The Swimming Pool (16 page)

‘Ooh, what other stuff is there? Stuff between you and Alain?' Lara looked at me with mischievous interest, her glass raised to her lips.

‘Oh, nothing in particular.' My flushed cheeks told otherwise. ‘I mean, not that we don't argue sometimes.' I didn't add that the last row had been about her and her suspected drug-taking.

‘Of course you argue,' Lara said. ‘You're a married couple. But I imagine it's all very respectful. Not like Miles and me. I threw a shoe at his head the other day. Given the heel on it, he was lucky not to lose an eye.'

As I giggled, Lara looked beyond me and I was startled to remember Gayle was still standing there. Hearing myself through a third party's ears, I had an image of her telling Craig, ‘You should have seen Nat with that Channing woman. So sycophantic. All over her like a rash.'

Having said that, there was a directness to the way she was regarding Lara that made me see that
I
was less her object of contempt than Lara herself.

‘You threw a shoe?' she said. ‘Golly.'

Lara couldn't know that Gayle only ever said ‘golly' to poke fun, but the deliberate limpness of the tone and damningly faint smile were unambiguous enough for her to pause in petting Choo and push her sunglasses into her hair, exposing eyes narrowed in confusion.
Resistance to her charms was presumably a rarity in her experience. Ridiculously, this made me feel protective of her and I rushed to make amends. ‘All I know is this is a day to remember: Molly Steele hanging out at the pool like a normal kid. I can't thank you enough, Lara.'

‘Oh, don't mention it. You're the one who took a chance on Bryony.'

‘Only because you magicked up an appointment for us.'

As if to signal that she could bear to witness this mutual-admiration society no longer, Gayle told me she'd get our coffees and meet me back at our base on the other side of the terrace.

‘Sit for a bit,' Lara suggested to me, nudging the second seat, presumably vacated by Angie, with her foot. ‘Here, take Choo a sec, will you? He's making me hot. Angie's just nipped back to her house to fetch something for Eve.' She made no further reference to Gayle, as if she had never been there, and I felt the downward pull of guilt as I obeyed.

‘Just for a couple of minutes.' Choo adjusted himself on my lap, paws poking my bare skin before he settled. My hands cupped his shoulders and head to support his weight. It was like holding a baby. ‘Are dogs allowed in here?' I asked.

‘Not in the pool area, no, but in the café it's at the discretion of the management.' Lara chuckled. ‘Isn't that one of the most comforting lines in the English language? So listen, now Molly's one of the gang, you'll
be able to come to the party, won't you? I'm so chuffed.' It was as if the original problem were solved and the matter of our attendance at the event the crucial new issue. She had a childlike approach to problems that was tempting to share.

I laughed. ‘I thought you just said it was sold out?'

‘It is, but I've kept tickets back for the Circle of Trust. I have to have
some
perks.'

The Circle of Trust
. I felt a thrill deep inside me. ‘Actually, it's my birthday that weekend and we normally go away.'

Lara's posture straightened, the smile stretching from ear to ear once more. ‘It's your birthday? That's
perfect
. I'll give you the tickets as a gift. How about that? You can have a staycation.'

In the face of such persuasion (and generosity, for the tickets, I remembered, were not cheap), I didn't have the heart – or the mind – to object.

‘By the way,' Lara added, ‘I had an update from Alain earlier.'

‘Ed?' Oh dear, I hoped he'd kept his more judgemental opinions about her lifestyle to himself. ‘Did he phone you?'

‘Emailed. We're very pleased with the progress Georgia's making with her maths. I'm sure it will make all the difference to her grades when term starts.'

‘I'm so glad it's working out. I'm sure Ed told you this is a fairly new venture for him.'

‘He did. Here's to new ventures.' She held my eye and inhaled deeply, her chest swelling. ‘Where
is
Angie? She
must have been waylaid. What a bore, I need to pick up Everett from his friend's – Marthe's got a doctor's appointment. Can I leave Choo with you till she comes back?'

‘Of course.'

In fact, Angie was another twenty minutes and by the time I returned to Gayle, she was packing up her things to leave. ‘I'm so sorry,' I told her. ‘I couldn't get away.'

‘I'm sure you couldn't,' she said.

‘I have to stay till Molly's ready.' I had not been aware, in the hour or so that we'd been there, of Molly once looking my way.

‘Who's “Alain”?' Gayle asked.

‘Oh, that's Ed. Lara thinks he looks like Alain Delon.'

‘The old French actor? Is she for real? Who references someone like that in the year 2015? In
Elm Hill
?'

‘She's eccentric, it's not a crime. And he
is
a screen legend,' I added.

Gayle regarded me not so much with annoyance as satisfaction that some dark, long-standing suspicion had at last been confirmed. ‘The way she was looking at you, Nat … What kind of a twisted thing have you got going with that woman?'

‘Don't be crazy,' I said, but I felt a distinct pleasurable charge at her words, powerful enough to cause me to flush.

‘By the way, your coffee's cold,' Gayle said.

At home, I reported to Ed my conversation with Lara about the tutoring. ‘She really cares about the grades,' I
said. ‘You wouldn't expect that, would you, from someone so cool and relaxed?'

Ed chuckled. ‘Oh, believe me, that type cares more than anyone, hence the tutoring. You're drinking very quickly.'

‘Am I?' In the spirit of celebration, I'd poured myself a glass of rosé. Ed, upholding our term-time rule of drinking only at weekends, had declined to join me. ‘What do you mean, she cares more?'

‘For the same reason those families are known as the Noblesse,' he said. Gayle must have told him that. How predictable that they'd joined forces in disapproval. ‘They feel entitled to the best, and that includes their children's exam results. If Georgia doesn't get ten A-stars next summer, they'll probably …' To my astonishment, he was growing a little emotional.

‘Probably what?' I prompted.

‘I don't know. Sell her into slavery or something.'

‘Well, they could get quite a price for her,' I said. ‘She's a beauty, all right.'

‘Who's a beauty?' Molly appeared suddenly, silently, in the doorway. She must have picked up that disconcerting habit from her new friend.

‘You,' I said, instinctively reaching to pull her to me in a hug before remembering that wasn't allowed now, that I had to wait for her to offer herself. I hugged her anyway. ‘You, of course. What an amazing day, eh? You should be so proud of the progress you made.'

Now I was the one becoming emotional. They say that with your children you care as much as if their
triumphs and disasters are happening to you, but that's not true. You care more.

‘
Mum
,' Molly protested, extricating herself from my clutch. ‘Why do you always have to overreact?'

That red-letter outing to the lido was followed by a second, and a third, and again I insisted on being present on the sidelines. Though Molly made no contact with the water, on one occasion she approached the edge to sit with Eve, their heads bent together over a phone. Focused as I was on Molly's body language, it was a few minutes before I realized what the girls must be doing: timing the laps of those in the water, chiefly Josh, Georgia and a male friend whose name I didn't know but who, judging by his quicksilver flip turns, must have been a teammate of Josh's. The lanes being busy, there was obviously no space for a head-to-head race and the youngsters seemed to have commandeered a lane between them.

Well, there was no rule against racing.

Of course, I'd made it my business some time ago to study the list of activities that
were
prohibited poolside, and I revisited it again when waiting for Molly to join me to walk home. It was reassuringly thorough: no running, diving, ducking, fighting, pushing; no wearing of snorkels or flippers, no throwing of balls …

‘Makes it look like you can't have any fun at all, doesn't it?' said a jovial male voice at my shoulder. I turned to find Matt, just arrived for a shift, judging by the
laundered-cotton smell of his lifeguard's vest. Though he radiated youth and rude health from every pore, it was his eyes that struck me: clear and trusting, with none of the muscle memory of pain.

‘No, I think it's an excellent list,' I said. I couldn't tell if he remembered me from our previous conversation or related me to the girl with aquaphobia. I resisted the temptation to repeat the briefing I'd given his manager.

‘Which one is it you're worried about?' he asked.

‘I was thinking about the ducking,' I said truthfully.

‘Hmm, not always easy to spot, but don't worry, we're on to it. Ducking is actually a form of bullying,' he added. ‘It can be very upsetting for the victim.'

‘I agree.'

When he moved on, I was alarmed to find myself gulping for air, forgetting for one ghastly moment that he had spoken to me as to an adult, a member of the community. A fellow enforcer of decency, not a perpetrator.

When Mel said she was bored, it meant something was going to happen. Like stealing cigarettes from her brother or – in one sting that owed more to luck than judgement – a whole packet from the newsagent's, spoils that we would take to the pond to flaunt in front of the other kids. Like sneaking into the building site on the new estate and looking for something to loosen or break
or hide. Like stripping the boys of their shorts and spinning the thieved garment on our fingers the way a martial artist twirs a staff.

Soon this last prank was our favourite. Fast, simple, as old as the hills, it never varied: we'd select our victim carelessly at the end of the day, picking off the weakest in the confidence that the pack would keep on running, then bringing him down by the side of the pond or a few feet into the woods before tearing off his swimming trunks and hiding them in the bushes (local sales of boys' swimming kit must have rocketed that summer: it was not unusual to see a twelve-year-old in shorts too big or too small, borrowed from a family member). Afterwards, we'd sit and watch his naked arse flash off in search of cover.

The main impediment to success was laughter. If we started laughing too early it made us too weak to finish the job and might even land us a blow, like the split lip Mel got one time from a little bastard called Colin. ‘Stop making me laugh,' she'd cry, as one of our victims proved exceptionally wriggly. ‘Sit on him, Nat! I can't get the fucking things off him!'

‘I'm going to wet myself,' I'd heave. It was just so funny, the sight of those righteous, powerless faces – and all the funnier when they thought they were about to get peed on.

At first it was interesting to see under their shorts, the varying stages of male development, but after a while boys were just boys – there were more intriguing things
happening under our own clothes – and their protests, their insults, all sounded the same.

‘Piggy! Pock-face!'

‘Snout-nose! Stain-head!'

‘Freaks! Ugly Sisters!'

‘Everybody hates you!'

‘Yeah, yeah,' we'd say, and afterwards we'd link arms to double our defences, sometimes striding all the way home intertwined.

Did we do what we did because they hated us so much or did they hate us so much because we did it?

Either way it didn't matter to us. As far as we were concerned the boys were complicit: why else did they keep coming back for more? It was only a matter of time before we grew bored and looked around for someone better to torture.

A girl, ideally.

And so the impossible became the inevitable. After her Saturday tutoring session, Georgia announced that she was ‘stealing' Molly for the afternoon and offered the frighteningly vague promise that ‘If we go to the lido, I'll make sure she's okay.'

‘I've got everything I need,' Molly pitched in, equally casual. ‘You know, sun lotion and all that.' Not you, was the message.

‘But …'

‘Leave it,' Ed warned me in an undertone. ‘I had a quick word with Georgia just now and I'm confident she'll take good care of her.'

So they'd discussed it, without my input.

‘She knows Molly can't swim,' he said, ‘and she'll make sure she doesn't go in the water.'

I wasn't convinced this was a strong enough ‘word', but by now the front door was closing, the girls already laughingly on their way. I had a sense of watching myself, powerless and appalled, of recognizing just too late that I'd witnessed an abduction.

‘Anyway,
you've briefed the staff, haven't you?' Ed said. Whatever his misgivings about Lara, they clearly did not extend to Georgia. ‘Molls just times their laps for them,' he added.

‘I know, I told you that before, with Eve. The others race. Georgia and Josh and some of his swimming buddies.'

‘Exactly. You know Josh is some sort of regional champion?'

‘Yes.' I didn't remind Ed of his sarcasm when Angie had detailed the young prodigy's efforts. ‘So you really think we can trust Georgia? This is
in loco parentis
, Ed. What if Molly suddenly decides she wants to stop timing laps and get into the water? Even the shallow end is quite deep, and total chaos with all the younger kids jumping in and out, pulling each other under.' My intestines knotted at the thought of Molly being lost from sight in the mêlée, the lifeguard squinting in vain at the rippling surface, and me, where? At home, outmanoeuvred.

‘They've all done life-saving courses, from what I gather,' Ed said, ‘and Georgia's taken kids from the Greendale to the swimming pool as part of a community-service initiative at Westbridge. Some of them have never been in a pool in their lives, she said.'

The Greendale was a shelter for victims of domestic abuse and their children. ‘I didn't know she did that,' I conceded. ‘That's impressive.'

‘To be honest, I think she hides her light under a bushel a bit, what with the other big personalities in the family.'

Miles
being laconic by anyone's standards and Everett relatively unknown to us, he could only referring to Lara.

His student arrived then, and I spent the next hour divided between my laptop research into the health and safety guidelines for lidos and my phone, alert for breaking news of a terrible tragedy or, at least, for Molly's tearful summons. To stop myself phoning to check on her, I replayed the exchange I'd had with Bryony Foster on the phone the previous day, when I'd called to consult her discreetly on Molly's quantum leap and had, in passing, asked if it was normal for parents to be sidelined in the way we'd been.

The answer was yes. ‘All this time she's been on the outside looking in,' Bryony said. ‘If she needs to push you to the outside a little bit in order to feel like
she
's getting in, well, it might be worth the short-term sacrifice. This sort of thing is not an exact science and I know it might feel counter-intuitive, but it's going to be fine, trust me.'

It's not an exact science because it's not a science, I imagined Gayle saying, but then I remembered Lara's expression when I'd raised the issue of shallow-water blackout, that flicker of scepticism, as if Molly's lack of progress all these years might have had something to do with my mollycoddling (the pun had not passed me by). Not for the first time it struck me that there might very well be people – my own mother, perhaps – who suspected the original episode had been all in my mind, the ensuing drama some sort of drawn-out Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

No,
I had no choice but to try to do as Bryony and Lara advised, and as Ed was already succeeding in doing: trust.

The student left and another arrived. After that, Ed started making noises about packing for the holiday. ‘D'you think you might be able to start on it?' he said, and I couldn't confess I was too keyed up to tackle the task. When, by four thirty, Molly had still failed to make contact, I phoned, only to find that the group had left the lido and decamped to Georgia's house. I volunteered to drive over to pick her up.

‘She's lost the use of her legs, has she?' was Ed's only remark, but I could tell he thought I'd done well to last as long as I had. ‘Don't be long,' he added. ‘There's masses to do.'

At La Madrague, the terrace was the usual sunlit, hedonistic scene and, once I'd reassured myself of Molly's survival (‘Uh, yeah, I'm
fine
' – this uttered with the breathtakingly dismissive gall of a true revisionist), I surrendered to it with relief. Angie was there, sharing a bottle of rosé with Lara, Choo circling their chairs and snapping at insects. He approached me, tail swinging, recognizing me now.

‘Just one more, ladies,' Lara said. ‘Miles is taking me to Claridges for our anniversary and I ought to make an effort of some sort.'

‘Yes, your standard vagrant chic won't wash there,' Angie said, with characteristic irony. ‘We can't let you disgrace yourself in public
again
.'

‘How many years have you been married?' I asked Lara.

‘Oh,
I forget. It was before Georgia – terribly conventional of us.'

‘Well, you know the date and that's what counts,' Angie said, giggling. ‘I wonder if Stephen knows ours?'

Ed knew ours, of that I was certain, though here and now the fact did not present itself as one to admire.

‘Where's
Alain
this afternoon?' Lara asked me, and I thought briefly of Gayle; what with the new complications of accompanying Molly to the lido, we had not been able to co-ordinate our own swims since Monday.

‘
Alain
is packing for
les vacances
.' The ice-cold wine, combined with the relief that Molly's excursion had been a success, had produced an elation I'd rarely felt before. ‘We head off tomorrow.'

‘I forgot you were going away as well,' she said, in flattering dejection. ‘Angie goes to Italy on Monday. That's a bore.'

The Channings, I knew, were not going on holiday until after the bank holiday, Westbridge's start of term being later than the local schools', which allowed them to bypass the August bun fight.

‘La?' Miles was at the terrace doors, frowning mildly in his wife's direction, presumably on account of her lateness in preparing for their date. Unheeded by her (of the three of us, I alone looked up), he appeared for a moment a little lost. It occurred to me that, for all the time I'd spent thinking about the Channings to date, I had not asked him a fraction of the questions I had his wife and the little personal information I did know had
come from her (or the internet) – his age (two years younger than Ed and me), his Kent childhood, his relatively early marriage and young fatherhood. Seeing him in the shadows, perplexed and diminished, I understood suddenly Ed's assertion that he was not enigmatic, just dull. An ordinary man with the trappings of wealth and glamour, the reflected glory of a dazzling wife. Imagine if he lived at Kingsley Drive, if he wore Ed's or Craig's clothes and not his own, a small man in a small house doing a small job. Married to a small woman.

Not an epiphany to share as the first and only drink inevitably became a second.

‘Claridges,' I said, after Lara drifted indoors after him, leaving Angie and me alone. ‘I'd love to go there. It must be so nice to have such a besotted husband. I bet Miles would do anything for her, don't you?'

Angie lifted her sunglasses and looked at me as if trying to gauge my intended degree of sarcasm. ‘Do you really think so?'

‘Well, yes. I do.'

As her pale eyebrows rose, she let the glasses drop back on to the bridge of her nose. I had never known a group so committed to their use of sunglasses as theatrical props. ‘How funny. I see it as the other way around.
She
'd do anything for
him
.' She chuckled. Everything she discussed was an amusement to her, which made her very easy company. ‘He's obviously never asked you to do anything for him. If he had, you'd know what I mean. I shouldn't be saying this, but La and Miles, they're both,
you know …' When I failed to respond, she lowered both her chin and her voice: ‘They may be celebrating their anniversary, but they're not always as observant as they might be about their marriage vows. They have an agreement.' Her chin was up again, voice back to normal: ‘You didn't hear that from me.'

I tried not to show how taken aback I was. If this was true then neither Ed nor I had gained a correct impression of Miles. As for Lara, well, I had to admit, it was easier to believe. ‘I read a piece in the
Guardian
about open marriages. It suits the man better than the wife, as a rule.'

‘There's a surprise.' Angie laughed. ‘It doesn't help that men continue to be found attractive long after we've been retired from the game. Isn't that a demoralizing thought?' She paused for a deep medicinal swallow of wine. ‘Sometimes I think this could be my last year of having anyone want to sleep with me. I should make the most of it.'

‘Hmm.' In light of my own peculiar responses to her husband, I felt it best not to comment on their marriage. A thought struck: what had Lara said at the pool after our movie night?
You don't want to know what we got up to …
Did that mean Lara and Stephen, Miles and Angie? Wife-swapping? My face burned.

‘Do
you
feel that?' Angie said, peering at me.

I hesitated. My better judgement distorted as it was by sun, alcohol, maternal relief, it was tempting to confide that Ed and I had let the sexual side of things lapse a little in recent years. It was nothing uncommon but, in this company, seemed shameful, something to
mark me as predictable. Less desirable. Lara – and Angie too perhaps – enjoyed extramarital adventures while I barely enjoyed marital ones. When a cool breeze from the park touched my hot skin, it seemed to me it contained the faint threat of summer's end, an elemental reminder of approaching old age. No wonder people rushed to seize the day, I thought, to act on the horrible knowledge that nothing lasted for ever. I promised myself there and then that something needed to change, that this group had right what I was getting wrong.

‘I do a bit,' I admitted, finally. ‘I've definitely been feeling older lately. It keeps hitting me, not how I feel physically, but more how other people treat me. I wondered if it was to do with having a daughter growing up.' Off balance, I asked Angie a question I had not intended to ask: ‘What you just said … about Lara.' I lowered my voice. ‘Do you think she has her eye on anyone in particular?'

The sunglasses came up again and I saw Angie's eyes widen with new interest.

‘I don't mean Stephen,' I blundered, ‘obviously.'

She cocked her head, smiling. ‘Are you asking me if I think you should be worried about
your
husband?'

‘No. Yes.' I saw that she looked rather impressed by this answer.

‘I would say no,' she said. ‘Don't waste your energy. Because if that's what La wants, then that's what she'll try to get, and there'll be nothing you can do about it.'

‘Wow.'
I wasn't sure what to make of either the opinion or the utterly matter-of-fact delivery of it.

‘She and Miles have that in common. They go for what they want. They're heat-seeking missiles.' Angie paused, reflecting. ‘But it's never anything personal.'

Returning with Molly to Kingsley Drive, I was aware straight away of a dangerous calm. In the hallway, two large holdalls, so plump with Steele possessions that they strained their fastenings, sat accusingly alongside a bag from Sarah containing items for Inky.

Ed was in the kitchen, prodding a wooden spoon at a dish of bolognese sauce. At the sight of me he said nothing, did not return my greeting, but turned on the gas under a pan of steaming water and began feeding handfuls of spaghetti into it with a pointedness that spoke volumes. It was only then that I realized how late it was, almost eight thirty. How had I let that happen? I had left to collect Molly before five. Miles and Lara would be in their taxi headed for Claridges.

It was my turn to cook.

‘No issues with the lido outing,' I said in a regular tone.

‘I told you there wouldn't be.' His eyes were reluctant to make contact, his tone bitten down, familiar signs of short-term sulking; if I avoided making any provocative remarks, he'd be fine in about an hour. I felt a rush of tenderness for him, for his being so transparent to me,
so legible. There was something to be said for knowing what you were dealing with.