The Swimmer Read online

  Something shifted in my heart. The morning readjusted itself. In the room, light stretched across the worn floor. Disjointed emotions rushed at me. Eric looked steadily into my eyes. Witness to all of my childhood, what better person to understand how I felt than him.

  ‘Well, I must be off,’ he was saying. ‘I expect your swimmer will be along soon!’

  And, picking up the willow basket, with a wave of his hand, he left.

  The rest of the morning passed slowly. I cleared a small part of the garden, dead-heading roses and tying back some of the more unruly honeysuckle. All the time I was thinking of my conversation with Eric. And I wanted Ben more than ever. Towards eleven I heard a car draw up. The rising heat made it impossible to work in the garden. It would soon be lunchtime. Ben was clearly not coming. Swallowing my disappointment, I went in just as the front doorbell rang. It was a policeman, making house-to-house calls about the burglary. Had I seen anything suspicious in the last few days? I ushered him into the sitting room.

  ‘Walker, Sergeant Walker, madam,’ he said, showing me his ID.

  He mopped his brow.

  ‘Nice piano, you’ve got. Cool in here.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed.

  And no, I hadn’t noticed anything. Wasn’t the burglary close to Dunwich?

  ‘That’s correct,’ Sergeant Walker said, still eyeing the piano.

  ‘Do you play?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, yes. But I don’t have anything as grand as this!’

  ‘Have a go,’ I said, opening the lid.

  I’ve no idea why I did it. It was completely out of character. Sergeant Walker hesitated. He looked sheepishly at me and touched the keys. Then he made a sound of appreciation and began to play a waltz in a minor key. For the second time that day, I was astonished.

  ‘Venezuelan,’ he said, when he came to the end of it. ‘A waltz. I used to have a wife who was Venezuelan. You lived here long?’

  ‘About three years.’

  He nodded and I guessed he had heard the story before.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘The poetess. You heard about the burglary at the top house?’

  I nodded, but I had no information for him.

  ‘Nasty business. The guy’s in hospital with a broken arm and the dog’s dead.’

  ‘Have you caught anyone yet?’

  ‘Not yet. But we will.’

  He gave me a considering look, then smiled suddenly.

  ‘Go to the theatre much?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pity. I’ve got some tickets for the local rep.’

  He sighed in an exaggerated manner and I waited.

  ‘Make sure you’ve locked the doors at night,’ he said as he left. ‘I know what you country folks are like!’

  I felt the sun beat down on my eyes. All summer seemed to rush forward in a single sultry breath.

  ‘I’m a Londoner,’ I retorted.

  He grinned.

  ‘Nice piano, though,’ he said again. ‘Here’s my card, if you think of anything.’

  And then he was in his car.

  ‘The man who was burgled, is he out of hospital yet?’ I called, but he had shut the car door and didn’t hear me.

  An enormous silence descended into the thickening heat. It was beginning to give me a headache so I lay down on the sofa. Desire, sharp as a splinter, seemed to be piercing my heart. I longed for my swimmer. It was no use fooling myself, I thought. My life, the world out here, everything had been transformed overnight. On Monday night I told him I wanted to go with him up to London to visit the Home Office. What I really wanted was to find a way to sponsor his stay in Britain. Uncertain of his response, I had broached the subject tentatively, fearful of offending him, not wishing to take him over. But in the end, when I did so, he had turned towards me, putting his dark hand against my white arm. He had smiled, without much excitement, and I was struck by the fact he did not beg for anything.

  ‘You are like the bird shells I collect,’ he said finally.

  There was a certain randomness to his conversation, I told him teasingly, but he replied seriously.

  ‘No. I’m wondering why you want to help me like this. Something has happened to you, too.’

  At that, I told him about my father, and how the loss of him was inscribed on my life. How it had stultified it. He listened intently.

  ‘I’ve been to counselling, I’ve tried writing it out of my system, but nothing works completely. So now I’ve given up.’ I shook my head, feeling slightly self-conscious. What was my problem, compared to his? ‘When my last relationship failed, I said to myself, no more. Better to live alone!’

  He sighed deeply.

  ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why didn’t she tell you? What was she frightened of?’

  ‘Grief, I suppose. She didn’t want to deal with it. It wasn’t what you did in her family.’

  ‘And your grief remains?’

  We both were silent, thinking.

  ‘I can feel it,’ he said, at last, laying a hand on my heart.

  I nodded, staring into the darkness, waiting.

  ‘And anger, too. I think you are angry with men?’

  I was taken aback, but before I could say anything he told me about his mother.

  ‘I have escaped,’ he said. ‘And she remains in hell. Leaving her to her fate was not easy. It took an act of will.’

  I could imagine him steeling himself, making the decision, sticking to it. Knowing there was no way out.

  ‘She had protected me in so many ways.’

  He was staring up towards the ceiling, his face unreadable.

  ‘She walked through life bare-footed in order to give me the best of everything.’

  I tried to imagine what it must have been like for her.

  ‘On that last day, before I left, she said, “Be a good boy in Europe and take care of yourself, for me, and don’t forget to brush your teeth!”’

  I squeezed his hand.

  ‘I looked at her face and saw how the stones on the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet.’

  I felt his words entering me like acid. I felt too, he had moved away from me again, to some remote spot where I could never follow. Despair started up again in me, but then he kissed me, full on the mouth and with strange insistent gentleness.

  ‘The war can’t stop because of all the people who have been hurt by it,’ he said. ‘Too many people have been killed, too many people have been left behind who remember those who have died.’

  Because of this he felt there was no single power that could stop it.

  ‘If I’m sent back,’ he told me, ‘I will be killed. One or other of them, either the army or the terrorists, will know I tried to escape, and they will hunt me down.’

  I had wanted to ask him what he planned to do if his residence status was denied, but I was afraid to.

  ‘I am a person lost in transit.’ He laughed. ‘Maybe when enough of us have died, some foreign government, one that is more powerful than us, will take notice.’

  ‘Not you,’ I told him.

  I put my hand over his mouth.

  More than ever, I had become determined to help him. Now, lying on the sofa, exhausted, I closed my eyes. He had told Eric about me. I felt extraordinarily touched by this.

  I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew was the touch of something warm against my lips. Confused, I opened my eyes to find myself looking deep into Ben’s dark eyes. He must have let himself in through the back door. He was looking at me as intensely as a cat watching a bird.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ he whispered. ‘I was afraid you had eaten.’

  ‘No. I’ve been clearing the garden all morning and then I got tired. Where’ve you been?’

  He nuzzled his face against my shoulder, like a young animal. His skin smelt of hot earth, fresh and very youthful.

  ‘Look what I’ve got,’ he said triumphantly, holding up a trout.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘I’
ve been fishing. I want to cook it for you,’ he said. ‘The way we sometimes cook it at home. Let’s go outside.’

  He seemed in a great hurry, ordering me imperiously to fetch foil and cooking implements. Then he made a fire.

  ‘Why don’t we grill it?’

  ‘No, no. I want to show you my way.’

  We went down towards the river where the willow tree offered some shade. Ben slit its throat and gutted the fish with ease. Then he dug a hole, covered the fish in foil, buried it and left it to cook on the bed of charcoal. He was whistling, like a little boy whistles: loud, clear and pure. He looked so serious that I began to laugh.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ he asked, absent-mindedly.

  ‘Ah! That reminds me, before I forget,’ I said. ‘I hear you are friendly with an old friend of mine.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Think!’

  He pretended for a moment not to know.

  ‘Eric,’ he said.

  ‘You never told me.’

  I tried to sound accusing. He looked at me and grinned. He didn’t have to tell me everything, he teased. Then he came to stand in front of me and began to slowly undress me. Underneath his flippancy I felt the tenderness of someone very young, rising towards me.

  ‘I’m astonished,’ I told him seriously, taking his face in my hands, ‘to be doing this with you. I am astonished to find so many of life’s experiences in just a few short days.’

  Moments before we joined, my shyness returned. Instinctively understanding, he came to me. Time stood still. There rose from deep within me a glow. What seemed like hours passed until finally, reluctantly, he dropped away, leaving the traces of love, the snakeskin of semen against my leg, kissed dry against the summer air. We lay entwined, brown against white. Between gasps I told him I had not been naked in the open air since I was a small child. He looked at me seriously, thinking about it, and then once more he was burning in me, turning and growing like molten glass. I stopped thinking. A lip folded back on itself and this time I was weeping on him as it began again.

  Afterwards, I felt we lay together in a place out of time. We stared up at the cobalt blue sky. Eternity stretched around us. Maybe, I thought lazily, exhausted and uncaring, to understand sex fully one has to risk being destroyed by it. Small, dark-winged birds were lining up in their thousands on telegraph wires, preparing for a long flight south. Through the chalk-white heat of late afternoon I saw small signs that autumn was on the march. Tomorrow it would be September.

  ‘For so long,’ I murmured, ‘for as long as I can remember, sex has only shown me the things I could not have.’

  I stopped abruptly, wishing I hadn’t spoken, for how could I describe the long lonely years, the child I had made in my mind’s eye, without ruining this moment of peace? I might have told him that while the whole world was making babies I was engaged in useless acrobatics. But while I hesitated he turned his face slightly towards the river. For a moment or two the reflected light of it, with that curious blinding power, was full in his eyes. Looking at him, I was dazzled by the sight of it. For quite some seconds I was speechless. When he looked down at me I was startled by the sadness in them.

  ‘There are too many children, now,’ he said quietly. ‘We have lost the art of loving for the sake of loving.’

  Was that what he was doing? I dared not ask. All that hot afternoon I remember the air was full of the sweet young scent of him as we comforted each other. We had forgotten about the fish, but when we dug it up it emerged, salty and crisp on the outside and soft inside, so that we made a late lunch of it washed down by white wine. Ben drank glass after glass and it was my turn to tease him about how quickly he had got used to drinking wine.

  He did not have to go back until much later on. The hours drifted unchecked. I told him about Eric and my father and what the farm had looked like when I was a child. The day was ours entirely. Towards five o’clock we strolled back to shower and I went into my study to work while he played the piano. Hours went by in this way, with the sound of his music drifting in through the house. He played some jazz and then a piece of music I recognised.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, coming in.

  He grinned and played it again, a lilting melody.

  ‘A waltz?’

  ‘Your policeman friend played it,’ he said, laughing.

  I frowned. How did he know, he hadn’t been there?

  ‘I was,’ he admitted. ‘I was hiding in the kitchen!’

  For some reason this disturbed me.

  ‘You mustn’t slink around, Ben,’ I admonished. ‘You’ll scare me.’

  Solemnly he promised he would not do it again and I thought what a child he was, for all his tender attention to me.

  ‘I couldn’t let him see me,’ he said reasonably. ‘They took someone into the police station last week, thinking he was a Pakistani.’

  ‘What? Why would they want to do that? It’s just a crop of burglaries, isn’t it? Why do they want to look for Pakistanis?’

  He shrugged, carelessly. The other men on the farm had heard rumours of a foiled terror attack in Ipswich, he said. He was speaking casually and I frowned.

  ‘You must be careful,’ I said. ‘No, really, Ben, it’s not funny. Promise me you won’t go skulking around?’

  I went back to my study. It had been so long since I had worked in a house with another human being in it that I was beginning to feel I had lost the thread of what I was writing. The Schubert now being played was more real than anything I was capable of creating at the moment. Perhaps, I thought, the time has come for me to give up. I had written seven collections of poems. Maybe there was no more to be said.

  A little later on, as I sat doing nothing, listening, the phone rang. It was Heather. Ben stopped playing. I could feel him listening in the background.

  ‘Are you working?’ Heather asked.

  The sound of her voice panicked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I lied.

  I tried to keep my voice as normal as possible, but even so she gathered something was different.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I presume you heard the news?’

  I told her I had been too busy to turn the radio on and she told me that there had been another burglary in Appleford and another dog had been found killed in the same horrific way, with its throat slit. No one knew why.

  ‘Who was that?’ Ben asked, coming up behind me as I put the phone down.

  He put his hands around my neck and smiled at me through the hall mirror.

  ‘You have a very, very, slender neck,’ he said, pressing his hands gently against my skin.

  Then he began kissing me all over again, his face hard against my throat. The next moment we were lying naked on the floor.

  6

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5TH. BEN HAD THE day off and arrived at seven. The weather changed, subtly. A late burst of summer heat embalmed the air. Not surprisingly, Ben still had heard nothing about his application for refugee status. I had been nagging him for days to let me ring the Home Office, but he had turned lazy and wouldn’t co-operate. I had the distinct feeling he wanted to shelve everything that was unpleasant and that this oasis of calm was all he needed. Every effort I made to get him up to London was met with evasion and in the end I realised I would have to go alone. I decided I would take the train the following day.

  I walked barefoot to my herb patch and picked some parsley. There was a smell of cut grass everywhere and I could feel the heat rise from the paving stones. Ben was absorbed in playing the piano. I wanted to make him a summery soup, green and cool, and very English, before he went back to the farm. He had to be up early and dared not stay the night in case he overslept. In any case, I told myself, we both needed a pause to take stock of where we went next. For a week we had done little but devour each other. When we were together it was impossible to think of anything else. I felt we needed to make some decisions, sort out a more permanent arrangement. />
  Thrushes were calling to one another. The evening sky looked as beautiful and as incomprehensible as the love that had found its way to me. I headed towards the riverbank. I remember thinking, just in case it did rain, I should bring in the rug we had lain on earlier. So I walked towards the trees to pick it up. My sandals were scattered carelessly across the grass. I sighed. Happiness coursed through me, my body ached sweetly. The sound of the piano followed me. I remember thinking he could not get enough of the piano, or me. Folding the rug I picked up my shoes and was just turning away towards the house when something caught my eye. There on the narrow path across the water, close to the trees, was a parked car. The river was low; there had been no rain for weeks. But now, in the few minutes since I had walked towards it, the sky had slowly become overcast. A slight breeze had sprung up, rustling the reeds. I heard the creaking beat of wings and watched a formation of birds move slowly towards the horizon. Puzzled, I stared at the car, wondering again what it was doing there. Not many people knew of this stretch of marshland. Uneasily, for we had spent the last hour making love in the open air, I hoped we had not been seen. The birds had disappeared from view and faintly, in the distance; I could hear the sound of thunder. There was a stagnant, warm smell of rotting vegetables and river water. Now that the harvest was over, rain would not matter. I glanced back at the car as with the smallest of movements a man stepped out of it. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the bonnet. He seemed in no hurry. I moved quickly behind the willow tree and watched. Something must have caught his attention too because he walked towards the edge of the water. A few large drops of rain began to fall and I screwed up my eyes. The man was peering down. Then he went back to the car, took out a camera and began to take photographs of the river after which he bent low and fished something out of it. The rain increased slightly and the air was beginning to smell of wet dust as the man hurriedly returned to his car. He reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think who it could be. A second later I heard the engine rev up and with a small wheel spin he was gone. I hurried back to the house with my rug over my head and forgot all about the incident.