Free The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain

sleepy and still and the people in the picture are dreaming about lunch.
    I lowered myself into the pool and swam a few lengths, trying not to splash too much. When I came back to the shallow end the fourth time, I saw Valentina’s legs dipping into the water. She’d taken off her cotton robe and was wearing a white-and-gold swimsuit. Now she had only this on, I could see the shape of her whole body and what I thought was that the most beautiful thing in the world would be to be born out of Valentina’s vagina and be lifted up on to her stomach and given one of her huge breasts to suck and kept there on her breast with my lips round her milky nipple, sucking and sucking until I passed into oblivion.
    I swam up to Valentina’s legs and took hold of one of her feet. Her toenails were more convex than mine and painted scarlet. I asked her to come swimming with me.
    She said she couldn’t swim. I said I didn’t believe a person of forty-one had never learned to swim and she said: ‘Well, there you are, darling. You see, you’re learning surprising things all the time.’
    I said I’d teach her how to swim and I thought, now this is going to be fantastic, because she’s going to have to lie down on the water and I’m going to have to hold her up with my arms. She called out: ‘Alice! Lewis says he’s going to teach me to swim!’ But Mum wasn’t really paying us any attention. She was admiring the embroidery Mrs Gavrilovich had got out and all she did was smile and nod. The Gardenia Men looked from us to her. One of them lit a cigarette.
    We began the swimming lesson then and there. Valentina held on to one of my hands and I put my other arm under her stomach and she tried to kick her legs. The weight of her on my puny arm was greater than I’d expected, but it was a beautiful weight, like someone fallen from Michelangelo’s famous ceiling.
    Valentina wasn’t a bit nervous; almost straight away she just started giggling and then I began to giggle and soon we were laughing so much that Valentina began to swallow water and start coughing and so I had to set her down.
    â€˜You see, darling?’ she said. ‘I’m completely hopeless!’
    â€˜No, you’re not,’ I said. ‘You just have to trust me more and not hold yourself so rigid. I won’t let you go.’
    â€˜I’m no good, Lewis,’ she said; ‘I will never learn.’
    â€˜Yes, you will,’ I said. ‘You can’t live and die and not learn to swim.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    I couldn’t think of a reason, really. It wasn’t as if she lived in Devon or in a shack by the River Volga. So I said: ‘Because swimming is a defiance of gravity. Don’t you want to defy gravity, Valentina?’
    â€˜Defy gravity?’ she said. ‘I don’t know. Do I want to?’
    â€˜Yes,’ I said, ‘definitely.’
    â€˜All right, darling. If you say so. Here we go, then. We’ll try again.’
    She concentrated harder then. I could tell she was really trying. She’d tied her blonde hair up into a scrunch on her head, but little wisps of it came loose and trailed in the water. I began to steer her around and around in a circle. I told her she was doing great.
    â€˜You know my bum’s out of the water, darling,’ she said after a circuit or two. ‘You don’t see the bums of swimmers sticking up out of the water in the Olympics.’
    We began giggling again then. Valentina’s beautiful laugh echoed all round the pool and through my heart. I made her go on trying to swim because I didn’t want to let her go, and then when we stopped laughing I said to her: ‘You haven’t forgotten about Le Grand Meaulnes , have you, Valentina?’
    Lunch was served to us on a terrace overlooking a rose garden. Lawn sprinklers fanned water on to the roses all the time. Two tables away sat the Gardenia Men. A