The Swimming Pool Read Free

its own freshness. I had to shield my gaze from the sheer dazzling beauty, from the transforming, sun-spangled glamour of it. With the photogenic length of multicoloured huts and the candy-striped deckchairs on the upper terrace, it might have been Miami Beach or the Côte d’Azur. Only the smell was English, not of swimming pool yet, but of the park beyond, of sap-drenched leaves and cut grass; green and lusty and alive.
    ‘It’s so huge,’ I said to Ed, slightly idiotically. The shallow end, a riot of flailing limbs and shrieking mouths,
seemed a field’s length away. ‘I can’t take my eyes off the water, can you?’
    ‘Humans have an inbuilt attraction to it,’ he replied, his words scarcely audible above the raised voices of a group of children setting up camp on the other side of the railing. ‘They’ve done a nice job, haven’t they?’
    ‘Nice? It’s
glorious
.’
    Ed registered the word – not one either of us had used in years, if ever – before shaking straight his newspaper. That Saturday
Guardian
symbolized many things for him. It spoke of who he was: a left-leaning man who still took the time to read the news in print and in full, at least once a week. Others might have downgraded their engagement with current affairs to a quick scroll on their phones as they jostled commuters on train platforms or jay-walked their kids across perilous roads, but
he
was still willing to give it the time and attention it deserved. Even if his wife would have preferred a conversation
    After we’d ordered I scanned the other tables for familiar faces. As a teacher at one local school and a parent at another, I was confident there’d be several. There was Molly’s chaotic chum Rosie and her family – we exchanged waves – and Gayle’s neighbour Ian, dressed for once in jeans and a shirt, not his customary Lycra (a keen cyclist, he was one of those hovering spidery types who, you suspected, had only themselves to blame when caught in a skirmish with a motorist); and Annabel from the kindergarten at Elm Hill Prep, in my opinion not so much teaching assistant as holy being.
    As
a member of staff at the largest senior school in the postcode, Ed, were he to look, would recognize more Elm Hillians still (recent incomers had led a movement to call us Elm Hillbillies but the old guard had squarely rejected
that
). Though not, I guessed, the woman my gaze fell on next.
    She was at the table closest to the water and the best on the deck, glamour radiating from her and rendering the rest of us mere extras in her scene. Her clothes were exotic (to my eye, anyhow; doubtless they were workaday to her): a pink silk shirt-dress with a woven silver belt; flat snake-print sandals, the kind you might wear on a luxury safari or for a stroll through a hilltop village in Umbria. Oversized sunglasses with amber-coloured frames covered much of her face, leading the eye down a small kittenish nose to an insolent Bardot mouth.
    Irrationally, my brain ordered my pulse to leap.
    ‘There’s that woman,’ I said to Ed in an undertone.
    He didn’t look up. ‘What woman?’
    ‘The one I told you about, with the matching daughter. I can’t remember her name.’
    That was a lie: I didn’t want to utter it for fear of being overheard by its owner. It was only six days since the sunrise photo shoot, but already Lara Channing had become the de facto face of the place, her photo gracing the leaflets posted through doors and even appearing on the features pages of the
Standard
to illustrate a piece about the new heyday of London’s lidos.
    She
was not with her daughter this morning but with a man I assumed to be her husband, given their idle tapping of iPhones and sporadic, inattentive conversation (at least he had not, as Ed had, placed a partition of newsprint between the two of them and kept it there even after their orders had arrived). I couldn’t see his face, only the back of his head, the still-dark hair fastidiously cropped, the