32

The Swimming Pavilion, 23rd June 1992, 4.15 a.m.

Gil,

We had another power cut last night. The three of us were in the sitting room when the lights flickered twice and then died. While Nan went out to the road I waited with Flora, holding her hand. She still doesn’t like being inside the house in the dark.

‘The whole village is out,’ Nan said when she returned. ‘I’ll get the candles.’

‘Shh.’ Flora gripped me. ‘Listen,’ she said, with such urgency that Nan and I didn’t move, waiting for something. ‘There’s a noise,’ Flora said, ‘in the kitchen.’ And there was a slow creak, the sound of a footstep. ‘It’s the loose floorboard.’

‘Which loose floorboard?’ Nan said.

‘The one in front of the cooker.’

I could hear the terror in her voice.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Nan said, and marched up the hallway to find the candles, and of course there was no one in the kitchen.

I need to teach Flora that there is nothing to be scared of, that she can do anything she wants, be anyone she wants to be.

After I finished my previous letter I thought about what had happened on the beach. At first I was angry that you weren’t there to help me. You brought me to this place, gave me children and left; everything that’s ever happened to me in my adult life is because of you, and now you expect me to be able to manage on my own, like a fledgling deserted before being taught how to fly. And then it occurred to me that I survived that incident on the beach by myself, I didn’t need you or anyone else to rescue me. I did it on my own.

After my conversation with Jonathan in front of the Agglestone, I decided I would stay. No, perhaps it was more that I made no decision. Leaving was too momentous, too frightening, something I only thought about in the abstract. And while I stored our time in Italy away and tried to forget it, my third pregnancy was something I was surprised to find I welcomed. It wasn’t only that I stopped being sick earlier and felt healthy, but that it made me strong, invincible. I began to join in with your enthusiasm and the list of names you taped to the fridge door (Herman, Leo, Ford, Günter). I, too, was certain it was a boy.

Jonathan called me after you’d told him.

‘You’re still there then?’ he said.

‘I feel fantastic.’

‘Do you want me to come down?’

‘It would be good to see you, but you don’t have to come on my account.’

‘Is Gil listening?’

‘No, I mean it. There’s something about this baby, a connection. He’s not something alien like the others. He’s part of me, I’m part of him. Perhaps I was meant to do this mother thing after all, it’s just taken me a bit longer than everyone else.’

‘If anything changes …’ Jonathan said.

‘It won’t.’

‘… I’m just at the end of the phone.’

One morning in July I asked Martin if I could borrow his lawnmower. We leaned on the gate to the Swimming Pavilion and looked at the grass – coarse and knee-high – and instead he loaned me his scythe, sharpening it with a whetstone, and in the gap between the pub’s lunchtime closing and the evening’s opening, he showed me how to use it. I swept the blade before me, only managing two or three jagged arcs before the ­muscles in my shoulders complained. (Different ones, it seemed, from those I used for swimming.) I cut the grass while Nan was sleeping, and it took me a week to shave it short enough to be able to mow it. After that I dug a flowerbed below the veranda, a laborious job through the compacted earth. Milkwood Stables heard about my plans and dropped off a pile of manure. Every day I worked in my wide straw hat, long trousers and one of your old shirts. Sometimes Martin would lean on the gate to watch and shake his head, telling me what I needed was a rowan and sea buckthorn windbreak and how the flowers Mrs Allen’s sister had sent would never survive in our salty air. As the baby grew inside me, so did the garden.

When I think back on those months of swelling and happiness, my recollection is that I was alone in the Swimming Pavilion, or, at least, it was just me, Nan and the garden. But you were there writing, because that summer you submitted your third novel. And it was rejected.

We were living off the tiny trickle of twice-yearly royalties from your first two books and the money your mother had left in trust for you; it wasn’t enough. Margarine sandwiches for supper, tea leaves reused pot after pot, and hiding from the milkman when he came knocking. Martin gave you a job behind the bar but asked you not to return for a third shift after you drank more than you poured for the customers. You worked for a few weeks at the stables but the horses scared you. You lasted six months or so at the dairy, but getting up early was never going to work for long. (Funny, after that conversation we’d had with Jonathan about milking cows in Ireland.)

The garden and the swimming were my release from the worries about money and from the relentless grind of motherhood. The water was good for what was happening inside me. Without you knowing, I crept out of the house and down to the sea in the dark, my feet finding their way around the rocks at the top of the beach. I hid the damp towel from you, washed the sand from my hair and the salt from my lips before you kissed me. I was gentle with the baby, I didn’t swim hard or far, we were never in danger. There was something magical about those mornings, imagining the child suspended in its fluid, while I was suspended in mine, both of us in our natural states.

I swam until the cold weather came, when instead of going in the water, I went down to stare at the sea – flat and grey, or brilliant as the sun rose, or, best of all, with the wind raging and the water throwing itself at the rocks.

In the village shop one afternoon, Mrs Bankes found me hiding behind the shelves, counting the money in my purse, trying to decide if I could afford a packet of butter. Nan was sitting up in the pram, pointing at everything and saying ‘jam’ no matter whether it was window cleaner or gravy browning.

‘She’s such a good girl, isn’t she? Never struggles or wants to get down,’ Mrs Bankes said to me. ‘You’re such a good girl,’ she said to Nan in a sing-song voice.

‘Jam,’ Nan said.

‘Let’s hope the next one will be as easy,’ Mrs Bankes said. I looked at my daughter and then, because it seemed to be expected of me, I reached out to stroke down a stray curl of her hair. ‘I expect you’re hoping for a boy. It’s always nice to have one of each.’

‘George,’ I said, my hand on my belly, the name coming out of nowhere.

‘Lovely. After George the Fifth, I suppose. Such a nice man.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Bernard Shaw, or maybe Orwell.’

Mrs Bankes carried on as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘They say we’re in for a cold winter, even down here. I hope you’ve got plenty of warm clothes ready for that new baby.’

‘I’ve kept Nan’s – in the loft, I think.’

The shopkeeper leaned towards Nan. ‘Your little brother is going to be wearing pink? That won’t do. That won’t do at all.’ And one of Mrs Bankes’s hands flew down from over her head, and her finger pressed the end of Nan’s nose. Another child would have cried, but Nan smiled, a kind of adult smile – tolerant, patronizing. Mrs Bankes stood up straight again. ‘You’re going to have to get knitting. I think we have some blue wool in the back here, and I’m sure I’ll have some needles you can borrow.’

‘I can’t knit,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how.’

She tutted. ‘Come up tomorrow lunchtime and I’ll show you.’ She bustled me out of the shop. At home I found a packet of butter and a pot of strawberry jam tucked under Nan’s blanket.

For the next month I spent every lunchtime in the shop, Nan stirring buttons in a saucepan, and Mrs Bankes and I side by side in front of the meat counter, as I learned to knit. The wool was baby-blue and soft. I finished one little boot, lopsided and too large for a newborn, but still I kept it under my pillow so I could hold it at night.

On the 23rd of November, in the evening, I was sitting in the kitchen casting on like Mrs Bankes had taught me, starting the next blue boot, wondering whether you were enjoying your birthday in London and trying not to worry about where you were exactly, when there was a familiar pop and my waters broke, two months prematurely. I put my hand between my legs as if I could stop the flow of liquid, but it ran off the chair and pooled on the lino. I must have cried out, because I heard Nan calling ‘Mum mum mum mum’ from her bedroom. I dropped a tea towel into the puddle.

I rarely used the telephone, too concerned about the bill, but that night I stood over it, thinking about what number to call. We still had that pop-up address book then, and for several minutes I slid the pointer up and down the alphabet, trying to recall the name of your agent, but as I dialled the last digit of his number I realized how late it was, and when the phone rang in an empty London office I felt the first contraction, a mild, low ache, like the others. Jonathan was in London that weekend and I remembered the name of the hotel he was staying in. The operator gave me the number, but when I phoned they said he’d gone out. I knew he’d be drinking with you, putting the tab on expenses. I left an urgent message with the receptionist. The only other person I knew in London was Louise. I hadn’t seen her for more than a year; we exchanged Christmas and birthday cards with letters, mine becoming a round robin with bad news smoothed over like the wash of a tide across dry sand. Louise answered on the fifth ring.

‘Fitzrovia 386?’

‘Louise? It’s Ingrid,’ I said.

‘Ingrid.’ She said my name without any intonation. There were voices in the background, the chink of cutlery on china. ‘Ingrid,’ she repeated, this time her voice starting high and dropping lower. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m very well,’ I said. And then another pain caught me and I clenched my teeth together and breathed through it. ‘I’m having a baby.’

She paused, and said, ‘Another? Congratulations.’

‘No. Right now.’

‘Shouldn’t you telephone a doctor or a midwife or someone?’

‘I will. But I’m trying to find Gil. He’s in London.’

‘In London,’ she said.

‘Yes, at a meeting with his agent, or out with Jonathan. I didn’t know who else to call.’

She covered the mouthpiece and spoke, and I heard more people talking and a burst of laughter.

‘And you’re having a baby?’

‘It’s coming, but it’s too soon.’ I didn’t want to cry.

‘Ingrid, listen.’ She sounded more pragmatic than she’d ever been before. ‘I’ll find Gil for you. When you put the phone down, call the hospital, tell them you’re having a baby, get them to send an ambulance. Right away. And Ingrid, don’t worry.’

Two days later when I was in my own bed again, one of those thick sanitary towels between my legs, and staring at the empty cot beside me, you went alone to the Royal Oak. I can’t write it, I can’t put down the words that describe what happened, and anyway, you were there. The hospital scene still replays in my head, and sometimes it’s easier to let it. They whisked our boy away before I had a chance to say goodbye, and never gave him back to us even in an urn or a coffin. I’d taken the knitted boot to the hospital, grabbing it at the last minute from under my pillow, and although there was only one, I’d been excited to see it on him. It disappeared in that hospital room, and I never found out where it went. In good moments I like to think the midwife put it on one of his tiny feet. I never told you, but I longed for it; just that one thing that had belonged to our son. What would I have done with one blue bootee? I don’t know; kept it under my pillow, or buried it perhaps and said Annie’s prayer over it.

I heard you bought your own drinks in the pub that time; you bought the bottle. I don’t blame you, sitting at the bar in the far corner, on Mrs Passerini’s seat, while Martin and his regulars whispered, casting worried glances at you.

‘Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,’ you said into your glass, according to Martin.

And that idiot George Ward, at the other end of the bar, almost under his breath, said, ‘Must have got the priest in there pretty damn quick if that baby made it to heaven.’ He didn’t say it quietly enough, because you got off your stool, staggered up to him, and when he turned, you punched him in the face. Martin told me he heard George’s nose crack under your knuckles as he staggered backwards, blood running from his nostrils (so much blood). You swayed, took another swing and then Martin was around the front of the bar, holding you off, saying, ‘Gil, it’s all right, Gil, Gil.’ As if soothing a baby.

Sometimes I think about George Ward in the accident and emergency department, lying on a bed behind a curtain, holding a blood-soaked bar towel to his face while his nose was reset, and at the same time, somewhere in the same hospital, there was our own George, cold and alone. A little fish, swimming too early from his private sea.

Ingrid

[Placed in Joe Strong, the Boy Fish by Vance Barnham, date unknown]