The Swimming Pool (3 page)

Unlike discussing the sex lives of dead celebrities in front of small children:
that
was not weird. Clearly this woman did not buy into the prevailing parenting cult of the appropriate, which I had to admit Ed and I had raised to an art form. (Was it appropriate to give appropriateness quite so much value? Might it not on occasion be helpful to be
in
appropriate? This, genuinely, had once been a debate in our household.)

Beside me, Molly's cool had slipped and she was starting to gape – good news in that it meant she was being properly distracted from her preoccupation. The boy, Everett, likely used to this sort of talk, was less riveted. With a kindly pat on his mother's hand, he left her side to stamp across people's possessions to the pool's edge and cannon-ball into the deep end with a tremendous splash. We were too far back for the spray to reach us but still Molly flinched.

‘You don't like the water,' Lara said to her, more in observation than query.

‘No.
She hasn't since she was little.' I spoke for Molly even though Ed and I had agreed to stop doing so because she wasn't an invalid, and if you couldn't speak for yourself at thirteen, your parents had done a pretty poor job raising you. ‘So, this is quite a crowd, isn't it?' I said, changing the subject. ‘A runaway success, I'd say.'

‘It certainly is.' With a languid movement, Lara brushed her hair from her eyes to view the crush. ‘But, my God, it's been a long time coming. There were so many times I almost threw in the towel, no pun intended.'

That was how I understood that she had been not only the most photogenic participant of the inaugural swim but also instrumental in the restoration project as a whole. And yet she did not make her remark as a boast or even with any particular pride, only in the casual assumption that I would know full well who she was and what it was she had done. She was less queen bee than citizen queen.

‘I'm not sure I know your name,' she said, and when I told her she was unexpectedly pleased, clapping her hands together and lacing her fingers in delight. ‘Well, there you go! His first wife was called Nathalie! The one he left Romy for.'

I looked at her, bewildered.

‘Delon, I mean. Poor Romy, she was
utterly
heartbroken. I don't think she ever really recovered.' Her attitude was one of true sorrow, as though these people were good friends of hers. She was, I thought, quite bonkers. ‘Did
your
Alain leave someone for you?' she asked.

‘Not
that I know of, no. And he's called Ed, actually.' I cleared my throat. ‘Will your little boy be all right in the water on his own?'

She didn't turn a hair. ‘Oh, totally, he swims like a fish.'

‘And is your daughter here with you?'

‘Somewhere, yes, with her little band of chumettes.'

‘We saw you in the paper,' Molly piped up to my surprise. ‘You were wearing those old-fashioned swimsuits.'

‘We were!' And Lara rewarded her with the same dazzling smile she'd bestowed on her son for remembering his sister's name. ‘Not a bad shot, was it, but I'm a bit ambivalent about it now, to tell you the truth. Apart from anything else, it's only gone and brought another scout out of the woodwork.'

‘Scout?' I assumed she didn't mean the ever-prepared kind that camped in the woods and strove to make the world a better place.

‘Yes, bloody model agencies. You know, she's even been approached getting on the school coach. She's barely fifteen! It should be against the law. It's hardly better than pimping or grooming.'

This was too much. Quite apart from the fact that Ed and I raised such adult and unsavoury subjects with Molly only after careful rehearsal, how much more arrogant complacency could one parent fit into a statement? A daughter so beautiful that model agencies fought over her, pestering her as she boarded a private coach to an
independent school (only the independents had their own coaches, the termly cost being considerably more than was allocated by the state for a child's lunch); and a parent so well off, so principled, she could afford to be dismissive of such approaches.

‘My heart bleeds,' I said. ‘What a terrible cross for her to have to bear.'

‘
Mum
,' Molly objected and I bit down my smile. The little betrayer was already siding with some beautiful stranger against her own flesh and blood.

She needn't have worried, however, because after a tiny moment of surprise Lara began giggling. ‘I think I'm going to get on very well with you, Natalie,' she said, in a flirtatious drawl, and I undid my previous good work by being thrilled that my little rebellion had impressed her.

As a sudden afterthought, she asked, ‘Are you a teacher as well, Natalie?'

‘I am, actually.'

‘At All Saints, like Alain?'

‘Ed. No, I teach year four at Elm Hill Prep.'

‘Oh, yes, across the park. I've heard good things about it.' And she gave me a last interested look before taking her leave.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her trade kisses with a couple at the edge of the café terrace before joining a female friend at the same plum table she'd occupied the day before. Its surface was scattered with phones, ashtray and cigarettes, ice bucket with champagne bottle
and several glasses – no kale smoothies today – and all of this, along with the small dog sitting on the friend's lap in defiance of the no-dogs signs around the site, conferred an aura of roped-off VIP glamour on the arrangement.

The supervision of her son was evidently to be managed from afar and with a drink in hand. As the waitress approached to refill their glasses, Lara beamed up at her with exaggerated gratitude – ‘You're an
angel
!' I lip-read – and her shoulders sagged like Odysseus returned, though all she'd done was pick her way across the decking to Molly and me and make a few eccentric remarks.

I didn't ask myself why she should have done this when she didn't know us, any more than I'd questioned with any real weight how she'd informed herself of my husband's profession and place of work. No, her idiosyncratic line in conversation was enough to tell me she did as she pleased and that, thanks to the dumb luck of being more attractive than the rest of us at an age when only the attractive retained any societal relevance, she got away with it.

Which both irritated and impressed me.

That evening, Molly and I Googled Alain Delon, and the images we found made us rock with laughter. To think of Ed being likened to this brooding Gallic god! Then I thought to bring up images of Delon at the age of forty-five and I saw there
was
a likeness of sorts: Ed could have been his less blessed, less tormented brother or cousin, an offering from a low-grade lookalike agency
(perhaps a scout – someone with a ‘gift', like Lara's – would approach him as he boarded the number 68 bus).

‘We met a fan of yours at the lido today,' I told him, when he came into the kitchen to see what all the hilarity was about.

‘Who?'

‘Lara Channing. The one sitting near us in the café yesterday.'

‘I don't remember.'

‘You
do
. I showed you her picture in the
Standard
last week?'

‘Oh, that one. The self-publicizing blonde.'

‘Exactly. Well, she's decided you look like that old French movie star, Alain Delon.'

‘She said that,' Molly confirmed. Sometimes she and Ed double-checked information with one another as if I were not a reliable source in my own right.

Not that Lara had been the first to note Ed's relative good looks – he
was
a little more handsome than most men of his age and type, and I don't deny there was a reflected glory in that, especially when meeting new people. There must be something about her if she's with
him
, they thought. But once they got to know us they understood the true inversion: in spite of his handsomeness, Ed behaved as if he were no less ordinary than his wife. ‘He distrusts flamboyance,' his late mother had told me, on our first meeting, and the manner in which she said it – shrill, provocative, loud enough to be heard in the next street – made no further explanation necessary.

As
for
my
first impression: with reasons of my own to desire conformity, a lack of exhibition, I'd known an exact match when I'd found one.

‘Let's have a look.' Ed viewed the images with commendable bafflement, enlarging one in which a sunlit Delon, hair swept casually from a furrowed brow, cigarette between his fingers, glowered menacingly into the mid-distance. ‘I think she must be overdue an optician's appointment.'

I laughed. I'd never given my style of laughter a moment's thought, but now it struck me as inferior to Lara's ringing instrument, expressive not so much of pleasure as of a mean-spirited crowing. How had I not noticed before? Was that how I'd sounded to Lara?

‘We talked to her at the lido today,' Molly said, her pride unmistakable. It struck me that it was the first time I'd heard her utter the word ‘lido'.

‘Oh, yeah?' Ed said. ‘What's she like?'

‘She's really nice.'

‘She's very …' I searched for the word, careful not to criticize in front of Molly ‘… she's very boho.'

Ed made a face and closed the image of Delon to expose the wallpaper image of a pre-pubescent, pre-sarcastic Molly that never failed to cause a sentimental pang. ‘Beware of boho,' he said. ‘It's just another word for immoral.'

‘Her daughter's a model,' Molly said, undeterred.

‘Could be,' I corrected, ‘but not allowed by her parents.'

‘Pleased
to hear it,' Ed said. ‘Modelling is not a career to aspire to. It totally destroys your value system. Brains are what count.'

Until you get Alzheimer's, I thought, but since Molly's grandparents and even a great-grandmother were still of sound mind I had yet to have occasion to explain
that
.

One human tragedy at a time, Gayle always said, and it was as sound a parenting philosophy as any other I'd heard.

‘What
happened tonight?' Ed asks, and he speaks under his breath as if he has no real expectation of being heard, much less answered. Then, more forcefully: ‘I'm not sure I understand, Nat.'

Here we go. I press my fingers into the plush of a soft toy on Molly's sofa – Rabbit, one of the few to survive the cull of puberty – before settling on my response. ‘She could have drowned, that's what happened.' And before I can help it, I'm bristling: I'm blaming him for what happened because he was there when I was not. He could have kept her closer, kept her safe.

But, of course, he thinks the same of me. He always has.

‘No, I mean, where were you before that? I was looking for you – I looked everywhere.'

I sit Rabbit on my lap. ‘It was a big crowd. I couldn't find you either.' My eyes return to Molly's resting form. Her rumpled sheet rises with each pull of breath and she has writhed free of her blankets. Is she warm enough? The paramedics wrapped her in hypothermic blankets – should we have asked to keep them? Her party clothes
were in a dripping bundle by the front door. ‘We need to concentrate on making sure she's OK,' I say. ‘And I don't just mean physically.'

He looks grim. ‘Well, this is going to be a setback, to say the least. Maybe take us back to square one.'

‘If we're lucky.' And we
are
lucky, I remind myself, compared to the Channings. At the thought, my heart begins to pound, a huge and frightening sensation. As if in objection, Molly's breathing grows a little more insistent and our heads turn instantly to monitor it. Only when it quietens again do we continue.

‘Seriously,' Ed says, ‘it would have been better if she'd never stopped being terrified. Then she wouldn't have been there in the first place.'

None of us would.

There is silence, broken by a hungry grumble from the hot-water pipe.

‘Where were you?' he asks again. ‘Who were you with? Obviously not our daughter.' And I catch a faint note underlying the suspicion, a note of patience run dry, of love lost.

Undone, I mutter that I need the loo, an easy way to end this before I say the wrong thing. Before I give myself away. Stepping from Molly's room into the hallway, the flat feels foreign, as if we've borrowed it from strangers, as if there are corners and shadows I've never noticed before.

In the bathroom, the first thing I see is the dress I wore to the party, sitting in a heap on the tiled floor. I
changed it for jeans and a shirt at the first opportunity, hours ago, or perhaps minutes, I'm not sure. Time is different tonight: it thickens and clots, rolls and spins. I can't trust it.

Who were you with? Obviously not our daughter.

And now I think the thought I've been suppressing these last hours: This is twice I've let you down, my love.

Twice I've not protected you as I should.