The True Line, Again

The Ivyholt Baths reopened to the public on the fourth of April, two years and three months after a councillor gave me six thousand pounds to open a truss.

There was a ceremony, because there is always a ceremony. There was a ribbon, and a speech from the leader of the council which contained the phrase “this administration’s commitment”, and a speech from Councillor Aluko which did not, and which mentioned by name the borough engineer who wrote the 1971 memo, a man called G. H. Steadman who has been dead since 1994 and who got, in the end, forty-nine years late, a round of applause in a room in Hackney.

Hester came in a coat that made her look like a woman who had personally financed the Renaissance. Kwame brought his mother. The scaffolder came, and cried, and denied it.

And then they let the public in, and within about four minutes the entire event stopped being about any of us.

I had not thought about the noise.

That is the single thing that none of the drawings tell you, and I have been doing this for nineteen years. Sixty feet of barrelled glass over a tiled box full of water and two hundred people, and the sound goes up, and hits the roof, and comes back down as one enormous joyful indistinguishable roar, and standing under it is like standing inside a bell being rung by children.

The chairs were gone from the deep end. I want that in the record. There were children in the deep end instead, about forty of them, and a swimming club from Homerton doing lengths in lanes three and four, and a very old woman in a floral cap doing an extremely slow and completely unbothered breaststroke down the middle of everything, who I later learned had learned to swim in that pool in 1953.

Daniel found me by the ticket booth, where the original green tiles are, cleaned now, worth more than the roof.

“Look up,” he said.

“I’ve looked up.”

“Look up again.”

So I looked up. Fourteen trusses. The new steel visible where it was supposed to be visible, painted a grey that admits what it is. And on truss four, at the west end, the old shoe — the lead still packed in the crack, the 1968 bolt still in it, conserved, carrying nothing, doing nothing whatsoever.

A boy of about seven was pointing at it and asking his father what it was, and his father said, “I don’t know, mate. Something old.”

Which is exactly right, and is the best review I have ever had.

—

Martin came. I had not expected him to and I had not asked.

He is in Glasgow now — he took a section job with a Scottish orchestra in the September after everything, a proper contract with a pension in it, the first one of his life — and he flew down for a thing of his own and came to Ivyholt because, he said, “you’ve been going on about this pool since 2023 and I’d like to see if it was worth it.”

We stood at the shallow end for about fifteen minutes with the noise coming down off the roof.

“It was worth it,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“I’d like to say something and then I’m going to go and get a train.”

“Go on.”

“I’m alright,” Martin said. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I’m playing four nights a week and I’m section, and there’s a woman called Suze who is much nicer than me and thinks I’m funny, and I bought a kettle.” He glanced sideways. “Eleven quid. It’s rubbish. I think about it most days, which is stupid.”

“It’s not stupid.”

“It is a bit.” He watched the old woman in the floral cap go past. “I’m not going to tell you I’ve forgiven you, because I don’t know what I’d be handing over, and I’ve stopped believing in the ceremony of it. But I’m not carrying it about any more, and I wanted you to hear that from me rather than from my father, who is going to be pleasant to you at some point in the next five years and won’t mean it yet.”

“How is he?”

“Eighty in November. Furious about it.” Martin put his hands in his pockets. “Right. That’s me.”

And then — and this is the thing I have thought about most since — he said: “The roof’s very good, Tess. I don’t understand a single thing about it and I can tell it’s very good.”

Then he went off to get a train to Euston, and that was the last proper conversation we have had, and it was a good one, and both of those facts are allowed to be true.

—

I stayed until nearly six, which is when they close the pool to the public and hand it to the clubs.

Daniel came back with two teas from the machine in the foyer, which are terrible, and we sat on the bottom row of the spectator benches with our feet on the tiles and the hall emptying out.

Ada was there, somewhere, being sixteen at a distance of about thirty feet, which is her preferred operating range and which I have learned not to close. She had come “to see the thing”, and had spent forty minutes photographing the tiles, and was going to get the bus with her friend, and had said “bye Tess” on the way out in a voice of total, unremarkable, everyday flatness, which took two years and which is the single best thing I have ever been given.

We live in Leyton now. Not his flat and not Verity’s top floor — a third place, rented, with a bad boiler and a garden the size of a rug, since last August. There is a chess set on the table permanently set up mid-game, and neither of us is allowed to move it.

“I’ve got something,” Daniel said.

“You’ve got tea.”

“I’ve got something else.” He reached into his bag and took out a roll of paper — A3, not A1, which mattered to me obscurely — and unrolled it on the bench between us, and put his hand flat on one corner.

It was a floor plan.

Not Ivyholt. Not a school, not a library, not a job I recognised. A ground floor and a first floor of a small Victorian terrace, drawn properly, by hand, in his hand, with the dimensions written in the way he writes dimensions.

“What is this?”

“It’s the house on Pevensey Road,” he said. “The one with the terrible kitchen extension that we walked past in February and you said something rude about the guttering.”

“That house is for sale.”

“That house is for sale.”

I did not say anything for a moment.

“There are two bedrooms and a box room,” Daniel said, “and the box room is the whole argument, because Ada’s got two more years of school in her and then she’s gone, and you can’t buy a house for somebody’s school holidays, except that you can, and I’m going to. And that’s a wall that isn’t coming out—“ he tapped it “—because I’ve assumed it’s structural, and if I’m right the kitchen stays a stupid shape and if I’m wrong we get the thing you drew on a napkin in November.”

“You drew the napkin thing up.”

“I drew the napkin thing up.”

“Daniel—“

“I’m not asking you today,” he said. “I want to be clear about that, because you’ve had one of these before and it ended in a solicitor called Mr Vaz. This is a drawing. It’s a thing I did on Sundays. You can look at it and hand it back and we’ll never mention it, and I’d like you to know now that that would be a completely acceptable outcome and I’d be fine, and that’s not the door, that’s just true.”

The hall was almost empty. Somewhere at the deep end a whistle went and a coach shouted a number.

I looked at the drawing for a long time.

Then I put my thumbnail on the long line of the party wall and ran it, slowly, all the way from the front elevation to the back.

He watched me do it. He always has.

“What are you feeling for?” he said.

Two years and three months. The same question, in the same building, from the same man, with a different everything.

The first time he asked me, I gave him a true answer about paper grain and hesitation and handwriting, and then I went home and did not tell my husband a single thing about my day, and noticed myself not telling him, and stepped over it like a puddle without breaking stride.

“I’m listening to it,” I said.

“To the drawing.”

“To the drawing.” My nail came to the junction where the back addition meets the return, where a person who was fudging it would have fudged it. The line ran clean. One movement, with the grain, no catch, no correction, nothing copied off another sheet to make a number work. “You didn’t hesitate anywhere.”

“No.”

“Not once. Not at the box room, not at the wall, not at the bit where you’ve had to guess the foundation.” I went back over it to be sure, because I am what I am. “You drew the whole thing in one go, on a Sunday, knowing exactly what it was.”

“Yes.”

“You can tell when someone’s hesitating in handwriting,” I said. “I told you that in January, in this room, when I was somebody else.”

“You did. You also said lying was a bigger claim.”

“It is. It’s a much bigger claim.” I put my hand flat on the paper, next to his, not touching it. “I’ve never been able to feel a lie in a drawing. I’ve never met anyone who could. You can only feel the not-quite-sure.”

“And?”

“There isn’t any,” I said.

He let out a breath.

“Right,” he said, and started, very carefully, to roll it up.

“Don’t,” I said. “Leave it out a bit.”

So we left it out a bit, on a bench, on the fourth of April, in a swimming pool built in 1903, and drank two terrible teas, and argued for about twenty minutes about whether a wall on a drawing was structural, and I thought he was probably right and did not say so immediately, because there is no reason to hand a man everything at once.

It was a Thursday. Neither of us chose that. Both of us noticed.

And at half past six we got our coats — his is still beautiful, and still wool, and still an act of optimism, and he has now had it ten years and will not be told — and we walked out through the double doors and up Ivyholt Road towards the bus stop, past the corner where he used to go left and I used to go right.

We went the same way.

That’s all. That’s the whole event. If you’d filmed it you’d have thirty seconds of two people carrying a rolled-up drawing to a bus stop.

There was nothing forbidden left in any of it, and I want to tell you that this was a disappointment — that the wanting had needed the wall to push against, that ordinary Thursdays are a lesser thing than stolen ones.

It isn’t true. I checked. I have run my nail along that line about four hundred times since, and it doesn’t catch.