The Swimming Pool Read Free Page A

strip of neck between hairline and box-fresh cotton shirt expensively bronzed. On the table, alongside the phones, were a black coffee (his) and a green smoothie (hers), the antioxidant one with kale and kiwi that I’d not ordered myself because I thought £4.99 was scandalous for a soft drink – and even if I didn’t Ed would.
    ‘They’re locals, apparently,’ I said, prodding his newspaper. ‘Though I’ve never seen them before, have you?’
    ‘Hmm.’ He lowered the paper to reveal a chewing jaw, his plate of sourdough toast almost finished. He was famously hard to engage in gossip even when he wasn’t trying to read. Careless talk costs lives: he would have led by example quite beautifully in wartime. ‘The daughter’s not at All Saints, is she?’
    ‘I’d be amazed if she was,’ I said. With or without the staff’s dedication, All Saints (staff nickname: All Sinners) was not the school of choice for any known elite, and if I took anything from this first in-the-flesh impression of Lara Channing it was that she belonged to an elite. With those enticing looks and that media-magnetism, she was a breed apart from the mothers of Elm Hill
Prep, BMW-driving, gem-set-watch-wearing creatures of privilege though they were. Even the way she looked out at the water suggested a satisfaction more personal, more nuanced, than mere inbuilt human response.
    Giving up on Ed, I spooned my granola, enjoying the erogenous touch of the sun as I continued to watch. But it was a risk to scrutinize someone in sunglasses when you were bare-faced yourself and, sure enough, she soon sensed my attention and returned it, even lifting her sunglasses in a playful peekaboo gesture. I blushed. Never in my life had I so regretted not making an effort with my appearance. My skin was makeup-free – caked in foundation during the working week, I tended to let it air at weekends, hardly noticing after all these years the looks that strayed to the birthmark above my right eyebrow; my hair was limp and in need of a wash, with a rather Tudor centre parting I didn’t normally wear; my clothes were shapeless and unflattering. Not at all the right look for Miami Beach, for the eye of Ms Channing.
    There was worse to come. I became aware of her husband/companion twisting in his seat to stare across to our table – at exactly the moment Ed happened to glance behind him with a frown. As I squirmed, mortified, there was a sudden heightening of energy at the other table, an exchange of urgent mutters, before Lara’s laughter sprayed the air, musical and delighted and, it seemed to me, a little contrived. I adjusted my seat so that Ed blocked my view of them and theirs of me, my
heart stuttering as if something significant had just occurred.
    ‘What?’ Ed said, seeing my face. His expression softened. ‘Thinking about Molls? You’re allowed to like it, you know.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘This. The pool. There’s nothing to stop
you
coming here.’
    ‘I know.’ I didn’t say that I hadn’t been thinking of Molly at all.
    We’d hardly finished eating when the bill came, unbidden. ‘I think Liam wants the table back,’ I said. ‘Look, the queue’s out the door. Shall we go?’
    Ed sighed. ‘If this is what it’s going to be like, I don’t think I’ll come here again.’
    But we both knew it was a moot point for soon his Saturdays would not be his own. Change was afoot in the Steele household: this summer, he would be offering himself as a private maths tutor, to continue at weekends during the autumn term and until the entrance exam season in January. If it went well, it was possible he might be able to do it full time from the 2016/17 school year, and as a family we would prioritize this mission. All Saints, like any conflict zone, was no place for middle-aged men.
    In any case, once Molly’s term-time Saturday-morning tennis finished and she was free to join us on such outings – well, this was the last place she’d want to