The Swimming Pool (18 page)

‘Of course.'

And now here it was, a Word file sitting just above the Trash icon, as if it might at any time find itself nudged into oblivion: ‘MS Journal'.

Don't click
, I warned myself.

I clicked. The file was locked. Which both served me right and allowed me to pretend I'd never committed the infraction in the first place.

I was about to shut down when another Word file caught my eye: ‘NOP'. What did that stand for? Some teenage acronym, like GTG or BFN? (Traditionally, Gayle had translated them for me.)

I opened this one without trouble and found my answer in the heading: ‘Normal Operating Plan'. It was
an excerpt from a lido staff document, perhaps shared by Matt in advance of the girls' tour:

Elm Hill Lido Normal Operating Plan
Awareness of risks

1. Youth and inexperience. Pay particular attention to those who appear nervous or afraid. Never forget that the life expectancy of a drowning non-swimmer is measured in seconds, not minutes.
   
2. Alcohol and drugs taken before swimming. Persons who appear intoxicated must be excluded.
   
3. Unclear pool water, preventing casualties from being seen.
   
4. Unauthorized access to pool intended to be out of use. Managers must assess effective measures to prevent access. These may include physical barriers and staff supervision.
   
5. Absence of pool attendants in an emergency.
   

I read point (a) a second time, before closing the lid and leaving the laptop on the kitchen table for Molly to reclaim.

We did not pass Mel's house as we drove into the village, but even so I buried my face in the hydrangea on my lap until Ed had parked the car at my grandmother's door.

I'd been back to Stoneborough numerous times, of course, since
that
summer – flat refusal would only have roused suspicion – for many years careful to keep myself indoors and out of sight. Later, on the rare excursions to the shop or village green with a young Molly, I'd taken refuge in the camouflage of motherhood, though by then the community had developed and those who'd been children in the 1980s and hadn't fled to the city were unrecognizable from their young selves. As for Mel, a chance remark of my grandmother's had let me know she'd left the village for Southampton in her early twenties. Her mother, Cheryl, was still there, though unlikely to be able to identify a girl she'd scarcely laid eyes on at the time.

Why, then, did I still feel the need to hide? Paranoia, I told myself. How could it be anything more after thirty years? And yet it was hardly less stressful than having something real to fear.

‘What
an enormous plant!' my mother exclaimed at the door. ‘You're far too generous,' she added with genuine reproach. I'd heard of mothers who could see no wrong in their grown-up daughters, but mine, alas, had not.

‘It's only a hydrangea,' I said.

‘But in a
very
nice pot. It looks hand-thrown.'

‘Hand-thrown?' Ed echoed. ‘Wouldn't that mean it was smashed to pieces?'

‘Ha-ha, Edward. Have you two won the pools or something?'

‘What's the pools?' Molly asked, wearing the same mistrustful look that I could only hope had skipped a generation.

‘Football scores,' Ed told her. ‘It was a gambling game that people used to play before the Lottery.'

‘Still do,' said my mother. ‘The woman in Boots' brother's friend just split a million with two others. That's worth having.'

‘Three hundred and thirty-three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three pounds, thirty-three and a third pence,' Molly said, before Ed could ask.

‘I don't suppose they argued about the penny,' said my grandmother, from the room beyond.

‘Granny, hello!' I called. ‘Can we come in and sit down?' We were still in the hallway, but conversation – or confrontation – with my mother tended to begin the moment the door opened. Already there was an odd disconnect between my own grudging conduct and the willing banter of everyone else.

Once
the door was closed behind us, I unclenched a little. We unloaded Molly's bags and arranged ourselves in the sitting room, where there was, as always, the faint smell of cats, in spite of there being none in residence. Perhaps they wandered in unnoticed by the chattering women and helped themselves to nibbles, like the ones Mum now distributed with drinks.

‘Wotsits,' Ed said, ‘king of the extruded snack,' and I could tell he was wondering about Molly's nutrition during the forthcoming week.

‘Nice and easy on nonagenarian gums, eh?' my mother said, from her drinks cabinet by the window. ‘Do you know what a nonagenarian is, Molly?'

Molly looked hopeful of a rude punch line but I could have told her to expect a straight definition.

My mother had moved here on retirement four years ago, my grandfather having died not long before and my grandmother, then in her late eighties, not able to live alone. Ed and I had always regarded this as an act of duty to be admired, celebrated. If and when the time came, we hoped that we, and Molly after us, could be counted on to fulfil the same familial duty. Nothing in his manner suggested any change of position on this. I, however, was aware almost on arrival of a brand-new emotion in my own response, an unwelcome, guttural one that I could only imagine had been exacerbated by general nerves: revulsion. Because my grandmother looked – not to put too fine a point on it – decrepit. Her eyes were glassy and remote, as if peering at us from
inside a jar, and her skin fell from the bone like oversized clothing. The idea of my mother nursing her struck me as not so much heroic as perverse; I didn't want to be responsible for someone in this condition any more than I wanted to foist it on my own daughter.

‘Thank you,' I said, accepting a tepid gin and tonic with weak fingers. What was wrong with me? Was this another manifestation of the crisis I'd experienced on meeting Georgia for the first time or, in a smaller way, the conviction I'd felt talking to Angie that I owed it to myself to seize life while I still had the muscular strength to do it? Looking to Molly for reassurance, I saw that she was regarding her great-grandmother in exactly the way she always did, with respect and wonder, rather as she would marvel at the longevity of a giant tortoise. She made no connection between her own flesh and that of her aged relative's. Between us, drinks distributed, sat the interim model that was my mother, aged seventy, sprightly enough, and single by choice since divorcing my father almost two decades ago. (In the end, they had waited for me to leave home, an ill-conceived act of selflessness if ever there was one.)

I thought of that sense I'd once had that the men had been eliminated from society and eyed Ed with gratitude and unexpected desire.

Catching my eye, he frowned his ‘All right?' frown and I nodded, swallowing a damp Wotsit.

‘So have you got all your textbooks with you?' Mum asked Molly. ‘What will we test you on this time?'

‘Nothing,'
Molly said. ‘I didn't bring any schoolwork.'

My mother and grandmother exchanged a look of astonishment.

‘She had a few bits and pieces at the beginning of the holidays, but now she's mostly just hanging out with chums,' I said. ‘She doesn't have any studies to do while she's here, not unless she wants to.'

‘I don't,' Molly confirmed.

‘Has something happened?' my mother said, looking from Ed to me. ‘Normally the poor girl doesn't have a minute to herself. Why's she suddenly been let off the leash?'

‘I wouldn't call her a poor girl,' I said, ‘
or
on a leash. Molly's older now, Mum, she's thirteen. She can decide how she wants to spend her free time.'

I didn't point out that, with his roster of private students, Ed had neglected the extracurricular enrichment of his daughter's state education this summer; when the first tranche of maths had been exhausted, he had not had time to set the next. Meanwhile, distracted by the lido, by new friends, I had been cutting her slack of my own. The week without us in Stoneborough had been Ed's idea, proposed in the spring when we'd planned the main holidays. At the time, I'd suspected he was concerned about my tendency to restrict her freedoms, thought Molly and I needed time apart. But that had been before Bryony, before Georgia. Before Lara. Such thoughts were unappealing, like remembering how it felt to be penniless after you'd struck gold.

‘Can
I help with lunch in any way?' I offered. The fact that neither hostess needed to be in the kitchen foretold of some one-pot affair that Molly would be sure to reject. I noticed there were extra place settings at the table, but did not draw attention to the miscount. I thought again of the missing men.

‘No, all done,' my mother said. ‘We made the casserole the day before yesterday. I hope the potatoes haven't gone liquid.'

I didn't look at Molly. All I could hope for was that there was no offal involved.

‘By the way, Natty, we have a surprise for you. Don't we, Mum?' My mother became animated, almost gleeful. ‘I was in the shop yesterday and I happened to overhear her talking, so I threw caution to the wind and asked her outright.'

There was a silence. ‘Asked who what?' I said at last.

‘If she was your old friend Mel, of course,' Mum said.

I had the sensation of being poised at the top of a tall slide, an inch from tipping, my arms only just able to withhold my bodyweight from the plunge.

‘And she was! She's been up all week visiting her mum while the damp's sorted out in her flat.'

My eye fell again on those extra place settings. ‘Mum, you didn't?'

‘Invite her for lunch? Of course I did.'

Now I was plummeting, friction burns on my legs and elbows.

‘Cheryl
can't come – she works in a pub in Eastleigh at weekends – but she's bringing her grandson instead.'

‘Cheryl's grandson?'

‘Mel's. She's got four, she told me. The little boy hasn't inherited her nose, which is a mercy.'

‘Why, what's wrong with it?' Molly said, then, remembering my stories, ‘Oh, Snout-nose.'

‘What a thing to say,' Mum said, frowning.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Molly,' Ed said. ‘I hope you won't say that in front of Snout-nose herself.'

As father and daughter giggled, I looked helplessly at them. Ed wouldn't be joking like this if he knew the truth. You have to face your fear, I told Molly (or at least I had until one therapist deemed it an unhelpful mantra), but I'd never faced my own and now I was going to have to, with five minutes' notice. I was going to the gallows without being allowed a last prayer.

It had not been easy to restrain myself, but over the years I had not once asked my grandmother for news of Mel or her family and she did not have the kind of personality to tittle-tattle unprompted. That one mention of Mel having relocated had been all she'd given and all I'd needed. My mother was a different matter: it would not have taken her long to penetrate the Stoneborough network, to acquire the intelligence needed to identify strangers from a moment's eavesdropping.

‘Are you all right?' Ed asked me. ‘You don't look too well.'

‘I'm
fine, just a bit thrown. No one likes a blast from the past.'

My mother was incredulous. ‘I thought blasts from the past were exactly what people liked. All this Facepaging.'

Molly and Ed giggled again. What was suffocating terror to me was high comedy to them. I was on my own.

The doorbell rang. ‘I'll get it,' Ed offered.

I didn't know her when she entered the room, a small boy in her wake: she did not resemble her younger self at all. She was heftier, close to obese, and her hair, which I'd remembered as having the colour and shine of young conkers, was black and charred-looking, like the remains of a bonfire. And yet my face burned, my ears filled with the whine of tiny insects, my heart banged harder still. How did the brain do this, provoke the fight-or-flight response to danger long lapsed?

‘Hello again, Mel,' Mum said, with a merriment she had not shown at
our
arrival.

‘We've got you some chocolates,' Mel said in reply, gripping a box of Cadbury's Heroes like an award, and it was her voice – the twang of its accent perfectly suited to the throwaway tone – followed by the rebellious bark of her laughter that made me know her.

My first lucid thought: did she remember the circumstances of our parting? Of course she did. How could she not? A better question was whether or not she despised me for it. But she was here, wasn't she, her eye contact
perfectly guileless? The flatness of her nose was not so noticeable: it had been an unnecessarily cruel fixation.

‘Nasty Nat!' she said, and when Molly gasped, she smiled warmly at her.

My heart rate steadied. How could I imagine I was in danger? She had never harmed me, she had
favoured
me. What I was feeling was the result of the same loose wiring that had caused that episode with Stephen in the screening room, linked perhaps to the intermittent midlife crisis. This was not a woman with a grudge, but one with soft spots – and adult responsibilities.

The boy was about Everett's age and rather bold, judging by his opening remark: ‘Where's your birthmark? Nan says it's as big as a fried egg. That's unless you've had it lasered.'

‘I haven't,' I told him. Long experience in speaking with children of his age calmed me. ‘It's hidden under my make-up.'

‘We used to call them angel's kisses,' said my grandmother.

Not around here
, I thought, but I smiled gratefully at her.

‘How many kids have you got, Mel?' Ed asked.

‘Three. All grown-up. Rio's my oldest daughter Justine's second boy.'

I supposed being a grandmother in your mid-forties was not so unusual. At Elm Hill Prep the mothers were still producing their own babies at that age, but at Rushbrook there'd been a smattering of Mels.

‘What's
for lunch, Nan?' Rio asked.

‘It's a corned-beef hotpot,' said my mother, and the boy's dismay mirrored Molly's. I knew I wouldn't have been able to eat even if it had been a Michelin-starred feast.

‘He won't eat that,' Mel said, matter-of-fact. ‘Fussy eaters, the lot of them.'

‘To be fair, I don't think kids today are familiar with corned beef,' Ed said, and I thought of the class discussion about ersatz foods, the paste sandwiches and rock cakes at the D-Day party that had remained largely untouched by children who knew how to roll their own sushi.