The Swimmer

Closing my book, I went across to the open window. Immediately the scent of late honeysuckle and jasmine came wafting towards me. Somewhere in the depths of the garden a nightjar called. Just after Ant left me, taking all hope I had of love, I had heard a nightingale pour its fluid notes across this garden. I had stood on this very spot, mesmerised by it, wondering for a confused moment who the singer was. I have never heard a nightingale sing since.

A slight breeze moved the muslin and the trees rustled. It had become so muggy that there would probably be a storm soon. I yawned, slowly. If I turned in now, I would wake refreshed. Next Tuesday, when they left, I’d be able to have a clear day to work. The poem would, I hoped, return once peace was restored. Turning, I reached out to close the window in case of rain later, my eyes scanning the garden idly. I froze. There was my swimmer! Good God, I thought, astonished, for there he stood, bold as brass, bare-chested at the water’s edge. What a nerve he had, trespassing in someone else’s garden, again. As I watched, to my amazement, he moved towards the honeysuckle and bent to smell it. He was towelling his hair with his T-shirt; I could see the whiteness of the cloth against the dark garden. Then he pulled it over his head. I shrunk back further into the room, but he wasn’t looking in the direction of the house. I saw him edge towards the water and stare beyond it. Something had obviously caught his attention for he stood perfectly still, looking in the direction of the woods. Almost instantly I heard the nightjar again. An owl flew past and my swimmer jumped. I could have told him the garden was full of nightlife and that over by the trees there were a family of owls, but I did not make a sound.

He turned his head as if he had read my thoughts, but he was still looking in the wrong direction. Then, bending down, he did up first one shoe and then the other with casual indifference and a second later he vanished from view, going presumably around the side of the house. I continued to stare out of the window, unable to move, straining my ears. There was a slight pause and unmistakably, I heard a door open. Could any burglar be this reckless? I hesitated. Damn, I thought, belatedly, the back door was unlocked, again. What if I went downstairs and confronted him? He had looked quite young. Not that it mattered if he was carrying a knife. But would you swim first, before you committed a crime? By now I had moved to the landing and I heard once again an unmistakable creaking of floorboards. There followed another silence. I waited. My study door was shut. I opened it a fraction of an inch, on the verge of going out when I heard a soft step. I was struck with paralysis. He was definitely in the house. I shivered. Something thrilling and fearful passed over me. Holding the empty bottle of wine in my hand I crept downstairs at the same moment as the outside light came on. Instantly I hurried down the stairs and into the kitchen just as the timer plunged the garden back into darkness. In a flash I had switched on the kitchen light. I gasped, there was no one there.

All this had taken only a few minutes, but any thoughts of sleep had vanished. Locking the back door, I checked the windows. Then I filled the kettle and was about to put some tea into the pot when I noticed the lid of the bread bin was slightly open. I closed it, changed my mind and opening it again peered in. It was empty. There had been a freshly baked loaf inside. I knew this because I had baked it myself only this morning.

2

TUESDAY, AUGUST 23RD. ON THE MORNING that Jack and Miranda left for the Broads I awoke to them having breakfast noisily in the garden. I was exhausted. They had now been here for three days. Last night I had again waited up until midnight hoping to catch sight of the swimmer, but the garden had remained undisturbed. Then, just as I dozed off, the outside light came on and woke me. It was him! But by the time I crept downstairs he had vanished. There were damp marks on the kitchen floor.

‘There’s no bread,’ Jack informed me, his mouth full of muesli.

Miranda handed me a cup of tea.

‘You look tired,’ she said.

‘Of course she is!’ my brother said, waving an empty cup in her face. ‘Workaholics usually are!’

He laughed a braying laugh and I wondered how Miranda could bear living with him.

‘More tea, more tea!’ he shouted childishly. Obviously he was in a good mood. I looked at him over the rim of my mug. Ant always maintained that Jack had a touch of Asperger’s Syndrome. It was the only way he could explain my brother’s sudden mood swings. Eric thought otherwise. Jack, he had once said, was disturbed for other reasons. Sunlight glinted through the trees. We had not had such an astonishing summer as this for years and it was going to be another hot day.

‘You need a wash, Miranda,’ Jack said. ‘You’re sweating, already.’

And he laughed.

‘I’ve got seven mosquito bites,’ Sophie complained.

‘Aunty Ria, have you seen how weird the spiders are in this house?’ Zach asked. ‘They’re enormous, like in the Caribbean!’

‘That’s global warming for you,’ Jack said.

He was eating and drinking with an odd, manic speed. Miranda seemed not to notice.

‘I read somewhere that the insects in Britain will become more like Mediterranean ones as the place hots up.’

‘Ugh, how will they get here? By swimming the channel?’

‘No, Sophie, I think they’ll just evolve differently. Like your Aunty Ria has!’

‘Mum!’ wailed Sophie. ‘I hate spiders.’

Go, I thought. Just go. We’ll never get on.

‘Stop winding her up, Jack,’ Miranda said. ‘There was some bacon in the fridge, Ria. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve used it.’

I nodded, not wanting the subject of bread to be brought up again.

‘Of course, help yourself.’

In all, my swimmer had appeared three times. Last night the images of him had played themselves over and over again. His visits were a puzzle, I was becoming mildly obsessed by them. Perhaps, I thought, I ought to write a poem about the mysterious way in which he visited and then vanished. I yawned. I had meant to wake at six, begin working, but not having managed this all I wanted to do now was sit in the sun. Miranda was probably right and I needed a holiday. The coffee was lukewarm. Could it be, I frowned, returning to my earlier train of thought, that I had imagined some of it? The facts were few. At some point in the night the outside light had come on and the bread was missing. That was all. I had no proof the swimmer had taken it. I had no proof that he had come into the house, even. I glanced at Jack, but he was concentrating on the map spread out in front of him. My baby brother has a round, slightly chubby face. Curiously unlined. Empty, Eric always said. Like a man who could not comprehend what was lost. I yawned, again, distracted. Hmm, I thought, but had I actually seen the swimmer?

Miranda was looking at me, quizzically.

‘You’re out of it, aren’t you!’ she said. ‘Would you like me to do the shopping before we go?’

‘Oh no, I shall go into town a bit later on.’

Tonight I would try a small experiment.

‘We could go through Bury,’ Jack was saying. ‘On the A14, that’s probably the quickest way.’

‘Are you sure you won’t come with us, Ria?’ Miranda asked.

I felt a certain desperation on her part. Fleetingly, I was sorry for her. Neither of us understood the preoccupations of the other.

‘My sister lives in a time warp,’ Jack declared, to no one in particular.

I ignored him. There was an electronic beeping and he started searching his pockets wildly. Miranda watched, expressionless. When he finally located his phone it had stopped. The air was filled with transparent light.

‘Damn,’ he said.

I laughed. He was frantically searching through his numbers.

‘Damn!’ he said, once more.

In his pixelated, globally driven life every eventuality depended on electronic devices. His iPhone, his iPod, his chargers, his cables; modern-day worry beads, all of them. Poor Jack. Was this the only way to survive what had happened to us as children? So no, I didn’t want to spend a few days with them on a river.

‘What time are you leaving?’ I asked, instead.

‘We have to pick the boat up by four at the latest, and we’ve got to find moorings before dark…so let’s say we leave around eleven?’

I would go shopping, I decided. A delicious sense of freedom brought on by their imminent departure spread over me. And I would buy bread.

By midday the house was mine again. The silence settled slowly like dust on the sunlit surface of the furniture. I tidied the detritus of the last few days in a desultory, half-hearted way, and went out. Orford is much smaller than Aldeburgh, a village really, with one main street. In reality it is an island, surrounded by marshland and the estuary running into the sea. For the past two years the heavy rains have brought extensive flooding to the area and house prices were going into a decline. Those who could had begun to move away. Others, like me, who chose to live close to the river, kept a supply of sandbags at the ready for the next deluge. As Orford has no tourist attractions it seldom gets crowded even at the height of summer. The smart London visitors come for the festivals and are interested only in Aldeburgh. They hardly ever venture as far as us. Which suits the xenophobic residents of Orford perfectly.

I went to the fishmonger’s and picked up the fresh crab I had ordered. The greengrocer was selling samphire and watercress, so I bought some. Next I went to the bakery. I bought a loaf of bread, hesitated for only a moment and bought some scones.

‘Your family’s arrived, I see,’ Eileen said.

I nodded.

‘How’s the politics?’ she asked.

I frowned. Jack’s semi-right-wing political party was of no interest to me. Eileen’s face was studiedly blank.

‘He thinks we should stop campaigning against the developers building the marina.’

If the marina and the proposed block of flats alongside the riverbank were built, apart from the flood risk they would face, the lanes in Orford would become completely clogged with cars.

‘Oh, does he!’ I said.

So Jack was talking to the locals now, was he? Poking his nose into things that were nothing to do with him.

‘Don’t worry. The builders won’t get permission,’ I said.

I didn’t tell Eileen, but I had written a piece for the local newspaper on the subject. So far, it didn’t look as though they would run it. The circus and the assault that had followed used up all available column inches.

Eileen packed up my scones. She nodded a little grimly, I thought. Then she slipped a pot of cream into the bag. I knew she would talk about me later. Everyone in Orford is like that. The landscape collects conversations as effectively as a bucket. I have known most of the people here since I was a child. They all know what happened to us. They know about our fight over the ownership of the house, and that I had come back to bury my secrets. I knew there were those who thought of me as the woman who had everything; there were others who felt sorry for me, but in either case I no longer encouraged friendship. In my experience, those who extended the hand of friendliness usually gave out private information at the drop of a hat and I trusted no one.

‘The children have grown a lot,’ she ventured, and I agreed, they had.

It was one o’clock. I bought some apples and a small pork pie and drove across the bridge to the other side of the riverbank in the direction of Orford Ness. When I was a teenager I used to sit for hours staring at this shingle desert of military ruin. The horizon remains the same through one hundred and eighty degrees. I used to love its other-worldliness. From here it is possible to catch a glimpse of Eel House as a faint smudge in the distance. Over time, the National Trust volunteers had grown used to seeing me sitting on the edge of its desert-like landscape, lost in thought.

The sun had become very hot while I walked and, because of the lack of rain, the marshland had taken on a brittle aspect. The smell of rotting vegetation in the dykes mingled with a drift of sea-air. All around me the reeds gave off a dry, hollow sound. By now I was lightheaded with hunger and something else. There was a strange suppressed anticipation in the air. At the edge of the marshes, there was a small hollow in the ground where I always sat and slipping into it now I ate my lunch. Silence stretched in every direction across the cloudless East Anglian sky. I watched a couple of waders fishing in the stagnant pools that had spread out from the river. Overhead a few gulls sailed confidently on the air. A fly buzzed in my ear and I could hear the faint sounds of crickets. Slowly, hardly aware of what I was doing, I closed my eyes.

I must have been asleep for ages, for when I woke the sun had moved lower in the sky. My face felt burnt and I suddenly remembered the food in the hot boot of the car. It was three o’clock. Hastily I retraced my steps and drove back. I was beginning to feel slightly sick and hoped I had not got sunstroke. At home I made myself a large mug of tea. Then I went into my study and worked with a solid concentration and an enormous sense of relief. For two years I had been working on a collection of poems. Working and re-working, trying to find the clear stanza that stands for a lorry-load of elaborate prose. The collection was about water and the way memory travels through it. I had wanted a high, pure sound, an elegiac note, of life poised between two states. My past and all it represented was what interested me most, but I had been stuck for months and the collection had got nowhere. This afternoon, as I rewrote some of the clumsier passages, a sense of calm began to break over me. I worked solidly for nearly three hours. When I finished, my headache had gone and it was seven o’clock. Going downstairs I made a salad. At seven thirty Miranda rang. They had arrived to find the boat was as enormous as a double-decker bus.

‘Jack can hardly steer it,’ she laughed. ‘And he’s in a terrible mood, but the kids are pleased because they each have their own bathroom!’

‘How large is it?’ I asked.

‘Well, the only boat available was one that sleeps twelve. So what could we do, having got here!’

‘We’ve only just managed to find a mooring,’ Jack said, taking the phone off her. ‘Miranda is hopeless. What…shut up, Zach, I’m speaking.’

His voice broke up slightly.

‘I can’t hear you,’ I shouted, wanting to laugh with relief that he was so far away.

‘…but unfortunately it’s on the furthest bank with no access to the towpath. So we can’t get off and go to any of the restaurants on the other side. If Eel House wasn’t so uninhabitable we wouldn’t have had to come to this bloody place.’

Suddenly I lost it.

‘What d’you mean, Jack? You didn’t have to come, you know what it’s like here. Why didn’t you have a holiday somewhere else, instead?’

‘Fine,’ Jack said, very clearly. ‘We won’t bother, next year.’

‘Stop it, you two,’ Miranda shouted. ‘We’ve frozen chips, beef burgers, Coke and a bottle of whisky. We could have some fun, if we tried, you know?’

Outside, a spectacular sunset was unfolding and I felt the satisfied tiredness of having done a good day’s work. Miranda’s voice came over faintly.

‘We’ve got the boat for an extra week, if we want it.’

I heard Jack say something in the background. Something in me snapped. I was fed up with his rudeness. He talked to me in the same way my mother used to.

They rang off, with Miranda still trying to smooth things over, and I went back to preparing my supper. In the years since my mother’s death I had become a different kind of person. There had been a time when my mother’s constant stream of boyfriends invading my privacy, and Jack’s pushiness, would have reduced me to a state of desperation. I had wanted a life of my own, then, away from them both. I had wanted someone to share things with, as only my father had done. Now that was all over. I no longer had anything to share and I was relieved to discover that the desire for belonging had finally gone.

The last rays of the sun caught the windowpanes as I cooked my pasta and dressed it lightly with olive oil. A sentence was threading through my head. It ran like music, rising and falling. Suddenly I needed to write it down. Covering the pasta, I quickly went upstairs and sat at my desk. In the last-nights-of-summer darkness that arrived more swiftly each evening, hardly daring to breathe lest I lose it, I sat absorbed for another two hours. The effortless ease with which I worked told me that this poem was going to be perfect, and as I wrote I smelt the drift of roses coming in through the window. A blackbird sang and sang again, the sun set and night descended while I remained absorbed.

When I had finished the rough draft I put on a CD. Then, sitting by the window, listening to Verdi, I fell asleep for the second time that day. I had completely forgotten about my swimmer of course and my plan to catch him in the act of stealing. Once again it was after midnight when I woke. The Verdi had long finished. The garden was completely silent, there was no moon tonight as I opened the window and breathed in the scent of newly opened jasmine flowers. The river glinted now and then. The starless sky made it impossible to distinguish water from garden. Nothing moved, there was no sound. I felt a small nudge of disappointment as the church clock struck one. The house next door was closed. Either the renters were asleep or they were out again. Well, that was that, I thought ruefully, aware of some disappointment. It was a simple enough explanation. A passing youth had decided to cool off by swimming upstream and then had discovered the house. Perhaps he had been on his way back from the pub, perhaps someone had even dared him, so that, in a moment of bravado, he had wandered in and stolen a loaf of bread. As I was the subject of some curiosity in Orford, what could I expect? Lucky he didn’t take anything valuable, I thought, pulling a face. Better lock the back door. The bare skeleton of the poem still glowed inside me. At least the swimmer’s appearance had given me the kick-start I needed. Reaching for the catch, I was about to close the window when I froze in my tracks. Someone was playing the piano downstairs with the soft pedal down.

The back of my neck went cold. I stood confused, staring into the darkness. Jack, the only person I knew who could play the piano, was miles away, moored up on the Broads. And Jack didn’t play jazz. The music went on and on, faint and familiar, jauntily inviting me to move in time to it. There was a small delicious run of notes and then it came to an abrupt end. I heard the lid come down, followed by footsteps going out into the hall. The kitchen door opened and shut gently. Moments later the outside light came on. Instantly I was galvanised and rushed downstairs. But when I reached the back door the garden was in darkness once more. I switched on the light. The kitchen was exactly as I left it, the pasta was still covered, the bread was in the bin and the forgotten bag of scones stood untouched on the work surface. Exasperated I went into the sitting room but the piano remained as it always had and it was then, at that moment, staring at the music on the stand, that I remembered there had been a piece of sheet music on the floor two days before. Without another thought I rushed to the front door and opened it, going swiftly around to the back of the garden. All was silent. No footprints on the grass, no rose petals fallen off the bushes, nothing had been disturbed. I felt sure the swimmer had not used the river path tonight. I waited, uncertain. Suddenly, realising how vulnerable I was, and with my fearlessness now tinged with a vague dissatisfaction, I went indoors. The rest of the night stretched ahead of me. I knew I would not sleep so, making a pot of tea, I sat down to make a plan.

My plans were all in vain. The following evening there was a thunder-storm of spectacular proportions. I suppose it had been building up to this with all the heat. Lightning flashed and rain fell heavily. It went on for hours. Miranda rang during the worst of it.

‘Can you hear it?’ I asked.

‘Sort of. It’s lovely here. We’ve had a busy day. Zach has got the hang of steering and won’t let anyone take a turn! So he and Jack argue all the time.’

She sounded a little drunk.

‘Did you manage to buy food?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said vaguely.

I could hear her sipping her wine.

She rang off and I wandered restlessly around the house, unable to settle to any work. I found myself going towards the piano and staring at the closed lid.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ I muttered.

Maybe I had overworked myself last night. The draft of the poem I had written in an alcoholic haze wasn’t quite right yet. What had seemed luminous and neat in the darkness was a little clumsy. I would have to work on it much more. Perfection did not come without pain, but I wasn’t in the mood tonight.

After about an hour the rain began to ease off and the air cooled slightly. I shivered and threw on a cardigan. It was not the weather for swimming. Pouring myself a generous glass of wine I went back up to my study where force of habit made me drift towards the window. I was still struggling with an idea. This long overdue collection of poems was turning out to be about the absence of parental love. I stared towards the dark point where the water flowed. Bitterness had stopped me from writing objectively, I thought. Then, perhaps because of the peculiar mood I was in, for the first time in many years I began to go over what had happened in that single most significant moment of my life.

I was ten years old and the school summer holidays had arrived. My father was due to have a small operation. Six-year-old Jack and I were sent to Eel House. This very room had been my bedroom, then. In those days, when the farm was at the height of its productivity, an extra pair of hands at harvest was always welcome. We kissed our parents goodbye. My father was going to the hospital the following morning and with us away my mother would be free to nurse him back to health. I remember them standing on the step waving.

‘Look after Jack,’ my mother called, anxious as always about her darling son.

‘Don’t forget to write, Ria,’ my father said, his smile going all the way up to his eyes.

He had the bluest of eyes, like a shimmer of cornflowers. The sunlight on them seemed to sharpen their colour. I have inherited their brightness. Jack has brown eyes like my mother. At Saxmundham station, Uncle Clifford was there to meet us. He was older than Dad, more serious, quieter. Both Jack and I were very fond of him.

All through that long holiday my brother and I played by the river and helped out in the fields. I wrote home twice but was told there was a postal strike so no letter came back. My mother rang several times, but on each occasion we were either out playing or at Eric’s farm for supper. Several times during those weeks he took us out in his boat to set the eel-traps and once or twice, very early in the morning before the sun was up, we went to check the baskets.

There came a night, one that remains very clearly in my memory, when for some unknown reason my uncle and aunt insisted we stay over with Eric and his wife Peggy. They seemed upset. Eric had looked a little subdued too. We could go with him on another early jaunt upriver, he said. Jack was excited but I remember I didn’t want to go, and the next morning I caught a glimpse of our uncle and aunt driving off in the direction of town.

‘Where are they going?’ I asked, puzzled, but Eric had his face turned away and didn’t hear me.

The weather continued to hold, the land grew rosy and then golden in the heat. Jack and I lost our pasty look and turned a gentle nutbrown. We had taken to running around in our bare feet and even Aunt Elsa didn’t try to stop us. Preoccupied with worries of their own, both our uncle and aunt left us to our own devices. From time to time, in the weeks that followed, as we loitered in the overgrown country lanes in search of treasures, or took our kites to the beach, I wondered vaguely what was the matter with them, but then forgot about it. Suddenly one morning my aunt woke me with a grim look on her face.