The Swimmer Read online

  It was in that year of living alone with her that I wrote my first poem. Filled with suppressed grief, but also a curious optimism that I now see was more to do with being young than anything else, it reduced my English teacher to tears. She printed it in the school magazine. The headmistress read it and entered it for a national competition where it won second prize. The story was about a fossil that had water poured on it, bringing it back to life to reveal a previous existence. During the writing of the poem I dreamt of my father every night. Mum knew nothing of any of this; even after I won the prize I kept it hidden from her. She had begun to drink and was often drowsy when I got back from school. It was a few more years before I found out that she had fallen out badly with Uncle Clifford, who disapproved of what she had done to us children. She would never visit Eel House again. Meanwhile Jack did well at boarding school. He grew with startling rapidity and took up weightlifting. At the end of his first year he came home for the summer just as we had to have our cat Salt put to sleep. I remember he came with us to the vet. There were dogs being restrained by their owners and cats that howled. Jack and I sat on either side of our mother waiting our turn. The room smelt of disinfectant and damp dog. We did not speak. The vet came out and recognised us.

  ‘Hello, my dear,’ she said, and she put her arm around my mother.

  I could see my mother beginning to cry. The vet took us into the back and took Salt out. Then the vet began stroking her. Hurry up, I thought. Get on with it. Our mother began a long story about Salt’s life and what a character he was and how she was going to miss him. When the vet gave him the injection, Mum stood stroking him and sobbing so loudly that I thought everyone in the waiting room would hear her.

  ‘Give your poor mum a hug,’ the vet told me.

  I swear there was disapproval in her voice. Jack was examining a chart on the wall. Throughout the whole business he had whistled softly, under his breath. Later, I caught him in the garden pouring boiling water on to a line of ants.

  ‘Look,’ he said, when he saw me, ‘come and see how they’re struggling.’

  And he laughed in a voice that was already beginning to deepen.

  The changes in Jack were unnerving. He began to look more and more like Dad, but there the resemblance ended. He would fly into sudden, violent rages that erupted for no reason at all, which Mum ignored and which terrified the other children he played with. One day a neighbour called round. Jack, who knew the neighbour’s disabled son, had tampered with the brakes of the boy’s wheelchair. It had rolled on to the road with the boy still in it. Luckily, there had been no cars and someone had come to his rescue.

  ‘He might have been killed,’ the neighbour said.

  ‘You’ve no proof it was Jack,’ my mother said, feebly.

  ‘I know it was Jack,’ the woman insisted. ‘I don’t want him coming round again, Mrs Robinson. I’m sorry. I know your family has had a lot to deal with. I think you should get your children to see a counsellor, perhaps?’

  Jack was hiding upstairs.

  ‘Did you?’ I hissed.

  In answer he kicked me. Downstairs there were raised voices.

  ‘Just look at them,’ the woman was saying. ‘Can’t you see how disturbed they are?’

  I remember I was far more shocked than Mum, but when I tried to talk to her she became vague and would not look at me. Something had gone terribly wrong with us all and there was nothing I could do about it. In hindsight, this was when I noticed how Jack loved to simultaneously bully and be kind to me. What I didn’t know was that everyone at school was frightened of him too and that my mother received letter after letter of complaint about his behaviour from the head teacher. This was something that came out much later.

  We lived with our individual preoccupations in this way while all the time our collective skeleton languished in a hidden cupboard. In the end, the sea at Aldeburgh saved me. When I was fourteen I went back to Eel House, and my uncle’s farm. I went back without Jack. He was spending the summer with friends from school, living a different existence with a different family. Who could blame him? Secretly I was glad to have the place to myself. My life had not so much gone downhill as stagnated. When I arrived another shock awaited me. Both Aunt Elsa and Uncle Clifford seemed to have aged terribly. None of us mentioned Dad. It was as if my father had never existed. On one rare occasion, after a particular angry phone call to my mother, my uncle told me gruffly that although Mum had behaved disgracefully he believed I would find it in me to forgive her one day. I said nothing. I was already hating my mother in a way that was beyond speech.

  It was Eric who eventually talked to me about what had happened. All through the summer when I was fourteen we would go out eeling while my uncle grumbled that he wanted to make me a farmer not a fisherman. Eels were Eric’s passion. We would go out in his boat on the hot summer nights, mooring up in places where the water curled around the base of a willow tree. Then, after we had eaten the delicious supper of fresh fish he had cooked on his little camping gas stove, Eric would tell me eel stories. It was he who introduced me to the Sargasso Sea.

  ‘Imagine, Ria,’ he would say, ‘a sea without shores, without waves, without currents. That’s the Sargasso for you!’

  I listened mesmerised as he talked about a place of utter darkness, where starfish and sea cucumbers crept. My imagination was fired by a place full of weed-harbouring monsters.

  ‘The eels swim there, Ria,’ he told me. ‘They are programmed to swim three thousand miles in order to remain faithful to their ancestral life in the matter of reproduction!’

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but the stories fascinated me, nonetheless.

  ‘And then,’ Eric said, getting into his stride, ‘after they finish reproducing, spent and exhausted, far away from home, the fire of life goes out of them and they die. That’s life, Ria.’

  We would sit staring at the night sky with its Milky Way running in a silent ribbon above us. And it was on such a night as this, without fanfare or fuss, that he began to talk about my father’s death. The conversation slipped in easily like oars dipping into the water. All conversations with Eric were like that. He told me that death, whenever it came, was always sudden, always a shock. You could not prepare for it, he said, no matter how hard you tried.

  ‘Your Ma was only trying to protect you both,’ he said. ‘She wasn’t being wicked, just foolish, maybe. We’re all foolish at some point or other. Don’t listen to other folks.’

  We sat in companionable silence. For the briefest of moments I felt a kind of peace.

  ‘How’s Jack been?’ he asked, finally.

  I shrugged and Eric looked at me sharply.

  ‘You’re both out there in the dark, aren’t you? It’s too much for you to have to deal with on your own.’

  Then he talked of other things too. He told me about the brother he had lost years before and he told me that having been born on the farm meant his roots were firmly buried in this little patch of land.

  ‘The land you are born on is so important, Ria,’ he said. ‘People take it for granted these days because travel is so easy. But it never was in my day and I have never wanted to be anywhere else.’

  I had no idea how old he was.

  ‘You’ll come back, luv, when you’ve grown,’ he said, nodding his head, certain. ‘Your dad loved it here and this place belongs to you, you’ll see.’

  I nearly began to cry but I took a deep breath and looked at my hands and then the tears went away again. Only the lump in my chest stayed where it was and I remember thinking I would have to learn to breathe with it always there.

  One day Eric gave me a photograph that my father had taken of me. In it I was sitting on the steps at the back of Eric’s farm, holding a doll. I must have been about five at the time, because I still had my hair in long blonde plaits. Later, as an adult, I had the photograph enlarged. It sits on my desk now, that figure of a little girl, smiling up at the sun with her father’s shadow across her
face.

  ‘He’ll always be with you, Ria,’ Eric told me, busying himself with his eel-traps. ‘You mustn’t fret. Time is the famous healer.’

  As I grew older, even after I moved away from him, and first my aunt and then my uncle died, it was Eric I loved the most. When the will was read and it turned out that the house had been left to me, it was Eric who wrote first.

  I love Eric. Always in the background of my life, his presence nevertheless underpins it completely.

  I had walked the length of the beach and was now on Main Street. This stretch never fails to remind me of those long, lonely years after Dad’s death. I was going to call them the barren years, but in fact barrenness came later. The breeze blew unstoppable and fresh, straight off the North Sea. Today it was warm, but in winter it could be very cruel. I bought my fish and returned home.

  Looking back, that day proved to be one of the most productive of the summer. I finished the poem and later even managed to do a bit of weeding in my vegetable patch. The sun had given my tomatoes an intensity of flavour. I picked a few and some runner beans, too. I decided to grill the fish with dill and parsley. It was all planned. The basil-soaked olive oil, the fresh bread. The pudding was to be apricots, halved and stoned and tossed with slices of watermelon and late strawberries in a dressing of my own invention. I had a bottle of wine chilling in the fridge but then, remembering how my swimmer had drunk his beer so thirstily, I put the last of Jack’s cans to cool. I was excited. It was years since I had cooked for a man. At six o’clock the phone rang. It was Heather. I sighed. Heather is my only friend left in Orford. As a child, Heather hated her own mother. She used to want to be part of our family and our mother was very fond of her. Later, when everything went cold at home, Heather would still sometimes visit us. Occasionally she even used to cook for us, making cakes that she knew Mum and Jack liked, fussing over them and bringing presents from the farm. I remember after one such visit Mum saying Heather should have been her daughter. I think I stopped believing that Heather was my special friend after that.

  ‘How’s the visit going?’ she asked me now.

  Heather knew all about Jack. She knew I dreaded these annual visits and she knew about the long-running battle over Eel House.

  ‘They’ve gone away for a few days.’

  Instantly I regretted telling her.

  ‘Poor Jack,’ she said. ‘Have you driven him away?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  I was back on the defensive.

  ‘How about supper over here, then?’

  ‘I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. I haven’t done any work for ages and I’m on a roll now.’

  ‘Of course, of course…um…well, never mind…’

  She made a sound as if she was gulping down some food and all the irritations of the past few days gathered in me. I could tell she was hurt by my refusal of dinner. The hurt was constantly in her voice and the more she tried to hide it, the more distant I became towards her. But, I suppose living alone had made me waspish.

  Why am I friends with Heather? When we were children her parents ran the farm on the other side of Orford, along the Unthank Road, the unfashionable side of town. We met each summer but then, after Dad died, apart from the odd visit, we went our separate ways, I to Cambridge and Heather into marriage to a difficult man, another farmer. She had three children in quick succession. The process aged her. We kept in touch spasmodically, but never met up again until my mother died. Then she tried to resurrect the friendship with the absence of the years lying unspoken between us. As a reunion, it was not successful. Mother had just died after a long and rambling descent into dementia. I had been the one to look after her, until Ant put a stop to that and I was forced to put her into a home. More guilt. The transfer killed her; of that I remain certain. We had about two months before the end when I tried belatedly and unsuccessfully to address the past, and then she died. Heather came to the funeral and fussed over Jack even though he had done nothing for Mother for years. She blamed me for the feud over Eel House, telling me that, as we only had each other now, I should try to sort out our differences. I never forgot that remark, made on the steps of the crematorium.

  ‘Try to understand him, Ria,’ she had said, in her kindly voice.

  I had been too shocked to defend myself. Looking at Jack’s handsome face, I suspected him of complaining about me. I never really forgave her after that.

  These days, now that her children have grown up and left home, Heather has drifted away from her monosyllabic husband and started throwing herself into local politics. She has a large circle of acquaintances to whom, when I first arrived in Orford, she introduced me. I think she hoped I would meet a suitable man. It was kind, but the ploy didn’t work. Neither her male friends nor I were interested. After a while she gave up and we continued our lukewarm relationship, regardless. The trick of intimacy evaded us both.

  There was a short, awkward pause.

  ‘Did you get the local paper?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I forgot. Why?’

  ‘You know about the calves that were killed?’

  ‘Probably a fox,’ I said.

  ‘A fox can’t slit throats,’ Heather said quickly. ‘Anyway there’s been an attack at the circus. Did you hear about that?’

  ‘You think it’s related?’

  Heather loved a good crime story. In this, as in so many other things, she and my mother were similar.

  ‘Of course! The woman’s passport was stolen, you know.’

  ‘So? What are you saying?’

  ‘Well, obviously it’s worrying. Clem has become paranoid. He thinks there are terrorists in Suffolk. Muslim terrorists!’

  Clem was the husband. Paranoia was his speciality. I laughed.

  ‘So the terrorists go around slitting up animals? What for? Doesn’t make sense.’

  She was silent.

  ‘Yes, I agree. So what are you doing this evening?’ she changed the subject.

  I had the feeling she wanted to catch me out, and this both annoyed and made me nervous.

  ‘I’m really exhausted, Heather. And I simply must work.’

  She rang off a few minutes later, her disappointment hovering like cigarette smoke in the air. To dispel it, I tuned in to the local radio station. There was nothing new. They were still talking about the animals that had been found with their throats slit. There was also speculation that the woman who was attacked had been part of a drugs ring. There was no mention of Heather’s terrorist theory. I went back to my cooking.

  My swimmer arrived just as I was pouring a glass of wine. The halibut, creamy white and melting at the touch, was almost cooked. He entered the kitchen silently, lifting up the latch. With the practised hand of a burglar, was my first ironic thought. He was wearing a clean T-shirt and had a folded piece of paper in his hand.

  ‘I have brought some music,’ he announced.

  I could see straight away that he was keen to play the piano, so I took him into the drawing room. As I set the table in the garden, music drifted out through the open window like wisps of scent. All my irritation over Heather, the vague anxiety she had induced in me, evaporated instantly as I listened to Ben playing French jazz and managing somehow to make the piano sound both unfamiliar and mellow. Confused, I felt the light from this summer evening fall sweetly through the tangle of trees. Roses bloomed. I stared at the old garden table set for two and, as if on cue, the phone rang, and rang again, insistently. The music faltered, almost stopped, then continued regardless as I hurried into the kitchen and closed the door. I picked up the handset and moved towards the small scullery.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m fine. I was listening to some music,’ I said.

  ‘You’re out of breath,’ Miranda remarked.

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘I didn’t hear you ring,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘Are you having a nice time?’

  The piano stopped and I heard footsteps approaching the kitchen but Miranda was still tal
king. I suspected she was trying to make amends for Jack’s brusqueness, but I could have done without it just at the moment. On and on she went; how wonderful the weather was, how dreadful the children were, how they squabbled, how crowded the Broads were, the ghastly day-trippers. I listened, saying as little as I could, not wanting to prolong the conversation, wanting her to finish.

  ‘Jack’s meeting someone in the pub,’ she said. ‘Honestly, Ria, sometimes I think he’s trying to take over the world!’

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘You know what he said this morning? How nice it was not to see any black faces on the Broads!’

  I felt my jaw tighten but managed to say nothing. Finally, thankfully, she rang off. My hands were sweating.

  Ben was sitting quietly at the kitchen table, waiting for me.

  ‘If you give me a screwdriver I’ll fix your light,’ he said.

  ‘That was my brother and his wife on the phone.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘You don’t like them?’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘It’s not that…’

  I was rummaging for a screwdriver and when I turned around he was staring at me with a puzzled look. I was aware of the velvet brownness of his eyes. I looked away abruptly.