The Swimming Pool (31 page)

Far away, I thought I heard voices raised above the chatter, first Liam's, ‘Where is she?', and then Ed's, ‘Let
me find Molly …' but I no longer knew if the sounds were real, if the experience I was having existed or was simply phantasmic.

Then, confusingly, I could no longer see Miles's eyes: the column of light had gone black.

‘They've turned out the lights in the café,' Lara was telling him. ‘I don't know why.'

My birthday cake
, I thought.

As the door opened fully, there was complete darkness beyond, an eruption of gaiety from across the water, a succession of distinct calls: ‘Not
all
the lights, just these ones!'

A male voice raised above the others: ‘Can someone sort this out? I can't see a thing!' Then, alcohol-fuelled jeering, laughter spraying from all directions.

‘Must be a power cut or something,' Lara said. ‘Even better.'

And now her body was wrapped around me like a towel and she was steering me through open air, chill after the closeness inside the hut. My bare skin was pale, hairs raised. Now Miles was alongside us, his grip digging into the flesh of my arm.

A grave corrective tone carried towards us: ‘Don't let anyone near the pool. Rog, can you patrol?'

As voices responded, too numerous to be distinct, we reached the caging of the turnstile, the sinister blackness beyond. I thought, if they force me through, I'll wait, I'll call over the wall, I'll go down to the main entrance and try to get someone's attention, I'll –

Miles's
breath was hot in my ear. ‘If you turn around and come back, the deal's off.'

‘It's not a deal! Stop this nonsense, please!' But I was in the triangular grip of the turnstile now, the press of cold metal against my shoulder and arm, ready to be ejected into the park. The reality was registering, the absurdity fading: this was happening or Ed would be discredited, investigated, perhaps arrested.

Then came a sudden commotion of cries, names called out with urgency, even fear. There was something wrong – something beyond the wrongness of
this
.

Miles felt it too. ‘What's going on?' he said, his voice tense and imperative, and I felt a final flare of hope.

Now, a single distinct cry in a voice all three recognized: ‘
Mummy!
'

‘Is that Everett?' Lara said. ‘He's supposed to be inside with David and Suki.'

Now voices, cries, one above the rest, coming closer, its owner moving in our direction, a female voice too shrill to identify: ‘Lara! Lara, where are you? You need to come, it's an emergency!' Then, obliterating the rest, consuming all other sound within the site, the giant swooping noise of an alarm.

And in that instant, a click away from expulsion, I was forgotten, as the Channings dematerialized, drawn from one darkness to another.

We stand facing each other, neither speaking. Less than twelve hours ago, we were crushed together, confined, breathing as one into the blackness, and he hated me as a lifelong enemy. My instinct should be to flee – he represents a threat to me, a bodily danger – but there is a twisting sensation at my softest core that I recognize as mercy.

It is his daughter, not mine, who is critically ill in an intensive-care unit above us. He told me I'd destroyed him, but he was wrong.
This
is what destroys us, a child's life in jeopardy. The problem is that his is in jeopardy because she saved mine, which means it's possible he hates me now with a depth he didn't know existed last night.

Yes, my instinct should be to flee.

‘Lara said she'd seen you,' he says. ‘You shouldn't have come here.'

In my hand I feel Molly's phone come to life and I slide it into my bag, feel it drop at exactly the moment my own starts to ring. Friends, having waited till a civilized hour to make contact; I haven't answered the texts
and they're worried. Other people care. Other people in my life besides the Channings.

‘Can we talk?' I say. ‘I know you need to get back upstairs, but just two minutes. Please.'

Miles says nothing, but gestures to the table where I've dropped my water bottle and pulls out the chair nearest him. I sink into the seat opposite, eyes lowered, aware of him placing his coffees in front of him. The second must be for Lara, upstairs at Georgia's bedside. I picture their usual drinks of choice: champagne, Negronis, tumblers of whisky.

When I raise my eyes again, I find his already fixed on me. I read loathing, of course, but also anguish and terror. He's never been more human to me, never less enigmatic – and yet I still cannot connect him with the boy he says he was. The boy whose face I cannot dredge from memory because I didn't care to look at it at the time, not properly. Too busy seeking Mel's approval; too busy laughing. In thirty years, none of my residual guilt has been attached to those pale and anonymous boys whose faces had blurred into one.

And yet mine had remained clear to him, his experience of my cruelty a component part of the life that followed.

‘Whatever you want from me, you can have it,' I say, just catching in time the gulp in my voice that would be sure to incense him for I have no right to distress. ‘You must know I would trade anything,
anything
, for this accident not to have happened.'

His
reply is not immediate, but when it comes, stark and unyielding, it makes me shudder: ‘You've got nothing to trade.'

I bring my hands in front of me, pleading. ‘Tell me what you want from me, but please, please leave my family out of it.'

‘Your family is why we're here,' he says, in the same bleak tone.

I had meant Ed, but he means Molly, of course. Dare I hope that his threat regarding Ed has passed, the sword lowered? I drop my hands. On my lap I knit my fingers together, scrape the left palm with my right thumbnail until it's too painful to bear without crying out.

In my bag, the ringing begins once more.

‘I told Lara how grateful we are to Georgia, and so incredibly sorry. I know Molly will want to thank her too.' I pause. ‘And Ed.'

I watch him. He has not forgotten.

‘So that's why you're here,' he says. ‘Not for Georgia.'

‘Of course for Georgia –'

He interrupts, more curious than cold: ‘You must think there's something in it.'

‘Think', not ‘know' or ‘agree': an admission, surely, that the accusation is fiction.

‘I assure you I don't.' A memory flickers then, a short-term memory, some time in the last week. I'd come into Ed's office without warning and, as I did, I caught the click of his laptop closing, a sharp look my way. Had he been covering his tracks, deleting those emails to her,
emails worth inspecting after all? I'd eradicated the thought, of course, but that wasn't the same as not having had it in the first place. ‘Georgia's what's important,' I say very firmly. ‘Her recovery, her future.'

As Miles and I stare at each other, it seems to me that a shadow lifts. For the first time we see one another not as new acquaintances and not as old enemies, or even as adults who were once children, together for a summer, but as the parents of two girls who are friends.

‘Save her for me,' he says, speaking in a new voice, a gruff and desperate one, and he looks at me as if he honestly believes I have the power to effect a miracle. ‘Save her for Lara.'

I flush. He knows about us. Everything worth knowing, he's known. I inch my hand towards his and I say, ‘I'll try.'

But his hand withdraws as mine approaches, the shadow resettles and all at once he's on his feet, he's snarling. ‘Try what, Pock-face?
You
can't save her. You can't even save yourself.'

In the dark, unclothed and defenceless, I was both frighteningly close to and mercifully removed from the human clamour, audible only with each split-second plunge in the alarm siren. Trembling badly, stubbing a toe on the stone, I staggered back to the hut, my nostrils finding the lingering body heat of the Channings, the scent of my own terror. I stepped into my underwear, and then the dress, damp from the day's pool water on the floor. I heard the tear of fabric as I rushed and lost balance.

My thoughts were in uproar, my mind strained to the brink of endurance. Had that really happened? Had I been inches from tumbling nude into the park, a wretch, a savage? Did the Channings really hate me – me, Natalie Steele, wife of Ed, mother of Molly, middle-aged teacher and Elm Hill stalwart? When the alarm stopped screaming, would they come back for me and finish what they'd started?

It was only when I was outside again and tripping in unstrapped sandals towards the crowd that my thoughts re-ordered themselves, the crucial phrases fighting
through the self-obsession:
Something's happening
…
Emergency
…

Molly!
Where's Molly?

Then:
She's with Ed.
Ed, who an hour ago I'd battled and mocked and disrespected and for what?

‘What's going on?' I'd reached the edge of the mêlée, yelled my questions to the first person I came to. ‘Why is the alarm on? Why have the lights gone out?' I pulled at the nearest arm, a man's, claiming his attention.

‘There was a boy in the water.' His eyes registered my dishevelment. We didn't know each other. ‘They've just pulled him out.'

A boy? Everett? Hadn't we just heard him calling? Had he been in the water at the time? While his mother attacked another adult, had he broken from the multitude and stumbled into the blue?

‘But the pool's out of bounds,' I said, a redundant observation since most of the party guests had spilled from the café terrace into the pool area; those who hadn't watched from railings as if from a ship's prow. A breeze had picked up, the balloons straining at their ties.

Then, startlingly close, I saw Angie crouching on the ground, her gingham skirt spread out on the stone, and in front of her, lying on his back in his swim shorts, bare chest heaving, not Everett but Josh. Then Stephen stepped forward, white and bulky, and blocked my view.

‘Is that
Josh
?'

‘You know him?' The man next to me nodded, grave, almost remorseful.

‘Is
he unconscious?'

‘No, he was speaking just now. He looked alert.'

‘Has someone called for help?'

Yes. An ambulance was on its way.

That was when I saw Everett, clinging to Miles and sobbing into his stomach, and Lara, too, her hands gripping Matt's shoulders, her mouth moving fast, screaming at him, and my brain, overloaded, scrambled, assumed they were upset about Josh, Lara for some reason blaming Matt for his having been in the water. I must have imagined being in the hut with them, I thought. Like I'd imagined Stephen wanting to harm me. I had some sort of death wish, a morbid desire to be victimized.
Guilt messes with your brain.
Don't say anything to anyone, I warned myself. You're the crazy one. You need psychiatric help.

‘But Josh is an amazing swimmer,' I heard myself protesting to my new companion. ‘I don't understand how he could have got into trouble.'

And now a nearby woman was telling us something through the din; I could not lip-read and held my ear to her mouth. ‘There was someone else in the water,' she repeated, ‘so maybe he got dragged under.'

‘No, they're both out,' a new voice said. ‘They've got her out as well. I saw that a minute ago.'

Her, I thought. Molly.
Molly
.

Two things happened then: lights came on – dim, back-up lights, not the underwater ones or those in the café – and the alarm stopped. Into the sudden silence,
into our ringing ears, a voice boomed: ‘
There's someone still in there!
'

And, as if animated by the new light, there was an instant collective spinning as parents gripped children tighter or pulled them backwards; others screamed names and the air shook with the collision of a hundred individual fears.

‘Molly!' Mine was a howl, not a call, obliterated at once by the frantic sound of another parent wailing:

‘Has anyone seen her? Where is she? Georgia!'

Lara.

‘Matt,' a voice was yelling, or maybe ‘Nat', but I couldn't tell because I was mesmerized by the sudden sight of Miles kicking off his shoes and preparing to leap into the water.

‘Don't jump,' someone told him. ‘You might hurt her!'

And hands seized him from the edge just as others pulled a girl from the pool, a girl in a swimsuit, her slender limbs limp, long hair glued to her neck and back, the same shade as her skin. Lara screamed, a sound lost in the bedlam of people rushing forwards to assist or tumbling backwards to create space, until the girl and her rescuers were settled at the side of the water. The liquid streamed from her, silver in the light, and she looked … she looked lifeless.

It was Georgia. My legs buckled. Only in sinking to my knees did a gap appear in the throng that allowed me to make out a third figure, another girl, this one prone
but clearly conscious, soaked and spluttering, speaking to the man who cradled her. Ed.

I tore to their side, my mouth open but my vocal cords disabled.

‘Where've you been?' Ed cried. ‘Did you not hear me shouting for you?' His face was disfigured with fright and something close to hatred.

‘I couldn't hear anything over the alarm. Was she in the water as well?'

‘Of course she was – look at her!'

‘Darling, darling, are you OK?'

Molly's eyes were open and moving and she was breathing well, but at the sight of me she burst into sobs, which caused coughing, streams of water and phlegm gushing from her mouth and nose. Unlike Josh and Georgia, she was fully clothed. I could make no sense of this.

‘What was she doing in there?' I asked Ed.

‘I have no idea, but once she was in, this dress must have dragged her down. Look how heavy the skirt is! She won't let me take it off. Can you find a towel or something dry I can wrap her in? Ask Liam or one of the staff. Help, will you? Look how she's shivering!'

But hands were helping ahead of mine, bringing towels and emergency equipment. Shoved aside, I began to feel lightheaded again, recognized the whisper that would become a roar, once more losing the strength in my legs.

Ed lunged to break my fall, mad with exasperation. ‘Stop it, Nat. Seriously, you need to hold it together. For once, hold it together!'

And
I did, not just for Molly but also for him, for all of us: I pulled myself back from the brink and, in doing so, experienced the profound conviction that I would never go over it. I never would forsake myself and fall out of reach, not as long as I remained this girl's parent.

So, when she grew hysterical, as she now did, it was not from having been infected by me. It was because she could see Georgia. Propped against Ed, she could see as well as we could the blue light flashing through the glass walls of Reception, casting a sickly glow on all our faces but especially on Georgia's as she was borne through emergency exits, strapped to the gurney to keep her from falling.

It was a long time since I'd seen Molly hysterical like this. She thrashed and raved and howled, a creature from Purgatory, a devil from my own imagination.