The Swimmer. Roma Tearne
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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