The Swimming Pool (28 page)

‘Come
with me. I have something I want to show you. Bring your glass.'

Bearing both her own glass and the bottle, she led me to the floor below, to the master bedroom at the front. I had not been in it before. A room more spacious than the two bedrooms in Kingsley Drive combined, it was directly below the terrace, with an elongated horizontal window overlooking The Rise. A run of mirrored palazzo doors, like a wall of folded silver, bisected the space; the central two were open, giving on to an en suite of grey marble and polished nickel, clusters of scent bottles and lipsticks on the glass shelves.

Was this where she and Miles would have brought me on Saturday night had I stayed? I erased the notion. Hadn't I already decided that I'd been mistaken or deluded, that subsequent events had overtaken it and that, in any case, Lara had not given it a second thought?

She directed me to the little white sofa at the foot of the bed and, to my surprise, threw herself at my feet, her free hand wrapping itself around my left calf, as it had at the lido when we'd last parted. This time, however, the fingers did not lock rigid, but moved, caressed, rose to my knee and rested just above, only the thumb now in motion, somehow both idle and deliberate. At once all bodily sensations were condensed into that small area of skin. I swallowed more wine, failing to moisten a suddenly dry throat.

‘What did you want to show me?' I asked.

‘Oh,
yes!' As she jumped up, the withdrawal of touch was as unwelcome as an application of pain. ‘I found a dress I thought might suit you. For Sunday.'

‘But I told you, I'm not going to –'

‘Wait till you see it before you decide.' She slid open lacquered wardrobe doors and found what she wanted. It was a long column of rose-print with a halterneck and a smocked waist, clearly a costly designer item.

‘It's beautiful,' I said, putting down my glass to touch the fabric with both hands. It was silk, erotically soft.

Lara smiled. ‘Try it on, go on, where's the harm?'

I realized she intended staying in the room while I undressed so I moved discreetly into the en suite, though it seemed prudish to seal the doors behind me and the many mirrors and reflective surfaces made modesty impossible.

I slipped the dress over my head. It stuck.

‘I'll do it.' Lara was behind me, her fingers tugging, and the dress slid down an inch or two. ‘You can't wear that bra with this neckline, you'll need a strapless one, if at all.' She unhooked my bra and brushed the straps from my shoulders, then when it fell to the floor, she slid the dress over me, running her knuckles over the fabric to smooth it. Her body was so close to mine, our body heat overlapped, doubled, and though covered now in the dress, I felt more naked than before, more naked than when we'd been in the pool together. In the mirror, my cheeks fired as I struggled to master a maelstrom of colliding words:
… just gossip … the Land of Do As You
Please … I have a confession to make … Miles said I shouldn't say anything … What about him? … Come with me …

Her face was at my right shoulder, our hair touching, our breath flowing in parallel. Her hands remained on the fabric, fingers moving idly, deliberately, on my stomach, ribs, the underside of my breasts. I felt both wild, enemy fear and the confidence to overcome it.

‘La …' I turned my head towards her face. Her mouth was at my ear, fingers moving slowly, possessively, over me.

‘You like that?'

I spoke without thinking or caring. ‘Yes.' I wanted more. My head pushed, mouth seeking hers.

‘Marthe,' she murmured, her voice thickened. ‘She'll be back soon with Everett.'

‘Of course.' But I couldn't leave it in this teasing, unexplored way. ‘When?'

‘At the party.'

‘At the party? But … How?' This was an empty house. That would be a teeming throng, how could it work? ‘What about tomorrow?'

‘Tomorrow will be crazy,' Lara said. ‘Miles will be here, and the kids. We'll be packing for the holiday. But at the party we can get lost for a little while. No one will notice who's there and who's missing …'

At the windows sheer drapes billowed, the breath of the real world outside. Then came the sound of footsteps on the pebble path, a boy's cry rising in excitement. Everett.

‘Take
the dress home,' Lara said, her voice still hushed, secretive.

‘I can't.'

‘Yes, you can.' The same fingers that had smoothed it down began puckering it, pulling it up again. ‘You will wear it, won't you? To the party.' She ran a finger over my skin a final time. ‘You have to come now, don't you?'

‘Yes,' I said.

At the pond, when we were tired from swimming, all the kids would sit together in a loose crescent at the water's edge or lie in a ring with our heads meeting like daisy petals and we'd play truth or dare. Which was really just truth. Which was actually insult, because none of the questions were designed to elicit answers that flattered or praised.

Who here would you
least
like to kiss?

Who would you save
last
from a burning building?

Whose pants do you reckon are the smelliest? (Cue laughter and concealed gulps of fear, followed by the inevitable citing of the latest boy to have been yanked out of the group for a family holiday or, as happened once or twice, to be kept out of Mel's and my path.)

‘If you had to choose one person to have plastic surgery, who would it be?' That was one I would remember
because I knew I must be a contender. Beside me, Mel's pull of breath was discernible only to me: she'd expect to be in the firing line too. Then again, as the more feared of the two of us, she also had the better chance of evasion.

Two of the boys made jokes about a third's penis size.

‘Come on, you're not allowed to bottle it,' Mel said, her tone bitter, for it was Nessie's question. It was as if she was willing Nessie to pick her just so she could punish her for it.

Nessie hesitated. This was a question she would have preferred to go to someone else, safe in the knowledge that she would have been the last to be named. Instead, she was required to deliver pain.

‘Otherwise you're never allowed back here again,' Mel said.

‘You'll be
shunned
,' I added, ever the spineless henchman.

Nessie's worried eyes moved from face to face, until, two from where the ring returned to her, it flickered, briefly, tellingly, on me, on my forehead and the raspberry stain there. She never smiled, I thought, or at least never anywhere near me. Even when she spoke, her lips hardly parted. ‘I choose myself,' she said at last, her voice very small. ‘I'd change my ears. I hate them.'

‘Liar,' we began, but the others were clamouring to hear more from her – ‘Why, what's wrong with them?' – and she was showing them the way her ears were positioned a smidgeon less flat to her skull than they might have been.

‘My
brother says they look like shells,' she said unconvincingly.

Mel and I swore in disapproval when this prattle was judged valid and the game moved on.

‘She thinks she's it,' we told each other as we walked home.

‘She thinks she's better than us.'

‘It's that bloody hair. Like in
Splash
.'

‘She must bleach it. Slag.'

There was a gathering energy to our hostility, a reaching towards something previously unvoiced. Our footsteps became more certain, matched, an army of two. Sure enough, by the time we reached Mel's door, she had an idea of how we might teach Nessie a lesson.

‘Brilliant,' I said, and we stood face to face, hands joined.

We would have to bide our time, of course, and secure our weapon: a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer, which I placed with my swimming kit in the backpack I used for days at the pond. When my grandmother missed them, I told her I'd borrowed them for a collage I was making as a souvenir of my special summer with her and Grandpa, and her eyes shone for a moment with sentimental tears.

It may be a false memory, but it seems to me there was melancholy in the air on the day of the party, that hovering sense of cusp, of the season deepening from gold to bronze and curling at the edges. There was a mood of … well, if not anticlimax, then a kind of foreseen grief.

At the party we would touch again and my blood would sing in my veins, my skin would shiver on the muscle. What she and I had started would continue and, whatever it was going to be, I wanted it. I wanted it enough to manipulate my husband, to bend his will by any means necessary.

‘I have to go to the party,' I told Ed. ‘
You
don't have to, I completely understand, but I promised I'd help out and I'm not in the habit of letting people down at the last minute.'

Had it not been my birthday, a day to be counted on for the suspension of hostilities in any civilized home, I would not have got away with that last pronouncement. Gayle, Craig, Sarah, Ed himself: there were countless recent examples to be cited of my having let people down.

‘Besides,
Molly's really keen to go. Remember, we're the Channings' guests, Ed, and she has no reason to think anything's changed. She won't want to disappoint Georgia and Eve.'

It was shameless to use our daughter like this. Unforgivable.

And effective. It was agreed that Molly and I would go to the party as planned while Ed stayed at home and brooded.

But when I was getting ready, trouble flared afresh.

‘I haven't seen that before,' he said of the rose-print dress, which, admittedly, a household pet would have noticed had more chic than my usual attire. I was nothing short of entranced by how the fabric fell, the way it kissed my skin without clinging, the touch of Lara in its fine weave. Lightly tanned and toned from all the swimming, I hadn't looked this good in many years and, against my better judgement, that felt important.

‘When did you get it?' Ed asked, and then, ‘It looks very expensive. How much did it cost?'

‘It cost nothing,' I said.

There was a dangerous pause, a gathering of rancour. ‘Don't tell me:
she
lent you it. When?'

‘Ages ago,' I lied.

‘Are you even the same size? It's probably not supposed to be that skimpy. And your shoulders are going to get cold – it's almost September, you know.'

I thought about the compliments Miles must surely pay Lara when she dressed for a party, or Stephen Angie,
or even Craig Gayle, and I thought, too, of that spiteful comment of Ed's that I was a desperate acolyte. Enough was enough. ‘You think I'm best kept covered up?' I snapped. ‘Not as svelte as some of your year elevens?'

There was an ugly silence. I was as shocked as he was and immediately apologetic. ‘I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that.' Yes, I'd been provoked, but it didn't take a psychologist to spot that I was deflecting my own feelings of guilty anticipation; in making Ed the villain, I was willing him to be deserving of betrayal.

He was staring at me in something close to horror. ‘You say these things and I don't recognize the person who's speaking any more.'

Neither did I. But whoever she was I wanted to be her – this evening, if not for ever. The truth was, I could not think beyond tonight.

From the next-door bedroom came sounds of drawers sliding open and thumping shut. Had Molly heard the exchange? Yet another argument between Mum and Dad. I knew all too well the feeling of being the child of parents who rowed, the turning off of the television or radio only to expose the bitter voices you hadn't known were being smothered. The feeling that peace would never last long enough or go deep enough to reach your soul. Hadn't I vowed Molly wouldn't have to feel it too?

‘She's destroying us,' Ed said.

‘No,
you
are,' I replied, ‘because you keep overreacting.' And of all the things I said that summer, this was the most unjust.

I
became aware then of Molly outside the door, of that prickle of energy her presence caused in me. ‘Molly's here,' I said brightly. ‘Doesn't she look wonderful?'

If she'd heard any of our row, she gave no indication of having an opinion on the matter. ‘I said I'd meet Georgia at seven,' she said. ‘Can we go?'

As we left the building, I said, ‘I'm sorry about all the arguing lately. It's nothing to worry about, honestly.'

She looked ahead in the vacant way I knew meant she would rather walk on hot coals than talk about it.

‘It's completely normal. I think it must be amplified because we're in a small flat. I promise it will stop. After tonight. We'll be back to school in a few days' time and everything will be back to normal.'

‘Thanks for reminding me,' she said.

Beside me, her stride was short to the point of reluctant, and as we reached the lights on the high street I took her arm to stop her crossing. ‘Are you sure you want us to go to this party? Because we don't have to. I mean it.'

Did I –
did I
– give her adequate time to reply? Certainly there was enough time for me to notice that her face was flushed the most lovely pink, making a mockery of the unnatural hues of the make-up she wore, the clogging black fingers of mascara. The dress she'd chosen, fitted on top and full-skirted, accentuated her new curves
.

‘No, I want to come,' she said. She seemed nervous but determined, and I was proud of her. Then, more matter-of-fact than anxious: ‘Dad isn't very happy, is he?'

And
I had a rush of memory, of saying those very words to my grandmother towards the end of my summer in Stoneborough. I hadn't had any communication with my father during my stay and the new school year was about to start, my family status uncertain. Gran had replied, ‘If we didn't feel unhappy some of the time, we wouldn't know how to recognize happy', a life philosophy I had not forgotten.

‘Maybe not today,' I told Molly. ‘But things change.'

I'd lost track of whom Lara had co-opted for the job of set designer, but whoever it was had done her proud. Strings of variously sized paper lanterns criss-crossed the café terrace in a solar system of blues; potted palms and sand-coloured beanbags were scattered in a chill-out zone to one side of the sundeck; on the whitewashed brick wall opposite the bar, classic pool scenes flickered (when we arrived, Dustin Hoffman was gliding under water in
The Graduate
, but it was only a matter of time before Alain Delon would saunter in and steal the show). Outside, a barbecue smoked; inside, frozen blue margaritas were served with pink straws and watermelon garnish.

The band would be playing outdoors on the far side of the sundeck, their backs to the pool, which was, as promised, strictly decorative. Hundreds of pastel-hued helium balloons bobbed over the water, and I smiled to imagine Lara charming the lifeguards into tying string after string to the lane dividers.

Noting
the abundance of rope barriers and ‘No Access' signs, I thought of how, as recently as two months ago – had I by some miracle been able to persuade Molly here – I wouldn't have been standing sucking a blue margarita on arrival, but sweeping the site for hazards as one might for a daredevil toddler. I wouldn't have let her out of my sight. I would have experienced the whole event as if the phobia were my own, tracking her like one of those surveillance cameras with a motion-sensitive lens.

This was so different as to feel surreal, like being in someone else's family, living someone else's life. Watching her slip away in search of her friends, seeing her pop up in the queue for the barbecue, as if a deathly peril did not lurk a splash away: it was what I'd always wished for – and I was not about to complain of being abandoned.

Besides, there were plenty of people to talk to. Of the throng at the bar, I recognized the mainstays of Lara's set: Angie and Stephen, of course, as well as Andrew and Douglas, David, the neighbour who'd taken me for an inveterate loafer, and his wife Suki. No Gayle, Craig or Harriet, but Alice was there with a group of her friends and I made a point of catching up with her first.

‘How's Harriet? She had quite a scare the other day.'

Alice, already tipsy, was reassuringly friendly. ‘Hmm, still feeling a bit sheepish. She hasn't been back here since.'

‘She shouldn't be sheepish,' I protested, and the girls, whose jug of cocktail was drained to the ice, joked that
this was a tongue twister. As we chatted, all I could think was how very young and smooth their faces were; how big multi-generational gatherings only emphasized the exquisiteness of youth, the unintended reproach of it. Alice mentioned that her parents were at the Vineyard and I told her I would try to drop in on my way back, if it were not too late for Molly.

Though Molly was in cahoots with Georgia and Josh, I could see no Eve.

‘She's running a temperature,' Angie told me, ‘so we made her stay at home with Milena.'

‘I bet she was cross about missing this.'

‘Oh, livid, but if she's got some virus we can't let her infect the whole neighbourhood. She's run down, needs to recharge before term starts.'

‘Don't we all.' I studied more closely her pink gingham dress and wide hairband. ‘Are you Brigitte Bardot, Ange?'

‘I am! I would have come barefoot but I thought I might get trampled on when the band starts. Stephen is, I don't know, generically summery. He's already rumpling, look.'

In a white linen suit, Stephen's solid physique looked cumbersome, unmanageable. It seemed impossible that he had torn off his clothes so recently and plunged naked into the water.

All at once, fingers hooked my waist, compliments crooned in my ear: ‘What a sexy dress! Couldn't have picked a nicer one myself.'

‘Lara!'
She looked extraordinary even by her standards, sheathed in a green-and-yellow maxi dress, her hair fixed smooth and high in that sixties way, eyes huge and spellbinding, mouth the exact pink of the watermelon garnish. ‘You look astonishing,' I said.

She pouted. ‘Miles says I hover between costume and homage. I'm not sure if it was meant as a compliment, but you know what? That's how I've chosen to interpret it.'

I couldn't help but contrast this with Ed's charmless comments – and my own ugly response.

Lara lowered her voice, the syllables tickling the skin on my neck: ‘So, you came on your own, then?'

‘Yes. Well, with Molly.'

‘Good. I hoped you would. I'll get Georgia to keep her occupied.'

At that moment Georgia, in a sunflower-yellow crocheted beach dress, was locked in a kiss with a very conspicuously off-duty Matt, while Josh and Molly were fixated on their respective phone screens. At least poor Harriet wasn't there to witness it.

Lara's voice became more public again: ‘Miles, look! Natalie's here, and she's on her own. We'll need to look after her.'

Miles stepped forward, tanned and dissolute-looking in a pale suit, so similar in style to Stephen's I wondered if they might have co-ordinated in Rat Pack costumes or some Riviera equivalent.

I kissed him hello, at once feeling the nervous energy but unable to tell whether it was mine or his – mine, most
likely. It was the first time I'd seen him since our encounter there the previous weekend, but much had occurred in the intervening days, not least Lara's shared – and retracted – concerns about Ed. Had he dispensed with the issue so easily? It certainly appeared so. The only problem was the one I'd caused by escalating it with Ed.

‘Isn't the pool beautiful tonight?' I said.

Miles gave a half-nod. ‘Hmm, balloons.' He spoke as if he'd never seen anything so absurd in his life.

‘La says you don't like to swim. I hadn't realized.'

He narrowed his eyes, whether in acknowledgement or denial I couldn't tell. It was another detail Lara had dismissed without a care but, expert that I was, I sensed something deeper than idiosyncrasy. ‘Did something happen when you were little? Like with Molly?'

As compassion flooded me, his gaze lit with sudden interest. ‘All this summer and you only ask now? Why, I wonder?'

His tone was good-natured, ponderous rather than critical, and I couldn't begin to fathom what he meant by the question. It didn't help that I now caught Stephen's eye, had the impression he had been staring, and allowed myself to become flustered.

‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be nosy. It's none of my business. Lots of people don't swim.'

‘There doesn't always have to be a reason,' Miles said, as if in agreement, and it made me think of Gayle's comment that not everything had to be a dramatic medical event.

‘You're
right.' I considered telling him how grateful I was that, with the help of his daughter, mine was conquering a lifelong phobia, that with the help of his wife, I was conquering neuroses of my own, but I decided against it. The truth was, I did not know what to say to Miles and was not sure I ever would.