Learning to Swim Read online

  Another occasion provoked my parents’ cordial version of a row. It was a sunny Sunday in May and I had returned from Frances’ early to do our homework. It was safer to do both than to let Frances copy since she would either reproduce mine in every detail and get us both into trouble, or deliberately introduce such ridiculous errors in an attempt to personalise her version that it rather defeated the object of my efforts. I had just knocked off the life-cycle of the liverwort and had come downstairs for a tea-break. In the sitting room mother was ironing the newly washed net curtains and father was standing at the bare windows looking up the road.

  ‘The room looks rather nice without net curtains,’ he remarked, absently. ‘You can see out.’

  ‘And people can see in,’ said mother, ironing with slightly more vigour.

  ‘People don’t often come down this road,’ father pointed out. ‘It’s not as if we’ve got anyone opposite, come to that.’ As the house at the end of the lollipop, we faced the green and the length of the road.

  ‘It would be like living in a goldfish bowl,’ said mother, laying the first curtain at full length on the couch and setting to work on the next. ‘Anyone passing would be able to see every speck on the wall.’ As if there were any specks!

  ‘It would be different on a main road,’ father conceded.

  ‘The Radleys live on a main road and they don’t have net curtains,’ I put in.

  ‘Well, net curtains take a lot of looking after,’ said mother pointedly. She seemed to have some idea, obviously picked up from an unguarded remark of mine, that the Radleys lived in squalor – an unfair impression: Frances and I often did the housework.

  ‘They make you feel shut in somehow,’ said father, as mother started threading the curtains back on to their vulcanised rail.

  ‘Well, I’ve just spent the day cleaning them,’ said mother, in a voice that was both mild and utterly inflexible, ‘so back they go.’ And climbing from the couch to the window sill with the yards of net fanning out behind her she hooked them back into position like an army raising its banner.

  The one-sidedness of my arrangement with Frances offended my mother’s sense of propriety. ‘Why don’t you ever bring her here?’ she asked one Saturday as I was stuffing some clothes into an overnight bag. ‘They can’t keep feeding you every week.’ I didn’t tell her that more often than not we fed ourselves – and them, for that matter. Nor could I explain the real reason why we always went to Frances’ place. It was simply more fun there. Nothing happened at our house, whereas at the Radleys’ there was always something going on; someone arriving or departing with fresh adventures or disasters to relate.

  Growth and Auntie Mim were the only members of the household who were guaranteed to be present. We would sometimes find the latter in the kitchen tending a foaming green pan of sprouts. She cooked them with so much bicarbonate of soda, Lexi said, that nutritionally they had no value whatever and it was a miracle that Auntie hadn’t got scurvy by now. Rad was often out on Saturdays, playing rugby, or swimming, or competing in chess tournaments. He didn’t appear to have a girlfriend, or any interest in acquiring one, a source of great mirth to Frances, who loved to tease him. ‘There’s only one girl at Rad’s school,’ she would say. ‘And she only comes over for woodwork lessons. What’s she like, Rad?’

  ‘Fat, ugly and stupid,’ Rad would reply, sending Frances into peals of delighted laughter.

  When at home Rad tended to stay in his room. The sound of rustling from the larder might alert us that he was on the prowl and on the pretext of going to the loo I would try to engineer a meeting on the stairs so that I might be the recipient of a terse ‘Hello’, which would form the substance of tormented dreams for nights to come. He never showed the slightest interest in me, of course. I didn’t dare tell Frances of my infatuation as she would certainly have told Rad, probably in my presence, a humiliation for which suicide would have been the only remedy.

  Mr Radley, because of his odd hours of work, was usually asleep for part of the day and silence in the vicinity of his bedroom had to be observed. I had by now learnt from Frances that he had once had a proper career in the Civil Service but for some years now had survived on a series of odd jobs of brief duration, the latest of which was lobby attendant at a London hotel. When he was up and about he frequently came into Frances’ room to ask her some trifling question, such as the whereabouts of a particular item of food that had vanished from the fridge, and ended up staying for hours telling us about work or cross-examining us about school. He loved us to ask him questions and would never be short of an opinion, but somehow I didn’t have great confidence in his pronouncements. When my father explained something you had the sense of drinking from the top of a deep well, whereas with Mr Radley you couldn’t help feeling that what you got was all there was – and some more – and if you persisted any further he’d be left thoroughly parched. I couldn’t work him out: he seemed to like the company of young people, and yet according to him they were responsible for all the ills of the world. ‘Youth is wasted on the young’ he was fond of saying, especially when he caught us idling in front of the television, or complaining we were bored. It was he who invented a nickname for me – Blush – which caught on as only the cruellest or most pertinent can.

  Lexi might spend the day enthroned in the living room entertaining a succession of callers. Clarissa or other golfing friends might turn up, followed by Lawrence, a good-looking man who was introduced as Lexi’s boyfriend. Everyone not a blood relation was hailed by Lexi as a ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’, so this was no cause for suspicion. Lawrence also seemed to be on the best of terms with Mr Radley, a further reassurance. On non-visiting days a brief but frenzied onslaught would be made on the housework. Lexi would tear through the house like a tornado, picking up discarded belongings and hurling them back into the owner’s bedroom, while Frances followed behind with the hoover, which made a terrific din on the uncarpeted floors. Wooden furniture would get a quick smear with a waxy duster, and anything above eye-level would be left to fester. In the evening Lexi would dress up, curl her hair in heated rollers and float out to dinner on a cloud of musky perfume. Occasionally she would play host herself and Frances and I would be paid to act as waitresses, serving food and drinks and washing up. Mr Radley, because of his anti-social working hours, was rarely of the party.

  After I had been to the house a few times I ventured to enquire about the mysterious third door on the top landing.

  ‘It’s Dad’s studio. He goes up there to do painting and stuff now and then.’

  ‘What – oil painting?’

  ‘Yes, you know, portraits and stuff.’

  ‘You mean he’s an Artist,’ I said, impressed. I must have known he was something more than an overgrown bell-boy. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘Well, he’s not really an artist,’ she said. ‘It’s just a hobby. Some of his stuff’s a bit weird. Do you want a look?’

  The door shuddered open on contact with Frances’ shoulder to release a dry smell of wood and turpentine. The floor was uncarpeted and marked with blobs of dried paint. Along one side of the room was a wooden bench cluttered with jars of brushes and palette knives, charcoal sticks, buckled tubes of paint and rosettes of crumpled rags. In the light of the window stood an easel and a blank canvas, and in the middle of the room was a low armchair covered with a grubby white sheet. Against one wall some canvases were leaning face down. Frances started to look through them. I peered over her shoulder. They were all rather blotchy nudes: one was obviously meant to be Lexi, but the others were different people, men and women, some old people, in outlandish colours.

  ‘A bit blobby, aren’t they,’ said Frances, critically. ‘He must get through loads of paint.’

  ‘Does he just make them up, or what?’ I couldn’t imagine a troupe of naked people processing through the attic room just to be rendered in tones of orange and green.

  ‘No, you twit, he goes to life-drawing classes.
All these people like Dad sit around and they take it in turns to take their clothes off.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I think that’s what happens. Where else would you get the people from?’

  ‘How embarrassing! Why can’t they just draw people with clothes on?’ I said. ‘It’s not as if he uses flesh-coloured paint anyway.’

  ‘Artists always paint people in the nude. Perhaps it’s more difficult, or easier or something,’ said Frances. ‘Anyway,’ she added in warning tones, ‘if he ever offers to paint you, you’ll know what to say.’

  ‘Did your dad go to Art College, then?’ I asked, as we made our way downstairs.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Radley, emerging from behind his bedroom door, making me jump. ‘I wasn’t clever enough to go to College,’ he said in a mock-apologetic voice that left me in no doubt that on the contrary he considered himself far too clever.

  13

  Living from Saturday to Saturday as I did seemed to make time travel faster, and the summer term was over, the exams sat and passed almost before I’d noticed it had begun. The rounders season had come and gone, and our despised summer uniforms – straw boaters and turquoise dresses which showed dark sweat patches under the arms – could be consigned to the back of the wardrobe. The long holiday approached, bearing down on me like an express train. I anticipated its arrival with something close to dread. By an unhappy accident the Radleys had planned their holiday for the first three weeks, while my parents were taking me away for the second three. We overlapped by a day so there was no possibility of my seeing Frances all summer. Six weeks – it didn’t seem possible. Frances’ composure in the face of this catastrophe was an added provocation. It was prompted no doubt by the prospect of an exciting trip abroad: Lexi was taking her to Menton via Paris, while father and son went somewhere called ‘The Trenches’, an annual pilgrimage, apparently.

  ‘Poor Rad,’ tittered Frances. ‘Three weeks of Dad’s driving. He’ll be a nervous wreck – if he’s not killed.’ Mr Radley’s reputation as a bad driver was part of family lore. He would always set off without doing up his seat-belt, and then once on a busy main road would think the better of it and fumble about looking for it down the side of the seat and tugging it across himself while the car veered from side to side. And he seemed to have an aversion to windscreen wipers – refusing to deploy them until the screen was a blur. His most dangerous habit, though, was his inability to hold a conversation with his passengers without continually swivelling round to address them face to face.

  ‘Why do you go on separate holidays?’ I asked, slightly shocked by the arrangements.

  ‘We always do – we just like different things. Mum doesn’t want to go traipsing round The Trenches year after year.’

  ‘What’s The Trenches?’

  ‘Something to do with some war. Lots of graves and stuff – really gloomy. Dad loves all that. So does Rad, actually. It’s the only thing they agree on.’ At the end of the three weeks, I gathered, the family, plus any extras collected on the way, would meet up for a night in a hotel in northern France to exchange stories before returning home together.

  My chances of an exciting holiday did not look so rosy. Mother and father tended to stick to the British Isles – usually its wettest and most windblown reaches – favouring walking holidays to places of literary or historical significance. Blasted moorland or chilly cathedrals were their holy places. This year there was an added significance to the choice of destination. For Christmas mother had bought herself a stone polisher she had seen advertised in a craft catalogue. She had sent off for it, at some expense and in great excitement, with plans to decorate the house with jars of sparkling stones in which one would be able to trail one’s hands in times of anxiety. The venture was not an immediate success: the machine, a small drum containing iron filings, had to be left running for weeks on end; mother stowed it in the spare room under a table to muffle the noise, but it could be heard grinding away day and night, persistent as toothache. It was mother’s ignorance of geology, however, that proved her undoing. Most of the stones she had collected were soft rocks like limestone, and when at the appointed time she opened the drum, instead of uncovering a sparkling horde of treasure, she was faced with a mass of grey slurry. Even those few surviving pebbles, glossy and jewel-bright when wet, looked much as before when dry, only smaller. This summer, then, we were off to the Isle of Skye in search of igneous rock.

  The night before Frances’ departure I went over to say goodbye. A quarrel was in progress over which party was to take which car. Finally it was decided that the women would have the Spitfire while the men took the Estate.

  ‘You’ll hardly have the weather for an open-topped car where you’re going,’ Lexi pointed out.

  ‘We’ll need a four-seater anyway,’ said Mr Radley, addressing his son in a stage whisper, ‘for picking up girls.’ Rad laughed. All four were in high spirits. Lexi’s cases were already in the hall, the larger of the two strapped to the wheels of Auntie Mim’s shopping trolley. Upstairs Frances was sorting clothes into four piles, categorised Hot Weather, Cold Weather, Smart and Scruffy, of which the fourth was by far the largest. Her journal and a blurry photo of Growth in the back garden were the only items so far packed. The house seemed quiet without Growth: he had been billeted with Daphne and Bill, his original owners, for the duration. I had almost offered to have him myself, but mother abominated all animals, and Growth, with his unprepossessing appearance and continual scratching, was unlikely to commend himself to any but the most ardent dog-lover. Auntie Mim was staying with Clarissa in case she left a pan of sprouts on and burnt the house down.

  ‘Send me a postcard, won’t you?’ I said, watching Frances squash the last of her clothes into a large nylon hold-all.

  ‘Oh no, I’ll write proper letters,’ said Frances. ‘I’ve written one already actually, so you should get it tomorrow. And if we stay anywhere with an address for long enough I’ll send you that and you can write to me.’ I allowed this thought to cheer me a little.

  The next day, as promised, the first letter arrived.

  Dear Abigail

  By the time you get this we’ll be At Sea! We’re getting the early boat to Calais and stopping at a place called Amiens for lunch. I spent all this morning hoovering dog hairs out of the Spitfire then Rad said they wanted to take it, so I had to do the Renault as well just in case. I wish you and Growth were coming too, but there’s quarantine and all that, and your holiday getting in the way. Dad keeps taking Rad’s books out of his suitcase when he’s not looking; he says they’ve got to talk to each other in the evenings! Rad asked in a sarcastic voice if Dad was taking his paints, and Dad got all uppity and said yes he might. Can you imagine him setting up his easel in the middle of some square? Rad will die of embarrassment. Well, I’d better go and post this now. My next letter will come from Paris.

  love

  Frances

  The next few days passed with agonising slowness. I knew from careful interrogation of my parents that mail from abroad was notoriously unreliable, took weeks to arrive and sometimes didn’t arrive at all. I cast around for new ways of occupying myself. I practised my cello with more dedication than usual, finished all my holiday homework within a day, and rearranged the few pieces of furniture in my room into every possible permutation. The weather during all this was hot and dry: the sunshine would clearly have exhausted itself before our trip to Skye. I helped mother in the garden, weeding and spraying and dead-heading. I went for long cycle rides around the streets. On about the fourth day I cycled further than usual, drawn irresistibly towards Balmoral Road. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, but as I drew level with the house I could see the Renault still parked in the driveway and the top floor windows wide open. Too shy to ring the doorbell I pedalled home at a furious pace, careering down hills and weaving up on to the pavement to avoid traffic lights. As soon as I got home I tried Frances’ phone number. After a dozen rings Rad answered.

 
‘Hello, is Frances there?’ I asked timidly.

  ‘Is that Blush?’ he said. ‘They’re in France, remember.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but I was just passing the house and I saw the car and thought maybe she was still there. Why haven’t you gone yet? Weren’t you all supposed to be leaving together?’

  ‘We were, but Dad couldn’t get organised in time so Mum and Frances went on ahead, and then Dad realised he didn’t have any money in his account, so he had to go round to Bill’s and borrow some. And then he found his passport had expired. We’re supposed to be trying again tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘He does something like this every year. I’m used to it.’

  This was the longest conversation I had ever had with Rad and I was grateful for the protection of the telephone and the several miles’ distance between us which prevented him seeing my burning cheeks. Sometimes I had been known to blush so violently that I gave myself a nosebleed. I was convinced that there was something pathological about my condition, but mother had dismissed my demands to see the doctor as ridiculous. In her view it would have been unhealthy for a twelve-year-old girl not to blush. It was one of the things she found suspicious about Frances, this refusal to be cowed.

  ‘Just think of something cool when you feel a blush coming on,’ was her suggestion. So for a while I would mutter ‘frozen peas, frozen peas’ to myself whenever embarrassment threatened.

  The Paris letter finally arrived the day before we were due to depart for Skye. I had spent the previous weeks moping around the house, bored and fidgety, rising late and driving my mother to distraction by shutting myself indoors watching television for hours at a time instead of enjoying the sunshine.

  ‘You’ll get rickets,’ she warned.