The Swimmer Read online

  ‘Look,’ I began, but he’d finished.

  ‘Here’s my card,’ he said, and then he raised his hat and was gone, swiftly, walking across the gravel and out through the gate. I waited until I heard his car start and and only went inside when he had driven off.

  That night he brought me a heap of feathers found in the woods at the back of the farm. He had found them on his walk over the fields. It had been an easy day, he said. All the time he was going over the phone call to his mother in his head and because of this he worked faster, got less tired.

  ‘Because of you, I was happy!’

  On the way he had heard fire engines, he said. ‘There were police cars as well. Going towards Dunwich.’

  ‘I’ve got something to discuss with you,’ I said, changing the subject, and I told him that I wanted him to leave the farm.

  ‘I’ve looked at the forms for the Home Office and tomorrow I’ll go through them with you. It’s not too difficult. We’ll fill them in together. But now I want to tell you something else.’

  I spoke quickly before he could interrupt.

  ‘I want you to come and live here with me until we get your illegal status changed.’

  He was watching me intently and I braced myself for objections.

  ‘My brother and his family will be passing through tomorrow on their way to London. I shan’t tell them anything at this point.’

  ‘I will not come tomorrow,’ he said instantly.

  ‘Look,’ I said, not wanting him to misunderstand, ‘Jack is a very odd man…’

  I stopped. He was looking at me blankly; I didn’t know how to go on. Whatever I said would come out wrong, I feared.

  ‘We are not close,’ I said, at last. ‘It’s best if I say nothing until I know what the situation is. Do you understand?’

  He nodded. I remembered I had bought him a white shirt but had forgotten to give it to him.

  The gift surprised him and he immediately put it on. It was a good fit.

  ‘I hate these T-shirts,’ he said. ‘When I left they were new and represented my hope. Now they just remind me of the journey.’

  We were both silent, both thinking. I guessed he was thinking of his mother.

  ‘I would like to buy you something, too,’ he said at last. ‘Maybe one day I can.’

  ‘One day,’ I agreed briskly, aware of the touch of melancholy that had invaded us both. ‘But first we must sort out your status here, and then we must get you back to being a practising doctor.’

  He nodded. Suddenly I was struck by the thought that he was simply humouring me. This country owed him nothing, he said quietly. A sense of exile was branded in him. At that a chilling thought, that really he wanted to return to his country, hit me forcefully and I felt my heart tighten with fear. Don’t go, I wanted to cry, but instead all I said was:

  ‘I want you to clear your things from the farm. I’ve got a funny feeling about the place.’

  ‘It’s not bad. Stefan is not a bad man. We get plenty to eat and at least I’ve had a bed there.’

  ‘Well, you don’t need it any more. You’ve a bed here, now!’

  Ben grinned. He reached over and took my face in his hands.

  ‘I can work for you,’ he said. ‘I can be your gardener and your cook. Your houseboy!’

  ‘Shut up!’ I said sharply.

  I kissed him and in the tenderness of the moment I forgot I had meant to watch the evening news.

  Thursday, September 8th. Jack and Miranda returned en route to London. They both seemed subdued and I guessed they had been quarrelling. Miranda looked as though she’d been crying and the children were being tiresome. They arrived noisily, hungry and chaotic, ready to spread their things all over the house. I was jumpy and desperate for them to leave.

  ‘Is there anything to eat?’

  ‘Can I have a sandwich?’

  ‘Sorry, Ria, they’re starving,’ Miranda apologised.

  Today, more than ever, my relatives seemed like people from another planet. I watched them, unable to think of a single thing to say. There was food in the fridge. Adult food for two. Champagne and salmon, some left-over duck, home-made ice cream.

  ‘Good God, Ria!’ Miranda cried, astonished. ‘Have you been entertaining?’

  ‘Ugh, I hate duck,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Could we have a barbecue?’ asked Zach.

  He was batting a ball around the kitchen.

  ‘That’s enough, Zach,’ Jack shouted. ‘No, we’ve got to get back. Good lord, Ria, you’ve painted the kitchen!’

  ‘And put shelves up!’

  ‘Can we go on the computer?’

  ‘Yes! Let’s download House! C’mon.’

  ‘Children!’

  ‘Now look,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid my study is out of bounds for you two. I’ve got work all over the place in there and I don’t want any of it muddled. Why don’t you go outside?’

  I stopped. Both children looked crestfallen and Miranda was staring at me.

  ‘You’ve done something to your hair?’ she said faintly.

  ‘You’re looking good!’ Jack added at the same time. ‘As if you’ve had a holiday. Have you?’

  I laughed.

  ‘Have you been entertaining?’ Miranda asked, peering at me.

  ‘No, of course not! I told you, I’ve been working. Now, what time are you leaving? I want to cook you all lunch before you go.’

  In the fraction of a pause that followed, the telephone broke in with an insistent ring. My heart leapt but I went out calmly into the hall and answered it. It was the journalist from the local paper, trying to get hold of me again. While I talked to him I could hear the murmur of voices in the kitchen. The subdued sound meant they were talking about me. I told the journalist that today wasn’t convenient as I had family present. But he was insistent so I agreed to meet him one day next week. Afterwards I wondered which day I had agreed to. My main preoccupation was getting Jack and Miranda to leave as quickly as possible. I wanted Ben back.

  To my surprise, there was no resistance from either of them. Perhaps sensing my mood, they seemed happy to have a quick lunch before leaving. We sent the children out into the garden.

  ‘I think it’s done them some good,’ Miranda said. ‘They haven’t seen any television for weeks!’

  I refrained from reminding her that the first request on their lips had been for the computer. Oh hell! I thought. She was only trying to be friendly, after all. As soon as everything is settled, I decided, I would take Ben to London. To see them on their own territory, and I would insist we became a family once more. Humming to myself, preoccupied with thoughts of the future, I made lunch. Jack was busy repacking the car, hurrying backwards and forwards through the kitchen, moving the stuff they had left behind.

  Miranda lowered her voice.

  ‘He’s been to see that friend of yours,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know—Heather whatshername. They’re getting a dossier together. There has been a spate of passport and identity card thefts in East Anglia which have been linked to all the illegal immigrants around here. Jack wants to present the information at the party conference next week, as a possible angle for the next election. Immigration is a hot topic, he says.’

  She paused.

  ‘He’s insane, Ria!’

  I swallowed. So he wasn’t having an affair. Or was he?

  Miranda was looking at me steadily.

  ‘Ria,’ she murmured, ‘are you okay?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She hesitated and I was struck, perhaps because of some heightened emotion within me, by the sweetness in her. There seemed about her a vulnerability I had not noticed before. Until this moment I had felt very little for her. But now I was aware of a faint stirring of warmth. She likes me, I thought with surprise. I saw how she had inherited a set of circumstances and how she was doing the best she could with them. I could trust her, I thought. I would talk first to Eric. Tell him of the changes I wa
s making to my life. And after that I would tell Miranda about Ben. Naturally Eric would be pleased. Jack would be a problem, but Miranda would be the one to help me. And Ben, I thought, going off into a daydream, would discover a ready-made family to help with the loss of his own.

  So far was I into my imaginings that I hardly heard Miranda.

  ‘Ria, Heather’s been telling Jack about a man who visits you at night…’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Ria…’

  Startled, I looked up. I was about to answer when we heard a bang. It was very loud and sounded as if it came from the garden. We both jumped. Instantly Miranda rushed to the window but there was nothing to be seen. She started calling the children, who were nowhere in sight.

  ‘Where are they?’ she cried, her voice rising in panic and Jack dropped the box he was holding and rushed outside too.

  ‘Sophie! Zach! Where are you?’

  The boot of his car was wide open. The willow trees were moving gently in the breeze. Miranda and Jack started along the side of the house towards the river. I turned to follow them and at the same moment I heard raised voices. Someone was shouting.

  ‘Stop, armed police!’

  ‘Stop!’

  There was the sound of scraping and panting and then heavy footsteps as a figure emerged running higher up in the field beyond the trees. It was Ben. I could see him clearly as he zig-zagged across the rough grass, the whiteness of the shirt I had given him fluttering in and out between the trees. I think I screamed, although I couldn’t be sure. The sun must have been in his eyes for I saw him raise his arm against it. He appeared to be calling something.

  Above and behind me, I heard another yell. As I turned I saw to my horror a man with the barrel of a shotgun levelled in front of him. I screamed again, but the sound of my voice was shattered by the blast of the second shot. I saw Ben, blown backwards, in the act of trying to wildly wrench the pain from his eyes and then his body, convulsing like a rabbit, turned over and over until at last it lay still.

  ‘Oh my God, my God!’ I said. ‘Oh! Oh! My God!’

  I stood gasping for a moment longer, weeping. Then I began to run, raising my hand in an agony of whiteness against the sky.

  Anula

  8

  SIX O’CLOCK. HORSEFAIR BUS STATION. IT is over. I am going back. Tomorrow when the sun is once more briefly in the wintry sky, for a few, short, daylight hours, if no snow falls, the river will flow again like a ribbon of mercury. The water meadow will return to a pale sodden green and although the grass will remain still flattened from my last pilgrimage to that spot, winter will edge a few minutes closer to a lighter hour. Tomorrow, what has been lost will be restored, outwardly at least. Trains will pass swiftly in the distance. Crows will sit on telephone wires, sheep will huddle under bare-branched trees. But I will be gone, my plane lifting through the heavy skies, turning and banking over the bitter sea. Over the snow-capped Alps, across Turkey, over Damascus and the Arabian Sea; across India then down, down, flying beside the Indian Ocean, homing. That is how, in a very few hours, I will go towards my journey’s end. Returning to the place that betrayed me, leaving the dead where they do not belong. Leaving this corner of a foreign field that is forever Sri Lanka.

  Sitting in the coach speeding towards the airport I watch my reflection in the window. Caught between a backdrop of a forest of trees the reflection is of a person I no longer recognise. The trees flank the roads for miles, close growing, forming a wall with no room to breathe, seeing me off, indifferent. Then they peter out. The trees at home don’t suffocate each other in this way. Occasionally I glimpse the land beyond the sea. Occasionally we pass houses with low red roofs, a chimney trailing smoke. No washing hangs out to dry, no flowers bloom. The streets are empty, monotonous. We have been travelling for about half an hour. The bus is almost empty. She drove me to the central bus station very early, in a place called King’s Lynn. We left at dawn.

  ‘I will wake you,’ she told me, and I agreed, dully.

  The reality is I have not slept for weeks. At least, not in the way I used to, not in that innocent, trusting abandonment of the past, when waking up was always a moment of refreshment. That kind of peace is over. But at five she came as she had promised and knocked on my door, then paused a moment and opened it. She came in and hesitantly sat on the end of my bed. It was the first and only time she did this. I was careful not to react. It was dark. All I could see was the outline of her body swathed in a dressing gown, head bent. I have to admit she looked frail; ill and ill at ease. I had been with her, in her house, for twelve days and in all honesty this was the first time I really considered her. It is a shocking admission. Until this moment all I had space for was myself. I still only have space for myself, but in the early hours of this, my last morning, I noticed how she sat, waiting for me to speak. She had the patience of a beautiful animal, I thought.

  ‘Would you like to drive past the field?’ she asked in a low voice.

  I was grateful for her thoughtfulness.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It won’t be fully light, but if we leave early enough, you could…’ she tailed off.

  I had bought flowers yesterday specifically for this purpose and she had guessed as much. Perhaps she had worried I would try to find the place myself and then get lost, or try to do something worse. I could see that she had become, in this short time, an anxious person, someone who would never trust that things would be normal again.

  ‘I will get dressed now,’ I said.

  We left the house in the strange half-light that I now recognised so acutely as characteristic of this country. The sky was yellow with cold, very wide and empty. I am in the north of the world, I told myself silently, staring out of the car. When I was a small child, one girl-child amongst so many others, I had a book of pictures of Lapland. One of my father’s friends from the university had brought it for me.

  ‘This child will travel far,’ said the man, whose name I can no longer recall. ‘She is clever, very clever. Who knows, she might even become prime minister!’ he had laughed.

  I was the cleverest in my family. After Ben was born, my father said I had passed on my genes to him.

  ‘Don’t neglect your intelligence,’ the old professor had said, but then I met Percy and fell in love. The book on Lapland and all it stood for faded in the heat of this new love.

  Being good Catholics, we had married in the big cathedral in Jaffna. And then, easily, with no sense of my fate, no warning, I became pregnant. When you long for a child, things like fate don’t disturb the surface of your dreams. Wanting a child is so big a desire that nothing can possibly overshadow it. In spite of the intermittent war, none of us thought it would get so bad that the hope for new life would vanish.

  The bus is speeding through another town. It stops. I have no idea where this place is. I don’t want to say his name. I have stemmed the flow only briefly and any stray thought might cause it to break through. Outside, as though from a great height, I watch as new passengers join the coach. A head of hair, golden in this pale morning, another, short and reddish and then, behind it, the dark, curly head of a youngish, dark-skinned man. He must be about twenty-four. Instantly I feel my chest tighten and I gasp for breath. Is this how it will be for the rest of my life? Am I consigned to spend what is left seeing what I have lost in every place I pass? The bus begins to move, the new passengers settle in scattered seats, and soon we are speeding on to a faster road with fields distanced by metal barriers.

  It was September when they told me. It has taken me this long to get permission to leave. Someone, a man, rang up. I couldn’t understand his accent. It was English; I knew that, of course.

  ‘Mrs Chinniah?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘Mrs Chinniah? Is that Mrs Chinniah?’

  The urgency in his voice was subtle, but I heard it nevertheless and it made me shiver. I maintain, one always knows. The horizon had already begun to tilt. There had been no one in
the house. I had been listening to the faint sound of shelling all day further up the coast. And then it had stopped. A bird sang melodiously in a tree in the wooded area behind the house. It had been singing off and on all day and had made me think of my swimmer, my beloved Ben. The truth was, everything made me think of him. The whole world was tied up with him, the sun, moonlight on the sea, a small animal scurrying across the garden, a bird in flight, a fish arcing through water. Oh God! When he left for England he had left those things behind as a reminder for me. Lest I forget. Painstakingly, on his instruction, I had released all the animals he had healed, all those birds with broken wings that he had cared for. I let them go back into the wilderness behind the house. Some of them refused to budge, some kept coming back for food, looking for Ben, thinking perhaps that he would return.

  ‘Mrs Chinniah, are you alone in the house? Is your husband with you?’ the man had asked.

  ‘My husband has disappeared,’ I whispered.

  I could say that without a tremor in my voice. It was possible for me to speak of Percy as though I’m not involved in any way. He disappeared twelve years ago. After every ceasefire I still hoped he would return. Of course it never happened, but the hope remains, regardless.

  ‘Is there any other relative with you?’ the voice asked next.

  I registered it as a kindly voice. Like a priest. Like Father Anselm. So because of this, forgetting the person on the other end couldn’t see me, I shook my head.

  ‘Tara has gone to the post office,’ I said. ‘We have to draw out money. It has been impossible to do anything for days now because of the shooting and we owe the rent for this place.’

  The funny thing was I didn’t ask the man’s name. I didn’t stop to wonder why he was ringing me, anyway. The palms of my hands were sweating and I couldn’t stop talking. I didn’t want to know. Already I was on the threshold of grief, already, in some way, deep within my body, I understood.

  ‘Mrs Chinniah,’ he kept repeating, ‘this is Scotland Yard here. From London. I’m terribly sorry but I have some very bad news for you. It is my duty to inform you that there has been an unfortunate accident. Your son, Ben Chinniah, has been killed.’