I have very little recollection of what happened next, and believe I must in fact have fainted as I fell. I tumbled down what seemed to be a very long way, and then met with something hard which I dimly understood to be the bottom of the pool. I could only have stayed there a few seconds, but the interlude had the framework of a dream, in which everything real is replaced by an entire and quite illusory memory designed to support the thing experienced. It seemed to me, in other words, that I had always lain at the bottom of the pooclass="underline" its profound silence was the sound of myself, its lovely columns of watered sunlight utterly familiar. On and on I lay; until suddenly I was rushing upwards, and was jerked forcefully from the water by something clamped painfully around the tops of my arms. I could hear a woman’s voice saying ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’ over and over; but again, in this dream-state, it seemed to me that she had always been saying that.
At the sound of the woman’s voice, in any case, something peculiar happened. I was in one way quite aware of it, and yet at the same time it was remote and beyond my control. It was as if I were on a train, watching the landscape fly past; and just as the appearance of houses and telegraph poles might have told me that I was about to arrive at my station, so the woman’s voice seemed to signal that I was going to wake up. But although the sound itself was clear, the words immediately sent my train lurching off course; so that suddenly I found myself speeding far away from where I wanted to go, on and on with everything around me a blur, until gradually, after some considerable time, it began to slow down. I felt the heat pulsing on my head and the pressure of something hard pushing against my stomach. Far away I could hear the sound of traffic, its faint cries rising discordantly from the steady buzz. Someone was saying ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’; but it was a man’s voice this time, which for a while seemed to have nothing to do with me. Presently I realized that it was Edward’s voice, and he kept saying it over and over again; so many times, really, that eventually I wanted to tell him just to be quiet and go away. It was impossible for me to do this, however. My physical predicament would not allow for it. I appeared to be upside-down, and even though I was too frightened to open my eyes my gradual recollection of events, as well as the sound of traffic from far, far below, told me that I was very high up and could fall at any moment.
I remembered that I had been standing on the balcony of our hotel room, looking down at the busy street several storeys below. In my mind I appeared to be standing there again. The noise filled my head like the sound of an argument. The sun hammered on my shoulders. Edward wasn’t there. I remembered then that he had gone out on some forgotten business, but my thoughts were dark with the threat of his return. This was my honeymoon, perhaps the third or fourth day of it, and the fact of my marriage still clung to me like an ugly, ill-fitting suit. I had woken each morning with the hope that it would have softened, loosened, accommodated me; but its tight, itchy grip, the shame of it, was unrelenting. I knew myself to be in the wrong place as surely as if I were looking at it on a map; and my head was filled only with panicked thoughts of escape and extrication, which as yet had found no outlet. It was with these thoughts that I leaned over the iron railing of the balcony. The deep, foreign chasm with its indifferent swarm of traffic opened itself to me with the promise of my own insignificance. I realized that there was nowhere else I wanted to be. It wasn’t that I liked it here; merely that at the invitation of this cruel vista I had searched, frenzied, for a sense of my own belonging, for my home, for somewhere I might be wanted more, and found nothing. There was no secret comfort, no lodestar, in my empty heart. I was merely lodged at the inconvenient junction — this small, crumbling balcony — between a past I had been glad to leave and a future whose alien prospect seemed to provide the proof that I would never visit it. It was at this moment, in my high, hot imprisonment, that I wanted to fly; that I knew it, indeed, to be my only course. And it was at this moment that I understood, as if I had conducted a scientific experiment, that the weight of my life would not be enough to stop me.
In the event, the iron railing of the balcony saved what I had become convinced I did not want; for as I stood there, the shock of my discovery combined with the strong sunlight to bring about a sudden giddiness and I appeared briefly to faint. When I came to, with the sound of Edward’s monotonous exclamation in my ears, I was collapsed in a kind of V over the balustrade, which, had it given way, would certainly have resulted in my death.
How long this unfortunate recollection endured I could not say. After I had gone through it in my mind, I was awash with strong emotions, which sluiced over me in inarticulate waves. Everything became very confused; but presently I began to come to my senses there in the garden of Franchise Farm. My eyes were closed, but I felt the warm, prickly grass beneath my back and legs and realized that I was lying down.
‘She’s still unconscious,’ said a man’s voice. ‘I think she’ll be all right, though.’
I opened my eyes a crack. The man was crouched beside me. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and was looking away so that I couldn’t see his face.
‘Are you sure we shouldn’t call an ambulance?’ said the woman, whom I couldn’t see without moving my head. She sounded young and was well-spoken.
‘Maybe. I don’t know. She vomited a lot of water, which is the main thing.’
I snapped my eyes shut again, fully alert now.
‘Perhaps she banged her head.’
‘Might have. Doesn’t look like it. I’m sure she’ll wake up in a minute.’
‘God, where on earth is Daddy?’ cried the woman impatiently. ‘He’s never around when you need him! I don’t even know who she is or anything.’
‘She’s probably his mistress,’ said the man with a laugh. ‘Running around the place in her knickers.’
I felt a blush begin to suffuse my cheeks. Now I dared not open my eyes, and began wondering how long I could reasonably prolong my coma.
‘Mark!’ said the woman reproachfully. I could hear a smile in her voice. ‘Thank God we were here to pull her out, though. A minute later and she’d have drowned.’
‘She was pretty lucky.’
The woman giggled suddenly. ‘She does look terribly odd. Look, I’m just going to run back over to the house and make sure he hasn’t slipped in the front way.’
‘OK.’
There was silence. The man cleared his throat once or twice beside me. I was beginning to feel an uncontrollable desire to move. The sun was burning my face.
‘Mark!’ shouted the woman just then, from a distance. ‘Look at this!’
‘Jesus!’ he said after a pause. ‘That explains that, then. She must have been pissed. No wonder she’s out cold.’
‘I’ve just realized,’ said the woman, closer now. ‘She must be Martin’s au pair. What a scandal! Mummy’ll be furious.’
I opened my eyes. The woman — girl, really — was standing above me to my left. She wore a short red dress with no sleeves.
‘Oh look!’ she said, meeting my eyes, ‘She’s waking up! Hel-lo.’ She knelt down beside me, suddenly solicitous, and put her hand on my arm. ‘How are you feeling? You nearly drowned, you know.’
I couldn’t take my eyes from her face. She was around my own age and quite beautiful, dark and slender with a mass of black ringlets. Her expression was tender. Around her neck was a delicate gold chain. I don’t think I have ever hated anyone in my life as much as I hated this girl in that moment.