Learning to Swim Page 15

  ‘She’s a funny girl, Frances,’ he said.

  ‘In what way?’ I asked guardedly.

  ‘She’s an odd combination – wayward and yet judgemental. You wouldn’t think the two would go together. She was completely out of control as a child – always running off and spending the night on Highbury Fields. Lexi was convinced she was going to go right off the rails. But now the judgemental side seems to be taking over. I’m willing to bet she’ll end up a pillar of the community – a district nurse or a magistrate or something. You wait and see.’

  I wasn’t sure if I should defend Frances from the charge of impending respectability. It was hard to tell with Lawrence whether or not an insult was intended. ‘She wants to be a film star,’ I said. ‘Or a dog-handler.’

  ‘Mind you,’ Lawrence went on, ‘between ourselves the whole family isn’t exactly what you’d call normal. Apart from Lexi. Rad’s an odd bloke – intelligent all right, but there’s a sort of coldness there, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It felt scandalously disloyal to be discussing the Radleys while their backs were turned, but at the same time I was riveted. I never normally had the chance to see them through someone else’s eyes. And although I had been ready to leap to Rad’s defence the moment his name was mentioned, Lawrence’s comment wasn’t easy to dismiss. There was something a little chilly about Rad. I had noticed it when he was acting, and had wished he was more like the character he was playing.

  ‘I can’t imagine how he and Mr Radley get along on holiday together. They’re so different.’

  ‘Oh, Michael,’ said Lawrence, as if this was a whole new subject which would need lengthy consideration. ‘There’s certainly rivalry there – all on Michael’s side of course. His trouble is he hates the fact that he’s no longer twenty. He likes hanging around with young people, but at the same time he’s madly jealous. He did have a decent job once, did you know that? At the Department of the Environment. But now, what is it? School caretaker? Bell-boy? Night-watchman? I forget.’

  ‘Pizza delivery,’ I said.

  ‘Christ,’ said Lawrence, shaking his head.

  ‘But it’s painting he’s really interested in, isn’t it?’ I don’t know why I felt obliged to stick up for him.

  ‘Have you seen his paintings?’ said Lawrence.

  I nodded. ‘Some.’

  He tutted sadly. ‘I’ve told him they’re absolutely putrid, and he agrees, but he will keep on. He thinks it’s solely a matter of persistence: if he splashes enough paint on to enough canvases eventually he’ll produce something decent. But you don’t want to take too much notice of his helplessness. I’m convinced it’s an act. Left to himself he’d be as competent as anybody. It’s all designed to …’

  I never did find out what it was designed to do, as Lexi and Frances reappeared and Lawrence changed tack smartly. ‘I didn’t order pudding as Abigail was already bursting out of her skirt and you two weren’t here, so I’ve just asked for coffee,’ he said. ‘Everything all right at home?’

  ‘It’s been raining all the time, so Dad hasn’t been able to take any of his paintings around in the Spitfire,’ said Frances, ‘but he’s entered one of his pictures of Mum in a national portrait competition.’

  ‘He says he’s submitted it in the name of Lazarus Ohene because it sounds more convincing than Michael Radley,’ said Lexi.

  ‘Doesn’t it make you feel creepy – all those judges and people seeing what you look like with no clothes on?’ asked Frances.

  ‘Not particularly,’ said Lexi. ‘It’s not an especially good likeness, if you remember. It’s the “blue and bloated” one.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Goodness, is that the time?’ said Lexi, glancing at the waiter’s watch as he poured the coffee. ‘I’m afraid Notre-Dame has had it for today. Will Sacré Coeur do instead? We can walk there from the hotel this evening.’

  Next to us a group of French teenagers had just finished eating and was about to disperse. The departees were orbiting the table giving and receiving two kisses on each cheek.

  ‘These continental farewells can take all day,’ said Lawrence as we stood up to go. ‘Consider yourselves kissed.’ And he waved us off before sitting back down again and taking out his newspaper. We were on the Metro, heading back to Montmartre, when Lexi realised she had left her sunglasses behind.

  ‘Oh damn,’ she said, taking off her red straw hat and tipping the contents of her handbag into it. ‘They were my best ones.’ As she rifled through lipsticks, powder compacts, wallets, combs and pieces of paper, we offered to go back to the café but she shook her head.

  ‘Perhaps Lawrence will notice and pick them up,’ suggested Frances.

  Back at the hotel Lexi lay on the bed with her hands across her chest like a knight on a tomb; Frances wrote up her journal and I settled down to read my Louvre catalogue to discover that I had picked up the Dutch language version by mistake.

  I was woken in the early hours by the sound of two men brawling outside the window. Clientele from the cinema opposite, inflamed by the piggy perversions, no doubt. Frances remained comatose beside me. I dragged myself over the lip of the bed, suddenly desperate for the loo. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I could see that Lexi’s bed was empty. I lay awake for some time after that, listening and waiting, but my eyes soon felt heavy and I let myself slip off. When I woke finally at seven Lexi was already up and packing, the lost sunglasses perched on the crown of her head.

  23

  Dear Mum, Dad and Granny

  I hope you are all well and that everything is okay at home. I’m having a lovely time and Mrs Radley is looking after me very well.

  Paris was great – we went to the Louvre and had lunch on the Champs Elysées with a friend of Mrs Radley. He paid. I am learning lots of new French words. The drive down to Menton was very long and hot. We stopped off for one night in a place called Beaune. The hotel room was so tiny and hot that we had to have all the windows open and I got badly bitten by mosquitoes. They seemed to leave Frances and her mum alone – I’m obviously tastier. I’ve eaten lots of interesting food – mussels, snails, quails and a steak which Frances said was cheval, but I think she was joking. Menton is very pretty. There are 324 steps up to our villa and we always seem to be going either up or down them at midday when the sun is just about overpowering. The calamine lotion is coming in useful. You can’t get a car through the village. Everyone seems to ride these little scooters – sometimes with whole families on the back. From the balcony of the villa we can just see Monte Carlo in the distance. Last night there were fireworks over the bay. The sea is amazingly blue. Nothing like Bognor. In the evenings we sit on the balcony and read or play cards or go for a walk down into the village. Tomorrow we are starting the drive back. We’re meeting Mr Radley and Rad in Arras. That should be fun. I’ve only spent 125 francs of the money you gave me – mostly on ice cream. You’d think with all this food I’d have put on weight, but I still look like a twig – a red twig.

  lots of love,

  Abigail.

  Menton, 12 August

  Dear Beatrice

  We spent last night in a place called something like Bone. The hotel room was minute and boiling hot – I spent most of the night sitting in the bath letting cold water in and out. Blush kept leaping up to swat mosquitoes. In the morning she had thirty-five bites on her legs and was feeling mightily sorry for herself.

  I don’t know, but there seem to be more steps this year. Perhaps they’ve raised the villa or lowered the beach or something. It’s a bit too hot to sunbathe (not for Mum, of course, whose bikini top hasn’t made an appearance yet). By the time you’ve got yourself oiled and in position you’re in such a lather you have to go and swim to cool off. Blush’s back and shoulders are bright red. We dabbed calamine all over her last night and now she looks like a bit of salami. There’s a sort of raft about thirty metres out in the bay for diving off and there are always several bronzed frogs posing on it. I
went out to it a few times on my own today – Blush can’t swim and won’t go out of her depth. I tried to teach her but every time she took her feet off the bottom she panicked and went under.

  After supper, which was just the rest of the baguette and brie from lunch and a peach, Blush and I walked down into the village to the bar for a Coke. It wasn’t long before a couple of French guys who I recognised from the raft this morning started leering at us across the tables. We ignored them, but a few minutes later they’d moved to a closer table and whenever I had to walk past them to go to the loo or get a drink they would make some comment in creaky English. Anyway they eventually came over and we did our best to communicate with a common vocabulary of about fifty words. The better looking of the two, Georges, offered me a ride on his moped, so we went haring around the village on that, dodging the dog turds, while Blush and the other one, Max, who had a squiffy eye, sat on the wall outside the bar waiting for us. When we pulled up they were in exactly the same positions as when we’d left. Afterwards Blush said neither of them had been able to think of a thing to say – in any language – and it had been totally excruciating. ‘You could have practised your subjunctive on him,’ I said. When it was time to leave Georges sort of fell on me and tried to kiss me, but I mumbled something about having a boyfriend back home who would be jealous. It wasn’t a complete lie as I regard myself as eternally wedded to Nicky even though he hasn’t yet shown any sign of returning my passion. Max didn’t try anything with Blush, which was as well, as from the looks she was giving him he’d probably have got a good slap. She didn’t say much on the way back here. I think she’s in a strop.

  Holiday diary. Day 10

  Note: Don’t go to any more bars with Frances: bad for morale.

  Last night after supper we told Lexi we were going for a walk, and her last words were ‘Don’t go into that bar in the village – it’s always full of rough-looking boys’, at which Frances perked up visibly. Naturally we made straight for the bar and found ourselves a table and Frances began her usual routine, familiar from the school bus stop, of keeping up a conversation with me at what I call performance pitch, at the same time scanning the room to see what effect she was having. It didn’t take her long to settle on two French blokes who were minding their own business over the other side of the bar. After several trips to the loo, which involved squeezing past their table and knocking one of their beers over, she managed to get talking to them. One of the two was quite attractive, in an unshaven sort of way. He fancied Frances. The other one wasn’t – in fact he was rather alarming-looking, with a wandering eye that was forever glancing over my shoulder, as if in pursuit of a more interesting object. He fancied Frances too. She wasn’t the least bit interested in either of them – only that afternoon she had been bewailing her failure to ensnare Nicky.

  The following day, the last of our stay in Menton, Georges and Max, undeterred by our frigidity, turned up on the beach where Lexi and Frances were giving themselves a final grilling. Itching all over with prickly heat and sunburn, I had commandeered the only shade for miles and skulked like a lizard in a cleft in a rock. They hailed us cheerfully and began to pick their way towards us across the stones, at which point Lexi, who was trying to tan those parts that seldom see sunlight and was lying on her back with her arms above her head and her bent legs turned outwards like a frog on a dissecting slab, rolled over and reached for her bikini top.

  Georges was carrying nothing but a rolled towel and a Walkman which was clipped to the front of his trunks; Max had a children’s plastic football which we started idly batting to one another until a strange, netless, teamless, pointless volleyball game developed amongst the four of us. As we stood there in the ferocious sunlight, virtually naked, hitting the ball back and forth, back and forth, I had a curious feeling of kinship with prehistoric man. Even in the most primitive and savage societies people must have felt a need to stand in circles and throw stones or even skulls to one another, just to pass the time.

  ‘Frances, get out of my sun,’ Lexi would complain if her daughter’s shadow fell even momentarily across her, at the same time swatting her with a copy of The Times which she had driven almost to Monte Carlo to track down.

  When the heat became unbearable and I could feel the rash across my shoulders beginning to tingle, we ran into the water, shrieking and gasping. Georges, Frances and Max immediately struck out for the raft, on which there were already several bodies, prone like seals on a rock, while I loitered in the shallows enjoying the feeling of wet hair on my sunburn. Frances won the race easily. I could see her hauling herself out on to the raft. She gave me a victorious wave, before a hand rose out of the sea and closed round her ankle and she was dragged in again. It seemed an age before her head bobbed up. I was already on my feet, ready to panic, but there she was, flicking diamonds from her wet hair and laughing.

  On the way back to the villa Frances hung back, pretending to shake grit out of her sandals until Lexi was out of earshot. ‘They want us to go for a midnight swim tonight,’ she said. ‘What do you reckon?’ Her eyes were bright with excitement. I could tell she had already made her decision.

  ‘I can’t see your mum agreeing, somehow.’

  ‘Oh God, I wasn’t going to tell Mum,’ replied Frances, shocked at the suggestion. ‘We could just slip out. She’s used to sleeping through Dad arriving home at all hours – she’ll never wake up.’

  ‘But we hardly know them – they might be weirdos.’

  ‘They’re weird all right, but I don’t think they’re dangerous.’

  ‘Look, I don’t think we should go. Supposing your mum does wake up – she’ll be furious. She’ll forgive you because you’re her daughter, but she won’t think very much of me.’

  Frances conceded there was something in this argument. ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘it’s all very well for you – Georges is at least good-looking. But Max is a hideous cross-eyed dwarf. And even he doesn’t fancy me.’

  ‘That’s not very kind,’ said Frances. ‘He might be a really nice person underneath.’

  ‘Yes, but how are we ever going to find out, with his English and my French?’

  ‘Oh, okay, we won’t go,’ she said sulkily, but a moment later she cheered up as if the whole subject was forgotten.

  I started to have my suspicions over supper when she suggested a game of cards rather than a trip to the bar for our final evening’s entertainment, but it was the extreme insouciance with which she proposed getting an early night, and the agitation with which she watched my protracted preparations for bed that clinched it. She was intending to go without me. Wounded by this betrayal I decided to thwart her by staying awake, but my exertions in the volleyball game must have sapped my strength as I fell asleep almost instantly and when I awoke Frances was snoring gently in the bed beside me.

  I was beginning to think I had misjudged her, but the moment she showed her head above the sheet I burst out laughing: above one ear her hair stuck up in a great crest, giving her the appearance of a bedraggled cockatiel. She had obviously crept back into bed with damp, unbrushed hair which had dried as she lay on it.

  ‘Where did you get to last night, then?’ I asked.

  She was a little surprised to be caught out, and was obviously considering a straight denial before the urge to brag took over, and a smug expression settled on her face. ‘Italy,’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s only a few miles to the border – Georges and I went on his moped to Ventimiglia.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Frances,’ I snapped. ‘What if something had happened? He could have just dumped you there – I mean anything could have happened.’

  She brushed this off. ‘No, he’s all right. We just went swimming.’ She saw my sceptical expression. ‘Honest. Nothing happened. He didn’t try anything.’ There was a pause. ‘Well, he tried,’ she conceded, ‘but he didn’t get anywhere.’

  ‘I knew you were planning something,’ I said with some bitterness.


  ‘You could have come,’ she said. ‘Only you didn’t seem that keen when I mentioned it yesterday.’

  It was true that I hadn’t shown any enthusiasm for midnight bathing, but Italy: that was something quite different. I was suddenly so jealous, so frustrated, that I could feel my eyes beginning to smart, and I had to put my head down and pretend to be rummaging for my washbag so that Frances wouldn’t see me blinking back tears. In the shower I let the water burst over my head like a hail of arrows. How at the advanced age of fifteen could I be so upset about something so trivial? It wasn’t even as though I liked Georges. It was irrational. It was petty. But our feelings often know truths which our reason can’t see: I was crying because all my experience of happiness came through Frances, but the equivalent was not true for her. When the time came, sooner or later, she would do without me very well.

  24

  We had arranged to meet Rad and Mr Radley at their usual hotel in Arras. It looked on to the Grande Place, which on the night we arrived was the site of a travelling funfair. Half a dozen dodgem cars parked in a minute arena beneath a row of flashing lights, paint-peeled stalls selling doughnuts and frites cooked in the same fat, and a rifle range offering a selection of grubby cuddly toys as its star prizes were the foremost of its attractions.

  ‘Oh hell,’ said Lexi, as disco music began to thump from a set of speakers covered with a tarpaulin. ‘We’ll get no sleep tonight.’

  I had been looking forward to seeing Rad for the entire holiday, an anticipated pleasure which had to be kept to myself. Although Frances was about as candid as a person could be, and kept me minutely informed of the progress of her infatuations, I had always guarded my secret closely. In spite of her assumption that Rad must be universally admired, she would, I was sure, view my rather more concentrated interest in him as intolerably presumptuous.