Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller

Author:Claire Fuller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2016-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 13TH JUNE 1992, 3:32 AM

Dear Gil,

Jonathan warned me not to go into your writing room because I might find things I wouldn’t like. When I raised my eyebrows, he said, “You know, scrappy bits of paper with bad words written on them, screwed-up pages with everything crossed out, first drafts. Apparently first drafts are always ugly.” We laughed. We were walking over the heath that first summer, the gorse flowers fading to a paper-yellow, the smell of coconut disappearing on the wind that blew in from the sea. Jonathan said you needed to keep your room separate from the house and the people who visited. It was a place for serious writing and thinking.

Once, when I was newly pregnant with Nan, I woke in the night without you beside me. I went outside and looked through the window in the door of your room and saw you resting your head on top of your typewriter. I tapped on the pane but you didn’t move. I wasn’t sure if you were asleep. In the morning you were back beside me, and you pulled me to you and made me promise that if you were ever missing from our bed I mustn’t come to find you. I laughed and you said, “I’m deadly serious, Ingrid. Everyone needs a place to escape to, even if it’s only inside their head.”

“I’ll promise,” I said, “if you promise me the same.”

We were lying face-to-face, separated only by the paisley curl of our baby inside me. Awkwardly, you held out your right hand and we shook on it. Do you remember?

And there was the time, years later—in the middle of the argument where the teapot got smashed—when you shouted that I wasn’t allowed in your room because I was too fucking nosy and asked too many fucking questions. “How’s it going? How many words today? Thought of a title yet?” And you accused me of reading your pages when you were out, of snooping and checking up on you, of dripping my wet hair onto your words when they were still spooling out from your typewriter. It was fucking inhibiting, you said, and the reason you stayed in your writing room was no longer to write but because you needed to fucking protect your intellectual property.

But the reason I wasn’t allowed in there wasn’t any of these, was it, Gil?

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