— Good night, Mum, Opie said. Don’t stay down too long.
Perhaps this was the way that families managed to stay together. There weren’t any guarantees, anyway, that what came out in tears and recriminations was any more truthful than this evasion. She didn’t even ask Bram, when they were alone in the bedroom, what it had all been about; even though she had seen for herself that the tape around the brickettes wasn’t broken and that Genny hadn’t put any new peat on the fire. He said something about “one of my mother’s moods.” If she accused his family of evasion he might ask her to look straight at him.
* * *
CLARE WOKE on Friday morning very early. The sunlight and the sounds of the birds from outside were thrilling presences in the room, irresistible once you wholly opened yourself to them. Rose had joined them at some time during the night and was asleep face down between them, hot little limbs flung abandonedly as if the bed were all hers, hard small feet kicking and pushing into free space, leaving the adults only a straitened margin that in their sleep they had submissively adapted to. Clare eased herself from under Rose’s embrace and slipped out of bed; then, without forming any articulate plan, she picked up her sandals and a sweater and went downstairs and out the back door into the morning. It seized her — still warm from her bed — like a gulp of ice water, waking her immediately and completely. She took the shortcut across the meadow down to the lakeshore; there was a heavy dew on the long grass and soon her feet were slipping wetly in her sandals, and the hem of her stretch nightshirt was soaked and clinging to her ankles. Arbitrary-looking puffs of milky mist were still lying about here and there on the fields and the water, not blotted up yet by the clear hot day.
There was a wooden dinghy drawn up on the shingle beach that was theirs to use. Clare had been out in it twice with the others and knew more or less how to row. She fetched the oars, which were hidden across the joists of an old boathouse, and pushed the dinghy out into the water, holding her nightshirt up above her knees. For a split second she queried what she was doing, incredulously returning into her normal self and doubting — What if the boat leaks, what if I’m pulled by the current out of the lake down the river toward the mill, what if I get tangled in the weeds, what if there’s something essential the others know that I just don’t know about? — but danger seemed unreal, the unpopulated golden morning felt like a promise of safety, a charm that meant she could do nothing wrong. The dinghy rocked and tipped wildly when she slithered across the side onto her knees in its wet bottom, but it didn’t spill her out; she maneuvered herself up onto the seat and remembered which way to face and pushed away from the shingly shallows with an oar.
She could do this. Buoyant, sweating, panting, a hundred yards from shore, she shipped her oars (Tinsley had taught the children all the nautical terms) and took off her sweater. She closed her eyes and held her face to the sun; on her lids were crimson trees growing upward, twisting into flames. When she opened them she saw that the water around the dinghy was thick with brown weed; because of a trick of the early slanting light she could see deeply in. The water was glassy and luminous between the brown stirring wafting fronds; she was looking into an illuminated drowned forest. In an impulse that was more physical than like a thought, she stripped off her nightshirt too. If anyone was watching from the edge of the lake she was too far off for them to see much; she even imagined there was someone and supplied for her voyeurs the teenage girl and the brown-suited man left over from some Arcadian pastoral coupling the night before. She convinced herself, but quite without any alarm, even with a sense of fitness and mutual appreciation, that she could make out his brown suit and her pale legs against the camouflaging russets of a stretch of bank.
Holding the dinghy with both hands she stepped over the side and into the water. It slipped over her naked body like a glove of cold, clenching her tight in its shock. The weeds touched her — not clingingly or spongily as she’d imagined, but intimately, lightly, like prompts and hints. She swam because there wasn’t anything else to do but move to keep alive; if she had stopped still her lungs might have seized up with cold and forgotten how to draw in air. So she cleaved the glassy water with her slow breaststroke, the sound of her own gasping breaths loud and strange in her ears and the weed ends brushing along her naked breasts and stomach. Birds on the water took flight, she heard the crack and beating of their wings. She’d never swum before without a bathing suit, her body felt unbound and loose and as if it were actually mingling and exchanging substance with the lake. At the same time she was so distinct from the lake, she parted it, and it opened ahead of her in obedience to the strong shapely movements of her limbs.
One part of her mind was already thinking that it would be difficult to get back in the boat, but another was still able to marvel at herself, at the reality of her doing this, this epic and improbable thing, not just imagining it but doing it, in the flesh, in the astonished and jubilant flesh.
* * *
IT WAS DIFFICULT, getting back in the boat. The dinghy had drifted, by the time she turned and swam back to it. She had even whimpered with fear and frustration, clinging on to its side, feeling the strength drain dangerously out of her. And she had hurt herself, scraped a long bleeding weal down her hip, when by a superhuman, grunting, undignified effort she had finally heaved herself aboard, panicking in horror that she might pull the dinghy over on herself. But once she was in the boat and had scrambled into her nightshirt she was all right, although at first her legs and arms trembled too much for her to row. She looked out defiantly for watchers on the bank. They couldn’t have known, at such a distance, how complete her abasement had been, so it didn’t count. She had had her swim. Her swim had been blissful.
She didn’t tell anyone.
Later that afternoon Clare and Opie volunteered to clean the house while the others took the children out. As Opie did the bedrooms upstairs, Clare telephoned David again. She knew she would get him this time, just as she had known for two whole weeks that it was in her power to keep the weather fine. She proposed a date when she could come to London, the soonest date she could manage. She said she would come to his flat.
— Are you on your own, right now? he asked, in an odd low conspiratorial voice.
— Sort of. Bram’s sister is upstairs.
— When you come to the flat, then, he said, I want to fuck you.
She buried her head back among the concealing hot coats hanging in the cloakroom, squeezing her eyes shut. Her hair was scraped back into a plait, her face was sweaty and gritty with dust, her hands smelled of dishcloths and bleach. Her hurt thigh ached.
— I want to fuck you too, she said.
Then she pressed down the metal rests and cut him off.
Now she had truly crossed the bridge to the other side, to the different place. Although nothing was burning. The image was very precise in her mind: there was no burning bridge behind her, only a wide impassable space of twinkling water, twinkling and dancing and silvery; banal, and shallow, even.
A FUNNY THING happened to Marian one Saturday morning when she went around as usual to her father’s flat. It was a lapse, a blink of dark in the bright light of ordinary consciousness, like the lapses her father had sometimes when he blanked out something they’d gone through only ten minutes before.
— I have no idea what you’re talking about, he would throw out at her exasperatedly, his reproach cold and sharp in his still perfect enunciation.