Learning to Swim Page 10

  I had made one other trip to Balmoral Road on my bike but the house was locked and dark. I even peered through the letter box, half expecting to hear the sound of yapping and paws skittering on the tiles, but there was nothing.

  Then it came at last, fluttering on to the mat in its airmail envelope, as light as an autumn leaf. I withdrew upstairs to my top bunk, closing the bedroom door in case the letter contained secrets that would otherwise escape. It had been posted two weeks ago: to Frances the events described would already be history.

  Dear Blush

  I’m writing this in the hotel room. It’s boiling hot and Mum is lying on the bed with nothing on. We’re having a great time – we’ve been to the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre and Notre-Dame where I lit a candle for you and one for Growth. It cost two francs. You have to put your money in this tin box but no one’s there checking. Mum keeps expecting me to talk French. I’ve tried telling her we only know stuff like ‘Il fait beau aujourd’hui’ and ‘Le chien est sous la table’ which is no good in shops or anywhere. There are loads of beggars in the underground with little bits of cardboard saying ‘J’ai faim’ – even I understood that! I gave one a franc and he said ‘Merci’ and I panicked and said ‘Merci’ back. I’ll never get used to this food – last night I ordered fish and that’s all I got – just a whole fish on a plate in a bit of sauce, staring at me. No chips or anything. I think I’ll stick to the steak from now on. Guess what? This morning we were in this café and guess who walked in? Lawrence. He’s in Paris for a few days at some architects’ conference so he’s taking us out to dinner.

  1 a.m. We’ve just come back from dinner with Lawrence. My feet are killing me. We went to this really flash place – Mum made me wear a dress and lent me a pair of her high heels. She was all dressed up of course. Lawrence speaks really good French – he didn’t ask us what we wanted or anything, he just went ahead and ordered a whole load of stuff – about six courses. And he bought Mum and me a red rose each from this chap with a bucket who was wandering around the tables. I’ve just tried to press mine between the pages of my journal but it’s gone a bit squashy. After dinner he took us to this club for more drink – I’d already had about two pints of Coke! – and you won’t believe it but there were these women on the stage, sort of formation dancing, wearing loads of feathers and sequins and stuff, but nothing on their boobs or bums! Honest! And no one except me even seemed to have noticed. Better not tell Dad about this place or he’ll be down here with his easel. I asked Mum afterwards if she’d seen them and she said yes, of course, and I said why did they have those bits showing, and she said, wait for it, ‘because a woman’s body is the most beautiful thing in creation’ and then I got a lecture about not being ashamed of my body because in the eyes of Nature even the ugliest woman is beautiful, not that I was at all ugly, etc etc. I think she was a bit sloshed actually. She’s fast asleep now, anyway. Tomorrow we’re off down south. Mum wants to find a nudist beach to get an all-over tan. Perhaps I’ll bury myself in sand, or stones, or whatever they have down there.

  lots of love

  Frances

  There were no all-over tans to be had in Skye. In fact we had to add layers of clothing as fast as Lexi had been shedding them. The holiday cottage we were renting was small and bare and bleakly furnished with cheap, mismatching chairs and tables that no normally inhabited house would have contained. It smelled empty – of stale air and unfilled cupboards and a faint suggestion of gas. Draughts blew in around the rattling windows making the curtains flutter; the night storage heaters raged for a couple of hours in the middle of the night but were cold as marble by morning. Mother had pulled a face at the decor but pronounced the place perfectly adequate ‘as a base’ – words which, threatening day-long hikes over the hills, made my heart sink. Father, having marked out his territory on the coffee table with piles of holiday reading, guide books, local history and a couple of Walter Scotts, seemed unperturbed. We had at least come prepared for the cold, with extra jumpers, thick socks and hot water-bottles.

  On the living-room wall was a crude oil-painting, executed in colours straight from the tube, of the view from the window – the garden wall, the gate, a frothy stream, some tussocky grass, a whitewashed cottage in the middle distance and, in the background, the Cuillins against a violent sunset. The day of our arrival was our only chance to compare the picture with the original as the following morning sheeting rain and mist swept in, turning the world beyond the windows a uniform grey. After three days of confinement to the house I had read all the books I had brought from home and moved on to the odd assortment of ancient hardbacks and broken-spined paperbacks on the dresser: Lord of the Flies, which I remembered seeing on Rad’s desk, and which mother predicted, wrongly, that I wouldn’t enjoy; Tropic of Cancer, into which I made furtive and troubling forays when unobserved, and The Call of the Wild, which was to do with dogs, and less interesting.

  By the fourth day it was decided that we would not let the weather spoil our plans any longer, and would go out in hail or flood. Shouldering the rucksack containing maps, sandwiches and a flask of hot soup, father led us, gloved and booted, plastic macks crackling as we walked, on a day’s march to Elgol and back. In the evening as a reward for blistered feet and raw noses, he drove for miles around the island in search of a fish and chip shop, returning an hour later with three lukewarm, greasy packages which we fell on like a pack of wolves. By tinkering with the night storage heaters father had managed to get the dial stuck at Constant so that they burnt ferociously day and night. No amount of adjustment would bring them to order. The wallpaper behind them, dry perhaps for the first time, started to lift away from the plaster; wet clothes draped over them dried to a crisp in half an hour; we awoke each morning with sore throats and cracked lips; mother had a migraine, and then another.

  At the end of the second week came a reprieve: after a walk to the nearest phone box to call Granny, mother returned with the news that she had fallen off a step-ladder while trying to dust the china on her topmost shelves, and hurt her back. She hadn’t broken anything, except the card table on which she had landed, but was bedbound and sore. We would have to go home; mother would have to look after her. Father concealed his disappointment: the end of the holiday meant the approach of another school term. I concealed my joy, as we loaded the car, locked up the cottage, and rode the heaving ferry to the Kyle of Lochalsh, the gateway to home.

  14

  When mother returned from her week in Bognor Regis acting as nursemaid to my grandmother, she announced her intention of learning to drive. The inconvenience of walking everywhere to pick up prescriptions, fetch shopping and run errands, and her inability to ferry her mother to the doctor’s surgery had convinced her that it was time she mastered what was sure to be a simple task. My father was horrified; the car was his refuge. In it he could slip off, without warning, who knew where. Another driver in the family would mean consultation, negotiation: it was unthinkable.

  ‘But why?’ he asked. ‘You don’t need to drive. I can take you anywhere you want to go. Any time. I’ll worry if I think you’re out on the road somewhere. It’s not safe.’

  There was a little flash of triumph in mother’s eyes. ‘Got you,’ it said.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she replied. ‘It’s ridiculous that I’ve gone all these years without learning. Everyone drives nowadays. I’d be no use to anyone in an emergency if I don’t drive.’

  ‘You’ll probably be the emergency if you do,’ said father. ‘Can’t you persuade her, Abigail?’

  I hesitated. Although I was bothered by the apparent pleasure mother was taking in her obstinacy, I could see no good reason for her not driving.

  ‘Think how much easier that journey to Skye would have been if we could have shared the driving,’ she went on, ignoring his last comment.

  ‘I didn’t mind,’ said Dad. ‘I’d be more nervous as a passenger. There’s no need for you to drive. If you ever want me to take you anywhere you know yo
u’ve only to ask.’

  ‘That’s not the point. I’d like to be able to drive myself.’

  ‘I can’t see what you’d have to gain.’

  ‘Freedom.’ At last the word was out in the open. Two different freedoms, and only one car. My mother won of course. Not because she shouted or ranted or had the better argument, but because in certain situations, where she could see the possibility of victory, her inflexibility was absolute. My father’s protestations were like drops of water bouncing off a great lump of jade: it wouldn’t be worn down in his lifetime. Sensibly he relented, even offering to teach her himself, but she was determined to do the thing properly, and twice a week the little red hatchback with its white dunce’s cap bearing the driving school’s insignia would glide up to the house to collect her, and bunny-hop away again with mother at the wheel. Gracious in defeat, father coached her on the Highway Code, took her out for practice drives around likely test routes, and bit back any words of advice that might be misconstrued. Her first two test failures left her rattled but not broken. After the third she said, ‘It looks as though I’m not destined to drive,’ devolving responsibility for her predicament upon a higher authority, the L-plates disappeared from the car and the subject was never raised again.

  It was father’s turn a few months later. This time it was his job that was the source of domestic tension. Having heard the chequered employment history of Mr Radley, I had never imagined that teaching Latin was anything other than a fine and admirable occupation. Nor had it occurred to me that there was anything wrong with staying in the same job for an entire career. It seemed the sensible thing to do. I was happy at school and had no inclination to leave; I couldn’t see why any teacher might want to. But about the time I had left Saint Bede’s, father’s Grammar School had become a Comprehensive. Naturally the technicalities of this were lost on me, but I was left in no doubt by my parents’ despondency and dark mutterings that this was a Bad Thing.

  ‘You see at the moment,’ father explained one morning, while laying bacon under the grill for breakfast, ‘the Grammar School only takes clever children like you – and heaven knows some of those are stupid enough.’ He switched on the gas which fanned out over the bacon while he hunted for the matches. ‘But when it turns Comprehensive,’ he struck a match, ‘we’ll have to take children who are very dim indeed,’ the gas ignited with a boom, ‘and teaching Latin to the very dim is much less agreeable than teaching it to the clever.’

  There was more to it than that, of course. Once the spirit of modernisation was on the march other changes followed. Latin and Greek, it was felt, were no longer as relevant as they had been, say, five years ago. Father and the Greek master would continue to teach the upper school, but the new intake would instead be taught a subject called Civics by a member of the History department. Father was happy to be relieved of his duties towards the very dim, but depressed all the same, and suppertimes, formerly an opportunity to recount the significant events of the day, became gloomy affairs presided over by the ghost of Civilisation, whose passing father would lament nightly.

  ‘It seems Shakespeare may be the next to go, poor fellow,’ he once said, as though referring to a member of staff. ‘There was quite a long meeting on the subject at lunchtime today – I always eavesdrop on these things to pick up the latest fatuity – and the conclusion was that the English department must find ways of making Shakespeare relevant.’ He sighed.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said mother, ‘is what is going to happen as each successive Grammar year leaves. I mean, there will come a time when there’s nobody left doing Latin. Then what happens to you?’

  ‘Ah,’ father said. ‘With each year that passes I am slowly being erased. Then what? Good question.’ But he didn’t have an answer, and the meal proceeded in uneasy silence.

  ‘Tony Inchwood has got a deputy headship,’ father reported over supper a few months after that conversation. ‘First person to be promoted out of the place in years.’

  ‘Tony Inchwood? What was he?’ said mother.

  ‘Head of languages.’

  ‘So his job will be vacant then.’

  ‘Not for long – the advert goes in the paper on Friday.’

  ‘You could apply for it – you teach a language. Of sorts.’

  ‘Oh, not me,’ said father, cutting a wedge of white bread from the end of the loaf and dipping it into his goulash gravy. ‘Wouldn’t have a hope.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ asked mother indignantly.

  ‘Too old.’

  ‘You’re not old – you’re only forty-nine.’

  ‘Fifty-one.’

  ‘Well, what’s two years?’

  ‘It sounds worse.’

  ‘But you’ve got nearly fifteen working years ahead of you. You can’t be expected to hang around in the same job all that time.’

  ‘Only recently you were worried that I wouldn’t be staying in the job for much longer,’ father pointed out, sweeping his bread around the plate, leaving a clean china trail. ‘Anyway, I don’t want to be head of languages – planning the German syllabus and stocktaking and running endless meetings. All that has nothing to do with teaching Latin.’

  ‘But you must apply for it,’ mother insisted. ‘Surely they’d be glad to give it to you after all you’ve done. And it would solve their problem of what to do with you.’ And before he’d finished his last swab of bread she had produced a pad of writing paper from the bureau. ‘Here you are.’

  ‘I don’t need to write – I’ll just mention to Roger that I’m vaguely interested. Not that I am,’ he added.

  ‘Oh no,’ mother said firmly. ‘We’re going to do this properly.’

  He didn’t get it of course. Having put himself to the trouble he was more disappointed than he’d expected, but stoical and magnanimous nevertheless. ‘It wasn’t a complete waste of time,’ he pointed out. ‘I’d been meaning to get this suit dry-cleaned for ages.’

  Mother’s sense of justice was outraged. ‘How could they?’ she shrilled, furious at the implied slight and that, after all, father should have been proved right. The victorious candidate was only thirty-two.

  ‘Looks even younger than that,’ said father. ‘He’s been in one of those big inner-city comprehensives. Terribly nice fellow. Just what we need, really.’

  ‘But don’t all those years of service count for anything?’ mother complained.

  Father gave a little smile. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Loyalty never goes unpunished.’

  15

  While my father’s career seemed to have stalled permanently, Frances’ parents were in the grip of change. Lexi had been promoted to something called a team leader. This meant more work and more money – money which didn’t somehow translate into new carpets or wallpaper, or the sort of things that windfalls in our house would provide. Lexi did buy an antique chaise longue for the sitting room, which looked rather odd alongside the gas fire and dralon sofa, and she would recline there with slices of cucumber over her eyes after a hard day of drafting reports or analysing survey results. Unfortunately this new acquisition soon became a favoured perch for Growth, and before long the elegant yellow brocade was covered for its own protection with a hairy dog-blanket. Mr Radley by contrast had taken another step down the ladder of commercial success. He had walked out of the lobby attendant’s job after a minor disagreement with the hotel manager. This was not, apparently, the first time he had left a job in such circumstances.

  ‘The trouble with Dad is that he’s got lots of principles,’ Frances explained. ‘And he’s always resigning on one or other of them.’ It was a Saturday morning and we were sitting at Lexi’s dressing table trying on her make-up. ‘He even resigned as caretaker of this private girls’ school in Hampstead, and that was his favourite job of all. Or was he sacked from that one? I can’t remember.’ She applied a plummy lipstick with an unsteady hand and pouted at herself in the mirror.

  ‘What does he do now?’ I asked, unaware that Mr Radley had
come into the room behind us.

  ‘He’s a sort of night watchman.’

  ‘What does he watch?’ I was craning towards my reflection, dragging a blunt eyeliner pencil under one eye to leave a thick broken line when I saw him in the mirror and started, jabbing myself.

  ‘The clock mostly,’ he said as I swung round, one eye streaming. ‘Now would you two trollops kindly clear off out of here so I can get some sleep.’

  Back in Frances’ room we looked at our painted faces and giggled. I had two flaming bars of orange blusher on my cheeks and one bloodshot eye ringed with black. Frances had silver shadow up to her eyebrows and a wobbly clown’s mouth. There was already a difference between us, though. I still looked like a girl trying on her mother’s make-up; she looked like a genuine slattern.

  Frances was rapidly becoming aware of her attractiveness to boys. At thirteen she already looked fifteen. This was partly on account of her figure. Although not especially tall, she was what my mother called, with a slight pursing of the lips, ‘well-developed’. She didn’t have that give-away skinniness which made my legs look the same width all the way down, like stilts. And she didn’t hunch her shoulders, in order to try and make herself invisible, but walked upright, confidently, chest out. It wasn’t just her appearance, though. Frances seemed to send out powerful signals, like radio waves, without even realising it. Whenever we went out together men on building sites or in passing lorries would whistle and leer, and she would yell ‘wanker’ furiously back at them before turning away with a smirk. It never happened to me when I was alone. She also had a knack of falling into conversation with strange men. There were always a few lads at the school bus-stop with whom she would exchange ongoing banter, and if some new arrival should present himself she had a way of raising her voice so that it became clear that her conversation, even with me, was a performance for his benefit. I found myself falling back on my ‘frozen peas’ mantra all too often in those days.