The Swimmer

The Swimmer

Roma Tearne

Barrie

Epigraph

Years

Later in the same fields

He stood at night when eels

Moved through the grass like hatched fears

Towards the water.

Seamus Heaney

A people does not carry the memory of its humiliations as an individual does.

André Chamson (1940)

SOMEONE HAD PLACED THE CALVES AT the entrance to Unthank Farm. The farmer, arriving at his usual early hour, discovered them. All three, pushed up against a barrel of hay, with their throats slit, in the way animals were butchered by the Halal butcher in Ipswich. It was August, hot and with the promise of a golden month ahead. Shocked, the farmer called the vet, who in turn reported the matter to the police, but the calves were already dead. A small item in the local newspaper recorded the incident which otherwise went unnoticed.

Unthank Farm spreads out towards the edge of the city of Ipswich. It is the largest farm in the area. A few days later, a rambler out walking some thirty-two miles away on Dunwich Heath, came across a dog with its throat slit. The dog was a German shepherd and it lay on the edge of the road that runs in a straight line down to Dunwich beach. It was still alive. The rambler bent and examined it. The animal had a collar but no name disc. The nearest house was some distance away, its rooftop just visible. Assuming it must belong there, he picked up the feebly struggling animal and staggered back along the road. But the house, when he reached it, looked empty. It was large, built in red brick and with an abundance of Scotch pines and thick undergrowth in the small copse behind. There were no cars in the drive, no signs of activity, no radio playing. The man hesitated. The dog was obviously cared for, its collar looked new, but the rambler was on his way to meet a group of other walkers and was already late. Placing the animal on the front doorstep, he rang the bell. There was a long pause. Then he rang the bell again, listening out for the sound of footsteps. Still nothing. Moving back, he was about to call out when he noticed one of the windows had been smashed. Clearly someone had broken in. The rambler peered through the jagged glass. He saw a room lined with bookcases and a few pieces of what looked like 1950s furniture. He saw some paintings on the walls but they were too far away and the room was too dark to make them out properly. He stepped back. The place was probably alarmed. It wouldn’t do to be caught like a thief, he thought. Just at that moment the dog made a rattling noise in its throat. Blood gushed out. It struggled, moaning softly. Then it was still. The rambler saw that it had died. Suddenly he did not want to be in this place another second. He had a mobile phone deep in his rucksack, he would call the local police about the break-in and the dog. But first he would get the hell out of here, he thought, his feet crunching hastily on the gravel driveway.

Twenty minutes later the vet from Orford arrived with the police. He was the same one who had examined the calves at Unthank Farm. The marks on the dead dog were similar to those on the calves. A slit across the throat. It was also clear that the house had been broken into. But although the rooms had been ransacked, at first glance nothing appeared to have been taken. The police began the process of lifting fingerprints and contacting the owner, William Letsby. Letsby had left his dog alone in the house for only a few hours while visiting friends in the Ipswich area. When asked his occupation he told the police he worked for the Home Office. The officer, glancing at Letsby’s ID, realised he was fairly high up in the Department of Immigration. He could also see that the man was very distressed about his dog and trying to hide this fact. Apologising, glad that nothing had been stolen, he left as soon as possible. He would be in touch, he said, in the event they caught any suspects. Meanwhile he was sorry about the dog.

Orford is a sleepy village of some beauty abutting the marshlands on one side and the estuary on the other. There are mighty tides that sweep in from the sea. Banks of sludge and silt laid down over the ages by all the marsh rivers lie unnoticed on the riverbed. The wading birds do nicely, as do the eels. Occasionally, when the tide is out and the water in the surrounding inlets appears to drop to almost nothing, you see them: eels, the length of bootlaces and the colour of green glass, twisting in the twilight.

Appearances can, however, be deceptive. People have been known to drown here. Two miles to the east, a matter of minutes by car, is Orford Ness, a one-time MoD establishment used for atomic weapons research. Now it is a benign and deserted haven for wild birds. Visitors in a small but steady stream come to visit it all year round, to walk, and observe the wildlife. This flat land with its extraordinary skies and matchstick forests is steeped in history. It is perfect country for painters, perfect crow country. But it is not a place with a high crime rate, and the vet was puzzled by the two incidents. Nothing like this had happened before. The police wondered if the animals had been the victims of a vixen. The vet knew this was not possible as the incisions looked to have been made with a knife. A local journalist filed copy about the Orford Ness animal killer but the editor did not print it for fear of causing panic amongst his readers. Besides, a circus had just moved into town and there were other, more interesting stories to print. And so the matter was dropped.

Then on the following Thursday two houses on the A1094 out of Aldeburgh were broken into and a large black retriever was found lying in a country lane. It too had been killed with a single cut to the throat. Nothing had been stolen from the houses and although a couple of windows had been broken no one had been seen entering or leaving. By now the circus was in full swing and the editor of the local paper did not run this story either.

The journalist who had filed the report was a married man, bored by the fact that nothing ever happened in Orford. The editor told him to stop complaining, forget the animal killer, and write a feature on the circus instead. But luck was on his side. While he was poking around the caravans, there was a commotion. One of the performing monkeys had been found dead. Its throat had been slit. The journalist’s eyes gleamed.

The day was marked by a warm breeze carrying the smell of ozone and fish, the sea was jewel-like and sparkling with the sun spilling over it. A small plane from RAF Mildenhall droned overhead, children played ball on the shingles. By nightfall the beach would be crowded with people returning from the circus, heading towards the fish-and-chip shop or the pub. But for now Eddie Sharp’s matinee performance was about to begin. Minus one small monkey.

No one would talk to the journalist. His eager, wolfish face made the circus folk wary. The monkey was buried quickly before the flies and the stink took hold, and the unease was quietly papered over.

In the centre of town a book launch was under way. A bestselling crime novelist was discussing his latest novel before a small audience. The journalist poked his head through the door of the bookshop. The launch had been advertised as ‘Fiction Noir’ with a picture of a corpse on a red background on the poster. The shop was packed. Solving a crime was better than Sudoku. There’s nothing here, thought the journalist, and he headed back to the office.

‘Not enough for a story,’ said the editor, shaking his head. ‘Talk to the police, see what they think. They won’t want you alarming anyone while the circus is here.’

The journalist was expecting this response. He had just been trying it on. The editor, who understood him all too well, eyed him speculatively.

‘Take a break, John,’ he said easily. ‘Take your son to see the big top.’

John frowned. He didn’t welcome advice about what to do with his kid, but he decided it mightn’t be a bad idea to take another look at the circus that evening, when it was dark. Something was nagging at him; perhaps a return visit would clear his mind. And what could be more natural than taking his four-year-old son?

‘It won’t finish until after his bedtime,’ his wife protested. ‘And he’ll be bad-tempered tomorrow.’

But the journalist insisted, and as it had been years since she had been to a circus, his wife agreed.

‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ John announced when they were settled in their seats. His son was clutching a balloon, staring solemnly at the empty ring ahead.

Sawdust and bright lights, with a hint of tiger musk. John slipped out. The caravans’ entrances were obscured from view. When he tried to push past the barrier, he was stopped. His press pass was useless against the wall of hostility he encountered. He slipped back into his seat just as the drum rolled.

‘What are you up to?’ his wife hissed.

John shook his head, placing a finger on his lips.

‘Sshh!’ he mumbled as the show began.

The applause was deafening. No one heard the scream. No one inside the tent, anyway. By the time the story was out, it was too late; the show was over, the trapeze artist had folded himself down to the ground, the sawdust was soiled with sweat and the tent had emptied. John Ashby, freelance journalist for the Suffolk Echo, heard nothing until the next morning when his editor informed him of the event.

A circus woman in her mid to late thirties had been attacked in her caravan. A kitchen knife had been held to her throat and the threat of rape whispered in her ear. She had not seen the man’s face but his hands were dark-skinned. Later, she told the police that all her travel documents, including her British passport, had been stolen.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

SOMEONE HAD PLACED THE CALVES

Ria

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Anula

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Lydia

17

18

19

20

Acknowledgements

BEHIND THE SCENES

A BANDIT OR A REBEL

TRUST THE TALE

THE PASSIONAL SOUL

Also by Roma Tearne

Copyright

About the Publisher

Ria

1

I REMEMBER IT WAS TOWARDS THE middle of August. Thursday the eighteenth, in fact. That I remember so clearly, so painfully still, tells me that I have never for one instant truly forgotten what happened. Great waves of tenderness sweep over me even now, and I am still able to feel within myself the faint, dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly and completely engulfed me then. That night the heat held me in a stranglehold. I remember swallowing it in huge gulps and sighs as I listened to the soft gasp of the river. A vast yearning, an unknown expectation was poised to grip me, so that some time later I thought my heart itself would burst. But first came the beginning.

Towards midnight on that evening I woke with a start to the crackle and dance of white static on the television screen. I think I must have fallen asleep with my fingers wrapped around the remote control. It was stiflingly hot, unusual for East Anglia. I remember I wiped small beads of perspiration from my face with the back of my hand, thinking how unlike Britain this was, to feel so hot. I must have been disorientated, confused rather than frightened. No, I wasn’t frightened at all on this perfectly ordinary summer night. Car headlights swept up and down the length of the garden like giant eyelids lighting up parts of the river, dipping into wetland mud before vanishing. The summer renters from Italy had returned after an evening out. I heard them slamming doors in a reckless way, laughing, happy.

‘Si, va bene,’ one of them said, faintly. ‘Capisco, capisco!’ and then they went inside.

I switched off the television without moving from my chair and the surface of the night appeared once more as an undisturbed skin. Except for a small liquid sound, quickly suppressed. So small was it that I continued to sit, glasses in hand, straining my ears, still half asleep, only half listening. Then I padded across towards the open window where the air was filled with summer fragrance. And I heard the sound again quite distinctly. A splash, some movement, then…nothing. The river licking itself, perhaps. Fully awake now, I stood bandaged in the folds of the thin curtain, glad of the high hedge that screened the garden on one side from my neighbours. And I heard it again, that sound, soft and rhythmic, like oars, moving through water. It was coming from below, from the direction of the river. An animal perhaps, cooling off. From where I stood I caught a glimpse of the water. A horned moon cast a dim light over it. In the distance, not quite discernible, was the vast shingle waste of Orford Ness.

One of my tasks that August was to do something about the inlet from the river that lay at the end of the garden. Over time, slowly and due to lack of use, it had become a swamp of leaves and drowned insects. There was no one to swim in it any more; no children escaping from parents, no adolescents messing about in boats. Since I returned to the house it had become merely a thing of untidy beauty. Only Eric came past occasionally in his boat, looking for places to leave his eel-traps. Eric had farmed the land and fished these waters for as long as I could remember. He lived at Fruit Tree Farm. When my Uncle Clifford decided to split his farm and sell it because of ill health it was Eric who saved the land from developers by buying it at a decent price. It all happened long ago, when I was still at school and the house we call Eel House came to be mine.

I was still living with Ant when Clifford died, still hoping I might have a child, still craving for love of sorts. We were in the middle of doing the rounds of the fertility clinics with dreary futility. First Ant was tested, then I. There were months of endless temperature charts ahead of us before I was forced to acknowledge that no technology on earth could help an old uterus. I was told bluntly that the eggs would not stick, whatever that meant. I was thirty-eight and, it would appear, punished by inexplicable infertility. When it sunk in, when at last I said the word barren out loud to myself, staring into a mirror, I began to notice that infertility was on the increase in Britain. Everywhere I went, I met women who could not hold a fertilised egg. There we all were, girls with bodies that still looked young but had grown old internally.

‘It’s always been this way,’ the doctor told me, when I protested. ‘Women’s reproductive rate slows down with age.’

So why hadn’t I realised there was an epidemic of childlessness? The papers wrote about insecticides and too many chemicals in the soil. Women, they told us, were filling up with harmful poisons. It would take years to reverse the current trends. Teenage pregnancies are best, the papers urged, contrary to everything they had been saying for years. If only it were that simple.

Ant left me. He was desperate for a family. If I couldn’t help him then he was sorry but he would be forced to go elsewhere. Who says men don’t have biological clocks? His callousness was breathtaking. In the long, sleepless nights that followed I began to think of Eel House. Throughout what was left of that miserable year the memory of it shifted uneasily within me. Like a tennis ball passed over the net, a plan went backwards and forwards across my mind. Once, many years ago, I had been happy there and now it was as though a fragment from that time had begun working its way to the surface, dislodging the earlier hurt, buried for so long. Suddenly my homesickness could not be contained and I wanted to go back. I remembered East Anglia as a place of both love and betrayal, of far-away summers and family fictions. A place where my beloved father had walked with me in the matchstick woods, and the place where, after his death, I returned to briefly in despair. Eel House belonged to me now, it would be easy to go back. On an impulse I wrote to Eric, who replied with a single word.

‘Come!’

So I turned back towards the east and my past, wanting to see again those wide watercolour skies and soft reed-grey marshes that blended so perfectly with the sea. Hopefully, looking for peace. I was forty-three years old; a poet whose work, even before Ant left me, dealt with emptiness; the colour of it, its smell.

The tug of the water being pushed aside grew louder. It wasn’t an animal; there was too much control, too many regular pauses, as if something, or someone, was taking their time. The moon came out from behind a cigarette-paper cloud and I caught a glimpse of the row of wooden fence-posts rising up like the river’s rotten teeth, and then some spray as an arm rose and fell and turned again in the water. My first thought was that I ought to warn whoever it was that this inlet was dirty and had been stagnant for a long time. Swimming in it would only churn the mud up. My second was that the door into the house was not locked. Whoever was down there could easily come in. I was alone, of course. Earlier that evening Miranda, my sister-in-law, had rung to say they were leaving London the following morning for their annual visit. In the morning, too, the cleaner would arrive, but now, at midnight, I was alone. With the darkness and the soft paddling of human limbs in the water below.

The movement stopped and then resumed, stroke by stroke, rhythmically. Silently, avoiding the furniture, the small occasional tables, the standard lamp, the foot stool, I moved across towards the French windows. I could get a better view from here. By now I was fully awake, breathless with suspense. Like a young girl, alert and taut, interested. Even my dress, caught in the moonlight, scrunched up and white, felt insubstantial, as though worn with the crumpled haste of youth. The moon was so good a liar, I remember thinking fleetingly, as I edged towards the window. Why was I so unafraid?

The man—no woman would have ventured into such filthy water—reached the end of his length and I saw a pair of hands rest against the grass before he heaved himself up on to the bank. I squinted, trying to catch sight of a face, concentrating hard, wishing I knew where my glasses were but not daring to move too much in case I was spotted. The straw-coloured moon was just slipping behind a cloud as I saw with some surprise that he was bare to the waist. He had been swimming in his trousers. In the semi-darkness I could see he was young and as he turned and picked up the shirt that lay on the grass I saw he was very dark and somehow, I felt, even from this distance, foreign. He turned sharply as though he had heard me move, but it was in the wrong direction. I wish you could have seen me in that moment, unafraid and a little astonished by my own calm acceptance of an intruder on my property. An owl hooted and the man looked up at the sky, unhurried, as though he had all the time in the world, as if the garden itself belonged to him. What cheek, I thought in reluctant admiration, as I watched him button his shirt and search for his shoes. The moon disappeared completely and when it reappeared he was moving in long strides through the soft August night. A small, gloved wind stirred the trees. There was a noise downstairs, in the hall perhaps? I could hear my heart beating. What should I do if he was in the house? There was no telephone in my study. To get to the renters next door I would have to go through the front door and down the drive. My feet would crunch on the gravel. I would be heard. Again, the smallest of noises; I was certain it was coming from below. Suddenly I was rooted to the spot; belatedly, I was frightened.

After the business of the will and the house, after the years of animosity, my brother Jack and I were finally on speaking terms. During the years of our disagreement he had pestered me constantly to sell the house. Ostensibly the reason he had given was that I should not live in such isolation in this house.

‘For God’s sake, Ria, sell the bloody place,’ he was always saying. ‘What does a woman in your position want with a mausoleum like that?’

What he meant was, what did a woman of forty-three, an unloved spinster like me, want with a house that by rights should belong to a family like his. Eel House had not been left to him but to me. There had, however, been a clause in the will. If it were sold, he would have half the money from its sale. My brother Jack was a strange, restless man, frequently angry, sometimes a bully. We did not know what to make of each other, so that, ignoring the sub-texts of our disagreements I had inadvertently ignored his warnings about safety. Only yesterday he had told me I needed new locks on the doors and windows.

‘I suppose you’re waiting for me to sort it out,’ he had said.

Bitterness from childhood flashed between us. I was weary of it. I had offered him every access to the house. I told him that he could use it at any time and that I would share everything with him. It was not as if he were poor; he had been left our London home by our mother. All I had was Eel House and the small amount of dwindling savings from my days as a university lecturer. Nonetheless, Jack wanted me to sell up and split the money. But for once I stood up to him. Our mother was no longer there to take his side. Miranda had always, to her credit, stayed neutral, so I told him firmly I would never sell the house. It was the beginning of a feud that was to last for years, until Ant left and Miranda, feeling sorry for me, rang up.

The truth was I hadn’t cared; either about his never-ending resentment, or my own safety. These days I was past caring about anything much, except perhaps for the fact that I had not completed a poem in nearly two years. Everything had dried up inside me.

Now, belatedly, fear stirred within me and I hesitated; tomorrow morning might be too late. Of course, I didn’t think this. When you are frightened all your mind has time for is the fear itself, and by now I admit I was frightened. It took some effort for me to open the door and head for the landing. I held an open penknife in my hand. It was laughable. Everything creaked. All those boards that were usually silent moved with me as I crept downstairs. Several times I froze, straining my ears. The moon was still behind the clouds; there was no light on the marshes. I was convinced someone was in the kitchen. What I needed was to get as far as the hall in order to find the telephone. The phones being portable, none were ever where they should be. Too late to be thinking about this, now.

Slowly I inched my way along the hall, barefoot, skimpily dressed, clutching that ridiculous penknife. What if he was a rapist? Don’t be stupid, Ria, I told myself, you’re too old to interest a rapist! I tried not to think about the incident that had occurred a few days ago in Aldeburgh when a woman had been held at knife-point. The woman had been a circus hand, but still, the police had urged people in the area to lock their doors. I reached the telephone just as the church clock struck the quarter. The only number I could ring at this hour was the police, but I was reluctant to do so. This was a small community; word would get out. People knew my brother Jack. He was bound to hear of it. He would tell me triumphantly, finally, I was losing my nerve! I would play into his hands at last, and the insidious process of ousting me from the house and putting it up for sale would begin. I hesitated. I swear the only reason I didn’t punch in the number was the thought of Jack’s smug face and in that moment, while I stood uncertainly, without warning, the outside light flickered on. I flattened myself against the wall and held my breath. There was the unmistakable sound of gravel and then, footsteps, fading away. I don’t know how long I stood there, rooted to the spot, but eventually the light switched off again. The moon reappeared showing its damaged side, barely above dream level. I blinked and found the switch in the hall.