Joshua caught my glance and laughed. “Did Serena bully you into buying that swimsuit?”
I felt my face burn. She had, of course.
“It won’t wash well, you know. Those fashionable ones never do. If you’re planning to swim properly and a lot, it will fade like a dishrag.”
“Such a fucking expert,” muttered Serena. The only time I heard her swear was when she was with Josh. I hauled myself out to sit adjacent to them, so that I could have a good look at his body. I took my goggles off first.
He was beautifully made, of course, with wide, muscled shoulders and a small waist. His thick thighs were squashed down on the tiles and I watched them work as he absently kicked at the water. His chest was small and later I was to hear him bemoan his lack of pectorals. He was an unashamed narcissist, but only, he claimed, because he knew he looked less than perfect. But he carried his body with easy, negligent pride, changing his clothes (as he did, three times a day) in front of anyone who happened to be around. He was covered with cappuccino-coloured moles that he would inspect routinely for cancerous danger signs. I was staring at the rounded nub of his collar bone, evidence that he’d once broken it and had it inexpertly set, when Serena suddenly said: “Look at her, staring at you! You’d think she’d never seen a naked man before!”
“I’m not naked!” he protested, and jammed his legs together self-consciously. “And she can look all she likes. As long as I can stare back.” He gave me a good looking-over then and smiled approvingly at my breasts, which had always been big and now the nipples were standing on end. It was the chill after the swimming, but it seemed like he did it just by looking at me. Josh was always very frank about his sexuality: it was part of his indolence. Or maybe vice versa. He wanted you and he wanted to lie curled up with you all the time, and he never got bored, he never wanted you to get up, ring the changes, open the curtains, wash the sheets.
“You should meet Katy,” Serena said. “Katy, sweetheart?”
“What?” Katy thundered, still cupping her handfuls of water
Joshua explained, “She’s trying to catch the reflections of the stained glass in her hands. We’ve been coming here since she was tiny. I’ve told her she should swim, but she can’t be bothered. She thinks she can take the reflections home with her.”
“A collector just like her father,” said Serena.
“Not really,” he sighed. “She’s always breaking things.” He brushed carefully at his chest, at a pale scar he seemed self-conscious about.
I asked, “What happened to your collarbone?”
“Is it that noticeable?”
I shook my head.
“I used to row, at Oxford.”
“That’s how he got his lovely muscles,” Serena said.
“Hilarious, isn’t it? That was ten years ago and I haven’t done a stroke of exercise since. I should be a blob.”
“And he eats like there is no tomorrow.”
“Anyway, I broke my collarbone at a boating club do. I fell off a chair. Some complete fucking fool set it like this, half an inch out of place and wouldn’t put it right again. Said they’d have to break it again to put it straight. I said, that’s ok, if that’s what it takes, but they wouldn’t. They let it knit back like this, like the hunchback of Notre fucking Dame.”
“It’s not like that…” I said.
“And do you know what the surgeon said?” He looked incredulous. “He said, it’s not as if you’re going to be a model, is it?”
Serena tutted and looked away.
“I mean, I’d never considered modelling, but to have it taken away like that, and decided for me… I felt like a freak.”
Katy came over to us then. She’d let her reflections go and she came to float beside her father’s legs.
“Hullo,” he said and she scowled. “This is Serena’s friend, Wendy.”
The child looked at me. “You’ve got big tits.”
“I know.”
“Serena hasn’t. Serena’s hardly got any.”
“Now, Katy. I’ve told you before about upsetting Serena.”
“I’m not upset,” said Serena. “It just… for god’s sake, Josh, she’s nine years old. She’s old enough to know what she’s saying.”
“Of course she is. And she knows what she’s saying, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Then, I wish she’d learn some manners.”
“Manners are for people who want to hide something,” said the child. It was obviously something she’d been told many times.
“Yeah,” said Joshua. “Manners suck. My lovely daughter and I are on a crusade to rid the world of manners, aren’t we? And tell people what we think of them?”
“Yeah, Serena, you’re…”
“That’s enough, Katy.”
It was the day before we were due to visit them at Greenwich that Mandy arrived at King’s Cross with her few bags, her unborn baby and her author’s copy of the book in which her story was printed. She signed this and gave it to me on the way to Aunty Anne’s house. “I can’t take your copy!” It was a thick paperback, over five hundred pages of stories, with a union jack on the cover. BritLit Four: New Stories for a New Britain.
“Have it,” she sad. “I’ll pinch another at the launch party.”
Which was next week, at SuperBooks in Charing Cross Road.
“Are you nervous about it? About being launched?”
“Am I hell.” She glanced outside as we heaved around the corner into Sloane Square. “It’s only a story.”
Her house almost completed, filled with the spoils of many consultations and shopping trips with Serena, Aunty Anne was spending a lot of time at home in Putney. It seemed to me that the place didn’t quite suit her. It was all that minimalism—far too much of it—good for the soul as it apparently was. She had lots of space to move around in, which she liked, but
