Learning to Swim Page 18

  I returned to an enthusiastic welcome from my parents: my presence would serve as a welcome diversion from my grandmother’s attentions. Both of them sought me out separately to tell me how much I’d been missed. I suppose my holiday had given them a foretaste of what life would be like when I left home in a few years’ time. Endless days of unrewarded servitude beckoned. Since her arrival Granny had applied herself to becoming as helpless and dependent as possible in case the arrangement should prove only temporary.

  The morning after my return I was in the front room searching through the bureau for her missing address book. It contained barely half a dozen names that were not scored through and annotated with a chilling ‘D’, and she could not read it anyway, but her agitation on mislaying it was such that the house was in the process of being ransacked, room by room, in order to find it. I had just turned up an old Post Office account book in my name which still had two pounds in and was practising my seven-year-old signature, in the hope of cashing it in one day, when I heard the jaws of the letter box clang shut and a parcel fall on to the mat. The parcel was addressed to me and contained a new paperback Goodbye to All That, inscribed with admirable economy: To Abigail from Rad. I had not even attempted to read Mr Radley’s tatty copy, but I began this immediately and within a couple of paragraphs had decided it was the best book ever written.

  I never got round to thanking Rad for this present: the next time I went round to the Radleys’ he had gone up to Durham. Mr Radley had insisted on driving him up there, even though Rad had tried to dissuade him, and the issue had threatened to become grounds for disinheritance. Privately, I couldn’t help thinking it was a matter of bloody-mindedness rather than paternal pride on Mr Radley’s part. As a self-taught man his attitude to universities had always been ambivalent: a combination of envy and disdain. Finally, it was the question of how many more books Rad would be able to take by car than by train that swung things in his father’s favour. I later heard that Mr Radley had shown a rather cavalier disregard for the petrol warning light on the last leg of the journey and that the car had ground to a halt just short of their destination. They had been forced to push it the last two hundred yards to Rad’s hall of residence, a humiliation which it would take him all term to live down.

  25

  A couple of months after our return from the holiday Frances came to school with the exciting news that Nude on a sun-lounger with fresh figs by Lazarus Ohene had come third in its category in the national portrait competition and that the Radley family fortune had increased by £500 at a stroke.

  Petitioners immediately began to present themselves.

  ‘We need a new hoover,’ said Lexi. ‘That one doesn’t suck up the dirt any more, it just pushes it around. Oh, and my subscription for the golf club’s coming up. Better forget the hoover.’

  ‘I need a leather biker’s jacket,’ said Frances.

  ‘You haven’t got a bike,’ protested Mr Radley. He turned to his wife. ‘I’m not spending my winnings on anything prosaic like a hoover, thank you very much.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘It’s not as if I even use it.’

  ‘As the subject of the painting, I think I have some rights,’ Lexi said.

  ‘I should be entitled to a proportion of the money,’ said Rad, who was home for the weekend. ‘I cycled half-way across London trying to track down those figs. And it’s not even as if it was a good likeness: any old fruit would have done.’

  It had been agreed that Mr Radley would go to the presentation alone. With the exception of Frances, no one relished the prospect of reinforcing the Lazarus Ohene deception, and she could not be relied upon not to embellish the fiction still further, given a chance. For years I kept the cutting from the Evening Standard which showed Mr Radley, his face a rictus of embarrassment, clutching his cheque, flanked by the other prizewinners and the chairman of judges. Underneath was the caption: Winners of the 1982 Sampson & Gould Portrait Competition (l to r) Judy Quaid, Louise Barrack and Lazarus Ohene receive their awards from Sir Gerald Sampson.

  More important to the artist than the prize-money was the fact that the winning paintings would be exhibited in a private gallery in Bloomsbury and, with the artists’ consent, offered for sale. Much energy was devoted to deciding the value of the painting; once Mr Radley had been allowed to rant and storm for a few minutes about Lexi’s portrait having a value beyond all price, a figure of £300 was settled upon.

  ‘It still seems rather dear to me,’ said Lexi.

  ‘It’s a six by four. A hell of a lot of paint went on that canvas,’ said her husband, for whom material concerns began to assume their proper significance once more. ‘Not to mention the hours it took. And if the price deters the buyers, so much the better. I don’t want to sell it anyway.’

  Frances and I went up to the exhibition one evening after school. I had missed the opening which clashed with an orchestra rehearsal. It had been arranged that Lawrence would meet us up there and bring us home afterwards.

  The proprietor of the gallery wasn’t used to schoolgirl clients, and kept looking at us suspiciously, as if we might suddenly pocket an eight-foot canvas and run. Mr Radley’s painting suddenly seemed so much more authentic framed and lit and hanging on a clean white wall than when I had seen it last, stacked like a giant slice of toast up against half a dozen other attempts in the attic. In fact it looked thoroughly at home among the other exhibits: Lexi’s distorted and scowling face was merely one of many. When we arrived Lawrence was already standing in front of it, stroking his chin and looking thoughtful. ‘Well, it’s hideous all right,’ he said to me, when Frances had moved off. ‘But is it Art?’

  The winning exhibit was a portrait of what I took to be an elderly victim of a mugging or other violent assault. One side of his face was the colour of raw liver, the eye reduced to a thin seam in the puffy flesh. The undamaged side was hardly more appealing, every wart, pock mark and nasal hair reproduced in fine detail. Purplish wattles of skin hung from jaw to collarbone and a fleck of spit foamed in the corner of the mouth. Lawrence grimaced and moved on to confront an image of a young girl with a shaven head and a cobweb tattooed on her forehead, snarling at him from the canvas.

  ‘Do you think we can deduce from these that flattery is no longer the duty of the artist?’ he whispered.

  Some of the paintings, I noticed, had small orange stickers beside the title. ‘What are they for?’ I asked Frances as we caught her up.

  ‘The stickers mean the painting’s sold.’ We turned back to the Radley entry with one movement. ‘Dad’s in a real lather about it. He’s already spent the money.’

  Apparently, having originally scorned the idea of selling the painting Mr Radley was now in a state of anxiety that it would suffer the humiliation of being the only one still unsold at the end of the fortnight. Between shifts at the pizza parlour he would scoot up to town on the delivery bike to check whether an orange sticker had appeared, returning home a little more dejected each time.

  ‘It’s not that I mind it sitting there like the only spinster at a wedding,’ he said, a couple of days before the exhibition closed. ‘It’s just that it feels like an insult to Lexi.’

  His model and muse blinked in surprise. ‘You can rest easy on that account, I assure you,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps it’s too expensive – you could knock it down by a few quid,’ Frances suggested.

  Mr Radley bridled. ‘It’s not a punnet of soggy raspberries, for God’s sake.’

  His dignity was restored the following day by a phone call from the gallery to say the painting was sold. ‘I had a feeling it would go for that price,’ he said, flushed with jubilation. ‘I wonder if they’ve got the name of the buyer. I could see whether he wants some of my other stuff.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Lexi quickly. ‘I think these transactions are usually anonymous.’

  26

  It was about this time that Frances’ obstinate devotion to Nicky finally paid off. Whether Rad’s departure to univers
ity had removed an awkward obstacle, or whether years of admiration had finally worn Nicky down, I never knew. But even after Rad had packed up his philosophy books and his holey jumpers and headed north, Nicky continued to be a regular visitor at the Radleys’: he was studying dentistry at King’s, and so didn’t have far to come. This coincided with my spending rather less time there. My Saturday mornings were taken up with playing cello in the local youth orchestra, and it was usually mid-afternoon before I could catch up with Frances and the weekend could really begin.

  One freezing Saturday in November I arrived with my usual overnight bag to find no one in. Fish was raking dead leaves into piles in the next-door garden, and then battening them down with black polythene and bricks. ‘I think they’re all out,’ he said cheerfully. I rang and knocked several times and peered through the front room window but roused nobody except Growth, who had been asleep on the chaise longue. Auntie Mim was almost certainly in as a light was on in her bedroom but she never answered the door on principle. While I stood shivering and wondering what to do, the tinny rattle of rake on grass stopped and Fish appeared at the dividing hedge, which was clipped square on his side to exactly half-way across the top, and ballooned on the Radleys’ side like the back end of a toy poodle. ‘Do you want to come in to the warm for a cup of tea while you wait?’ he asked, his head on one side in a pretence of shyness. ‘They could be ages.’

  I cast about for an excuse. Although he had stopped offering to turn the hose on Frances and give her ‘a good spraying’ whenever the sun shone, somehow the image had stayed with me, and I found the prospect of being alone with him particularly uninviting. I had in fact been prepared to let myself into the back garden and wait in the shed until someone showed up, but could hardly offer that to Fish as my chosen alternative. I was saved by the arrival of Lawrence in his Jaguar. ‘Ah, there you are,’ said Fish, failing to keep the disappointment out of his voice, and he turned his back and went on pawing away at the lawn with his rake.

  Lawrence let us in with his key and went about switching on lights and turning radiators up as if he lived there. ‘Make yourself at home,’ he said, sweeping newspapers and dog toys off the couch, and settling down with his feet on the coffee table to watch the Grand Prix. I wandered out into the kitchen and started to tidy up. In the sink a tower of saucepans and crockery stood in six inches of greasy water. Fat had congealed at the edges of the bowl and potato peelings floated on the surface. The oven door stood open to reveal the curling remains of a lasagne in a foil dish. Every worktop seemed to be covered with lidless jars: marmalade, piccalilli, peanut butter, stuffed olives. God knows what they’d had for lunch. The swing bin was full and, rather than empty it, someone had started another rubbish bag which now hung, half full from the back-door handle. A note in Frances’ handwriting was propped amid the debris. DAD IT’S YOUR TURN.

  A protracted search turned up one punctured rubber glove. I gritted my teeth and plunged my hands into the sink, my fingers contacting a plug of lard which had to be excavated before the water could drain away. After twenty minutes my enthusiasm for the task was abating, and I left the washing up to drip dry – there was no tea-towel to be found – and dried my hands on an oven glove before creeping upstairs. I could still hear the whine of racing cars, and gabbled commentary coming from the television. I paused on the first landing and double-checked that there was no one in any of the bedrooms before continuing up to Rad’s room. It would have been stripped of the essentials for a term’s survival, but would still yield up clues. I don’t know what I was hoping to find – a lock of my hair perhaps, pressed between the pages of Byron. I pushed open the door and felt a rush of cold air. The radiator had been switched off and the room already smelled damp and abandoned. I clicked on the overhead light and dust particles swarmed in its glare. The wardrobe door had been left open to reveal half a dozen empty hangers, Rad’s old school uniform and three odd shoes. He owned so few clothes that he could hardly have afforded to leave behind anything serviceable.

  On the desk was a letter rack containing a postcard from Nicky, certificates of proficiency in diving and life-saving, and a review, cut from the local paper, of his school’s Much Ado About Nothing. One sentence from it – Marcus Radley as Benedick was the undoubted star of this uneven production – had been highlighted with yellow pen: an allowable piece of vanity, I decided. The walls were unadorned apart from a dartboard with all three darts in the bull’s-eye and a peppering of holes in the surrounding plaster, and a collection of postcard-sized prints: Cézanne’s Baigneuses, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, some severe-looking 1950s bathing beauties, David Hockney’s swimming pools. What was that all about? Water. Wasn’t swimming one of his many super-abilities? I vaguely remembered Frances telling me he had once saved a drowning girl.

  I hesitated in front of the desk drawer. It was all right, I reasoned, to look at things that had been left out – that’s what they were there for. But opening drawers was another matter. All the same. I would just look, I decided, but I wouldn’t rummage. Rummaging would be shabby. The drawer turned out to be empty, leaving me with all the discomfort of a bad conscience without the gratification of discovery. I didn’t snoop any further: Rad was not to be found amongst his things. As I emerged from his room I almost fell over Auntie Mim, who was carrying a jangling tray across the landing. A plate of violent green sprouts and pallid potatoes steamed beside a cup of grey tea, most of which was washing around in the saucer. A guilty blush surged over my cheeks. ‘Hello,’ I stammered. She would probably think I had been trying to steal something. Maybe she thought I’d been in her room. ‘Do you want a hand?’ I took the tray from her while there was still some tea left to save, and she pushed her door open and waved me in.

  Auntie Mim’s diet had led me to expect a certain austerity in her surroundings, but there was nothing monastic about this room. Every surface was covered with knick-knacks – china figurines and thimble collections, pill boxes, framed embroideries, entire tribes of peg dolls in frilly dresses. I hovered, still holding the tray while Auntie Mim picked the bedside cabinet clean, slotting the ornaments meticulously into new positions on the dressing table. The last item to be removed was an old black and white photo in a round silver frame about the size of a powder compact. It was of a young woman with an intelligent, determined face, dark eyes and a squarish jaw. Auntie Mim noticed me staring at the picture as she picked it up, so I said, ‘Is that you?’ It was impossible to tell what Auntie Mim might have looked like as a twenty-year-old, shrunken and lined as she was, but the girl in the photo was attractive enough for it to be a flattering observation, even if wrong.

  And then she did the most surprising thing. She tapped the picture against her heart and said, ‘The great love of my life,’ before setting it down next to her bedside lamp. I was so astounded I almost dropped the tray, and managed to say nothing more than ‘Oh!’ before she had reclaimed her supper and was tipping the saucerful of tea back into the cup, and the moment for further confidences was past. I reeled down the stairs, angry with myself for remaining speechless at such a confession. My lack of interest must have looked positively rude, but it was only amazement that had paralysed me. Somehow Auntie Mim and forbidden passion seemed incompatible.

  Downstairs I found Frances had arrived home with Nicky. They were sitting on the couch a little closer together than necessary and looking exceedingly pleased with themselves. Lawrence was still engrossed in the motor-racing.

  ‘Oh hello, what are you doing here?’ said Frances in a voice that wasn’t altogether welcoming. As I had been spending almost every weekend there for the past four years I didn’t bother to answer this, but said, ‘What were you doing not here?’

  ‘Nicky came over this morning and said he’d got tickets to see Les Enfants du Paradis,’ said Frances, with great authority, as though her acquaintance with the film hadn’t begun and ended that very day.

  ‘What did you think?’ Lawrence asked, roused to interest all of a
sudden.

  ‘Amazing,’ said Frances. ‘Classic.’

  ‘You fell asleep!’ Nicky remonstrated, cuffing her.

  ‘So did you.’

  ‘I was up half the night, writing up an experiment.’

  ‘Well, it was harder for me to concentrate with that huge bloke’s head right in front of the subtitles.’

  ‘It sounds riveting,’ I said frostily, rattled by my ignorance of the film and by the unusual intimacy between Frances and Nicky. There was something going on. Neither of them would quite meet my eye, and my attempts to start up a normal conversation – one in which I could at least participate – foundered. Any subject that arose would be hijacked by Frances and Nicky and turned into an opportunity for an exchange of banter and mock insults, accompanied by playful shoving and jostling. Frances seemed to be experimenting with a new laugh to replace her regular cackle. Every feeble witticism from Nicky would prompt a flutey giggle, which he would then imitate, setting her off afresh. For this I had almost succumbed to the vile Fish! I thought. After half an hour or so of this I was about to demand whether they were feeling quite all right, when Lawrence, who had grown tired of the sports results, looked at his watch and said, ‘It doesn’t look as though Lexi’s coming back. I’ve got a table for two booked at that Chinese place. Do you want to come, Abigail?’ Nobody raised any objection to this scheme so I accepted and wished Nicky and Frances a curt goodbye.