Me. A
life together.” She paused and neither of us spoke for a moment or two. “Look,
I know you didn’t get a very good welcome when you came over that time, but he
was just worried, that’s all. He came back late at night and I wasn’t there. He
didn’t know where I was. And that was my fault for not leaving a note…”

“You weren’t expecting him back till the following
day! Why would you leave a note?”

“Well, that doesn’t alter the fact that he was
worried. Anything could have happened to me.”

“He knew you were going out with me,” I argued. “That’s
what you told me.”

“Not till that late, though!”

I sighed.

“Look Lizzie, I don’t know what you’ve got against
him. It wasn’t personal, him shutting the door on you like that. He likes you. When
I told him I was coming over today to help you pack he offered to come and help
too, straight away.”

I sighed again, lost for words.

“I said we could manage - and he had to go to
work, so he couldn’t come, not really, but he offered all the same and was even
willing to get his shift covered. To help you. I told him he didn’t need to,
but he wanted to, that’s the point.”

The doorbell rang. I jumped down, grateful for the
interruption, and went to answer it, moving a box of books to one side with my
toe as I walked through the living room. Catherine followed me, padding softly across
the carpet behind me. I felt upset and uncomfortable. I didn’t want my mistrust
of Martin to drive a wedge between us, but I knew that Catherine sensed it and it
was hard not to speak my mind. Until it was spoken about, the wedge was there in
any event; it was hard to be close to a person when there was something you
couldn’t talk about, especially something as important as the man she was going
to marry.

I opened the door. Martin stood on the doorstep,
smiling.

“Oh, hello,” I said. “Are you looking for
Catherine? She’s here.”

“I’ve brought some more boxes,” said Martin,
nodding towards the car. “They’re flat packed but I can soon put a few
together.”

“Thank you,” I stood aside to let him in. “I don’t
think I need any more, though. I haven’t got much more packing to do.”

“She’s hardly taking anything,” said Catherine.

“Don’t blame her,” said Martin, standing in my
living room and looking around him. “Clean slate. Best thing.”

I followed Martin’s gaze round the room at the
apple-white walls and the half empty bookshelves, down to the magnolia and fawn
flecked carpet and across to the red corduroy Habitat sofa that Larsen’s mother
had given us when we first moved in. At the black leather wingback armchair
Larsen had found in an antiques shop on Mill Road one afternoon and had dragged
all the way home, with Doug. And at the oak coffee table that we had splashed
out on at Clement Jocelyn when I had first got my job at GCFM. I had removed
Jude’s painting that had hung over the gas fire and had slid it down behind the
sofa. That was one thing that was definitely not coming with me. “I don’t have
that much that’s just mine,” I muttered.

Martin slid an arm round Catherine’s waist, pulled
her to him and kissed her full on the lips. “Hello baby,” he said. “Pleased to
see me?”

Catherine looked up at him adoringly. “Yes,” she
said. “But what happened to your shift? I thought you were working till four?”

“They didn’t need me today, after all. Closed the
pool. Some kind of problem with the heaters. Had to get the engineers in.”
Martin kissed her again. Catherine put her arms round his neck and kissed him
back.

I averted my eyes and picked up a roll of
sellotape that was sitting on the coffee table and began picking away at it to
find the end. I hated sellotape. It didn’t matter how many times you found the end,
all it took was one snip of the scissors and it was lost again, your
fingernails ruined. I lowered myself to the ground in front of the box of books
and kneeled on the carpet.

“So, I thought I could help.” Martin said. “Where
do you girls want me? Kitchen? Bathroom? Bedroom?”

“All of those,” said Catherine in a sexy, but
loud, whisper.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Martin slap
Catherine on the bottom. She let out a squeal. I located the end of the roll,
and pulled a strip of tape with a loud screech. Both Catherine and Martin
stopped grabbing at each other and watched as I taped up the box of books.

“It’s all done. Really. Like I said, I don’t have
much.” I wrote “BOOKS” on the box with a marker pen, which was a bit pointless
really since I didn’t have any other box to mistake it for.

“When are you leaving?” asked Martin. “You want me
to start loading up?”

“Tomorrow. First thing. I suppose you could put
these in the boot if you don’t mind. The rest can wait till the morning.”

“No problem. Here.” Martin bent down beside me and
picked up the box. He followed me out to the car. I opened the boot and took
out my map and my swimming bag to make room for the books. As I turned, my
goggles fell out of my bag onto the pavement. Martin and I both bent down at
the same time to pick them up. Our heads collided and we both crouched on the
pavement for a brief moment, looking at each other awkwardly. I rubbed my head.

Martin grinned. “You okay ?”

“Fine.” I reached out and retrieved my goggles.

“Look…” said Martin. I waited. Behind him, Catherine
appeared in the doorway of my house, a few feet away. She leaned against the
door frame, watching us. I stood up and Martin, glancing over his shoulder, did
the same.

“I never meant…” said Martin. “I hope we can...”

“Catherine’s waiting,” I said.

Martin gave me a look that I couldn’t decipher and
slammed down the door to the boot.

After they had gone I picked up the phone and
dialled the number for the pools complex.

“When are you going to be open again?” I asked.

“When are you looking to come?” asked the
receptionist.

“Well, as soon as I can. As soon as the pool
reopens.”

“Re-opens? What do you mean? We’re open now,” she
said.

“Oh, great. I heard the pool had been closed
today. Power failure. Heaters or something?”

“No, love,” said the receptionist. “You heard
wrong. We’re open all day. Till ten tonight. Lane Swim only from seven though.”

“Thank you.”

I put down the phone and wandered round the house,
collecting up items of clothing and bed linen from the upstairs rooms and
throwing them into a big black bin liner. What was his game? I wondered. Was he
making excuses to see me? Was that it? Or was he jealous of my friendship with
Catherine? Afraid I’d pack her up in one of my boxes and whisk her off to
London? In the living room I picked up a woollen purple throw with black and
white crocheted flowers that my mother had given me from the back of a chair
and put it in the washing basket which was sitting on the floor near the door. I
paced the room, briefly switching on the telly and switching it off again. Whatever
he was up to, Catherine was completely taken in. There was no point in trying
to tell her something she didn’t want to hear. And maybe he was right; maybe it
was none of my business. Maybe I was just jealous, after all. Maybe he had just
wanted to spend the day with Catherine, whatever she was doing, whoever she was
seeing. Maybe he really loved her. Maybe I was wrong.

I paused and looked up. In a corner of a book
shelf above the telly was an old photograph of Larsen which I had taken soon
after I met him. I wasn’t sure if that made it his or mine. I picked it up. He
was stood on stage, smiling, his head bent over his guitar, wisps of his
shoulder-length blond hair falling into his face. His beautiful face. My heart
leaped; he still took my breath away. But he was gone. And now our home
together was gone - packed up and laid bare, all ready for his new life with
Jude. All bar the cot that would soon be in the spare bedroom, the Moses basket
that would soon be sitting beside the bed. Our bed. The bed that we had rolled
around in naked together. The bed that we had curled up in together, laughing
and talking dreamily until sleep overcame us. The bed that would soon have Larsen
back in it again - Larsen and his new family, lying tangled up sleepily
together.

I put the photo back on the shelf where I had
found it, laid down on the sofa and turned out the light.

There are good days and there are bad days and then there
are those days from hell that leap up out of nowhere and smack you right
between the eyes. These are the days when you wish you’d stayed in bed, or in
the womb. “Nobody told me there'd be days like these,” sang John Lennon once. Nobody
told me either.

Not that any of it had been particularly easy of
late. Even moving was scary at first. Apart from my first term at college and
the few months since Larsen had left, I'd never really lived on my own and now,
aside from the practical details like worrying alone (which is different from
worrying with someone else) about the rent and the bills and the poll tax and
TV licence, there were more fundamental and complicated problems to be faced -
like what to do with moths, beetles and spiders in the bath, what to do when
the water pipes froze and burst and flooded the kitchen, what to do when things
went bump in the night, and, with no-one to direct me or to be my excuse for
inactivity, how to decide what to do with the rest of my life.

I'd been lucky with the flat, I knew that. My
mother’s friend Lynne was more than happy to let it to me. It was a modest but
distinctly up-market two-bed upper floor flat conversion in a cobbled mews in Central
London, just off Marylebone High Street. The house itself was pretty - white brick
with timber sash windows, a cast iron downpipe, and a Juliet balcony leading off
my living room at the front. A pair of authentic-looking stable doors opened
onto the neighbour’s garage downstairs. At the rear, a black iron staircase
provided a fire escape which led up past the living room window to the kitchen.

The living room had the original floorboards,
cornices and picture rail and was decorated simply in white and lemon. Two
small sofas with cream and tartan throws sat in front of a gas fire, and a
large vase of dried flowers stood by the door that led onto the two small bedrooms.
Two large Gaugin prints filled the walls in the hallway. The overall effect was
light and bright, chic and feminine, and it would ordinarily have been
completely out of my price bracket. But, to my immense surprise, Lynne had only
wanted to recoup the cost of her considerably cheaper rented flat in Edinburgh
on the basis that I was semi-house-sitting and therefore doing her a favour.

I moved in with two suitcases full of clothes, the
cardboard box full of books, a bag of cassette tapes, Jeffrey, my beige woolly
teddy bear and an Ikea bedside lamp that had seen better days. I couldn't
believe that this sparse collection of chattels, small enough to load into my
car and out at the other end all by myself, was the product of my seven years
with Larsen, of my twenty-seven years of life. It occurred to me with some
sadness how many people I'd also left behind over the years along with my
belongings.

The flat seemed very empty, and it was cold for
July. It had been overcast and wet for days and didn’t really feel like summer.
I should be having a housewarming, I mused regretfully, but there was no-one to
invite. After a quick spring clean I lit the gas fire, hung my clothes up in
the wardrobe and went off to Europa for bread, cheese and olives and a bottle
of red wine. Soon I was sitting on the living room carpet in front of the fire,
drinking an ambivalent toast to my new home.

Being alone, I discovered, is a state of mind. At
its best it brings serenity. It could recreate for me the sunshine days of my solitary
youth, when all I needed as friends were my books and the fields at the back of
the house where we lived. On my days off I'd go swimming, then lie on my bed
wrapped up in my duvet and read for hours, or I'd catch a bus up to Finchley
Road and take long brisk walks over Hampstead Heath. Sometimes as I plodded
past the ponds and up to Kenwood through bracken and stretches of reedy grass, I'd
pause to smoke a cigarette and watch the sun go down over the city below and,
whether my mood was blissfully happy or reflective and melancholy, I’d achieve
the state of inner harmony that I now realised I'd been missing for so long. My
senses reawakened, I'd feel so completely and utterly at peace that it would
almost bring tears to my eyes. At those moments I'd feel I'd achieved the
perfect equilibrium between the security I needed so desperately on the one
hand and the freedom I craved on the other. I'd see my future as bright and
hopeful with an infinite number of choices open to me.

Other times, being alone was just plain lonely and
hard work to boot. The effort of travelling well over a hundred miles to work
and back each day, combined with shopping, cooking, cleaning and paying the
bills, then climbing into bed at night with no-one to touch or to talk to about
the way I was feeling often made me wonder what I was doing in London and
whether I'd made some huge mistake. I'd plough on for days, even weeks, barely
acknowledging to myself that anything was wrong until I'd wake one morning early
and off balance after a dream about Larsen in which he'd been holding me and
stroking my hair and whispering that everything was going to be all right. I'd
stretch out my hand and feel the emptiness of the bed beside me and my heart
would sink. I'd lie there apathetically for hours, staring into the dim and
dusky bedroom, seeing nothing but one more empty day ahead and then more and
more days exactly the same, stretching on and on into infinity. I'd see the
crossroads of my future looming up ahead but instead of enthusing over the
various paths I could take I'd feel lost and confused and long to run back the
way I'd come, knowing deep down that I never could, and this would frighten me
more.