Learning to Swim

by Clare Chambers

  ‘You’re not listening to the poetry then?’

  ‘We stayed till the interval,’ I said. ‘Granny got cold.’

  He nodded. He was wearing, over his regular clothes, an all-in-one flying suit made of dark brown sheepskin, fleecy side out – obviously designed for Antarctic flights in open-topped aircraft – which gave him the appearance of a large teddy bear. There was a gas fire in the room but he never lit it, refusing to claim for himself any comfort which mother had relinquished.

  He searched his pockets for a moment before trying to stand up, realising he was hemmed in by boxes of papers, and subsiding again. ‘I don’t seem to have any on me,’ he said. ‘Try my jacket – it’s somewhere in the bedroom.’

  It had been hung up on the back of the door, no doubt by mother. One pocket contained nothing but chalk – a few broken sticks and some grey powder which lodged under my fingernails as I scrabbled for coins – the other held father’s wallet, which like the study was full of bits of paper but no money. Although it was obvious at a glance that the wallet was too flat to contain any change, I browsed idly through the contents. I didn’t consider this to be snooping as father had more or less given me permission. There were library cards and bank cards, stamps, old receipts, and some pieces of blue paper with numbers on and words like NET and GROSS and TAX. And tucked in a pocket at the back was a square black and white photograph of a tiny baby in a cot. A baby who was not me: on the back in blue ink in unfamiliar handwriting were the words: Birdie aged 18 days.

  7

  I was helping mother to set the breakfast table the following morning when I brought up the subject of the photograph. We were doing things properly because Granny was here: toast in a rack, butter in a dish, sugar in a bowl. Father, oblivious to our ministrations, was hidden behind The Times. Granny was fussing about in the kitchen trying to find her knife and fork. (She always brought her own silver cutlery from home because she said our stainless steel tasted funny.) I was distributing boiled eggs, covering each one with a hand-embroidered felt cosy. They were the sort of thing we were encouraged to make during needlework lessons as they were simple and didn’t require too much material. I used to dash them off so quickly mother now had a drawerful; if she ever found herself needing to insulate twenty-four boiled eggs at a time she would have been well prepared. At just the moment when mother was bringing in a tray loaded with cereal bowls, milk jug and teacups, my mind must have made the unconscious connection between eggs and birds, and I said, without any preamble, ‘Who’s Birdie?’

  Crash went the tray as mother let out an ‘Oh’ which burst in the air like a bubble. She dropped on to her knees and started mopping up the milk with her apron, scraping shards of blue and white china into a ragged hill. My father looked up from his paper, white-faced.

  ‘Where did you get that from?’ mother said indistinctly from the floor, her head well down. Father covered his face with his hands and said ‘Oh God.’ I started to cry.

  ‘What have you done with my table napkin, Monica?’ Granny demanded, walking in on us and stopping mid-stride as she took in the scene.

  ‘I just f-f-found a picture in Daddy’s wallet. He said I could look for some change. I didn’t mean to do anything naughty,’ I sobbed as mother struggled to her feet and rushed blindly from the room. ‘Oh no. Oh God,’ said father, going after her, crunching heedlessly through the broken pottery leaving a trail of milky prints behind him. There was the sound of pounding footsteps on the stairs and then agitated voices.

  ‘Darling, please, you’ve upset Abigail now.’

  ‘I’ve upset her!’ And then more crying as the bedroom door clicked shut.

  ‘Now look here, ducky,’ said Granny, putting a hand on my shoulder and shaking me gently as if trying to wake me. ‘What’s this all about?’

  Through a film of mucus and tears I gasped out what I’d said. At the mention of the name Birdie she said, ‘Oh dear. Oh dear,’ and sat down rather hard next to me, using my shoulder as a prop. She pulled out a large man’s hanky, embroidered with my dead grandfather’s initials, and wiped my face, then put her arm around me and gave me a squeeze, an utterly uncharacteristic gesture. ‘Shall we leave Mummy and Daddy upstairs for a moment and go out in the garden, eh?’ she wheedled. I nodded and made a grand effort to reduce my sobs to a whimper as she led me out through the french doors. The lawn was still wet with dew and our shoes left green trails on the silver grass. After a few circuits of the garden we sat down on the bench between the rose beds: the first leaves were just appearing. Granny traced the outline of her lips with one finger for a few minutes. She seemed to have forgotten I was there. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Thinking,’ she said. ‘Will you be very good when I tell you what I’m going to tell you? And very brave?’

  ‘Mmm-mn,’ I said, clamping down my bottom lip with my teeth to stop myself crying.

  ‘Of course, what I tell you is a secret. And that means you must never breathe a word of it to anyone. You’ve had secrets before, I suppose.’

  My experience of the currency of friendship was still very limited at this stage, but I said yes anyway.

  ‘Well …’ She took a deep breath. ‘When you were just a baby yourself you had a little sister, but she died.’

  ‘Was that the baby in the picture?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did she die?’

  ‘Er …’ She paused for a moment and glanced up at the sky as if the answer might lie there, before saying, ‘No one knows. It was just one of those things.’

  ‘How old was I?’

  ‘Much too young to remember anything about it. But of course your mummy and daddy do remember, and that’s why you must never mention the name Birdie again, or ask about her. Do you understand?’

  ‘Why didn’t they tell me about her before?’

  ‘Because you’d no need to know. Sometimes it’s easier to get over things if you don’t talk about them or think about them too much. And they wanted to do whatever would be best for you. So you just go on being the Abigail we all love so much and forget all about this. Do you promise?’

  I nodded, dry-eyed. There was no room for negotiation. But I didn’t forget; how could I? In the space of a few minutes I had gained and lost a sister, the friend and companion I had dreamed of for so long, for whom my bunk-beds and my tennis set, and my cupboard full of games waited in vain; who should have grown into my clothes; who would never hear me play my cello or walk to school with me, or wait outside the unlockable Girls’ loos with one foot under the door, or keep the secrets I would one day surely have. I thought about her often; last thing at night when I lay in my top bunk I imagined her hand reaching up from the bed below to hold mine. I thought about her on all those rainy weekends when mother had a headache or father was working in his study with the door closed and the silence in the house became a roaring in my ears. And whenever I heard my mother sigh, and I knew she must be remembering, I thought about you then, Birdie. But I kept my promise and never asked about you or mentioned your name, or heard it mentioned until that night nine years later when my life as an adult really began.

  III

  * * *

  8

  In the summer of 1977 I left Saint Bede’s with one friend, my Grade Two cello certificate and two dozen hand-made egg cosies. The friend was a girl called Karen Smart and was the only other member of the class to have passed the Eleven Plus. This was the sand on which our friendship was built. While we were funnelled off to the girls’ grammar to receive an education, our classmates were destined for the local high school for an early introduction to smoking, fist-fights, and having their heads forced down the toilet by Sandra Skeet’s sister. Or so the prevailing demonology had it.

  I only got to know Karen in my final term when I realised we would be going to the grammar school together. She lived a couple of roads away and we started to go to each other’s houses to play. Karen was horse mad: the walls of her room were papered with pictu
res of ponies; horse-brasses on leather straps hung from her mirror and she had acquired a sizeable collection of rosettes. This was doubly impressive as she didn’t even own a horse. I wasn’t actually all that keen on horses, but I sensed that this was a deficiency on my part and did my best to hide it. In her garden there was a high wall built of breeze-blocks screening the smart end by the house with its stripy lawn and weedless flowerbeds from the scruffy play area beyond. We would throw folded blankets over the wall for saddles and use a couple of her dad’s leather belts for stirrups and reins and spend hours on end riding the wall, and practising mounting and dismounting. Sometimes Karen used to rig up some jumps using broom handles and other garden implements balanced on bricks, wheelbarrows and watering cans and we would gallop, horseless, around the course, timing each other and counting faults. Unlike Karen, I never managed to get a clear round. She could play this game all afternoon without getting bored. Sometimes, when I really couldn’t take any more, my horse would run amok, sending broom handles and buckets flying, and Karen would ask if I wanted to put him back in the stable.

  Although we had not been the best of friends at Saint Bede’s Karen and I clung together like survivors of a wreck in the swirling sea of blue blazers that was our first experience of secondary school. She saved me a locker in the changing room; I saved her a place in the dinner queue; she saved me a seat next to her in French. French. This was new terrain. Philippe est dans le jardin. Marie-Claude est dans la cuisine. Truly, opportunity was all around.

  Everything was new and strange. The timetable at first seemed unfathomable. Where previously we had sat in the same place all day, we were now continually on the move, herded along from room to room every half-hour like driven cattle. The building smelled different from Saint Bede’s – not of poster paint and disinfectant, but floor polish and old books, a combination that was at once clean and dirty. The uniform took some getting used to: the blue felt hats with elastic tight as a garrotte, used as frisbees in the playground, were regarded as valuable trophies by marauders from the high school, in the way that a rhino’s horn might tempt a poacher. And the itchy polo-neck jumpers which were supposed to free us from the tyranny of the tie rode up under our tunics to form a tight sausage around the chest. At break time the loos were always full of girls hoisting up their tunics and tucking these exasperating jumpers back into their knickers.

  It was useful to have a ready-made ally in the face of all this novelty. So many of the other girls had come up to the school together that it was easy for singletons to find themselves stranded on the margins as the class began to shake down into its component parts. Karen and I might have become good friends. She was pleasant enough, and the sort of polite, innocuous girl my mother would have chosen for me if she could. But fate – that wicked jade – had settled otherwise.

  Some people can look back at their past and can identify certain pivotal moments where a meeting, an action, a decision, or even a failure to act or decide, has proved critical and altered the course of their life. I can think of three such moments in my life. The first of these happened just a fortnight after I had started at the grammar school and was contingent upon a number of trivial factors: Karen Smart’s swollen glands, the incompetence of a firm of North London solicitors, and the failing health of Miss Mimosa Smith.

  One Monday morning I arrived at school to find Karen was off sick. I already knew all about her ‘glands’, which she said were liable to swell up like golfballs without warning: Karen was often to be found examining the back of her throat in a pocket mirror, and feeling the sides of her neck with finger and thumb to check for any sudden expansion.

  We always sat at a double desk in the same position in whatever class we were in – about half-way back and off to the left. There were usually a couple of spare desks in each room, so if one’s partner was away there was no need to share, and on this particular day I had sat through morning lessons unaccompanied. When afternoon school began and we took our places in the history room – well named, given the antiquity and decrepitude of the furniture – a stranger was sitting in Karen’s seat. She had very thick, very dark brown hair and was wearing an odd variation on the school uniform: her jumper, tunic and cardigan all approximated to the prescribed kit but were not quite the same. I learnt later that her mother, appalled by the prices at the bespoke outfitter’s to which we had been directed, had trawled the chainstores in search of cheaper versions: she was not the sort to be intimidated by school rules.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked, hovering uncertainly next to my usual chair.

  ‘Frances Gillian Radley. That woman’ (she meant Dr Peel) ‘told me to sit here. My brother’s just invented a five-move checkmate.’

  ‘Oh. Are you new?’

  ‘Yes. Obviously.’

  ‘Why didn’t you start at the beginning of term like everyone else?’

  ‘Because we were moving house so that Auntie Mim could come and live with us, but it all got held up and Mum had to go down to the solicitor’s and have a row. We were stuck in Highbury till last week. Rad – that’s my brother – still goes to school up there. He gets the train and tube every day. It’s fourteen miles.’

  ‘Rad’s a funny name,’ I said. (I was interested in anyone with an affliction similar to my own.)

  ‘It’s short for Radley. His first name’s Marcus’ – she whispered it – ‘but you can’t call him that or he’ll hit you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He doesn’t like girls anyway.’

  ‘Oh.’

  This was my first introduction to Frances; the first time I heard the name Rad or a mention of the curious Radley establishment. I was to hear plenty more about them in the weeks to come.

  The following morning I hung around anxiously in the playground waiting to see whether Karen would be back to claim her seat. The truth was I already preferred Frances and was hoping to sit next to her again and wondering how I could arrange this without hurting Karen’s feelings. As the class filed in for registration, however, it became clear that neither of them had turned up, and my anxiety had to be deferred to another day. Half-way through the first lesson, which was history again, there was a noise outside the door and I could see Frances, her face slightly flushed, bobbing up and down behind the glass panel, gesticulating and nodding and jerking her head in the direction of the teacher, who fortunately had her back turned and was writing on the board. I frowned at Frances and mouthed, ‘What are you doing?’ A few of the other girls were beginning to notice and giggle. Dr Peel looked round sharply as a tremor of fidgeting ran around the class like wind through a wheatfield.

  ‘Ssh,’ she said sharply, and carried on writing.

  Frances abandoned her pantomime outside the door and pushed it open. She was half-way to her desk when Dr Peel turned round.

  ‘Yes?’ said Dr Peel in a sarcastic voice.

  ‘It’s me, Frances,’ said Frances.

  ‘I can see that,’ said Dr Peel, pursing her lips. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m just going to my desk,’ she said, pointing at me.

  Dr Peel started to bristle. ‘What I meant, Frances, was what are you doing strolling into my lesson twenty minutes late?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Frances, full of apologies now, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve only just got here. I had to take our dog to the vet.’

  ‘I see. You’ve brought a letter from your parents, I suppose.’

  ‘No – they’re not there. That’s why I had to take him myself. He’s got a growth,’ she added.

  ‘Yes, well, perhaps you’d better see me at the end of the lesson,’ said Dr Peel, momentarily nonplussed.

  ‘He’s not actually our dog,’ Frances conceded, as she slid into the seat beside me. ‘But we’re going to adopt him.’ There were some titters from the rest of the class, who were enjoying this diversion from the Enclosures Act. Dr Peel’s hand came down flat on the desk with a crack like a gunshot.

  ‘Thank you, Frances.’

  ‘What
’s up with her?’ Frances said in a stage whisper until a frown from me silenced her, and the lesson was able to proceed without further interruption.

  The next day she failed to turn up altogether, and I began to wonder whether I hadn’t in fact imagined her, but on the Thursday morning father and I passed her in the car on the way to drop me off. There she was, toiling up the hill in her funny uniform – her blazer slightly darker than the regulation blue, her tunic a paler grey, her hat obviously bought secondhand from a careless owner as, instead of being stiff and flattish on top, it was domed and floppy and made her resemble some species of mushroom. I asked father to pull over so that I could walk with her the rest of the way, and waited for her to catch me up.

  ‘Where were you yesterday?’ I asked accusingly.

  ‘I had to take five bags of washing to the launderette,’ she explained in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Our washing machine hasn’t been fixed yet and we’ve all run out of clothes. There was so much I had to make two journeys with Auntie Mim’s shopping trolley. I got it all done by lunchtime, but I didn’t want to come in late again in case I got into trouble.’

  ‘But you can’t take a day off school just to do washing,’ I said, flabbergasted. Who had ever heard of such a thing?

  ‘I had to,’ she said, surprised at my indignation.

  ‘But what about your mother. Couldn’t she do it?’ Mine would have done – well, she would never have let five bags of washing build up like that in the first place.

  ‘No. She leaves too early in the morning for work. She’s a market research co-ordinator. Dad’s working nights, so he was asleep; Rad has to go to school because he’s taking Maths O-level this year – two years early, and Auntie Mim couldn’t do it – she can’t do anything, that’s why we had to move in the first place. Anyway, I said it didn’t matter if I missed a day at school because I’d got this brilliant friend I could copy off.’ And she gave me a winning smile.