With Emma at the Ladies-Only Swimming Pond on Hampstead Heath

In payment for those mornings at the mirror while, at her expense, I’d started my late learning in Applied French Braids, for all the mornings afterward of Hush and Just stand still, to make some small amends for every reg- iment- ed bathtime and short-shrifted goodnight kiss, I did as I was told for once, gave up my map, let Emma lead us through the woods “by instinct,” as the drunkard knew the natural prince. We had no towels, we had no “bathing costumes,” as the children’s novels call them here, and I am summer’s dullest hand at un- premeditated moves. But when the coppice of sheltering boxwood disclosed its path and posted rules, our wonted bows to seemliness seemed poor excuse. The ladies in their lumpy variety lay on their public half-acre of lawn, the water lay in dappled shade, while Emma in her underwear and I in an ill- fitting borrowed suit availed us of the breast stroke and a modified crawl. She’s eight now. She will rather die than do this in a year or two and lobbies, even as we swim, to be allowed to cut her hair. I do, dear girl, I will give up this honey-colored metric of augmented thirds, but not (shall we climb on the raft for a while?) not yet.