Learning to Swim

by Clare Chambers

  From time to time Frances would arrange an assignation with one of the better looking of the bus-stop lotharios. The venue was usually a steamed up café in the shopping precinct with ripped vinyl seats and tomato-shaped ketchup dispensers on the tables, and a tea urn kept at a rolling boil all day. I would be dragged along on these occasions – rather like the second at a duel, and with similarly low hopes of a pleasant outcome. The boy in question might have brought his deputy along, too, and we would sit in a booth over our cups of scummy tea, while Frances and Baz or Gaz or Jez stirred pepper into the sugar bowl or picked the clots of ketchup from the spout of the plastic tomato and flirted with each other by the time-honoured method of trading insults and declarations of mutual contempt.

  Her latest infatuation, however, was with a friend of Rad’s called Nicky, who was about six foot four, with curly hair, pebble glasses and acne. It must have been his fear of her that she found attractive. Rad didn’t often bring friends back home because most of them lived in North London, nearer his school, but Nicky seemed prepared to make the long journey to the southern suburbs and was soon a regular visitor to the house. Indeed Lexi soon adopted him as a sort of handyman. He was forever being called upon to fetch things down from the topmost shelves, open or close high windows, rescue spiders from the picture rails and scrump inaccessible apples from Fish and Chips’s overhanging tree. He was even more afraid of Lexi than he was of Frances, so raised no objection. On his introduction to the Radleys he inadvertently precipitated a scene.

  Unusually the whole family was together: the central heating had packed up and we were all in the sitting room with the gas fire full on. Even Auntie Mim had come down and was sitting on the couch in a blanket.

  Lexi was looking through her address book. ‘Who do we know who can fix a boiler?’ she was saying. There was no question of their resorting to hired labour – petty maintenance jobs were invariably foisted on to friends, or friends of friends, or acquaintances of friends if necessary. I wasn’t sure quite what reciprocal services were offered. Perhaps Mr Radley offered to paint them nude. ‘I was talking to someone only the other day who knew someone who’d put in his own central heating. Who was it? Damn.’

  ‘Your father’s not a plumber is he, Nicky?’ said Mr Radley.

  ‘No, he’s an obstetrician.’

  ‘Hmm, we don’t have much call for one of those any more,’ said Mr Radley. ‘A vet – yes.’

  ‘My mother’s a solicitor,’ Nicky added helpfully.

  ‘Solicitor,’ said Lexi. ‘Let me write that down – I don’t think we’ve got one of those.’

  ‘And Blush’s father teaches Latin, so he’s no use,’ said Mr Radley.

  ‘Nicky Rupp – Obs and Solic,’ said Lexi, writing.

  ‘I don’t suppose he went into it with the aim of being useful to you,’ said Rad, coming to my father’s defence.

  ‘As if you’re so useful,’ Frances added.

  ‘Well, that’s true enough,’ Mr Radley admitted good-humouredly.

  ‘I’ve got an uncle who knows a bit about cars,’ Nicky put in quickly. He was not yet used to the terms of disrespect which flowed freely between father and children.

  ‘Oh fantastic,’ said Lexi. ‘Does he live near?’

  ‘Harrogate. And it’s more vintage cars.’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake don’t let Rad near any of them.’ Ignoring agonised signals from his son he went on, ‘He nearly killed me in France, swerving to avoid a dead hedgehog.’ This statement was received with a moment’s frosty silence. Mr Radley coloured slightly. Rad looked at the floor.

  ‘Are you saying you let Rad drive in France?’ Lexi said in a voice that was pure poison.

  ‘Oh bugger!’ said Mr Radley.

  ‘Well done, Dad,’ said Rad bitterly.

  ‘You let him drive on French roads, under-age, with no licence, uninsured? How could you be so irresponsible? What if he’d killed someone?’

  ‘He nearly killed me,’ Mr Radley said, aggrieved. There is no indignation like that of the justly accused.

  Nicky and I exchanged a look of confederacy. ‘Our families are not like this,’ it said.

  ‘It was only a one-off,’ said Rad. ‘And it was safer than letting Dad drive in the condition he was in.’

  At the mention of this condition of Mr Radley Lexi’s anger seemed to give way to extreme weariness and without a word she got up and walked out of the room. Nicky and I made our excuses and left soon afterwards.

  16

  At the beginning of December there were a few days of snow. Frances and I were in a biology lesson when the first flakes began to drift past the window. The weather forecast had predicted a heavy fall and the sky had been the colour of porridge all morning. Frances was in disgrace because she had refused to take part in the dissection of a rat – had almost cried when she saw its pickled body pinned out on the chopping board, and insisted the smell of formaldehyde would make her sick. So while the rest of us clustered around Mrs Armitage’s desk trying to breathe through our mouths to avoid the stench of embalmed rodent, Frances was banished to the back of the room to stand near an open window and cut up a mushroom instead.

  ‘Ahem!’ Mrs Armitage stopped, scalpel poised, to admonish Frances who had thrown the window back as wide as possible and was leaning out trying to catch snowflakes on her tongue. An icy draught was sweeping through the lab rattling the pages on the benches. Already the playing fields and houses beyond were obscured by the blizzard. Frances withdrew her head and closed the window against the swirling mass of flakes which were blowing about like down from a burst pillow. It didn’t seem possible that the stuff could settle: most of it seemed to be flying upwards. By the end of the afternoon, however, the school was surrounded by a pelt of snow six inches deep. As we emerged after the final bell, awed into silence like explorers setting foot on a new continent, we could see Rad and Nicky waiting by the gate. They greeted us with a hail of snowballs.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asked Frances, spitting out snow.

  ‘School closed early so we thought we’d come and meet you,’ said Rad, lobbing a snowball into the branches of a tree where it disintegrated, bringing down an avalanche on to our heads. ‘We can walk home through the woods.’

  ‘You might as well come back to tea,’ Frances said to me. ‘You can do our homework there.’ This decided, we set off as fast as Frances’ and Rad’s unsuitable footwear permitted. Nicky and I of course had come prepared with boots. The bottom of Rad’s trousers were already soaked, and Frances’ lace-ups were swamped within seconds. A few of the older girls looked at me and Frances with new respect as we passed. Rad was obviously an object of some interest.

  We took the footpath to the woods in silence apart from the creaking of the snow under our feet. There was an unspoken understanding that hostilities would not start until we had reached the fields beyond the trees. The snow had stopped falling by now and the sky was already dark as we reached the top field. A single line of footprints was the only trail as far as the ridge of trees that divided the park from the main road. We hesitated a second and then, as if at a prearranged signal, ran whooping and screeching down the slope, kicking up as much snow as possible, leaving four ragged furrows in our wake. At the bottom of the dip Rad drew two lines with his foot about twenty feet apart. He and Nicky stood on one side of no-man’s-land, Frances and I on the other, and at the word ‘Go’ we began pelting each other with snowballs packed hard as glass. Soon this disciplined approach gave way to anarchy – Nicky broke across the line, rugby-tackled Frances and stuffed handfuls of snow down the back of her blazer until she screamed for mercy. I felt slightly dizzy with excitement at the prospect of being similarly molested by Rad, but, whether from politeness or reserve or sheer indifference, he confined himself to the decorous pitching of a few more snowballs before joining Frances in her counter-attack on Nicky, who by now had lost his glasses and was easy prey. It was only when they realised that I had so far escaped injury an
d was looking altogether too presentable that the three of them joined forces and practically buried me alive. Nicky and Frances held me down while Rad tipped my schoolbooks out of my bag, filled it with snow and emptied it over my head. We spent the next fifteen minutes looking for Nicky’s glasses which turned up, twisted but unbroken, caught in a hole in the back of Frances’ blazer. He dusted the snow off them and put them back on, the bent frames giving him an even more comical appearance than usual.

  With streaming eyes and raw faces we limped home. By the time we reached the main road I had lost all sensation in my fingers, and my toes felt like loose pebbles rolling about in the bottom of my boots. Every so often a chunk of snow would drop from my matted hair and slip, melting, down my neck. There was no sign of Mr and Mrs Radley in the house, but someone had lit the fire in the dining room so Rad threw some more coal on while Frances made tea and toast, and we sat in front of the hearth to thaw out. Frances was trying to flirt with Nicky, brushing the snow out of his hair and teasing him about his glasses, and I found myself squinting at him through half-closed eyes to try and see what he would look like without acne, when he caught me and demanded to know what I was staring at.

  ‘Nothing,’ I stammered, lying feebly, ‘I think there’s something in my eye,’ and I retreated from the room on the pretext of going to investigate. When I returned they had obviously been plotting something as there was a densely conspiratorial silence. Rad was playing with the fire irons, shoving the poker into the coals until the end glowed orange. As I looked suspiciously from one face to another Rad got up and advanced towards me with the red-hot poker in his hand. I laughed and stood my ground until the tip, which had now turned white, was six inches from my face, at which point I lost my nerve and started to back away. He came at me, unsmiling. When my heels touched the wall and Rad kept coming I flinched and closed my eyes, and feeling a burning pain between my eyebrows, and hearing the hiss of searing skin, I let out a scream which brought Nicky and Frances leaping to their feet. There was a crash as the poker hit the floor and when I opened my eyes Rad was standing in front of me with his index finger still outstretched and a look of horror on his face.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ I said, tears leaping to my eyes.

  ‘Abigail. I’m sorry. I didn’t do anything,’ he stammered. ‘Did I?’ he appealed to the others. The three of them crowded round me now to examine my brand, while I stood there, still too dazed to move.

  ‘It’s scientifically impossible,’ said Nicky.

  ‘Totally freaky,’ agreed Frances.

  It was some time before they could persuade me that what had actually happened was this: as soon as I had closed my eyes, Rad had put the poker down by his side and touched me lightly on the forehead with one finger. But there between my eyebrows like a Hindu wife’s tilak was a perfectly round burn which, in spite of the hasty application of an ice cube wrapped in a flannel, lasted in its most vivid form for several weeks and then faded to form a silvery scar, the ghost of a full moon.

  17

  When I was fourteen I discovered where it was that my father went on his many unexplained absences from home. In a curious way the truth was stranger than my most lurid imaginings. For some time Frances had been entertaining the fantasy that he was a Russian spy.

  ‘He was at Cambridge, wasn’t he?’ went her reasoning. ‘And Latin is a useful skill for code-breakers.’

  ‘And Latin teachers,’ I said.

  She ignored me. ‘And he’s always going off – he’s probably meeting the head of the KGB in a park to pass on secrets.’

  ‘My father’s not a communist. He votes Conservative,’ I protested.

  ‘I don’t suppose the communists field a candidate in northwest Kent,’ said Rad, who was playing clock patience on the floor and listening to our discussion. Since Nicky’s introduction to the household Rad seemed to have grown more sociable. Although he didn’t exactly join in Frances’ and my activities, he was out of his bedroom more often and could manage to sustain a conversation – even a frivolous one – if required.

  ‘You don’t know who he votes for once he’s in that little booth,’ said Frances. ‘It’s a perfect front – he’s such a pillar of respectability not even his own daughter would suspect him.’

  ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, your dad’s just as likely to be a spy as mine. I mean, he has all day to hang around meeting people in parks or whatever they do.’ Her insinuations were beginning to rankle.

  She looked at me scornfully. ‘Dad? Don’t be stupid. No one would trust him with a secret for five minutes.’ There was a silence as I acknowledged the truth of this. ‘Why don’t you follow him on your bike one day?’ she went on.

  ‘Oh no, I couldn’t do that. What if I caught him doing something really bad – like going to a brothel?’ I wasn’t quite sure how I would recognise a brothel, unless it had a neon sign outside advertising itself. ‘And what if he saw me seeing him?’

  Frances conceded this would be difficult. As it turned out I didn’t need to make any elaborate plans to catch my father in the practice of his illicit hobby.

  It was a summer’s evening in June, and Frances and I were on our way to a party. We had spent the afternoon trying on and discarding various costumes from her and Lexi’s wardrobes. I was already kitted out in a tight black pencil skirt which my mother, with some misgivings, had agreed to make. I had only managed to save it from being a respectable piece of office clothing that a librarian might safely wear by secretly moving the pins inwards after a fitting. At Frances’ suggestion I had stuffed my bra with tissues, and was now sporting a pair of hard and rather lumpy breasts under my T-shirt. Frances, who was a great frequenter of jumble sales, had settled on what was obviously a man’s striped night-shirt, frayed at the collar, and was wearing it half open and belted over a low-necked vest. She didn’t need any stuffing. I was practising walking in a pair of Lexi’s stilettos, which were a size too large and had to have still more tissues packed into the toes to give me a chance of keeping them on. I was beginning to feel like a rag doll.

  ‘Hmm. I think your problem is the split in your skirt doesn’t go up far enough,’ said Frances as I teetered past, knees locked together, eyes fixed on my feet. Years of trying on Lexi’s shoes had made her a confident practitioner of the art of running for buses in high heels. ‘Do you want me to alter it for you?’

  ‘Well …’ I hesitated. My mother’s main objection to the fashion had been that a split made the wearer look cheap. And I’d never put Frances down as much of a seamstress. Before I had had time to decline the offer, she had seized the back of my skirt and pulled the seam apart with a horrible rending sound.

  ‘There you are,’ she said, pleased to be of help.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I wailed, craning round to inspect the damage. ‘What have you done? You can almost see my knickers.’

  ‘Not if you don’t lean forward too much.’ She had already moved on and was rummaging in a shoebox full of Lexi’s discarded make-up. I watched her apply scarlet polish to her bitten nails. ‘I don’t know why I’m making so much effort,’ she said, waving one hand in the air to dry, ‘there won’t be anyone decent there anyway.’ By which she meant Nicky.

  ‘No,’ I agreed. The party was being given by a girl at school, and in recognition of the shortage of available males we had all been instructed to ‘bring a boy’. (When my mother first saw the invitation she thought it said ‘bring and buy’ and offered me some home-made marmalade to take.) Naturally we were unable to oblige as we didn’t know any co-operative boys. There was no possibility of asking Rad along. He was now in the sixth form and would have considered the event ‘girlie’ and quite beneath him. He was also too busy rehearsing a school production of Much Ado About Nothing, in which he was taking the part of Benedick. Only that day I had tested him on his lines and experienced the thrill of hearing him say to me without any embarrassment that he would live in my heart, die in my lap and be buried in my eyes. I had read Tw
elfth Night at school and was familiar with Shakespearean innuendo. It was only after some circumlocution and careful questioning that I learnt to my great relief that Beatrice was to be played by a reedy fourth year called Toby Arlington.

  The party invitation had also required us to bring a bottle. Just before we left, Frances remembered this detail and went to check the fridge. ‘We’re in luck,’ she cried, emerging from the kitchen holding a bottle of slimline tonic, two-thirds full. ‘I didn’t think there’d be anything.’

  ‘You’re not going out without coats, are you?’ Lexi said, emerging from the sitting room to make her farewells. ‘It’s not all that warm, you know.’

  We shook our heads in horror. ‘Oh no, Mum, a coat wouldn’t go with this at all,’ said Frances. ‘We’ll be fine. It’s bus most of the way.’ I nodded my agreement. In truth I was already a little chilly, especially around the neck as Frances had put my hair up, but my navy school coat was unthinkable; I’d have been a laughing stock.

  ‘And how are you getting home?’

  ‘Oh, we’ll get a lift off someone.’ This seemed to satisfy Lexi. There was never any question of her or Mr Radley turning out to fetch Frances. My father, had he known what we were up to, would have insisted on taking and collecting us, door to door. As we were leaving, Rad came down the stairs three at a time, carrying the remains of his supper – a variation on that old favourite, the Greasy Dog – on a tray. He was wearing frayed, very faded jeans and a fisherman’s jumper with paint on and great unravelling holes in the elbows.

  ‘What do you think, Rad?’ said Frances, striking a pose.

  He looked us over for a second or two, taking in our underdressed state and painted faces. ‘I think you look like a couple of tarts,’ he said indifferently, and clumped off to the kitchen. I was ready to wash my face there and then but Frances was impatient to set off, so we let ourselves out and tottered up to the bus stop. Lexi was right about the weather: my arms had broken out in goosepimples long before the bus came. I must have spent most of my teens being the wrong temperature. Fashion was so insanely perverse: chunky jumpers tucked into tight jeans in midsummer, bare legs and no jacket in winter.