Learning to Swim Read online

  ‘Oh very dignified,’ said Mr Radley, striding off indoors.

  ‘Here, Rad, load these up,’ Lexi ordered, considering the argument well won. She pointed to her own large cases and Frances’ and my smaller ones. ‘I’ve got to go and change.’

  By this time Frances had finished with the laundry and had joined Rad and me in the drive. ‘I suppose I’ll have to spend next week driving Dad all over the south-east with his paintings,’ said Rad gloomily, slinging the bags into the boot. ‘What a waste of time. He hasn’t flogged a single one in five years.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Frances. ‘Rain’s forecast all next week.’

  ‘Ssh,’ said Rad, at the sound of approaching footsteps. But it was only Lexi, dressed for the journey in white jeans, red boots and a poncho which looked as though it might have been made from Growth’s least favourite car rug. Her hair was pinned up in a French pleat and a large pair of red-rimmed sunglasses covered half her face. The car keys dangled from her middle finger.

  ‘We’re off,’ she called back into the house. ‘See you in Arras. Look after him,’ she said to Rad.

  Mr Radley had the good grace to appear in the doorway, waving, as we reversed out of the drive. ‘Behave yourself,’ was his final injunction. Frances was already rummaging through a box of cassettes looking for some suitable music. Between us on the back seat was a plastic sack full of sweets which Cecile had given Frances for the journey – lollipops and sherbet fountains and liquorice pipes – as if we were eight-year-olds.

  ‘Well, girls, I hope I can leave all the French speaking to you,’ Lexi said, glancing in the mirror. I wasn’t worried. There was no chance of Lexi fading into the background in any dialogue with officialdom, and her combination of polite and well-projected English and ferocious smiling would bring far quicker results than our bumbling O-level French. The journey to Folkestone was largely taken up with her delivering one of her lectures or exhortations. This one was on the preferability of the Many as opposed to the One, in the matter of boyfriends. ‘When I was your age my friends and I all went around together in a gang – it never occurred to us what sex we were. If one of the boys wanted to see a film he might issue a general invitation, and any one of the girls might go with him. There was never any pairing off. Much better that way.’

  Frances and I would have been happy to number half a dozen boys amongst our acquaintance. Apart from Rad and Nicky there was only the bus-stop brigade – the lads from the Boys’ High with whom Frances enjoyed an on-going flirtation, and to whom I was about as interesting as her hockey stick. Less interesting, in fact, since the hockey stick could be seized and used for lifting skirts and making lewd gestures.

  We were also instructed not to marry before the age of thirty. It was something to be contemplated only when all other areas of experience had been exhausted. This was puzzling. Lexi had married at twenty-three and didn’t have the air of a woman plagued by missed opportunity. Another of Lexi’s great precepts was that a girl should have no secrets from her mother. It was, of course, perfectly permissible for Frances to have secrets for recreational purposes, as it were, but she should never feel there was any subject that could not be broached.

  ‘All right. What’s oral sex?’ asked Frances.

  Lexi blenched slightly, before offering an explanation in measured terms. Frances feigned retching.

  ‘Anything else you want to ask?’ said Lexi, confident that the worst was over.

  ‘Have you ever read my diary?’

  ‘No, never,’ said Lexi without a moment’s hesitation. ‘Mum read my diary when I was about your age because she thought I was seeing an unsuitable boy. There wasn’t anything the least bit incriminating in it, but it was years before I forgave her. She should have known that the mere fact that I kept a diary was proof of my innocence. As soon as I started doing the things she disapproved of I abandoned the diary altogether. So you see I don’t need to read yours – all the time you’re writing it I know you’re behaving yourself.’

  Frances was flabbergasted.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Why did you marry Dad?’

  Lexi seemed more taxed by this question than by the earlier ones. I was shocked by it too, since it seemed to imply that Frances considered it an odd match, and although I had often privately wondered how two such divergent characters came together it felt like the sort of question which should never even occur to the product of the union.

  ‘I loved him,’ Lexi said finally. ‘I mean I still do,’ she added as an afterthought.

  Once on the ferry we put our watches forward an hour, which made it lunchtime, so we ate our sandwiches, and then Lexi spread out her poncho on one of the long seats on deck and fell asleep in the sun. Frances and I roamed the corridors of the boat, losing the last of our English change on the slot machines, sniggering at our fellow passengers and gazing in the windows of the duty-free shops. Just outside Boulogne Lexi woke up, looking slightly crumpled, imprints of poncho tassels marking her cheeks, and disappeared to the Ladies to repair herself. She returned carrying a plastic bag containing two bottles of perfume – Chanel No. 5 for Frances and No. 19 for me. I was speechless with gratitude and delight. I had never been given such a lavish and frivolous gift before, had never in fact had any perfume of my own. An occasional squirt of my mother’s Tweed and a forbidden dab of her ancient and acidulated bottle of Joy was the limit of my experience. I could hardly bear to disturb the packaging, whereas Frances immediately tore into hers and began spraying herself with a vigour which put me in mind of mother taking on the aphids.

  ‘Steady,’ Lexi reproved mildly. ‘The effect you are after is one of subtlety.’

  As the car rolled on to French tarmac I gave Frances a significant look, though the moment could not be expected to impress her so forcefully, seasoned traveller as she was. I scanned the scenery for signs of foreignness as Lexi, map open on the seat beside her, guided us along the right-hand side of the road towards Paris, our first stop. TOUTES DIRECTIONS/AUTRES DIRECTIONS offered one road sign. Frances and I devised a game which involved guessing the meaning of the advertising slogans on the hoardings by the side of the road: sometimes even identifying the product was hard enough.

  Lexi, following established practice, was avoiding the motorway on account of the tolls, and, she said, to give us a better view of the countryside. Occasionally she would turn our music down to point out some church or monument, and we would be obliged to nod and enthuse. ‘I’m only doing this so you have something interesting to write in your diaries,’ she said.

  Frances, sated by a big lunch and our earlier gorging on sweets, and half hypnotised by the chequered sunlight flashing through the windows, had soon dozed off and, fearful of being drawn into a conversation with Lexi in case it took a confessional turn, I closed my eyes too, mindful that I was missing my first experience of Abroad, and was pretty soon asleep.

  We awoke to find that the fields and poplars and dusty linear villages had given way to the outskirts of Paris. The air was hazy with petrol fumes, and to either side of the road were grey factories, demolition yards full of wrecked cars, and grim, pastel-coloured apartment blocks with porthole windows, like giant cheese graters against the sky. Hoardings flashed past, streaked with grime. Much of the graffiti was in English, evidently the international language of hooliganism.

  ‘Yuk,’ said Frances, rubbing her eyes. ‘What a dump.’

  But there in the distance was the gleaming eggshell white of Sacré Coeur and the blurred silhouette of the Eiffel Tower, remembered from a thousand books and postcards. Our hotel was in Montmartre, not quite in view of Sacré Coeur itself, but on a pavement clogged with parked cars and pigeon droppings. On the pavement opposite a woman in a leather jacket and leopard print miniskirt was standing in the doorway of a sex cinema, scratching mosquito bites on her thigh and wearily exhorting passing men to step inside.

  PERVERSIONS

  COCHONNERIES

  a faded poster in th
e window promised.

  ‘Piggy perversions!’ said Frances delightedly. Lexi pulled a face.

  The doorway of the hotel was guarded, indeed blocked, by a sleeping Alsatian, who staggered to his feet and limped off to a distant corner of the lobby after we had all stepped carefully over him. The proprietress, Madame Orselly, a small dumpy woman with dyed red hair, greeted Lexi and Frances with rapture, kissing them twice on each cheek. ‘And this is Abigail, our girlfriend.’ Lexi introduced me, and more bonjours were exchanged before Madame Orselly summoned a spotty youth from the back room to take our bags upstairs. Even in the early evening of a bright sunny day the staircases and corridors were in darkness and our porter and guide would periodically slap switches indicated by a glowing orange bulb which would give us a few seconds’ murky light before clicking off. I couldn’t help noticing that the walls seemed to tremble as we trooped past, and on reaching out to touch the wallpaper, I realised that they weren’t solid at all, but made of a piece of floral fabric stretched between a frame, flimsy as a stage set.

  Our room had a double bed and a single covered with blue candlewick bedspreads, balding in places, rose wallpaper bleached by the sun, and an ornately carved dark wood wardrobe, almost big enough to park a car in. A hardboard partition, faced in the same rose paper and not quite reaching the ceiling, divided the ensuite facilities from the rest of the room. These consisted of a chipped sink, a squat, square bath with ledge for sitting on, and a bidet on wheels. After dismissing the porter untipped, Lexi stripped down to her knickers and, tossing the bolster aside, lay stretched out on the single bed with a flannel over her eyes.

  ‘I’m going to recover for an hour or so before dinner,’ she said, blindly. ‘You girls can explore if you like.’

  Our explorations took us no further than the bar downstairs, where we sat and drank lemonade and made a fuss of the dog, who was called Boubous, and passed critical comment on the arriving and departing clientele. Madame Orselly brought us a glass of pastis each and a carafe of water, setting them down on the table with a wink, and a burst of French of which we understood not a word, and we responded with nods and smiles and mercis until she retreated, satisfied.

  When Lexi came down an hour later we were both slightly giggly. Not from the pastis, which both of us had found undrinkable – Frances anyway having a puritanical disapproval of alcohol – but from our attempts to dispose of it discreetly without hurting Madame Orselly’s feelings. Tipping it into the carafe had to our surprise and mirth made the water turn cloudy, and we had resorted to slopping a little of the mixture into a vase of plastic chrysanthemums in an alcove behind us each time the proprietress’s back was turned.

  We dined in the hotel from the sixty-franc menu. Assorted Pork-Butcher’s Meat offered the translation of Charcuterie. Frances and I stuck with pâté and steak, items which were at once familiar and foreign – the pâté served with mashed potato and gherkins and the steak, despite being bien cuit, still leaking blood into the chips. Lexi had quails, pathetic, wizened creatures with barely a mouthful of meat on them, and haricots verts thin as bootlaces.

  For pudding Lexi insisted we all had crêpes flambéed at the table, even though Frances and I had been coveting the chocolate mousse we had seen being ferried to other diners.

  ‘I don’t want any alcohol with mine,’ said Frances primly, as the chef sloshed amaretto into the pan and ignited it with a pop.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Lexi. ‘You can’t flamber in Coca-Cola. Alcohol won’t hurt you in these quantities.’ She had had a modest half-bottle of red wine with her dinner. ‘Delicious,’ she said, spearing a dripping corner of pancake.

  ‘It’s poison,’ said Frances vehemently, trying to squeeze as much of the liquid out of hers as she could with her knife and fork. It was only over the course of this holiday that Frances’ aversion – which I had previously thought a pointless affectation – along with much else which puzzled me about the Radleys, began to make sense.

  22

  Early the following morning we settled down to planning our brief visit to Paris. Frances and Lexi had done the sights before, but I hadn’t and time was short. I was invited to nominate two places of interest. My choice of the Eiffel Tower was vetoed by Lexi. It was boring, overrated and best viewed from afar. Notre-Dame, my second choice, was acceptable, but no one could visit Paris without seeing the Louvre. In the end we found ourselves deposited at the Louvre by Lexi to look around while she went shopping. She left us instructions to meet her at a particular café in the Champs Elysées at one. When we arrived, footsore from pounding through the galleries, we found her ensconced at a table with Lawrence, an empty bottle of champagne between them. Frances later explained that Lawrence attended an architects’ conference in Paris every year at this time and regularly met up with them, although Lexi seemed to present his arrival as a fortuitous coincidence. ‘Look who’s here!’ she exclaimed as we threaded our way between the tables towards them. ‘Surprise surprise!’ said Lawrence, raising his glass. He was wearing city clothes – a blue and white striped shirt with a dark suit, the jacket of which was slung over his chair. It occurred to me that he wasn’t bad looking – for a man of forty-something, anyway. His face was tanned; when he stopped smiling small white creases showed at the corners of his eyes and mouth as if he even sunbathed with a smile on his face.

  ‘Shall we find somewhere cheaper to eat?’ said Lexi, gathering up her bags, but Lawrence waved her down, and, summoning one of the roving waiters, ordered four bowls of mussels, some wine and two Cokes for us. I was beginning to get used to having decisions made for me. It was what happened when someone else was paying the bill.

  ‘How do you like Paris, Abigail?’ Lawrence asked.

  I replied that I’d been here less than a day but so far liked it very much.

  ‘I’ve been coming here for thirty years,’ he said. ‘It’s my favourite place.’ The mussels arrived just as he was in the middle of an extended account of his first trip to Paris at the age of sixteen. ‘It was an exchange visit organised by school – considered quite adventurous in those days. My opposite number was a lad called Alain who was as hopeless at English as I was at French. We spent the entire two weeks grinning at each other and shrugging. The father was a dour little civil servant who was out at work all day and couldn’t take us anywhere interesting, and Madame didn’t speak a word of English – well, she didn’t seem to speak at all as far as I could see, she just produced this endless, alien food at every meal. It was absolutely miserable. But he had this cousin called Delphine who did know a little English, so they dragged her over from Versailles to talk to me and show me Paris – I think they were feeling bad that I was obviously not enjoying myself – and of course I fell madly in love with her and the whole visit was suddenly transformed. And then the fortnight was up and I had to come home and that was that.’

  ‘Didn’t you keep in touch?’ demanded Frances, letter-writer of distinction.

  ‘We did write for a couple of years, and then the letters stopped, so I finally wrote to Alain and asked after her, just in passing, and I got a letter back saying they were all devastated because she had drowned in the Seine – trying to rescue a dog apparently.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Frances. Neither of us had expected the story to take so tragic a turn. If it had been Mr Radley telling it we would have suspected fabrication.

  Our bowls of mussel debris were carried off and replaced by four trays of snails in garlic butter, and four crochet hooks. I closed my eyes. I had already filled up on the bread.

  ‘No way,’ said Frances. (It was she after all who had to be given a vegetarian option during the dissection class in Biology.)

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ said Lexi, selecting a shell and starting to gouge. ‘You’ll eat a steak but you won’t eat a snail. What’s the difference?’

  ‘I’ve trodden on snails,’ said Frances. ‘I’ve seen the stuff that oozes out of them. But if my inconsistency bothers you I’ll give
up steak as well.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Lexi, outmanoeuvred. They were all looking at me to see what I would do. I picked up my crochet hook. Loyalty was all very well, but I couldn’t be expected to take up all of Frances’ battles, and it would have looked a bit ungracious after Lawrence’s hospitality. When next a tureen of casseroled guinea-fowl arrived at the table I could feel the sweat begin to break out on my brow. I eased the button of my skirt undone and the zip burst open like an overripe fruit.

  The afternoon wore on. It looked as though Notre-Dame would go unvisited. Still, I had my catalogue of the Louvre as a souvenir of Paris to take home. I had wanted an ice cream and felt obliged to break into one of my hundred-franc notes by buying some item of cultural relevance of which father would approve.

  Frances’ obstreperous mood seemed to have set in for the day. Apart from her abhorrence of the snails she made no comment about the food, which was delicious, even to my untested palate. When Lawrence lit up a cigarette between courses, she flapped the smoke away irritably, and when Lexi reached for a second glass of wine she let out a great hiss of disapproval. And then just as the dessert trolley approached – usually the highlight of the meal for Frances – she suddenly jumped up and said, ‘Look, there’s a phone here – I could call home and check everything’s okay.’ And she started rooting for her purse.

  ‘Not just at this minute surely?’ said Lexi.

  ‘Why not?’ said Frances. ‘I want to see if Growth’s all right. And find out if Dad’s sold any paintings. I won’t be long.’ And she strode off in the direction of the booth. Lexi shrugged, and then pushed her own chair back. ‘I suppose I’d better go and have a word, too,’ she said. ‘Or they’ll feel neglected.’

  ‘Do you mind if I seize the moment?’ Lawrence asked when they’d gone, indicating his cigarettes. He offered me one, which I turned down, before lighting up and leaning back in his seat and beaming at me as if we were confederates, old buddies. We did have something in common of course – we weren’t Radleys.