I need to teach Flora that there is nothing to be scared of, that she can do anything she wants, be anyone she wants to be.
After I finished my previous letter, I thought about what had happened on the beach. At first I was angry that you weren’t there to help me. You brought me to this place, gave me children, and left; everything that’s ever happened to me in my adult life is because of you, and now you expect me to be able to manage on my own, like a fledgling deserted before being taught how to fly. And then it occurred to me that I survived that incident on the beach by myself; I didn’t need you or anyone else to rescue me. I did it on my own.
After my conversation with Jonathan in front of the Agglestone, I decided I would stay. No, perhaps it was more that I made no decision. Leaving was too momentous, too frightening, something I only thought about in the abstract. And while I stored our time in Italy away and tried to forget it, my third pregnancy was something I was surprised to find I welcomed. It wasn’t only that I stopped being sick earlier and felt healthy but also that it made me strong, invincible. I began to join in with your enthusiasm and the list of names which you taped to the fridge door (Herman, Leo, Ford, Günter). I, too, was certain it was a boy.
Jonathan called me after you’d told him.
“You’re still there then?” he said.
“I feel fantastic.”
“Do you want me to come down?”
“It would be good to see you, but you don’t have to come on my account.”
“Is Gil listening?”
“No, I mean it. There’s something about this baby, a connection. He’s not something alien like the others. He’s part of me, I’m part of him. Perhaps I was meant to do this mother thing after all, it’s just taken me a bit longer than everyone else.”
“If anything changes . . .” Jonathan said.
“It won’t.”
“. . . I’m just at the end of the phone.”
One morning in July I asked Martin if I could borrow his lawn mower. We leaned on the gate to the Swimming Pavilion and looked at the grass—coarse and knee-high. Martin loaned me his scythe, sharpened it with a whetstone, and in the gap between the pub’s lunchtime closing and the evening’s opening, he showed me how to use it. I swept the blade before me, only managing two or three jagged arcs before the muscles in my shoulders complained. (Different ones, it seemed, from those I used for swimming.) I cut the grass while Nan was sleeping, and it took me a week to shave it short enough to be able to mow it. After that I dug a flower bed below the veranda, a laborious job through the compacted earth. Milkwood Stables heard about my plans and dropped off a pile of manure. Every day I worked in my wide straw hat, long trousers, and one of your old shirts. Sometimes Martin would lean on the gate to watch and shake his head, telling me what I needed was a rowan and sea buckthorn windbreak and how the flowers Mrs. Allen’s sister had sent would never survive in our salty air. As the baby grew inside me, so did the garden.
When I think back on those months of swelling and happiness, my recollection is that I was alone in the Swimming Pavilion, or, at least, it was just me, Nan, and the garden. But you were there writing, because that summer you submitted your third novel. And it was rejected.
We were living off the tiny trickle of twice-yearly royalties from your first two books and the money your mother had left in trust for you; it wasn’t enough. Margarine sandwiches for supper, tea leaves reused pot after pot, and hiding from the milkman when he came knocking. Martin gave you a job behind the bar but asked you not to return for a third shift after you drank more than you poured for the customers. You worked for a few weeks at the stables but the horses scared you. You lasted six months or so at the dairy, but getting up early was never going to work for long. (Funny, after you’d teased Jonathan about milking those cows in Ireland.)
The garden and the swimming were my release from the worries about money and the relentless grind of motherhood. The water was good for what was happening inside me. Without you knowing, I crept out of the house and down to the sea in the dark, my feet finding their way around the rocks at the top of the beach. I hid the damp towel from you, washed the sand from my hair and the salt from my lips before you kissed me. I was gentle with the baby, I didn’t swim hard or far, we were never in danger. There was something magical about those mornings, imagining the child suspended in its fluid while I was suspended in mine, both of us in our natural states.
I swam until the cold weather came, when instead of going in the water, I went to stare at the sea—flat and grey, or brilliant as the sun rose, or, best of all, with the wind raging and the water throwing itself at the rocks.