The Swim Club Read online

  Anne de Lisle lives with her husband, Ian Russell, and two dogs, Topsy and Lottie, in Maryborough, Queensland. She has written four internationally successful historical romances as well as A Grand Passion, an entertaining memoir about restoring her house. Visit her website: www.annedelisle.com

  Also by Anne de Lisle

  Fiction

  The Black Highlander

  Isabeau

  Tabitha

  Clementina

  Non-fiction

  A Grand Passion

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  The Swim Club

  ePub ISBN 9781742745589

  This is a work of fiction. All central characters are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental. In order to provide the story with a context, some real names of places are used as well as fictional place names.

  A Bantam book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by Bantam in 2008

  Copyright © Anne de Lisle 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  de Lisle, Anne, 1958–.

  The swim club.

  1 v.

  ISBN 978 1 86325 650 6

  To my children, Andrew, Elizabeth and Robert

  Acknowledgements

  Janean, Sian, Sue, Bronwyn, Janet and Libby, enormous thanks to you all for the years of easy maintenance friendship. Your tenacity and dedication to achieving the unachievable gave me the inspiration for this book.

  Thank you also to my publisher, Katie Stackhouse from Random House, and Julia Stiles, editor-at-large, who both understood Charlie and her gang of four so well. Thanks yet again to my agent, Lyn Tranter, for so much advice and enthusiasm. You smooth my path and give much appreciated encouragement.

  And last, but not least, love and thanks to my husband, Ian, ever willing to listen to bits and read bits and to try to get his man-brain around the baffling idiosyncrasies, the secret women’s business of this story. Your unflagging belief in me makes it all so much easier.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Anne de Lisle

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘MOVE THOSE LEGS! Work those legs! Jeez … look at youse. A pack of whales!’

  Sean the swimming coach, all gold and bronzed muscle, looms over the edge of the pool. ‘Another thirty seconds!’ he yells. ‘Go …! Go …! Go!’

  My legs burn, my lungs are fit to burst. Anyone’d think I was flat out in an Olympic final but don’t be fooled. I am not actually swimming.

  Bobbing in the deep end of the pool, Laura and I are doing rapid cycling movements with our legs to the blare of Shania Twain’s ‘Man! I Feel like a Woman!’ Under each arm we’re buoyed by two-litre plastic milk bottles which bear a disturbing resemblance to the shape and colour of my thighs. Sean calls us whales. I prefer to think blancmange or cottage cheese rather than blubber. Dairy foods seem a far more appropriate metaphor when it comes to my body parts.

  ‘Okay, okay, ladies.’ Mercifully, Sean’s attention drifts elsewhere for a moment. Laura and I cease cycling; our tortured legs hang limply below the surface, the water laps at our chins. I’m beyond speech, grateful for the milk bottles, without which I’d be sinking like a stone. We make eye contact, a message of agony passing between us.

  We’ve been attending aqua-aerobics twice a week for three weeks, and are yet to discover the joy of fitness or the comfort of swimsuits that don’t dig into our fat bits and make them bulge. If it weren’t for Laura, there’s no way I’d be here. She has the determination and staying power I lack. To be here for six o’clock, I have to get up at five, fill the twins’ lunchboxes, drink a cup of tea, eat a bit of breakfast, pack a bag of changing-room essentials, and make the twenty-minute car journey along winding mountain roads to the Soldiers’ Memorial Swimming Pool in the heart of our hilltop town of Macclesfield.

  ‘Okay ladies …’

  Sean is back on our case. We flinch, shrinking into our milk bottles.

  ‘Warm-down time.’

  Ah … warm-down time. Sweet, sweet words. Warm-down time means gentle, easy, stretching movements. It’s a chance to bask in the afterglow of our efforts, to float on our backs and watch the morning sun gild the fronds of the palms trees that surround the pool. My muscles relax in anticipation.

  ‘Give us your milk bottles up here and let’s see a bit of freestyle to the shallow end. That’ll do as your warm down today.’

  There is silence. Neither Laura nor I move. I’m conscious of the lap, lap of water against my chin, and that towering above me is a hundred kilos of annoyed young man.

  ‘Ladies … please.’

  I tighten my grip on the milk bottles.

  Sean is growing impatient. Mutiny, I imagine, is not something he normally encounters in his aqua-aerobics class.

  ‘I never do freestyle,’ I say in what I hope is a firm voice. ‘Perhaps we could do breaststroke instead?’

  Sun-bleached eyebrows form a straight, hard line. ‘No aerobic benefit.’

  ‘But I can’t do freestyle,’ I bleat, then look at Laura. ‘Can you?’

  ‘Not really,’ she says. ‘The concept is there. It’s just kicking legs and rotating arms, isn’t it?’

  ‘Easy, if you can pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time.’

  We glance across to the other side of the pool partitioned off with lane ropes. This is where the real athletes spend their mornings, churning up lengths, cutting effortlessly through the water, flipping neat tumble turns.

  ‘Ladies. Milk bottles please.’

  Laura looks at me, daring. ‘I will if you will.’

  I c
atch her mood. ‘We’re scarcely going to drown.’

  ‘There’s always breaststroke if we’re desperate.’

  We stare down the twenty-five metres of the Soldiers’ Memorial Pool. Twenty-five metres of no-man’s-land. It looks a long, long way. But not so far as the soldiers faced at the Somme, at Verdun, at Ypres.

  ‘Right then,’ I say, and surrender my precious plastic bottles. ‘Let’s go.’

  I take a huge breath, stick my head down, bottom up and start kicking. Seconds pass before I remember that I have arms, then I flail them uselessly until oxygen deprivation has me rolling half onto my back for air. There’s no way I can kick, do the arms and breathe all at once. I don’t have goggles, so am blinded by water, stinging chlorine and my own wet hair which, doing a good impression of squid tentacles, has latched onto my face.

  I hit the side of the pool and stop, rubbing my bruised shoulder. But I’m almost halfway and feel rather pleased with myself. Laura, I see, is way ahead, nearly there. Head down, bottom up, I start again. I get the giggles, knowing what I must look like. The giggles are not good for maintaining water-free lungs. I start to choke and end up having to walk the final third.

  Sean is laughing. Sean never laughs. Teaching aqua-aerobics to a handful of plump non-swimmers – only two of us today – bores him stupid. He teaches us with barely disguised impatience. Now he is laughing.

  ‘I told you I couldn’t do it,’ I say, my pride stung.

  ‘You should learn to swim properly,’ he flings over one shoulder, and strides off to supervise the real athletes.

  Laura and I hang out at the shallow end, doing stretches, making bitchy comments about Sean. In the water my limbs feel graceful and sleek; I can believe that I am slender and lithe and gorgeous. Up on tiptoes, down again. Up and down, oh so easy, Swan Lake, here I come.

  There is a handful of teenage girls clustered at the entrance of the changing rooms, hugging and crying. They look lost, loitering miserably in their school uniforms.

  ‘What do you suppose is wrong with them?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ Laura pulls off her swimming cap and shakes out her dark hair. It’s thick, almost frizzy, and she likes to wear a cap so it doesn’t end up matted; it’s the sort of hair that grows taller and wider instead of longer like everybody else’s. Everything about Laura, with the exception of our plumpish bodies, is the antithesis of me. Whereas my eyes look bald and startled unless lavishly enhanced by mascara, Laura’s are thickly lashed: a natural dark fringe that, somewhat deceptively, makes her look gentle as a doe. And she’s tanned with a scattering of freckles across her golden chest and shoulders, whereas my skin is better suited to the frozen north. As for my hair …

  ‘You really should wear a cap,’ she says, eyeing my pale, limp tentacles. ‘They keep your head warm on cold mornings too.’

  More weeping girls gather. It’s half the school swim squad, still dressed, clearly with no intention of getting in the water. Laura and I climb out of the pool, reach for our towels – strategically placed poolside so as to reduce the walking-about-in-just-our-swimsuits distance – and head for the showers. On the way we pass the kiosk where Cate, Goddess of the Pool, is working her shift.

  Cate is several years younger than Laura and me, and a good five inches taller, narrow-hipped, with lean yet muscled legs as high as my armpits. When she moves there is rippling instead of wobbling, there is grace instead of lumbering. Cate the Colt. Cate does lots of serious swimming. Laura and I are humble with admiration in her presence. Today we stop to say hi and ask why there are so many crying teenagers.

  ‘Someone drowned yesterday,’ she tells us.

  Drowned. Such a frightening word, conjuring up nightmare images. I eye the crystal waters of the pool with increased trepidation.

  ‘No, not here,’ says Cate. ‘Down at the coast.’

  Laura and I look at each other then back to Cate. ‘Not a child from the school?’

  ‘No, someone’s dad. He had kids at the school. Swimmers. He was involved with the swim club here, did the barbecues, drove kids to swim carnivals, that sort of thing. They all knew him.’

  ‘Who?’ ask Laura and I in unison. Macclesfield Primary is not a big school. Between us we know most of the families.

  ‘A guy called Adam Trainor.’

  CHAPTER 2

  MY HANDS ARE TREMBLING on the steering wheel. My mind’s a mess of appalled disbelief and shock. I’ve only met Adam half-a-dozen times, but I know his wife Karen quite well. Her eldest is the same age as my twins. We’ve done reading groups and tuckshop days together at school. She’s even come to aqua-aerobics a couple of times. I always rather envied Karen, if the truth be known. She had two great kids, a lovely home and a wonderful husband. Now she’s without one of those things, facing life, facing motherhood, alone.

  Adam was one of those husbands other wives sighed over. Not that he was particularly handsome, or pumped iron in the gym and had a body with bulges in all the right places. No, Adam had qualities that were far more enviable. He was straightforward and utterly reliable. As happy pushing Karen’s trolley in the aisles of the IGA supermarket as he was playing golf with his mates. As competent packing lunch boxes for the children as he was in his career in the bank. And he adored Karen. Never looked sideways. Other women just didn’t exist for him.

  Karen and Adam, so Karen once told me over making sandwiches at the school canteen, had been together since she let him plagiarise one of her biology assignments when they were in their last year at high school.

  Human Biology? I teased. Were there practical demonstrations?

  A Mona Lisa smile. In his dreams.

  And yours?

  It is always delightful to make a grown woman blush.

  But now all that’s gone. In the blink of an eye. The life Karen’s known and loved is over, and I have to fight the urge to turn the car around and drive straight to her house. I want to share her burden, ease her pain, but I’m being presumptuous. Karen has far closer friends than me, and her parents live nearby. She has an abundance of shoulders to cry on.

  Back home, the warmth and colour I’ve worked so hard to create seem to have evaporated, the world suddenly a grey, drear place. I’m on automatic, waking Mikey and Dan, waking them a second, a third time, hustling them to finish breakfast, nagging them to clean their teeth, pack their school bags, find their shoes. It’s a relief when the school bus arrives. I go back inside, sit on my bed and sob.

  If Adam could see the extent of my grief I expect he’d be a bit surprised. Until I admit that my tears are not all for him, that this tragedy has ruptured not only his family’s life but the brittle surface of my own skin, letting a tide of suppressed misery come flooding out. Adam’s death has released the geyser from hell, and I don’t know how I’m going to staunch it.

  Two years ago my husband ran off. Two years and two months to be precise, when Mikey and Dan had just celebrated their ninth birthdays. He didn’t just elope with someone else’s wife, my best friend or his secretary. Oh no, Alec absconded in spectacular style. He ran off with Emma Lewis who, one year previously, had been a pupil in his class at the local high school.

  Alec had been a popular teacher: fun, involved, an extrovert. He’d had a great rapport with the kids. Some of the perter girls used to make eyes at him, send him text messages. Emma was a favourite of his. ‘That Emma Lewis is quite something,’ he’d tell me. ‘She’s smart, attractive and ambitious. She’s going to go places, that girl.’

  If alarm bells rang, I didn’t hear them. Why would I, how could I, suspect my husband and the father of my children of eloping with a child? Seventeen might be legal, but only a year earlier he’d been her Grade Eleven teacher, influencing her thoughts and ideals, moulding her ambition: a situation ripe with opportunities for the misuse of power. And always, always, the unanswered question: when did it start? I’ll never know if laws were broken, or only commandments.

  They went and I stayed, stayed to face the looks of pity,
of embarrassment, of thinly veiled disgust. Was it my fault then, that my husband had a liking for children? Sometimes people crossed to the other side of the street when they saw me coming. Some still do, either not wanting to talk to me or not knowing how to talk to me. That suits me fine – I don’t want to talk about it either. Far better to save my words for two bewildered boys who kept asking when their father was coming home. It took me a full year to find the courage to say never.

  At the time, Emma’s mother, Sharon, was a ball of rage. I understood her pain. That her daughter had run away with a man twenty-three years her senior was bad enough. But that fact that he had been her teacher, well, I couldn’t blame her for wanting his blood. When did it start? Laws or only commandments? Six months after they were gone, Sharon got onto A Current Affair, who tracked the lovers down. Walking hand in hand with Emma along the beach, Alec swore they’d done nothing wrong. We’re so in love, he said.

  But this is two years old. Two years is enough time to dull the shock, enough time to carefully graft new skin across the open wound. Besides, what is a husband walking out, when compared to death by drowning? It seems fraudulent to compare, yet at the time – to me – it felt like a massive bereavement.

  My pile of soggy tissues is growing. I reach for a fresh one and try to remind myself that there are some compensations in being husbandless: I can live where I want to live. Go where I want to go. Dress as I like to dress. I can eat when the children eat, or I can skip dinner altogether and gorge on chocolate instead. Best of all, after the boys have gone to bed, I can watch reruns of SeaChange without fear of ridicule. It’s my mantra, the one that – along with enough calls to my mother in England to constitute telephone harassment – gave me the strength to get on with life: selling the house Alec and I had shared, paying him what he thought he was owed, and buying a sanctuary for the boys and myself, a place unscathed by painful memories. Then picking up the pieces of my writing career – in the throes of a dramatic and lucrative change – and set about becoming an Independent Woman.