They made a bedraggled procession as they walked up the chine, Richard carrying a wet Gil in his arms.
“He could have drowned,” Nan hissed at Flora. And Flora wondered, for a moment, if that was what he had wanted after all.
Chapter 38
THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 28TH JUNE 1992, 4:45 AM
Gil,
Yesterday the three of us caught the bus into Hadleigh. I thought it’d be fun—we would have fish and chips on the beach and I’d buy us some clothes, even though you’re late again with the money. We went to the shop that calls itself a department store because it sells everything in one room, and Nan and I combed through the racks of clothes. Flora sulked. She didn’t want to be there, wasn’t going to wear anything from that “shitty place,” she was going to catch a “bloody bus to London or anywhere else but here.” I cajoled and reasoned, ignored and bribed, but after five minutes Flora walked out and Nan and I ran after her, just in time to see her turning the corner onto the promenade and disappearing into the amusement arcade. We gave her ten minutes and then I sent Nan in after her.
“She won’t come,” Nan said when she returned.
I went into that jangling, eye-jarring place, which was murky with smoke. Tiny aluminium ashtrays overloaded with cigarette butts shuddered on top of every machine.
I found her at the back of the room. “Flora, we need to go now.”
“Five more minutes,” she said.
“Now.” She walked off, scanning the bottom trays for stray coins. I followed her. “Nan’s waiting. We need to go now.”
“I’m not ready,” she said.
“We’re going, whether you like it or not.”
“OK.” She moved to another machine.
“And you have to come too.”
“Why?” Flora didn’t look at me.
“Because I say so.” My voice was raised.
Our youngest daughter bumped her hip against the glass of Rio Carnival, girls with coconut-shell bras cavorting alongside the sliding plates of two-pence pieces. A cascade of coins dropped into the crevice at the side and disappeared.
“Bugger,” Flora said.
I could see the woman behind the change counter watching us, eyes squinting. “Now, Flora.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“I don’t care what you want. We’re going.”
Then Nan was there. “Mum,” she complained. “I’m hungry.”
“OK, Nan,” I said, surprising myself at the volume, and she backed away from me.
I grabbed Flora’s wrist and yanked her. She became limp and silent under my hand, and I dragged her along, negotiating the blaring machines.
“Mum! Let her go.” Nan was crying, tugging on my arm. The lonely men with their plastic pots of 50p’s and the women with their blonde hair and cigarettes stared. Bad mother, they were thinking. Bad mother. Nan, pleading with me to let her sister go, was thinking, Bad mother.
When we got outside, Flora ran to the steps down to the beach and huddled against the promenade wall as if I’d beaten her. It took Nan half an hour to talk her round so we could catch the bus home, without doing any more shopping or having fish and chips. The girls sat together and I sat alone near the front. And it was while I pressed my forehead up against the bus window, and with the warm smell of dusty upholstery in my nose, that I wondered if my children might be better off without me.
In September 1990 you delivered A Man of Pleasure to your editor and the advance was larger than we could ever have imagined. Previously he’d taken a month to return your phone calls, but now you were in demand for London lunches, deals, and meetings. You phoned to speak to the girls every night you were gone, but I was left explaining to Flora why her father wasn’t here to put her to bed, and to Nan why she no longer had to worry about switching off the lights so I wouldn’t cry when the electricity bill arrived. It took me weeks to get used to the idea that I didn’t need to tally the prices in my head as I walked around the supermarket and that I could take a taxi home from Hadleigh rather than the bus.