The Swimming Pool (22 page)

The morning is empty and expectant, the traffic lanes bank-holiday clear. I park on yellow lines opposite the hospital's emergency bays, where a lone police car idles, windows down, its driver smoking a cigarette.

The hospital has opened a new wing since I was last here, a curved, glossy structure, the lines of which distort as you walk under a glass canopy to the entrance. Inside, the atrium foyer is empty, like an evacuated hotel, the reception desk unmanned, the check-in monitors unused. The only sign of life is at the Patient Transport desk, where a driver directs me to the third floor.

I pass signs for Breast Radiology, Rheumatology, Neurology, doors to a thousand nightmares past and future, before taking the lift towards the one that the Channings are living in the present. The school-age artworks, no different from those on the walls of my classroom at Elm Hill Prep, are a reminder that Georgia is, in law and in medicine, still a child.

The doors to the unit are locked and I ring and wait, watch through a narrow glass panel as preoccupied staff move between further sets of secure doors. I can already
hear Lara's voice telling me everything's fine; I can already hear her tone of relief, taste the sweet perspective it brings. ‘Nothing else matters,' she'll say, or I'll say, or we'll both say, our words bumping together. The most important words will be unspoken, but there'll be smiles, tearful ones. Does Miles agree? I'll ask her, as I asked before in better times.

Does he?

At last a nurse approaches, nudges open the door a fraction.

‘I've come to see how Georgia Channing is,' I say.

‘I'm afraid it's not possible to see her.' She begins to tell me about bank-holiday visitor arrangements; they differ from those shown online, and only immediate family are permitted this morning.

‘I know I can't go in,' I say. ‘I just wanted to find out how she is.'

‘I'm not in a position to tell you that.' Nor, evidently, is she willing to make eye contact and that is, in a way, more of a shock than the safeguarding of information. In recent weeks, a constant at Lara's side, I've been visible, worthy of attention, and I've grown used to it. How quickly I've forgotten that people are not always friendly – or, at least, they're selective in their friendliness.

‘I'm a good friend of Lara's,' I say softly, and there it is, the magic word, almost certainly the last time I'll be able to use it; the nurse raises her eyes to mine, says she'll go and check.

I
watch as she approaches the next set of doors, which open at the touch of her security pass, and just as they swing closed I catch a glimpse of something identified by my brain as precious: bold colour, viridian, the fabric of Lara's dress. The lurch this causes is sharp, an organic tug back to last night, to when I thought I knew differently. I blink and the green has gone, but already the doors are reopening and I see a sliver of bedside equipment, enough to visualize the full picture of monitors and tubes and probes, the artificial supplies and suctions of a body that cannot run itself.

The nurse is back, the crack through which she chooses to speak even narrower than before. ‘Mrs Channing asks that you leave.' Eye contact has been withdrawn once more.

‘I understand,' I say, and inside me there is the sensation of collapse. ‘Please give the family my best wishes.'

She hardly acknowledges this and as I say my goodbyes to a closed door I can't blame her. Wishes have no place in here, only ECG machines and ventilators and the precise administration of intravenous fluids.

Wishes are no better than superstition, or maybe witchcraft.

Ed's face wore an expression midway between appeal and glower. ‘More drinks with the Channings? Really, Nat? You've been with Lara every day this week. Isn't that enough?'

‘Keep your hair on,' I said easily. ‘It's just a glass of wine. And it's not at the Channings', it's at Angie and Stephen's. They're just back from Liguria this afternoon.'

‘I'm delighted for them.' He sighed. ‘I thought we might go to the Picture House with Craig and Gayle.'

‘But I've already said yes,' I told him.

Glower began to eclipse appeal. ‘You've always already said yes. How about getting my take on it
before
, not after? And who sees their friends constantly like this at our age? The same day they come back from holiday? Seriously, Nat, you know what I think about that group.'

Here we go again
, I thought. It was clear by now that my friendship with Lara and her circle was developing in spite of Ed's wishes, if not at his expense. He had decided on his position after the night of
La Piscine
and it was one of polite closed-heartedness. It was as if,
having tried a free sample of a new product, he'd strengthened his preference for the brand he already used. Why I was not flattered by this declaration of satisfaction with the status quo – more than flattered, moved to tears – Heaven only knows, but instead I was determined to challenge it.

Sheer decency meant he would honour the commitment I had made, though not without staking a complicating claim of his own and arranging to meet Gayle and Craig at the Vineyard after their film had finished. ‘Gayle says she hasn't seen you since before our holiday,' he reported. ‘I thought you said you ran into her the other day.'

‘We've texted,' I said vaguely. Displaying precisely the behaviour I counselled my daughter – and pupils – against, I appeared to have sidelined a loyal long-standing friend in favour of a glittering untried one. Indeed, the texts we'd exchanged had left me feeling guilty on more than one level.
Ed told me about your birthday plan
, Gayle wrote.
Tried to get tickets for pool party but it's sold out. Sorry.

Of course,
Ed told me
meant that she was less sorry that the party was sold out than she would have been if I had been the one to invite her. Or thought to arrange tickets at the same time that I'd arranged my own.

I scrambled to make amends:
Let me see if Lara can help.
I would have enjoyed being able to fix things for her, but when I asked Lara, she told me that even she had no more spares, a response I did not question.
You're right
, I texted Gayle.
But she can put you at the top of the waiting list?

When
her response came, I could hear the scornful laugh that accompanied it:
Don't worry, it's not the be-all.
Then:
Surprised Molls good with plan tbh.

I couldn't help reading the rebuke in that, not least because I had yet to consult Molly on the matter.
Let's have a drink another night instead
, I texted, finally.

Gayle did not reply. I cared, just as I cared that I was no longer swimming with her in the mornings but with Lara in the afternoons, but I admit I didn't care as much as I should have.

As for Molly, though I would have preferred to ask her about the pool party face to face, Gayle's comment weighed heavily on me and I decided it couldn't wait.

‘Listen, darling,' I said, when I next called, ‘Dad and I thought the three of us might go to this party at the lido for the night of my birthday. Would you be Okay with that? I've checked with Lara and the pool itself will be closed. They'll just be using the café and the sundeck as a venue.'

‘Sure,' Molly said.

‘I think you'll enjoy it. There'll be a barbecue and a jazz band.'

‘Yeah, Georgia said. She told me all about it.'

‘Great.'

It had been so straightforward that I was momentarily lost for words. Was I to gather that I had Georgia to thank for this easy acquiescence?

At this rate I'd soon need to send the girl flowers.

Angie's
house was on Steadman Avenue, one of the roads running south off The Rise, a relatively modest Edwardian semi from the street but opulent and moneyed inside, with one of those glass and granite kitchen extensions that cost more than the entire Steele pension fund. The garden, where we assembled for drinks around a rattan table, had been landscaped with minimalist severity; it was not clear if the vegetation was the photosynthesizing real thing or simply top-grade counterfeit.

The cocktail
du jour
was the Aperol Spritz.

‘Welcome back to shore, babe.' Lara toasted Angie as if she'd returned from sailing the
Cutty Sark
, not people-watching from a hotel terrace in Portofino. ‘If it weren't for Natalie, I swear I would have expired in your absence.'

‘You mean your beautiful children aren't enough to sustain you?' Angie laughed. At her feet, Choo was savaging what looked like a snorkel, still frantic with excitement at being reunited with his mistress.

‘God, no,' Lara said. ‘Are yours? I don't go along with those weird people who say children are more interesting than adults.'

‘I've never heard anyone say that,' Angie said.

‘But
honestly
, darling, we've been
bereft
. Haven't we, Miles?'

‘Oh, quite distraught,' Miles agreed, in his sardonic way.

‘You're a bad liar, mate,' said Stephen, tanned and well fed from Italy. Though he had welcomed Ed and me with faultless bonhomie, I couldn't help being
relieved when he'd taken a seat on the far side of the table from me.

The kids wandered out to graze on our bar snacks, inoffensively remote as ever. Georgia, long-legged in fraying cut-off shorts, a pink vest and a trilby, was every inch the girl who routinely shunned model-agency scouts. The sight of her cheered Ed, at least, giving him the opportunity to emphasize a point about co-sines, which, when Lara listened in and contrived to understand, taxed her acting skills more sorely than any challenge I'd seen her face to date.

‘How's Molly?' Angie asked me, when the youngsters had drifted off again. Here, the kids chose the soundtrack, and as she spoke, some R&B star shrieked his parallel narrative. ‘Eve hasn't been able to get hold of her all week.'

‘Her mobile signal's been a bit dodgy in Stoneborough,' I said, pleased on Molly's behalf that she'd been missed by the older girls. ‘I was just telling her the other day how it was when I spent a few weeks down there in the eighties. Just a landline that you had to get permission to use. You'd have thought I was talking about the
eighteen
eighties the way she reacted. Gayle says she has pupils at Rushbrook who literally don't know what a fixed-line phone is.'

‘Remind me, is Gayle the one whose daughter likes Georgia's new boyfriend?' Angie asked.

‘I'm not sure who her girls are interested in at the moment,' I said. As Ed had pointed out, it was a while since she and I had had a conversation of any length. I
would ask her tonight, I thought. ‘Who's Georgia's new boyfriend?'

‘Matt, of course,' Lara said. ‘I thought I'd bored you enough this week with tales of my rampant sexual jealousy, Natalie.'

I chose not to catch Ed's eye, this being exactly the sort of comment he would stockpile in evidence against Lara. (He'd probably have something to say about the three-year age gap between Matt and Georgia too.)

‘Well, I saw him first,' she continued, giggling. ‘No one can dispute that. I was there for a meeting the day they interviewed the lifeguards.'

‘Spare us your tales of the casting couch,' Stephen said.

‘You shot yourself in the foot hiring him,' Angie told her. ‘Your own daughter is the least of it: the moment that place opened, he was public property. You'd have been better getting him to do your gardening.'

Lara was delighted. ‘You're right, I could have been Lady Chatterley! What's that great quote: “We fucked a flame into being”?'

As the group fell about, I felt Ed wince.

‘You can just imagine the hormonal tensions, can't you?' Angie said. ‘Near-naked teenagers in the best shape of their lives, boys at their sexual peak.'

‘It's certainly a formative time,' Stephen said, ‘and not one I'd want to revisit.'

‘None of us would,' I agreed. I was becoming aware that I was trying too hard with Stephen. I was the dog
who'd singled out the human in the group the most indifferent to me. ‘It's so lovely and peaceful on this side of the park, isn't it?' It was all too easy to imagine us Steeles in a house like this, living the life of the one-percenters. (‘Isn't that a gang of motorcycling outlaws?' Ed asked, when I later made the mistake of sharing the thought.)

‘Compared to during the day, it is,' Angie agreed. ‘But you get used to the screams.'

‘And that's just the Channings' sex life, boom-boom,' Stephen said.

Miles gave a tolerant roll of the eyes. The two men were seated side by side, complementary characters. Stephen was animated, a crude alpha commentator, Miles self-contained, an observer. It seemed to me that what they shared was an understanding that it was the women who counted in this group; I could hardly say the same for my husband.

‘I
love
the lido noise,' Lara said. ‘All that excitement in the air. It feels primal.'

On cue came the sound of a fox, its cry like some diabolical instrument; it was impossible to know if we were hearing agony or ecstasy.

‘Without the crowds, it's like there isn't a pool there at all,' I said. ‘You probably don't, remember the days when the skateboarders used to break in. And the illicit raves.'

‘We didn't live here when they had the raves,' Angie said, ‘but the neighbours say it was a nightmare.'

‘I
imagine it was,' Ed said.

‘Not your thing at all,' Lara told him, teasing. ‘
I
would have gone over and joined them,' she declared. ‘I would have made you all come with me.'

I thought of what Molly had said about the Stoneborough pond having been drained. Did kids still congregate there? Or did they sit in their bedrooms alone with their technology? What was Molly plugged into right now? What was she negotiating to watch on television? I used to know the answers, but now I didn't. She was becoming a stranger. ‘Don't fight independence,' Gayle always advised. ‘It's a natural process. Besides, what's the alternative? A daughter in her twenties or thirties who can't cross the road or boil a kettle on her own?'

Yes, I thought, taking another mouthful of Aperol. There was something to be said for Lara's and Angie's more hands-off approach to parenting. With a twinge of guilt that was becoming familiar, I corrected myself: what I'd meant to think was that there was something to be said for
Gayle's
advice.

‘Nat …' Ed was on his feet, reminding me that we needed to depart to meet Gayle and Craig. Though night had fallen, the sky growing inky, I sensed he was moving us along a little more promptly than was necessary.

‘You go on your own,' I said. ‘I've just started this drink. I'll join you in a little while.'

He looked hard at me. ‘You should come. I'm sure they'd love to see you.'

‘I know. I'll be there.'

There
was a pause. He wouldn't make a scene, we both knew that; even if the Channings had not been his clients, he would have kept up appearances.

As he left, a fox, a skinny young thing, ran along the beam-narrow brick wall at the end of the garden, startling me.

‘I've just had a thought,' Lara said suddenly.

‘What?' we all said.

‘Ooh,' she said, and she radiated that special energy of hers, edgier than mischief, too guileless to be criminal. ‘It's a bit naughty.'

Amid groans from the men, Angie and I clamoured to hear it.

‘
I know the alarm code
,' she said. ‘For the lido.'

‘You don't mean …?' Angie said.

‘Don't tell her what she
doesn't
mean,' Stephen said. ‘It only gives her more ideas.'

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Miles's raised eyebrows, his amusement at both his wife's implied misconduct and his own tolerance of it. Ed had never looked at me in that way, not once.

Lara gave Stephen a playful slap. ‘I'm just saying, if a bunch of kids had the nerve to break in, then surely we do.'

‘There wasn't any water in it when they did,' Stephen pointed out.

‘So we won't need our skateboards, will we?' she shot back.

‘You're a monster, La,' Angie said. ‘Someone should take you into custody for your own safety.'