Chapter 12: A Telephone Number
Her name was Lorna Vasey and she swam on Tuesdays and Fridays in the lane next to mine.
Fifty-six.
A retired school administrator with a bad hip and an excellent front crawl and a laugh that carried across water.
We had been nodding at each other for a year and talking in the changing room for about four months, mostly about the temperature of the pool, which was a scandal, and about her sister in Carlisle.
I swam because it is the only serious thing you can do with a bad shoulder, and because a pool is a place where nobody can begin a conversation.
Eleven hundred metres, Tuesdays and Fridays, forty-four lengths, and I never once got out early.
Her husband had died in the spring.
She had not said so for three months and then she said it in one sentence while pulling a sock on.
At the end of the first week in November she asked me whether I would ever fancy a coffee, some morning, if I was free.
I said yes.
I had not said yes to anything in three years. I want to be accurate about that.
I had said yes to a great many instructions. I had not accepted an invitation.
No paper.
She had a receipt from the vending machine in her bag and I wrote my mobile number on the back of it in pencil, because the pencil was in my swimming bag with the goggles.
Then I put my coat on and got the bus, and I remember being embarrassed by how pleased I was, the way you are embarrassed at fourteen.
That is the whole offence. That is the entire content of it.
She texted me on the Sunday afternoon. Coffee Weds? L.
The phone was on the hall table because that is where telephones lived in that house.
There was a rule about phones at the table, and like all the rules it was excellent as a rule and existed for another purpose.
The rule was that phones stayed in the hall.
So all of them were in the hall, face up, on a mahogany table, in a house with nine rooms leading off it.
I did not see the message until after dinner.
Margot saw it at ten past seven, on her way in from the drawing room, because a screen lights up.
She did not pick it up. She did not need to.
The whole message fits on a locked screen. Coffee Weds? L.
I have thought since about how much of my life was decided by the character limit of a notification.
We sat down. There were five of us. Soup, then a fish pie, because of the delivery.
She let it run until the plates went out. She always did.
Whatever it was, she let you have the meal first, and I never worked out whether that was mercy or seasoning.
Then she put her knife and fork together and said, “Who is L?”
And I said, “Lorna. From the swimming baths.”
“And you have given her your telephone number.”
“Yes.”
“Which telephone number?”
That is the question I would like people to look at.
Not who is she. Not what does she want. Which number.
I said, my mobile.
Margot said, “I see,” and picked up her water, and did not drink it, and put it down.
Then she said the thing, and she said it kindly, and I have never heard anything colder.
“You gave a stranger a number that comes into this house.”
I said it was my own number, and that Lorna Vasey was a widow of fifty-six from the swimming baths.
I said all of that, which was more than I usually said, and I heard my own voice do the thing voices do when they are explaining and should not be.
Julian was eating.
Damon had put his elbows on the table, which he only did when he was enjoying himself.
Margot said, “We have had this. With the Hendersons' girl. Things get out.”
Nobody asked what things.
I have never found out who the Hendersons' girl was, or what got out, and I am no longer certain there was a Hendersons' girl.
I looked at the table and did the arithmetic that I had been doing for three years, which is not a metaphor, it is arithmetic.
Cost of complying: thirty minutes on oak, three days of stairs.
Cost of not complying: an evening, a fortnight of temperature, and eventually the thing everyone understood to be available and nobody had said, which was that a woman with my record does not get to be difficult.
I put my hands flat on my thighs under the tablecloth.
It is a preparatory position and I had not made a decision yet and my body had.
“Nadia.”
“Yes.”
Margot folded her napkin. Three folds, the same three folds.
“I think we'll have a little while on the floor tonight.”