The Third Swimmer: A Novel

By Roisalind Brackenbury

This is the story of a marriage between two Britons, Olivia and Thomas. The first part of the novel takes place in London, on the brink of war, bracing for invasion. It ends with a bomb that would have killed Olivia, had Olivia not been spending the night with her married lover, Felix. Part Two opens in 1952, after the war, but with the effects of the war still haunting the survivors as well as the landscape. Thomas and Olivia, now married with children, have traveled to the south coast of France, to have what might be their delayed honeymoon. But their marriage has cooled down almost to the point of dying out. The central event of the novel is an attempt by Thomas to rescue a stranger seen drowning out at sea.The couple’s future will depend on the outcome of this impetuous act of bravery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel & Daniel Publishers
• Release date: Mar 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781564748027

Book preview

The Third Swimmer

a novel

Rosalind Brackenbury

2016

John Daniel & Company

McKinleyville, California

Copyright © 2016 by Rosalind Brackenbury

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-56474-802-7

An excerpt of this novel appeared in The French Literary Review, Number 14, Aude, France.

A short section of an earlier version of this story appeared in Brick magazine, Number 75, Toronto, Canada.

The interior design and the cover design of this book are intended for and limited to the publisher’s first print edition of the book and related marketing display purposes. All other use of those designs without the publisher’s permission is prohibited.

Published by John Daniel & Company

A division of Daniel and Daniel, Publishers, Inc.

Post Office Box 2790

McKinleyville, CA 95519

www.danielpublishing.com

Book design and production: Studio-E-Books, Santa Barbara, CA

Distributed by SCB Distributors [phone]

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Brackenbury, Rosalind.

The third swimmer : a novel / by Rosalind Brackenbury.

pages ; cm

ISBN [first printed edition] 978-1-56474-582-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

I. Title.

PR6052.R24T48 2016

823’.914—dc23

2015032439

In memory of my parents, who first took me to Cassis.

Contents

I. LONDON, 1939

1

2

3

4

II. CASSIS, 1952

1

2

3

4

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Author

I. LONDON, 1939

It is generally supposed that happy people, like happy nations, have no history.

—Marie Stopes, Married Love, 1913

Bought by Thomas Essleman in 1940

1

He had no idea who she was, when she first came to his ­office that day. A secretary, surely not? And why was she here? She knocked, came in with something white in her hand, and held it out to him; and there she stood, amazing him. He’d already guessed what the letter was about, but had not been prepared for her physical self, there, in his day, in his life.

Excuse me, Mr. Essleman? I’m sorry to disturb you. I’m from Personnel. I have to give you this.

His drawing hand went on making its doodles on the scuffed paper. It drew spirals, cross-hatchings. A snail grew from a spiral, sprouted horns. He looked up and glared at her, because of this morning and the anger he had felt since Murphy’s telephone call, and because of the nag of toothache still in that lower molar, and because he guessed at what was coming for them all. But he saw her hesitancy, her secretive beauty. Heard her fast upper-class accent. Felt, rather than saw, the lift of her head when she handed him the letter, black hair smoothed across, hair ribbon tied on top. He looked at her the way he habitually looked at women, hunting up perfection. Long legs in smooth pale stockings. Her folded arms as she waited. Her teeth white, straight, and rather large. The swell—he couldn’t help it—of her breasts under that soft gray wool. What was wool like that called? It was made from rabbit fur. It made everything look soft.

I’m sorry, it isn’t good news.

Nothing is these days, is it? I suppose I should read it?

She watched him like someone who has brought a notice of death to a stranger’s door.

So, he said, reading, I’ve been fired, have I? Well. What if I won’t accept it? Miss…?

Harkness. Olivia. I don’t know. Can you do that?

Well, Miss Harkness Olivia, I don’t see why not. He’s offering me the opportunity to resign. The opportunity! Well, you know, I suppose; you must have typed it.

I’m so sorry, she said, with that gentleness. He remembered the word for the soft wool: angora.

I’m going to join up, anyway.

You mean, the army?

Yes. There’s going to be a war.

But Mr. Chamberlain said there won’t be, now.

I know. He’s wrong. This one can’t be put off. And shouldn’t be.

So ordinary, it sounded like a sort of weather forecast. She watched the letter she had delivered, that harmless-looking piece of paper, drift closer and closer to the edge of the drawing board and float to the floor.

Who did he think he was?

He faced her down, just a girl bringing a stupid letter, said one part of his mind, just a silly upper-class girl who doesn’t know what’s going on, her lot simply don’t realize; while another part of him entirely spoke its subtle truth.

She stared at him—very clear whites to those brown eyes, her nose rather short and tipped up, longish upper lip, mouth like an angel’s. A black-haired angel by Bellini.

What makes you such an expert, Mr. Essleman?

I’m sorry. I know, I’m too outspoken. But people do talk such rubbish. I’m no more war-like than the next person, you know. But it’s perfect hell they are busy putting into action. I’ve been in Germany. I’ve seen it. And what does our Prime Minister do but waffle on about ‘peace in our time.’ Peace with gangsters, more like it. His mouth said these things, he knew he sounded angry; all the anger that had been building up over the last few days spilling out now, unfairly, to her.

I’m a pacifist, actually. I’m with the Peace Pledge Union. I don’t believe in war. She sounded smug to him, talking about something she knew nothing about. But, that lower lip, and the white teeth that just grazed it.

Believe in it or not, it’s coming. You can’t turn back history, Miss Harkness.

She listened as if she had been trained as a lawyer. He noticed a remoteness in her, guarding a place that would not easily open. She was out of his class, anyway. It would not be the way it had been with other girls—Jennifer, Angela, Sissy, all of the ones he’d bedded and laughed with and let go. This one, this stranger, this woman he didn’t yet know, this one with the imperious vowels, would demand a seriousness to match her own.

He’d already come this far with her, in his mind. You knew, at something like the speed of light, everything that would be wonderful and everything that would be difficult. Then you proceeded to forget the difficult part. It would take years, perhaps, to remember it, to be forced to confront it, to understand. Now, he didn’t care; he just wanted more than anything to take her in his arms.

Neither of them bent to pick up the sheet of paper that had floated away from its envelope. He offered her a cigarette from his squashed packet, and she took one. She leaned towards him. Men handed you cigarettes and you leaned to have them lit, whatever brand they were. She and her mother always smoked Turkish at home. He slid off the high stool to strike a light for her. Worn shirt cuffs, she saw, razor nicks on his inky thumb, the thick black curly hair on his bent head; the flare of a match, and there they were, standing in the bare little office room as if they already knew each other.

She smoked, leaning back on her heels, one arm under her breasts, a hand holding an elbow. So, you’re for war?

Of course. We have to be, now. Are you interested, or would you rather just trot along with your Peace Pledge people in ignorant bliss?

I’m interested. But, you know, you’re very rude.

The room smelled of ink and smoke and the cedary whiff of sharpened pencils. An open bottle of Indian ink with a rusty top was on the stand beside the slanted drawing board. Pens stained to their handles lay beside it. She saw the tracing paper tacked to its board, its rough edges and what was drawn on it, a plan of a building that would now probably not be built. So this was what he did: imagined, drew, doodled, smoked, sharpened pencils, came up at last with ideas for buildings. But how did that flatness, that line, ever translate to become a solid building you could walk into? Surely something else had to happen in between? Another dimension, not yet imagined? The paper around the pinned sheet was marked with razor cuts and the strange little black drawings he had apparently been doing when she came in. The day already felt like a hinge, with a before and an after.

I have to go, really.

All right.

She finished the cigarette and stubbed it out—Players, horrible tobacco—in an already filled ashtray.

It was not just the embarrassment of standing there being looked at like that, nor the anger that had sparked between them, nor that she had left her office door open and there was a pile of things to be seen to on her desk; more urgent, unmistakable, was the drag of sudden pain in her lower stomach, the seep of moisture between her thighs. Thank God, the curse at last, its tinny blood smell on her, the loosened feeling between her legs that let her know, once more, she was safe.

Well, good luck.

He said, watching her, I’m going to need it.

She opened the door to go. Someone passed in the corridor, with a tap of heels. A telephone rang and rang, then stopped. She looked back at him, and he smiled, bent to pick up the letter, wadded it up and lobbed it at the basket that was already half full of rumpled tracing paper and the woody curled spirals of pencil sharpenings.

When she got to the lavatory, the rust stain was there, thank God, and the coming darker flood as she wiped herself. She puffed her cheeks and blew out her breath with relief, and placed the thick pad between her legs and hooked it to the belt. Walking about with a towel on, you felt a little unwieldy, a little awkward; but there was also this vivid sense of reprieve. You could start again, blameless, on the cycle of risk and hope. She hoped nobody would notice her altered gait as she walked back to her office.

— —

Murphy had telephoned that morning, while he was still shaving. Tom, I’m afraid our designs are going to be turned down. They can’t see it. We’re just too modern for them. I feel it in my bones. The Old Man’s been got at by Bradley and Sykes. They don’t like all your glass.

So, he had known what was coming. He’d wiped shaving soap from his neck, seen his own disappointment in the mirror in the lopsided face, the half-shaved chin, as he scowled to tighten the other cheek. The black telephone with its wire stretched from its stand in the hall, Murphy’s voice coming and going like waves in his clean ear.

Their design for the new Oxford Street building, worked on for more than three years now, would not after all be built. He would no longer be the job architect; Bradley and Sykes, those self-satisfied clowns, would take over. The plans, the working drawings, the facades, elevations, every detail would remain on paper, lie in plan chests, be lost, because a building that was only drawn did not exist. It was like being refused the right to breathe.

My dear old boy, I’m so sorry. But, let’s meet at the Athenaeum and have a council of war. We won’t give up without a fight.

Murphy sent him weekly, sometimes daily letters, with exclamations written all around their edges in black ink and sketches of parts of buildings in any empty space. He sent postcards, with the address of the hotel he lived in on the front in Brighton, photographs of the beach, the pier, that same scrawl filling them, ink pictures dancing round their edges. He summoned him to cocktails, to lunches to meet people, to councils of war. Dear Tommy, we have to meet: my club at six? Or, There’s a meeting of the finance committee; we should be there, I’ll pick you up. Or, You should meet so-and-so, I’ll drop them a line. Are you free on Thursday for lunch? If Murphy thought it was all up, it probably was; that born optimist, who rarely resorted to the telephone, who believed that talent, cunning and luck were more than enough; who loved him, the best student he’d had, like a son. Murphy with his cars, his American cocktails, his mysterious life in a seedy Brighton hotel, the wife he never introduced.

Are you still there?

I’ve not finished shaving. I had to put the phone down.

Six, then?

— —

He would tell him, Thomas thought hours later as he ran for the Oxford Circus tube station: They sent me a beautiful messenger to give me the sack; and a piece of white paper, what do you think of that?

To himself he said, This one, this one is for me. It was swift, incontrovertible, the way his decision for architecture had been, when as a boy he’d first met Professor Murphy at the school in Liverpool and he’d known what he must do. The Professor knew, too. Not how he could work, how tireless he was, but about his vision and what his right hand could do to express it. The skill and verve that had been sharpening and defining itself during all the unhappy years of his adolescence. Patrick Murphy unrolled his drawings on his own board, smoothed them with his fleshy hands, weighted them at the edges so that they would not curl up, and said, I want you to come next year. Can your father afford it?

Thomas had had no idea. Whatever his brothers asked for in the way of money—loans to buy unlikely businesses, hotels, cars, to put mortgages out for houses, to pay off racing debts—his father gave. He had no idea if any was left for him. He said, I’ll have to ask.

If there’s any problem, there are scholarships, you know.

It was settled. Thomas would be Murphy’s student and, when he got his qualification, Murphy’s assistant. The old Irishman knew talent when he saw it. When Murphy had been offered the design of the new department store, he had immediately recommended that Thomas, aged only twenty-four, do all the design work on the building which would make his name, while the working drawings were to be done by another firm. So Thomas had had the freedom to design, while older men backed him with their expertise with the details of construction. But now, it seemed, they were out of luck; it was not going to happen again.

— —

He’d seen in Germany how red-hot rivets could be thrown up from the ground to welders overhead; he’d watched men at work balanced high and elegant as circus artistes; he’d grasped the use of welded steel instead of reinforced concrete to create a building’s structure. In Czechoslovakia, he’d seen whole new towns built for industry, for workers. He’d been to see Mendelssohn’s stores in Chemnitz and Breslau and his Universum cinema in Berlin; in London he met Gropius and Moholy-Nagy when they were living on Lawn Street, he went with Murphy to cocktail parties at the Mendelssohns’ in Berkeley Square, drank their martinis and ate as many cheese biscuits as he could. He had watched Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, the buildings that went up like sculpture, the creation of space for human beings to use. The beliefs, in built form, of the Bauhaus. During his months in America, he’d studied the new department stores in New York, in Chicago. Form that was content, surfaces that were clean and sharp. Architecture that gave workers and ordinary people recreation, health, the fresh air of modernism, delight to the eye. In London he insisted on glass curtain walling, underground car parks, the suavity of steel.

He was too big for his boots, they said. A whiz kid, an upstart, a northerner with that accent, not one of us. He argued with older architects, with his employers; with Murphy beside him, he fought his corner and won. The department store on the corner of Sloane Square had his name on it, finally; it was his, down to the sans-serif lettering that graced its sinuous front. Its minted-penny shine, its new-sports-car freshness, its twentieth-century cinematic panache were his own.

It was only when he went back to Germany in ’36 to bring his sister Maudie home after playing in an orchestra in Cologne, that Thomas had known what would stop him, what would stop them all. He saw Nazi Brownshirts in the streets, wrecking homes, herding old men from their shops; and because he had known his bullying brothers, Fred and George, he recognized what he saw. The world would not be made new along the clean rational lines of evolved thought. It would repel abstract art, it would punish artists, architects, filmmakers, writers, anyone who dared to say that the world was other than power and blood.

— —

Waiting days. He took her for tea to the Oxford Circus Lyons, a week after she’d delivered that letter. On Oxford Street she had to hurry to keep up with his stride. Their breath was like twinned columns of smoke on the cold air. He stood aside for her to go in first. She went in, set her bag down, pulled out a chair. Across the little table he spoke to her quietly, as everybody else in there seemed to be leaning forward, muttering to each other across tables, as if the whole country had begun to mutter. It felt strangely intimate, to be almost whispering like this. Their tea was set in front of them, brown liquid slopped into white saucers. He asked for biscuits. The glass fogged with the breath of strangers; he wiped a swathe of it clear with his sleeve, to let in gray light from the street.

I have to go north. My mother’s ill. She’s been ill for years, actually, but I think this time she’s going to die.

Olivia said, I’m so sorry.

Then, he risked it. Can I see you again when I get back? If you’re free?

It was too soon, too abrupt; he had given himself away. She looked back at him. He was a man to be taken seriously, but she was not in a position to take him seriously. "I’m sure we’ll bump into each other