Swimming Pool Sunday (6 page)

He was right, Katie now thought, leaning back and admiring her shiny starfish-decorated swimming-suit. She wanted to stay in here all day, and all night; for the rest of her life, maybe. She lay her head lazily against the surface of the water and felt cool blue wavelets lap into her ears.

Then, with a start, she realized she’d stopped counting Amelia’s handstand. ‘Eight thousand, nine thousand, ten thousand,’ she said quickly, watching Amelia’s legs. The legs faltered and fell back into the water.

‘How many?’ Amelia’s wet face appeared in front of her.

‘Ten thousand.’ Amelia frowned.

‘Is that all?’

‘My go,’ said Katie quickly. She plunged down, clutching her nose, feeling for the bottom of the pool with one outstretched hand. But balancing on a single palm wasn’t easy, and after only a few seconds she collapsed back into the water.

‘Only three thousand,’ said Amelia. ‘You should do it with two hands.’

‘But it hurts my
nose,
’ wailed Katie. ‘All the water goes up it if I don’t hold it.’

‘Can you open your eyes underwater yet?’

‘Of course I can.’ Katie was scornful.

‘OK then, let’s dive for coins. We’ll go and get them off Mummy.’

Louise was lying on her back, enjoying the sensation of the sun burning into her face. She had deliberately chosen a spot on the grass slightly apart from the group of chatting women which she would normally have joined. Now, above the sounds of splashes and shrieks from the pool, she could hear Sylvia Seddon-Wilson beginning on some long, no doubt exaggerated, and no doubt highly amusing anecdote. But Louise didn’t feel like chatting, or even listening. She felt like being on her own and thinking.

If she lifted her head very slightly and swivelled her eyes to the right, she could see Barnaby, ensconced in a deck-chair next to Hugh Delaney. In spite of herself, she felt a pang of pity for him as she watched him. He should have known better than to expect Katie to last even a short car journey without vociferous complaint, Louise thought. If he’d just ignored her, and managed to get to wherever the fishing was, Katie would soon have forgotten her woes and they would probably have had a lovely day.

As it was, he’d arrived twenty minutes ago, a
disconsolate miserable sight, made even more so as Katie sprang free of his grasp, yelling, ‘Mummy! We’re here! We came swimming, after all!’ Everyone had looked up; everyone had taken in the situation at a glance; eyes had swivelled from Barnaby to Louise and back to Barnaby.

Barnaby had come over and explained, in a few sentences, what had gone wrong. Louise had mustered a sympathetic word or two of reply. And then, as the surrounding eyes watched, Barnaby had made his way over to the other side of the swimming-pool where Hugh – stalwart Hugh – had already pulled over a chair in preparation for him. The entertainment for the village was almost complete, thought Louise bitterly. Now all that was needed for their delectation was an appearance by Cassian, village anti-Christ.

Louise knew the village’s opinion of Cassian. She knew the village’s version of events. No-one had asked; everyone had assumed. They had assumed that when Louise popped over to Cassian’s cottage and ended up spending the evening there, something suspicious must be going on. They had assumed that when Barnaby arrived at The George, silent and angry and without Louise, he had found some sort of confirming evidence. No-one – and here Louise wriggled angrily on her towel – no-one had noticed that the problems between her and Barnaby stretched way back before Cassian had arrived in the village.

Louise and Barnaby had married soon after she left university. The wedding was a large glittering affair – only right for the only daughter of a man who, until recently, had been the local MP and, at one time, a cabinet minister. Louise Page – as she was then – had been a well-known figure on the local political campaign circuit. She had started to help out her father while she was at school and became even more involved after her mother died. When an election fell
during her first year at university, she motored over from Bristol every weekend to put up posters and go from house to house with her clipboard, blue scarf and cheerful smile.

When she rang Barnaby’s doorbell, she found a group of agricultural college chums watching the football, drinking beer, and unwilling to be disturbed.

‘What does it matter?’ said one of them, offering her a can. Louise stared.

‘What does it
matter?
’ she echoed in disbelief. ‘It matters … it matters …’ Her hands started to whirl helplessly in the air. ‘It affects your whole life! If you don’t vote for the right people …’

‘I’m not going to vote,’ said one of them. ‘Bloody waste of time.’

‘You must vote!’ Louise’s voice sounded through the house like a clarion. ‘You must! My God! You’re young, don’t you care?’

‘I’m going to vote.’ Barnaby’s voice came from the back of the room. Louise turned and looked at him. He’s huge, was her first thought. He sat on a smallish wooden chair that looked as though it might break under his weight, and cupped a can of beer in a huge paw of a hand. But his voice was gentle and Louise smiled at him.

‘Good,’ she said.

‘Not for your lot, though,’ said Barnaby, gesturing to her rosette. ‘I’m voting Green.’ He took a swig of beer while his friends exchanged derisive glances.

‘Green?’

‘You’re a bloody hippy, Barn.’

‘Going to join the hunt sabs too?’

Louise ignored them and met his eye.

‘Well, good for you,’ she said. ‘At least you care.’

And that would have been that had Barnaby not come to vote while Louise was on poll-monitoring duty. She smiled as he approached the polling station,
and put her pen next to his name, ready to tick.

‘Well,’ she said, as he got near. ‘I don’t have to ask you who you’re voting for, do I?’

‘Not for you, if that’s what you mean,’ said Barnaby.

‘I didn’t expect you to,’ said Louise. ‘In fact, I would have been disappointed if you had.’ Barnaby looked at her.

‘How long do you have to stand there?’

‘Another couple of hours.’

‘And then?’

‘Home, to wait for the results.’ She flushed slightly. ‘My father’s the Conservative candidate.’

‘John Page, I know.’ Barnaby grinned at Louise’s look of surprise. ‘We’re not all unaware yobs.’ He looked at her clipboard. ‘And is he going to win?’

‘I should think so. It’s closer run than last time, but still …’

‘And then you celebrate madly?’

‘Then we celebrate madly.’

‘And tomorrow?’

Louise shrugged.

‘Hang-over.’ Barnaby grinned.

‘You know, it just so happens, I’ve got a very good cure for hang-overs.’

His cure had been to take her to bed, with a directness that sent Louise, who was accustomed to sensitive thoughtful undergraduates, into slight shock. When they had finished, he went to make her a cup of tea, and she lay in his single bed, clutching the sheet up to her chin as though afraid of attack, shaking slightly, while thoughts, protests and attempts at indignation batted round her mind like butterflies. From his bedroom window was a view of some school playing-fields, and as she lay there, completely silent, a group of rugby players came running onto the field, dressed in bright-red kit. With their big burly legs, they reminded her of Barnaby, and suddenly she began to cry.

‘I thought you’d gone away,’ she wailed, as he came back into the room, and then stopped short, for this was not what she had meant to say at all. But it was too late. Barnaby, who, he later told her, had been pacing the kitchen anxiously, wondering if what he had just committed was an act of love or an act of violence, hastened to her side with a relieved solicitude. His tea was so strong it made Louise shudder, but she said it was lovely, and smiled at him with tears still dancing on her eyelashes, and Barnaby, feeling a sudden unfamiliar surge of tenderness, went straight away and carefully made her another cup, just the same.

Since then they had never really talked very much about politics. Louise’s father stood down at the next election, which was a year before Louise and Barnaby married, and then, a couple of years later, was made a peer.

‘If only we’d
known,
’ Louise would say at regular intervals. ‘We could have been married in the House of Lords.’

‘But then we would have had to wait,’ Barnaby would reply, ‘and I would have had to move to Melbrook on my own.’

Barnaby had accepted a job running a medium-sized estate, ten minutes’ drive from Melbrook, which he started two months after they married. He had been in the same job ever since. Louise had long ago given up suggesting he look for a more senior, more challenging, or more lucrative job.

‘We’re happy here,’ he would say, ‘that’s all that matters.’

And for a long time they were happy. They moved into Larch Tree Cottage, and Louise commuted into Linningford for her job as marketing executive with a small publishing firm. Then she had Amelia and gave up her job, and then she had Katie. She was no longer involved in politics, her father wasn’t an MP any more,
and besides, Melbrook was in a different constituency. Besides which, she no longer felt quite as fervent about it all. For a few years, the minutiae of the children, the school run, village gossip and church fêtes kept her going. I’m lucky, she would tell herself at frequent intervals, I may not have a career, but I have a loving family and a happy life.

It never occurred to her to question why she needed to reaffirm these facts to herself quite so regularly. Nor did she understand why, as the tenth anniversary of her marriage to Barnaby approached, she began to get edgy and irritable; to attack Barnaby with unreasonable complaints and heap bitter criticisms on the village, her life, his job, Britain. It didn’t help that her brother had recently moved with his family to a reportedly exciting new life in New York; nor did it help that Barnaby couldn’t begin to understand or, it seemed, sympathize.

‘But you grew up in the country!’ he once shouted, when her impatience with Melbrook had spilled over into a suppertime diatribe.

‘I know!’ she retorted angrily. ‘But it was different! It was exciting! We had important people to stay, and we had interesting discussions, and we had a flat in London, and we went to parties at the House of Commons, and …’ she broke off, feeling foolish. ‘You just don’t understand,’ she finished feebly.

‘I do understand,’ said Barnaby bitterly. ‘You wish you’d married someone intelligent and important and glamorous. Not a country bumpkin like me.’

‘No!’ exclaimed Louise, a little too late. ‘No, don’t be silly.’

And then Cassian Brown had moved into the village. Smooth and sophisticated and intelligent and charming. Barnaby had distrusted him on first sight. But Louise had been enchanted when, at a welcoming drinks party at the vicarage, Cassian revealed, first that he was interested in politics, and then that Lord Page
had always been a particular hero of his.

Cassian was a young lawyer with the biggest law firm in Linningford, a huge prestigious concern with offices in London and all over the world. He had been seconded to the Linningford office for two years to run the commercial litigation department, and had, he said charmingly to Frances Mold, decided to take the cottage in Melbrook as soon as he saw its exquisite view of the church. He smiled at Frances, revealing perfect white teeth against tanned, not quite English-looking skin. Frances said faintly, ‘How nice,’ and Barnaby nudged Louise. ‘What a creep,’ he whispered in her ear.

But Louise didn’t think he was a creep. On the way home from the drinks party she’d been full of exhilarated chatter.

‘He actually remembered that speech of Daddy’s,’ she said, striding ahead into the darkness. ‘That one about housing.’

‘It’s a famous speech,’ said Barnaby brusquely. But Louise wasn’t listening; her thoughts had moved on.

‘His grandparents were Italian,’ she said. ‘Did you know that?’

‘Whose grandparents?’ said Barnaby, feeling a deliberate angry need to misunderstand.

‘Cassian’s, of course,’ said Louise. Her voice sounded, to Barnaby, light and happy. ‘Bruni, they were called, but they changed it to Brown when they came to England. It’s a shame, don’t you think? He went to Oxford,’ she added irrelevantly, ‘like Daddy.’

Barnaby couldn’t bear it any more.

‘Do we have to keep talking about this chap?’ His voice thundered through the dark street. Louise turned back, unsure how to react.

‘Well …’ she began, in hesitant mollifying tones. But as she marshalled her thoughts, her initial instinctive desire to pacify was taken over by indignation. ‘Well!’ she repeated. ‘So now I’m not allowed to talk to
anybody, is that it? One interesting person comes to live in Melbrook and we’re not allowed to talk about him. Well, fine. What shall we talk about? Oh, I know, the lambing. We haven’t talked about that for at least an hour.’

Her voice held an unfamiliar sarcasm, and Barnaby stared at her through the darkness for a few moments, unable to read her expression. Then he shrugged and walked on.

‘What?’ demanded Louise, grabbing him as he went past. ‘What? Aren’t you going to
say
anything? Talk to me!’

Barnaby paused and looked at her. Then he said, ‘I haven’t got anything to say,’ and strode on ahead.

Maybe, thought Louise now, turning over onto her front and resting her sunbaked cheeks on her hands, maybe if Barnaby had talked to her a bit more, instead of listening to all those silly rumours; maybe if he’d trusted her a bit more, then they wouldn’t have had all those awful rows. With a painful jolt, she remembered the last one they’d had. She’d been pink and outraged; he’d been obstinately determined. He’d actually told her,
commanded
her, to stop seeing Cassian. She’d shrieked back, in frustrated anger, that she was going to see whoever she wanted, whenever she wanted, and if he didn’t like it he could bloody well move out.

She still wasn’t sure where those last words had come from, but once they had burst out into the air, there was no taking them back. Barnaby had gazed at her, a look of disbelief on his face, and the air had seemed to resonate with shock. And Louise had slumped heavily into a chair, wanting to say, sorry, she didn’t mean it, but, somehow, unable to.