The Lido at Closing Time

The lido closed at eight in September, and at ten to eight there was only ever one person still in the water, and that was Jude.

Cora did not mind. She was on the closing shift, which meant the chairs, and the flags, and the long slow walk round with the net for leaves, and she could do all of that with somebody in the water. Especially that somebody. He swam the way he did everything, unhurriedly and without splashing, up the long side and back down the long side in a line so straight you could have hung a picture by it.

She started with the chairs. There were forty of them, striped, and by the end of a warm day they had wandered all over the terrace, following the sun, and she brought them back in twos and stacked them under the café awning. It was a good job. You could see the results.

The water was the colour water is at that hour, which is no colour at all, just a lit thing with the sky in it. The pool lights had come on under the surface, pale green, and Jude went up and down through them like something being slowly developed.

Then the flags. Then the net.

The net was on a long pole and she walked the edge with it, lifting out the leaves that had come down from the poplars, one at a time, and a wasp that had made a bad decision, and a hair tie. The leaves went in the bucket. The wasp went on the wall, to think it over.

“Two more,” said Jude, going past.

“Two more,” said Cora.

The café was shut, the shutters down, but the smell of it was still there, chips and sun cream and chlorine, which is the smell of every lido in the world and could not be sold in a bottle, though people would buy it. The changing rooms had been hosed. The sky over the far wall was going pink at the bottom and a deep, clean blue at the top, and a plane went across it, high, with the sun still on it, though the sun was gone from everything else.

Cora leaned on the net and watched him do his two more.

Up. The turn, which he did without touching the wall, because he never touched the wall. Down. The last length slower than the others, always, as if the water were something he wanted to leave politely.

He stopped at the shallow end with his arms on the edge and his chin on his arms and looked at her.

“Cold?” she said.

“Lovely.”

“Liar.”

“Lovely and cold.”

She threw him the towel. It landed on his head. He left it there a moment, then climbed out with it, and stood dripping on the warm stone with the towel round his shoulders, and the pool went still behind him, the last of the ripples going out to the edges and coming back and giving up.

Cora did the final walk. Doors, gate, taps. She turned the pool lights off from the box by the office, and the green went out of the water, and the water went dark, and then it was just the sky, upside down, in a rectangle.

Jude waited by the turnstile with his hair wet and his bag over his shoulder, smelling of chlorine and evening.

She locked the office. She locked the gate. It had a padlock that stuck, and she did the thing you had to do to it, which was to lift and turn at the same time, which had taken her a whole summer to learn.

They went out along the path between the hedges. Behind them the lido lay empty, with its forty chairs stacked and its flags down and its water holding the sky.

“Same tomorrow?” said Jude.

“Same tomorrow.”

He put his damp arm round her. She let him.

The poplars let one more leaf go, slowly, onto the water, where nobody would net it until morning.