The Swimming Pool

Céleste Fontaine wasn’t the name she was given at birth, but it was the name she went by when she turned eighteen and stopped talking to her stepfather, who, over the years, had stolen close to fifty thousand pounds from her.

At first, he told people she knew small things ahead of time, like what would be for dinner or that it would rain the next morning. Then he said she could foresee catastrophes, like the time when a red Triumph Herald came out of nowhere and clipped them en route to her Thursday morning swimming class.

He claimed, nights before it happened, that she spoke in her sleep about their black Cocker Spaniel being stuffed into the rucksack of a young man on a motorbike while they were walking along the beach. He even advertised her prediction that the US President would be assassinated in 1963 when she was just eight years old. 

When the US President was indeed shot dead, Céleste became a national fascination. People came from all over the country and even Europe to hear her predictions and ask questions about their lives. With blonde ringlets and bright red cheeks that matched her dress, Céleste told the crowds things they did and didn’t want to hear.

Radio stations, magazines, and the big papers interviewed her. She was a child star, and, with her money, her stepfather bought a seven-bedroom house straddling the Oxfordshire- Gloucestershire border with a bright green tennis court. He paid for Céleste to take lessons with a man who twice tried to kiss her on the mouth for executing the perfect serve.

It wasn’t until ten years later, when she found herself without enough in her purse for a box of tampons, that Céleste suddenly came to a realisation about her stepfather.

She cut her hair off with kitchen scissors, announced she was retiring, and cancelled her upcoming shows in London and Manchester. She found cash in her mother’s wardrobe, took the lot, leaving the glass jar empty, and moved to the south coast, into the hotel room next to mine.

When I first saw Céleste, it was a hot mid-July morning, and she was on her hotel room balcony, pegging a silk blouse onto the washing line with a blue scarf tied loosely around her short blonde hair. At first, I didn’t realise it was her. She didn’t look the same as she did on the magazine covers and London billboards. The heavy makeup, glamorous clothes, and long ringlets were gone. She stood there with slumped shoulders and chipped white paint on her toenails.

She glanced across at me, and I was flustered, doubly because I was holding an unlit cigarette that I wasn’t meant to have. Though how could she have known I’d promised my husband I’d quit before we moved into our new house? I slid the cigarette back into the packet, and the packet back into my linen trouser pocket.

“Hello,” I said.

The swimming pool below us was turquoise and rectangular with rounded edges, like a playing card. It glistened in the heat of the morning sun.

“I’m Céleste,” she smiled and reached her small hand across the narrow divide between our two balconies.

Her hand was soft, and she smelt faintly of honeysuckle.

“Mabel,” I said.

“My grandmother was called Mabel,” she said. “She had a bob like yours, too—pretty eyes.”

I’d always wished for a name that was more fun.

“This’ll sound odd,” I said. “But you didn’t use to go by another name, did you?” 

We stood talking on our balconies for much longer than I thought we would. She said she often got bored and played the radio late at night so she didn’t feel lonely.

Her biological father died from kidney failure six months after she was born. I told her mine had died the day after my tenth birthday in a motorbike accident. She asked me if my replacement father bordered on evil, too.

Suddenly, she brushed her hand along the wooden rail and swore.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“I think it’s a splinter,” she said. She held her hand up in front of her eyes.

“Do you have tweezers?”

“None.”

“Come over to my room,” I said. “I’ll sort you out.” 

“Won’t your husband mind?”

“He’s playing tennis.”

We were supposed to be renovating our first home in Salcombe, but my husband spent more time hitting balls. Perhaps that’s why I hadn’t given up smoking; perhaps that’s why I didn’t feel bad about insisting we stayed in the most expensive hotel on the south coast.

I carefully pulled a dark brown splinter from Céleste’s thumb and offered her a glass of Merlot. We sat dangerously on the white bed sheets to drink it, with our sandals kicked off onto the green carpet. Céleste’s were the same shade of turquoise-blue as the swimming pool, with tiny leather flowers across the straps.

After two glasses, she told me about her stepfather and her life on the stage and all the drugs she started to take when she was barely a teenager. They were given to her in a soft velvet pouch, like jewellery.

“And I’m broke now,” Céleste said. “The hotel owner knew of me. She came to one of my shows years ago. She lets me stay here for under half the usual price. Sometimes I help out on Sundays, take a few bookings, shine the brass.”

I couldn’t imagine her shining brass.

“I don’t mind it,” she said. It was as though she could hear my thoughts. “It’s that or go back to my father. I can’t ever do that. Christ, he’d make my life hell.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Tell me, Mabel,” she said after a moment. “Have you ever had your cards read before?”

“My cards?”

“Tarot,” she said.

 I told her I hadn’t.     

Céleste drained her glass, left the room, and came back with a blue beaded bag and a smooth, circular rose quartz. We lowered ourselves onto the carpet, legs folded, the room a little unsteady from the wine. Then she told me to choose three cards and turn them the right way up.

They all had the same striking, bright colours.

The next morning, I woke with a new feeling of optimism and dressed quicker than I did most days. Céleste was stretched out across one of the green-striped sun loungers as my husband and I walked to breakfast. She wore a navy blue swimsuit, a green paisley headscarf, and a pair of cat-eye sunglasses that covered most of her face. She waved hello to me, and I waved back. She was eating a cold slice of pepperoni pizza from a cardboard takeaway box.   

On the way back from breakfast, the cardboard takeaway box had been tucked beneath the sun lounger, and Céleste was sitting with two women I half-recognised. She was reading their cards. My husband walked ahead of me, full of bacon and raring for another morning of tennis. I called out to him.

“I’ll catch you later.” He barely heard me.

Yvette had honey-blonde hair, a West London accent, and she wore a blue floral dress that was two sizes too big for her startling pale body. The other woman, Gerta, came from the American-occupied quarter of Berlin, wore her jet-black hair in finger curls, and smoked like nicotine was her oxygen. And I thought I was bad. Consequently, the late-morning air was thick with the prematurely nostalgic smell of cigarette smoke, chlorine, and Yvette's coconut sun lotion. Gerta slipped Céleste a slim wad of banknotes.

“Céleste’s been making me realise a thing or two about my life,” Gerta said.

“I haven’t told you a thing.” 

“Well, your cards did.” Gerta flicked her left hand around. It was adorned in a large diamond ring, and her fingernails were painted cherry red.

“What did they say?” I said, thinking back to what the cards had told me the night before.

“I should leave my fiancé,” Gerta said. “He’s no good.”

“What’s he done?” I said.

“Nothing,” Gerta said, “That’s the problem, there’s no romance, no compliments, no affection anymore. He makes me feel drab. I feel like I’m engaged to an old man.”

She twisted the ring and held her lipstick between her fingers the same way she held her cigarette. She applied it to her lips in a thin, abrupt line.

“You are marrying an old man, darling. He’s what—fifty-seven?” Yvette said. “I need to get back into riding. That’s what the cards told me.”

“Horses?” I said.

Yvette laughed. “Yes, darling, horses. I used to be very good, but I felt too fat for it after I had the children. I was always sure I'd snap the poor horse’s spine.”

She was as slim as a flower stem.

“Do you believe in tarot?” Gerta turned to me with a wide grin. Her teeth were white and round like pearls.

“I think so.” I looked at Céleste. Her smile reached her eyes, even under those large, glamorous sunglasses that I wished were mine.  

We met there by the swimming pool most mornings after breakfast. Slowly, more women joined us until there were around seven or eight of us, and we had to take turns sitting on the white marble floor. Whoever was having their cards read always got to sit on the sun loungers.

One woman decided to sign up for a poetry course at her local library, another decided to apply for a job as an accountant at a big law firm, and another began selling the clothes she sewed by hand (a decision that eventually grew into a multi-million-pound business).

I called our architect and told him I’d drawn up the plans for our kitchen, exactly the way I wanted them, with deep blue tiles, a small hatch window, and a large white stove that would be perfect for cooking in batches.

I was going to perfect my stews and casseroles, and I was going to start a lunchtime takeaway business. That way, I’d have my own income. This, I decided, was what the cards had meant when they said I was suppressing a dream.   

It didn’t take long for our husbands and fiancées to catch wind of what had been going on down by the swimming pool, especially after Gerta did indeed leave her older fiancée in a spectacular row involving a flying tuna steak at dinner.    

My husband woke me from a nap after tennis one afternoon.

“Mabel.” His orange-golden skin was still sticky with sweat. “What’s been going on down at the swimming pool?” 

“The swimming pool?” I stretched my stiff arms up over my head.

“Rob said you’re all behaving like witches.” His eyes were wide and his expression serious.

It was a struggle not to laugh.

“You mean the tarot cards?” I propped myself up on a soft feather pillow. “Nonsense, it’s just for fun.”

“Gerta left her husband just for fun?”

“Fiancé,” I said. “I’m not going to leave you, if that's what you’re worried about. Not yet—anyway.”

My husband didn’t laugh.

“What did they say about me?”

I hadn’t asked the cards anything about him directly, but it was very on-brand of him to assume that I had. 

“You should play less tennis.”

“I’ll go jump in the shower.”

At the pool after breakfast the next morning, Céleste stood facing the hotel manager with her hands wedged deeply into her fleshy hips, wearing a floaty beige dress in a beautiful mosaic-like pattern.

The hotel owner pursed her red lips, and Yvette’s husband, whose name I could never remember, stood next to him with folded arms. Yvette and the other women remained reclined on the sun loungers, watching Yvette’s husband and the hotel manager through narrowed eyes. 

That morning, Gerta had checked out of the hotel. She stepped into a black cab with all seven of her suitcases. She was wearing her soon-to-be ex-husband’s Tag Heuer and allegedly held a cigarette in each hand. 

“She should be put in jail with all the other feminists.” Yvette’s husband pointed a finger first at Céleste and then towards the hotel owner. 

The hotel owner was a petite, slim woman with oval glasses and a slick grey bun. Her navy suit dress was perfectly pressed, and she kept her gaze tightly fixed on Yvette’s husband.

“I don’t want her corrupting my wife any longer.” His cheeks turned the same colour as his salmon-pink shirt.

“I’m sorry Céleste.” The hotel owner said without meeting her eyes. “This arrangement has to work for both of us. You’re disturbing the guests.”

The thought of Céleste going back to her father made my insides turn green.

“She’s not disturbing me,” Yvette said, loudly.

“If Céleste has to leave, my sister and I will go early,” another woman said.

“Ladies—” the hotel owner pushed her oval glasses up into her hair.

“I don’t want to spend my day playing tennis with my husband,” said a woman who wasn’t in fact me. “I want to be here by the pool. I want to get my cards read.”

“Perhaps a word, Céleste, in my office.”

“I’ll go too, if Céleste does,” I said. “I’ll tell my husband I’m bored of the place.”

“You’re booked in until the eighth of next month,” the hotel owner said.

“I know,” I said.

Yvette’s husband lowered himself onto the edge of his wife’s sun lounger as Céleste followed the hotel manager past the swimming pool and down a long, tall corridor that only the staff ever went down.

Yvette didn’t open her eyes. I reached into my handbag and took out a nail file to distract myself from the churning feeling inside my stomach. I felt strongly that if Céleste was forced back to her father, my dreams would somehow go with her.

Yvette's husband tapped his wife on the knee, but she ignored him, looking as though she was drifting off into sleep.

The hotel owner came back with Céleste following closely behind her. Yvette’s husband shot up onto his feet with a smile that fell flat. 

“Miss Fontaine will be staying with us for as long as she’d like to,” the hotel owner said. “On the condition that she doesn’t tell anyone what to do with their personal lives.”

“Céleste doesn’t tell anyone to do anything.” Yvette’s eyes were still shut. “People just take whatever they need to hear.”

“Come on, Yvette, let’s go.” Her husband reached out for her hand, but her fingers remained flat against the green-striped fabric of the sun lounger.

“I’m quite happy here,” Yvette said. “But you can go, if you want to.”

Yvette’s husband slapped his hand against his thigh and kicked the leg of the sun lounger where his still unbothered wife lay. She shooed him away with two sharp flicks of her hand.

Slowly, to the sound of her husband’s retreating footsteps, she sat up to massage pink petroleum jelly into her lips.

Yvette stayed at the hotel for two more weeks after her husband returned to West London, then filed for divorce and alimony. In response, he fired their children’s nanny and sent both kids to a boarding school halfway up the country. Yvette bought herself a slim, porcelain-white horse from an old friend.

I did not divorce my husband that year or the year after, though I did have my way with the kitchen, and he stopped playing quite so much tennis.

Every Sunday evening, he helped me chop vegetables for my stews and casseroles, and I left them to simmer on the black round hobs of the large white oven that looked even better in person than in the catalogue. The smooth oak hatch window opened onto the high street, and the lunchtime takeaway’s menu featured a sort of Art Nouveau face that vaguely looked like me by one of the women from the hotel.

Céleste often dropped by to read my cards and help eat leftovers, and my husband knew better than to complain about it. She’d bought a small flat two streets over with a cobblestone garden that overlooked the harbour. Her hair had grown long again, and she’d started doing reading evenings for groups of women in their homes, like Tupperware parties, except more popular.  

It was also rumoured that her father had lost the seven-bedroom house with the bright green tennis court, though Céleste was glad not to have any way of knowing whether or not this was true.      

Rachel Makinson is a UK-based writer and editor, with a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from Newcastle University. Her work has been featured by several magazines and journals, including Otherwise Engaged Literature and Arts Journal, Marrow Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, Scribbled, Tabula Rasa Review, and the London Independent Story Prize.