The Swimmer

‘Your mother wants you back,’ she said shortly.

‘When?’ I asked.

‘Why?’ was Jack’s predictable reaction.

Uncle Clifford had brought the car round already. Our aunt, I saw with surprise, had even packed our bags in the night.

‘But I don’t want to go,’ Jack wailed. ‘I don’t want to go back to school.’

I knew school wasn’t for a few more weeks. Something about my aunt’s mood alarmed me.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, but she shook her head and looked away.

I knew she didn’t like my mother. Probably they had had a row, I decided. We rushed to wash and have some breakfast. By now I was a little uneasy and Jack was in a bad mood. We had arranged to go to Orford that day and have a kite-flying competition with my friend Heather. I remember Jack howling and refusing to put his shoes on. He loved Heather and was bitterly disappointed.

‘Be a good boy, darling,’ my aunt said, bending to do them up.

She mumbled something about growing up, but wouldn’t say more. Then, just as we were getting into the car, she ran out and gave us each a fierce hug, after which she held me at arm’s length and peered hard at me. She looked as if she had been crying.

‘Come back, Ria,’ she told me softly. ‘Whenever you want. This place belongs to you.’

That I hadn’t said goodbye to Eric was all I could think as my uncle drove us to the station to board the train bound for London. Our aunt had packed us sandwiches and some of the delicious home-made lemonade we had been drinking all summer long.

The journey home was tedious and we had to change trains twice. The views from our carriage window went slowly from the flat landscape I loved to a grimy build-up of houses and factories. After what seemed like ages we arrived at Liverpool Street and saw our mother waiting for us on the platform.

‘Where’s Dad?’ Jack asked.

‘Is he still in hospital?’

‘Come on,’ Mum said. ‘The car is in a twenty-minute space.’

‘How’s Dad?’ I asked when we were in the car, but she was busy negotiating the traffic and didn’t answer.

We were home in fifteen minutes.

‘I feel sick,’ Jack said.

‘I told you not to drink all that lemonade,’ I scolded, rushing up to the house.

But once in the front door we both came to an abrupt halt for the sitting room was filled with flowers.

‘Why are there so many flowers?’

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘Mum?’ I asked, suddenly frightened, seeing the look on my mother’s face.

She sat down heavily and looked at us both helplessly. Then she grabbed Jack, who squirmed but allowed her to draw him towards her. She was looking at me, fixing me with a look I took to mean that I was in trouble.

‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ I asked.

The pit of my stomach seemed to be falling away. My legs had begun to shake.

‘Mum?’ I asked again, my voice rising with panic.

There was a fraction of a pause as she drew Jack to her more closely so that he made a small noise of protest.

‘Children,’ she said, ‘I have some bad news. There was a complication with your father’s operation. He got peritonitis.’

She stopped and seemed to choke.

‘Where is he?’ I shouted. ‘Mum? Mum?’

‘He’s dead, Ria,’ she said in a small voice. ‘We had the funeral last week.’ And then she began to cry.

It was how I heard the news of what had happened to my beloved father; on the day that my childhood ended.

The air had become warmer and the scent of stirred-up earth and grass, and dust after rain, filled it. The sky was rosy once more and in the early twilight a sharp fork of geese flew clacking between the trees, silhouetted now by a watery light. Tomorrow the sun would be high in the sky again, the heat would return for a week or two longer, even though a few autumnal minutes were already wiping away the summer. What lingered was a softness of light. I was just about to reach out for the switch of my table lamp when I saw him. My swimmer! He was much earlier than before, moving slowly across the surface of the water. I stood open-mouthed and astonished. Then I turned silently and let myself out of the kitchen door, rounding the corner of the house before I stopped. The swimmer had reached the bank and was clambering up it. He had his back to me as once again he began to dry himself with his shirt. I stood waiting. Under the darkening summer sky I could see that he was not a local boy. I watched as he shook his dark curly hair and water sprayed out. He had been swimming in his trousers again and now he reached for the shoes he had thrown down in the long grass. He was putting them on when something made him turn slightly. I stood rooted to the spot and watched as, lifting his head, he listened. Then slowly he moved his head and saw me. For a whole minute we stared at each other without speaking. Both of us shocked. He was the first to break the silence, surprising me by holding up his hand, one foot in a shoe. He looked ready to run.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, in perfect, though accented, English. ‘I’m very sorry. Please. I won’t do it again.’

I saw he was terrified and in the light fading from the sky I saw that he was also very young.

‘It’s all right.’

There was a silence. The boy, he was surely no older than eighteen, stood waiting as though he had been stunned.

‘I don’t mind you using this stretch of river. It isn’t private or anything,’ I said. ‘Just filthy, that’s all. And your mother might not be so happy with you swimming in it.’

I was talking to keep him from doing a runner. He continued to stare at me and then he smiled with sudden force and I saw he wasn’t so young after all.

‘Are you from around here?’ I asked.

He shook his head and in one swift movement pulled his wet T-shirt on. I hesitated.

‘Did you come into my house last night and play the piano?’

‘No…I…no!’

‘I think you did,’ I said.

My voice sounded unfamiliar, as if I couldn’t breathe properly. I was stalling for time.

‘I might have called the police, you know,’ I said, conscious of trying to sound amused. ‘You might have got into a lot of trouble. Were you going to steal anything?’

What a ridiculous thing to have said! The swimmer shivered. He stood with his head slightly bowed. Silent, reminding me again of the image of the Roman swimmer I had seen in Naples. I hesitated.

‘You play the piano well.’

He didn’t move.

‘Would you like to come in and play it again?’

He said nothing.

‘You can, if you like.’

He looked at me full in the face. In the growing twilight I could not see the expression in his eyes but I had the distinct feeling he was sizing me up.

‘Are you going to ring for the police?’ he asked.

He sounded Indian.

‘No,’ I said. I looked at him in what I hoped was a stern but friendly and motherly manner. ‘Not if you promise you won’t steal anything. Where are you from?’

One part of my mind was amazed at the ridiculous nature of this conversation. The swimmer hesitated as if he too were thinking something along these lines. Then he seemed to make up his mind.

‘I’m not from here. I’m from Jaffna in Sri Lanka,’ he said, and now I could see he was shivering violently and I thought, he’s frightened. ‘You know where that is?’

A single blackbird trilled a long note into the rain-dampened air.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Where the tea comes from. Are you on a visit or a holiday?’

‘Neither, miss,’ he answered gravely. ‘I am a refugee.’

Sitting in my kitchen he told me his story in perfect but halting English. He had come to Russia by plane and then overland in a lorry that had been waiting at a pick-up point along an empty stretch of coast road. The conditions had been cramped, the driver had demanded more money than he had and the journey had been terrible. His name was Ben and he was twenty-five years old. He told me this much while he ate the cold chicken I gave him and drank a glass of beer. The driver of the lorry was an aggressive man. Having taken the last of their money he began dropping people off randomly. It had been Ben’s turn halfway along the Unthank Road. It was how he became separated from the people with whom he had travelled from Moscow. Not that they were his friends, but at least he had spent some of the worst hours of the journey with them. Left by the roadside he had walked in circles for five days with no money and no documents, sleeping rough, eating when he could, trying to keep clean. He had been petrified of being picked up by the police. He had heard stories that, if that happened, he would simply be deported. And if he returned to Sri Lanka, he feared he would be killed.

Then he had found a farm and burrowed down in one of the outbuildings. The farmer discovered him one night, but instead of calling the police had offered him the chance to pick sweetcorn. In exchange for a bed and food and, the farmer promised, a work permit. Ben could not believe his luck. This was where he lived for the moment. The work permit hadn’t materialised and he had yet to make contact with his mother to tell her that he was safe.

He finished speaking and drained the glass of beer. He had eaten the small amount of food I had put in front of him with ravenous haste. I wondered when he had last had a proper meal. Under the electric light he looked terribly young and vulnerable. It crossed my mind that he might be lying about his age.

‘I want to get to London,’ he said. ‘I want to find proper work.’

‘What sort of work?’

‘I am a doctor, but because of government restrictions I have never practised…well, hardly at all.’

He moved his head rapidly from side to side. I felt he was withholding something.

‘I began working as a nurse in the hospital in Batticlore. Then an opportunity came for me to leave. It was becoming dangerous for Tamil men of my age to stay. The insurgents were rounding them up for their army.’

He paused, looked around the room, taking in his surroundings for the first time.

‘So I left.’

The light flickered, distracting him.

‘You have a loose connection in your switch,’ he said, finally. ‘I can fix it for you, if you like.’

I had been listening to him, spellbound, and didn’t know what to say.

‘I would like to do that…as payment for this meal.’

I waved my hand.

‘There is no need to pay, it isn’t anything, just a little chicken.’

He stood and picked up his plate awkwardly. I had a feeling he was thinking about the stolen bread. In that moment there was within me a stirring of something exciting, something undefined and exotic. Before he could open his mouth to protest, I took the plate from him and put it in the sink.

‘But if you want to pay me,’ I told him, smiling faintly, ‘you could play a little of the jazz you played last night. Without the soft pedal!’

Instantly he lowered his eyes, embarrassed.

‘I’m sorry!’

‘No, no. I really mean I’d like to hear the piano being played.’

I spoke briskly, turning and leading the way into the sitting room.

When I relive that moment now I am always reminded of a story I once read by Jean Rhys. My swimmer sat gingerly down at the piano. He opened the lid and stared at the notes. Then he placed his hands gently on the keys. I noticed his fingers were long and thin. Confused, there grew in me again the conviction that he was younger than twenty-five. He sat with head bowed, then suddenly he was galvanised into action and he began to play. I am no judge of music, nor have I ever learnt to play the piano, but I was struck by his velvet touch. The piano had not been tuned for years. Apart from the odd occasion when Jack played it, it hadn’t been touched.

For nearly an hour I sat listening, spellbound. Ben played as though he was a blind man who had found sight. He played with no music. I suspected he was going through a memorised repertoire and it made me wonder what journey he had passed through to go from someone who knew this kind of music to become a refugee who carried his trainers on his back. He played on and on, gaining confidence, never looking at me, hardly aware of my presence. Some of the pieces were familiar; pieces like ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ and ‘Maybe’, others were clearly music from his own country. Then, just when I was beginning to think his supply of jazz was inexhaustible, he turned to something else entirely. A piece of music I was familiar with. Schubert, I thought, uncertainly. I remembered Aunt Elsa used to play it. The melody ran on, hesitant and haunting. He was playing differently. In the light from the lamp I could see his face as he stared across the room and now I had the distinct feeling he was playing for someone beyond me, some invisible presence I knew nothing of. The next moment he bent his head and the music came to an abrupt stop.

‘What was that?’ I asked, breaking the silence.

He looked at me as though from a great distance.

‘Schubert’s last sonata,’ he said, tiredly. ‘Your piano needs tuning. I can tune it for you, if you will let me.’

‘In payment!’ I teased and unexpectedly he smiled for the second time.

‘Yes, in payment. For all the times I used your river and your garden, and…I stole a loaf of bread one night.’

I thought of Jack’s family, his children who had everything they wanted. I thought of my own comfortable life. It was not the last time I was to think this way.

‘You are welcome,’ I told him, quietly.

Neither of us knew what to say after that. He stood up and I saw his T-shirt had dried.

‘You know the river is polluted, don’t you? It isn’t what it used to be, years ago.’

‘I can dredge it for you, if you like,’ he said.

‘For payment!’ I teased, and now we were both laughing.

He nodded.

‘I’d better make sure I cook something really good in that case,’ I said.

‘There is no need,’ he said, perfectly seriously.

We were both assuming he would come back tomorrow. And that was when I noticed he was becoming anxious to be gone.

‘I’ll start early,’ he said. ‘Do you have a lawn mower? I could cut the grass by the bank.’

He seemed relieved.

‘I can come while it is light,’ he said and I understood that he had dreaded sneaking into the garden.

He went swiftly after that, the outside light coming on as he left. I watched from the door. At the top of the drive he turned and I saw him raise his hand in a gesture of farewell. I saw his white T-shirt fluttering through the trees and the next instant he was gone. I stood watching a moment longer before I let out the breath that I had not known I had been holding. The garden was still, the outside light went off and once again I smelt the fragrance of honeysuckle and roses. Summer seemed to linger, the storm might never have occurred. Overhead, the Milky Way stretched like an endless satin ribbon across the darkening sky. For no reason at all, I felt inexplicably, deliriously happy.

3

THURSDAY, AUGUST 25TH. EARLY MORNING SUNLIGHT is best. I wasted it by oversleeping but awoke refreshed and filled with energy. Lying in bed like a hostess planning a dinner party, I decided my day’s activities. First a trip to the fishmonger in Aldeburgh. The sun streamed in through the cracks in the shutters; I knew that when I opened them, they would reveal a blue sky. A seagull called faintly. Today was for work, I decided, with sudden optimism. With a flash of certainty I saw how my collection of poems might shape out. Ideas that seemed to have been unanchored for most of my life floated towards me. Traces of my father’s presence nudged me. I had swum in apathy for years but now possibilities spread their wings. I would begin again. Getting out of bed, humming to myself, I went into the bathroom. From outside the window the green hinge of summer opened, wide and seductive, while beyond the river the fields were a smudge of blue flowers. I showered and went downstairs, drank a coffee swiftly and went to fetch the car.

I drove fast with the smell of the sea threading my thoughts. The circus that had been in town a few days earlier had gone now, leaving a slight sense of unease. There were a couple of policeman walking on the beach which was otherwise empty of people. As yet no one had been charged with the attack on the circus woman. Aldeburgh is a sleepy town caught in a 1940s time warp; there is no pier, no seaside paraphernalia, no marina. Only the shingles, shelving steeply to the water’s edge, a few fishing boats and the seagulls. I stopped the car and walked the length of the beach.

On what was to be the last summer of his life, my father had decided to make both Jack and me better swimmers. That summer he had brought us daily to this spot, to plunge us screaming into the water, laughing and shivering as the waves broke over us. Jack had protested and at one point started to cry, but my father had bribed him with the promise of hot chocolate afterwards at his favourite café. I remember hugging Jack as he clung to me but, thanks to Dad, he was now a much better swimmer than I was. On that last day of summer I remember the pebbles we found. I have them still, on the windowsill. Afterwards we visited the bookshop and Dad bought us each a book. Mine was The Mill on the Floss. I have it still, inscribed with his message: To my darling daughter who reminds me so much of Maggie Tulliver. Today the handwriting remains as fresh as it had looked on the day he wrote the words. In the lonely years that followed I don’t know how many times I stared at those words. Looking back, I see how my literary tastes were formed in that little bookshop. We used to always be laughing. Even when we returned home late and my mother was cross with us, Dad had the knack of jollying her out of her bad mood. Often, after his death, when my mother tried first to find another partner and, when that did not work, turned slowly to alcoholism, when Jack went his own way in silent grief, I used to wonder where that summer had vanished. I did not know then what I know now; that a way of life can disappear in an instant.

On that terrible day, after she had broken the shocking news to us, Jack and I went to our respective bedrooms and stayed there in silence until the following morning. Neither knew what the other was thinking; neither cared. We were sealed in shock. It was the beginning of the end of our family, for by the time we emerged through the wall of silence we had changed, for ever. Jack and I would never hug each other again. From now on he was my little brother only in name. I blamed myself. I was the oldest, I should have taken care of him, should have comforted him on that first night, gone to him when I heard him crying. But I did not. A great, terrible tidal wave of grief had engulfed me. I was drowning in it and I had become mute. I wanted my father so desperately, so inarticulately, my heart was so broken, that I simply closed in on myself. I did not cry for years. Funerals are for crying but we had witnessed no funeral. Mother withdrew. She made matters worse by expecting us to act like adults from then on. She stopped shouting at us, stopped telling us what we should do, letting us go to bed whenever we wanted, quarrel as much as we liked. Suddenly there were no rules. It would be years before I recognised the guilt she felt. By the time we went back to school, a month later, the three of us had formulated a way of circling the empty void of our lives; dead planets around a sun lit by the memory of Dad. There was some money left in a trust fund and a year later, when Jack was seven, my mother used it to send him away to boarding school. Now there was one fewer pair of eyes to reproach her.

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.